TRUTHDIG– The most important moral and intellectual voices within a disintegrating society are slowly discredited when their nonviolent protests and calls for justice cannot alter intransigent and corrupt systems of power. The repeated acts of peaceful civil disobedience, efforts at electoral and political reform and the fight to protect the rule of law are dismissed as useless by an embittered, dispossessed and betrayed public. The demagogues and hatemongers, the purveyors of violence, easily seduce enraged and bewildered masses in the final stages of collapse with false promises of vengeance, new glory and moral renewal. And in the spiral downward the good among us are reviled as naive and ineffectual fools.
There is no shortage of courageous dissidents in America. They seek to thwart the imperial disasters, looming financial insolvency and suicidal addiction to fossil fuel. They have stood in small knots on street corners week after week, month after month, year after year, to denounce the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They have occupied banks, shut down coal-fired power plants, attempted to halt mountaintop removal, interfered with whaling ships and walked in blustery weather to the White House, where they were arrested. They are struggling to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza on a ship called the Audacity of Hope. But because the corporate state and the two major political parties are indifferent to principled calls for reform, and because the mass of the public still buys into the myths of globalization and the American dream, the plundering and destruction continue unimpeded.
When most Americans face the nightmare before us, when they realize the irreversible devastation unleashed on the ecosystem and the economic misery from which they cannot escape, violence will have a broad and terrifying appeal. Those of us who demand a return to the rule of law and remain steadfast to nonviolence will find ourselves cast aside—the useful idiots Lenin so despised. I watched this happen in the social and political implosions in El Salvador, Guatemala, the Palestinian territories, Algeria, Bosnia and Kosovo. I watched the same cocktail of despair, economic collapse and callousness from a corrupt power elite mix itself into potent brews of civil strife. I watched the same untiring efforts by those who detested the violence and cruelty of the state, and the nascent violence and intolerance of the radical opposition. I covered as a reporter the disintegration that tore these societies apart. Those who held fast to moral imperatives, including Archbishop Oscar Romero in El Salvador and Ibrahim Rugova in Kosovo, were thrust aside and replaced with killers on both sides of the divide who embraced violence.
NATION-The US Supreme Court’s conservative majority continued its project of bartering off American democracy to the highest bidder with a decision Monday that will make it dramatically harder to counter free-spending attack campaigns funded by billionaire donors and corporate spin machines.
With a 5-4 vote, the Court has struck down a matching-funds mechanism in Arizona’s Clean Elections Law that allowed candidates who accepted public funding to match the spending of privately funded candidates and independent groups that might attack them. Under the Arizona law—which has long been considered a national model for using public funds to pay for campaigns—candidates who accept public funding are limited in what they can spend.
Candidates who refuse public funding are not so constrained; and nor are independent groups that support privately funded candidates; indeed, in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s sweeping Citizens United v. FEC ruling of 2010, which cleared the way for corporations to spend as much as they like to influence election, restrictions to the flow of private money into politics have been all but eliminated.
SALON– With the possible exception of Jon Huntsman, the Republican presidential field is weak on candidates who could appeal to centrist swing voters, including moderate Republicans. But there is one 2012 prospect who has a proven track record of pursuing policies that owe a great deal to the moderate Republican tradition and who could potentially shake up the race for the GOP presidential nomination: President Barack Obama.
If Obama chose to run for reelection not as a Democrat but as a moderate Republican, he could bring about two healthy transformations in the American political system. The moderate wing of the Republican Party could be restored. And the Democratic presidential nomination might be opened up to politicians from the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party.
In the last generation, the old-fashioned moderate Republicans from New England and the Midwest symbolized by Nelson Rockefeller have been driven out of the GOP by the conservative followers of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. Streaming into the Democratic Party as voters, and buying it with ample Wall Street cash as donors, this upscale elite has changed the party from a populist liberal alliance of unionized workers and populists into a socially liberal, economically conservative version of the old country-club Republicanism of the pre-Reagan era.
The transformation began under Jimmy Carter, accelerated under Bill Clinton and has nearly been completed under Barack Obama. This is not your grandfather’s Democratic Party. It is your grandfather’s Republican Party of 1955.
