Chris Hedges – The political crisis in America is severe. The old ideas that buttressed the ruling class and promised democracy, growth and prosperity—neoliberalism, austerity, globalization, endless war, a dependence on fossil fuel and unregulated capitalism—have been exposed as fictions used by the corporate elite to impoverish and enslave the country and enrich and empower themselves. Sixty-two billionaires have as much wealth as half the world’s population, 3.5 billion people. This fact alone is revolutionary tinder.
We are entering a dangerous moment when few people, no matter what their political orientation, trust the power elite or the ruling neoliberal ideology. The rise of right-wing populism, with dark undertones of fascism, looks set in the next presidential election—as it does in parts of Europe—to pit itself against the dying gasps of the corporate establishment.
We are caught between the jaws of the monsters Charybdis and Scylla, and our escape route is narrow and diminishing. Playing the old political game, attempting reform using the old rules, won’t work. We must focus exclusively on revolt, on overthrowing corporate power to reclaim our liberty and save the planet from a coup de grâce delivered by the fossil fuel industry.
If we fail to revolt we will see the numerous mechanisms for control enshrined in our system of inverted totalitarianism—wholesale surveillance, militarized police empowered to use lethal force against unarmed citizens, the loss of nearly all civil liberties, the impoverishment of the majority of the citizenry in the name of austerity, the use of the military as a domestic police force, indefinite detention without trial, government-ordered assassination of American citizens—spread like a wildfire across the landscape.