Chris Hedges’ Take on Corporatism Is Accurate — Now What to Do?

14 July 2015

I find myself becoming more cynically pessimistic as the years go by — take corporatism’s stranglehold on humanity

Human beings, I have concluded, are too easily manipulated and overwhelmed to recognize that we have to fight for both The Commons and our commoners’ place in the sun. For most of History, the bulk of humanity has been the “back” upon which the privileged Few have extracted morally inequitable wealth.

Today’s version of the Middle Ages’ agrarian feudalism’s serfdom is corporatism, which Merriam Webster defines as:

the organization of a society into industrial and professional corporations serving as organs of political representation and exercising control over persons and activities within their jurisdiction.

Thoughtful readers will recognize this as a variant of fascism . . .

. . . once they recognize that it is the hand of government that allows corporations to seize control of our political institutions.

American fascism can be described as self-serving collusion between (i) essentially bribed government leaders — among all three branches of government — (ii) corporations and (iii) the wealthy elite.

This assemblage configures government institutions to do its will(s), which in most instances boil down to extracting riches from everyone else.

Corporatism is totalitarian in that the subservient public has no remaining lawful means of resisting wealth’s buyout of their once representative institutions.

Writer and social activist Chris Hedges describes corporatism’s evils this way:

The Greeks and the U.S. working poor endure the same deprivations because they are being assaulted by the same system—corporate capitalism. There are no internal constraints on corporate capitalism. And the few external constraints that existed have been removed.

Corporate capitalism, manipulating the world’s most powerful financial institutions, including the Eurogroup, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Federal Reserve, does what it is designed to do:

It turns everything, including human beings and the natural world, into commodities to be exploited until exhaustion or collapse.

In the extraction process, labor unions are broken, regulatory agencies are gutted, laws are written by corporate lobbyists to legalize fraud and empower global monopolies, and public utilities are privatized.

Secret trade agreements—which even elected officials who view the documents are not allowed to speak about—empower corporate oligarchs to amass even greater power and accrue even greater profits at the expense of workers.

To swell its profits, corporate capitalism plunders, represses and drives into bankruptcy individuals, cities, states and governments. It ultimately demolishes the structures and markets that make capitalism possible.

The system of unfettered capitalism is designed to callously extract money from the most vulnerable and funnel it upward to the elites.

Corporate profit is God. It does not matter who suffers. In Greece 40 percent of children live in poverty, there is a 25 percent unemployment rate and the unemployment figure for those between the ages of 15 and 24 is nearly 50 percent. And it will only get worse.

It is difficult to reasonably and factually argue with Hedges’ assertion

If we look at the near total collapse of regulated capitalism in the United States since President Reagan, we can appreciate how closely the United States mimics the anti-worker Lochner v. New York (198 U.S. 45) period. Lochner was the US Supreme Court decision that approved the anti-social, hands-off government mechanics which underlay the Robber Baron era.

In approximately 110 years, after an intervening attempt to build a more equitable society, we have returned to where we started. Greed, it seems, is an unquenchable motivation for the oppression of others.

The key sticking point in resisting this trend — is our reluctance to believe painfully negative things about the societies we inhabit

In the United States, the Establishment Elite propagandizes the statistical lie that maybe tomorrow many of us will be among this rapacious elite:

The mandarins that maintain this system cannot respond rationally in our time of crisis. They are trained only to make the system of exploitation work. They are blinded by their insatiable greed and neoliberal ideology, which posits that controlling inflation, privatizing public assets and removing trade barriers are the sole economic priorities. They are steering us over a cliff.

We will not return to a rational economy or restore democracy until these global speculators are stripped of power.

But — how does one throws off the oppressors and what structure do we substitute in their place?

Human beings inevitably screw up whatever they touch. Mobs are not disciplined enough to do anything intelligent. As a result, I see little hope in social movements. The educational and commitment level required to keep a fairer system operating exceeds the capacity of societies built upon tens of millions of “average” people, most of whom pretty consistently do not display noticeable levels of communitarian commitment and action.

The United States is sad proof that keeping us overworked, energy-drained and reliably entertained is a pretty good strategy for dominating the many.

The moral? — Corporatism is indeed evil — but until most of us see this as a fact that slices us directly — nothing will change

When bankers and financiers stole up to roughly $16 trillion of the public’s wealth in 2008 and nothing happened to them, either from government action or public wrath, we got a pretty good indicator of how aimlessly complaisant we are.

Had someone tried to rob us of an equal amount of money and savings in person, we would have reacted differently. Physical robbery apparently strikes us as being more objectionable than institutionally-approved grand theft.

If toppling today’s gross inequities is to come, it will arrive only when the Average Person is insightful, realistic, and motivated enough to seriously contemplate decorating the street with disempowered corporatists.

This is very likely what Thomas Jefferson meant when he said that:

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.

Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Stephens Smith, November 13, 1787, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Julian P. Boyd (editor), volume 12, page 356 (1955) (see http://www.bartleby.com/73/1065.html)

To an ordinarily peacefully inclined person like me, Jefferson’s insight constitutes an inconvenient but probable truth.

It may be that mob-inspired blood-letting performs the equivalent of forest fires, which get the cycle of regrowth and ecological succession restarted. And afterward, eventually, the process has to start all over again — people, greed and oppression being what they are.

PeteFree.com

Chris Hedges’ Take on Corporatism Is Accurate — Now What to Do?