We must destroy the centers of power that lure us and our children—like the Pied Piper of Hamelin—to certain doom.
(Original illustration for ScheerPost by Mr. Fish)
By Chris Hedges
ScheerPost.com
Joe Biden and the systems managers of the deep state and empire are returning to power. President Donald Trump and his coterie of buffoons, racists, con artists and Christian fascists are sullenly preparing to leave office. U.S. pharmaceutical corporations are starting to disseminate vaccines to mitigate the globe’s worst outbreak of Covid-19 that has resulted in more than 2,600 deaths per day. America, as Biden says, is back, ready to take its place at the head of the table.
In the battle for the soul of America, he assures us, democracy has prevailed. Progress, prosperity, civility and a reassertion of American prestige and power are, we are promised, weeks away.
But the real lesson we should learn from the rise of a demagogue such as Trump, who received 74 million votes, and a pandemic that our for-profit health care industry proved unable to contain, is that we are losing control as a nation and as a species.
Far more dangerous demagogues will arise from the imperial and neoliberal policies the Biden administration will embrace. Far worse pandemics will sweep the globe with higher rates of infections and mortality, an inevitable result of our continued consumption of animals and animal products, and the wanton destruction of the ecosystem on which we and other species depend for life.
“One of the most pathetic aspects of human history,” Reinhold Niebuhr wrote, “is that every civilization expresses itself most pretentiously, compounds its partial and universal values most convincingly, and claims immortality for its finite existence at the very moment when the decay which leads to death has already begun.”
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Biden’s appointments are drawn almost exclusively from the circles of the Democratic Party and corporate elite, those responsible for the massive social inequality, trade deals, de-industrialization, militarized police, world’s largest prison system, austerity programs that abolished social programs such as welfare, the revived Cold War with Russia, wholesale government surveillance, endless wars in the Middle East and the disenfranchisement and impoverishment of the working class.
The Washington Post writes that “about 80 percent of the White House and agency officials he’s announced have the word ‘Obama’ on their résumé from previous White House or Obama campaign jobs.”
Bernie Sanders, apparently rebuffed in his efforts to become secretary of labor in the Biden administration, has expressed frustration with the Biden nominations. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was denied a seat by House Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee because of her support for the Green New Deal.
The message of the Biden administration to progressives and left-wing populists is very clear – “Drop dead.”
The List of Incoming
Seahawk helicopters firing flares into the Atlantic as they approach USS Abraham Lincoln in 2012. (U.S. Navy, Seaman Zachary A. Anderson)
The list of new administration officials includes retired General Lloyd J. Austin III who is being nominated to be secretary of defense. Austin is on the board of Raytheon Technologies and a partner at Pine Island Capital, a firm that invests in defense industries and also includes Antony Blinken, Biden’s nominee to be secretary of state.
Blinken, who was deputy national security adviser and deputy secretary of state, is a strong supporter of the apartheid state of Israel. He was one of the architects of the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq and a proponent of the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, resulting in yet another failed state in the Middle East.
Left to right: U.S. Ambassador to Iraq James Jeffrey, Vice President Joe Biden, Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III in Iraq, November 2011. (DoD, Caleb Barrieau, Wikimedia Commons)
Janet Yellen, former Federal Reserve chair under Barack Obama, is slated to be treasury secretary. Yellen as the chair of Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisors (CEA) and later as a member of the board of the Federal Reserve, backed the repeal of Glass-Steagall, which led to the banking crisis of 2008. She supported the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). She also lobbied for a new statistical metric intended to lower payments to senior citizens on Social Security.
Yellen backed “quantitative easing” that provided trillions in virtually no-interest loans to Wall Street, loans used to bail out banks and corporations and engage in massive stock buy-backs while the victims of financial fraud were abandoned.
