“The silent colossal National Lie that is the support and confederate of
all the tyrannies and shams and inequalities and unfairness’s that afflict the
peoples – that is the one to throw bricks and sermons at.” Mark Twain
I desperately want to
believe that Chris Hedges (journalist, author, rebel and anarchist) is right
when he argues that the corporate elite who own and operate America are running
scared, but I have trouble imagining a popular revolt in our future. If Hedges
is right, a single incident could spark an uprising and put citizens in the
street. I would hope such an uprising, if it happens, would be peaceful, but
the powers that be are unlikely to sit idly by when they have militarized
police forces at their disposal.
The Occupy movement,
although short-lived and largely unfocused as to its political goals, made the
corporate elites nervous because the movement made the problem crystal clear:
the 99% were being shafted by the 1%, with ample help from courts of law and
legislative bodies. Occupy embodied what millions felt and knew to be true
because their personal experienced confirmed it.
The 1% drove the final stake
into the heart of the American Dream, and as the dream lay dying in the gutter
the moguls laughed; they laughed at how easy it was to engineer a corporate
coup, to buy politicians wholesale, to crush labor unions, to send millions of
jobs abroad, to eliminate or hose down regulations, and to seize de facto
control of the legal system. The 1% laughed because even when they lost they
won. They knew the asset bubbles they created had to burst, and when the day of
reckoning arrived they strolled away from the smoking wreckage richer than
ever. The 1% shrugged and said that free market capitalism sometimes worked
this way, but the 99% recognized racketeering when we saw it. The federal
government once enforced anti-trust laws and prosecuted mobsters, but that was
before the death of the American Dream, when working people who played by the
rules and tried to do the right thing had a shot at a ticket to the middle
class. Today the government sleeps under a goose down comforter with the
mobsters.
The Occupy movement gave us
images and words to express what we felt but the forces of the state, working
on behalf of moneyed interests, moved against Occupy in full riot gear.
Sanitation reasons, they claimed. Necessary for protection of private property,
they said. Corporate media echoed
these justifications. The usual pundits told us Occupy was way off base, out of
touch with Main Street, a nuisance that deserved to be driven from private and
public spaces.
What will the spark that
ignites the tinder be? Another bailout of Wall Street gamblers? Another stupid
war in the Middle East? Financial meltdown, Part II? Or some other event that will open the people’s eyes to the
reality that their government doesn’t work for them, or that American-style
capitalism is a game for insiders.
The insiders build walls and erect fences
and invest in barbed wire.
As noted many times before
on the Balcony, the American government no longer fears the people, as some
European governments fear their citizens. The only sure-fire way to ignite the
outrage of average Americans is to take away their access to TV; do that and
the people will pour into the streets, armed to the teeth and determined to
spill blood.
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