Chris Hedges: Bandaging the Corpse
Bidens bailout will not alter the structural inequities and other
fundamental underpinnings of Americas death spiral.
by Chris Hedges
March 12th, 2021
By Chris Hedges
Princeton, New Jersey (Scheerpost) The established ruling elites know
there is a crisis. They agreed, at least temporarily, to throw money at it
with the $1.9 trillion Covid-19 bill known as American Rescue Plan (ARP).
But the ARP will not alter the structural inequities, either by raising the
minimum wage to $15.00 an hour or imposing taxes and regulations on
corporations or the billionaire class that saw its wealth increase by a
staggering $1.1 trillion since the start of the pandemic. The health system
will remain privatized, meaning the insurance and pharmaceutical
corporations will reap a windfall of tens of billions of dollars with the
ARP, and this when they are already making record profits. The endless wars
in the Middle East, and the bloated military budget that funds them, will
remain sacrosanct. Wall Street and the predatory global speculators that
profit from the massive levels of debt peonage imposed on an underpaid
working class and loot the U.S. Treasury in our casino capitalism will
continue to funnel money upwards into the hands of a tiny, oligarchic cabal.
There will be no campaign finance reform to end our system of legalized
bribery. The giant tech monopolies will remain intact. The fossil fuel
companies will continue to ravage the ecosystem. The militarized police,
censorship imposed by digital media platforms, vast prison system, harsher
and harsher laws aimed at curbing domestic terrorism and dissent and
wholesale government surveillance will be, as they were before, the primary
instruments of state control.
This act will, at best, provide a momentary respite from the countrys death
spiral, sending out one time checks of $1,400 to 280 million Americans,
extending $300 weekly unemployment benefits until the end of August and
distributing $3,600 through a tax credit for children under the age of 6 and
$3,000 per child ages 6 to 17 starting on July 1. Much of this money will be
instantly gobbled up by landlords, lenders, medical providers and credit
card companies. The act does, to its credit, bail out some 1 million
unionized workers poised to lose their pensions and hands $31.2 billion in
aid to Native communities, some of the poorest in the nation.
But what happens to the majority of Americans who get government support for
only a few months? What are they supposed to do when the checks stop
arriving at the end of the year? Will the federal government orchestrate
another massive relief package? I doubt it. We will be back where we
started.
By refusing to address the root causes of Americas rot, by failing to pump
life back into the democratic institutions that once gave the citizen a
voice, however limited, and make incremental and piecemeal reform possible,
by not addressing the severe economic and social inequality and dislocation
that afflicts at least half the country, the anomie and ruptured social
bonds that gave rise to a demagogue like Donald Trump will expand. The
American empire will not staunch its disintegration. The political
deformities will metastasize.
The Age of Social Murder
The ruling elites, despite the accelerating and tangible ecological
collapse, mollify us, either by meaningless gestures or denial.
MintPress News | Chris Hedges | Mar 2
When the next demagogue appears, and the Republican Party has banked its
future on Trump or his doppelgänger, he or she will probably be competent.
The Republican Party in 43 states has proposed 250 laws to limit mail, early
in-person and Election Day voting and mandate stricter ID requirements, as
well as reduce the hours at voting sites and the numbers of voting locations
potentially disenfranchising tens of millions of voters. The party has no
intention of playing by the rules. Once back in power, cloaked in the
ideological garb of Christian fascism, the new or the old Trump will abolish
what little is left of democratic space.
The established elites pretend that Trump was a freakish anomaly. They
naively believe they can make Trump and his most vociferous supporters
disappear by banishing them from social media. The ancien régime, will, they
assert, return with the decorum of its imperial presidency, respect for
procedural norms, elaborately choreographed elections and fealty to
neoliberal and imperial policies.
But what the established ruling elites have yet to grasp, despite the narrow
electoral victory Joe Biden had over Trump and the storming of the capital
on January 6 by an enraged mob, is that the credibility of the old order is
dead. The Trump era, if not Trump himself, is the future. The ruling elites,
embodied by Biden and the Democratic Party and the polite wing of the
Republican Party represented by Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney, is headed for the
dustbin of history.
The elites collectively sold out the American public to corporate power.
