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The Charlatan, the Huckster, and the Fate of the Planet

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The Narcissistic Billionaire Sociopath vs. the Corrupt Corporate Crony

I once believed in the idea of progress. I did not think of progress as an inevitable march of humanity toward a better life; it was not the illusion of happiness through chemistry and consumerism, as the corporate elite would have us believe. I thought that with greater knowledge, people could act more rationally.

At the onset of my career as a college professor, I thought, we could surely do better if everyone were just more educated and understood the nature of the physical and social worlds. Then people would vote for the candidates who had the best ideas to create progress through enlightened policies. I held to that belief for quite a while, as I watched the U.S. education system deteriorate for thirty-five years. I retired no longer an optimist, but as a stubbornly hopeful realist. Back then, I was sure I would have died of old age before any major devastation from global warming would affect many people.

That was then and this is now. The world has changed so much yet remained the same. The immediate effects of climate destabilization are upon us, yet ignorance prevails. Trump’s Tropes play directly to the most ignorant forms of fear and resentment. The last half century of corporate-cash driven social policies carried out by the corporate state has deeply dumbed down and impoverished much of the population.

False Politics and the Corporate State

I have a feeling that Hillary Clinton harbors a genuine set of humanistic concerns for people and families everywhere. But I doubt that such sympathies will overcome her financial obligations to the giant institutions of the corporate state. Her claims of liberal policies and empathy for the victims of the corporate state she supports ring hollow. The liberal political class is dead in all but name and muted slogans.

The so-called conservative political class is in disarray. Its corporatist elites have played the racist scapegoating card to the ignorant resentments of the declining white middle and working classes to the limit. The Republicans have pandered to Tea Party racists and xenophobes for so long that they have lost control to a megalomaniacal narcissistic neo-fascist sociopath. The prospect for an American fascist state is no longer speculation; it is just as real as the likelihood that the neo-liberal (free-market) economic policies that favor corporations over people will continue.

The corporate elite, which funds most “liberal” and “conservative” candidates, seeks stability and predictability. Neither of these political styles veers far from the established political-economic orthodoxy. The continued hegemony of the financial, military, and industrial power elites depends on the continued subservience of the political class to its corporate benefactors.

The power elites support conventional liberalism and conservatism because both are good cover stories for maintaining control over the public and private institutions of the corporate state. That is why both Republicans and Democrats in congress agree to vote for legislation such as the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) and similar so-called free trade deals. They have no problem giving away national sovereignty to multinational corporations as long as they get to feed at the lobbyist’s trough.

Meanwhile, the charade of national political elections pits political personalities against one another in mock combat of ideas that carefully avoid addressing the great global crises of our time. No candidate other than Bernie Sanders even mentions the emerging catastrophic climate collapse. Bernie, however, does not detail the crisis or offer specific actions commensurate with the urgency of the crisis. Well, Hillary vaguely alludes to it, but no more. Climate denial is, of course, one of Trump’s Tropes.

This 2016 election cycle, however, is a little different. We must question Chris Hedges’ contention that it really does not matter whether the Charlatan or the Huckster wins the presidency, because of the apparent extreme danger of a man who has no center. Narcissists and sociopaths do not have policies; they merely seek social power and personal recognition. They are inherently dangerous because they have no human empathy. Yet, the counter argument that the Huckster will continue to serve the short-term corporate financial interests at the expense of the public interest in avoiding climate collapse, also has merit.

Two Kinds of Political Deceit 

The Charlatan plays to the ignorance fostered by climate-denial, birther, and racist propaganda, while the Huckster gives faint lip service to liberal environmental and social justice concerns while serving the financial and corporate elites. Both exhibit war-mongering tendencies. Neither represents the public interest in seeking peace, community, or climate stability.

The problem with the Obama state department was not that Hillary caused the Benghazi disaster; rather, it was that they both fostered repeated militarist interventions seeking “regime change” without a scintilla of sensibility for what might come after. They use the resulting chaos, such as the rise of ISIS, to excuse further interventions. Who benefits from all this? The arms manufacturers and dealers do, as well as the fossil-fuel industry, and their congressional cronies.

The Charlatan-billionaire’s ignorance of international affairs matches his racist scapegoating and political bullying. But what does that matter if a sociopath has the codes enabling a nuclear strike anywhere in the world? We are living through as very messy time, so far. Part of the reason for that is the rigged electoral system, which normally allows only candidates from the two-party corporatist political establishment to run for office. Both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, in very different ways, disrupted that “normal” political process.

