A long-announced development—happening also in other lands—where the false promises and betrayals of social democracy and corporatist liberalism leave the people utterly confused, with no electoral options, and at the mercy of the Right’s facile “solutions.”  —PG

Transcript follows below. 

Original Music Composed by VICKI HANSEN

Wherein the redoubtable critic of an establishment he was once a prominent member of declares his doubts about the ability of humanity to fix the messes it has created, and refuses to admit that the bourgeoisie can act as a class to advance and defend its interests.

With Gary Corseri

“This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.
There are men who can’t be bought.
The fireborn are at home in fire.”

–Carl Sandburg

GC: I’ve been reading your work fairly regularly over the past 4 years.  Within this year, I’ve reviewed your two most recent books: THE FAILURE OF LAISSEZ FAIRE CAPITALISM and HOW AMERICA WAS LOST.  I know something about your background as Assistant Treasury Secretary during the Reagan Administration, and as a former associate editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, etc.  You and I have corresponded a little, mostly about setting up this interview.  I’m glad to meet you in person.

So, my first question is: What’s the matter with you?  Why didn’t you take the easy path?  What kind of credo drives you? 

PCR:  Well, you know, being a prostitute is not an easy path!  It’s not a role that anybody really wants… and it’s just people who don’t have alternatives who get stuck in that.   .  Of course, I did have a prestigious university chair…. When I went to Treasury, I had been occupying the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy at Georgetown University for 12 years.  I think that what some of my former colleagues were saying is that they had gotten rich by selling out.  That was their claim to fame—that they were now rich.  [He laughs here.  He has a good!]  So, I felt sorry for them.  My friend who related the story told me that he stood up and told them that he didn’t know he was having lunch with a bunch of whores… and he left!  [More laughter….]

GC: It sounds apocryphal!

PCR: That could be….

GC: The reason I mention it… many of my “progressive” friends are critical of Hamilton as the founder of the Central Bank, and so forth…. Do you have any feelings about that?

PCR: When you’re forming a new country, no one really knows exactly what to do, and there were differences among these Founding Fathers… and I am not really the kind of historian to handle this issue.  He was right and he was wrong. I think everybody was trying to do what they thought was right, and, on the whole, they succeeded.  But… the troubles since then are not entirely due to their inability to anticipate….

GC: Everything changes….

PCR: Well, they knew that power would accrue to Government.  That’s why they tried to break it up into 3 coequal branches, hoping that the jealousies between the branches would keep the overall power low.  Unfortunately, they did not anticipate the War Against Southern Secession, which destroyed States’ Rights and elevated the power of the Central Government…. Since then, we’ve had other interest groups step forward: the Bankers who wanted the Federal Reserve so that they would have a way of endlessly expanding credit; and, of course, we’ve had the so-called “War on Terror,” which is a way to get rid of the Constitution itself!  We can’t really say that the Founding Fathers should have anticipated all of this….

GC: Okay… this is somewhat related…. In the 60s and early 70s, there was a flourishing of political and cultural energies.  Is anything like that happening now?  How can we help it along?

PCR: Well, I think there was some output with the Occupy Movement.  It was put down with force and intimidation…. In a very real sense, those forces in the 60s and 70s have been bought off…. You don’t see [for example] the kind of Black leadership that you had in the days of Martin Luther King…. Just think about the Rappers—when they came on the scene they were socially conscious, the songs were challenging.  Now, some of them are billionaires!  I saw the other day that someone was selling out and, ah… Apple… Apple was going to buy his company and the guy’s going to end up a billionaire!  So… where are these energetic forces going to come from?  That has been the success of the elites!  They just co-opt whatever movement comes along.

GC: And this all happened under Clinton, basically….

PCR: The repeal of Glass-Steagall happened under Clinton.  The subsequent deregulations happened under George W. Bush.  For example, when Brooksley Born, the head of the Commodities Futures Trading Corporation, tried to perform her federal duty and regulate over-the-counter derivatives, she was blocked by the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, the Secretary of the Treasury and the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission!  They took this to Congress and shouted her down and forced her out of office.  The position they had was an ideological position for which I know of no evidence: that markets are “self-regulating”… and, therefore, that markets are better regulated without regulators!  This is absolute nonsense!  And, it’s hard to believe that people in Congress didn’t know it was nonsense!  I attribute it to the influence of the Banks—the money…. And, lo and behold, the senator who led the deregulation was very quickly rewarded—he was made Vice-Chairman of one of the “too big to fail” banks; somebody who’s paid millions of dollars to go around giving speeches! This is the way this System works when private interests become too powerful.  In the United States today, the public and private sectors have merged–because the powerful private sectors essentially determine the policy of the government.  There isn’t really a government independent of Wall Street, the military-security complex, the Israel Lobby, the mining, energy and timber business, agribusiness—these groups write the laws that Congress passes and the President signs…. And, the Supreme Court has made it even easier for them because it has ruled that it’s legitimate for corporations to purchase the government—

GC: “Citizens United” and—

PCR: That was the first one… and then the most recent one—

GC: Made it even easier—

PCR: In other words, there are no limits for wealthy corporations to elect the government they want!  It’s like former President Jimmy Carter said a short time ago: At this time, the United States does not have a “functioning democracy.”  Well, he’s right!  We have an oligarchy.  And the oligarchy rules, and the government is some sort of cloak for the rulers.  You never see anything happen against the oligarchs!  For example, one of the senior prosecutors for the Securities and Exchange Commission retired recently; and, he gave a speech and said that his most important cases had been blocked by the “higher-ups” who hoped to get good jobs with the banks that they were protecting!  This is the way the government works today.  When you try to say, we need more regulation—you can’t!  The regulators are “captured” by private interests.  It was about 30 years ago, that economist George Stigler said that regulatory agencies invariably wind up “captured” by the industries they’re supposed to regulate.

GC: What was his name?

PCR: Stigler…. He won the Nobel Prize… not for that observation.  He was a colleague of Milton Friedman… and was quite jealous of Freedman’s renown among ordinary people.  Whereas, Stigler had renown only among academics!  [Laughter….]  At any rate, I don’t think you can simply say that we’ll restore regulation… because the regulations that are on the books can’t be enforced; the higher-ups are protecting those they’re supposed to regulate—so they can get major jobs when they leave government service.

GC: The “revolving door”!

