Posted by Chris Hedges in TruthDig. Excerpt:
The corporate forces that are looting the Treasury and have plunged us into a depression will not be contained by the two main political parties. The Democratic and Republican parties have become little more than squalid clubs of privilege and wealth, whores to money and corporate interests, hostage to a massive arms industry, and so adept at deception and self-delusion they no longer know truth from lies. We will either find our way out of this mess by embracing an uncompromising democratic socialism—one that will insist on massive government relief and work programs, the nationalization of electricity and gas companies, a universal, not-for-profit government health care program, the outlawing of hedge funds, a radical reduction of our bloated military budget and an end to imperial wars—or we will continue to be fleeced and impoverished by our bankrupt elite and shackled and chained by our surveillance state.
The free market and globalization, promised as the route to worldwide prosperity, have been exposed as a con game. But this does not mean our corporate masters will disappear. Totalitarianism, as George Orwell pointed out, is not so much an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia. “A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial,†Orwell wrote, “that is when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud.†Force and fraud are all they have left. They will use both.
There is a political shift in Europe toward an open confrontation with the corporate state. Germany has seen a surge of support for Die Linke (The Left), a political grouping formed 18 months ago. It is co-led by the veteran socialist “Red†Oskar Lafontaine, who has built his career on attacking big business. Two-thirds of Germans in public opinion polls say they agree with all or some of Die Linke’s platform. The Socialist Party of the Netherlands is on the verge of overtaking the Labor Party as the main opposition party on the left. Greece, beset with street protests and violence by disaffected youths, has seen the rapid rise of the Coalition of the Radical Left. In Spain and Norway socialists are in power. Resurgence is not universal, especially in France and Britain, but the shifts toward socialism are significant.
Today’s Date: 6-17-2015: How has that tearing down of the Democratic Party been working out? The tea bagging Christofascists won, thanks to you and your “progressive” cohort: http://blog.reidreport.com/2011/04/re-rise-of-the-naderites-glenn-greenwalds-third-party-dreamin/
Yeah, your fellow “progressives” are on the far right, idiot: http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2005/11/reality-of-latin-american-reaction-to.html
Cattrot!
Happy New Year, guy!
I used the term “semi-Christian” of Hedges because I know him to be (1) the son of a clergyman of a mainline Protestant Church, one that over the last 80 years or so has so set aside its foundational beliefs as to become nothing more than an ideology with a Christian facade, and (2) a constant critic of Evangelicalism whose criticism always carries with it the air of someone grounded in a presumed morality and a knowledge of the faith that at once surpasses that of those philistines he criticizes. Yet while it pretends at saving us working schlubs from the vagaries of a rampaging Wall Street, this all-surpassing moral sense of Hedges can’t quite reach through to the unwanted, most innocent among us so as to preserve their lives. No, to the “Reverend” Hedges, these littlest are just so much oafal, as is the notion of an indissoluable union of a man and woman in sacramental marriage. Chris grasps all of this better than we do, you see. Just ask him.
John and Deran, I agree with both of you, and I have initiated the philosophy of Catholic Trotskyism in order to address this problem. I did not read the entire article, but John, I was under the impression that Chris Hedges is an atheist. He had a debate with right-wing radical atheist Sam Harris at an atheist forum that was moderated by a radical atheist Trotskyist Democrat, Suzi Weissman. If he has in fact converted to Christianity, perhaps he is making some progress.
Neoliberalism has NOTHING to do with laissez faire. Laissez faire = CLASSICAL liberalism. Neoliberalism = pseudo-socialism.
I think hedges has the spirit of socialism, but he needs to bring it in to the 21st century. Recent history has made it abundantly clear that “neo-liberal”/laisse faire capitalism is a disastrous failure, but socialism can not be tied to industrialism or the rubric of “growth”. And socialism needs to be libertarian (the roots of modern socialism are libertarian; the the Levellers, Chartists, the Paris Commune, etc) to avoid the excesses of statism.
Reading the entire article at it’s source, one is encounters what can be considered a mostly truthful analysis, but one distorted by the lens of a tired and now exhausted ideology. When will the socialists ever give up the rigidity confining what truth they have to offer and the insufferable romanticism rooted in a past long sabotaged by just this rigidity. And of course we have as author the semi-Christian, Chris Hedges. The classical product of a mainline Protestantism whose faith became contaminated long ago by the outlook of a privileged, rationalizing upper class unable to contain its personal sexual appetites, Hedges uncritically sees all evil in the contrasting possibilities of an incipient Evangelical, Christo-fascism. I’d suggest that the reader stick to the anti-system analysis, the rest bogs down in Hedges personal limitations.