Former Secretary of State John Kerry is to become a special envoy for climate. Kerry championed the massive expansion of domestic oil and gas production, largely through fracking, and, according to Obama’s memoir, worked doggedly to convince those concerned about the climate crisis to “offer up concessions on subsidies for the nuclear power industry and the opening of additional U.S. coastlines to offshore oil drilling.”
Avril Haines, a former Obama deputy CIA chief, is to become Biden’s director of national intelligence. Haines oversaw Obama’s expanded and murderous drone program overseas and backed Gina Haspel’s nomination to be the head of the CIA, despite Haspels’ direct involvement in the CIA torture program carried out in black sites around the globe. Haines called Haspel “intelligent, compassionate, and fair.”
Brian Deese, the executive who was in charge of the “climate portfolio” at BlackRock, which invests heavily in fossil fuels, including coal, and who served as a former Obama economic adviser who advocated austerity measures, has been chosen to run the White House’s economic policy.
Neera Tanden, a former aide to Hillary Clinton, has been picked to be director of the Office of Management and Budget. Tanden, as the head of the Democratic Party’s think tank, the Center for American Progress, raised millions in dark money from Silicon Valley and Wall Street. Her donors include Bain Capital, Blackstone, Evercore, Walmart and the defense contractor Northrup Grumman.
The United Arab Emirates, a close ally of Saudi Arabia in the war in Yemen, also gave the think tank between $1.5 million and $3 million. She relentlessly ridicules Sanders and his supporters on cable news and social media. She also proposed a plank in the Democratic platform calling for the bombing Iran.
Unpopular Wars & Demonization of Russia
Long-range Ocullar Interrupter delivers a warning effect at distances of 3000 meters and increases irradiance at ranges up to 2000 meters to provide visual suppression of the target. (DoD, Todd Getz)
The perpetuation of the deeply unpopular wars and onerous neoliberal policies by the Biden administration will be accompanied by a fevered demonization of Russia, most recently blamed for cyber-attacks.
A new Cold War with Russia will be used by the corporate Democrats to discredit domestic and foreign critics and deflect attention from the political stagnation and the corporate pillaging of the country. It will allow MSNBC and The New York Times, which spent two years slogging empty Russiagate conspiracies, to disseminate a daily stream of emotionally charged rumors and shady accusations about Russia.
Cable celebrities such as Rachel Maddow will hyperventilate night after night about Russia while ignoring the corruption of the Biden administration. The only reason Russia is not blamed for rigging the election in 2020, as opposed to 2016, by the Democratic Party is because Trump was defeated.
Biden, after his defeat in the Democratic Party Caucus in Nevada by Bernie Sanders, where Sanders got more than twice his vote, immediately played the Russian card, telling CBS News that the “Russians don’t want me to be the nominee, they like Bernie.” Hillary Clinton started this dirty game when she attacked 2016 Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein as a “Russian asset” and in 2020 leveled the same charge against Rep. Tulsi Gabbard.
The Democrats need an enemy, real or fictitious, and Silicon Valley and major manufacturers will not allow them to target China.
More of the same means more disaster. If we want to reclaim our open society and save the ecosystem, we must abolish the corporate stranglehold on global economic and political power.
If we want to avert zoonotic diseases such as Covid-19, swine flu, avian flu, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (Mad Cow disease), Ebola and SARS we must stop consuming animals and their bodily secretions. We must abolish factory farming and adopt a vegan diet. And we must keep fossil fuels in the ground.
“Cable celebrities such as Rachel Maddow will hyperventilate night after night about Russia while ignoring the corruption of the Biden administration.”
Razing the rainforest for cattle grazing and vast tracts of farmland devoted to growing monocrops to feed animals destined for human consumption are responsible for up to 91 percent of Amazon rainforest destruction since 1970. The loss of forests is one of the single biggest contributors to climate change.
Animal agriculture is the leading cause of ocean dead zones. Oceans could be devoid of fish by 2048. Each minute, 7 million pounds of feces are produced by the animals raised for human food in the U.S. alone. The continued destruction of natural habitat, coupled with the vast factory farms which use 80 percent of the antibiotics in the U.S. and incubate drug-resistant pathogens that spread to human populations, presage new forms of the Black Death.