PCR: It’s a sea change.  And I think the only way you recover from something like this is through a catastrophe—something comparable to the Great Depression.  But even that might not do it, because the way the forces are arrayed now it seems that the so-called forces of “Law and Order” are in behalf of the private interest groups.  Look at who busted up the Occupy Movement!  And we now have all this information of all the federal agencies being armed to the teeth.  I mean, even things like the Social Security Administration, and the Post Office!  The other day, I read where the Department of Agriculture has put in a purchase order for submachine guns!  So… what is all this about if not to suppress any sort of popular resistance to an economic collapse or catastrophe?  And, it may be that even a catastrophe won’t let the United States recover.

GC: Are we past the point of no return?

PCR: Who knows?  But, I gave you the reasons that could be the case….

GC: I do think we are in a great transitional period.  I’m pessimistic, as you are.  I think a lot of people admire your work because you made a transition, a transformation in your life—from being a conservative, Reaganite type to a radical who now writes against the system—

PCR: Well, Gary, let me interrupt you here….  Actually, that’s a mistaken perception of me…. Because, they think if you work in a Democratic Administration it means you’re a liberal or a Leftie; if you work in a Republican, it means you’re a conservative or a Right Winger.  But, actually, I was writing against the Establishment of the time!  The supply-side movement was an attack on the Keynesian movement.  The Keynesians were the Establishment!  I wasn’t attacking them for any ideological reasons; I was attacking them because their policies had ceased to work, and we were confronted with stagflation—which meant worsening inflation and worsening of unemployment; and they had no solution except to freeze everybody’s wages, salaries and prices—which was an absurd solution; it wouldn’t have worked!  I was as much “on the outs” at that time as I am now.  I haven’t made any transition.  I just see mistakes and speak against them.

GC: That was in his New York Times op-ed piece. 

PCR: Wherever it was… when you start making these claims that you are some sort of ubermensch, you start sounding like the Nazis.  And you then start acting like you have the right to run over other people, other countries… because History chose you to be the hegemon!  Well, this is extremely dangerous—not just to others, but it’s dangerous to Americans; because the next step is, you lose your civil liberties.  And you’re faced with indefinite detention… or you may be murdered!  Simply because somebody in the Executive Branch suspects you might be a terrorist!  So, it’s not radical to complain against the loss of the Constitution.  That’s a very conservative position—historically.

GC: I think it’s fair to say you’re a moralist—

PCR: I’m not an immoralist, I hope!

GC: I’m wondering about your background…. You mention God, not thinking of ourselves, and so forth… What about your upbringing?  Can you tell us how these values were inculcated?

PCR: You know…, it was a different world….  People had to be able to look themselves in the mirror—and that meant you had to have behaved correctly.  Today, it has almost turned around!  The only way you can look yourself in the mirror is if you got the better of someone else.  It’s like the Wall Street culture has taken over…. And, if we look at American foreign policy—what it’s about is prevailing!  It’s not about diplomacy; it’s about the application of force.  Our diplomacy is: If you don’t do as we say, we’re going to bomb you into the Stone Age.  This is not the country I grew up in!

GC: What country did you grow up in?  Did you go to Church every week…?

PCR: I grew up in the United States!  And the people I grew up with—their values, their way of life—were formed in earlier times; their behavior, their appearance, their way of thinking reflected the kinds of values that were the basis of the country—when such values were still effective… or somewhat effective.  It was before those values had been worn out and discarded.  So, in that sense, I’m a remnant of when we were finer than we are today…. And the kinds of things that happen today simply couldn’t have happened earlier.  I think that a great deal has been lost….

GC: Has that been intentional?  Some people argue that the globalists actually do want to pauperize the American population, and make it docile, and increase our military strength everywhere while at the same time the people are becoming—

PCR: Gary, that doesn’t make any sense to me….  Because, they’re American-based, and there’s nothing they gain by losing the power base.  If Americans are impoverished, certainly the globalists aren’t in control in China.  And, they’re not in control of Putin.  So…, it can look like that, but I think it’s mainly just hubris and stupidity.  What was Hitler thinking when he decided to invade the Soviet Union?  He wasn’t!

GC:  Well… I don’t think he was positive that Britain would attack him when he did that—when he attacked Poland.

PCR:  People make mistakes.  And I would never think that, as mistake-prone as people are, that they can organize the world in conspiracies.  That implies that people don’t make mistakes—especially these conspiracies that people think have been going on for centuries….  We see every day that people make mistake after mistake… That undermines my calculus that there can be some kind of global conspiracy.  Again, what do they gain from undermining their own power-base?  Their assets are here….

GC: I do have a question related to this.  I’ve been preparing for this, so let me go through it.  You can berate me, but l’ll ask it anyway.  If you were one of the super-elite and had the power they have, is it not likely that you would conspire with your peers to maintain your power against the masses who opposed you?  Like the Titans who would rather eat their children than surrender power to the upstart gods….

PCR: Well, logically, it seems that you would do that.  But, what we do know is that most people are so competitive with each other that they can’t get along.  I mean, even families can’t hold together!  So, when these guys are out competing about who has the biggest yacht… or one’s mad because he’s only got 3 Penthouse playmates, and the other guy’s got half a dozen… and one guy’s mad because he’s only got 10 billion dollars but the other guy’s got 15 billion… and his jet plane is bigger than my jet plane!  When you see all this endless competition between individuals among the elite—the notion that they’re somehow going to sit down and agree on how they’re going to do anything…. I mean, nobody can hold together!  The Beatles couldn’t hold together!  Who had a better thing going than the Beatles? I mean, it’s “first me!”  First guy comes along and he says, Okay, I’m going to be the leader of this…. He steps in and soon everybody else is trying to get him out because they want to be the leader!  And the policy goes to hell!  I mean, in the Reagan Administration—it was all we could do to get the President’s economic program out of his own Administration: it was a drag-out fight!  If Treasury had not been willing to take that burden, it wouldn’t have happened.  We had to make endless enemies within our own government to do what the President wanted.  And there aren’t many people in government who will do that!  It just so happened that that particular Treasury had some feisty, fighting people, and they were backed up by the Secretary… That’s rare.  Usually, nobody can agree!  Or, everybody thinks what he wants was the agreement!  And each proceeds on the basis of his own agenda.  So, I think that the elites—not all of them… there are some very nice ones—but the politically active ones are mainly concerned with maintaining their wealth and power.  As to whether they can form up to something tight that holds a line… like an old-time Mafia group…. See, today the Mafia can’t even hold together!  If the Mafia can’t hold together, how can these competitive, rich, educated guys who are jealous of each other?

GC: I’m trying to make a point that… if they can’t hold together against each other… but, against the masses, don’t they hold a solid line?

