September 22, 2014
| AlterNet
Chris Hedges made these remarks Saturday at a panel discussion in
New York City titled “The Climate Crisis: Which Way Out?” The other
panelists were
Bill McKibben ,
Naomi Klein ,
Kshama Sawant and
Sen. Bernie Sanders . The event, moderated by
Brian Lehrer , occurred on the eve of the People’s Climate March in New York City. For a video of some of what the panelists said,
click here .
We have undergone a transformation during the last few decades—what
John Ralston Saul
calls a corporate coup d’état in slow motion. We are no longer a
capitalist democracy endowed with a functioning liberal class that once
made piecemeal and incremental reform possible. Liberals in the old
Democratic Party such as the senators Gaylord Nelson, Birch Bayh and
George McGovern—who worked with Ralph Nader to make the Clean Air Act,
the Clean Water Act, the Mine Safety and Health Act, the Freedom of
Information Act and the OSHA law, who made common cause with labor
unions to protect workers, who stood up to the arms industry and a
bloated military—no longer exist within the Democratic Party, as Nader
has been lamenting for several years. They were pushed out as corporate
donors began to transform the political landscape with the election of
Ronald Reagan. And this is why the Democrats have not, as
Bill Curry points out, enacted any major social or economic reforms since the historic environmental laws of the early ’70s.
We
are governed, rather, by a species of corporate totalitarianism, or
what the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin describes as
“inverted totalitarianism.”
By this Wolin means a system where corporate power, while it purports
to pay fealty to electoral politics, the Constitution, the three
branches of government and a free press, along with the iconography and
language of American patriotism, has in fact seized all the important
levers of power to render the citizen impotent.
The old liberal
class, the safety valve that addressed grievances and injustices in
times of economic or political distress, has been neutered. There are
self-identified liberals, including Barack Obama, who continue to speak
in the old language of liberalism but serve corporate power. This has
been true since the Clinton administration. Bill Clinton found that by
doing corporate bidding he could get corporate money—thus NAFTA, the
destruction of our welfare system, the explosion of mass incarceration
under the [1994] omnibus bill, the deregulation of the FCC, turning the
airwaves over to a half dozen corporations, and the revoking of FDR’s
1933
Glass-Steagall reform
that had protected our banking system from speculators. Clinton, in
exchange for corporate money, transformed the Democratic Party into the
Republican Party. This was diabolically brilliant. It forced the
Republican Party to shift so far to the right it became insane.
By
the time Clinton was done the rhetoric of self-professed liberals was a
public relations game. This is why there is continuity from the Bush
administration to the Obama administration. Obama’s election did nothing
to halt the expanding assault on civil liberties—in fact Obama’s
assault has been worse—the Bush bailouts of big banks, the endless
imperial wars, the failure to regulate Wall Street, the hiring of
corporate lobbyists to write legislation and serve in top government
positions, the explosion of drilling and
fracking , the security and surveillance state as well as the persecution of government whistle-blowers.
This audience is well aware of the Democratic Party’s squalid record on the environment, laid out in detail in a new
Greenpeace report
written by Charlie Cray and Peter Montague, titled “The Kingpins of
Carbon and Their War on Democracy.” The report chronicles what it calls
“a multi-decade war on democracy by the kingpins of carbon—the coal, the
oil, and gas industries allied with a handful of self-interested
libertarian billionaires.”
The Obama administration, in return for
financial support from these kingpins of carbon, has cynically
undermined international climate treaties, a fact we discovered only
because of the revelations provided by Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks. It
uses its intelligence agencies, these revelations revealed, to spy on
those carrying out climate negotiations to thwart caps on carbon
emissions and push through useless, nonbinding agreements. The Obama
administration has overseen a massive expansion of fracking. It is
pushing through a series of trade agreements such as the
TPP and the
TAFTA
that will increase fracking along with expanding our exports of coal,
oil and gas. It authorized the excavation of tar sands in Utah and
Alabama. It approved the southern half of the Keystone pipeline. It has
permitted seismic testing for offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico,
the East Coast and in parts of Alaska, a process that kills off hundreds
of sea mammals. It authorized drilling within four miles of the Florida
coastline, violating one of Obama’s 2008 campaign promises. This
expansion of offshore drilling reversed 20 years of federal policy.
If
we appeal to self-identified liberals in the establishment who have no
capacity or desire to carry out the radical reforms, we will pour energy
into a black hole. And this is what the corporate state seeks. It seeks
to perpetuate the facade of democracy. It seeks to make us believe what
is no longer real, that if we work within the system we can reform it.
And it has put in place a terrifying superstructure to silence all who
step outside the narrow parameters it defines as acceptable.
The
Democratic Party speaks to us “rationally.” The party says it seeks to
protect civil liberties, regulate Wall Street, is concerned about the
plight of the working class and wants to institute reforms to address
climate change. But in all these areas, and many more, it has, like its
Republican counterpart, repeatedly sold out the citizenry for corporate
power and corporate profits—in much the same manner that Big Green
environmental groups such as the
Climate Group and the
Environmental Defense Fund have sold out the environmental movement.
To
assume that Obama, or the Democratic Party, because they acknowledge
the reality of climate change, while the lunatic fringe of the
Republican Party does not, is better equipped to deal with the crisis is
incorrect. Republicans appeal to one constituency. The Democrats appeal
to another. But both parties will do nothing to halt the ravaging of
the planet.
If Wolin is right, and I believe he is, then when we
begin to build mass movements that carry out repeated acts of civil
disobedience, as I think everyone on this panel believes we must do, the
corporate state, including the Democratic Party, will react the way all
calcified states react. It will use the security and surveillance
apparatus, militarized police forces—and, under Section 1021 of the
National Defense Authorization Act, the military itself—to shut down all
dissent with force. The legal and organizational mechanisms are now in
place to, with the flip of a switch, put the nation effectively under
martial law. When acts of mass civil disobedience begin on Monday
morning with
Flood Wall Street and later with
Occupy the U.N. , the face of the corporate state will, as it did during the Occupy movement, reveal itself.
If
the response of the corporate state is repression rather than reform
then our strategy and our tactics must be different. We will have to
cease our appealing to the system. We will have to view the state,
including the Democratic Party, as antagonistic to genuine reform. We
will have to speak in the language of ... revolution. We will have to
carry out acts of civil disobedience that seek to cripple the mechanisms
of corporate power. The corporate elites, blinded by their lust for
profit and foolish enough to believe they can protect themselves from
climate change, will not veer from our path towards ecocide unless they
are forced from power. And this means the beginning of a titanic clash
between our corporate masters and ourselves.
