The monopolies that own the elected Federal Government were always a known-known in America. That hasn't changed.

Yesterday, in the (Must Read if You Hope to be Informed in the US) Evening Blues, our news curator, joe shikspack, directed us with a simple link to an attempted interview with Chris Hedges, which was posted at Naked Capitalism.

Parts of the interview, by John Siman, are a study in "sentence fragment syndrome" as a sign that a finger in the dike is all that is standing between you and a deluge of uncanny clarity pouring forth from one of the foremost towering minds in American culture today — Chris Hedges.

joe shikspack, in his wisdom, declined to extract a single word of this interview or comment\, but I shall because such clarity is my drug of choice. I aspire to a final-draft mind like Hedges', which has a cognitive distillery that drips, steadily, the rarefied truth of the gods. Alas, I am but limited to the contact high I can achieve only from reading or watching a demi-god like Chris Hedges in action. If you resonate with this notion, bookmark my link on "watching" which leads to Hedges' On Contact, currently broadcast on RT, where the remaining final hours of American journalism are being recorded for posterity.

Chris Hedges: ....I think pushing the whole idea that Trump was elected because of Russia ignores the much more important issue, and that is the rise of corporate oligarchy and the impoverishment of now over half the country.

John Siman: And that’s not discussed by —

Chris Hedges: No, and that’s because the Democrats were, especially under Clinton, the architects of it. It was Clinton who pushed through NAFTA, it’s Clinton who destroyed the welfare system, it’s Clinton who passed the 1994 omnibus crime bill that saw the prison population explode from 700,000 to over two million. It’s Clinton who passed these draconian drug laws — three strikes you’re out — and increased the lengths of sentences, militarized the police, deregulated the FCC so a handful of corporations control what most Americans listen to and watch — this is all Clinton.

John Siman: And as we look back on Clinton, how do we want to judge him? Was he just purely —

Chris Hedges: Well, Clinton understood: if he did corporate bidding, he’d get corporate money — so that by the end of his presidency the Democratic Party had rough parity in terms of corporate money with the Republican Party…. That was all Clinton — including the rolling back of the opening up of the Democratic Party establishment that had been possible because of Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition — dog-whistling, you know, super-predators — appealing to a racist white base — this was all Clinton. I think Clinton did tremendous amounts of damage because he continued to speak in the feel-your-pain language of liberalism and yet betrayed working men and women.

John Siman: Yes —

Chris Hedges: And so this is why when Hillary Clinton goes to places like Anderson, Indiana, where the old GM plants were — you know most of those people voted for Sanders, the old UAW workers. They weren’t going to vote for Clinton.

John Siman: No —

Chris Hedges: Because of Clinton those plants closed down in 2006, went to Monterrey, Mexico where they’re paying those workers three dollars an hour without benefits. And their wives, their families, their community, their city was devastated. And that’s the reality we have to grapple with. And it’s one that, because the Democratic Party is so complicit in creating this monstrous system of unfettered corporate capitalism, they don’t want to confront. I mean, for instance, if there were to be serious electoral reform — i.e. they wouldn’t take corporate money the way Sanders didn’t — then the major figures in the Democratic Party wouldn’t exist. Pelosi wouldn’t exist. Schumer wouldn’t exist. These are creatures of — and especially in the case of Pelosi and Schumer — they are the funnels for corporate money.

John Siman: Yes —

Chris Hedges: They select the candidates. I think the ship of state may go down, but they have no intention of giving up their first-class cabins. And that’s why the Democratic Party is not reformable from the inside. It’s a creature of the corporate state. It doesn’t even function as a political party traditionally functions. The base is irrelevant. You have certain moments like the Democratic National Convention — delegates trotted out as props — but they don’t have any say in party control, and they don’t have any say in legislation. It’s all done by lobbyists….

John Siman: So do they have any reason to exist as a party anymore? Can they be salvaged?

Chris Hedges: No. I don’t think they can be salvaged.

You can read John Siman's entire interview, Fear and Loathing — Mostly Loathing — with Chris Hedges at the Harvard Club, at Naked Capitalism, hosted by the brilliant Yves Smith.

If you care to venture deeper into the weeds and learn exactly how you have been harmed by some of the same Neoliberal mechanisms that Chris Hedges is discussing above, joe shikspack also posted a video from The Keiser Report, — also without comment. In this edition, the famously inarticulate Max Keiser and the famously patient Stacy Herbert deconstruct the Financial Repression that has you in its grip. They explain how and when the American people were robbed blind, which they pretty much accomplish in the first few moments of their show; so it doesn't have to be a long watch. Of course, financial repression also crawled out of the witch's cauldron of Clinton-era neoliberalism. You were likely tricked into voting for it. If only the healthy years of the human lifespan had been extended with all the money the US spent on killing people instead. You would have plenty of time to use the information revealed here to reverse your losses.

In any event, now you know.

The Keiser Report is another of those American intelligentsia news shows that is produced and broadcast by RT. Although the shows are mirrored at Your Tube, don't expect them to remain on the Internet for long. You are probably less than a year away from full content filtering — for your own good.