by Chris
Hedges
The poor and
the working class in the United States know what it is to be Greek.
They know underemployment and unemployment. They know life without a
pension. They know existence on a few dollars a day. They know gas
and electricity being turned off because of unpaid bills. They know
the crippling weight of debt. They know being sick and unable to
afford medical care. They know the state seizing their meager assets,
a process known in the United States as “civil asset forfeiture,”
which has permitted American police agencies to confiscate more than
$3 billion in cash and property. They know the profound despair and
abandonment that come when schools, libraries, neighborhood health
clinics, day care services, roads, bridges, public buildings and
assistance programs are neglected or closed. They know the financial
elites’ hijacking of democratic institutions to impose widespread
misery in the name of austerity. They, like the Greeks, know what it
is to be abandoned.
The Greeks
and the U.S. working poor endure the same deprivations because they
are being assaulted by the same system—corporate capitalism. There
are no internal constraints on corporate capitalism. And the few
external constraints that existed have been removed. Corporate
capitalism, manipulating the world’s most powerful financial
institutions, including the Eurogroup, the World Bank, the
International Monetary Fund and the Federal Reserve, does what it is
designed to do: It turns everything, including human beings and the
natural world, into commodities to be exploited until exhaustion or
collapse. In the extraction process, labor unions are broken,
regulatory agencies are gutted, laws are written by corporate
lobbyists to legalize fraud and empower global monopolies, and public
utilities are privatized. Secret trade agreements—which even
elected officials who view the documents are not allowed to speak
about—empower corporate oligarchs to amass even greater power and
accrue even greater profits at the expense of workers. To swell its
profits, corporate capitalism plunders, represses and drives into
bankruptcy individuals, cities, states and governments. It ultimately
demolishes the structures and markets that make capitalism possible.
But this is of little consolation for those who endure its evil. By
the time it slays itself it will have left untold human misery in its
wake.
The Greek
government kneels before the bankers of Europe begging for mercy
because it knows that if it leaves the eurozone, the international
banking system will do to Greece what it did to the socialist
government of Salvador Allende in 1973 in Chile; it will, as Richard
Nixon promised to do in Chile, “make the economy scream.” The
bankers will destroy Greece. If this means the Greeks can no longer
get medicine—Greece owes European drug makers 1 billion euros—so
be it. If this means food shortages—Greece imports thousands of
tons of food from Europe a year—so be it. If this means oil and gas
shortages—Greece imports 99 percent of its oil and gas—so be it.
The bankers will carry out economic warfare until the current Greek
government is ousted and corporate political puppets are back in
control.
Human life
is of no concern to corporate capitalists. The suffering of the
Greeks, like the suffering of ordinary Americans, is very good for
the profit margins of financial institutions such as Goldman Sachs.
It was, after all, Goldman Sachs—which shoved subprime mortgages
down the throats of families it knew could never pay the loans back,
sold the subprime mortgages as investments to pension funds and then
bet against them—that orchestrated complex financial agreements
with Greece, many of them secret. These agreements doubled the debt
Greece owes under derivative deals and allowed the old Greek
government to mask its real debt to keep borrowing. And when Greece
imploded, Goldman Sachs headed out the door with suitcases full of
cash.
The system
of unfettered capitalism is designed to callously extract money from
the most vulnerable and funnel it upward to the elites. This is seen
in the mounting fines and fees used to cover shortfalls in city and
state budgets. Corporate capitalism seeks to privatize all aspects of
government service, from education to intelligence gathering. The
U.S. Postal Service appears to be next. Parents already must pay
hundreds of dollars for their public-school children to take school
buses, go to music or art classes and participate in sports or other
activities. Fire departments, ambulance services, the national parks
system are all slated to become fodder for corporate profit. It is
the death of the civil society.
Criminal
justice is primarily about revenue streams for city and state
governments in the United States rather than about justice or
rehabilitation. The poor are arrested and fined for minor infractions
in Ferguson, Mo., and elsewhere; for not mowing their lawns; for
putting their feet on seats of New York City subway cars. If they
cannot pay the fines, as many cannot, they go to jail. In jail they
are often charged room and board. And if they can’t pay this new
bill they go to jail again. It is a game of circular and never-ending
extortion of the poor. Fines that are unpaid accrue interest and
generate warrants for arrest. Poor people often end up owing
thousands of dollars for parking or traffic violations.
