This is yet another frustrating piece that is breathtakingly void of critical thinking and self-awareness.
Trump was elected in 2016 and will likely be elected again because of this list of unsolved problems and yet he is listed as the main problem.
So, we are supposed to support the ongoing political establishment and reject outsiders like Trump and then this is going to miraculously fix all the problems that the political establishment caused?
This reminds me of the woman stuck in an abusive marriage with bruises on her face telling the social worker that her husband is better now and she needs to stay with him because otherwise her life would be hell.
fascism, international fascism, definitions of fascism, Hungry, Orben, assault on science, assault on education, election reforms, court packing, Eastern Europe, Biden administration, neo-cons and neoliberals converging, takeover of Democratic party by neo-cons, Brazil, Steven K. Bannon, Ukraine, Ukrainian War, Russia, Putin, Poland, Intermarian, Polish vs American vs Russian perception of Intermarian, Stratford, defense spending, defense contractors, clerical fascism, ethnonationalism vs technocratic fascism, WWIII
This Frank Lee guy is a right-wing troll who comes in here and trolls. Notice how he seems to have read an entirely different essay than the one everybody else has read?
The problem is not capitalism. It is corporatism and globalism. Nationalism is not fascism similar to how communitarianism is not fascism. The liberal college town I live in demands to be individually quirky… to maintain its own culture of community… to resist development that would allow in more people and potentially change its local character. Are these people fascists? Totalitarianism is the real threat. Global totalitarianism to be more concise.
The meme that Trump represents white supremacist fascism is an intellectually bankrupt propaganda spew perpetuated by the Great Reset globalist corporatist cabal to deflect from their hand in every problem we are dealing with today. Trump is against that cabal. Biden Democrats are part of the cabal. That is the disconnect.
Exactly. Pay him no mind--this is his stock in trade. He always comically mis-reads what is written by Hedges, and thinks everyone else is wrong. What an irony! This is exactly the type addressed by Hedges.
The problem is Empire, capitalism, and our military/intelligence/corporate leaders. If you are not capable of criticizing the most corrupt parts of our culture, then your conclusions will be stained with inaccuracy and fantasy.
You are coming from a black and white world that isn't what Chris Hedges is writing about. He doesn't propose solutions -- and you could critique him for that -- but I would say that he brilliantly gives us the lay of a corrupted land.
Exactly, that is what Journalists are supposed to do.
Frank Lee is an indignant, tiny, toddler without his blankie, after refusing to eat his vegetables that is being told it is bedtime. I feel sorry for the poor little guy.
You completely misread Hedges. He says Trump is the symptom not the disease. He says the political establish must respond and reform, and that people should organize and engage in non-violent civil disobedience to make that happen, not that we should vote for lesser evil democrats (who he correctly calls sometime worse evil).
No, I get all that. Again, dreaming of the same political establishment that caused the problems to now fix the problems is that clutching to an abusive relationship. We have to elect anti establishment politicians to fix what is broken. The Democrats are not lesser evil. They are the establishment.
How in the world do you or anyone else expect changes to take place from the actions, behavior and proposed policies of either side!? There is but one solution to this debacle, and that is to starve the overlords until everyone realizes that the government works for the people or it will not work at all... exit the existing financial and political system. Do not keep your money in USD. It is collapsing... learn to use the lightning network for payments and strip those who dominate the payments infrastructure like Visa who rape everyone for no less than 3%. It's going to be a brutal transition, stop arguing and pretending things will change with the next president.. every single one of them is a crook. Take your life into your own hands, nobody will save you. Democracy is smoke and mirrors.
Socialism. Right. That murderous ideology that never works. Name one country historically or today that exemplifies your model of a working socialist system. You cannot. So you are a hazardous fool with a vote.
OK, so now you are making claims. Socialism is a murderous ideology.
Then you reverse the question posed to you, in my last post, attempting to squirrel out of a burden to produce evidence for your claims by asking me a question.
No, no no. Basic argumentation. You make the claim, you give the evidence.
but deflection is what you have been taught in the defunded schools that line the blighted neighborhoods where little music or laughter can be heard and instead the typing of the imperfect human attempting to announce his or her existence without supporting their claims. That, my friend, is uncritical thinking.
