Papering Over the Rot
Chris Hedges: Papering Over the Rot
The staggering concentration of wealth at the top has deformed our governing institutions — new window dressing will not end oligarchy.
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 world’s most heinous despots and wealthiest capitalists of the past. In 2015, shortly before he died, Forbes estimated David Rockefeller’s 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 Clinton’s 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 China’s 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.
This is a small excerpt.
Comments
I read the whole article at Mint Press News, it is excellent!
Hedges is a treasure to be guarded, saved and respected, imo. Thank You Snoopydawg.
https://www.euronews.com/
the conclusion is spot on too
original source:https://scheerpost.com/2021/02/01/hedges-papering-over-the-rot/
“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
Great article!
I used to avoid reading much of Chris Hedges because I thought he was too negative and distopian of his assessments of our world. I was very wrong. For a long time, Chris Hedges has been predicting what we are now seeing in the open.
The COVID 19 pandemic has openly exposed how the establishment and the government that they run views the citizens of this country. It is something most of us here at C99 have known but it has been exposed to everyone in this nation that our government and the people we elect to represent us do not give one shit about us.
This paragraph stood out for me.
Thanks for posting this, snoopy.
Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy
I sought him out because I knew he was serious
in the ways that the NYRB could be serious back when it first began, and that I could not find, with a few brief exceptions,
in the surroundings of my own life.
He speaks for the work done here at C99, for consciousness and for grief, articulating the sinews that link actuality and feeling to the constant duststorm of events.
Great essay
Capitalism is just the golden calf. Money courses through it's veins, it's heartbeat is greed. Capitalism, 60, 70 years ago was like a game, with rules and umpires, and whoever played the best game gained the most. No more. Rules are for little people.
More and more we see liberalism is the true protector of capitalism. Conservatives are content with robbery, while liberals enshrine the theft as principle. Both sides are just willing hired guns.
We also have to ask these questions...
How did Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton come to power? Did the American people take a big rightward step?
It's not just the Southern Strategy because RR was considerably to the right of Nixon. IMO the failure of the Democratic Party to effectively govern, from initiating the disastrous Vietnam war to the failure to contain galloping inflation, is the root cause. I remember the enthusiasm in DC when Jimmy Carter was elected, particularly the Southern born. (The beginning of identity politics). While I feel, probably foolishly, that Carter was a well-meaning decent man, he had no skills as a manager, a job that requires a certain amount of ruthlessness. People turned to Reagan not for philosophical reasons but in a blind attempt at ANYBODY that could provide relief to the working class. IMO, the country would have been far far better off if Ted Kennedy had managed to oust Jimmy Carter.
Re Bill Clinton: I was a supporter of Clinton, actually a campaign volunteer in 1992. Again, IMO, the Liberal lights of the day were tied up in identity politics and Political correctness. When Dukakis said he would not want to kill a hypothetical rapist of his wife, he lost the male blue collar class right there. Not sure of the female blue collar class, but I do know that my mother, who never cast an (R) vote in her life, despised Dukakis, stating she would never vote for a man that wouldn't defend his wife.
To us, Dukakis revealed himself as either a liar, or a man so morally degenerate that he didn't care if someone raped his wife. A MUCH better response would have been, "Of course I would want to kill him! Preferably with my bare hands. but that would be wrong." signalling thereby that he was not a bloodless uncaring cipher but a man who controlled his instincts with his intellect. Blue collar Christians do not believe in turning the other cheek. More like the John Wayne line "..but I won't hit you. No, I won't hit you. The Hell i won't hit you!" Bill Clinton did have the gift of gab. He went to public school, not a snooty private school. He knew how we think. He came from our ranks! a demagogue. Unlike his wife who was petty bourgeois with her nose in the air. The obviously elite insider Man with four Names didn't have a clue as to us "Lowers".
I've seen lots of changes. What doesn't change is people. Same old hairless apes.
Here's a story of a dear late friend & a little re Bill Clinton
When I was living in Nacogdoches Tx, I became friends with an older Black man named Carl who was a veteran of Korea and Vietnam and when I first met him he lived outside of town in a tent.
