edges: Papering Over the Rot
BY EDITOR
February 1, 2021
The staggering concentration of wealth at the top has deformed our governing
institutions new window dressing will not end oligarchy.
Chris Hedges / Original to ScheerPost
The death spiral of the American Empire will not be halted with civility. It
will not be halted with the 42 executive orders signed by Joe Biden, however
welcome many are, especially since they can, with a new chief executive, be
immediately revoked. It will not be halted by removing Donald Trump, and the
crackpot conspiracy theorists, Christian fascists and racists who support
him, from social media. It will not be halted by locking up the Proud Boys
and the clueless protestors who stormed the Congress on January 6 and took
selfies in Mike Pences Senate chair. It will not be halted by restoring the
frayed alliances with our European allies or rejoining the World Health
Organization or the Paris Climate Agreement. All of these measures are
window dressing, masking the root cause of the demise of America unchecked
oligarchic power and greed. The longer wealth is funneled upwards into the
hands of a tiny, oligarchic cabal, who put Biden into office and whose
interests he assiduously serves, we are doomed.
Original art by Mr. Fish
Once an oligarchy seizes power, deforming governing institutions to
exclusively serve their narrow interests and turning the citizenry into
serfs, there are only two options, as Aristotle pointed out tyranny or
revolution. The staggering concentration of wealth and obscene avarice of
the very rich now dwarfs the hedonism and excesses of the worlds most
heinous despots and wealthiest capitalists of the past. In 2015, shortly
before he died, Forbes estimated David Rockefellers net worth was $3
billion. The Shah of Iran looted an estimated $1 billion from his country.
Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos amassed between $5 and $10 billion. And the
former Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe was worth about a billion. Jeff
Bezos and Elon Musk are each at $180 billion.
The new wealth comes from a cartel capitalism far more concentrated and far
more criminal than any of the cartels built by the old robber barons of the
19th century. It was made possible by Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton who, in
exchange for corporate money to fund their campaigns and later Clintons
foundation and post-presidency opulent lifestyle, abolished the regulations
that once protected the citizenry from the worst forms of monopoly
exploitation. The demolishing of regulations made possible the largest
upwards transference of wealth in American history. Whatever you say about
Trump, he at least initiated moves to break up Facebook, Google, Amazon and
the other Silicon Valley monopolists, none of which will happen under Biden,
whose campaign these corporations bankrolled. And that has to be one of the
reasons these digital platforms disappeared Trump from social media.
The new robber barons peddle the classless identity politics of the
Democratic Party to deflect attention from their stranglehold on wealth and
power, as well as their exploitation of workers, especially those that make
their products overseas. Corporations such as Walmart have 80 percent of
their suppliers in China. These corporations are full partners in Chinas
state-controlled capitalism and suppression of basic labor rights and wages,
where most Chinese workers make less than $350 a month and toil in
Dickensian conditions.
There is no political will among the ruling elites to defend the rights of
Amazon workers who are aggressively blocked by the company, the countrys
second largest employer, from forming unions, work all night in drafty,
COVID-19-infested warehouses or deliver packages for $15 an hour, which
leaves thousands of Amazon workers dependent on food stamps. Likewise, this
is no political will among the elites to defend the rights of workers in
China, often forced to work 100 hours of overtime a month in sweatshops for
as little as $2 or $3 an hour.
History has repeatedly illustrated the dire consequences of extreme social
inequality. It foments revolutionary ferment, which can come from the left
or the right. Either a leftwing populism that smashes oligarchic power takes
control or its counterfeit, a rightwing populism, built on the poisoned
solidarity of hate, racism, vengeance and violence and bankrolled by the
hated oligarchs that use it as a front to solidify tyranny. We are barreling
towards the latter.
The soaring levels of social inequality are laid out in stark statistics
that are reflected back to us in the pain, despair and suffering afflicting
perhaps 70 percent of the US public. The wealth of US billionaires has
increased to over $1.1 trillion since mid-March 2020, when the pandemic
began to ravage the country, a nearly 40 percent leap during the past 10
months. The total wealth of Americas 660 billionaires, $4.1 trillion, is
two-thirds higher than the $2.4 trillion in total wealth held by the bottom
half of the population, 165 million Americans. An additional eight million
Americans were recently classified as newly poor as the poverty rate
increased 2.4 percentage points from June to December 2020. It is now at
11.8 percent, although many economists argue that the official poverty rate
of $26,500 for a family of four masks the fact that perhaps half the country
lives in real poverty.