PCR: I don’t think there’s a “solid line” because I think there are disagreements among elites.  Some of them are really nasty, and some of them have a social conscience.  I knew Sir James Goldsmith—he was a billionaire; he spent the last years of his life fighting for the people against the E.U.!  I knew Roger Milliken.  He was a textile magnate, a billionaire.  He spent his entire life… not on yachts with Playboy bunnies, but fighting for American jobs—in the Congress!  He was totally opposed to all this offshoring of jobs!  That doesn’t mean there’s not a whole bunch of bad ones; they do conspire—but they’re conspiring for themselves.  Plus, you know, if a group like that was seen as a threat to some particular country—like the United States—the CIA would assassinate them!  If the CIA wants to kill every billionaire, they can do it tomorrow.  So, it’s really not so much about individuals as it is about corporate interests, or sector interests—agribusiness, Wall Street–those guys seem to fix it somehow so that all of them can gain from it, even though they try to cut each other’s throats!  That’s a different kind of maneuvering—and that’s the kind we have to be worried about at this time.

GC: You make some solid, perhaps indisputable points, that there isn’t one unified “elite.”  That some of the worst aspects of human nature—our selfishness, greed, hubris, even stupidity—militate against such unity.  Still, having no desire to join that group… I wonder about the possibility of alliances among us children of a lesser God?  Ralph Nader has a new book, UNSTOPPABLE.  He proposes an alliance of Left and Right.  I’ve been wondering for a long time: Is there any way we can work together and transcend these political divisions, these ideological divisions, and find common ground?

PCR: I have no idea.  I have nothing against it…. You know, I’m not an activist.  Nader is.  I’m a thinker, I analyze.  I can see where explanations or perceptions are wrong, and how wrong explanations, and wrong economic theory, and wrong perceptions–like the “Russian threat”—can lead to total disasters.  I try to tell people what really is going on.  I think we actually do live in a matrix.  And our perceptions are controlled by propaganda: some of it intentional, some unintentional.  Some… just because people don’t think things through…. I try to show people what reality is… in so far as I can ascertain it.  At least I can show them a different way of seeing what is happening.  That doesn’t make me a political activist… because I’m not trying to organize people, I’m trying to wake them up, trying to make them aware.  And, what they do with that—I don’t know…. If they organize successfully, and they can find leaders capable of pulling off something like that—that’s great!  I don’t really know the answer about forming alliances.  I suspect that aspects of the matrix are falling away; people are starting to realize that American propaganda doesn’t make sense; that we destroyed 7 countries in the 21^st century—in whole or in part.  I don’t think many people are falling for the propaganda that Russia invaded Ukraine and stole Crimea.  I don’t think that’s the perception in Europe.  It could be that the ability of the formal propaganda—the intentional lies–may be losing its convincing power.  If so, it makes it easier for people to escape the unintentional lies, or the misperceived ways of thinking.  So, there could be big change…. If the E.U. failed, it would have a huge impact on American power.  We would no longer be able to claim that we had a “coalition of the willing” or that we were acting in the name of NATO.  The aggressive behavior of the United States would be recognized for what it is—war crimes!   If Germany, for example, were to say: Look, we have too many relations with Russia, we see the future here….

GC: So, you must feel heartened by the E.U. parliamentary elections this past week—the rise of the “Euro-skeptics”—

PCR: Those elections were not about “race” and immigrants.  They were about dissatisfaction… with the whole concept of the E.U.—the loss of national sovereignty.  The Greeks, the Italians, the Portuguese, the Irish—they feel like they’ve lost their sovereignty.  The only ones that are “holding on” are the Germans, the French and the British—so it starts to look like the E.U. is some sort of Anglo-German-Franco Empire.  And even the Germans, French and Brits have their issues with it!  The Germans don’t like it that their government is a puppet state of Washington!

GC: So, this is one positive thing that’s happening now—

PCR: These dissolutions are positive.  But, I don’t have a plan on how to bring them about.  I think if you organized such a plan, you’d be met with overwhelming opposition…. But, if you haven’t got a plan—it’s more than likely to happen!  To wind this up: I think that humans are capable of every kind of error, every kind of stupid mistake.  And this means that holding anything together, even a family, is difficult.  I mean… half of the marriages end in divorce!  So, you’ve got two people in love, two people intimate together, and they can’t hold together.  So, somehow you’re going to have a plot that’s going to overwhelm the world?  It’s not going to happen!  I think you’re going to have continuing errors, crises, and mistakes.  And I think the United States has made a massive number of them since the Clinton Administration.  All the kinds of restraints that George H. W. Bush had in foreign policy—remember the first Iraq War?  That was to get them out of Kuwait!  We didn’t go on to attack Iraq!  This is the kind of restraint that lets a country continue to exist!  But, since that time we’ve seen the most reckless kinds of behavior.  I think it’s turning the world against us, and the consequences could be catastrophic.  I think we can place our hope in the fact that what’s here today won’t stand… because it’s shaky and the mistakes are multiplying.  It’s going to come down.  And, when it does–that gives the opportunity to change.  And to try to bring that about through some revolutionary movement is not going to succeed.  But, it will succeed on its own.

GC: To quote Shakespeare: “the readiness is all.”

PCR:  Yeah… right….

ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTS

Paul Craig Roberts is a former Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury, and a former columnist for Business Week.  He held the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy at Georgetown University for a dozen years.  He has authored several books, including, “The Supply-Side Revolution” (translated and published in China in 2013) and “How America Was Lost” (2014).  His official home page is: http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/. 

Gary Corseri has published novels and poetry collections, and his dramas have been produced on PBS-Atlanta and elsewhere. His work has been published and posted at hundreds of venues worldwide.  He has performed his poems at the Carter Presidential Center and has taught in US prisons and public schools, and at US and Japanese universities. Contact: gary_corseri@comcast.net.

From the annals of Cyrano’s Journal (1982)
Understanding the political grammar of the American media
Compiled and edited by Patrice Greanville
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Indispensable reading for the serious left

WITH WHAT IS PROBABLY the lowest political consciousness in the industrialized world, Americans live the paradox of being media-rich and information poor. Major clues to this bizarre situation can be found in the national mythologies and techniques of miscommunication favored by the U.S. media. While no nation can claim today to be fully exempt from the ravages of false political consciousness or sheer historical confusion, in some nations the publics are more deluded than in others, and the myths sustaining the whole edifice of lies far more difficult to detect and expose. Sad to say, such is the case in the United States.