The tent was a one man army tent and with his cot and footlocker at the bottom and everything was in perfect order as if he was waiting for an inspection. While in the area surrounding the tent, for about 50 yards in every direction, everything was cut to the ground so his sight was unimpeded. There was nothing for anyone to hide behind, he was safe.
In time he moved into town and he spent plenty of time at my house, he didn't drink but would occasionally take a hit off a joint but he was always upbeat and laughing as he told stories of growing up in Arkansas.
It was a big family and he'd left home he said when he turned 18 and therefore "mama broke my plate" and with no jobs joining the Army and going to Korea seemed like the only choice.
About Bill Clinton: One time when I was visiting his apt. he'd finally unpacked his footlocker and one of the things he put on the shelf was a picture of his lovely daughter.He beamed when he talked about her.
Then he told me his 'mama' was big in local politics in Hope Arkansas because she could get out a lot of black votes. Carl told me near election time there would be fancy cars parked along her road as they visited her trying to get support for the election.
That included when Bill Clinton was up for election (Gov.), Carl said there was a limo parked out front along with other cars with well dressed men that stayed with the cars.
Then Carl showed me a picture of Bill Clinton with his arm around Carl's daughter, nice picture, then Carl said his daughter later told him yes Bill Clinton had his hand on her back,but she got uncomfortable when he started popping her bra.
Carl wasn't smiling.
This was all around the time when Bill Clinton, showing he wasn't 'soft on crime' as he was running for President, and it's when I started really disliking that man, before Biden's 'crime bill',NAFTA,Telecom Act, Glass-Steagall etc.
It was the execution of Ricky Ray Rector in 1992 that got my attention first. Bill Clinton had this guy executed in order to help his campaign for the Presidency.
"It’s a chapter in Clinton political history that has become moderately infamous, but most accounts fail to convey the full calculating brutality of Clinton’s actions.
"Ricky Ray Rector was a black prisoner in Arkansas who had been convicted of murder and was scheduled for execution. But Rector was severely brain damaged, having shot himself in the head after shooting the victim; he was missing one-third of his brain and had been effectively lobotomized. As a result, Ricky Ray Rector’s mental functioning was that of a very young child. The prison chaplain recalls meeting him for the first time:
“He was gripping the bars, howling, jumping like an ape. There were Indians, he thought, in the corner of his cell, who he was busy hunting. In between, he would speak to me.” His sister Stella visited him, to be told about serpents slithering across his bunk, alligators and chickens set loose by the guards, and people shining spotlights into his cell."
“6.46am: Inmate Rector began howling. 6.59am: Inmate Rector began dancing in his cell.” Soon after, Rector told a guard that “If you eat grass, lethal injection won’t kill you.”
As Rector’s execution time drew closer, even the prison warden had become uncomfortable with the idea of executing Rector, with one observer saying the warden “seemed to be coming apart the closer the execution got.” Meanwhile, frantic appeals were being made to Governor Clinton to give Rector clemency. Jeff Rosenzweig, Rector’s attorney and an old friend of Clinton’s, begged Clinton not to allow the execution to proceed. Rosenzweig told Clinton that Rector was “crazy, a zombie – it couldn’t, it shouldn’t be done. He’s a child. It’s like killing a child.” Clinton then “hung up with a non-committal pleasantry.”
Rosenzweig wasn’t alone in his desperate attempt. As The Guardian reported in 1993:
Others, close to Clinton, were making their own appeals to him. Mrs Freddie Nixon, wife of the pastor who had married the Clintons, had even written to Rickey on Death Row, and was particularly distraught. Dr Douglas Brown, the psychiatrist, faxed the governor to say the case had been a “travesty” – far from being “competent,” Rector was the least competent individual he had ever evaluated. He got no reply. Some of Clinton’s staunchest admirers, aware of his compassion and warmth, confidently expected him to intervene. “Nobody could believe that he would go through with it,” says one. “After all, the guy was berserk. You might as well execute a child.”
Last of all...
