more about teotwawki...
hedges true left update:
--...blinded by self-delusion and hubris, as if we are somehow exempt from human experience and human
nature, we refuse to listen. The United States... piling up massive deficits and neglecting our basic
infrastructure, including electrical grids, roads, bridges and public transportation, to spend more on our
military that all the other major powers on Earth combined.
...The virtues we argue we have a right to impose by force on others — human rights, democracy, the free
market, the rule of law and personal freedoms — are mocked at home where grotesque levels of social
inequality and austerity programs have impoverished most of the public, destroyed democratic institutions,
including Congress, the courts and the press, and created militarized forces of internal occupation that carry
out wholesale surveillance of the public, run the largest prison system in the world and gun down unarmed
citizens in the streets with impunity.
The American burlesque, darkly humorous with its absurdities of Donald Trump, fake ballot boxes, conspiracy
theorists who believe the deep state and Hollywood run a massive child sex trafficking ring... ten hour long
voting lines in states such as Georgia, militia members planning to kidnap the governors of Michigan and
Virginia and start a civil war...
... It is this despair that is killing us. It eats into the social fabric, rupturing social bonds, and manifests itself in
an array of self-destructive and aggressive pathologies. It fosters what the anthropologist Roger Lancaster
calls “poisoned solidarity,” the communal intoxication forged from the negative energies of fear, suspicion,
envy and the lust for vengeance and violence. Nations in terminal decline embrace, as Sigmund Freud
understood, the death instinct. No longer sustained by the comforting illusion of inevitable human progress,
they lose the only antidote to nihilism. No longer able to build, they confuse destruction with creation. They
descend into an atavistic savagery, something not only Freud but Joseph Conrad and Primo Levi knew lurks
beneath the thin veneer of civilized society. Reason does not guide our lives.
...Hundreds of thousands of Americans die each year from opioid overdoes, alcoholism and suicide, what
sociologists calls deaths of despair. This despair fuels high rates of morbid obesity, some 40 percent of the
public, gambling addictions, the pornification of the society with the ubiquitous of images of sexual sadism
along with the proliferation of armed right-wing militias and nihilistic mass shootings. As despair mounts, so
will these acts of self-immolation.
...Our privatized health care system, which is making record profits during the pandemic, is not designed to
cope with a public health emergency. It is designed to maximize profit for its owners.
... Forty-eight percent of front line workers remain ineligible for sick pay. Some 43 million Americans have lost
their employee-sponsored health insurance. There are ten thousand bankruptcies a day, with perhaps two-
thirds of them tied to exorbitant medial costs. Food banks are overrun with tens of thousands of desperate
families. Roughly 10 to 14 million renter households, or 23 to 34 million people, were behind on their rent in
September.
...The proportion of American children who do not have enough to eat, the study found, is 14 times higher
than it was last year.
Only one thing matters to the corporate state. It is not democracy. It is not truth. It is not the consent of the
governed. It is not income inequality. It is not the surveillance state. It is not endless war. It is not jobs. It is not
the climate crisis. It is the primacy of corporate power — which has extinguished our democracy, taken from
us our most basic civil liberties and left most of the working class in misery — and the increase and
consolidation of its wealth and power.
In America we are only permitted to vote against what we hate. Partisan media outlets set one group against
another, a consumer version of what George Orwell in his novel 1984 called the “Two minutes of Hate.”
... Civic discourse has been poisoned by invective and lies. Power, meanwhile, is left unexamined and
unchallenged.
Political coverage is modeled, as Taibbi points out, on sports coverage... It is the language and imagery of
war... goal is to set demographic against demographic. This stoking of antagonism is not news. It is
entertainment, driven not by journalism but marketing strategies to increase viewership and corporate
sponsors. News divisions are corporate revenue streams competing against other corporate revenue streams.
The template for news, as Taibbi writes in his book Hate Inc., the cover of which has Sean Hannity on one
side and Rachel Maddow on the other, is the simplified morality play used in professional wrestling. There are
only two real political positions in the United States. You love Trump or you hate him, which comes from the
playbook of professional wrestling.
...Both parties have reconfigured American society into a mafia state. It only depends on how you want it
dressed up.
...The CARES Act handed trillions in funds or tax breaks to oil companies, the airline industry, the cruise ship
industry, a $170 billion windfall for the real estate industry. It handed subsidies to private equity firms, lobbying
groups, the meat industry and corporations that have moved offshore to avoid U.S. taxes...
... we are headed towards a Christianized fascism.
...There are three options: reform, which, given the decay in the American body politic, is impossible,
revolution, or tyranny...
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