You went full circle and with your own words and narrative have defined the ver uncritical thinking you accuse Hedges of.
I will not have the time to respond to future posts by you. So I will leave you the words and thoughts of Big Bill Haywood, a man you probably never heard of:
''The mine owners did not find the gold, they did not mine the gold, they did not mill the gold, but by some weird alchemy - all the gold belonged to them! If the workers are organized, all they have to do is to put their hands in their pockets and they have got the capitalist class whipped.''
~ Big Bill Haywood, Miner, founding member & leader of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).
It is hard to think critically. Birds brought up in cages think flying is insane.
Don't let me forget you and thanks for allowing others to see your thoughts and a critical analysis of its shortcomings.
FDR implemented socialist style policies and they were wildly popular. Hmmm. Maybe it is the balance between capital's needs and the social needs that were so successful for 40 years after the great depression?
This all or none style of thinking is so ignorant. This version of capitalism at present in the US is more corporate socialism or socialism for the rich. And it speaks to the nature of the question you ignore with your labels of "socialism", such that socialism will be a part of our overall system in some respect no matter what and the same with capitalistic undercurrents. The real question is qui bono, who benefits from these policies. And all the grown ups know the answer to this question.
Capitalism evolves into corporatism naturally without regulation and strong social state apparatus that does not bend to the will of finance, intelligence or the military.
And power seeks a vacuum and fills it. It is like you missed the entire neoliberal period from 1976 to present, and are talking about a fictional concept. Our tallest buildings in this country are corporate banks - our national debt is over 34 Trillion dollars, and covertly, we have been in secret wars in the last 15 years to overthrow anyone we did not like (PNAC 1998).
So, I am not here to answer your questions. I am here to say that the US does whatever the fuck it wants to, and then justifies it later. Tony Benn, someone I admire would say that if you can find money for war to kill people, then you can find it help people. FDR is not a bad model for balancing the social needs of a society while putting a check on finance and corporations.
But there was also the business coup with old Smedley Butler - group of businessmen who want to take Roosevelt out. There always is.
We can elect leaders that do the work to benefit the citizens if we stop being duped idiots voting for the same career politician plastic clones with their deep establishment connections to enrich themselves at the expense of the citizens.
You're not categorically wrong about needing a different sort of leadership, but of course the problem runs deeper where the system has virtually all politicians answering to funders over constituencies. That's a generic problem that we need outside the box thinking to deal with.
No one has ever seen that happen to date. Hold your breath long enough and you will die waiting. Not until the incentives structure is made permanently aligned with doing good will that even have a chance. The fiat currency system incentivizes theft via debasement cause through printing. This is not possible under a fixed supply money that is controlled by no one and everyone simultaneously. Bitcoin is the answer.
"but one solution" isn't felicitous. Slapping right and wrong back and forth isn't the way to progress. You can express that as an opinion -- and I'm all for expressing opinions that we should be doing more of -- but it doesn't work as a directive.
If the solution is the solution, will you ignore it because you didn't like the hair color of the person who brought it to your attention? It matters not to me if you utilize the exit valve... save yourself or not.. the fiat currency system is what enables all of this theft to take place.. even if I'm not smiling when I write
On the contrary, it is the idiots who keep voting for the Democrats in the belief that change will come through them who are holding the working class back. It is past time to abandon the two party/one party capitalist system for good and all. In fact, since you bring up the battered wife analogy, it is the supporters of the Democratic Party who behave like the wife and keep going back to the husband who already has his fists clenched ready to break her face again.
Nowhere in this essay does Chris Hedges advocate for supporting the establishment. In fact, it's just the opposite. Hedges says that we got Trump because of the establishment, which certainly doesn't mean that we should support the establishment.
