Colonized by Corporations By Chris Hedges

Chris Hedges raises much to think about. 

Carl Jarvis

Subject: Colonized by Corporations By Chris Hedges

Colonized by Corporations
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/colonized_by_corporations_20120514/
Posted on May 14, 2012
By Chris Hedges

In Robert E. Gamer's book "The Developing Nations" is a chapter called "Why
Men Do Not Revolt." In it Gamer notes that although the oppressed often do
revolt, the object of their hostility is misplaced. They vent their fury on
a political puppet, someone who masks colonial power, a despised racial or
ethnic group or an apostate within their own political class. The useless
battles serve as an effective mask for what Gamer calls the "patron-client"
networks that are responsible for the continuity of colonial oppression. The
squabbles among the oppressed, the political campaigns between candidates
who each are servants of colonial power, Gamer writes, absolve the actual
centers of power from addressing the conditions that cause the frustrations
of the people. Inequities, political disenfranchisement and injustices are
never seriously addressed. "The government merely does the minimum necessary
to prevent those few who are prone toward political action from organizing
into politically effective groups," he writes.

Gamer and many others who study the nature of colonial rule offer the best
insights into the functioning of our corporate state. We have been, like
nations on the periphery of empire, colonized. We are controlled by tiny
corporate entities that have no loyalty to the nation and indeed in the
language of traditional patriotism are traitors. They strip us of our
resources, keep us politically passive and enrich themselves at our expense.
The mechanisms of control are familiar to those whom the Martinique-born
French psychiatrist and writer Frantz Fanon called "the wretched of the
earth," including African-Americans. The colonized are denied job security.
Incomes are reduced to subsistence level. The poor are plunged into
desperation. Mass movements, such as labor unions, are dismantled. The
school system is degraded so only the elites have access to a superior
education. Laws are written to legalize corporate plunder and abuse, as well
as criminalize dissent. And the ensuing fear and instability-keenly felt
this past weekend by the more than 200,000 Americans who lost their
unemployment benefits-ensure political passivity by diverting all personal
energy toward survival. It is an old, old game.

A change of power does not require the election of a Mitt Romney or a Barack
Obama or a Democratic majority in Congress, or an attempt to reform the
system or electing progressive candidates, but rather a destruction of
corporate domination of the political process-Gamer's "patron-client"
networks. It requires the establishment of new mechanisms of governance to
distribute wealth and protect resources, to curtail corporate power, to cope
with the destruction of the ecosystem and to foster the common good. But we
must first recognize ourselves as colonial subjects. We must accept that we
have no effective voice in the way we are governed. We must accept the
hollowness of electoral politics, the futility of our political theater, and
we must destroy the corporate structure itself.

The danger the corporate state faces does not come from the poor. The poor,
those Karl Marx dismissed as the Lumpenproletariat, do not mount
revolutions, although they join them and often become cannon fodder. The
real danger to the elite comes from déclassé intellectuals, those educated
middle-class men and women who are barred by a calcified system from
advancement. Artists without studios or theaters, teachers without
classrooms, lawyers without clients, doctors without patients and
journalists without newspapers descend economically. They become, as they
mingle with the underclass, a bridge between the worlds of the elite and the
oppressed. And they are the dynamite that triggers revolt.

This is why the Occupy movement frightens the corporate elite. What fosters
revolution is not misery, but the gap between what people expect from their
lives and what is offered. This is especially acute among the educated and
the talented. They feel, with much justification, that they have been denied
what they deserve. They set out to rectify this injustice. And the longer
the injustice festers, the more radical they become.

The response of a dying regime-and our corporate regime is dying-is to
employ increasing levels of force, and to foolishly refuse to ameliorate the
chronic joblessness, foreclosures, mounting student debt, lack of medical
insurance and exclusion from the centers of power. Revolutions are fueled by
an inept and distant ruling class that perpetuates political paralysis. This
ensures its eventual death.

In every revolutionary movement I covered in Latin America, Africa and the
Middle East, the leadership emerged from déclassé intellectuals. The leaders
were usually young or middle-aged, educated and always unable to meet their
professional and personal aspirations. They were never part of the power
elite, although often their parents had been. They were conversant in the
language of power as well as the language of oppression. It is the presence
of large numbers of déclassé intellectuals that makes the uprisings in
Spain, Egypt, Greece and finally the United States threatening to the
overlords at Goldman Sachs, ExxonMobil and JPMorgan Chase. They must face
down opponents who understand, in a way the uneducated often do not, the
lies disseminated on behalf of corporations by the public relations
industry. These déclassé intellectuals, because they are conversant in
economics and political theory, grasp that those who hold power, real power,
are not the elected mandarins in Washington but the criminal class on Wall
Street.

This is what made Malcolm X so threatening to the white power structure. He
refused to countenance Martin Luther King's fiction that white power and
white liberals would ever lift black people out of economic squalor. King
belatedly came to share Malcolm's view. Malcolm X named the enemy. He
exposed the lies. And until we see the corporate state, and the games it is
playing with us, with the same kind of clarity, we will be nothing more than
useful idiots.

"This is an era of hypocrisy," Malcolm X said. "When white folks pretend
that they want Negroes to be free, and Negroes pretend to white folks that
they really believe that white folks want 'em to be free, it's an era of
hypocrisy, brother. You fool me and I fool you. You pretend that you're my
brother and I pretend that I really believe you believe you're my brother."