As we write these lines, this deeply-ingrained popular ignorance, so often deliberately cultivated by those in power, has finally translated itself in the late-industrial period into a major engine for constant war, and a threat to all living things on this planet. How did such a grotesque situation arise in the United States? What are the major ideological pathways routinely utilized by the system for the dissemination of outrageous falsehoods, or, when the case recommends it, subtle distortions? How is this system maintained? Some of the answers may be found below.

—P. G. [1982]

 HERE FOR AN INTERVIEW WITH HERBERT SCHILLER ON MULTINATIONAL MONITOR

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The Myth of Individualism and Personal Choice

The basis of freedom as it is perceived in the West is the existence of substantial individual choice. Personal choice has been emphasized as highly desirable and attainable in significant measure. The origin of this sentiment is not recent. The identification of personal choice with human freedom can be seen arising side-by-side with seventeenth -century individualism, both products of the emerging market economy and the expanding economic power of the new mercantilist entrepreneurial class, still largely stifled in its social ambitions by the dead weight of a declining but still contemptuous nobility. 1

In the newly-settled United States, few restraints impeded the imposition of an individualistic private enterprise system and its accompanying myths of personal choice and individual freedom. Both enterprise and myth found a hospitable setting. The growth of the former and consolidation of the latter were pretty inevitable. How far the process has been carried is evident today in the easy (though hardening) public acceptance of the giant multinational corporation as an example of individual endeavor worthy of awe and admiration.

PRIVATISM IN EVERY SPHERE OF LIFE is considered normal. 2 The American life style, from its most minor detail to its most deeply felt beliefs and practices, reflects an exclusively self- centered outlook, which is in turn an accurate image of the structure of the economy itself. The American dream includes a single-family home, the owner-operated business. Such other institutions as a health system based on fees for service, a business principle, and the view that medical care is essentially a privilege to be purchased as any other commodity according to private means, are obvious, if not natural, features of the privately organized economy.

Though individual freedom and personal choice are its most powerful mythic defenses, the system of private ownership and production requires and creates additional untruths, along with the techniques to transmit them. These notions either rationalize its existence or promise a great future, or divert attention from its searing inadequacies and conceal quite ably the possibilities of new departures for social organization. Some of these techniques are not exclusive to the privatistic industrial order, and can be applied in any social system intent on maintaining its dominion. Other myths, and the means of circulating them, are closely associated with what has come to be called the American Way of Life.

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The Myth of Neutrality

For manipulation to be most effective, evidence of its presence should be non-existent. When the manipulated believe things are the way they are naturally and inevitably, manipulation is successful. In short, manipulation requires a false reality that is a continuous denial of its existence.

The chief executive, though the most important, is but one of the many governmental departments that seek to present themselves as neutral agents, embracing no objectives but the general welfare, and serving everyone impartially and disinterestedly. For half a century all the media joined in propagating the myth of the FBI as a nonpolitical and highly effective agency of law enforcement. In fact, as congressional hearings confirmed, the Bureau has been used continuously to intimidate and coerce social critics, and is itself a major lawbreaker.

Science, which more than any other intellectual activity has been integrated into the corporate economy, continues also to insist on its value-free neutrality. Unwilling to consider the implications of the sources of its funding, the directions of its research, the applications of its theories (just consider the idea of DNA for profit, recently sanctioned by the Supreme Court), and the character of the paradigms it creates, science promotes the notion of its insulation from the social forces that affect all other ongoing activities in the nation.

The Myth of Unchanging Human Nature

Daily TV programming, for example, with its quota of half a dozen murders and car crashes per hour, is rationalized easily by the media controllers as an effort to give the people what they want. Too bad, they shrug, if human nature demands eighteen hours daily of mayhem and slaughter.

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The Myth of the Absence of Social Conflict

An unwillingness to recognize and explain the deepest conflict situation in the social order is no recent development in the performance of the cultural-informational apparatus. It has been standard operating procedure from the beginning. Authentic cultural creation that recognizes this reality is rarely encountered in the mass of material that flows through the national informational circuitry.

The Myth of Media Diversity

Though it cannot be verified, the odds are that the illusion of informational choice is more pervasive in the United States than anywhere else in the world. The illusion is sustained by a willingness, deliberately maintained by information controllers, to mistake abundance of media for diversity of content. It is easy to believe that a nation that has more than 6.700 commercial radio stations [1975], in excess of 700 commercial TV stations, 1,500 daily newspapers, hundreds of periodicals, a film industry that produces a couple of hundred new features a year, and a billion-dollar private book-publishing industry provides a rich variety of information and entertainment to its people.

The fact of the matter is that, except for a rather small and highly selective segment of the population who know what they are looking for and can therefore take advantage of the massive communications flow, most Americans are basically, though unconsciously, trapped in what amounts to a no-choice informational bind. True variety of opinion, as opposed to superficial differences, on foreign and domestic news or, for that matter, local community business, hardly exists in the media. This results essentially from the inherent identity of interests, material and, ideological, of property-holders (in this case, the private owners of the communications media), and from the monopolistic character of the communications industry in general.

Though no single program, performer, commentator, or informational bit is necessarily identical to its competitors, there is no significant qualitative difference. [On the other hand, the size of the audience regularly reached by progressive media is so miniscule as to be politically impotent to expand, in a meaningful way, the boundaries of the national debate.] Just as a supermarket offers six identical soaps in different colors and a drugstore sells a variety of brands of aspirin at different prices, disc jockeys play the same records, between personalized advertisements for different commodities.

The lore of capitalism has given rise to many self-serving myths, and nowhere have they found a more hospitable soil than in the United States.

The fundamental similarity of the informational material and cultural messages that each of the mass media independently transmits makes it necessary to view the communications systern as a totality. The media are mutually and continuously reinforcing. Since they operate according to commercial rules, rely on advertising, and are tied tightly to the corporate economy and its worldview, both in their own structure and in their relationships with sponsors, the media constitute an industry, not an aggregation of independent, freewheeling informational entrepreneurs, each offering a highly individualistic product. By need and by design, therefore, the images and messages they purvey, are, with few exceptions, constructed to achieve similar objectives, which are, simply put, profitability and the affirmation and maintenance of the private ownership consumerist society.

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 Fragmentation As a Form of Communication

The intrusions also trivialize highly dramatic moments, hindering emotional involvement in any given issue, and thereby indirectly dampening the potential for political protest.

It would be a mistake, however, to believe that without advertising, or with a reduction in advertising, events would receive the holistic treatment that is required for understanding the complexities of modern social existence. Advertising, in seeking benefits for its sponsors, is serendipitous to the system in that its utilization heightens fragmentation.

access to a free flow of opinion.