Trump is only a fake anti-establishment candidate. There's no such thing as a billionaire who's anti-establishment. Trump says that he's opposed to some things like certain wars and unfettered international trade, but as soon as he got any resistance to his attempts to change those things he backed down. Trump only cares about his money and his ego, and his only real issue is whether you're for or against him. Trump is a vile racist, sexist, and misogynist, and he lies constantly, often outrageously. The only reason that the establishment doesn't like him is because he puts a bad face on them and all the evils they do, and sometimes says in public what they want kept private, such as the U.S. stealing Syria's oil.
Trump is not the answer to our problems. If you think there's an electoral answer -- and to be clear, i don't because the system is so corrupt and rigged for the establishment -- then support ACTUAL anti-establishment candidates, not phony ones like Trump.
Yet you read it. Why not pay attention to this,... "It is impossible to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs, the fossil fuel industry or Raytheon, no matter which party is in office."...
Frank, “void of critical thinking” seems to miss the point of the article. This is an incisive critique of our national delusion. Nowhere do I find any suggestion to “support the ongoing political establishment.” Try reading it again.
You seem to have missed the point of the essay--which criticizes the political establishment for serving the interests corporations/ billio aire class rather than those of the American people.
Thanks Pam. No, I did get that. But read the title of the article and the subheading. There are a few billionaires that oppose the corporatist globalist takeover that the establishment has been aligned with waging war against the American middle class. Trump is one of them. Elon Musk is another. The problem I see in what Chris as written here, and what other old right and left of center people opine about, is that Trump is the anti-establishment leader.
We are at war with a powerful enemy. We need SOBs that will fight on our behalf. We cannot both complain about the outcomes of the war while supporting the enemy by opposing those leaders that fight the enemy.
But while Trump may "talk the talk"--using a populist style that appeals to many people's baser instincts--he doesn't "walk the walk" in terms of policies that actually improve people's lives. Where was he on the minimum wage issue? On healthcare? Or, just on reigning in Big Pharma's monopoly power?
If he was really interested in fighting for a more democratic order, why didn't he embrace some of Sanders' genuinely popular ideas? He might have won a much bigger following including youth (most of whom saw a future in Sanders that they don't see in Biden).
You are advocating for more matriarchal socialist ideas which is what the globalist corporatists cabal wants. They want to get rid of the economically independent working class and replace it with a moochers class dependent on the establishment.
Fixing people’s lives does not happen with more handouts. It happens with more opportunity for them to make their own way in life. That is what Trump’s platform and policies were focused on.
And you are wrong that he was not fighting big pharma. Trump was working on regulatory reform that bettered the playing field for small business competition against the bigs. The bigs knew it and that is why they put their money into supporting the Democrats to defeat the man that threatened their march to consolidate and take over the markets.
The establishment hates small business and working-class citizens because they are cats they cannot control and herd. Better to have just a few mega corporations controlled by the Billionaire Boys Club that all rub shoulders with the political elite so they can do their high-dollar quid-pro-quo. Trump has been lamenting this direction for over 25 years. You can research interviews where he is totally against corporate consolidation, collusion with government, outsourcing and importing of cheap labor, and the resulting destruction of American economic opportunity.
If you oppose Trump, you support the establishment cabal by default.
This is yet another frustrating piece that is breathtakingly void of critical thinking and self-awareness.
Trump was elected in 2016 and will likely be elected again because of this list of unsolved problems and yet he is listed as the main problem.
So, we are supposed to support the ongoing political establishment and reject outsiders like Trump and then this is going to miraculously fix all the problems that the political establishment caused?
This reminds me of the woman stuck in an abusive marriage with bruises on her face telling the social worker that her husband is better now and she needs to stay with him because otherwise her life would be hell.
Why is it devoid of critical thinking? Why is it devoid of self-awareness?
You will have to be more concise.
the problem is capitalism and that is what Hedges is tying to tell his audience.
The Society of the Spectacle is what we witness on the political side.
There is an international organized fascist movement gaining ground all over the world.
From techno-fascism, like the corporate democratic party, or the more ethno-nationalist fascists like Trump.
Fascism is a managerial mechanism for capitalism in severe crisis.
