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.
This was just the into. Now fasten your seatbelts as Hedges leaves behind any semblance of sanity:
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.
An inconvenient truth for Chris Hedges is that the political ideology of the totalitarian state of Oceana in George Orwell's novel 1984 is Ingsoc which is Newspeak for "English Socialism." Got that, Chris? S-O-C-I-A-L-I-S-M. However, Hedges lack of familiarity with Orwell doesn't keep him from ranting on about the glories of socialism:
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.
Ah, how Hedges waxes enthusiastically over Die Link, the updated version of Die Rotfront. Next we are entertained by Hedges' obsession with a certain word which for him encapsulates just about all the evil in the world:
Corporations have intruded into every facet of life. We eat corporate food. We buy corporate clothes. We drive corporate cars. We buy our vehicular fuel and our heating oil from corporations. We borrow from corporate banks. We invest our retirement savings with corporations. We are entertained, informed and branded by corporations. We work for corporations. The creation of a mercenary army, the privatization of public utilities and our disgusting for-profit health care system are all legacies of the corporate state. These corporations have no loyalty to America or the American worker. They are not tied to nation states. They are vampires.
CORPORATIONS!!! Sloooowly I turned...step by step...inch by inch...
Hedges' belief in the evil supposedly perpetrated by corporations sound even funnier than an Abbott and Costello routine when he quotes psychologist Robert Hare about their "psychopathic traits."
- callous unconcern for the feelings for others;
- incapacity to maintain enduring relationships;
- reckless disregard for the safety of others;
- deceitfulness: repeated lying and conning others for profit;
- incapacity to experience guilt;
- failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behavior.
Hedges forgot to mention that evil corporations are also the cause of athlete's foot and uncontrollable drooling. Meanwhile do you notice not the slightest bit of castigation of communist (or socialist) governments from Dear Chris? People in North Korea are starving but it must be the fault of those nasty corporations in the Chris Hedges fantasy universe. You really know that Hedges has lept off edge of sanity when he holds up Cynthia McKinney as some sort of political role model. I kid you not:
Coalitions of environmental, anti-nuclear, anti-capitalist, sustainable-agriculture and anti-globalization forces have coalesced in Europe to form and support socialist parties. This has yet to happen in the United States. The left never rallied in significant numbers behind Cynthia McKinney or Ralph Nader. In picking the lesser of two evils, it threw its lot in with a Democratic Party that backs our imperial wars, empowers the national security state and does the bidding of corporations.
Hedges concludes with a dire warning that if President Obama does not destroy the evil corporations, then the country is doomed to be ruled by a "perverted Christian fascism" and a "ruthless totalitarian capitalism."
If Barack Obama does not end the flagrant theft of taxpayer funds by corporate slugs and the disgraceful abandonment of our working class, especially as foreclosures and unemployment mount, many in the country will turn in desperation to the far right embodied by groups such as Christian radicals. The failure by the left to offer a democratic socialist alternative will mean there will be, in the eyes of many embittered and struggling working- and middle-class Americans, no alternative but a perverted Christian fascism. The inability to articulate a viable socialism has been our gravest mistake. It will ensure, if this does not soon change, a ruthless totalitarian capitalism.
Correct me if I'm wrong but didn't Chris Hedges collect a fat paycheck for 15 years from a certain corporation known as the New York Times? Hypocrisy, thy name is Hedges. However, let us give Chris credit for honesty. He is saying out loud in his support of socialism what many of his New York Times and mainstream media colleagues think privately.