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Immediacy of Information

Notes

C.J. Polychroniou interviews Henry A. Giroux, a Cyrano’s Journal Contributing Editor. Democracy in Crisis at CounterPunch.

1. It is widely believed that the advanced liberal societies are suffering a crisis of democracy, a view you share wholeheartedly, although the empirical research, with its positivists bias, tends to be more cautious. In what ways is there less democracy today in places like the United States than there was, say, 20 or 30 years ago?

What we have seen in the United States and a number of other countries since the 1970s is the emergence of a savage form of free market fundamentalism, often called neoliberalism, in which there is not only a deep distrust of public values, public goods and public institutions but the embrace of a market ideology that accelerates the power of the financial elite and big business while gutting those formative cultures and institutions necessary for a democracy to survive. The commanding institutions of society in many countries, including the United States, are now in the hands of powerful corporate interests, the financial elite and right-wing bigots whose strangulating control over politics renders democracy corrupt and dysfunctional.  More specifically, Americans now live in what the new Pope has condemned as the “tyranny of unfettered capitalism,” where the corporate, financial, and ruling elites shape politics, assault unions, mobilize great extremes of wealth and power, and enforce a brutalizing regime of neoliberalism. This is a period that lacks any sense of social and economic justice, a historical moment in which the existing norms, values, and for that matter language itself legitimate the production of zones of social and civil death, death spheres—driven by a mad violence rooted in a dystopian theater of cruelty.  Some have argued that Americans have entered a new Gilded Age or an oligarchy, but in reality it is more brutal than these terms suggest. This new period of political, social, and economic savagery is more reminiscent of what Hannah Arendt called “dark times,” a historical conjuncture rooted in the reworked attributes of a life-sapping totalitarianism, posing shamelessly as an updated version of democracy. The new authoritarianism  reinforces what conservative politicians, hedge fund managers and pundits refuse to admit, which is that in the United States the social contract and social wage are under sustained assault by right-wing politicians and anti-public intellectuals from both political parties.  Moreover, those public spheres and institutions that support social provisions, the public good and keep public values alive are under sustained attack. Such attacks have not only produced a range of policies that have expanded the misery, suffering, and hardships of millions of people, but have also put into place a growing culture of cruelty in which those who suffer the misfortunes of poverty, unemployment, low skill jobs, homelessness, and other social problems are the object of both humiliation and scorn.

Neoliberal societies, in general, are in a state of war-a war waged by the financial and political elite against youth, low income groups, the elderly, poor minorities of color, the unemployed, immigrants, and others now considered disposable. Liberty and freedom are now reduced to fodder for inane commercials or empty slogans used to equate capitalism with democracy. At the same time, the very idea of freedom, equality, and civil rights are under sustained condemnation just as racism is spreading throughout the culture like wildfire, especially with regards to police harassment of young black and brown youth. A persistent racism can also be seen in the spiraling attacks on voting rights laws, the mass incarceration of people of African-American males, and the overt racism that has become prominent among right-wing Republicans and Tea Party types, much of which is aimed at President Obama and poor minorities. At the same time, women’s reproductive rights are under assault and there is an ongoing attack on immigrants.

It gets worse. Education at all levels is being defunded and defined as a site of training rather than as a site of critical thought, dialogue, and critical learning. Public education is under siege by the forces of privatization and advocates of charter schools, rendering public education a dead zone bereft of curiosity, imagination, and critical pedagogy. Critical thought and learning have been replaced by mind numbing testing agendas just as teachers have been reduced to clerks of the empire. At the same time, higher education is under massive attack by the apostles of corporatization just an entire generation has been plunged into life-draining debt that stifles the imagination and reduces young people to a culture of precarity and an endless struggle for survival. In addition, democracy has withered under the emergence of a national security and permanent warfare state. This is evident not only in endless wars abroad but also in the passing of a series of laws such as the PATRIOT ACT, the Military Commission Act, the National Defense Authorization Act, and many others laws that shred due process and give the executive branch the right to hold prisoners indefinitely without charge or a trial, authorize a presidential kill list, and conduct warrantless wiretaps. Of course, both Bush and Obama claimed the right to kill any citizens considered to be a terrorist or who have come to the aid of terrorism. Targeted assassinations are now carried out by drones that are more and more killing innocent children, adults, and bystanders. Similarly, the war on terror migrates touching everything in its path and is no longer limited to matters of foreign policy. Domestic terrorism has opened new war zones, operating off the assumption that all Americans are potential terrorists.

Another index of America’s slide into barbarism and authoritarianism is on display with the rise of the racial punishing state with its school-to prison pipeline, the criminalization of a range of social problems, the rise of a massive incarceration system, the increasing militarization of local police forces, and the growing use of ongoing state violence against youthful dissenters and ordinary citizens. The prison has now become the model for a type of punishment creep that has impacted upon public schools where young children are arrested for violating something as trivial as a dress code. It is also evident in the management of a number of social services where poor people are put under constant surveillance and punished for minor infractions. It is also on full display in the militarization of everyday life with its endless celebration of the military, police, and religious institutions, all of which are held in high esteem by the American public, in spite of their undeniably authoritarian nature.

In addition, as Edward Snowden has made clear, the US is now a national security-surveillance state illegally gathering massive amounts of information from diverse sources on citizens who are not guilty of any crimes. There is also the shameful exercise under Bush and to a lesser degree under Obama of state sanctioned torture coupled with a refusal on the part of the government to prosecute those CIA agents and others who willfully engaged in systemic abuses that constitute war crimes. What this list amounts to is the undeniable fact that in the last forty years, the US has launched an attack not only on the practice of justice and democracy itself, but on the very idea of justice and democracy.

Nowhere is the more obvious than in the realm of politics. Money now drives politics in the United States and a number of other countries. Congress and both major political parties have sold themselves to corporate power and have become utterly corrupt. Campaigns are largely financed by the financial elite such as the right wing Koch brothers, Sheldon Adelson, major defense corporations such as Lockheed Martin, and major financial institutions such as Goldman Sachs. As a recent Princeton University report pointed out, policy in Washington, DC has nothing to do with the wishes of the people but is almost completely determined by the wealthy, big corporations, and financial elite, made even easier thanks to Citizens United and a number of other laws enacted by a conservative Supreme Court majority.  Hence, it should come as no surprise that Princeton University researchers Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page came to the conclusion that that the United States is basically an oligarchy where power is wielded by a small number of elites.

