By Chris Hedges
March 09, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" - There is
only one choice in this election. The consolidation
of oligarchic power under Donald Trump or the
consolidation of oligarchic power under Joe Biden.
The oligarchs, with Trump or Biden, will win again.
We will lose. The oligarchs made it abundantly
clear, should Bernie Sanders miraculously become the
Democratic Party nominee, they would join forces
with the Republicans to crush him. Trump would, if
Sanders was the nominee, instantly be shorn by the
Democratic Party elites of his demons and his
propensity for tyranny. Sanders would be red-baited
— as he was viciously Friday in The New York Times’
“As
Bernie Sanders Pushed for Closer Ties, Soviet Union
Spotted Opportunity” — and turned into a figure
of derision and ridicule. The oligarchs preach the
sermon of the least-worst to us when they attempt to
ram a Hillary Clinton or a Biden down our throats
but ignore it for themselves. They prefer Biden over
Trump, but they can live with either.
Only one thing matters to the oligarchs. It is
not democracy. It is not truth. It is not the
consent of the governed. It is not income
inequality. It is not the surveillance state. It is
not endless war. It is not jobs. It is not the
climate. It is the primacy of corporate power —
which has extinguished our democracy and left most
of the working class in misery — and the continued
increase and consolidation of their wealth. It is
impossible working within the system to shatter the
hegemony of oligarchic power or institute meaningful
reform. Change, real change, will only come by
sustained acts of civil disobedience and mass
mobilization, as with the yellow vests movement in
France and the British-based
Extinction Rebellion. The longer we are fooled
by the electoral burlesque, the more disempowered we
will become.
I was on the streets with protesters in
Philadelphia outside the appropriately named Wells
Fargo Center during the 2016 Democratic Convention
when hundreds of
Sanders delegates walked out of the hall. “Show
me what democracy looks like!” they chanted, holding
Bernie signs above their heads as they poured out of
the exits. “This is what democracy looks like!”
Sanders’ greatest tactical mistake was not
joining them. He bowed before the mighty altar of
the corporate state. He had desperately tried to
stave off a revolt by his supporters and delegates
on the eve of the convention by sending out repeated
messages in his name — most of them authored by
members of the Clinton campaign — to be respectful,
not disrupt the nominating process and support
Clinton. Sanders was a dutiful sheepdog, attempting
to herd his disgruntled supporters into the embrace
of the Clinton campaign. At his moment of apostasy,
when he introduced a motion to nominate Clinton, his
delegates had left hundreds of convention seats
empty.
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After the 2016 convention, Sanders held
rallies — the crowds pitifully small
compared to what he had drawn when he ran as
an insurgent — on Clinton’s behalf. He
returned to the Senate to loyally line up
behind Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer,
whose power comes from his ability to funnel
tens of millions of dollars in corporate and
Wall Street money to anointed Democratic
candidates. Sanders refused to support the
lawsuit brought against the Democratic
National Committee for rigging the primaries
against him. He endorsed Democratic
candidates who espoused the neoliberal
economic and political positions he claims
to oppose. Sanders, who calls himself an
independent, caucused as a Democrat. The
Democratic Party determined his assignments
in the Senate. Schumer offered to make
Sanders the head of the Senate Budget
Committee if the Democrats won control of
the Senate. Sanders became a party
apparatchik.
Sanders apparently believed that if he was
obsequious enough to the Democratic Party elite,
they would
give him a chance in 2020, a chance they denied
him in 2016. Politics, I suspect he would argue, is
about compromise and the practical. This is true.
But playing politics in a system that is not
democratic is about being complicit in the charade.
Sanders misread the Democratic Party leadership,
swamp creatures of the corporate state. He misread
the Democratic Party, which is a corporate mirage.
Its base can, at best, select preapproved candidates
and act as props at rallies and in choreographed
party conventions. The Democratic Party voters have
zero influence on party politics or party policies.
Sanders’ naivete, and perhaps his lack of political
courage, drove away his most committed young
supporters. These followers have not forgiven him
for his betrayal. They chose not to turn out to vote
in the numbers he needs in the primaries. They are
right. He is wrong. We need to overthrow the system,
not placate it.
Sanders is wounded. The oligarchs will go in for
the kill. They will subject him to the same
character assassination, aided by the courtiers in
the corporate press, that was directed at Henry
Wallace in 1948 and George McGovern in 1972, the
only two progressive presidential candidates who
managed to seriously threaten the ruling elites
since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The feckless
liberal class, easily frightened, is already
abandoning Sanders, castigating his supporters with
their nauseating self-righteousness and championing
Biden as a political savior.
