On Reality & Resistance: What Is Needed To Overcome The Fascist Storm
The soul is real and if we don't stand up against these rapacious forces of radical evil, our soul will die and we may not win but we must save our soul.
Demonstrators gather outside U.S. Office of Personal Management headquarters to protest Elon Musk's attempts to seize sensitive data on February 4, 2025. / Cropped version of photo: Michael Nigro/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images)
By Mark Taylor
DeMOCKracy.ink (2/18/25)
This interview with Chris Hedges is tough but essential medicine in regards to grasping the reality of the Musk/Trump fascist coup rapidly deconstructing our government and putting us all on the road to poverty and tyranny.
This is no time for dreamy delusions that somehow everything will “work out” and the country will “come to its senses.” No, too many countries have been on this path to doubt the inevitable outcome. Hell, many countries have been thrown down this path to fascist totalitarianism by our own CIA for American corporate profiteering and control.
Just like here and now.
It’s all coming home.
No false hope
If there is to be any hope the resistance needs to get serious and hone its message and discipline its response. There is no time for usual divisive woke debates and energy-draining factional squabbling and distraction of the American left. The key to a better society for ALL is a society where all people are able to earn a livable wage to house and feed their families, educate their children and know healthcare is available for their families. History and commonsense have shown that when people can stop scrambling to survive, tolerance and acceptance will spread.
And, no, the damnable Democrats are not an answer. Any party that willingly began a preventable war and sponsored a grotesque genocide is not to be trusted in any way at any time. Especially in the face of a fascist attack.
Hedges is one of the few who has seen firsthand the cold brutality the United States exercises in other nations. He knows — has seen and experienced — what is happening here and now and will be accelerating in the months and years to come.
In the interview below he pulls no punches and — thankfully — does not dish out bromides of false hope. As usual, Hedges hands us the brutal reality we all must now understand, come to grips with and mount resistance to.
Chris Hedges: What It Will Take To Stop America’s Billionaires & Fake Christian Right From Enslaving Us All
From the Al Jazeera interview below:
Marc Lamont Hill: Are traditional forms of protest or dissent enough or does the scale of the crisis; the intensity of the suffering people are experiencing right now demand a more radical response than what we've traditionally done?
Chris Hedges: It demands a more radical response because we have to destroy the system. We have to destroy the ruling class and the only mechanism we have to destroy the ruling class is by disrupting economic, social and political life. That comes through mass mobilization, primarily through labor and especially through the strike. We have to rebuild militant labor movements that shut the country down. That's the only way out of this.
The oligarchs have understood this for a long time. It's why they have made war against organized labor for a long time. Only 11% of the US workforce is unionized, but we have to regain that militancy. We have to understand who our enemy is and that if we don't break the back of that enemy, things are going to get worse and worse and worse. We have to understand the only power we have is collective. And it will require sacrifice.
We had the bloodiest labor wars of any industrialized country. Hundreds of American workers were killed. Thousands, probably tens of thousands, were blacklisted. We’ve got to look back because the capitalist class are going to use every vicious mechanism they have. …
They essentially made it impossible for Bernie [Sanders]. Without that corporate money Bernie Sanders would have run against Trump the first time around and, I believe, he would have won. But they destroyed it. They destroyed that possibility. So are you hopeful that we're close to that moment; are we on the precipice of a radical moment of resistance? Are we on the verge of toppling power? No, because the left has been so decimated.
In the 1930s Europe went one way — fascist. We went another way, which was quasi socialist. But our left has been so decimated and destroyed I fear that we don't have the forces of resistance that can create the kind of space and social equality and liberty that is — should be —fundamental to an open society. So, no, I'm actually very pessimistic. However, that's where I fall back on my religious tradition where it doesn't matter. You come out of the Black prophetic tradition. If anybody understood the world around them and the forces against them it was was Black America and the Black prophetic tradition. But they fought anyway. And they fought anyway because it wasn't finally what they achieved empirically, it was who they were. It was their own dignity and we have to protect our own dignity.
The soul is real and if we don't stand up against these rapacious forces of radical evil, our soul will die and we may not win but we must save our soul.
[Lightly edited for clarity. — MT]
Marc Lamont Hill
Al Jazeera (2/11/25)
Marc Lamont Hill sits down with Chris Hedges, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and former New York Times Middle East bureau chief, to break down America’s looming future under a toxic mix of corporate greed, religious extremism, and fascist politics. Hedges calls out the “Christian Right” for its deep ties to the billionaire class, claiming they're using "magic Jesus" to distract the masses from real economic collapse. The conversation goes deep into how the system is rigged against the working class, how “boutique activism” misses the point, and why the fight for true justice can’t be won without confronting economic inequality head-on.
The explosive talk covers the dangerous rise of Christian nationalism, the genocide in Gaza, and why the left is too weak to stop the chaos ahead. You won't hear this anywhere else.