2. In other words, you do not think we have an existential crisis of democracy, the result of an economic crisis, with unforeseen and unintended consequences, but an actual corrosion of democracy, with calculated effects? Is this correct?

I think we have both. Not only has democracy been undermined and transformed into a form of authoritarianism unique to the twenty-first century, but there is also an existential crisis that is evident in the despair, depoliticization, and crisis of subjectivity that has overtaken much of the population, particularly since 9/11 and the economic crisis of 2007. The economic crisis is not matched by a crisis of ideas and many people have surrendered to a neoliberal ideology that limits their sense of agency by defining them primarily as consumers, subjects them to a pervasive culture of fear, blames them for problems that are not of their doing, and leads them to believe that violence is the only mediating force available to them, just the pleasure quotient is colonized and leads people to assume that the spectacle of violence is the only way in which they can feel any type of emotion and pleasure. How else to interpret polls that show that a majority of Americans support the death penalty, government surveillance, drone warfare, the prison-industrial complex, and zero tolerance policies that punish children. Trust, honor, intimacy, compassion, and caring for others are now viewed as liabilities, just as self-interest has become more important than the general interest and common good. Selfishness, self-interest, and an unchecked celebration of individualism have become, as Joseph E. Stiglitz has argued, “the ultimate form of selflessness.”  What we are witnessing is an extensial crisis rooted in the destruction of meaningful solidarities,  supportive collective provisions, and the eradication of all public spheres that open up spaces for critical and compassionate public connections.  One consequence of neoliberalism is that it makes a virtue of producing a collective existential crisis, a crisis of agency and subjectivity, one that saps democracy of its vitality.  There is nothing about this crisis that suggests it is unrelated to the internal working of casino capitalism. The economic crisis intensified its worse dimensions, but the source of the crisis lies in the roots of neoliberalism, particularly since its inception since the 1970s when social democracy proved unable to curb the crisis of capitalism and economics became the driving force of politics.

3. In your writings, you refer frequently to the specter of authoritarianism. Are you envisioning western liberal democracies turning to authoritarian-style capitalism as in China, Russia, Singapore, and Malaysia, to “friendly fascism,” or to oligarchic democracy?

Each country will develop its own form of authoritarianism rooted in the historical, pedagogical, and cultural traditions best suited for it to reproduce itself.  In the US, there will be an increase in military style repression to deal with the inevitable economic, ecological, political crisis that will intensify under the new authoritarianism. In this instance, the appeal will largely be to security, reinforced by a culture of fear and an intensified appeal to nationalism. At the same time, this “hard war” against the American people will be supplemented by a “soft war” produced with the aid of the new electronic technologies of surveillance and control, but there will also be a full-fledged effort through the use of the pedagogical practices of various cultural apparatuses, extending from the schools and older forms of media, on the one hand to the new media and digital modes of communication, on the other, to produce elements of the authoritarian personality while crushing as much as possible any form of collective dissent and struggle. State sovereignty has been replaced by corporate sovereignty and this constitutes what might be called a new form of totalitarianism that as Michael Halberstam once stated “haunts the modern ideal of political emancipation.” In addition, as Chris Hedges has argued “There is no national institution left that can accurately be described as democratic.” What is unique about this form of authoritarianism is that it is driven by a criminal class of powerful financial and political elites who refuse to make political concessions. The new elites have no allegiances to nation states and don’t care about the damage they do to workers, the environment, or the rest of humanity. They are unhinged sociopaths, far removed from what the Occupy Movement called the 99 percent. They are the new gated class who float above national boundaries, laws, and forms of regulation. They are a global elite whose task is to transform all nation states into servile instruments willing to enrich the wealth and power of this monstrous global elite. The new authoritarianism is not just tantamount to a crisis of democracy it is also about the limits now being placed on the very meaning of politics and the erasure of those institutions capable of producing critical, engaged, and socially responsible agents.

4. The role of neoliberalism in reducing democracy and destroying public values is an undeniable fact as the economics of neoliberal capitalism seek to establish the supremacy of corporate and market values over all political and social values. Many of your books represent a systematic attack on the neoliberal project. Do you treat neoliberalism as policy paradigm congruent with a certain stage in the evolution of capitalism or as a particular philosophy of capitalism?

Neoliberalism is both an updated and more ruthless stage in predatory capitalism and its search for the consolidations of class power globally, buttressed by the free market fundamentalism made famous by Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, without any regard for the social contract. As Robert McChesney has argued, it is classical liberalism with the gloves off or shall we say liberalism without the guilt–a more predatory form of market fundamentalism that is as ruthless as it is orthodox in its disregard for democracy. The old liberalism believed in social provisions and partly pressed the claims for social and economic justice. Political and economic concessions were necessary under the old liberalism in order to preserve class power and control.  That paradigm disappeared under the force of global neoliberal capitalism. Neoliberalism considers the discourse of equality, justice, and democracy quaint, if not dangerous and must be either trivialized, turned into its Orwellian opposite, or eviscerated from public life. It certainly represents more than an intensification of classical liberalism and in that sense it represents a confluence, a historical conjuncture in which the most ruthless elements of capitalism have come together to create something new and more predatory amplified by the financialization of capital and the development of a mode of corporate sovereignty that takes no prisoners.

5. Some years ago, in an attempt to analyze the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina, you invented the term “the politics of disposability.” Do you consider “disposability” to be a systemic element of global neoliberal capitalism?

Neoliberalism’s war against the social state has produced new forms of collateral damage. As security nets are destroyed and social bonds are undermined, casino capitalism relies on a version of Social Darwinism to both punish its citizens and legitimate its politics of exclusion and violence. It also works had to  convince people that the new normal is a constant state of fear, insecurity, and precarity. By individualizing the social, all social problems and their effects are coded as individual character flaws, a lack of individual responsibility, and often a form of pathology. Life is now a war zone and as such the number of people considered disposable has grown exponentially and this includes low income whites, poor minorities, immigrants, the unemployed, the homeless, and a range of people who are viewed as a liability to capital and its endless predatory quest for power and profits.  Under the regime of neoliberalism, Americans now live in a society where ever-expanding segments of the population are subject to being spied on, considered potential terrorists, and subject to a mode of state and corporate lawlessness in which the arrogance of power knows no limits.

