Chris
Hedges: The Coming Collapse
1
July, 2018
The
Trump administration did not rise, prima facie, like Venus on a half
shell from the sea. Donald
Trump is the result of a long process of political, cultural and
social decay. He is a product of our failed democracy. The
longer we perpetuate the fiction that we live in a functioning
democracy, that Trump and the political mutations around him are
somehow an aberrant deviation that can be vanquished in the next
election, the more we will hurtle toward tyranny. The
problem is not Trump. It is a political system, dominated by
corporate power and the mandarins of the two major political parties,
in which we don’t count. We
will wrest back political control by dismantling the corporate state,
and this means massive and sustained civil disobedience, like
that demonstrated
by teachers around
the country this year. If we do not stand up we will enter a new dark
age.
The
Democratic Party, which helped build our system of inverted
totalitarianism,
is once again held up by many on the left as the savior. Yet the
party steadfastly refuses to address the social inequality that led
to the election of Trump and the insurgency by Bernie Sanders. It
is deaf, dumb and blind to the very real economic suffering that
plagues over half the country. It will not fight to pay workers a
living wage. It will not defy the pharmaceutical and insurance
industries to provide Medicare for all. It will not curb the
voracious appetite of the military that is disemboweling the country
and promoting the prosecution of futile and costly foreign wars. It
will not restore our lost civil liberties, including the right to
privacy, freedom from government surveillance, and due process. It
will not get corporate and dark
money out
of politics. It will not demilitarize our police and reform a prison
system that has 25 percent of the world’s prisoners although the
United States has only 5 percent of the world’s population. It
plays to the margins, especially in election seasons, refusing to
address substantive political and social problems and instead
focusing on narrow cultural issues like gay rights, abortion and gun
control in our peculiar species of anti-politics.
This
is a doomed tactic, but one that is understandable. The leadership of
the party, the Clintons, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Tom Perez, are
creations of corporate America.
In an open and democratic political process, one not dominated by
party elites and corporate money, these people would not hold
political power. They know this. They would rather implode the entire
system than give up their positions of privilege. And that, I fear,
is what will happen. The idea that the Democratic Party is in any way
a bulwark against despotism defies the last three decades of its
political activity. It is the guarantor of despotism.
Trump has tapped into the hatred that huge segments of the American public have for a political and economic system that has betrayed them. He may be inept, degenerate, dishonest and a narcissist, but he adeptly ridicules the system they despise. His cruel and demeaning taunts directed at government agencies, laws and the established elites resonate with people for whom these agencies, laws and elites have become hostile forces. And for many who see no shift in the political landscape to alleviate their suffering, Trump’s cruelty and invective are at least cathartic.
Trump,
like all despots, has no ethical core. He chooses his allies and
appointees based on their personal loyalty and fawning obsequiousness
to him. He will sell anyone out. He is corrupt, amassing money for
himself—he made $40 million from his Washington, D.C., hotel alone
last year—and his corporate allies. He is dismantling government
institutions that once provided some regulation and oversight. He is
an enemy of the open society. This makes him dangerous. His
turbocharged assault on the last vestiges of democratic institutions
and norms means there will soon be nothing, even in name, to protect
us from corporate totalitarianism.
But
the warnings from the architects of our failed democracy against
creeping fascism, Madeleine
Albright among them,
are risible. They show how disconnected the elites have become from
the zeitgeist. None
of these elites have credibility. They built the edifice of lies,
deceit and corporate pillage that made Trump possible. And the more
Trump demeans these elites, and the more they cry out like
Cassandras, the more he salvages his disastrous presidency and
enables the kleptocrats pillaging the country as it swiftly
disintegrates.
The
press is one of the principal pillars of Trump’s despotism. It
chatters endlessly like 18th-century courtiers at the court of
Versailles about the foibles of the monarch while the peasants lack
bread. It drones on and on and on about empty topics such as Russian
meddling and a payoff to a porn actress that have nothing to do with
the daily hell that, for many, defines life in America. It refuses to
critique or investigate the abuses by corporate power, which has
destroyed our democracy and economy and orchestrated the largest
transfer of wealth upward in American history. The
corporate press is a decayed relic that, in exchange for money and
access, committed cultural suicide. And
when Trump attacks it over “fake news,” he expresses, once again,
the deep hatred of all those the press ignores. The press worships
the idol of Mammon as slavishly as Trump does. It loves the
reality-show presidency. The press, especially the cable news shows,
keeps the lights on and the cameras rolling so viewers will be glued
to a 21st-century version of “The
Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.” It
is good for ratings. It is good for profits. But it accelerates the
decline.