They did this by lying to the public about the consequences of the North
American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), trade deals, dismantling welfare,
revoking Glass-Stegall, imposing austerity measures, deregulating Wall
Street, passing draconian crime bills, launching endless wars in the Middle
East and bailing out the big banks and financial firms rather than the
victims of their fraud. These lies were far, far more damaging to the public
than any of the lies told by Trump. These elites have been found out. They
are hated. They deserve to be hated.
The Biden administration and Biden was one of the principal architects of
the policies that fleeced the working class and made war on the poor is
nothing more than a brief coda in the decline and fall, set against which is
Chinas rising global economic and military clout.
The loss of credibility has left the media, which serves as courtiers to the
elites, largely powerless to manipulate public perceptions and public
opinion. Rather, the media has divided the public into competing
demographics. Media platforms target one demographic, feeding its opinions
and proclivities back to it, while shrilly demonizing the demographic on the
other side of the political divide. This has proved commercially successful.
But it has also split the country into irreconcilable warring factions that
can no longer communicate. Truth and verifiable fact have been sacrificed.
Russiagate is as absurd as the belief that the presidential election was
stolen from Trump. Pick your fantasy.
The loss of credibility among the ruling elites has transferred political
influence to those outside established centers of power such as Alex Jones,
celebrities and those, such as Joe Rogan, Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi
who were never groomed by the media conglomerates. The Democratic Party, in
an effort to curb the influence of the new centers of power, has allied
itself with social media industry giants such as Twitter, YouTube, Facebook,
Patreon, Substack and Spotify to curtail or censor its critics. The goal is
to herd the public back to Democratic Party allied news organizations such
as The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN. But these media outlets,
which in the service to corporate advertisers have rendered the lives of the
working class and the poor invisible, are as reviled as the ruling elites
themselves.
Papering Over the Rot
The staggering concentration of wealth at the top has deformed our governing
institutions new window dressing will not end oligarchy.
MintPress News | Chris Hedges | Feb 1
The loss of credibility has also given rise to new, often spontaneous
groups, as well as the lunatic fringe that embraces conspiracy theories such
as QAnon. None of these groups or individuals, whether they are on the left
or the right, however, have the organizational structure, coherence and
ideological cohesiveness of radical movements of the past, including the old
Communist Party or militant labor unions. They traffic in emotional outrage,
often replacing one outrage with another. They provide new forms of identity
to replace the identities lost by tens of millions of Americans who have
been cast aside. This energy can be harnessed for laudable causes, such as
ending police abuse, but it is too often ephemeral. It has a tendency to
transform political debate into grievance protests, at best, and more often
televised spectacle. These flash mobs pose no threat to the elites unless
they build disciplined organization structures, which takes years, and
articulate a vision of what can come next. (This is why I support Extinction
Rebellion, which has a large grassroots network, especially in Europe,
carries out effective sustained acts of civil disobedience and has a clearly
stated goal of overthrowing the ruling elites and building a new governing
system through peoples committees and sortition.)
This amorphous, emotionally driven anti-politics is fertile ground for
demagogues, who have no political consistency but cater exclusively to the
zeitgeist of the moment. Many of those who support demagogues know, on some
level, they are con artists and liars. But demagogues are revered because,
like all cult leaders, they flout conventions, are outrageous and crude,
claim omnipotence and disdain traditional decorum. Demagogues are weaponized
against bankrupt well-heeled elites who have stripped the public of
opportunities and identities, extinguishing hopes for the future. A cornered
population has little left but hate and the emotional catharsis expressing
it brings.
The engine of our emerging dystopia is income inequality, which is growing.
This bill does nothing to address this cancer. The bottom 50 percent of
households in 2019 accounted for only 1 percent of the nations total
wealth. The top 10 percent accounted for 76 percent. And this was before
the pandemic accelerated income disparity. More than 18 million American
depend on unemployment benefits, as businesses contract and close. Nearly
81 million Americans struggle to meet basic household expenses, 22 million
lack enough food and 11 million say they cant make their next house
payment. Only deep structural reforms accompanied by New Deal-type
legislation can save us, but such changes are an anathema to the corporate
state and the Biden administration. History has amply demonstrated what
happens when income disparities of this magnitude afflict a country. We
will be no exception. Lacking a strong left, the United States will in
desperation embrace authoritarianism, if not proto-fascism. This will, I
fear, be Biden and the Democratic Partys real legacy.