[R-G] America’s Political Cannibalism

[Anthony Fenton]

Published on Monday, October 13, 2008 by TruthDig.com
America’s Political Cannibalism
http://www.commondreams.org/print/33357
by Chris Hedges

It is no longer our economy but our democracy that is in peril. It was  
the economic meltdown of Yugoslavia that gave us Slobodan Milosevic.  
It was the collapse of the Weimar Republic that vomited up Adolf  
Hitler. And it was the breakdown in czarist Russia that opened the  
door for Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Financial collapses lead  
to political extremism. The rage bubbling up from our impoverished and  
disenfranchised working class, glimpsed at John McCain rallies,  
presages a looming and dangerous right-wing backlash.

As the public begins to grasp the depth of the betrayal and abuse by  
our ruling class, as the Democratic and Republican parties are exposed  
as craven tools of our corporate state, as savings accounts, college  
funds and retirement plans become worthless, as unemployment  
skyrockets and as home values go up in smoke we must prepare for the  
political resurgence of a reinvigorated radical Christian right. The  
engine of this mass movement-as is true for all radical movements-is  
personal and economic despair. And despair, in an age of increasing  
shortages, poverty and hopelessness, will be one of our few surplus  
commodities.

Karl Polanyi [1] in his book "The Great Transformation," written in  
1944, laid out the devastating consequences-the depressions, wars and  
totalitarianism-that grow out of a so-called self-regulated free  
market. He grasped that "fascism, like socialism, was rooted in a  
market society that refused to function." He warned that a financial  
system always devolved, without heavy government control, into a Mafia  
capitalism-and a Mafia political system-which is a good description of  
the American government under George W. Bush. Polanyi wrote that a  
self-regulating market, the kind bequeathed to us since Ronald Reagan,  
turned human beings and the natural environment into commodities, a  
situation that ensures the destruction of both society and the natural  
environment. He decried the free market's belief that nature and human  
beings are objects whose worth is determined by the market. He  
reminded us that a society that no longer recognizes that nature and  
human life have a sacred dimension, an intrinsic worth beyond monetary  
value, ultimately commits collective suicide. Such societies  
cannibalize themselves until they die. Speculative excesses and  
growing inequality, he wrote, always destroy the foundation for a  
continued prosperity.

We face an environmental meltdown as well as an economic meltdown.  
This would not have surprised Polanyi, who fled fascist Europe in 1933  
and eventually taught at Columbia University. Russia's northern  
coastline has begun producing huge qualities of toxic methane [2] gas.  
Scientists with the International Siberian Shelf Study 2008 describe  
what they saw along the coastline recently as "methane chimneys"  
reaching from the sea floor to the ocean's surface. Methane, locked in  
the permafrost of Arctic landmasses, is being released at an alarming  
rate as average Arctic temperatures rise. Methane is a greenhouse gas  
25 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. The release of millions of  
tons of it will dramatically accelerate the rate of global warming.

Those who run our corporate state have fought environmental regulation  
as tenaciously as they have fought financial regulation. They are  
responsible, as Polanyi predicted, for our personal impoverishment and  
the impoverishment of our ecosystem. We remain addicted, courtesy of  
the oil, gas and automobile industries and a corporate- controlled  
government, to fossil fuels. Species are vanishing. Fish stocks are  
depleted. The great human migration from coastlines and deserts has  
begun. And as temperatures continue to rise, huge parts of the globe  
will become uninhabitable. The continued release of large quantities  
of methane, some scientists have warned, could actually asphyxiate the  
human species.

The corporate con artists and criminals who have hijacked our state  
and rigged our financial system still speak to us in the obscure and  
incomprehensible language coined by specialists at elite business  
schools. They use terms like securitization, deleveraging, structured  
investment vehicles and credit default swaps. The reality, once you  
throw out their obnoxious jargon, is not hard to grasp. Banks lent too  
much money to people and financial institutions that could not pay it  
back.  These banks are now going broke. The government is frantically  
giving taxpayer dollars to banks so they can be solvent and again lend  
money. It is not working. Bank lending remains frozen. There are  
ominous signs that the government may not be able to hand over enough  
of our money because the losses incurred by these speculators are too  
massive. If credit markets remain in a deep freeze, corporations such  
as AT&T, Ford and General Motors might go bankrupt. The downward  
spiral could spread like a tidal wave across the country, especially  
since our corporate elite, including Barack Obama, seem to have no  
real intention of bailing out families who can no longer pay their  
mortgages or credit card debts.

Lenin said that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to  
debauch its currency. If our financial disaster continues there will  
be a widespread loss of faith in the mechanisms that regulate society.  
If our money becomes worthless, so does our government. All  
traditional standards and beliefs are shattered in a severe economic  
crisis. The moral order is turned upside down. The honest and  
industrious are wiped out while the gangsters, profiteers and  
speculators amass millions. Look at Lehman Brothers CEO Richard Fuld  
[3]. He walks away from his bankrupt investment house after pocketing  
$485 million. His investors are wiped out. An economic collapse does  
not only mean the degradation of trade and commerce, food shortages,  
bankruptcies and unemployment; it means the systematic dynamiting of  
the foundations of a society. I watched this happen in Yugoslavia. I  
fear I am watching it happen here in the United States.

The Patriot Act, the FISA Reform Act, the suspension of habeas corpus,  
the open use of torture in our offshore penal colonies, the stationing  
[4] of a combat brigade on American soil, the seas of surveillance  
cameras, the brutal assaults against activists in Denver and St. Paul  
are converging to determine our future. Those dark forces arrayed  
against American democracy are waiting for a moment to strike, a  
national crisis that will allow them in the name of national security  
and moral renewal to shred the Constitution. They have the tools. They  
will use fear, chaos, the hatred for the ruling elites and the specter  
of left-wing dissent and terrorism to impose draconian controls to  
extinguish our democracy. And while they do it they will be waving the  
American flag, singing patriotic slogans and clutching the Christian  
cross. Fuld, I expect, will be one of many corporatists happy to  
contribute to the cause.

This is a defining moment in American history. The next few weeks and  
months will see us stabilize and weather this crisis or descend into a  
terrifying dystopia. I place no hope in Obama or the Democratic Party.  
The Democratic Party is a pathetic example of liberal, bourgeois  
impotence, hypocrisy and complacency. It has been bought off. I will  
vote, if only as a form of protest against our corporate state and an  
homage to Polanyi's brilliance, for Ralph Nader. I would like to offer  
hope, but it is more important to be a realist. No ethic or act of  
resistance is worth anything if it is not based on the real. And the  
real, I am afraid, does not look good.
Copyright © 2008 Truthdig, L.L.C.
Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer prize winner and a former foreign  
correspondent for The New York Times, is the author of "American  
Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America [5]." His column  
appears Mondays on Truthdig [6].