As American society becomes increasingly militarized and political concessions become relics of a long abandoned welfare state, hollowed out to serve the interests of global markets, the collective sense of ethical imagination and social responsibility towards those who are vulnerable or in need of care is viewed as a weakness or a pathology. What has emerged under the regime of neoliberalism is a notion of disposability in which entire populations are now considered excess, relegated to zones of abandonment, surveillance, and incarceration. The death-haunted politics of disposability is a systemic element of neoliberal capitalism actively engaged in forms of asset stripping as is evident in the wave of austerity policies at work in North America and Europe. The politics of disposability is also one of neoliberalism’s most powerful organizing principles rendering millions who are suffering under its market-driven policies and practices as excess, rendered redundant according to the laws of a market that wages violence against the 99 percent for the benefit of the new financial elite. Disposable populations are now consigned to precincts of terminal exclusion, inhabiting a space of social and civil death. These are students, unemployed youth, and members of the working poor as well as the middle class who have no resources, jobs, or hope. They are the voiceless and powerless who represent the ghostly presence of the moral vacuity and criminogenic nature of neoliberalism. They are also its greatest fear and potential threat. What is particularly distinctive about this neoliberal historical conjuncture is the way in which young people, particularly low-income and poor minority youth, are increasingly denied any place in an already weakened social contract and the degree to which they are no longer seen as central to how the many neoliberal societies define their future.

6. Adjusting themselves to the neoliberal reality, universities worldwide are turning increasingly toward corporate management models and marketization. What impact are these shift likely to have on the traditional role of the university as a public sphere?

The increasing corporatization of higher education poses a dire threat to its role as a democratic public sphere and a vital site where students can learn to address important social issues, be self-reflective, and learn the knowledge, values, and ideas central to deepening and expanding the capacities the need to be engaged and critical agents. Under neoliberalism, higher education is dangerous because it has the potential to educate young people to think critically and learn how to hold power accountable.  Unfortunately, with the rise of the corporate university which now defines all aspects of governing, curriculum, financial matters, and a host of other academic policies, education is now largely about training, creating an elite class of managers, and eviscerating those forms of knowledge that conjure up what might be considered dangerous forms of moral witnessing and collective political action.  Any discipline, academic subject, idea, or pedagogical practice that does not serve the instrumental needs of capital is rendered unworthy or useless, suggesting that the only knowledge of any value is one that is blessed by commercial interests and the dictates of commerce.  At the same time, the only pedagogical practice of any is measured by the degree to which is can be viewed as a  commercial transaction. The corporate university is the ultimate expression of a disimagination machine, which employs a top-down authoritarian style of power, mimics a business culture, infantilizes students by treating them as consumers, and depoliticizes faculty by removing them from all forms of governance. As William Boardman argues, the destruction of higher education “by the forces of commerce and authoritarian politics is a sad illustration of how the democratic ethos (educate everyone to their capacity, for free) has given way to exploitation (turning students into a profit center that has the serendipitous benefit of feeding inequality).”

Particularly disturbing here is the corporate university’s attempt to wage a war on higher education by reducing the overwhelming number of faculty to part-time help with no power, benefits, or security. Many part-time and non-tenured faculty in the United States qualify for food stamps and are living slightly above the poverty level. The slow death of the university as a center of critique, a fundamental source of civic education, and a crucial public good make available the fundamental framework for the emergence of a formative culture that produces and legitimates an authoritarian society. The corporatization of higher education constitutes a serious strike against democracy and gives rise to the kind of thoughtlessness that Hanna Arendt believed was at the core of totalitarianism. A glimpse of such thoughtlessness was on display recently at Rutgers University. How else to explain the fact that a Rutgers University recently offered an honorary degree to  Condoleezza Rice, while offering to pay her $35,000 to give a  commencement speech. There is no honor in giving such a prestigious degree to a war criminal.  But, then again, higher education is now firmly entrenched in what President Eisenhower once called the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex. The culture of business has become the most valued cultural capital in the university, hardening and soiling everything it touches.

7. What role does popular culture play in contemporary democratic life?

Popular culture is largely colonized by corporations and is increasingly used to reproduce a culture of consumerism, stupidity, and illiteracy. Mainstream popular culture is a distraction and disimagination machine in which mass emotions are channeled towards an attraction for spectacles while suffocating all vestiges of the imagination, promoting the idea that any act of critical thinking is an act of stupidity, and offering up the illusion of agency through gimmicks like voting on American Idol.  What is crucial to remember about popular culture is that it is not simply about entertainment, it also functions to produce particular desires, subjectivities, and identities. It has become one of the most important and powerful sites of education or what I have called an oppressive form of public pedagogy.  Film, television, talk radio, video games, newspapers, social networks, and online media do not merely entertain us, they are also teaching machines that offer interpretations of the world and largely function to produce a public with limited political horizons.  They both titillate and create a mass sensibility that is conducive to maintaining a certain level of consent while legitimating the dominant values, ideologies, power relations, and policies that maintain regimes of neoliberalism. There are a number of registers through which popular culture produces a subject willing to become complicit with their own oppression. Celebrity culture collapses the public into the private and reinforces a certain level of stupidity. It infantilizes as it seduces and promotes a kind of civic death.  Surveillance culture undermines notions of privacy and is largely interested into locking people into strangulating orbits of privatization and atomization. A militarized popular culture offers up the spectacle of violence and a hyper-masculine image of agency as both a site of entertainment and as a mediating force through which to solve all problems. Violence now becomes the most important element of power and mediating force in shaping social relationships. Market culture functions largely to turn people into consumers, suggesting that the only obligation of citizenship is to shop. This is largely a way to depoliticize the population and distract them from recognizing their capacities as critically engaged agents and to empty out any notion of politics that would demand thoughtfulness, social responsibility, and the demands of civic courage.

As the late  Stuart Hall argued, there is also a subversive side to popular culture both as a site of resistance and also as a sphere in which education becomes central to politics.  This was particularly clear when he argued that the left “has no sense of politics being educative, of politics changing the way people see things.” He was pointing in part to failure of the left to take seriously the political unconscious and the need to use alternative media, theater, on-line journals and news outlets. At the same time, there is enormous pedagogical value in bringing attention in the rare oppositional representations offered within the dominant media. In this instance, popular culture can be a powerful resource to map and critically engage the everyday, mobilize alternative narratives to capitalism, activate those needs vital to producing more critical and compassionate modes of subjectivity. Film, television, news programs, social media, and other instruments of culture can be used to make education central to a politics that is emancipatory and utterly committed to developing a democratic formative culture. At stake here is the need for progressives to not only understand popular culture and its cultural apparatuses as modes of dominant ideology but to also take popular culture seriously as a tool to revive the radical imagination and to make education central to politics so as to change the way people think, desire, and dream. Stanley Aronowitz is right in arguing that “education would be one of the crucial tasks of a radical political formation” and would need to launch a comprehensive educational program extending from the creation of online journals and magazines to the development of alternative schools.