The official poverty rate for Blacks has climbed 5.4 percent to 23.6 percent
just between June and December, but again is probably at least twice that
number. Blacks, along with Hispanic and Native American people, are also
dying from COVID-19 at almost three times the rate of white people,
according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But, despite
the fact that many Blacks work in the health care industry they are being
inoculated at percentages far below those of whites. In Maryland, for
example, Black people make up 30 percent of the population and 40 percent of
the health care industry yet account for just 16 percent of those who have
been vaccinated. Since the beginning of the pandemic, landlords have filed
more than 227,000 evictions in just the 27 cities in five states that the
Princeton Eviction Lab tracks and that is with a national eviction
moratorium. Twelve million renters, who owe an average of $5,600 in back
rent and utilities, now face being thrown out of their homes. By the end of
2020 there were an estimated 50 million food-insecure Americans, up from 35
million in 2019. One in four households with children, according to a report
from Feeding America, experienced food insecurity in 2020.
The response by the ruling oligarchs is the equivalent of tossing coins from
their gilded carriages to the despised masses. The Democrats have proposed
raising the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $15, but not until 2025.
Biden has actually called for reducing the proposed third stimulus check a
$1,200 check for eligible adults was issued last spring and a $600 per
person check was issued earlier this month from $2,000 to $1,400. The
oligarchs have bristled at even these meager responses. Larry Summers,
Clintons treasury secretary who orchestrated the Wall Street bailout in
2008, called the $2,000 checks crumbs compared to the trillions handed to
Wall Street speculators - a serious mistake. Elon Musk, now one of the
two richest humans, said that a second government stimulus package is not
in the best interests of the people.
The response by a morally bankrupt ruling class are symbolic, given that we
are enduring the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression and an
estimated one-third of all Americans are struggling to pay their bills. It
illustrates how woefully disconnected the elites are from the lives of those
they dominate.
Unless families receive regular monthly payments of at least $2,000 until
the pandemic ends; unless the country has access to universal health care,
especially during a national health crisis; unless the nation radically
pivots from fossil fuels to halt the looming ecocide; unless the crippling
debts that are draining the bank accounts of American families are reduced
or forgiven; unless there is an unassailable moratorium on evictions and
foreclosures; and unless manufacturers at home and overseas are forced
through stringent trade agreements and labor laws to pay decent wages, abide
by strict labor regulations and permit independent unions, the oligarchs
will only accelerate their pillage.
The class warfare is global. Not until workers in sweatshops in China,
Mexico, Cambodia, Vietnam, India and Bangladesh are lifted out of poverty
will the American working class be lifted out of poverty. This class war is
the real fight, which corporate-owned media platforms and bankrupt liberals
refuse to discuss.
In a real sense all life is inter-related, Martin Luther King wrote in his
Letter from Birmingham Jail. All men are caught in an inescapable network
of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one
directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until
you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be
until I am what I ought to be.
Liberalism, which Rosa Luxemburg called by its more appropriate name
opportunism is an integral component of capitalism. When the citizens
grow restive, or when capitalism goes into crisis as it did in the 1930s,
liberals ameliorate capitalisms cruel excesses. Franklin Delano Roosevelt
correctly said his greatest achievement was that he saved capitalism.
But capitalism, Luxemburg argued, is an enemy that can never be appeased.
Liberal reforms, such as the New Deal legislation, are used to temporarily
stymie organized resistance and then later, when things grow quiet,
dismantled to reinstitute capitalist slavery. The history of capitalism
illustrates this constant seesaw between liberal reforms and unregulated,
capitalist exploitation. The last century of labor struggles in the United
States, which has seen unions largely obliterated, and the advent of
neoliberalism, austerity, rampant militarism and deindustrialization amply
prove Luxemburgs thesis.
Fascism is the result of a failed liberalism. With liberalism corrupted, as
it has been in the hands of the Democratic Party since Bill Clinton, all
self-identified liberals have left to peddle is cloying appeals for
tolerance and civility, shorn of economic justice. This politesse, which
epitomizes the Biden White House, fuels an animus towards the ruling elites,
along with the feckless liberals and the liberal values they purport to
defend.
The elevation of women, people of color and those with different sexual
orientations to managerial positions in the oligarchic state is not an
advance. It is a species of corporate colonialism. It is branding. It is the
substitution of cultural politics for real politics.
When the Belgian colonizers could no longer openly exploit the Congo, they
installed the corrupt and compliant puppet Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, after, of
course, assassinating the courageous independence leader and first prime
minister Patrice Lumumba. Mobuto, who embezzled between $4 and $15 billion
during his bloody dictatorial reign, served his colonial masters until the
end. Expect the same prostrations before corporate power from the diverse
appointments in Bidens cabinet and, should it be required, the same state
repression.
The political, cultural and judicial systems in any capitalist state are
centered around the sanctity of private property. Laws and legislation are
instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or, as Luxemburg
writes, those who have some property against those who have none at all.
This inherent bias in capitalist societies, however, becomes criminal once
monopolies, from Wall Street Banks to Silicon Valley, seize the organs of
power. These monopolists create, by abolishing regulation and oversight, as
political economist Karl Polanyi writes, first a mafia economy and then,
inevitably, a mafia state.