For more on the growth of fascism worldwide with an emphasis on Hungary, one can listen at:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/international-fascism-vii-the-return-of-fascism/id1625511894?i=1000567125061
fascism, international fascism, definitions of fascism, Hungry, Orben, assault on science, assault on education, election reforms, court packing, Eastern Europe, Biden administration, neo-cons and neoliberals converging, takeover of Democratic party by neo-cons, Brazil, Steven K. Bannon, Ukraine, Ukrainian War, Russia, Putin, Poland, Intermarian, Polish vs American vs Russian perception of Intermarian, Stratford, defense spending, defense contractors, clerical fascism, ethnonationalism vs technocratic fascism, WWIII
This Frank Lee guy is a right-wing troll who comes in here and trolls. Notice how he seems to have read an entirely different essay than the one everybody else has read?
Indeed a troll...yuk.
The problem is not capitalism. It is corporatism and globalism. Nationalism is not fascism similar to how communitarianism is not fascism. The liberal college town I live in demands to be individually quirky… to maintain its own culture of community… to resist development that would allow in more people and potentially change its local character. Are these people fascists? Totalitarianism is the real threat. Global totalitarianism to be more concise.
The meme that Trump represents white supremacist fascism is an intellectually bankrupt propaganda spew perpetuated by the Great Reset globalist corporatist cabal to deflect from their hand in every problem we are dealing with today. Trump is against that cabal. Biden Democrats are part of the cabal. That is the disconnect.
Bandying about terms like "cabal" and "Great Reset" are quite revealing.
Especially after what could only be a bad faith comment based on a misreading of Hedges.
Exactly. Pay him no mind--this is his stock in trade. He always comically mis-reads what is written by Hedges, and thinks everyone else is wrong. What an irony! This is exactly the type addressed by Hedges.
The problem is Empire, capitalism, and our military/intelligence/corporate leaders. If you are not capable of criticizing the most corrupt parts of our culture, then your conclusions will be stained with inaccuracy and fantasy.
You are coming from a black and white world that isn't what Chris Hedges is writing about. He doesn't propose solutions -- and you could critique him for that -- but I would say that he brilliantly gives us the lay of a corrupted land.
Exactly, that is what Journalists are supposed to do.
Frank Lee is an indignant, tiny, toddler without his blankie, after refusing to eat his vegetables that is being told it is bedtime. I feel sorry for the poor little guy.
You completely misread Hedges. He says Trump is the symptom not the disease. He says the political establish must respond and reform, and that people should organize and engage in non-violent civil disobedience to make that happen, not that we should vote for lesser evil democrats (who he correctly calls sometime worse evil).
This joker ALWAYS spectacularly misreads Hedges.
I suspect that the poster wants Hedges to go Full On MAGA and is expressing his frustration that Hedges does not do so.
Isn't Chris advocating making America great again?
I don't think Chris is sloganeering.
No, I get all that. Again, dreaming of the same political establishment that caused the problems to now fix the problems is that clutching to an abusive relationship. We have to elect anti establishment politicians to fix what is broken. The Democrats are not lesser evil. They are the establishment.
Your logic appears to be that since the "establishment" is the problem, all we gotta do is elect anyone not part of the establishment.
By that logic, Idi Amin or some straitjacket mental patient ought to do just nicely.
"The Democrats are not lesser evil. They are the establishment." Nothing gets by you, dude.
How in the world do you or anyone else expect changes to take place from the actions, behavior and proposed policies of either side!? There is but one solution to this debacle, and that is to starve the overlords until everyone realizes that the government works for the people or it will not work at all... exit the existing financial and political system. Do not keep your money in USD. It is collapsing... learn to use the lightning network for payments and strip those who dominate the payments infrastructure like Visa who rape everyone for no less than 3%. It's going to be a brutal transition, stop arguing and pretending things will change with the next president.. every single one of them is a crook. Take your life into your own hands, nobody will save you. Democracy is smoke and mirrors.
As Bertolt Brecht asked in 1935:
“How can anyone tell the truth about Fascism, unless he is willing to speak out against capitalism, which brings it forth?
Bertolt Brecht, Galileo (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1966), 137–38.
All over the world capitalism is failing. I am afraid the answer is not as individualistic as you state.
