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by Larry Cwik
Chris Hedges, professor at Princeton University, and author of the 2009 book, “Empire of Illusion, the End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle,” a follow-up to his prior, critically-acclaimed, book, “War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning,” called for socialism in the United States in a talk at the downtown Powell’s Bookstore on July 21, telling a standing room only crowd of more than 200 that he feared for the future of the nation.
Hedges, who worked for National Public Radio, and as foreign correspondent for the New York Times, sharing a Pulitzer Prize for the newspaper’s coverage of terrorism, told a rapt audience in a one hour prepared speech that the U.S. is now a corporate state, where corporations control our government. The recent bailouts of major U.S. banks and other financial institutions are corporate solutions put forward by the U.S. government. They switch the losses from corporate losses to taxpayer losses.
Is a fascist police state possible in the U.S.? Hedges believes so, and fears that this is the direction that we are currently moving in. The Democratic Party controls the President and Congress, but the corporate state still calls the shots. The Obama White House has not renewed Habeas Corpus, and still allows domestic eavesdropping on civilians in the U.S., and has massive databases that can be used in any future needed fascist state. Technology would be allow the government to suppress any opposition before it becomes significant in the future fascist state that Hedges fears for the U.S.
Our security as a nation is now significantly in the hands of those holding 100s of billions of dollars in U.S. Treasury securities, including China, and oil fiefdoms in the Middle East. When these are called in, if we lack the funds, our dollar will become worth much less, severely disrupting our economy and throwing millions more of Americans out of work. If millions more are thrown out of work, suffering will increase. The middle class got less under Reagan, less still under Clinton, less still under the two Bushes, and the trend continues under Obama. The Republican and Democratic parties serve as serfs, with their elected members of Congress, to the corporations that fund them. We had a chance to rally around Ralph Nader and Cynthia McKinney, but did not. He regrets this.
The North American Free Trade Agreement, urged on by President Bill Clinton, and passed during his administration, has caused millions of Mexican farmers to lose their livelihoods to corporate agribusiness.
Our economic situation is dire. Adding the people who have stopped looking for work to the official unemployment rate, and then adding the people who can only find part-time job for poverty level wages, yields a true current unemployment rate in the United States of 17 percent, or one in six adults. This will get worse, not better, Hedges believes. Coupled with the economic desperation to come is further environmental catastrophe, unless major changes opposed by corporations start to be implemented now. James Hansen, former NASA administrator, has calculated that we need to stop coal burning by 2030 to halt a cycle that is going to have the carbon levels in the atmosphere reach suffocating levels that will be unsustainable for human life on this planet.
A growing majority of Americans is not interested in current events, but more interested in magic, illusion, fantasy, and being what the corporate image-makers want us to be. The recent Michael Jackson funeral, “a variety show with a coffin,” as Hedges described it, was viewed by an average of more than 31 million people. We have more interest in Britney Spears, and in who is thrown off the show America’s Next Top Model, than in what is now happening to our government, and what has been a free society in the U.S.
With all the dire predictions of our future trends, Hedges did allow for some solutions that may work, if people join together: street demonstrations, shopping local, not buying new goods, and working toward socialism. Europe already has people working toward socialism; in the U.S., we have hardly started working for it, to our future detriment.
Larry Cwik is a Portland-based fine art photographer who travels widely and sometimes internationally for his work.
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