Popular Progressivism Disallowed

For decades, Bernie caucused with the Democrats; a life-long Vermont independent from Brooklyn, he was one of them in all but name and moral stature. His liberalism was true and consistent, unlike the establishment Democrats whose consistent corporatist voting records belied their public protestations of concern for the people. Bernie was able to mount a near successful primary campaign by directly expressing and appealing to the real concerns of the people. His populist social-democratic programs were explicit, essentially the kind of FDR progressivism that has always been popular because of its focus on the well-being of the people. That is why he was able to draw millions of small donations via social media. His honest unpolished “Grampa Bernie” persona became his unconstructed charisma.

The contrast between the corporate media patronizing of sensationalistic Trump Tropes and his racist xenophobia, and their treatment, or should I say avoidance, of Bernie Sanders, was profound. The corporate media gave the billionaire bully billions of dollars in free television exposure, while carefully excluding the “democratic socialist” from coverage. It was an uphill battle for Bernie all the way. The Democratic National Committee had to let Bernie run in the primaries because he had worked with Democrats in the congress for decades. But the DNC had its own corporate candidate and did whatever it could to defeat him while claiming neutrality. It is remarkable that against all those odds, he came so close to victory.

Held back severely at the beginning of the race and torpedoed throughout, Sanders came closer to winning than anyone expected. In a fair race, without the DNC dirty tricks and media blackout, he surely would have won the nomination. But what is fair about normal politics in the U.S.A.?

The tragedy of the charlatan and the Huckster is not that the Democratic Party establishment unfairly defeated Bernie Sanders. Nor is it that a narcissistic sociopath was able to take over the Republican Party to the shock and dismay of both corporatists and extreme fundamentalists.  It is that the American people and the population of the planet are now put at grave risk by the inverted totalitarian of the corporate state, whether Charlatan or Huckster resides in the White House. The “choice” is now between short-term financial interests of the corporate state and the pure demagoguery of a neofascist would-be dictator. The contrast of each with the social mobilization necessary to save the people and the planet from complete climate collapse will differ, but in either case is gravely profound.

