Covid

MASKING SAVES LIVES

Monday, August 10, 2020

Chris Hedges: America’s Death March – Consortiumnews

Chris Hedges: America’s Death March – Consortiumnews:

CONCLUSION:

Donald Trump’s vulgarity and ineptitude is an embarrassment to the architects
of empire. He has ripped back the veil that covered our failed
democracy. But no matter how hard the elites try this veil cannot be
restored. The mask is off. The façade is gone. Biden cannot bring it
back.
 
Political, economic and social dysfunction define the American empire. Our
staggering inability to contain the pandemic, which now infects over 5
million Americans, and the failure to cope with the economic fallout the
pandemic has caused, has exposed the American capitalist model as
bankrupt. 
 
It has freed the world, dominated by the United States for seven decades,
to look at other social and political systems that serve the common good
rather than corporate greed. The diminished stature of the United
States, even among our European allies, brings with it the hope for new
forms of government and new forms of power.
 
It is up to us to abolish the American kleptocracy. It is up to us to
mount sustained acts of mass civil disobedience to bring down the
empire. It poisons the world as it poisons us. If we mobilize to build
an open society, we hold out the possibility of beating back these
crisis cults as well as slowing and disrupting the march towards
ecocide.
 
This requires us to acknowledge, like those protesting in the streets of
Beirut, that our kleptocracy, like Lebanon’s, is incapable of being
salvaged. The American system of inverted totalitarianism, as the
political philosopher Sheldon Wolin called it, must be eradicated if we
are to wrest back our democracy and save ourselves from mass extinction.

We need to echo the chants by the crowds in Lebanon calling for the wholesale removal of its ruling class — kulyan-yani-kulyan — everyone means everyone.

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