Trump and Biden are repugnant figures, doddering
into old age with cognitive lapses and no moral
cores. Is Trump more dangerous than Biden? Yes. Is
Trump more inept and more dishonest? Yes. Is Trump
more of a threat to the open society? Yes. Is Biden
the solution? No.
Biden represents the
old neoliberal order. He personifies the
betrayal by the Democratic Party of working men and
women that sparked the deep hatred of the ruling
elites across the political spectrum. He is a gift
to a demagogue and con artist like Trump, who at
least understands that these elites are detested.
Biden cannot plausibly offer change. He can only
offer more of the same. And most Americans do not
want more of the same. The country’s largest
voting-age bloc, the 100 million-plus citizens who
out of apathy or disgust do not vote, will once
again stay home. This demoralization of the
electorate is by design. It will, I expect, give
Trump another term in office.
By
voting for Biden, you endorse the humiliation of
courageous women such as Anita Hill who confronted
their abusers. You vote for the architects of the
endless wars in the Middle East. You vote for the
apartheid state in Israel. You vote for wholesale
surveillance of the public by government
intelligence agencies and the abolition of due
process and habeas corpus. You vote for austerity
programs, including the destruction of welfare and
cuts to Social Security. You vote for NAFTA,
free trade deals, de-industrialization, a decline in
wages, the loss of hundreds of thousands of
manufacturing jobs and the offshoring of jobs to
underpaid workers who toil in sweatshops in China or
Vietnam. You vote for the assault on public
education and the transfer of federal funds to
for-profit and Christian charter schools. You vote
for the doubling of our prison population, the
tripling and quadrupling of sentences and huge
expansion of crimes meriting the death penalty. You
vote for militarized police who gun down poor people
of color with impunity. You vote against the Green
New Deal and immigration reform. You vote for
limiting a woman’s right to abortion and
reproductive rights. You vote for a segregated
public-school system in which the wealthy receive
educational opportunities and poor people of color
are denied a chance. You vote for punitive levels of
student debt and the inability to free yourself of
debt obligations through
bankruptcy. You vote for deregulating the
banking industry and the abolition of
Glass-Steagall. You vote for the for-profit
insurance and pharmaceutical corporations and
against universal health care. You vote for bloated
defense budgets. You vote for the use of unlimited
oligarchic and corporate money to buy our elections.
You vote for a politician who during his time in the
Senate abjectly
served the interests of MBNA, the largest
independent credit card company headquartered in
Delaware, which also employed Biden’s son Hunter.
There are no substantial political differences
between the Democrats and Republicans. We have only
the illusion of participatory democracy. The
Democrats and their liberal apologists adopt
tolerant positions on issues regarding race,
religion, immigration, women’s rights and sexual
identity and pretend this is politics. The right
wing uses those on the margins of society as
scapegoats. The culture wars mask the reality. Both
parties are full partners in the reconfiguration of
American society into a form of neofeudalism. It
only depends on how you want it dressed up.
“By fostering an illusion among the powerless
classes” that it can make their interests a
priority, the Democratic Party “pacifies and thereby
defines the style of an opposition party in an
inverted totalitarian system,” political philosopher
Sheldon Wolin writes.
The Democrats will once again offer up a
least-worst alternative while, in fact, doing little
or nothing to thwart the march toward corporate
totalitarianism. What the public wants and deserves
will again be ignored for what the corporate
lobbyists demand. If we do not respond soon to the
social and economic catastrophe that has been
visited on most of the population, we will be unable
to thwart the
rise of corporate tyranny and a Christian
fascism.
We need to reintegrate those who have been pushed
aside back into the society, to heal the ruptured
social bonds, to give workers dignity, empowerment
and protection. We need a universal health care
system, especially as we barrel toward a global
pandemic. We need programs that provide employment
with sustainable wages, job protection and pensions.
We need quality public education for all Americans.
We need to rebuild our infrastructure and end the
squandering of our resources on war. We need to halt
corporate pillage and regulate Wall Street and
corporations. We need to respond with radical and
immediate measures to curb carbon emissions and save
ourselves from ecocide and extinction. We don’t need
a “Punch and Judy” show between Trump and Biden. But
that, along with corporate tyranny, is what we seem
fated to get, unless we take to the streets and tear
the house down.
Chris Hedges, spent nearly two decades as a
foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle
East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from
more than 50 countries and has worked for The
Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio,
The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for
which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years.
https://www.truthdig.com/author/chris_hedges/
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