36-minute video
Here’s How To Survive If Trump Trigger’s Global Collapse
It could be wildfires, a pandemic or a financial crisis. The super-rich will flee to their bunkers – the rest of us will have to fend for ourselves.
By George Monboit
The Guardian (2/18/25)
Though we might find it hard to imagine, we cannot now rule it out: the possibility of systemic collapse in the United States. The degradation of federal government by Donald Trump and Elon Musk could trigger a series of converging and compounding crises, leading to social, financial and industrial failure.
There are several possible mechanisms. Let’s start with an obvious one: their assault on financial regulation. Trump’s appointee to the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), Russell Vought, has suspended all the agency’s activity, slashed its budget and could be pursuing Musk’s ambition to “delete” the bureau. The CFPB was established by Congress after the 2008 financial crisis, to protect people from the predatory activity that helped trigger the crash. The signal to the financial sector could not be clearer: “Fill your boots, boys.” A financial crisis in the US would immediately become a global crisis.
But the hazards extend much further. Musk, calling for a “wholesale removal of regulations”, sends his child soldiers to attack government departments stabilising the entire US system. Regulations, though endlessly maligned by corporate and oligarchic propaganda, are all that protect us from multiple disasters. In its initial impacts, deregulation is class war, hitting the poorest and the middle classes at the behest of the rich. As the effects proliferate, it becomes an assault on everyone’s wellbeing.
Demonstrators gather outside the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to protest against Donald Trump's move to close it, Washington DC. / Cropped version of photo by Andrew Leyden/NurPhoto/REX/Shutterstock
To give a couple of examples, the fires in Los Angeles this year are expected to cost, on various estimates, between $28bn and $75bn in insured losses alone. Estimates of total losses range from $160bn to $275bn. These immense costs are likely to be dwarfed by future climate disasters. As Trump rips down environmental protections and trashes federal responsiveness, the impacts will spiral. They could include non-linear shocks to either the insurance sector or homeowners, escalating into US-wide economic and social crisis.
If (or when) another pandemic strikes, which could involve a pathogen more transmissible and even more deadly than Covid-19 (which has so far killed 1.2 million people in the US), it will hit a nation whose defences have been stood down. Basic public health measures, such as vaccination and quarantine, might be inaccessible to most. A pandemic in these circumstances could end millions of lives and cause spontaneous economic shutdown.
The key to collapse
Because there is little public understanding of how complex systems operate, collapse tends to take almost everyone by surprise. Complex systems (such as economies and human societies) have characteristics that make them either resilient or fragile. A system that loses its diversity, redundancy, modularity (the degree of compartmentalisation), its “circuit breakers” (such as government regulations) and backup strategies (alternative means of achieving a goal) is less resilient than one which retains these features. So is a system whose processes become synchronised. In a fragile system, shocks can amplify more rapidly and become more transmissible: a disruption in one place proliferates into disaster everywhere. This, as Andy Haldane, former chief economist at the Bank of England, has deftly explained, is what happened to the financial system in 2008.
A consistent feature of globalised capitalism is an unintentional assault on systemic resilience. As corporations pursue similar profit-making strategies, and financialisation and digitisation permeate every enterprise, the economic system loses its diversity and starts to synchronise. As they consolidate, and the biggest conglomerates become hubs to which many other enterprises are connected (think of Amazon or the food and farming giant Cargill), major failures could cascade at astonishing speed.
As every enterprise seeks efficiencies, the system loses its redundancy. As trading rules and physical infrastructure are standardised (think of those identical container terminals, shipping and trucking networks), the system loses both modularity and backup strategies. When a system has lost its resilience, a small external shock can trigger cascading collapse.
Paradoxically, with his trade wars and assault on global standards, Trump could help to desynchronise the system and reintroduce some modularity. But, as he simultaneously rips down circuit breakers, undermines preparedness and treats Earth systems as an enemy to be crushed, the net effect is likely to make human systems more prone to collapse.
From crisis to catastrophe
At least in the short term, the far right tends to benefit from chaos and disruption: this is another of the feedback loops that can turn a crisis into a catastrophe. Trump presents himself as the hero who will save the nation from the ruptures he has caused, while deflecting the blame on to scapegoats.
Alternatively, if collapse appears imminent, Trump and his team might not wish to respond. Like many of the ultra-rich, key figures in or around the administration entertain the kind of psychopathic fantasies indulged by Ayn Rand in her novels Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, in which plutocrats leave the proles to die in the inferno they’ve created, while they migrate to their New Zealand bunkers, Mars or the ocean floor (forgetting, as they always do, that their wealth, power and survival is entirely dependent on other people). Or they yearn for a different apocalypse, in which the rest of us roast while they party with Jesus in his restored kingdom.
