Monday, October 28, 2013

What is happening to our Democracy?

Excerpt from Chris Hedges: “Our Invisible Revolution”

“Corporations, freed from all laws, government regulations and internal constraints, are stealing as much as they can, as fast as they can, on the way down. The managers of corporations no longer care about the effects of their pillage. Many expect the systems they are looting to fall apart. They are blinded by personal greed and hubris. They believe their obscene wealth can buy them security and protection. They should have spent a little less time studying management in business school and a little more time studying human nature and human history. They are digging their own graves.

Our shift to corporate totalitarianism, like the shift to all forms of totalitarianism, is incremental. Totalitarian systems ebb and flow, sometimes taking one step back before taking two steps forward, as they erode democratic liberalism. This process is now complete. The “consent of the governed” is a cruel joke. Barack Obama cannot defy corporate power any more than George W. Bush or Bill Clinton could. Unlike his two immediate predecessors, Bush, who is intellectually and probably emotionally impaired, did not understand the totalitarian process abetted by the presidency. Because Clinton and Obama, and their Democratic Party, understand the destructive roles they played and are playing, they must be seen as far more cynical and far more complicit in the ruination of the country. Democratic politicians speak in the familiar “I-feel-your-pain” language of the liberal class while allowing corporations to strip us of personal wealth and power. They are effective masks for corporate power.

The corporate state seeks to maintain the fiction of our personal agency in the political and economic process. As long as we believe we are participants, a lie sustained through massive propaganda campaigns, endless and absurd election cycles and the pageantry of empty political theater, our corporate oligarchs rest easy in their private jets, boardrooms, penthouses and mansions. As the bankruptcy of corporate capitalism and globalization is exposed, the ruling elite are increasingly nervous. They know that if the ideas that justify their power die, they are finished. This is why voices of dissent—as well as spontaneous uprisings such as the Occupy movement—are ruthlessly crushed by the corporate state.“

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/our_invisible_revolution_20131028



Just for reference, Under Bill Clinton, NAFTA came into being resulting in a major shift of manufacturing from the United States to Asian countries and the dismantling of banking controls under the Glass–Steagall act. Under Barack Obama the TPP is being pushed through and stronger security controls are being foisted upon the population while the wealth of the nation is being siphoned into the pockets of the super-rich. Dissent and whistle-blowing is being crushed and our privacy is being shredded. Can this all be happenstance and ignorantly ignored as coincidence?


And all this happening under Democratic presidency. Think how much worse it would probably have been under Republican. We, the working poor, have been led down this path unknowingly by our leaders under the supervision of the super-rich. They have accomplished much during our lifetime. We can only start to slowly divest them of their controls with a united front.