ADBUSTERS– The unrest in the Middle
East, the convulsions in Ivory Coast, the hunger sweeping across failed
states such as Somalia, the freak weather patterns and the systematic
unraveling of the American empire do not signal a lurch toward freedom
and democracy but the catastrophic breakdown of globalization. The world
as we know it is coming to an end. And what will follow will not be
pleasant or easy.
The bankrupt corporate power elite, who continue to serve the dead
ideas of unfettered corporate capitalism, globalization, profligate
consumption and an economy dependent on fossil fuels, as well as endless
war, have proven incapable of radically shifting course or responding
to our altered reality. They react to the great unraveling by pretending
it is not happening. They are desperately trying to maintain a doomed
system of corporate capitalism. And the worse it gets the more they
embrace, and seek to make us embrace, magical thinking. Dozens of
members of Congress in the United States have announced that climate
change does not exist and evolution is a hoax. They chant the mantra
that the marketplace should determine human behavior, even as the
unfettered and unregulated marketplace threw the global economy into a
seizure and evaporated some $40 trillion in worldwide wealth. The
corporate media retreats as swiftly from reality into endless
mini-dramas revolving around celebrities or long discussions about the
inane comments of a Donald Trump or a Sarah Palin. The real world – the
one imploding in our faces – is ignored.
The deadly convergence of environmental and economic catastrophe is
not coincidental. Corporations turn everything, from human beings to the
natural world, into commodities they ruthlessly exploit until
exhaustion or death. The race of doom is now between environmental
collapse and global economic collapse. Which will get us first? Or will
they get us at the same time?
Carbon emissions continue to soar upward, polar ice sheets continue
to melt at an alarming rate, hundreds of species are vanishing, fish
stocks are being dramatically depleted, droughts and floods are
destroying cropland and human habitat across the globe, water sources
are being poisoned, and the great human migration from coastlines and
deserts has begun. As temperatures continue to rise huge parts of the
globe will become uninhabitable. The continued release of large
quantities of methane, some scientists have warned, could actually
asphyxiate the human species. And accompanying the assault on the
ecosystem that sustains human life is the cruelty and stupidity of
unchecked corporate capitalism that is creating a global economy of
masters and serfs and a world where millions will be unable to survive.
We continue to talk about personalities – Ronald Reagan, Bill
Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama or Stephen Harper – although
the heads of state and elected officials have become largely irrelevant.
Corporate lobbyists write the bills. Lobbyists get them passed.
Lobbyists make sure you get the money to be elected. And lobbyists
employ you when you get out of office. Those who hold actual power are
the tiny elite who manage the corporations. The share of national income
of the top 0.1 percent of Americans since 1974 has grown from 2.7 to
12.3 percent. One in six American workers may be without a job. Some 40
million Americans may live in poverty, with tens of millions more living
in a category called “near poverty.” Six million people may be forced
from their homes in the United States because of foreclosures and bank
repossessions. But while the masses suffer, Goldman Sachs, one of the
financial firms most responsible for the evaporation of $17 trillion in
wages, savings and wealth of small investors and shareholders in the
United States, is giddily handing out $17.5 billion in compensation to
its managers, including $12.6 million to its CEO, Lloyd Blankfein.
The massive redistribution of wealth happened because lawmakers and
public officials were, in essence, hired to permit it to happen. It was
not a conspiracy. The process was transparent. It did not require the
formation of a new political party or movement. It was the result of
inertia by our political and intellectual class, which in the face of
expanding corporate power found it personally profitable to facilitate
it or look the other way. The armies of lobbyists, who write the
legislation, bankroll political campaigns and disseminate propaganda,
have been able to short-circuit the electorate.
Our political vocabulary continues to sustain the illusion of
participatory democracy. The Democrats and the Liberal Party in Canada
offer minor palliatives and a feel-your-pain language to mask the
cruelty and goals of the corporate state. Neofeudalism will be cemented
into place whether it is delivered by Democrats and the Liberals, who
are pushing us there at 60 miles an hour, or by Republicans and the
Conservatives, who are barreling toward it at 100 miles an hour.
“By fostering an illusion among the powerless classes that it can
make their interests a priority,” Sheldon Wolin writes, “the Democratic
Party pacifies and thereby defines the style of an opposition party in
an inverted totalitarian system.” The Democrats and the Liberals are
always able to offer up a least-worst alternative while, in fact, doing
little or nothing to thwart the march toward corporate collectivism.
