Once again, in my personal opinion, Chris Hedges is right on target.
Carl Jarvis
On 2/12/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
> The Deadly Rule of the Oligarchs
>
> Mr. Fish / Truthdig
>
>
> Oligarchic rule, as Aristotle pointed out, is a deviant form of government.
> Oligarchs care nothing for competency, intelligence, honesty, rationality,
> self-sacrifice or the common good. They pervert, deform and dismantle
> systems of power to serve their immediate interests, squandering the future
> for short-term personal gain. "The true forms of government, therefore, are
> those in which the one, or the few, or the many, govern with a view to the
> common interest; but governments that rule with a view to the private
> interest, whether of the one, of the few or of the many, are perversions,"
> Aristotle wrote. The classicist Peter L.P. Simpson calls these perversions
> the "sophistry of oligarchs," meaning that once oligarchs take power,
> rational, prudent and thoughtful responses to social, economic and
> political
> problems are ignored to feed insatiable greed. The late stage of every
> civilization is characterized by the sophistry of oligarchs, who ravage the
> decaying carcass of the state.
>
> These deviant forms of government are defined by common characteristics,
> most of which Aristotle understood. Oligarchs use power and ruling
> structures solely for personal advancement.
>
> Oligarchs, though they speak of deconstructing the administrative state,
> actually increase deficits and the size and power of law enforcement and
> the
> military to protect their global business interests and ensure domestic
> social control. The parts of the state that serve the common good wither in
> the name of deregulation and austerity. The parts that promote the
> oligarchs' power expand in the name of national security, economic growth
> and law and order.
>
> For example, the oligarchs educate their children in private schools and
> buy
> them admissions into elite universities (this is how a mediocre student
> like
> Jared Kushner went to Harvard and Donald Trump went to the University of
> Pennsylvania), so they see no need to fund good public education for the
> wider population. Oligarchs can pay teams of high-priced lawyers to bail
> them and their families out of legal trouble. There is no need, in their
> eyes, to provide funds for legal representation for the poor. When
> oligarchs
> do not fly on private jets, they fly in first class, so they permit
> airlines
> to fleece and abuse "economy" passengers. They do not use subways, buses or
> trains, and they slash funds for the maintenance and improvement of these
> services. Oligarchs have private clinics and private doctors, so they do
> not
> want to pay for public health or Medicare. Oligarchs detest the press,
> which
> when it works shines a light on their corruption and mendacity, so they buy
> up and control systems of information and push their critics to the margins
> of society, something they will accelerate with the abolition of net
> neutrality.
>
> Oligarchs do not vacation on public beaches or in public parks. They own
> their own land and estates, where we are not allowed. They see no reason to
> maintain or fund public parks or protect public land. They hand such land
> over to other oligarchs to exploit for profit. Oligarchs cynically view
> laws
> as mechanisms to legalize their fraud and plunder. They use their lobbyists
> in the legislative branch of government to author bills that increase and
> protect their wealth, through the avoidance of taxes and other means.
> Oligarchs do not allow free and fair elections. They use gerrymandering and
> campaign contributions to make sure other oligarchs are elected over and
> over to office. Many run unopposed.
>
> Oligarchs look at regulations to protect the environment or the safety of
> workers as impediments to profit and abolish them. Oligarchs move
> industries
> to Mexico or China to increase their wealth while impoverishing American
> workers and leaving U.S. cities in ruins. Oligarchs are philistines. They
> are deaf, dumb and blind to great works of art, reveling in tawdry
> spectacles, patriotic kitsch and mindless entertainment. They despise
> artists and intellectuals who promote virtues and self-criticism that
> conflict with the lust for power, celebrity and wealth. Oligarchs always
> unleash wars on culture, attacking it as elitist, irrelevant and immoral
> and
> cutting its funding. All social services and institutions, such as public
> housing programs, public parks, meals for the elderly, infrastructure
> projects, welfare and Social Security, are viewed by oligarchs as a waste
> of
> money. These services are gutted or turned over to fellow oligarchs, who
> harvest them for profit until they are destroyed.