Every government should hope for the best and prepare for the worst. But, as they do with climate and ecological breakdown, freshwater depletion, the possibility of food system collapse, antibiotic resistance and nuclear proliferation, most governments, including the UK’s, now seem to hope for the best and leave it there. So, though there is no substitute for effective government, we must seek to create our own backup systems.
Don’t face your fears alone
Start with this principle: don’t face your fears alone. Make friends, meet your neighbours, set up support networks, help those who are struggling. Since the dawn of humankind, those with robust social networks have been more resilient than those without.
Discuss what we confront, explore the means by which we might respond. Through neighbourhood networks, start building a deliberative, participatory democracy, to resolve at least some of the issues that can be fixed at the local level. If you can, secure local resources for the community (in England this will be made easier with the forthcoming community right to buy, like Scotland’s).
From democratised neighbourhoods, we might seek to develop a new politics, along the lines proposed by Murray Bookchin, in which decisions are passed upwards, not downwards, with the aim of creating a political system not only more democratic than those we currently suffer, but which also permits more diversity, redundancy and modularity.
Yes, we also – and urgently – need national and global action, brokered by governments. But it’s beginning to look as if no one has our backs. Prepare for the worst.
COWARDICE OR COMPLICITY? Here's the 'Fire Elon Musk' Ad The Washington Post Refuses To Run
"Is it only okay to run things in The Post now that won't anger the president or won't have him calling Jeff Bezos asking why this was allowed?"
By John Queally
Common Dreams (2/17/25)
Critics of the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post are targeting the newspaper over its "gutless" refusal to run a paid wrap-around advertisement that makes a prominent demand for President Donald Trump to fire mega-billionaire Elon Musk from his cohort of inner-most advisers.
The special ad, at a cost of $115,000, was orchestrated by the pro-democracy watchdog Common Cause, a progressive advocacy group, and scheduled to be delivered to members of Congress and subscribers at the Pentagon and White House on Tuesday. On Friday, however, the newspaper notified the group that it was backing out of the arrangement.
"Elon Musk is attempting to run our government like one of his companies, and it's hurting the American people," reads some of the language of the campaign on which the ad is based. "Even more concerning is that President Donald Trump is allowing it to happen. It's time to say enough and FIRE Elon Musk from any role within our government."
The campaign, like the ad refused by the Post, points people to an online petition where they can back the demand Musk be fired and information to contact their members of Congress.
"Our elected officials are totally abandoning their duty to their constituents while Elon Musk does as he pleases," reads the call to action. "Whether your senators are on the right, on the left, or in the center, they ALL need to hear from everyday Americans like us today."
The Hill, given an exclusive for the story, reports that one of the ironies of the situation is that when the Post gave Common Cause a sample look at how the advertisement would appear, the example was a previously run ad by the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM), an industry lobby group, highlighting the new president's promise to "end the electric vehicle mandate on Day 1," which included an image of a smiling Trump with his thumbs up.
"They gave us some sample art to show us what it would look like," Kase Solomón, president of Common Cause, explained. "It was a thank-you Donald Trump piece of art."
According to The Hill:
The ad’s design features a large picture of Musk with his head tilted back, laughing, along with a cutout image of the White House and large white text: “Who’s running this country: Donald Trump or Elon Musk?”
Lower down on the page it features smaller font text stating: “Since day one, Elon has created chaos and confusion and put our livelihoods at risk. And he is accountable to no one but himself.”
“The Constitution only allows for one president at a time. Call your senators and tell them it’s time Donald Trump fire Elon Musk,” it says, followed by the URL FireMusk.org.
Here's what the ad was supposed to look like:
Solomón said it was not clear why the newspaper made its decision, but it seemed very much to do with the nature of the ad's content and possibly with the political leanings of the Post's owner, the second-richest man in the world after Musk himself. Both men have significant business interests that could be injured if they run afoul of President Trump.
"Is it because we’re critical of what's happening with Elon Musk?" asked Solomón. "Is it only okay to run things in The Post now that won't anger the president or won't have him calling Jeff Bezos asking why this was allowed?"
Excellent bit of writing.
Whatever happened to Trump is the symptom of a far larger problem?
Too late Trump elected or appointed - has filled his cabinet with 10 or more billionaires - the merger of big business and government is out in the open and Trump has become the side show while Musk has taken over the WH while even jr tell's Trump he should just leave, it should be obvious where he got that one from.
In any case - It's revolution time.
The biggest obstacle is to get the uniforms on your side.
I love Chris Hedges' writing, but he comes across as being very depressed to me at times. We need to keep our spirits up and organize. I think the upcoming Economic Blackout on February 28 is one way to capture the imagination of a large number of people and make a point to the billionaires that we're not cooperating with them and we can take them out by our sheer numbers and determination. Power to the people!