Thursday, February 25, 2016

Despair in the Time of Donald and Madam Clinton

“The current corrupt and dysfunctional state of American politics is about a growing authoritarianism tied to economic, political, and cultural formations that have hijacked democracy and put in place structural and ideological forces that constitute a new regime of politics, not simply a series of bad policies.” Henry A. Giroux

Journalist Robert Scheer was in Santa Barbara the other night, giving a lecture for the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. In a career spanning more than four decades, Scheer has covered plenty of important events, penned a number of books, and founded the award-winning news website, Truthdig, which, among other things, provides a platform for the uncompromising work of Chris Hedges.

At one point in his talk, Scheer said, “The enemy is us.” Not ISIS or Iran or China. Us. We are the enemy because of our own stupidity and arrogance. Take military spending, for example. In fiscal year 2016, according to one report I read, 54%, or roughly $625 billion, of the discretionary federal budget is devoted to defense expenditures. More than half the entire discretionary budget. Education accounts for 6%, or about $74 billion of discretionary spending. The US, of course, outspends every other nation on the planet on armaments. We are bristling with weaponry, armed to the gills, ever ready to wage war on our enemy du jour.  

Our level of military spending and our boot print on the globe is grotesque and completely unsustainable, but our political leaders keep shoveling money at the Pentagon, despite ample evidence that all this insane spending isn’t making the US any safer or more secure. While America’s social and practical needs – like bridges, roads, water systems (think, Flint, Michigan), mass transit, solar power, wind power, care for the young and the elderly – are allowed to go to seed, or get sold off to private operators, the politicians continue to sink billions into hopeless causes like Afghanistan.  

Has the disconnect between the governed and the federal government ever been more pronounced? The system is now so perverted that the will of the people is ignored without consequence. Both parties are ruled by the same sources of money: Wall Street banks, insurance companies, resource extractors, and the military-intelligence-security complex. The corporate-owned media works in tandem with the power complex, feeding the public a steady diet of misinformation, spectacle, and trivia. It takes very little effort to hoodwink the electorate into supporting bogus military conflicts, not to mention economic policies that make the majority poorer, enslaves people in debt, and brings ruin, even death (again, think Flint) to communities. 

The regimes of Uncle Ronnie, Slick Willie, and Cowboy George went too far, created and unleashed a neo-liberal Frankenstein that today is beyond control. Obama maintained the beast. Sadly, too many citizens sat passively by as the American Dream was put to the sword. What happened to American working-class militancy? Who speaks for average working people now? Nobody. In its rightward march toward the political center and beyond, the Democratic Party abandoned the working class.  The only use the GOP has for working people – white ones, anyway – is to stir them up about abortion or gay marriage or gun control.

The prospect of a presidential contest between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton fills me with despair. Forget choosing between the lesser of two evils. We face a choice between the lesser of two lessers. Standing on one side is Trump, a boorish demagogue, nearly a cartoon character, and quite possibly a fascist; on the other side is Hillary Clinton, an utterly corrupt opportunist with a track record of failure and mediocrity. This is not good, not good at all. I was reading something today that opined that people who support Trump honestly believe that he will restore order in the world. Why, because he’s rich and talks tough?


Yes, the enemy is us. The empire decays from within and is destined to totter and fall. The only question is when.

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