THE ENEMY AT HOME

 

In a recent article in Scheerpost, Chris Hedges once again points out a truth that many of us have not stopped to more deeply contemplate: "The belief that Democrats will dismantle a system designed to serve the rapacious greed of the war machine and the ruling billionaire class is a mirage. [Illustration: PET PROJECT by Mr. Fish.]

Power does not rest in the Congress. It does not rest in the courts. It does not even rest in the imperial presidency. It rests in the hands of Wall Street financiers, Silicon Valley, private equity firms, the fossil fuel industry, the predatory health care and pharmaceutical giants, agribusinesses and, most of all, the war industry.

WOW! Let that sink in. It is horrifying and yet true.

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The disease of permanent war and militarism is devouring the guts of our nation. War, is at the heart of all the evil of the ruling class. Hedges suggests that as solution we should nationalize the weapons industry. [I can just imagine the wave of indignation from the ruling class and their sycophants if someone were to actually attempt them.]

Lockheed Martin, RTX (formerly Raytheon Technologies), Boeing, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, BAE Systems, Leonardo, Airbus, Rheinmetall and ThyssenKrupp, along with Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Palantir, Goldman Sachs, Citibank and Exxon, are the state--not Congress, not the courts, not the President.

Furthermore this corporate state is enmeshed with elected officials in Washington. Their financial well-beings are intertwined. Members of Congress and their families traded between $24 million and $113 million worth of Pentagon contractor stocks in 2024. These politicians run the Democratic Party. They carry out the same illegal insider trading and have the same conflicts of interest as the Republicans and the Trump White House. That's why Chuck Schumer and Hawkeem Jeffries are likely to be "chosen". They are members of the backroom establishment Democrat leadership.

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Historian Arnold J. Toynbee argued that: "Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder." They are disemboweled by an uncontrollable and unaccountable military that drains state budgets and plunges dying empires into one military debacle after the next. These decaying civilizations finally collapse from within. [Think about how historically true this is. Ancient Greece did not fall overnight; instead, its political independence slowly dissolved over several centuries due to internal division, devastating wars, and the rise of powerful neighbors like Macedonia and Rome. After them we have the example of Rome. The fall of the Western Roman Empire was not caused by a single event, but by a slow, multi-century collapse driven by economic trouble, internal political decay, and massive military pressures.]

If we do not dismantle global capitalism, if we do not free ourselves from the tentacles of the war industry, we will descend into the Hobbesian world of totalitarian capitalism, failed states, mass migrations, endless war, ecocide and permanent immiseration.

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