America's Political Burlesque

Chris Hedges and Jimmy Dore on America's Corporate Oligarchy

This election season, you’ll have noticed there’s no talk of affordable health care for all, an increase in the federal minimum wage, workers’ rights, serious reductions to student debt, the homeless problem, helping the mentally ill and other vulnerable Americans, and so many other issues that affect people like you and me.

Meanwhile, Congress is sending $95 billion in weaponry to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan while dedicating roughly a trillion dollars a year to the military-industrial complex, which includes money for a new generation of nuclear weapons that will likely cost $2 trillion over the next thirty years.

The U.S. government isn’t a democracy, it’s a highly corrupted oligarchy that’s motivated by greed, power, and goals like suppressing workers’ wages by facilitating illegal immigration and cutting jobs in America at the same time. Politicians are cashing in themselves with dubiously “legal” insider trades (Nancy Pelosi, for example) while serving powerful corporate interests. It’s all about power and money, as Jimmy Dore says here, with both parties basically adopting similar policies.

We live in a failed state, as Jimmy Dore says. For example, why should people go bankrupt when they get sick? Why do people sometimes die because they delay going to the doctor until it’s too late? Why does America have the largest prison system in the world? Why are Americans surveilled and having their liberties curtailed under the so-called PATRIOT Act?

Back in 2010, I wrote an article for TomDispatch, “The Business of America Is Kleptocracy.” In that article, I said the following:

If we were to take an honest look at America’s blasted landscape of “losers” and the far shinier, spiffier world of “winners,” we’d have to admit that it wasn’t signs of onrushing socialism or fascism that stood out, but of staggeringly self-aggrandizing greed and theft right in the here and now.  We’d notice our public coffers being emptied to benefit major corporations and financial institutions working in close alliance with, and passing on remarkable sums of money to, the representatives of “the people.”

Never has the old adage my father used to repeat to me — “the rich get richer and the poor poorer” — seemed fresher or truer.  If you want confirmation of just where we are today, for instance, consider this passage from a recent piece by Tony Judt:

In 2005, 21.2 percent of U.S. national income accrued to just 1 percent of earners.  Contrast 1968, when the CEO of General Motors took home, in pay and benefits, about sixty-six times the amount paid to a typical GM worker.  Today the CEO of Wal-Mart earns nine hundred times the wages of his average employee.  Indeed, the wealth of the Wal-Mart founder’s family in 2005 was estimated at about the same ($90 billion) as that of the bottom 40 percent of the U.S. population: 120 million people.

Wealth concentration is only one aspect of our increasingly kleptocratic system.  War profiteering by corporations (however well disguised as heartfelt support for our heroic warfighters) is another.  Meanwhile, retired senior military officers typically line up to cash in on the kleptocratic equivalent of welfare, peddling their “expertise” in return for impressive corporate and Pentagon payouts that supplement their six-figure pensions.  Even that putative champion of the Carhartt-wearing common folk, Sarah Palin, pocketed a cool $12 million last year without putting the slightest dent in her populist bona fides.

While my article is 14 years old and the Dore/Hedges video above is more than a year old, nothing has changed in America except the gap between the richest few and the rest of us continues to widen. Meanwhile, this election year we are given a “choice” between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, neither of whom will do anything to challenge this corrupt kleptocracy.

What is to be done? With two right-wing parties that are slavering most of all to serve Israel in its genocide in Gaza, it’s hard to see a way forward for meaningful reform in America that addresses the needs of our country and its people. That’s why people were galvanized (especially in 2016) by Bernie Sanders’s call for a “political revolution”—and why Sanders and his movement had to be suppressed and sidelined.

This time around, there is no Bernie calling for health care for all and workers’ rights. In that sense, the kleptocrats (or, if you prefer, plutocrats) have already won the 2024 election. Hope and change? From Trump or Biden? Forget about it.

And that’s really the point of America’s political burlesque.