by Chris Hedges
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Truthdig
September 14, 2009
The right-wing accusations against Barack Obama are true. He is a socialist, although he practices socialism for corporations. He is squandering the country’s future with deficits that can never be repaid. He has retained and even bolstered our surveillance state to spy on Americans. He is forcing us to buy into a health care system that will enrich corporations and expand the abuse of our for-profit medical care. He will not stanch unemployment. He will not end our wars. He will not rebuild the nation. He is a tool of the corporate state.
The right wing is not wrong. It is not the problem. We are the problem. If we do not tap into the justifiable anger sweeping across the nation, if we do not militantly push back against corporate fraud and imperial wars that we cannot win or afford, the political vacuum we have created will be filled with right-wing lunatics and proto-fascists. The goons will inherit power not because they are astute, but because we are weak and inept.
Violence is a dark undercurrent of American history. It is exacerbated by war and economic decline. Violence is spreading outward from the killing fields in Iraq and Afghanistan to slowly tear apart individuals, families and communities. There is no immunity. The longer the wars continue, the longer the members of our working class are transformed by corporate overlords into serfs, the more violence will dominate the landscape. The slide into chaos and a police state will become inevitable.
[…]
via Truthdig
Copyright © 2009 Truthdig
Chris Hedges is the author of the new book “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.”
see
Chris Hedges: War exposes the lies we tell ourselves about ourselves (video)
War Is Sin by Chris Hedges (text)
Journalist and Six Protesters Arrested At “Army Experience Center” in Philadelphia
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Froom my own obserrvations, I find that people tend to find or seek out opinions, facts, whatever, that support their political and philosopihical preconceptions, thus becomes sellf-fulfilling and circcullar. Fox news or some talk show idiot says how ineffiicient and terrible government run programs–“The US Post Service loses millions each day, And Medicare is fraught with problems, and is totally inefficinet, and only 12 million are without isurance and most of the undocumented,, et cetera.” It’s irrelevent to them that all these statements are factually inaccurate, because they can find people, allegedly intelligent people, to tell them this is the case. They don’t want to see or know the actual situation, they want to see what they believe.
The Dumbcrats have a long histoory of supporting thei5r wealth corporate moneymen. A good example is FDR”s first term. He carried right on with Hoover”s failled policies, and it was only when radical progressives such as Huey Long brought into focus what he was actually doing, that he turned to watered down progessive idea in his second term.
I allso know what it is to wake in a cold sweat from a war time experience, and I was only covering the wars as a journalist.
The heart of the problem here is not actually war, but the giving of rights of an individual to corporations, and allowing them to excert undue influence on a once Reppublican form of government.
Bravo , Hedges.
I think the problem is that this country was built on economic selfishness. Plain and simple.
Capitalism will kill us all.
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This is a vivid, powerful piece of work, Chris. I agree with you and try to write about similar things (“The New Serfdom”, “Teflon Obama”) but I don’t have your facility or first-hand knowledge. Tell you the truth, I’m a progressive (socialist, liberal, whatever) and I feel rage toward the administration. For its double dealing, its betrayal, its lies, and I didn’t even drink the koolaid of the Obamaniacs.
To reply to the first comment, I think there are a few reasons Americans don’t rise up to overthrow the corporate system. One is the ingrained and reinforced notion of “American Individuality” and “Self-Reliance” which basically says that if you’re in a bad way, it’s your own fault. It’s not the American capitalist system of privatized profits and socialized losses and the eternal war machine that caused your plight, it’s your own weaknesses and flaws. Maybe that has to do with our worship of private property embeddened in our case and common law.
Chris Hedges is correct in his observations, including the one comparing the Weimar republic in Germany to our present state of affairs. I have often wondered why the left in Europe is so much more united and powerful than the left in the United States. In France the workers have free medical care, many weeks of paid vacation time, months of paid maternity leave and many other benefits Americans can only dream about. If the French ruling class attempts to take any of these things away or privatize some important public service, there immediately are hundreds of thousands of French protesters in the streets of all the major cities and a general strike occurs, until the ruling class backs off from their plans. Is this because France has had so many revolutions in the past like the ones in 1789, 1848 and the Paris commune, and they recognize the class nature of capitalist society? Is it because the French Communist Party was so strong (being such a large part of the resistance to the Nazis) after World War 2, that all of this progressive legislation could be passed? I don’t know, but when I listen to my neighbor and he thinks Sean Hannity is the most brilliant man on television, I know something is drastically wrong in the United States.