Chris Hedges — The Rule of the Uber-Rich Means Tyranny or Revolution

It is essential to understand the pathologies of the uber-rich. They have seized total political power.…

The uber-rich live in an artificial bubble, a land called Richistan, a place of Frankenmansions and private jets, cut off from our reality.... 

Political theorists, from Aristotle and Karl Marx to Sheldon Wolin, have warned against the rule of the uber-rich. Once the uber-rich take over, Aristotle writes, the only options are tyranny and revolution.…

Corporate capitalism, which has destroyed our democracy, has given unchecked power to the uber-rich. And once we understand the pathologies of these oligarchic elites, it is easy to chart our future. The state apparatus the uber-rich controls now exclusively serves their interests. They are deaf to the cries of the dispossessed. They empower those institutions that keep us oppressed—the security and surveillance systems of domestic control, militarized police, Homeland Security and the military—and gut or degrade those institutions or programs that blunt social, economic and political inequality, among them public education, health care, welfare, Social Security, an equitable tax system, food stamps, public transportation and infrastructure, and the courts. The uber-rich extract greater and greater sums of money from those they steadily impoverish. And when citizens object or resist, they crush or kill them....

The uber-rich, as Karl Polanyi wrote, celebrate the worst kind of freedom—the freedom “to exploit one’s fellows, or the freedom to make inordinate gains without commensurable service to the community, the freedom to keep technological inventions from being used for public benefit, or the freedom to profit from public calamities secretly engineered for private advantage.” At the same time, as Polanyi noted, the uber-rich make war on the “freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, freedom of meeting, freedom of association, freedom to choose one’s own job.”…

We will repudiate these pathologies and organize to force the uber-rich from power or they will transform us into what they already consider us to be—the help....

Not that this is anything new. The Enlightenment was the first successful attempt to modify the historical trend of rule by dominant alpha-males over the submissive rest, even though the rest are the vast majority and provide the alphas with what they glean from exploitation through power.

However, Enlightenment liberalism only attacked feudalism and sought to replace it by bourgeois liberalism, the "bourgeoisie" being the owners of capital, both land and technology, as the means of production. while Adam Smith was aware of this, Karl Marx analyzed it in detail and concluded that the options were revolution or acquiescence in tyranny, at least until another mode of production replaced capitalism, with no guarantee that the alphas would not still be dominant.

The fundamental questions are whether the alphas can be bridled by the establishment of democracy as government of the people, by the people, and for the people. The prior question here is how that could be accomplished against the will and interests of the dominant ruling class.  There is also the question whether the "masses" could effectively govern themselves in a socialistic system. Prior experience suggests that another dominant elite would seize power.

So while Chris Hedges rant is rousing, it leaves major issues up in the air. What happens after the revolution, if there is one? Marx left that question rather up in the air. The American colonists handled it pretty well, while the French didn't do was well. However, the colonists were left to themselves while the French were struggling with a longstanding tradition. Even with the advantage of new beginning, America experienced a civil war before reaching its first centennial.

On the other hand, Chris Hedges is correct and even downplays the actual threat somewhat. The real threat now is transnational corporate totalitarianism being imposed globally. Such is the intent of the American Empire.

This was the intent of Rome and Rome was quite successful in doing it ruthlessly. With the Enlightenment behind us, the US is more restricted in carrying that out as ruthlessly, at least in a obvious way. So now the hidden agenda is cloaked in an Enlightenment agenda of spreading freedom and democracy, defending human rights, exporting prosperity, and culturing enlightened Western values and the American way globally.

What could go wrong?

TruthDig

The Rule of the Uber-Rich Means Tyranny or Revolution
Chris Hedges

See also

Project Syndicate
America’s Plutocrats Are Winning

Jeffrey D. Sachs | Professor of Sustainable Development and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University, and Director of Columbia’s Center for Sustainable Development and of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network.

See also

Nation of Change
An Arena Full of the Richest Americans Would Own As Much Wealth as 70% of the World

Paul Buchheit / NationofChange / Op-Ed

Can Capitalism and Democracy Coexist? (Parts 1, 2 and 3) — Chris Hedges interviews Sheldon Wolin

For many years now, Wolin has been perhaps Hedges’ most cited source in articles and lectures about the state and direction of American society. An intellectual peer of Noam Chomsky, albeit less well known, Wolin is the author of seminal books on contemporary political theory, including “Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism,” and “Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought.” He is an enthusiastic proponent of popular participation in government. 