“Nuremberg Chronicle” illustration by Hartmann Schedel. Inspired by the Black Death, “The Dance of Death,” or “Danse Macabre,” is an allegory on the universality of death. (Wikimedia Commons)
The belief that we can maintain current levels of consumption, especially of animal products, capitalist expansion, imperial wars, a reliance on fossil fuels and abject subservience to unfettered corporate power, which has solidified the worst income inequality in human history, is not a form of hope but suicidal self-delusion.
We are not headed under the policies of the Biden administration and the global ruling elite for the broad sunlit uplands of a new and glorious future, but economic misery, vast climate migrations, waves of new and more virulent pandemics, of which Covid-19 is a mild precursor, along with irreversible ecological systems collapse and frightening forms of societal breakdown, authoritarianism and neofascism.
Global Warming Can Only Be Slowed
Global warming is inevitable. It cannot be stopped. At best, it can be slowed. Over the next 50 years the earth will most likely heat up to levels that will make whole parts of the planet uninhabitable. Tens, perhaps hundreds, of millions of people will be displaced. Millions of species will go extinct. Cities on or near a coast, including New York and London, will be submerged.
Oceans absorb much of the excess CO2 and heat from the atmosphere. This absorption is rapidly warming and acidifying ocean waters, resulting in the deoxygenation of the oceans. Each of the earth’s five known mass extinctions was preceded by at least one part of what climate scientists call the “deadly trio” — warming, acidification and deoxygenation of the oceans.
The next mass extinction of sea life is already under way, the first in some 55 million years.
This is not defeatism. It is realism. We appear to have bought four years with Biden’s election, but if we do not use it wisely — and there is nothing in the Biden nominations that offer any encouragement — we are merely reconstructing a shabby Potemkin village that will soon be flattened by the gale-force political and environmental hurricanes that are gathering around us.
One of the lessons I learned from covering wars and revolutions as a foreign correspondent is that the political, economic and cultural systems that are erected by any society are very fragile. The façade of power remains in place, as I saw in Eastern Europe during the 1989 revolutions and later in Yugoslavia, long after terminal rot has consumed the foundations.
People detained after Dec. 22, 1989, in Timisoara, Romania. (Urbán Tamás, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)
This façade fools a society into thinking the structures of authority remain solid, impervious to collapse. So, when collapse comes, which should have been long predicted, it appears sudden and incomprehensible. The ensuing chaos is disorienting and frightening. The cognitive dissonance between the perception of power and its rapid dissolution feeds self-delusion.
It creates, as I witnessed in the former Yugoslavia, what anthropologists call crisis cults, as well as bizarre conspiracy theories, fascism and the embrace of inchoate violence to purge society of the demons blamed for the national debacle.
Hatred becomes the highest form of patriotism.
The vulnerable are scapegoated. Intellectuals, journalists and scientists rooted in a fact-based world are despised. Ruling elites and ruling structures lose all credibility. This collapse is often a portal to a world of nihilism and blood-drenched fantasy.
After four years of lies, the stoking of racist violence, stunning ineptitude, rampant corruption and an abject failure to cope with a national health crisis, Trump expanded his base by 11 million votes. This should be a huge, flashing red light.
Worse, 70 percent of Trump voters, 51 million Americans, believe that “radical Left Democrats” and the deep state rigged the elections through “voter fraud,” including the importation of Venezuelan voting software, illegitimate mail-in ballots and the wholesale destruction of Trump ballots by election officials.
One hundred and twenty-six Republican House members joined a lawsuit filed by 18 Republican state attorneys general asking the Supreme Court to overturn Biden’s victory. The vast majority of Republican senators refused to acknowledge the election results following the November vote.