Those within a demoralized ruling elite, like characters in a Chekhov play,
increasingly understand that the system that enriches and empowers them is
corrupt and decayed. They become cynical. They do not govern effectively.
They retreat into hedonism. They no longer believe their own rhetoric. They
devote their energies to stealing and exploiting as much, as fast, as
possible. They pillage their own institutions, as we have seen with the
newly disclosed loss of $2 billion within JPMorgan Chase, the meltdown of
Chesapeake Energy Corp. or the collapse of Enron and Lehman Brothers. The
elites become cannibals. They consume each other. This is what happens in
the latter stages of all dying regimes. Louis XIV pillaged his own nobility
by revoking patents of nobility and reselling them. It is what most
corporations do to their shareholders. A dying ruling class, in short, no
longer acts to preserve its own longevity. It becomes fashionable, even in
the rarefied circles of the elite, to ridicule and laugh at the political
puppets that are the public face of the corporate state.

"Ideas that have outlived their day may hobble about the world for years,"
Alexander Herzen wrote, "but it is hard for them ever to lead and dominate
life. Such ideas never gain complete possession of a man, or they gain
possession only of incomplete people."

This loss of faith means that when it comes time to use force, the elites
employ it haphazardly and inefficiently, in large part because they are
unsure of the loyalty of the foot soldiers on the streets charged with
carrying out repression.

Revolutions take time. The American Revolution began with protests against
the Stamp Act of 1765 but did not erupt until a decade later. The 1917
revolution in Russia started with a dress rehearsal in 1905. The most
effective revolutions, including the Russian Revolution, have been largely
nonviolent. There are always violent radicals who carry out bombings and
assassinations, but they hinder, especially in the early stages, more than
help revolutions. The anarchist Peter Kropotkin during the Russian
Revolution condemned the radical terrorists, asserting that they only
demoralized and frightened away the movement's followers and discredited
authentic anarchism.

Radical violent groups cling like parasites to popular protests. The Black
Panthers, the American Indian Movement, the Weather Underground, the Red
Brigades and the Symbionese Liberation Army arose in the ferment of the
1960s. Violent radicals are used by the state to justify harsh repression.
They scare the mainstream from the movement. They thwart the goal of all
revolutions, which is to turn the majority against an isolated and
discredited ruling class. These violent fringe groups are seductive to those
who yearn for personal empowerment through hyper-masculinity and violence,
but they do little to advance the cause. The primary role of radical
extremists, such as Maximilien Robespierre and Vladimir Lenin, is to hijack
successful revolutions. They unleash a reign of terror, primarily against
fellow revolutionaries, which often outdoes the repression of the old
regime. They often do not play much of a role in building a revolution.

The power of the Occupy movement is that it expresses the widespread disgust
with the elites, and the deep desire for justice and fairness that is
essential to all successful revolutionary movements. The Occupy movement
will change and mutate, but it will not go away. It may appear to make
little headway, but this is less because of the movement's ineffectiveness
and more because decayed systems of power have an amazing ability to
perpetuate themselves through habit, routine and inertia. The press and
organs of communication, along with the anointed experts and academics, tied
by money and ideology to the elites, are useless in dissecting what is
happening within these movements. They view reality through the lens of
their corporate sponsors. They have no idea what is happening.

Dying regimes are chipped away slowly and imperceptibly. The assumptions and
daily formalities of the old system are difficult for citizens to abandon,
even when the old system is increasingly hostile to their dignity,
well-being and survival. Supplanting an old faith with a new one is the
silent, unseen battle of all revolutionary movements. And during the slow
transition it is almost impossible to measure progress.

"Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong," Fanon wrote in
"Black Skin, White Masks." "When they are presented with evidence that works
against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a
feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And
because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will
rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn't fit in with the core
belief."

The end of these regimes comes when old beliefs die and the organs of
security, especially the police and military, abandon the elites and join
the revolutionaries. This is true in every successful revolution. It does
not matter how sophisticated the repressive apparatus. Once those who handle
the tools of repression become demoralized, the security and surveillance
state is impotent. Regimes, when they die, are like a great ocean liner
sinking in minutes on the horizon. And no one, including the purported
leaders of the opposition, can predict the moment of death. Revolutions have
an innate, mysterious life force that defies comprehension. They are living
entities.

The defection of the security apparatus is often done with little or no
violence, as I witnessed in Eastern Europe in 1989 and as was also true in
1979 in Iran and in 1917 in Russia. At other times, when it has enough
residual force to fight back, the dying regime triggers a violent clash as
it did in the American Revolution when soldiers and officers in the British
army, including George Washington, rebelled to raise the Continental Army.
Violence also characterized the 1949 Chinese revolution led by Mao Zedong.
But even revolutions that turn violent succeed, as Mao conceded, because
they enjoy popular support and can mount widespread protests, strikes,
agitation, revolutionary propaganda and acts of civil disobedience. The
object is to try to get there without violence. Armed revolutions, despite
what the history books often tell us, are tragic, ugly, frightening and
sordid affairs. Those who storm Bastilles, as the Polish dissident Adam
Michnik wrote, "unwittingly build new ones." And once revolutions turn
violent it becomes hard to speak of victors and losers.

A revolution has been unleashed across the globe. This revolution, a popular
repudiation of the old order, is where we should direct all our energy and
commitment.  If we do not topple the corporate elites the ecosystem will be
destroyed and massive numbers of human beings along with it. The struggle
will be long. There will be times when it will seem we are going nowhere.
Victory is not inevitable. But this is our best and only hope. The response
of the corporate state will ultimately determine the parameters and
composition of rebellion. I pray we replicate the 1989 nonviolent
revolutions that overthrew the communist regimes in Eastern Europe. But this
is not in my hands or yours. Go ahead and vote this November. But don't
waste any more time or energy on the presidential election than it takes to
get to your polling station and pull a lever for a third-party
candidate-just enough to register your obstruction and defiance-and then get
back out onto the street. That is where the question of real power is being
decided.