One has to see the class struggle and organize with others to fight fascism and struggle for socialism.
Only socialism can beat fascism.
United we stand, divided we fell!
Socialism. Right. That murderous ideology that never works. Name one country historically or today that exemplifies your model of a working socialist system. You cannot. So you are a hazardous fool with a vote.
OK, so now you are making claims. Socialism is a murderous ideology.
Then you reverse the question posed to you, in my last post, attempting to squirrel out of a burden to produce evidence for your claims by asking me a question.
No, no no. Basic argumentation. You make the claim, you give the evidence.
but deflection is what you have been taught in the defunded schools that line the blighted neighborhoods where little music or laughter can be heard and instead the typing of the imperfect human attempting to announce his or her existence without supporting their claims. That, my friend, is uncritical thinking.
You went full circle and with your own words and narrative have defined the ver uncritical thinking you accuse Hedges of.
I will not have the time to respond to future posts by you. So I will leave you the words and thoughts of Big Bill Haywood, a man you probably never heard of:
''The mine owners did not find the gold, they did not mine the gold, they did not mill the gold, but by some weird alchemy - all the gold belonged to them! If the workers are organized, all they have to do is to put their hands in their pockets and they have got the capitalist class whipped.''
~ Big Bill Haywood, Miner, founding member & leader of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).
It is hard to think critically. Birds brought up in cages think flying is insane.
Don't let me forget you and thanks for allowing others to see your thoughts and a critical analysis of its shortcomings.
FDR implemented socialist style policies and they were wildly popular. Hmmm. Maybe it is the balance between capital's needs and the social needs that were so successful for 40 years after the great depression?
This all or none style of thinking is so ignorant. This version of capitalism at present in the US is more corporate socialism or socialism for the rich. And it speaks to the nature of the question you ignore with your labels of "socialism", such that socialism will be a part of our overall system in some respect no matter what and the same with capitalistic undercurrents. The real question is qui bono, who benefits from these policies. And all the grown ups know the answer to this question.
You did not answer the question other than a case to revert back in time to Make America Great Again.
Capitalism is fine, but corporatism... what we have today.. is not.
Capitalism evolves into corporatism naturally without regulation and strong social state apparatus that does not bend to the will of finance, intelligence or the military.
And power seeks a vacuum and fills it. It is like you missed the entire neoliberal period from 1976 to present, and are talking about a fictional concept. Our tallest buildings in this country are corporate banks - our national debt is over 34 Trillion dollars, and covertly, we have been in secret wars in the last 15 years to overthrow anyone we did not like (PNAC 1998).
So, I am not here to answer your questions. I am here to say that the US does whatever the fuck it wants to, and then justifies it later. Tony Benn, someone I admire would say that if you can find money for war to kill people, then you can find it help people. FDR is not a bad model for balancing the social needs of a society while putting a check on finance and corporations.
But there was also the business coup with old Smedley Butler - group of businessmen who want to take Roosevelt out. There always is.
We can elect leaders that do the work to benefit the citizens if we stop being duped idiots voting for the same career politician plastic clones with their deep establishment connections to enrich themselves at the expense of the citizens.
You're not categorically wrong about needing a different sort of leadership, but of course the problem runs deeper where the system has virtually all politicians answering to funders over constituencies. That's a generic problem that we need outside the box thinking to deal with.
"Don't change life, change leaders."
Situationist International, Paris 1968
No one has ever seen that happen to date. Hold your breath long enough and you will die waiting. Not until the incentives structure is made permanently aligned with doing good will that even have a chance. The fiat currency system incentivizes theft via debasement cause through printing. This is not possible under a fixed supply money that is controlled by no one and everyone simultaneously. Bitcoin is the answer.
Bitcoin is the psyop.
"but one solution" isn't felicitous. Slapping right and wrong back and forth isn't the way to progress. You can express that as an opinion -- and I'm all for expressing opinions that we should be doing more of -- but it doesn't work as a directive.