All
this will soon
be compounded by financial collapse. Wall
Street banks have been handed $16
trillion in bailouts and
other subsidies by the Federal Reserve and Congress at nearly zero
percent interest since the 2008 financial collapse. They have used
this money, as well as the money saved through the huge tax cuts
imposed last year, to buy back their own stock, raising the
compensation and bonuses of their managers and thrusting the society
deeper into untenable debt peonage. Sheldon Adelson’s casino
operations alone got
a $670 million tax break under
the 2017 legislation. The ratio of CEO to worker pay now averages 339
to 1, with the highest gap approaching 5,000 to 1. This circular use
of money to make and hoard money is what Karl Marx called “fictitious
capital.” The
steady increase in public debt, corporate debt, credit card debt and
student loan debt will ultimately lead, as Nomi
Prins writes,
to “a tipping point—when money coming in to furnish that debt, or
available to borrow, simply won’t cover the interest payments. Then
debt bubbles will pop, beginning with higher yielding bonds.”
An
economy reliant on debt for its growth causes our interest rate to
jump to 28 percent when we are late on a credit card payment. It is
why our wages are stagnant or have declined in real terms—if we
earned a sustainable income we would not have to borrow money to
survive. It is why a university education, houses, medical bills and
utilities cost so much. The system is designed so we can never free
ourselves from debt.
However,
the next financial crash, as Prins points out in
her book “Collusion:
How Central Bankers Rigged the World,” won’t be like the last
one. This is because, as she says, “there
is no Plan B.” Interest rates can’t go any lower. There
has been no growth in the real economy. The next time, there will be
no way out. Once the economy crashes and the rage across the country
explodes into a firestorm, the political freaks will appear, ones
that will make Trump look sagacious and benign.
And
so, to quote Vladimir Lenin, what must be done?
We
must invest our energy in building parallel, popular institutions to
protect ourselves and to pit power against power. These parallel
institutions, including unions, community development organizations,
local currencies, alternative political parties and food
cooperatives, will have to be constructed town by town.
The elites in a time of distress will retreat to their gated compounds and leave us to fend for ourselves. Basic services, from garbage collection to public transportation, food distribution and health care, will collapse. Massive unemployment and underemployment, triggering social unrest, will be dealt with not through government job creation but the brutality of militarized police and a complete suspension of civil liberties.Critics of the system, already pushed to the margins, will be silenced and attacked as enemies of the state. The last vestiges of labor unions will be targeted for abolition, a process that will soon be accelerated given the expected ruling in a case before the Supreme Court that will cripple the ability of public-sector unions to represent workers. The dollar will stop being the world’s reserve currency, causing a steep devaluation. Banks will close. Global warming will extract heavier and heavier costs, especially on the coastal populations, farming and the infrastructure, costs that the depleted state will be unable to address. The corporate press, like the ruling elites, will go from burlesque to absurdism, its rhetoric so patently fictitious it will, as in all totalitarian states, be unmoored from reality. The media outlets will all sound as fatuous as Trump. And, to quote W.H. Auden, “the little children will die in the streets.”
As
a foreign correspondent I covered collapsed societies, including the
former Yugoslavia. It
is impossible for any doomed population to grasp how fragile the
decayed financial, social and political system is on the eve of
implosion.
All the harbingers of collapse are visible: crumbling infrastructure; chronic underemployment and unemployment; the indiscriminate use of lethal force by police; political paralysis and stagnation; an economy built on the scaffolding of debt; nihilistic mass shootings in schools, universities, workplaces, malls, concert venues and movie theaters; opioid overdoses that kill some 64,000 people a year; an epidemic of suicides; unsustainable military expansion; gambling as a desperate tool of economic development and government revenue; the capture of power by a tiny, corrupt clique; censorship; the physical diminishing of public institutions ranging from schools and libraries to courts and medical facilities; the incessant bombardment by electronic hallucinations to divert us from the depressing sight that has become America and keep us trapped in illusions.
We suffer the usual pathologies of impending death. I would be happy to be wrong. But I have seen this before. I know the warning signs. All I can say is get ready.
*
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Chris Hedges interviews Seymour Hersh
A
quest for truth with investigative journalist, Seymour M. Hersh
Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist, Seymour M. Hersh discusses the quest for truth with host, Chris Hedges.
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