In part two of the conversation, which was produced by The Real News Network, Hedges mentions that Wolin wrote that he “doesn’t believe we have any authentic democratic institutions left.” 

Wolin responds: “I don’t. That may be a bit of an overstatement, but I think—in terms of effective democratic institutions, I don’t think we do. I think there’s potential. I think there’s potential in movements towards self-government, movements towards economic independence, and movements towards educational reform, and so on, that have the seeds for change. But I think that it’s very difficult now, given the way the media is controlled and the way political parties are organized and controlled, it’s very difficult to get a foothold in politics in such a way that you can translate it into electoral reforms, electoral victories, and legislation, and so on. It’s a very, very complex, difficult, demanding process. And as I’ve said before, democracy’s great trouble is it’s episodic.”

Truthdig
Can Capitalism and Democracy Coexist? (Parts 1, 2 and 3)

Chris Hedges interviews Sheldon Wolin, Professor of Politics, Emeritus, at Princeton University
Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly

Gaius Publius — Neoliberalism, “just deserts” and the post–climate crisis economy

This is an important post about where neoliberalism is taking us. It's well worth reading in its entirety. To summarize, the "just deserts" ethical theory justifies rationalizes growing inequality of income and wealth distribution upwards. Under the rational, given increasing scarcity from the consequences of climate change food, water, energy and other vital resources are becoming scarcer, at least in part owing to negative externalities along with the m.o. of capitalizing gains and socializing losses by passing the cost of fouling the nest and disrupting the ecology on to society. 

The "makers are also acquiring the sources of viral resources, since they foresee reaping huge profits and usurious rents as monopolists. To ensure that the "takers" don't object effectively, the world is being turned into a security and surveillance super-state by the owners of governments, chiefly the US government. Anyone who objects in a way that is deemed to active is defined as a terrorist and "removed." Welcome to the future. It's already here.

America Blog
Neoliberalism, “just deserts” and the post–climate crisis economy
Gaius Publius

Chris Hedges — The Treason of the Intellectuals and Warren Mosler — Modern Monetary Theory: The Last Progressive Left Standing

The power elite, especially the liberal elite, has always been willing to sacrifice integrity and truth for power, personal advancement, foundation grants, awards, tenured professorships, columns, book contracts, television appearances, generous lecture fees and social status. They know what they need to say. They know which ideology they have to serve. They know what lies must be told—the biggest being that they take moral stances on issues that aren’t safe and anodyne. They have been at this game a long time. And they will, should their careers require it, happily sell us out again....

“Nothing in my view is more reprehensible than those habits of mind in the intellectual that induce avoidance, that characteristic turning away from a difficult and principled position, which you know to be the right one, but which you decide not to take,” wrote the late Edward Said. “You do not want to appear too political; you are afraid of seeming controversial; you want to keep a reputation for being balanced, objective, moderate; your hope is to be asked back, to consult, to be on a board or prestigious committee, and so to remain within the responsible mainstream; someday you hope to get an honorary degree, a big prize, perhaps even an ambassadorship.”

“For an intellectual these habits of mind are corrupting par excellence,” Said went on. “If anything can denature, neutralize, and finally kill a passionate intellectual life it is the internalization of such habits....

“The desire to tell the truth,” wrote Paul Baran, the brilliant Marxist economist and author of “The Political Economy of Growth,” is “only one condition for being an intellectual. The other is courage, readiness to carry on rational inquiry to wherever it may lead … to withstand … comfortable and lucrative conformity.”

Those who doggedly challenge the orthodoxy of belief, who question the reigning political passions, who refuse to sacrifice their integrity to serve the cult of power, are pushed to the margins. They are denounced by the very people who, years later, will often claim these moral battles as their own. It is only the outcasts and the rebels who keep truth and intellectual inquiry alive. They alone name the crimes of the state. They alone give a voice to the victims of oppression. They alone ask the difficult questions. Most important, they expose the powerful, along with their liberal apologists, for what they are.

ZNet
The Treason of the Intellectuals
Chris Hedges | Truthout

Compare with Warren Mosler, Modern Monetary Theory: The Last Progressive Left Standing, at The Huffington Post.

Chris Hedges: America Is a Tinderbox — Interview with Paul Jay

Video with transcript.

Truthout
Chris Hedges: America Is a Tinderbox
Paul Jay, The Real News Network | Video