It is not that the public in the United States does not want a good
healthcare system, programs that provide employment, quality public
education or an end to Wall Street’s looting of the U.S. Treasury. Most
polls suggest Americans do. But it has become impossible for most
citizens in these corporate states to find out what is happening in the
centers of power. Television news celebrities dutifully present two
opposing sides to every issue, although each side is usually lying. The
viewer can believe whatever he or she wants to believe. Nothing is
actually elucidated or explained. The sound bites by Republicans or
Democrats, the Liberals or the Conservatives, are accepted at face
value. And once the television lights are turned off, the politicians go
back to the business of serving business.
Human history, rather than being a chronicle of freedom and
democracy, is characterized by ruthless domination. Our elites have done
what all elites do. They have found sophisticated mechanisms to thwart
popular aspirations, disenfranchise the working and increasingly the
middle class, keep us passive and make us serve their interests. The
brief democratic opening in our society in the early 20th century, made
possible by radical movements, unions and a vigorous press, has again
been shut tight. We were mesmerized by political charades, cheap
consumerism, spectacle and magical thinking as we were ruthlessly
stripped of power.
Adequate food, clean water and basic security are now beyond the
reach of half the world’s population. Food prices have risen 61 percent
globally since December 2008, according to the International Monetary
Fund. The price of wheat has exploded, more than doubling in the last
eight months to $8.56 a bushel. When half of your income is spent on
food, as it is in countries such as Yemen, Egypt, Tunisia, Somalia and
Ivory Coast, price increases of this magnitude bring with them
widespread malnutrition and starvation. Food prices in the United States
have risen over the past three months at an annualized rate of five
percent. There are some 40 million poor in the United States who devote
35 percent of their after-tax incomes to pay for food. As the cost of
fossil fuel climbs, as climate change continues to disrupt agricultural
production and as populations and unemployment swell, we will find
ourselves convulsed in more global and domestic unrest. Food riots and
political protests will be frequent, as will malnutrition and
starvation. Desperate people employ desperate measures to survive. And
the elites will use the surveillance and security state to attempt to
crush all forms of popular dissent.
The last people who should be in charge of our food supply or our
social and political life, not to mention the welfare of sick children,
are corporate capitalists and Wall Street speculators. But none of this
is going to change until we turn our backs on the wider society,
denounce the orthodoxies peddled in our universities and in the press by
corporate apologists and construct our opposition to the corporate
state from the ground up. It will not be easy. It will take time. And it
will require us to accept the status of social and political pariahs,
especially as the lunatic fringe of our political establishment steadily
gains power as the crisis mounts. The corporate state has nothing to
offer the left or the right but fear. It uses fear to turn the
population into passive accomplices. And as long as we remain afraid, or
believe that the formal mechanisms of power can actually bring us real
reform, nothing will change.
It does not matter, as writers such as John Ralston Saul have pointed
out, that every one of globalism’s promises has turned out to be a lie.
It does not matter that economic inequality has gotten worse and that
most of the world’s wealth has become concentrated in a few hands. It
does not matter that the middle class – the beating heart of any
democracy – is disappearing and that the rights and wages of the working
class have fallen into precipitous decline as labor regulations,
protection of our manufacturing base and labor unions have been
demolished. It does not matter that corporations have used the
destruction of trade barriers as a mechanism for massive tax evasion, a
technique that allows conglomerates such as General Electric or Bank of
America to avoid paying any taxes. It does not matter that corporations
are exploiting and killing the ecosystem for profit. The steady barrage
of illusions disseminated by corporate systems of propaganda, in which
words are often replaced with music and images, are impervious to truth.
Faith in the marketplace replaces for many faith in an omnipresent God.
And those who dissent are banished as heretics.
