I was in Anderson, Indiana and what was fascinating is that all these old UAW workers voted for Sanders, but in the presidential election, they voted for Trump. They were never going to vote for Clinton, because 25,000 good union jobs, benefits, pensions. People could make 25, 30, 40 dollars an hour, buy their own homes, send their kids to college. All of that was destroyed….
Where did the jobs go? They went to Monterrey, Mexico where GM is paying workers $3 an hour without benefits.
~ Chris Hedges
General Motors once had so many plants [in Anderson, Indiana] that it had to stagger their schedules so that the streets would not be clogged with traffic when the workday ended. At the city’s peak, [in 1970], one of every three people in Anderson worked for G.M.
Now there is not a single G.M. plant left…
The ruling elites, terrified by the mobilization of the left in the 1960s, or by what the Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington called America’s “excess of democracy,” built counter-institutions to delegitimize and marginalize critics of corporate capitalism and imperialism. They bought the allegiances of the two main political parties by purging from its ranks New Deal Democrats and corporate and imperial critics. They imposed obedience to corporate capitalism and globalization within academia and the press. This campaign, laid out by Lewis Powell in his 1972 memorandum titled “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” was the blueprint for the creeping corporate coup d’état that today is complete.
The destruction of democratic institutions, places where the citizen has agency and a voice, is far graver than the ascendancy to the White House of the demagogue Trump. The coup destroyed our two-party system. It destroyed labor unions. It destroyed public education. It destroyed the judiciary. It destroyed the press. It destroyed academia. It destroyed consumer and environmental protection. It destroyed our industrial base. It destroyed communities and cities. And it destroyed the lives of tens of millions of Americans no longer able to find work that provides a living wage, cursed to live in chronic poverty or locked in cages in our monstrous system of mass incarceration.
This coup also destroyed the credibility of liberal democracy. Self-identified liberals such as Bill and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama mouthed the words of liberal democratic values while making war on these values in the service of corporate power. The revolt we see rippling across the country is a revolt not only against a corporate system that has betrayed workers, but also, for many, liberal democracy itself. This is very dangerous. It will allow the radical right to cement into place an Americanized fascism.
It turns out that those who truly hate us for our freedoms are not the array of dehumanized enemies cooked up by the war machine–the Vietnamese, Cambodians, Afghans, Iraqi, Iranians, or even the Taliban, al Qaeda, and ISIS. They are the financiers, bankers, and business people cultivated in the elite universities and business schools who sold us the utopian dream of corporate capitalism and globalization.
Wealth is no longer created by producing or manufacturing products. It is created by manipulating the prices of currencies, stocks, and commodities and imposing crippling debt peonage on the public. Our casino capitalism has merged with the gambling industry. The entire system is parasitic. It is designed to prey on the desperate–young men and women burdened by student loans, underpaid workers burdened by credit card debt and mortgages, towns and cities forced to borrow to maintain municipal services….
The kleptocrats–and, now, those they con–have no interest in the flowery words of inclusivity, multiculturalism, and democracy that a bankrupt liberal class used with great effectiveness for three decades to swindle the public on behalf of corporations. That rhetoric is a spent force. Barack Obama tried it when he criss-crossed the country during the 2016 presidential campaign telling a betrayed public that Hillary Clinton would finish the job started by his administration.
Political rhetoric has been replaced by the crude obscenities of reality television, the deformed and stunted communications on Twitter, professional wrestling, and the daytime shows in which couples discover if their husband or wife is having an affair. This is the language of Trump, who views the world through the degraded lens of television and the sickness of celebrity culture. This is why he is so effective as a politician. He may be a crass New York billionaire, but he, like much of the public, is also entranced and almost exclusively informed by whatever he sees or hears on television. These electronic hallucinations for him, and many Americans, have replaced reality.
Chris Hedges
America:The Farewell Tour
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We, the people, must redeem the land and make America again!
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all human beings are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among the People, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
Our faith in the promise of America will move mountains and unleash unsuspected human potential where nothing will be impossible for us.
If we don’t want poverty in our nation, our businesses must pay living wages with decent benefits. And if we don’t want polluted air, water, and land, our businesses must behave in environmentally sustainable ways.
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