8. While we speak of a crisis in democracy, some writers speak of a crisis in neoliberalism, probably influenced by the recent global crisis in neoliberal capitalism.  Do you believe that neoliberalism is in a crisis?

I think it is more appropriate to argue that neoliberalism creates and thrives on crises. Crises provide the opening for radical neoliberal reforms, for suspending all government regulations, and for building support for extreme policies that under normal conditions would not be allowed to be put in place. One only has to think about Hurricane Katrina and how the Bush administration used to destroy the public school system and replace it with charter schools. Or how 9/11 offered up an opportunity for going to war with Iraq while drastically curtailing civil liberties that benefitted the rich and powerful defense corporations.

9. The “retreat of the intellectuals is not a recent phenomenon, yet it has become quite pervasive, partly due to the collapse of socialism and partly due to the marketization of contemporary society as well as the neoliberal restructuring of the university.  In your view, how critical is the “retreat of the intellectuals” to the struggle for radical social change?

The seriousness of the retreat of intellectuals from addressing important social issues, aiding social movements, and using their knowledge to create a critical formative culture cannot be overstated. Unfortunately, the flight of the intellectuals from the struggle against neoliberalism and other forms of domination is now matched by the rise of anti-public intellectuals who have sold themselves to corporate power. More specifically, neoliberalism has created not only a vast apparatus of pedagogical relations that privileges deregulation, privatization, commodification, and the militarization of everyday life, but also an legion of anti-public intellectuals who function largely in the interest of the financial elite. Rather than show what is wrong with democracy, they do everything they can to destroy it. These intellectuals are bought and sold by the financial elite and are nothing more than ideological puppets using their skills to destroy the social contract, critical thought, and all those social institutions capable of constructing non-commodified values and democratic public spheres. They view both informed critique and collective dissent as dangerous.  As such, they are the enemies of democracy and are crucial in creating subjectivities and values that buy into the notion that capital rather than people are the subject of history and that consuming is the only obligation of citizenship.  Their goal is to normalize the ideologies, modes of governance, and policies that reproduce massive inequities and suffering for the many and exorbitant and dangerous privileges for the corporate and financial elite.  They are the apostles of an unmitigated apology for thoughtlessness and assume that any act of critical thinking is tantamount to a form of  stupidity.  Moreover, such intellectuals are symptomic of the fact that neoliberalism represents a new historical conjuncture in which cultural institutions and political power has taken on a whole new life in shaping politics. What this implies is that the left in its various registers has to create its own public intellectuals in higher education, the alternative media, and all of those spaces where meaning circulates.  Intellectuals have a responsibility to connect their work to important social issues, work with popular movements, and engage in the shaping of policies that benefit all people and not simply a few. At the heart of this suggestion is the need to recognize that ideas matter in the battle against authoritarianism and that pedagogy must be central to any viable notion of politics and collective struggle. Public intellectuals have an obligation to work for global peace, individual freedom, care of others, economic justice, and democratic participation, especially at a time of legitimized violence and tyranny. I completely agree with the late Pierre Bourdieu when he insisted that there is enormous political importance “to defend the possibility and necessity of the intellectual, who is firstly critical of the existing state of affairs. There is no genuine democracy without genuine opposing critical power.”  The very notion of being an engaged public intellectual is neither foreign to nor a violation of what it means to be an academic scholar, but central to its very definition.  Put simply, academics have a duty to enter into the public sphere unafraid to take positions and generate controversy, functioning as moral witnesses, raising political awareness, and making connections to those elements of power and politics often hidden from public view.

10. One final question. Are you optimistic about the future of the Left and of progressive politics in general?

It is impossible to be on the left and at the same time surrender to the normalization of a dystopian vision. One has to be optimistic, but also realistic. This means that there is no room for a kind of romanticized utopianism. Instead, one has to be motivated by a faith in the willingness of young people to fight principally for a future in which dignity, equality, and justice matter and at the same time recognize the forces that are preventing such a struggle. More specifically, hope has to be fed by the need for thoughtful collective action.  Power is never completely on the side of domination and resistance is not a luxury but a necessity. The left in its various registers has to engage the issue of economic inequality, overcome its fragmentation, develop an international social formation for radical democracy and the defense of the public good, undertake ways to finance itself, take seriously the educative nature of politics and the need to change the way people think, and develop a comprehensive notion of politics and a vision to match. History is open, though the gates are closing fast. The issue for me personally is not whether I am pessimistic, but how am I going to use whatever intellectual resources I have to make it harder from getting worse while struggling for a society in which the promise of democracy appears on the horizon of possibility.

C. J. Polychroniou writes for Eleftherotypia.

A version of this interview will appear in Eleftherotypia in Greece.

Vltchek

Editor’s Note: This is one of the most important articles we have published in a long time, and we are grateful that the author took the time to pen a terribly needed and well articulated cri du coeur that may serve as a proto-manifesto for reflection and action for people dedicated to social change.

Occasionally a furious thread on social media may bubble up, and then, again, after some pointed, inspiring discussions, nothing. The anti-status quo information, the apparent rage, vanish into a political black hole that keeps challenging revolutionists to disarm it. Vltcheck argues that many (at least in Europe) clearly understand who the enemy is, what heinous crimes are being committed, including against them, yet they remain passive. We mean no offense to the exceptions to the rule, people who really fight on perfectly conscious of the odds against them/us. They know that to push back effectively we need tools: our own media, and a robust network of social defense organizations, chiefly a reawakening of unionism and worker participation in social struggles. Unions have been effectively dismantled by the plutocracy and its hirelings, from politicians and propagandists to street-level thugs. Corruption and active class collaboration by some top union leaders has obviously facilitated the decline (the vicious anti-communist George Meany, long at the helm of the AFL-CIO, comes readily to mind), but union corruption is wildly exaggerated by the capitalist media. Unfortunately, workers, like the rest of society, mostly consume the toxic news product crafted by a communications (and distraction) system completely at the service of their bosses. 

The Packaged Consciousness, and pay closed attention to his analysis of “fragmentation”.]

In sum, some hope flickers in the distance, but the road remains long and hard. But whatever the answer to the questions posed above, common sense indicates that the left must give immediate attention to the building of a well coordinated system of mass communications capable of reaching at least 5% of the American population on any given day.  Surely some sort of a media strategy can be devised? Without that I fear that a successful pushback against the Big Lie will remain impossible. 
—Patrice Greanville

Time to Listen