No One Cares

I can't help but share his pessimism and despair. But then again, these are different circumstances than the 60's and 70's, when the government didn't have complete control over the media. If the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were covered in the same way Vietnam was, perhaps there would be more hostility towards these vicious wars. Do Americans know that there was literally no opium being exported from Afghanistan prior to our invasion, and now upwards of 95% of the world's opium now originates from there? Ditto hashish? Do they know that one-third of drone attack victims are civilians? These are stories you don't hear on Fox News, or, if you do, they are excused and justified.

One big problem we face is the cowardice of the fake "anti-war" Left - groups like moveon.org and Code Pink, who were virulently anti-war when Bush the so-called conservative was in office, but have little or no problem with Obama, the fake liberal, who is far worse a war mongerer and butcher than Bush ever was. This is the fallacy and the tragedy of the left-right paradigm. It's not about principle, it's about your "team".

Chris Hedges
Truth Dig -

We are approaching a decade of war in Afghanistan, and the war in Iraq is in its eighth year. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and thousands more Afghans and Pakistani civilians have been killed. Millions have been driven into squalid displacement and refugee camps. Thousands of our own soldiers and Marines have died or been crippled physically and psychologically. We sustain these wars, which have no real popular support, by borrowing trillions of dollars that can never be repaid, even as we close schools, states go into bankruptcy, social services are cut, our infrastructure crumbles, tens of millions of Americans are reduced to poverty, and real unemployment approaches 17 percent. Collective, suicidal inertia rolls us forward toward national insolvency and the collapse of empire. And we do not protest. The peace movement, despite the heroic efforts of a handful of groups such as Iraq Veterans Against the War, the Green Party and Code Pink, is dead. No one cares.

The roots of mass apathy are found in the profound divide between liberals, who are mostly white and well educated, and our disenfranchised working class, whose sons and daughters, because they cannot get decent jobs with benefits, have few options besides the military. Liberals, whose children are more often to be found in elite colleges than the Marine Corps, did not fight the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994 and the dismantling of our manufacturing base. They did nothing when the Democrats gutted welfare two years later and stood by as our banks were turned over to Wall Street speculators. They signed on, by supporting the Clinton and Obama Democrats, for the corporate rape carried out in the name of globalization and endless war, and they ignored the plight of the poor. And for this reason the poor have little interest in the moral protestations of liberals. We have lost all credibility. We are justly hated for our tacit complicity in the corporate assault on workers and their families.

Our passivity has resulted, however, in much more than imperial adventurism and a permanent underclass. A slow-motion coup by a corporate state has cemented into place a neofeudalism in which there are only masters and serfs. And the process is one that cannot be reversed through the traditional mechanisms of electoral politics.

Please read all of it.