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.He said, “What is CTR?” She said, “I am a contractor.” He said, “This is the press office at the Department of Transportation.They contracted out the press office?” “Yes,” she said, “but that’s OK, I come to work here every day.”“The corporate state is the ultimate maturation of American-type fascism,” Nader said:They leave wide areas of personal freedom so that people can confuse personal freedom with civic freedom—the freedom to go where you want, eat where you want, associate with who you want, buy what you want, work where you want, sleep when you want, play when you want.If people have given up on any civic or political role for themselves, there is a sufficient amount of elbow room to get through the day.They do not have the freedom to participate in the decisions about war, foreign policy, domestic health and safety issues, taxes or transportation.That is its genius.But one of its Achilles’ heels is that the price of the corporate state is a deteriorating political economy.They can’t stop their greed from getting the next morsel.The question is, at what point are enough people going to have a breaking point in terms of their own economic plight? At what point will they say enough is enough? When that happens, is a Tea Party type enough or [Senator Robert M.] La Follette or Eugene Debs type enough?It is anticorporate movements as exemplified by the Scandinavian energy firm Kraft&Kultur that we must emulate.Kraft&Kultur sells electricity exclusively from solar and water power.It has begun to merge clean energy activities with cultural events, bookstores, and a political consciousness that actively defies corporate hegemony.The failure by the Obama administration to use the bailout and stimulus money to build public works such as schools, libraries, roads, clinics, highways, public transit; to reclaim dams, and to create green jobs, has snuffed out any hope of serious economic, political, or environmental reform coming from the centralized bureaucracy of the corporate state.And since the government did not hire enough auditors and examiners to monitor how the hundreds of billions in taxpayer funds funneled to Wall Street are being spent, we will soon see reports of widespread mismanagement and corruption.The rot and corruption at the top levels of our financial and political systems, coupled with the increasing deprivation felt by tens of millions of Americans, are volatile tinder for a horrific right-wing backlash in the absence of a committed socialist alternative.“If you took a day off and did nothing but listen to [Sean] Hannity, Beck, and Limbaugh and realized that this goes on 260 days a year, you would see that it is overwhelming,” Nader said:You have to almost have a genetic resistance in your mind and body not to be affected by it.These guys are very good.They are clever.They are funny.They are emotional.It beats me how Air America didn’t make it, except it went after [it criticized] corporations, and corporations advertise.These right-wingers go after government, and government doesn’t advertise.And that is the difference.It isn’t that their message appeals more.Air America starved because it could not get ads.We do not have much time left.And the longer we refuse to confront corporate power, the more impotent we become as society breaks down.The game of electoral politics, given legitimacy by the right and the so-called left on the cable news shows, is just that—a game.It diverts us from what should be our daily task: dismantling, piece by piece, the iron grip that corporations hold over our lives.Hope is a word that is applicable only to those who grasp reality, however bleak, and do something meaningful to fight back—which does not include the farce of elections and involvement in mainstream political parties.Hope involves fighting against the real forces of destruction, not chanting “Yes We Can!” in rallies orchestrated by marketing experts, television crews, pollsters, and propagandists, or begging Obama to be Obama.Hope, in the hands of realists, spreads fear into the black heart of the corporate elite.But hope, real hope, remains thwarted by our collective self-delusion.ISRAEL AND PALESTINEMutually Assured DestructionJULY 14, 2006Israel’s air, land, and sea blockade of Lebanon, which includes jet fighter strikes against the airport in Beirut, presages a new era in the Middle East, one in which the center has collapsed and Muslim and Jewish extremists, capable only of the language of violence, determine the parameters of existence.These strikes, like the suicide bombings carried out by Islamic militants in Iraq or Israel, expose the Ahab-like self-immolation that now inflects the region.And unless it is halted soon, unless those fueling these conflicts learn to speak another language, unless they break free from an indulgence in collective necrophilia, the Middle East will slip into a death spiral.This crisis has been a long time coming.The Bush administration never had any interest in helping broker Middle East peace agreements.This willful negligence was seen as befriending Israel, along with the bizarre demands of the Christian Right.In fact, the administration befriended only an extreme political wing in Israel that, since the death of Yitzhak Rabin, has done a pretty effective job of endangering the Jewish state by dismantling all mechanisms for peace and turning Israel into an international pariah.As the machinery of Middle East diplomacy rusted shut with disuse, it was gleefully replaced by harsher Israeli closures, curfews, shelling, and air strikes.Palestinians have, since Bush arrived in office, been reduced by Israel to a subsistence existence matched only by that in the poorer African countries
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