Chris Hedges: Rise Up or Die

[ewagner]

62. In a strange way, I understand Hedges' desperation...

I found writings I had undertaken for my own amusement/sanity going back to 2010 in which I referenced two works:

A Peace to End All Peace
and
Shock Doctrine

Those two works foreshadowed Hedges' recent article and, if I read them correctly, Hedges' essays, interviews and lectures have all pointed him in a more radical direction, step-by-step.

I understand why.

and I also have this terrible, gnawing feeling in my stomach that he is, above all, right in his conclusions.

There is a certain insanity going on in our great, beloved America these days. The insanity is based on an institutionalization of the premise that the most important thing to each and every American Citizen is "a job". There is a nasty little corollary to that premise, that, in order to "create more jobs", the entire society has be be organized around the needs and desires of business. Business, of course, means corporations who must be unchained from the manacles of regulation of health, safety, environmental concerns, unions and wages. All levels of Government must bow down before the demands of business. (Locally us minor public officials live in abject fear of having an opponent run against us on a platform that we are "anti-business&quot . In the past 20 years, it has become the sole purpose of government to worship at the alter of Economic Development; it is literally the Holy Grail of local government and thousands and perhaps hundreds of thousands of preciously few local dollars are spent every year on the retention, recruitment and subsidizing of local businesses in order to provide the mythical "job" for local citizens.

I've seen this coming for years but only in the past few years have I actually seen local ordinances presented to governing bodies which purported to serve "business" or "public job creation" which were really, and in fact, written by industry trade groups and sometimes by businesses themselves.

And who has the courage to stand up to them? Do we local officials forfeit our seat at the table (political death) in order to stand up to the Business/Corporate/Economic Development interests? Therein lies the dilemma: if we are not at the table, how can we change the course of events? Can we change the course of events from the outside?