[D66] Fwd: [Marxism] Chris Hedges depressed by Francois Holland candidacy

[Antid Oto]

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_globalization_of_hollow_politics_20120423/

The Globalization of Hollow Politics

By Chris Hedges
Posted on Apr 23, 2012

I went to Lille in northern France a few days before the first round of
the French presidential election to attend a rally held by the socialist
candidate François Holland. It was a depressing experience. Thunderous
music pulsated through the ugly and poorly heated Zenith convention hall
a few blocks from the city center. The rhetoric was as empty and
cliché-driven as an American campaign event. Words like “destiny,”
“progress” and “change” were thrown about by Holland, who looks like an
accountant and made oratorical flourishes and frenetic arm gestures that
seemed calculated to evoke the last socialist French president, François
Mitterrand. There was the singing of “La Marseillaise” when it was over.
There was a lot of red, white and blue, the colors of the French flag.
There was the final shout of “Vive la France.” I could, with a few
alterations, have been at a football rally in Amarillo, Texas. I had
hoped for a little more gravitas. But as the French cultural critic Guy
Debord astutely grasped, politics, even allegedly radical politics, has
become a hollow spectacle. Quel dommage.

The emptying of content in political discourse in an age as precarious
and volatile as ours will have very dangerous consequences. The longer
the political elite—whether in Washington or Paris, whether socialist or
right-wing, whether Democrat or Republican—ignore the breakdown of
globalization, refuse to respond rationally to the climate crisis and
continue to serve the iron tyranny of global finance, the more it will
shred the possibility of political consensus, erode the effectiveness of
our political institutions and empower right-wing extremists. The
discontent sweeping the planet is born out of the paralysis of
traditional political institutions.

The signs of this mounting polarization were apparent in incomplete
returns Sunday with the far-right National Front, led by Marine Le Pen,
winning a staggering vote of roughly 20 percent. This will make the
National Front the primary opposition party in France if Holland wins,
as expected, the presidency in the second round May 6. Jean-Luc
Mélenchon’s leftist coalition, the Front de Gauche, was pulling a
disappointing 11 percent of the vote. But at least France has a
Mélenchon. He was the sole candidate to attack the racist and
nationalist diatribes of Le Pen. Mélenchon called for a rolling back of
austerity measures, preached the politics “of love, of brotherhood, of
poetry” and vowed to fight what he termed the “parasitical vermin” who
run global markets. His campaign rallies ended with the singing of the
leftist anthem “The Internationale.”

“Long live the Republic, long live the working class, long live France!”
he shouted before a crowd of supporters Saturday night.

Every election cycle, our self-identified left dutifully lines up like
sheep to vote for the corporate wolves who control the Democratic Party.
It bleats the tired, false mantra about Ralph Nader being responsible
for the 2000 election of George W. Bush and warns us that the corporate
technocrat Mitt Romney is, in fact, an extremist.

The extremists, of course, are already in power. They have been in power
for several years. They write our legislation. They pick the candidates
and fund their campaigns. They dominate the courts. They effectively gut
regulations and environmental controls. They suck down billions in
government subsidies. They pay no taxes. They determine our energy
policy. They loot the U.S. treasury. They rigidly control public debate
and information. They wage useless and costly imperial wars for profit.
They are behind the stripping away of our most cherished civil
liberties. They are implementing government programs to gouge out any
money left in the carcass of America. And they know that Romney or
Barack Obama, along with the Democratic and the Republican parties, will
not stop them.

The abrasive Nicolas Sarkozy is France’s oilier version of Bush.
Sarkozy, along with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, has done the dirty
work for bankers. He and Merkel have shoved draconian austerity measures
down the throats of Ireland, Portugal, Greece, Spain and Italy. The
governments of all these countries, not surprisingly, have been deposed
by an enraged electorate. And if the new governments in these distressed
European states continue to be ineffectual—which is inevitable given the
sacrifices demanded by the banks—the instability will get worse.

Politicians such as Obama—and, I fear, Holland—who carry out corporate
agendas while speaking in the language of populism become enemies of
liberal democracies. Labor unions, environmentalists, anti-war activists
and civil libertarians, blinded by the images and lies disseminated by
public relations offices, stop watching what these politicians do. They
mute their criticism to give these politicians, whose rhetoric is rarely
matched by reality, a chance. The result accelerates our disempowerment.
It is also, more ominously, a discrediting of traditional liberal
democratic values. The longer the liberal class does not vigorously
denounce expanded oil drilling, our corporate health insurance bill and
the National Defense Authorization Act, simply because these initiatives
have been pushed through by the Democrats, the more marginal the left
becomes. If Bush had carried these policies, “liberal” pundits would
have thundered with feigned outrage. The hypocrisy of the American left
is too blatant to ignore. And it has effectively left us disempowered as
a political force.

The political theater staged by the Democrats and Republicans, bloated
with corporate money, will not work much longer. The game will soon be
up. There are four countries in Europe with socialist
governments—Belgium, Austria, Denmark and Slovenia. All have had to
implement austerity programs. None have effectively defied the power of
the banks. This paralysis is a ticking bomb both in the U.S. and abroad.
And when it explodes it will be far more deadly than anything cooked up
by a group of radical jihadists.

Paris was convulsed by riots led by unemployed youths in 2005, many of
them immigrants living in the depressing high-rise housing projects in
the poor suburbs of Paris known as banlieues. These riots swiftly spread
across France. The French government declared a state of national
emergency. Now, the simmering rage of the underclass could easily boil
over again. The French unemployment rate of 10 percent is the highest in
12 years, but for those in the banlieues the rate is more than 40
percent. We in the United States have similar numbers, only without
France’s health care system or safety net. And public unrest could soon
pit the disorganized rage of the dispossessed against organized
crypto-fascists such as Le Pen, who once compared Muslims praying on
France streets in front of overcrowded mosques to the Nazi occupation.

A breakdown of liberal democracy, which seems to be where we are headed,
may not bring with it a salutary change. The most retrograde forces
within the corporate state, such as the Koch brothers, will lavish
racists, homophobes, demagogues, birthers, creationists and
gun-carrying, flag-waving idiots with money once the political center
crumbles. The left in Europe, and most certainly in the United States,
could prove to be too weak to battle against figures like Le Pen or
those in the U.S. who rally around the perverted ideologies of the
Christian right and the tea party and who receive tens of millions of
dollars in corporate backing. The left, in short, may find that it has
done too little too late to be an effective counterweight. And
widespread discontent could very easily be manipulated by the corporate
elites to ensure our enslavement. I watched this happen in the former
Yugoslavia. This is the real battle before us. And it has nothing to do
with the election charade between Obama and Romney and, I expect,
Holland and Sarkozy.