Electors from the Electoral College were forced in several states to deliver their votes to state legislatures under armed guard. Some two dozen armed protesters carrying American flags and chanting “Stop the Steal” descended on the home of Democratic Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson.
Seven hundred members of the white nationalist group the Proud Boys took over streets in Washington last weekend to protest the alleged theft of the election, leading to more than three dozen arrests, four stabbings, the vandalizing of four Black churches, and Black Lives Matter banners and signs ripped down and burned.
Trump may be gone soon, but he leaves behind a party that is openly authoritarian, dismissive of democratic norms, an enemy to science and fact-based discourse and which attempted a coup d’état. The next time around they won’t be so disorganized and inept.
This hostility to democracy by one of the two ruling parties, supported by millions of Americans, many of whom were betrayed by Biden and the leaders of the Democratic Party, will not dissipate but grow, especially as the hammer of economic dislocation, including the looming evictions of millions of Americans, pummels the country.
The decades-long corporate assault on culture, journalism, education, the arts, universities and critical thinking has left those who speak this truth marginalized and ignored. These Cassandras, locked out of the national debate, are dismissed as unhinged and depressingly apocalyptic. The country is consumed by a mania for hope, which our corporate masters lavishly provide, at the expense of truth. It is this delusional hope that will doom us.
Fireworks over White House during “Salute to America” on July 4, 2020. (White House, Stephanie Chasez)
The Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, who with a handful of other writers and artists desperately tried to warn of the suicidal folly of World War I, wrote of what he called “the mental superiority of the defeated.” His anti-war play Jeremiah, based on the Biblical prophet Jeremiah who issued warnings in vain, illustrated that those who face reality, however bitter, are able to endure and rise above it.
“Awaken, doomed city, that thou mayest save thyself,” the prophet cries out in Zweig’s play. “Awaken from your heavy slumbers, heedless ones, lest you be slain in sleep; awaken, for the walls are crumbling, and will crush you; awaken.”
But the warnings from Jeremiah, called “the weeping prophet,” were ignored and ridiculed. He was attacked for demoralizing the people. There were plots against his life. When the Babylonian army captured Jerusalem, Jeremiah, like Julian Assange, was in prison.
“I was always attracted to showing how any form of power can harden a human being’s heart, how victory can bring mental rigidity to whole nations, and to contrasting that with the emotional force of defeat painfully and terribly ploughing through the soul,” Zweig wrote in his memoir, The World of Yesterday. “In the middle of war, while others, celebrating triumph too soon, were proving to one another that victory was inevitable, I was plumbing the depths of the catastrophe and looking for a way to emerge from them.”
We cannot use the word hope if we refuse to face the truth. All hope rooted in self-delusion is fantasy. We must lift the filter from our eyes to see the danger before us. We must heed the warnings of our own prophets.
We must destroy the centers of power that lure us and our children, like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, to certain doom. The walls, daily, are closing in around us. The radical evil we face is as real under Trump as it will be under Biden. And if this radical evil is not smashed, then the world ahead will be one of torment and mass death.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and NPR. He is the host of the Emmy Award-nominated RT America show “On Contact.”
This column is from Scheerpost, for which Chris Hedges writes a regular column twice a month. Click here to sign up for email alerts.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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I don’t think that the sole reason that “Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was denied a seat by House Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee (was) because of her support for the Green New Deal”.
As Hedges points out, it goes way deeper than that. She is in fact a potent direct threat to the overall system he so incisively, and quite rightly, rails against.
And it’s not her alone, all of the newly elected, continuously derogated progressives and left-wing populists – the ‘Squad’, will not be permitted to deviate from the party’s neoliberal corporate agenda.
If the people, whose representatives the Congress is supposed to be, are incapable of recognizing the middle finger being given them by now, what hope is there for evolutionary political change ever coming into play, systemically?
Ergo, what remains are the ever-tightening screws of the status quo agenda of the duopoly; which are deeper austerity for the populace, and ever more tyranny, from the top-down.