How to Create a Corporate State and Destroy the Planet

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Ever wonder why President Obama insists that the “Trans-Pacific Partnership” (TPP) be “fast-tracked” through Congress? Why does its content have to be kept secret from the Congress and the American people? Yes, members of Congress may view its drafts in a secure room but are not allowed to even take notes away with them. Under “Fast Track,” a bill cannot be debated or amended; it must simply be voted “up or down.” That in itself certainly lacks transparency and severely constrains the democratic process. If something is kept secret from me, I have to assume that it contains something I would object to if I knew what it was – probably something that would hurt me too. Secrecy has been a primary tool of tyranny across cultures and time. In the hands of powerful elites, secrecy is almost always a means to increase or maintain unjustified power. For a further motivational clue in this case, you could look at the composition of the group negotiating the treaty. This TPP thing is being written by corporate lobbyists and lawyers, with token representatives of labor or environmental groups. What gives? Okay, so it is pretty obvious that this so-called “free trade” agreement is being written in the interests of trans-national corporations that dominate international trade. Not surprising, of course. But this one reaches far beyond the administration merely pandering to the political interests of corporations. It is a question of national sovereignty – whether nations or corporations will have sovereignty over fundamental elements of political authority. NAFTA was only the beginning. We have no direct knowledge other than those initial drafts of chapters obtained and published by WikiLeaks. They alone are scary enough. Apparently, provisions in its 29 chapters allow mega-corporations to override national, state, and local laws on environment, worker safety, and even carbon emissions policies. It is easy for the uninformed to read paranoia into a claim that the corporations are taking control of the federal (and state) governments. But that is what has happened with other “trade agreements” that allow corporations to sue governments in corporate controlled tribunals for non-compliance, NAFTA being a prime example. Under such provisions, corporations can override national sovereignty; as a result, we are increasingly living in a “corporate state.” Corporate Profit Trumps Mitigating Climate Chaos In the case of the TPP, someone is chasing us whether we are paranoid or not. “TPP elevates corporations and corporate profits to and above the level of governments. TPP lets corporations sue governments for laws and regulations that cause them to be less profitable.”[1] Once governments and their laws are subordinated to international corporate tribunals, well, it is “game over” for national sovereignty over the things that matter to real people. Any national or local effort to uphold standards of environmental protection, labor safety, or efforts to constrain carbon emissions to avoid climate catastrophe will be denied by international corporate tribunals. Naomi Kline describes an obvious case of corporate interests subordinating local economic and planetary climate mitigation needs. An attempted project to bring an advanced Italian solar panel manufacturing operation to Ontario, Canada, would have boosted local employment. It also would have contributed to the necessary conversion of regional energy production to renewable energy. But under the threat of World Trade Organization rules that treat any preference for local manufacturing as a violation of “free trade,” the company withdrew its plans.[2] Ironically, the net gain in carbon emissions reduction by adopting renewable energy production can be wiped out by the carbon emissions of international shipping. For effective carbon emissions reduction, manufacturing of renewable energy technologies must occur near their location where they are to be installed. Indeed, for effective emissions control international trade must itself be curtailed. Consider, for example, almost half of China’s carbon emissions come from manufacture for export. In addition, all those giant container ships emit large quantities of carbon. Local and regional production of a wide variety of products must replace mega-corporate driven remote manufacture for international trade, if carbon emissions reduction is to reach meaningful levels to constrain global warming to livable limits. In this and many other ways, corporate “free trade” ideology expressed in international trade laws is trumping attempts to mitigate climate disruption. It is thereby threatening to wreak havoc on human populations around the world. The ideologies of unrestricted growth and profligate wasteful consumerism support this destructive economic model. The legal elevation of corporate profits over public policy directly increases the power of corporations have been building over governments and their people. It thereby establishes legal corporate sovereignty over all other authority in the world and prevents necessary social action to address the approaching climate catastrophe. Who benefits? Only the international mega-corporations do, at the expense of everyone. A Partially Exposed Coup d’état No wonder they want to keep it all a big secret until the TPP is passed by Congress. No wonder they want to restrict Congress from debating the pros and cons of the content of the bill and prohibit amendments. A coup d’état to overthrow a government is usually exercised in secret, without negotiation. And no wonder. The TPP usurps the public interest in key areas that affect the lives of everyone: environmental protections, labor practices and safety standards, intellectual property, and more broadly, the economic ‘rules of the game.’ We tend to think of revolutions in terms of rebellious generals and their troops storming the presidential palace in a “banana republic.” But today, an unprecedented corporate revolution is occurring in the form of international laws that give the mega-corporations sovereignty over everything. The secrecy of these negotiations includes the propaganda smokescreen that implies that it is just about “leveling the playing field” of trade rules. But only a few of the twenty nine chapters are about trade. What has been leaked so far, thanks to Wikileaks, indicates something far more odious. Much of the document deals with ways to assure corporate sovereignty over national interests by sanctifying profits above the interests of people – the public interest. In fact, it is about how the mega-corporations will rule both governments and the people around the world. The irony is that the secretly negotiated TPP deal by and for the corporations is intended to pass congress without discussion or public knowledge, masquerading as an economic benefit for the nation. And it is to be voted on to circumvent the already seriously damaged democratic process. It is an international treaty passed by congress and the governments of other major trading nations. Any attempt to change it would have to be approved by all the nations that signed it. Get ready to live under a corporate-police state, or join the effort to stop it now. Otherwise, game over for saving even a shred of democracy. __________ 1 Dave Johnson, “Stop Calling the TPP a Trade Agreement – It isn’t.” Reader Supported News. http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/30426-stop-calling-the-tpp-a-trade-agreement-it-isnt. 2 Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014. Chapter 2.

Making Money, Making Time, and Making a Living

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For many Americans, the time has come to reassess our relations with the economy that is being driven off the cliff by the creation and hoarding of phantom money by the very few and catastrophic burden of debt for the rest of us. The economy is controlled by the Big Banks and it has not worked for ordinary citizens. The economy of the plutocrats has kept the nation in debt. At the same time it has made it more and more difficult to make a living by simply working at a job.

This situation raises several serious questions about the nature of money itself and how it is created, managed, distributed, and used in our economy. Most of us are not schooled in the technical aspects of ‘money and banking’ or the philosophy of money, neither of which quite rises to the level of science. But we know that something is very wrong with the way money flows – mostly up – in today’s economy. Just like blood in our arteries and veins, money must circulate broadly to assure a healthy society. One might consider today’s mega-banks as aneurisms in the economy’s aorta, poised to burst.  Surgery is required.

Time is Life
Some recent criticisms of contemporary economic culture have looked at money from the larger perspective of life itself. We have all heard the cliché, “Time is money.” An alternative view is that “Time is life.” What does that mean? Well, time is all we really have in this life and what we do with that time is our life. When we complain that we “don’t have time” for things we deem important, it is because we do not make time for them. Our time is mediated by money, which controls our access to the essentials of living. [1] Thus, money controls much of our life, so political control of the money system is critical for making a living — life.