"Clinton refused to grant clemency. Rector was executed on January 24, 1992. It is unlikely he had any idea what was about to happen. When he had his last meal, Rector set the dessert aside for later, even though there wouldn’t be a later. And in a pitiful and poignant detail, the night before his execution, watching Clinton on television, Rector said that he planned to vote for him in November."
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2016/04/bill-clinton-has-always-been-this...
thank you for sharing all of it, to me so full of details
that are very eye-opening and interesting. So much history to share and know. Thanks a lot.
https://www.euronews.com/
Oh, Rector...
Used as the example of how executing a mentally challenged inmate is perfectly legal. It is also cited as the state's reason overcoming defense's claim of mental health being a reason not to even have a damn trial.
I am neither shocked nor dismayed by the young woman's story about Bill snapping her bra.
I didn't know he was a bastard then, but it is apparent now, and has been for a while.
And still, he and Hillary are a force, and their "charity" has tremendous influence.
So glad you made a friend up in Nacogdoches. That is fairly close to home.
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981
I lived there 12 years, went to SFA, & still have friends there
I hope to visit again.
Thinking about what you said, I want to add a little more from that article that I think rounds out the picture of just how evil this man was/is.
"There was no mystery as to why Clinton had refused to grant Rector clemency. Earlier in his political career, Clinton had lost a race against a “law and order” candidate, and those around him said he was determined not to make the same mistake twice. And it worked:
Intended or not, in the following months the political value of Rector’s execution became abundantly clear. It knocked the law-and-order issue out of the campaign. One commentator said it showed Clinton was “a different sort of Democrat.” As another put it, “he had someone put to death who only had half a brain. You don’t find them any tougher than that.”
Or, as former prosecutor and Arkansas ACLU director Jay Jacobson said, “You can’t law-and-order Clinton… If you can kill Rector, you can kill anybody.” In the general election, the National Association of Police Organizations endorsed Clinton over Bush, and so did a law enforcement group in Bush’s home state of Texas.
Clinton did not just simply allow Rector to die, however. In fact, he was active in using Rector’s death politically, flying back to Arkansas just so he could be there for the execution. As The Guardian reported:
The same week, Gennifer Flowers came forward with her story of a 12-year affair with the candidate. Beset by crisis, Governor Clinton broke off his campaign in New Hampshire to return to Little Rock for Rector’s execution. There was no legal obligation on him to do so; as the Houston Chronicle remarked, “never – or at least not in the recent history of presidential campaigns – has a contender for the nation’s highest elective office stepped off the campaign trail to ensure the killing of a prisoner.”
The Ricky Ray Rector case has been mentioned from time to time as a controversial Clinton act. But it’s important to be clear about just what Clinton did: he deliberately had a hallucinating disabled man killed, in an execution so callous it made even the warden queasy. He personally ensured the execution of a mental child so as not to appear weak. This is an unthinkably monstrous act. As Derrick Jackson wrote in the Boston Globe: “The killing of human vegetables is an exercise for brutes.”
Just one from the Clinton body count
How utterly and heinously abhorrent. My gawd he did execute a child on his way to killing 1 million Iraqis including the 500,000 children. And I never heard of that before he got elected. It took until Obama for me to see Clinton for what he was. As Jimmy says, Clinton and Obama were the more effective evil over Bush, McCain and Romney. Hillary has Libya's death count on her soul as well as every person sold into slavery. The countries around Libya have fallen to terrorism after Gaddaffi was murdered because he kept terrorists under control and after his death the borders became sieves and terrorism spread.
Just think that after the Cold War was over Clinton could have chosen peace for once and for all. Instead he meddled in Russia and set their economy plummeting and then messed in countless countries and set us up for the stock market crash. Twice. The second one hasn’t happened yet. But it’s coming.
Thanks for the history.
Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.
I read Scheerpost every
week or so. I watch On Contact on Saturday nights.
Thanks for posting this. I may not have caught it for another week.
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981
Thanks, snoop--
It's always good to read the words of an honest actor, even in times like this.
"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha
"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver
Hard truths. Thanks for posting this. n/t