Fascist and
communist firing squads sometimes charged the victim’s family for
the bullets used in the execution. In corporate capitalism, too, the
abusers extract payment; often the money goes to private corporations
that carry out probation services or prison and jail administration.
The cost of being shot with a stun gun ($26) or of probation services
($35 to $100 a month) or of an electronic ankle bracelet ($11 a
month) is vacuumed out of the pockets of the poor. And all this is
happening in what will one day be seen as the good times. Wait until
the financial house of cards collapses again—what is happening in
China is not a good sign—and Wall Street runs for cover. Then
America will become Greece on steroids.
“We are a
nation that has turned its welfare system into a criminal system,”
write Karen Dolan and Jodi L. Carr in an Institute for Policy Studies
report titled “The Poor Get Prison.” “We criminalize
life-sustaining activities of people too poor to afford shelter. We
incarcerate more people than any other nation in the world. And we
institute policies that virtually bar them for life from
participating in society once they have done their time. We have
allowed the resurgence of debtors’ prisons. We’ve created a
second-tier public education system for poor children and black and
Latino children that disproportionally criminalizes their behavior
and sets them early onto the path of incarceration and lack of access
to assistance and opportunity.”
The
corporate dismantling of civil society is nearly complete in Greece.
It is far advanced in the United States. We, like the Greeks, are
undergoing a political war waged by the world’s oligarchs. No one
elected them. They ignore public opinion. And, as in Greece, if a
government defies the international banking community it is targeted
for execution. The banks do not play by the rules of democracy.
Our
politicians are corporate employees. And if you get dewy-eyed about
the possibility of the U.S. having its first woman president,
remember that it was Hillary Clinton’s husband who decimated
manufacturing jobs with the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement
and then went on to destroy welfare with the Personal Responsibility
and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, which halted federal
cash aid programs and imposed time-limited, restrictive state block
grants. Under President Bill Clinton, most welfare recipients—and
70 percent of those recipients were children—were dropped from the
rolls. The prison-industrial complex exploded in size as its private
corporations swallowed up surplus, unemployed labor, making $40,000
or more a year from each person held in a cage. The population of
federal and state prisons combined rose by 673,000 under Clinton. He,
along with Ronald Reagan, set the foundations for the Greecification
of the United States.
The
destruction of Greece, like the destruction of America, by the big
banks and financial firms is not, as the bankers claim, about
austerity or imposing rational expenditures or balanced budgets. It
is not about responsible or good government. It is a vicious form of
class warfare. It is profoundly anti-democratic. It is about forming
nations of impoverished, disempowered serfs and a rapacious elite of
all-powerful corporate oligarchs, backed by the most sophisticated
security and surveillance apparatus in human history and a
militarized police that shoots unarmed citizens with reckless
abandon. The laws and rules it imposes on the poor are, as Barbara
Ehrenreich has written, little more than “organized sadism.”
Corporate
profit is God. It does not matter who suffers. In Greece 40 percent
of children live in poverty, there is a 25 percent unemployment rate
and the unemployment figure for those between the ages of 15 and 24
is nearly 50 percent. And it will only get worse.
The economic
and political ideology that convinced us that organized human
behavior should be determined by the dictates of the global
marketplace was a con game. We were the suckers. The promised
prosperity from trickle-down economics and the free market instead
concentrated wealth among a few and destroyed the working and the
middle classes along with all vestiges of democracy. Corrupt
governments, ignoring the common good and the consent of the
governed, abetted this pillage. The fossil fuel industry was licensed
to ravage the ecosystem, threatening the viability of the human
species, while being handed lavish government subsidies. None of this
makes sense.
The
mandarins that maintain this system cannot respond rationally in our
time of crisis. They are trained only to make the system of
exploitation work. They are blinded by their insatiable greed and
neoliberal ideology, which posits that controlling inflation,
privatizing public assets and removing trade barriers are the sole
economic priorities. They are steering us over a cliff.
We will not
return to a rational economy or restore democracy until these global
speculators are stripped of power. This will happen only if the
streets of major cities in Europe and the United States are convulsed
with mass protests. The tyranny of these financial elites knows no
limits. They will impose ever greater suffering and repression until
we submit or revolt. I prefer the latter. But we don’t have much
time.
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