Rise Up or DieBy Chris Hedges (about the author) Permalink (Page 1 of 1 pages)OpEdNews Op Eds 5/20/2013 at 11:00:10 |
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Illustration by Mr. Fish
Joe Sacco and I spent two years reporting from the poorest pockets of the United States for our book "Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt." We
went into our nation's impoverished "sacrifice zones" -- the first
areas forced to kneel before the dictates of the marketplace -- to show
what happens when unfettered corporate capitalism and ceaseless economic
expansion no longer have external impediments. We wanted to illustrate
what unrestrained corporate exploitation does to families, communities
and the natural world. We wanted to challenge the reigning ideology of
globalization and laissez-faire capitalism to illustrate what life
becomes when human beings and the ecosystem are ruthlessly turned into
commodities to exploit until exhaustion or collapse. And we wanted to
expose as impotent the formal liberal and governmental institutions that
once made reform possible, institutions no longer equipped with enough
authority to check the assault of corporate power.
What has taken place in these sacrifice zones -- in post-industrial
cities such as Camden, N.J., and Detroit, in coalfields of southern West
Virginia where mining companies blast off mountaintops, in Indian
reservations where the demented project of limitless economic expansion
and exploitation worked some of its earliest evil, and in produce fields
where laborers often endure conditions that replicate slavery -- is now
happening to much of the rest of the country. These sacrifice zones
succumbed first. You and I are next.
Corporations write our legislation. They control our systems of
information. They manage the political theater of electoral politics and
impose our educational curriculum. They have turned the judiciary into
one of their wholly owned subsidiaries. They have decimated labor unions
and other independent mass organizations, as well as having bought off
the Democratic Party, which once defended the rights of workers. With
the evisceration of piecemeal and incremental reform--the primary role
of liberal, democratic institutions--we are left defenseless against
corporate power.
The Department of Justice seizure of
two months of records of phone calls to and from editors and reporters
at The Associated Press is the latest in a series of dramatic assaults
against our civil liberties. The DOJ move is part of an effort to hunt
down the government official or officials who leaked information to the
AP about the foiling of a plot to blow up a passenger jet. Information
concerning phones of Associated Press bureaus in New York, Washington,
D.C., and Hartford, Conn., as well as the home and mobile phones of
editors and reporters, was secretly confiscated. This, along with
measures such as the use of the Espionage Act against whistle-blowers,
will put a deep freeze on all independent investigations into abuses of
government and corporate power.
Seizing the AP phone logs is part of the corporate state's broader
efforts to silence all voices that defy the official narrative, the
state's Newspeak,
and hide from public view the inner workings, lies and crimes of
empire. The person or persons who provided the classified information to
the AP will, if arrested, most likely be prosecuted under the Espionage
Act. That law was never intended when it was instituted in 1917 to
silence whistle-blowers. And from 1917 until Barack Obama took office in
2009 it was employed against whistle-blowers only three times, the
first time against Daniel Ellsberg for leaking the Pentagon Papers in
1971. The Espionage Act has been used six times by the Obama
administration against government whistle-blowers, including Thomas Drake.
The government's fierce persecution of the press -- an attack pressed
by many of the governmental agencies that are arrayed against
WikiLeaks, Bradley Manning, Julian Assange and activists such as Jeremy
Hammond -- dovetails with the government's use of the 2001 Authorization
for Use of Military Force to carry out the assassination of U.S.
citizens; of the FISA Amendments Act, which retroactively makes legal
what under our Constitution was once illegal -- the warrantless
wiretapping and monitoring of tens of millions of U.S. citizens; and of
Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act, which permits
the government to have the military seize U.S. citizens, strip them of
due process and hold them in indefinite detention. These measures, taken
together, mean there are almost no civil liberties left.
A handful of corporate oligarchs around the globe have everything --
wealth, power and privilege -- and the rest of us struggle as part of a
vast underclass, increasingly impoverished and ruthlessly repressed.
There is one set of laws and regulations for us; there is another set of
laws and regulations for a power elite that functions as a global
mafia.
We stand helpless before the corporate onslaught. There is no way to
vote against corporate power. Citizens have no way to bring about the
prosecution of Wall Street bankers and financiers for fraud, military
and intelligence officials for torture and war crimes, or security and
surveillance officers for human rights abuses. The Federal Reserve is
reduced to printing money for banks and financiers and lending it to
them at almost zero percent interest; corporate officers then lend it to
us at usurious rates as high as 30 percent. I do not know what to call
this system. It is certainly not capitalism. Extortion might be a better
word. The fossil fuel industry, meanwhile, relentlessly trashes the
ecosystem for profit. The melting of 40 percent of the summer Arctic sea
ice is, to corporations, a business opportunity. Companies rush to the
Arctic and extract the last vestiges of oil, natural gas, minerals and
fish stocks, indifferent to the death pangs of the planet. The same
corporate forces that give us endless soap operas that pass for news,
from the latest court proceedings surrounding O.J. Simpson to the tawdry
details of the Jodi Arias murder trial, also give us atmospheric
concentrations of carbon dioxide that surpass 400 parts per million.
