ONE MUST ACKNOWLEDGE THAT THE WESTERN MEDIA HAS DONE ITS JOB MAGNIFICENTLY:

— WE HATE DONALD TRUMP

— WE HATE PUTIN (THE "MURDERER", ETC)

— WE LOVE BIDEN (SENILE, WARMONGER)

— WE HATED SADDAM (AND STILL DO)

— WE HATED GADDAFI (AND STILL DO)

— WE HATE ASSAD

— WE HAVE A SOFT SPOT FOR MBS (MURDERER, ETC)

— WE LOVE OBAMA (WARMONGER, MURDERER)

— WE HATE RUSSIA IN GENERAL (IT'S TOO BIG)

— WE BLEED FOR MACRON (NOBLE IDIOT, KILLER OF DEMOCRACY)

— WE LAUD OLAF THE NEW NAZI (MERKEL WAS THE BEST AT PLAYING THE DOUBLE-CROSS GAME)

— WE LOVE ZELENSKYYYYY (CORRUPT, DUMB-ASS, PUPPET, LIAR, NAZI, JEWISH, IDIOT, MURDERER OF CULTURE, STEPAN BANDERA FOLLOWER, UNINTELLECTUAL, BEGGAR, ETC...)  

— WE HATE THE POOR...... (LAZY BASTARDS, GOOD FOR NOTHING, INCLUDING THOSE WE GIVE CHARITABLE "DONATION" TO)

Gus Leonisky

CATOONIST SINCE 1951.

-----------------------------

By Chris Hedges
Original to ScheerPost

The United States is undergoing the most vicious class war in its history. Social inequality has reached its most extreme levels of disparity in over 200 years, surpassing the rapacious greed of the era of the robber barons. 

The legislative, executive and judicial branches of government, along with the media and universities, have been seized by a tiny cabal of billionaires and corporations who pass laws and legislation that consolidate their power and obscene wealth at the peoples’ expense. 

Americans are sacrificial victims, whether on the left or the right, helpless before this modern incarnation of the Biblical idol Moloch.

In 1928, the top 1 percent held about 24 percent of the nation’s income, a percentage that steadily declined until 1973. By the early 1970s the oligarchy’s assault against workers was accelerated in response to the rise of popular mass movements in the 1960s. 

The billionaire class and corporations poured billions into political parties, academia, think-tanks and the media. Critics of capitalism had difficulty finding a platform, including on public broadcasting. 

Those who sang to the tune the billionaires played were lavished with grants, book deals, tenured professorships, awards and permanent megaphones in the commercial press. Wages stagnated. Income inequality grew to monstrous proportions. Tax rates for corporations and the rich were slashed until it culminated in a virtual tax boycott. 

Today, the top 10 percent of the richest people in the United States own almost 70 percent of the country’s total wealth. The top 1 percent control 32 percent of the wealth. The bottom 50 percent of the U.S. population hold 3 percent of all U.S. wealth. 

These ruling oligarchs have Americans, not to mention the natural world, in a death grip. They have mobilized the organs of state security, militarized the police, built the largest prison system in the world and deformed the courts to criminalize poverty. 

Americans are the most spied upon, watched, photographed and monitored population in human history, and I covered the Stasi state in East Germany. When the corporate state watches you 24-hours a day you cannot use the word liberty. This is the relationship between a master and a slave.

“These ruling oligarchs have Americans, not to mention the natural world, in a death grip.”

The oligarchs have bought off intellectuals and artists to serve commercial interests. 

The machinery of corporate dominance is carried out by the college-educated, those who rise to the top of academia — such as the economist Larry Summers who pushed the deregulation of Wall Street under President Bill Clinton, or the political scientist Samuel Huntington who warned that countries like the U.S. and U.K. were suffering from an “excess of democracy” — those who manage the financial firms and corporate superstructures, those who provide the jingles, advertising, brands and political propaganda in public relations firms, and those in the press who work as stenographers to power and those in the entertainment industry who fill our heads with fantasies.  

Creating Pariahs 

It is one of the great ironies that the corporate state needs the abilities of the educated, intellectuals and artists to maintain power, yet the moment any begin to think independently they are silenced. 