I can’t see the American people rising up to overthrow the corporate overlordss, because most want what to live like the overlords – we just don’t have enough money, yet. But one day …. when our ship comes in; when we win the lottery – we will have arrived, the Dream will become our reality. All we have to is work hard, keep our noses to the grindstone, and be good citizens and America will bless us as it has the overlords whom we secretly admire. John Steinbeck is recorded as once remarking: “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”
John Steinbeck
We are complicit in our own imprisonment. We are not lured by piped pipers. We willingly march to our deaths. We don’t want to destroy the overlords; we want to be them. And until that changes, nothing else will.
So true! Right on Brother Culpepper!
Who among us too does not depend on the system for their very lives, their food, water, shelter, etc?
The system has us and the system is us.
But note too that there’ll be no magical change in us either…We are all social primates (means our brains are designed to manage social-economic status issues…we “swim in politics like fish swim in water” as Jay Hanson put it at dieoff.com). We live in a techno-industrial economy based on food production and exosomatic energy, highly controllable basic economic inputs, and that enables those who control them to maintain and even increase their power. Each of us all the way down to the lowest in social-economic status has at least some measure of power from the system and isn’t seeking to lose it but to keep it and even increase it if possible. Yes, there are exceptions but those only serve to prove the rule, and they have been around for millennia.
Also, under the forces unleashed by scientific and technological “progress” humanity now is on a road to becoming borg.
There’ll be no restoration of freedom, no stopping of the process of denaturalization of the earth and “borgification”unless the system self-destructs…only a crazy man like a Kaczynski would think it might be possible to destroy it pre-emptively, and therein lay his insanity,
Unless there’s a total irrecoverable collapse, or self-destruction due to technological accidents, of our current economic form back to hunting & gathering, we should expect freedom and egalitarianism to become ever more forgotten reminiscences as our species undergoes epigenetic evolution toward increasing borg-likeness. There is the possibility that such collapse could occur, and we are now in the decisive period on that as our current tech&resource paradigm has reached its limits. I’m not so sure whether it’s even right to hope the transition to a new paradigm can be accomplished. Well, the process, however it’s going to go, must play itself out…that’s the hand of God.
Chris Hedges is being Jeremiah like the other prophets he mentions…heeding his call. It’s what he must do, and he does it well… he may not alter the future but at least he keeps a good conscience, and that’s not an easy thing to do. May he keep up the good work and the rest of us too, as the Jeremiahs we’re called to be.
As usual, Chris is (unfortunately) spot on. I’ll note re: climate change, the consequences of it may be worse than many of us realise, and I’m very glad to see what is currently happening brought up. The chain of events that are unfolding are astounding, and the facts can’t be brought to light enough – so here’s a few more to hopefully further emphasise a few points made in the article.
The currently ongoing Holocene extinction may lead to as many as 80% of current extant megafauna going extinct — 70% are already in decline — and as a consequence of human civilisation, 83% of wild mammals, 80% of marine mammals, 50% of plants and 15% of fish have already vanished; 60% of Earth’s biomass has been reduced to livestock, 36% is us, a mere 4% is wild animals. NASA’s current predictions are that the “Arctic Ocean is expected to become essentially ice free in summer before mid-century” with the global temperature increasing by potentially as much as 10C by end-century. All this, I’ll note, is non-controversial, mainstream science that’s widely accepted and easily verified.
All of that may not even be the worst of it. The worst extinction in Earth’s entire history, the Permian-Triassic extinction (or Great Dying) seems similar in many ways to the Holocene extinction – e.g., up to 96% of marine species went extinct because of the “deadly trio” mentioned in the article of warming, acidification and deoxygenation of the oceans. We’re artificially recreating some of the suspected causes of the PT extinction. One theory that a few climate scientists have tried to bring attention to is called the Clathrate gun hypothesis, which suggests oceanic warming causes the release of massive amounts of methane trapped beneath the oceans. Methane is a far worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. If the hypothesis is true, it’s aptly named, as we may be collectively shooting ourselves in the head with the “Clathrate gun,” and there’s no telling how it may effect climate change predictions.