They entrance us with their electronic hallucinations as we waiver, as
paralyzed with fear as Odysseus' sailors, between Scylla and Charybdis.
There is nothing in 5,000 years of economic history to justify the
belief that human societies should structure their behavior around the
demands of the marketplace. This is an absurd, utopian ideology. The
airy promises of the market economy have, by now, all been exposed as
lies. The ability of corporations to migrate overseas has decimated our
manufacturing base. It has driven down wages, impoverishing our working
class and ravaging our middle class. It has forced huge segments of the
population -- including those burdened by student loans -- into decades
of debt peonage. It has also opened the way to massive tax shelters that
allow companies such as General Electric to pay no income tax.
Corporations employ virtual slave labor in Bangladesh and China, making
obscene profits. As corporations suck the last resources from
communities and the natural world, they leave behind, as Joe Sacco and I
saw in the sacrifice zones we wrote about, horrific human suffering and
dead landscapes. The greater the destruction, the greater the apparatus
crushes dissent.
More than 100 million Americans -- one-third of the population --
live in poverty or a category called "near poverty." Yet the stories of
the poor and the near poor, the hardships they endure, are rarely told
by a media that is owned by a handful of corporations -- Viacom, General
Electric, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., Clear Channel and Disney. The
suffering of the underclass, like the crimes of the power elite, has
been rendered invisible.
In the Lakota Indian reservation at Pine Ridge, S.D., in the United
States' second poorest county, the average life expectancy for a male is
48. This is the lowest in the Western Hemisphere outside of Haiti.
About 60 percent of the Pine Ridge dwellings, many of which are sod
huts, lack electricity, running water, adequate insulation or sewage
systems. In the old coal camps of southern West Virginia, amid poisoned
air, soil and water, cancer is an epidemic. There are few jobs. And the
Appalachian Mountains, which provide the headwaters for much of the
Eastern Seaboard, are dotted with enormous impoundment ponds filled with
heavy metals and toxic sludge. In order to breathe, children go to
school in southern West Virginia clutching inhalers. Residents trapped
in the internal colonies of our blighted cities endure levels of poverty
and violence, as well as mass incarceration, that leave them
psychologically and emotionally shattered. And the nation's agricultural
workers, denied legal protection, are often forced to labor in
conditions of unpaid bondage. This is the terrible algebra of corporate
domination. This is where we are all headed. And in this accelerated race to the bottom we will end up as serfs or slaves.
Rebel. Even if you fail, even if we all fail, we will have asserted
against the corporate forces of exploitation and death our ultimate
dignity as human beings. We will have defended what is sacred. Rebellion
means steadfast defiance. It means resisting just as have Bradley
Manning and Julian Assange, just as has Mumia Abu-Jamal, the radical journalist whom Cornel West, James Cone
and I visited in prison last week in Frackville, Pa. It means
refusing to succumb to fear. It means refusing to surrender, even if you
find yourself, like Manning and Abu-Jamal, caged like an animal. It
means saying no. To remain safe, to remain "innocent" in the eyes of the
law in this moment in history is to be complicit in a monstrous evil.
In his poem of resistance, "If We Must Die," Claude McKay
knew that the odds were stacked against African-Americans who resisted
white supremacy. But he also knew that resistance to tyranny saves our
souls. McKay wrote:
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursèd lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! We must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
It is time to build radical mass movements that defy all
formal centers of power and make concessions to none. It is time to
employ the harsh language of open rebellion and class warfare. It is
time to march to the beat of our own drum. The law historically has been
a very imperfect tool for justice, as African-Americans know, but now
it is exclusively the handmaiden of our corporate oppressors; now it is a
mechanism of injustice. It was our corporate overlords who
launched this war. Not us. Revolt will see us branded as criminals.
Revolt will push us into the shadows. And yet, if we do not revolt we
can no longer use the word "hope."
Herman Melville's "Moby-Dick" grasps the dark soul of global
capitalism. We are all aboard the doomed ship Pequod, a name connected
to an Indian tribe eradicated
by genocide, and Ahab is in charge. "All my means are sane," Ahab says,
"my motive and my object mad." We are sailing on a maniacal voyage of
self-destruction, and no one in a position of authority, even if he or
she sees what lies ahead, is willing or able to stop it. Those on the
Pequod who had a conscience, including Starbuck, did not have the
courage to defy Ahab. The ship and its crew were doomed by habit,
cowardice and hubris. Melville's warning must become ours. Rise up or
die.
Chris Hedges spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in
Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has
reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian
Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The (more...)
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