>
> Oligarchs, who do not serve in the military and who ensure their children
> do
> not serve in the military, pretend to be great patriots. They attack those
> who oppose them as anti-American, traitors or agents for a foreign power.
> They use the language of patriotism to stoke hatred against their critics
> and to justify their crimes. They see the world in black and white-those
> who
> are loyal to them and those who are the enemy. They extent this stunted
> belief system to foreign affairs. Diplomacy is abandoned for the crude
> threats and indiscriminate use of force that are the preferred forms of
> communication of all despots.
>
> There is little dispute that we live in an oligarchic state. The wealthiest
> 1 percent of America's families control 40 percent of the nation's wealth,
> a
> statistic similar to what is seen globally: The wealthiest 1 percent of the
> world's population owns more than half of the world's wealth. This wealth
> translates into political power. The political scientists Martin Gilens of
> Princeton and Benjamin Page of Northwestern, after examining differences in
> public opinion across income groups on a wide variety of issues, concluded,
> "In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule-at
> least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When
> a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized
> interests, they generally lose. Moreover . even when fairly large
> majorities
> of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it."
>
> Oligarchs accelerate social, political, cultural and economic collapse. The
> unchecked plunder leads to systems breakdown. The refusal to protect
> natural
> resources, or the economic engines that sustain the state, means that
> poverty becomes the norm and the natural world becomes a toxic wasteland.
> Basic institutions no longer work. Infrastructure is no longer reliable.
> Water, air and soil are poisoned. The population is left uneducated,
> untrained, impoverished, oppressed by organs of internal security and beset
> by despair. The state eventually goes bankrupt. Oligarchs respond to this
> steady deterioration by forcing workers to do more for less and launching
> self-destructive wars in the vain attempt to restore a lost golden age.
> They
> also insist, no matter how bad it gets, on maintaining their opulent and
> hedonistic lifestyles. They further tax the resources of the state, the
> ecosystem and the population with suicidal demands. They flee from the
> looming chaos into their gated compounds, modern versions of Versailles or
> the Forbidden City. They lose touch with reality. In the end, they are
> overthrown or destroy the state itself. There is no institution left in
> America that can be called democratic, and thus there is no internal
> mechanism to prevent a descent into barbarity.
>
> "The political role of corporate power, the corruption of the political and
> representative processes by the lobbying industry, the expansion of
> executive power at the expense of constitutional limitations, and the
> degradation of political dialogue promoted by the media are the basics of
> the system, not excrescences upon it," the political philosopher Sheldon
> Wolin wrote in "Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter
> of
> Inverted Totalitarianism." "The system would remain in place even if the
> Democratic Party attained a majority; and should that circumstance arise,
> the system will set tight limits to unwelcome changes, as if foreshadowed
> in
> the timidity of the current Democratic proposals for reform. In the last
> analysis, the much-lauded stability and conservatism of the American system
> owe nothing to lofty ideals, and everything to the irrefutable fact that it
> is shot through with corruption and awash in contributions primarily from
> wealthy and corporate donors. When a minimum of a million dollars is
> required of House candidates and elected judges, and when patriotism is for
> the draft-free to extol and for the ordinary citizen to serve, in such
> times
> it is a simple act of bad faith to claim that politics-as-we-now-know-it
> can
> miraculously cure the evils which are essential to its very existence."
>
> The longer we are ruled by oligarchs, the deadlier our predicament becomes,
> especially since the oligarchs refuse to address climate change, the
> greatest existential crisis to humankind. The oligarchs have many
> mechanisms, including wholesale surveillance, to keep us in check. They
> will
> stop at nothing to maintain the sophistry of their rule. History may not
> repeat itself, but it echoes. And if we don't recognize these echoes and
> then revolt, we will be herded into the abattoirs that tyrannies set up at
> the end of their existence.
>
> Chris Hedges
>
> Columnist
>
> Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, New York Times best
> selling author, former professor at Princeton University, activist and
> ordained Presbyterian minister. He has written 11 books,.
>
>
>
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