Transcript of Chris Hedges’ presentation at the University of Missouri, Columbia, February 17, 2009. University Lecture sponsored by College of Arts and Science, Peace Studies Program, and Center on Religion and the Professions.
The daily bleeding of thousands of jobs will soon turn our economic crisis into a political crisis. The street protests, strikes and riots that have rattled France, Turkey, Greece, Ukraine, Russia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria and Iceland will descend on us. It is only a matter of time. And not much time. When things start to go sour, when Barack Obama is exposed as a mortal waving a sword at a tidal wave, the United States could plunge into a long period of precarious social instability.
At no period in American history has our democracy been in such peril or has the possibility of totalitarianism been as real. Our way of life is over. Our profligate consumption is finished. Our empire is imploding. Our children will never have the standard of living we had. And poverty and despair will sweep across the landscape like a plague. This is the bleak future. There is nothing President Obama can do to stop it. It has been decades in the making. It cannot be undone with a trillion or two trillion dollars in bailout money. Our empire is dying. Our economy has collapsed.
Take a look at the grim statistics. The United Nations’ International Labor Organization estimates that some 50 million workers will lose their jobs worldwide this year. The collapse has already seen 3.6 million lost jobs in the United States. The International Monetary Fund’s prediction for global economic growth in 2009 is 0.5 percent-the worst since World War II. There are 2.3 million properties in the United States that received a default notice or were repossessed last year. And this number is set to rise in 2009, especially as vacant commercial real estate begins to be foreclosed. About 20,000 major global banks collapsed, were sold or were nationalized in 2008. There are an estimated 62,000 U.S. companies expected to shut down this year. Unemployment, when you add people no longer looking for jobs and part-time workers who cannot find full-time employment, is close to 14 percent.
And we have few tools left to dig our way out. The manufacturing sector in the United States has been destroyed by globalization. Consumers, thanks to credit card companies, shady mortgage brokers and easy lines of credit, are $14 trillion in debt. Banks, which have negative equities, are charging 23 to 30 percent on credit cards to try and recoup the loss made gambling on subprime bonds. The government has pledged trillions toward the crisis, most of it borrowed or printed in the form of new money. It is borrowing trillions more to fund our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And no one states the obvious: We will never be able to pay these loans back. We are supposed to somehow spend our way out of the crisis and maintain our imperial project on credit. Let our kids worry about it. There is no coherent and realistic plan, one built around the recognition of our severe limitations, to stanch the bleeding or ameliorate the mounting deprivations we will suffer as citizens. I am all in favor of a stimulus plan, but not a giveaway to zombie banks, to the creditors, without a dime for actual debt reduction. The hope that half a percentage point, $ 50 billion, might be used to write down troubled mortgage debtors was quashed by this current plan. As Michael Hudson, a professor at The University of Missouri, in Kansas City and a former Wall Street economist has correctly pointed out, what we have done is give $ 12 trillion to the richest one percent - or ten percent of the population - and indebted the economy and the government to this oligarchic class for the next 100 years. We need to refinance mortgages directly so that aid goes to homeowners. The banks and bondholders who made massive profits on these con schemes should take the hit, not the elderly couple down the street. This is what Roosevelt did in the 1930s with the Home Owners Loan Corporation. The stimulus plan is far too small to staunch the bleeding. State and Local governments will face revenue declines of $ 400 to $ 500 billion over the next two years — yet the money for the states in the stimulus package is about $ 140 billion. Why have we handed $ 135 billion to AIG, which has been raided in Britain by police because of allegations of financial fraud? We are paying out taxpayer dollars to mafia capitalists rather than the victims. It is insane. It is regressive politics. It is the opposite of New deal economics. And it will not work. The taxpayer dollars spent on high speed rail, on clean energy, on infrastructure repair, on food stamps, unemployment compensation and public health are helpful, but pitifully small given the magnitude of what we face.
http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2009/02/18/the-looming-collapse-of-the-american-empire-by-chris-hedges/
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