The Democrats and Republicans have legalized a level of greed and fraud that
even heirs of the robber barons thought unsustainable. David Rockefellers
enlightened capitalism, however self-serving, along with his call for a
nation of stakeholders and his formation of the Trilateral Commission, have
been pushed aside to license unchecked corporate pillage.
Bill Clinton and his two treasury secretary enablers, Robert Rubin and Larry
Summers, instituted a system of unregulated capitalism that has resulted in
financial anarchy. This anarchic form of capitalism, where everything,
including human beings and the natural world, is a commodity to exploit
until exhaustion or collapse, is justified by identity politics. It is sold
as enlightened liberalism as opposed to the old pro-union class politics
that saw the Democrats heed the voices of the working class. Financial
anarchy and short-term plunder have destroyed long-term financial and
political stability. It has also pushed the human species, along with most
other species, closer and closer towards extinction.
The more workers are dehumanized, as Polanyi notes, the more the ruling
elites are morally degraded. Unheard-of wealth creates unheard-of poverty.
Scholars proclaimed in unison that a science had been discovered which put
the laws governing mans world beyond any doubt, Polanyi writes of
laissez-faire capitalists. It was at the behest of these laws that
compassion was removed from the hearts, and a stoic determination to
renounce human solidarity in the name of the greatest happiness of the
greatest number gained the dignity of a secular religion. Workers,
abandoned by the state, reach a point where they resemble more spectators
that might haunt a nightmare than human beings.
The shipping of jobs overseas, where workers toil in conditions that
replicate the worst abuses of the early industrial revolution, leaves those
in the industrialized world unable to compete. A living wage, job security
and benefits are replaced by the insecurity of the gig economy. This
global market forces workers, whether in the Rust Belt or in China, to
surrender before the dictates of their corporate masters. The bondage of the
working class, at home and abroad, cannot be corrected by legal or
legislative reform when the political system is hostage to corporate money
and political office is defined by legalized bribery.
Global capitalism relentlessly searches the globe to exploit cheap,
unorganized labor and plunder natural resources. This is its nature, as Karl
Marx understood. It buys off or overthrows local elites. It blocks the
ability of the developing world to become self-sufficient. At the same time,
it strips workers in the industrialized world of good paying jobs, benefits
and legal protections, pushing them into crippling debt peonage, which
further swells the bank accounts of these global speculators. Its two
unrelenting goals are the maximization of profit and the reduction of the
cost of production, which demands that workers be disempowered and treated
like prisoners. This global assault on the working class is fueling a global
rage. And its visage, as we see among the white, dispossessed working class
in America, can often be very ugly.
Apple, one of the most profitable companies in the world, is the epitome of
enlightened global capitalism. WIRED reported that employees at Alphabet,
Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and Oracle have contributed nearly 20
times as much money to Biden as to Trump since the beginning of 2019.
According to data released by the Federal Election Commission, which
requires individuals who contribute $200 or more to a presidential campaign
to report their employer, employees at these six companies have contributed
$4,787,752 to Biden and just $239,527 to Trump.
Employees at Alphabet, Googles parent company, WIRED reported, are Bidens
biggest financial backers in Silicon Valley. They donated nearly $1.8
million, more than one-third of the money raised from employees of the six
companies. Open Secrets, a campaign finance watchdog, found that
contributions from Alphabets employees and political action committee to
the Biden campaign collectively exceed those from any other company.
Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple, Open Secrets found,
account for five of the seven largest donors to the Biden campaign on that
basis.
Apple in China, however, treats its workers little better than 19th-century
serfs. Jenny Chan, Mark Selden and Pun Ngai in Dying for an iPhone,
chronicle the endemic labor abuses, including substandard wages and wage
theft, long hours, union busting, a refusal to pay sick leave, unsafe labor
conditions, a harsh work environment and pressure to meet quotas, that
contribute to a high rate of worker suicides in factories that make Apple
products. Workers are crammed into overcrowded dormitories next to factories
to facilitate high-speed, round-the-clock production and are forced to put
in as much as 130 overtime hours a month.
The disenfranchised white working class embraced Trump because he taunted
and belittled the globalists and monopoly capitalists who destroyed their
communities and their lives. For them, Trumps vulgarity was a welcome
respite from the cloying language of inclusivity and political correctness
used by the oligarchs to mask the crimes of monopoly capitalism. The
connecting tissue, in the United States, between these disparate,
disenfranchised groups of white workers is Christian fascism.
Biden, a tool of global oligarchy, who naively intends to resurrect the
ancien régime, is paving the way for a frightening despotism, one where
voices of dissent, from the left and the right, are censored and all who
refuse to accept the new global order are labeled as domestic terrorists and
pounded into submission. Societal breakdown, which is looming, brings with
it grotesque political distortions. Trump was a symptom of this breakdown.
He was not the disease. This dystopian future, one that will probably end
in the United States in a form of Christian fascism, has been bequeathed to
us by the ruling global elites, who in another era would have been found
promenading thought the halls of Versailles or the Forbidden City.