The aim of the corporate state is not to feed, clothe or house the
masses but to shift all economic, social and political power and wealth
into the hands of the tiny corporate elite. It is to create a world
where the heads of corporations make $900,000 an hour and four-job
families struggle to survive. The corporate elite achieves its aims of
greater and greater profit by weakening and dismantling government
agencies and taking over or destroying public institutions. Charter
schools, mercenary armies, a for-profit health insurance industry and
outsourcing every facet of government work, from clerical tasks to
intelligence, feed the corporate beast at our expense. The decimation of
labor unions, the twisting of education into mindless vocational
training and the slashing of social services leave us ever more enslaved
to the whims of corporations. The intrusion of corporations into the
public sphere destroys the concept of the common good. It erases the
lines between public and private interests. It creates a world that is
defined exclusively by naked self-interest.
Many of us are seduced by childish happy talk. Who wants to hear that
we are advancing not toward a paradise of happy consumption and
personal prosperity but toward disaster? Who wants to confront a future
in which the rapacious and greedy appetites of our global elite, who
have failed to protect the planet, threaten to produce widespread
anarchy, famine, environmental catastrophe, nuclear terrorism and wars
for diminishing resources? Who wants to shatter the myth that the human
race is evolving morally, that it can continue its giddy plundering of
nonrenewable resources and its hedonistic levels of consumption, that
capitalist expansion is eternal and will never cease?
Dying civilizations often prefer hope, even absurd hope, to truth. It
makes life easier to bear. It lets them turn away from the hard choices
ahead to bask in a comforting certitude that God or science or the
market will be their salvation. This is why these apologists for
globalism continue to find a following. And their systems of propaganda
have built a vast, global Potemkin village to entertain us. The tens of
millions of impoverished Americans, whose lives and struggles rarely
make it onto television, are invisible. So are most of the world’s
billions of poor, crowded into fetid slums. We do not see those who die
from drinking contaminated water or being unable to afford medical care.
We do not see those being foreclosed from their homes. We do not see
the children who go to bed hungry. We busy ourselves with the absurd.
The game is over. We lost. The corporate state will continue its
inexorable advance until two-thirds of the nation and the planet is
locked into a desperate, permanent underclass. Most of us will struggle
to make a living while the Blankfeins and our political elites wallow in
the decadence and greed of the Forbidden City and Versailles. These
elites do not have a vision. They know only one word: more. They will
continue to exploit the nation, the global economy and the ecosystem.
And they will use their money to hide in gated compounds when it all
implodes. Do not expect them to take care of us when it starts to
unravel. We will have to take care of ourselves. We will have to rapidly
create small, monastic communities where we can sustain and feed
ourselves. It will be up to us to keep alive the intellectual, moral and
cultural values the corporate state has attempted to snuff out. It is
either that or become drones and serfs in a global corporate dystopia.
It is not much of a choice. But at least we still have one.
GUARDIAN– Let’s get this right: the world’s biggest boss, supported by
companies as diverse as Altria, Bank of America, Microsoft and General
Electric and backed up by the godfather of big business (the US Chamber
of Commerce) has persuaded the US supreme court that thousands of women
workers can’t possibly share enough of an interest to constitute a
class?
It’s hard to know which part of the court’s decision in Dukes v
Walmart hurts equity most: the assault on class-action jurisprudence
generally, at a time of shrinking tools for workers seeking redress, or
the defeat of history’s biggest gender-based claim before a court that,
for the first time, includes two women, one of whom (Ruth Bader
Ginsburg) made her reputation in sex discrimination law.
Dividing 5-4, in Dukes v Walmart, the supreme court on Monday dismissed the plaintiffs’ claim
that companywide policy gave local managers too much discretion in pay
and promotion decisions, leaving Walmart employees at thousands of
Walmart and Sam’s Club stores vulnerable to gender stereotypes. (The
company changed the format of its name since the case was filed.) The
plaintiffs “provide no convincing proof of a companywide discriminatory
pay and promotion policy,” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the
majority.
TRUTHDIG– The most important moral and intellectual voices within a disintegrating society are slowly discredited when their nonviolent protests and calls for justice cannot alter intransigent and corrupt systems of power. The repeated acts of peaceful civil disobedience, efforts at electoral and political reform and the fight to protect the rule of law are dismissed as useless by an embittered, dispossessed and betrayed public. The demagogues and hatemongers, the purveyors of violence, easily seduce enraged and bewildered masses in the final stages of collapse with false promises of vengeance, new glory and moral renewal. And in the spiral downward the good among us are reviled as naive and ineffectual fools.
NATION
SALON
ADBUSTERS
GUARDIAN