[THS] Chris Hedges: No One Cares

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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25371.htm

No One Cares

By Chris Hedges

May 03, 2010 "Truthdig" --  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.

Last Thursday I traveled to Washington to join Rep. Dennis Kucinich for a public
teach-in on the wars. Kucinich used the Capitol Hill event to denounce the new
request by Barack Obama for an additional $33 billion for the war in Afghanistan. The
Ohio Democrat has introduced H. Con Res. 248, with 16 co-sponsors, which would
require the House of Representatives to debate whether to continue the Afghanistan
war. Kucinich, to his credit, is the only member of Congress to publicly condemn the
Obama administration’s authorization to assassinate Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen
and cleric living in Yemen, over alleged links to a failed Christmas airline bombing in
Detroit. Kucinich also invited investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill, writer/activist
David Swanson, retired Army Col. Ann Wright and Iraq war veteran Josh Stieber to
the event.

The gathering, held in the Rayburn Building, was a sober reminder of our
insignificance. There were no other Congress members present, and only a
smattering of young staff members attended. Most of the audience of about 70 were
peace activists who, as is usual at such events, were joined by a motley collection of
conspiracy theorists who believe 9/11 was an inside job or that former Sen. Paul
Wellstone, who died in a plane crash, was assassinated. Scahill and Swanson
provided a litany of disturbing statistics that illustrated how corporations control all
systems of power. Corporations have effectively taken over our internal security and
intelligence apparatus. They run our economy and manage our systems of
communication. They own the two major political parties. They have built a private
military. They loot the U.S. Treasury at will. And they have become unassailable.
Those who decry the corporate coup are locked out of the national debate and
become as marginalized as Kucinich.

“We don’t have any sort of communications system in the country,” said Swanson,
who co-founded an anti-war coalition (AfterDowningStreet.org) and led an
unsuccessful campaign to impeach George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. “We have a
corporate media cartel that overlaps with the war industry. It has no interest in
democracy. The Congress is bought and paid for. It is absolutely corrupted by
money. We kick ourselves for not being active enough and imposing our demands,
but the bar is set very high for us. We have to try very, very hard and make very,
very big sacrifices if we are going to influence this Congress prior to getting the
money out and getting a decent media system. Hypocritical Congress members talk
about money all the time, how we have to be careful about money, except when it
comes to war. It is hypocritical, but who is going to call them on that? Not their
colleagues, not their funders, not the media, only us. We have to do that, but we
don’t in large part because they switch parties every number of years and we are on
one team or the other.”

Scahill—who has done most of the groundbreaking investigative reporting on private
contractors including the security firm Blackwater, renamed Xe—laid out how the
management of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is being steadily transferred by the
Pentagon to unaccountable private contractors. He lamented the lack of support in
Congress for a bill put forward by Rep. Jan Schakowsky known as the Stop
Outsourcing Security (SOS) Act, H.R. 4102, which would “responsibly phase out the
use of private security contractors for functions that should be reserved for U.S.
military forces and government personnel.”

“It is one of the sober realities of the time we are living in that you can put forward a
bill that says something as simple as ‘we should not outsource national security
functions to private contractors’ and you only get 20 members of Congress to support
the bill,” Scahill said. “The unfortunate reality is that Rep. Schakowsky knows that the
war industry is bipartisan. They give on both sides. For a while there it seemed
contractor was the new Israel. You could not find a member of Congress to speak out
against them because so many members of Congress are beholden to corporate
funding to keep their House or Senate seats. I also think Obama’s election has wiped
that out, as it has with many things, because the White House will dispatch
emissaries to read the riot act to members of Congress who don’t toe the party line.”

“The entire government is basically privatized,” Scahill went on. “In fact, 100 percent
of people in this country that make $100,000 or less might as well remit everything
they owe in taxes to contractors rather than paying the government. That is how
privatized the society is, that is how much of government has been outsourced in this
society. There are 18 U.S. intelligence agencies on the military and civilian side and
70 percent of their combined budget is outsourced to for-profit corporations who
simultaneously work the United States government as well as multinational
corporations and foreign governments. We have radically outsourced the intelligence
operations in this country because we have radically outsourced everything. Sixty-
nine percent of the Pentagon’s entire work force, and I am not talking only about the
battlefield, is now privatized. In Afghanistan we have the most staggering statistics.
The Obama administration is infinitely worse in Afghanistan in terms of its
employment of mercenaries and other private contractors than the Bush
administration. Right now in Afghanistan there are 104,000 Department of Defense
contractors alongside 68,000 U.S. troops. There is almost a 2-to-1 ratio of private-
sector for-profit forces that are on the U.S. government payroll versus the active-duty
or actual military forces in the country. And that is not taking into account the fact
that the State Department has 14,000 contractors in Afghanistan.”

“Within a matter of months, and certainly within a year, the United States will have
upwards of 220,000 to 250,000 U.S. government-funded personnel occupying
Afghanistan, a far cry from the 70,000 U.S. soldiers that those Americans who pay
attention understand the United States has in Afghanistan,” Scahill said. “This is a
country where the president’s national security adviser, Gen. James Jones, said there
are less than 100 al-Qaida operatives who have no ability to strike at the United
States. That was the stated rationale and reasoning for being in Afghanistan. It was
to hunt down those responsible for 9/11.”

Josh Stieber spoke at the end of the event. Stieber was deployed with the Army to
Iraq from February 2007 to April 2008. He was in Bravo Company 2-16, which was
involved in the July 2007 Apache helicopter attack on Iraqi civilians depicted on the
video recently released by WikiLeaks. Stieber, who left the Army as a conscientious
objector, has issued a public apology to the Iraqi people.

“This was not by any means the exception,” he said of the video, which showed
helicopter pilots nonchalantly gunning down civilians, including a Reuters
photographer and children, in a Baghdad street. “It is inevitable given the situation
we were going through. We were going through a lot of combat at the time. A
roadside bomb would go off or a sniper would fire a shot and you had no idea where
it was coming from. There was a constant paranoia, a constant being on edge. If you
put people in a situation like that where there are plenty of civilians, that kind of
thing was going to happen and did happen and will continue to happen as long as
our nation does not challenge these things. Now that this video has become public it
is our responsibility as a people and a country to recognize that this is what war looks
like on a day-to-day basis.”

I was depressed as I walked from the Rayburn Building to Union Station to take the
train home. The voices of sanity, the voices of reason, those who have a moral core,
those like Kucinich or Scahill or Wright or Swanson or Stieber, have little chance now
to be heard. Liberals, who failed to grasp the dark intentions of the corporate state
and its nefarious servants in the Democratic Party, bear some responsibility. But even
an enlightened liberal class would have been hard-pressed to battle back against the
tawdry emotional carnivals and the political theater that have thrust the nation into
collective self-delusion. We were all seduced. And we, along with thousands of
innocents in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and beyond, will all be consumed.

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