The relentless assault on culture, journalism, education, the arts and critical thinking has left those who speak in the language of class warfare marginalized, frantic Cassandras who are viewed as slightly unhinged and depressingly apocalyptic. Those with the courage to shine a light into the inner workings of the machinery, such as Noam Chomsky, are turned into pariahs, or, like Julian Assange, relentlessly persecuted.

Culture is vital to democracy. It is radical and transformative. It expresses what lies deep within us. It gives words to our reality. It validates the facts of our lives. It makes us feel as well as see. It allows us to empathize with those who are different or oppressed. It reveals what is happening around us. It honors mystery.

“The precise role of the artist, then, is to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through the vast forest,” James Baldwin writes, “so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place.”

“Ultimately, the artist and the revolutionary function as they function, and pay whatever dues they must pay behind it because they are both possessed by a vision, and they do not so much follow this vision as find themselves driven by it,” writes Baldwin.

The central premise of mass culture is that capitalism is the unassailable engine of human progress, even as global capitalists have pumped nearly 37 percent more greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere since the first Convention on Climate Change in 1992. 

Speak of values and needs, speak of moral systems and meaning, defy the primacy of profit, especially if you only have the few minutes allotted to you on a cable television show to communicate back-and-forth in the usual thought-terminating cliches, and it sounds like gibberish to a conditioned public .

Capitalism, as Karl Marx understood, is a revolutionary force. It is endemically unstable. It exploits human beings and the natural world until exhaustion or collapse. That is its nature. 

But those in society tasked with revealing this nature have been bought off or silenced. Truth is not derived from social values or ethics external to corporate culture. Social, familial and individual rights and needs, as well as the ability to focus on these rights and needs, are robbed from the population.

“Capitalism, as Karl Marx understood, is a revolutionary force. It is endemically unstable.”

There are their facts and there are our facts. Markets, economic growth, higher corporate profits and consolidations, austerity, technological innovation, deindustrialization and a climbing stock market are their facts. Janet Yellen’s need to orchestrate unemployment to bring down inflation is, for them, a vital fact. 

Our facts, the facts of those who are evicted, go to prison, are unemployed, are sick yet uninsured, the 12 million children who go to bed hungry, or live, like nearly 600,000 Americans, on the streets, are not part of the equation. 

Our facts do not attract advertisers. Our facts do not fit with the Disneyfied world the media and advertisers are paid to create. Our facts are an impediment to increased profits. 

Living the Dream 

One strives towards a dream. One lives within an illusion. And the illusion that people are fed is that there is never an impediment which can’t be overcome. That if we just dig deep enough within ourselves, if we find our inner strength, if we grasp as self-help gurus tell us that we are truly exceptional, if we believe that Jesus can perform miracles, if we focus on happiness, we can have everything we desire. 

And when we fail, as most fail in a post-industrial United States to fulfill this illusion, we are told we didn’t try hard enough.

Sigmund Freud wrote that societies, along with individuals, are driven by two primary instincts. One is the instinct for life — Eros, the quest to love, nurture, protect and preserve. The second is the death instinct. 

The death instinct, called Thanatos by post-Freudians, is driven by fear, hatred and violence. It seeks the dissolution of all living things, including ourselves. One of these two forces, Freud writes, is always ascendant. 

Societies in decline are seduced by the death instinct, as Freud observes in Civilization and Its Discontents, written during the rise of European fascism and World War II. The death instinct sees destruction as creation. 

The satisfaction of the death instinct, Freud writes, “is accompanied by an extraordinarily high degree of narcissistic enjoyment, owing to its presenting the ego with a fulfillment of the latter’s old wishes for omnipotence.”

A population beset by despair, a sense of dethronement and powerlessness, is intoxicated by an orgy of annihilation, which soon morphs into self-annihilation. It has no interest in nurturing a world that has betrayed them. 

It seeks to eradicate this world and replace it with a mythical one. It retreats into self-adulation fed by self-delusion and historical amnesia.

READ MORE:

https://consortiumnews.com/2023/04/05/chris-hedges-reclaiming-the-us/

SEE ALSO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6tUEaWEeoU

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