It’s ironic that we always depict the dinosaurs looking up at an asteroid in terror, yet we blindly head towards our own extinction. There’s long been speculation of why we’ve never found other intelligent life in the universe, and I sometimes wonder if we’re witnessing the answer to the Fermi paradox. Maybe it always ends like this – petty, disorganised tribal confederacies whose leaders — animals unable to escape their brutal evolutionary pasts of being “great apes” — thump their chests over hierarchy and charge everyone forth into oblivion.
I agree with virtually everything that CH says here, though I would also say he could have emphasized humane population reduction a bit more strongly, instead of just hinting at it. As a practicing vegan for about 10 yrs now, I can also vouch for its personal benefits as well as its ecological and moral benefits.
That being said, I’ve become very pessimistic about the human race’s possibilities of peacefully, rationally resolving the MAJOR worldwide problems that CH lists. And these problems are almost certainly immune to rational analysis and solution, because most (70 or 80%?) people aren’t concerned about them and want/demand to-be pandered-to. I think history bears this out also – – it’s hard to think of a country that proactively solved a major problem UNTIL they were virtually forced to. Our animal drives for procreation, families, tribal cohesiveness, territory, etc will keep pushing us towards the abyss…
i get all the conspiracy theories i need from the corporate mass media, even though some say “it aint a conspiracy theory when enough
people believe it”.
Chris can we please address the DNC stealing yet another primary? Cheating US out of our rightful candidate Bernie Sanders!
The exit polls were way above the UN’ threshold for honest elections.
My issue with Chris is that he goes to great lengths laying out the complaints, of which we’re all, unfortunately, too well aware without having it reiterated, with little in the way of options in terms of alternative approaches. Pressing for veganism is all well and good, I suppose, but it’s hardly a panacea for the myriad issues he highlights.
Additionally and to your point, Fred, I find it odd that he doesn’t mention his endorsement of the Peoples Party, which is an alternative to the Duopoly’s grip on governmental power.
see: peoplesparty.org/
Who is actually the author here? The exact same piece appears today in the Smirking Chimp under the name of Robert Scheer!
Chris Hedges is the author. It appeared on Scheer Post, but it was not written by Robert Scheer.
I’d argue that the utter deregulation of derivatives by Clinton is what lead to the 2008 crash.
However, that deregulation, there is NO public market for derivatives, allowed big banks like Chase, BofA, and Citi to trade in that crap.
And now in 2020, derivatives trading, which was never simply about bundles of suspect mortgages or old style commodities futures, is most of what “high finance” trades.
What a pleasure to read Chris.
I am on SS.
I disagree about forced veganism. I always will. But most of the rest is right on target.
With all due respect Chris ,I hope you don’t expect any changes that will make any difference whatsoever in US politics with Biden being the next puppet the war profiteers exercise power over.Not to mention the rot of corruption on both sides of the isle .
As an outsider looking in ,my feeling is that the old saying ,meet the new boss same as the old boss ,has merit .But realistically it does not matter who is the deemed as the boss ,it is figurehead only .
You want to curb climate change? De-urbanize. The city is a cement and asphalt heat sink soaking up solar energy by day, and radiating it out again by night. AC not only consumes energy, it produces heat. Heating a building produces heat. The byproducts of infernal combustion engines and industry are drivers, but the equation is incomplete without considering the impact of high density living.
I am an urban person. I do not want to live in the country and be a farmer. Sorry.
Your penchant is predicated upon the luxury of modernity. At no time prior could you choose to not be more responsible for your own calories. It is the insistence of humanity to live beyond their means that is killing the planet. Cities are not sustainable. You can choose to not deal with reality, that does not mean reality will not deal with you.
So what uses more energy? Five single-family homes or a 5-unit apartment building?
Thank you for another brilliant piece Chris!