The cult of American Individualism would blame the victim of poverty for not exercising her/his “individual freedom.” But where is the individual freedom of the increasingly common fast-food or other service worker who has to work two jobs just to pay the rent? Such admonitions assume a perfect world in which anyone who works hard can achieve anything. As Barbara Ehrenreich[2] and others have demonstrated, for many Americans, hard work is simply not enough.

You can’t make time you do not have. If you have to work at minimum wage or less, it is necessary to work most waking hours to avoid homelessness. As middle-income jobs are “outsourced” to China or other super-low wage nations, the middle class shrinks because jobs with a living wage continue to disappear from the American economy. Corporate controlled international trade agreements such as NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) and the new TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) supersede national sovereignty over environmental quality and worker rights. They are negotiated in secret because voters would not tolerate them if they knew of their terms. “When Corporations Rule the World,”[3] the people lose their basic rights along with power over their own lives and the ability to make a living.

What Christian Parenti [4] has called a “catastrophic convergence” of accelerating poverty, violence, and climate disruption is already producing chaos around the world. An impending sense that the party is over is also beginning to bring about a sea change in the image ordinary people have of their lives in relation to both the economy and the planet. Profligate consumption and waste are reaching their limits as resources have passed their peak of easy extraction. Increased costs of extraction cascade into manufacturing costs and cannot be controlled. Capital is moved to locations where labor costs can be reduced. But this results in post-industrial markets shrinking due to the loss of wages that would otherwise be used to buy products. It’s a downward spiral.

A major cultural reassessment is under way. The economy is obviously failing to serve the people. The concentration of wealth in the top 1% of the top 1% is now greater than at the onset of the Great Depression of the 1930s. It is unsustainable. Any economy is sustained by the effective circulation of money as the means for allocating time for doing work. Capital exists only to the extent that labor organizes material – the production of value. Yet, our economy has become subservient to a financial elite that increasingly “makes” phantom money [false capital] by generating more debt without economic productivity.

The fundamental purpose of money in the economy has been subverted. Corporate media attempt to maintain the illusion that multinational corporate capitalism is just that good old Adam Smith version of “small business” and “free” markets in bucolic communities. But we are closer to a corporate police state than any imagined democratic capitalism. Whether they articulate it in such economic terms, people know that the system is rigged. They also know that it is the corporate control of the economy and political system that is doing the rigging. Not only do the people have little or no chance of making a living in that rigged system, but those who do so sustain the larger problem.

A living Economy to Thwart Climate Catastrophe
So, what is to be done? When a system is rigged the only way to break out is to turn away from that system. This is being done in little ways all around the country. Most scientists know that massive programs to stop or at least slow climate chaos must be initiated at the national and international levels. But the system is rigged against that as it accelerates toward the convergence of climate, economic, and population catastrophes causing mass starvation/migration, resource wars, and social chaos. Energy production and wasteful consumption must be severely curtailed, but how?

Parenti argues that: “We cannot wait for a socialist, or communist, or anarchist, or deep-ecology, neoprimitive revolution; nor for a nostalgia-based localista conversion back to the mythical small-town economy of preindustrial America as some advocate…Instead, we must begin immediately transforming the energy economy. Other necessary changes can and will flow from that.” (p. 241) Parenti, like so many others who see what is needed, fails to articulate how such a massive transformation can be accomplished. He says that it “will require a relegitimation of the state’s role in the economy.” But that is precisely what the power elites will not allow – except, of course, where that role entails the massive economic subsidies the state already provides to the mega-corporations. So, he is partly right and partly wrong. He is right to say that we cannot wait, but for what? He is wrong in assuming the energy economy will be transformed from the top without revolutionary change in the structure of political power.

First, we cannot wait for the federal government to act in the public interest – it is controlled by the corporate interests tied to the fossil-fuel economy. The energy economy must be transformed immediately, but how? Even if Bernie Sanders were elected president, the hypocritical Corporate Democrats and the magical-thinking Corporate Republicans would still be in control of legislation and continue to serve their corporate masters. Second, the only action that cannot be stopped by the political-economic elites is the grass-roots action of growing numbers of people organized to change their lives to make a living without depending on the corporate consumer economy. That is both very difficult to do and the only viable path available.

Parenti is right in saying that the immediate task is specific: drastically cut carbon emissions. But that entails a myriad of even more specific tasks, which if achieved will have arisen from below, demonstrating human resilience in the face of corporate-state paralysis. So much to do, so little time.
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1 David C. Korten, Change the Story, change the Future: A Living Economy for a Living Earth. Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2015.
2 Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In America. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.
3 David C. Korten, When Corporations Rule the World. 2nd edition. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2001.
4 Christian Parenti, Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence. New York: Nation Books, 2011.