If the solution is the solution, will you ignore it because you didn't like the hair color of the person who brought it to your attention? It matters not to me if you utilize the exit valve... save yourself or not.. the fiat currency system is what enables all of this theft to take place.. even if I'm not smiling when I write
Fiat currency is a product of the capitalist economy. You are dealing with the symptom not the problem.
On the contrary, it is the idiots who keep voting for the Democrats in the belief that change will come through them who are holding the working class back. It is past time to abandon the two party/one party capitalist system for good and all. In fact, since you bring up the battered wife analogy, it is the supporters of the Democratic Party who behave like the wife and keep going back to the husband who already has his fists clenched ready to break her face again.
Nowhere in this essay does Chris Hedges advocate for supporting the establishment. In fact, it's just the opposite. Hedges says that we got Trump because of the establishment, which certainly doesn't mean that we should support the establishment.
Trump is only a fake anti-establishment candidate. There's no such thing as a billionaire who's anti-establishment. Trump says that he's opposed to some things like certain wars and unfettered international trade, but as soon as he got any resistance to his attempts to change those things he backed down. Trump only cares about his money and his ego, and his only real issue is whether you're for or against him. Trump is a vile racist, sexist, and misogynist, and he lies constantly, often outrageously. The only reason that the establishment doesn't like him is because he puts a bad face on them and all the evils they do, and sometimes says in public what they want kept private, such as the U.S. stealing Syria's oil.
Trump is not the answer to our problems. If you think there's an electoral answer -- and to be clear, i don't because the system is so corrupt and rigged for the establishment -- then support ACTUAL anti-establishment candidates, not phony ones like Trump.
Yet you read it. Why not pay attention to this,... "It is impossible to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs, the fossil fuel industry or Raytheon, no matter which party is in office."...
Frank, “void of critical thinking” seems to miss the point of the article. This is an incisive critique of our national delusion. Nowhere do I find any suggestion to “support the ongoing political establishment.” Try reading it again.
Perhaps "Lee" can define for us what critical thinking is so we can then apply his or her definition.
Mr Lee,
You seem to have missed the point of the essay--which criticizes the political establishment for serving the interests corporations/ billio aire class rather than those of the American people.
Pam
Thanks Pam. No, I did get that. But read the title of the article and the subheading. There are a few billionaires that oppose the corporatist globalist takeover that the establishment has been aligned with waging war against the American middle class. Trump is one of them. Elon Musk is another. The problem I see in what Chris as written here, and what other old right and left of center people opine about, is that Trump is the anti-establishment leader.
We are at war with a powerful enemy. We need SOBs that will fight on our behalf. We cannot both complain about the outcomes of the war while supporting the enemy by opposing those leaders that fight the enemy.
I hear you, Frank.
But while Trump may "talk the talk"--using a populist style that appeals to many people's baser instincts--he doesn't "walk the walk" in terms of policies that actually improve people's lives. Where was he on the minimum wage issue? On healthcare? Or, just on reigning in Big Pharma's monopoly power?
If he was really interested in fighting for a more democratic order, why didn't he embrace some of Sanders' genuinely popular ideas? He might have won a much bigger following including youth (most of whom saw a future in Sanders that they don't see in Biden).
You are advocating for more matriarchal socialist ideas which is what the globalist corporatists cabal wants. They want to get rid of the economically independent working class and replace it with a moochers class dependent on the establishment.
Fixing people’s lives does not happen with more handouts. It happens with more opportunity for them to make their own way in life. That is what Trump’s platform and policies were focused on.
And you are wrong that he was not fighting big pharma. Trump was working on regulatory reform that bettered the playing field for small business competition against the bigs. The bigs knew it and that is why they put their money into supporting the Democrats to defeat the man that threatened their march to consolidate and take over the markets.
The establishment hates small business and working-class citizens because they are cats they cannot control and herd. Better to have just a few mega corporations controlled by the Billionaire Boys Club that all rub shoulders with the political elite so they can do their high-dollar quid-pro-quo. Trump has been lamenting this direction for over 25 years. You can research interviews where he is totally against corporate consolidation, collusion with government, outsourcing and importing of cheap labor, and the resulting destruction of American economic opportunity.
If you oppose Trump, you support the establishment cabal by default.