Society of Spectacle

The televised spectacle of the January 6th hearings will not restore democracy or halt the rise of the far right. The hearings are a desperate ploy by a doomed political class.

[chrishedges.substack.com]

{The committee, which most Republicans boycotted, hired James Goldston, a documentary producer and former president of ABC News, to turn the hearings into engaging television with slick packaging and an array of pithy sound bites. The result is, and was meant to be, politics as reality television, a media diversion that will change nothing in the dismal American landscape. What should have been a serious bipartisan inquiry into an array of constitutional violations by the Trump administration has been turned into a prime-time campaign commercial for a Democratic Party running on fumes. The epistemology of television is complete. So is its artifice.}

Quite frankly, this is what television news has been since at least the Reagan era. A past ABC president would surely be qualified to capture the gullible. Those who truly understand the political arena and their perception management tools of MSCM should easily be able to relate this newest political reality show to the Iran-Contra show. Which also correlates to Trump's impeachments and every congressional and senate hearing or trial that has been widely shown on TV or played on the radio which I have talked about here a number of times. No substantial resolutions are ever found with only a few sacrificial lambs being tossed under a bus.

Quite frankly, the democratic party has been on life support since Clinton lost to Obama. Not that either party really cares who's in power. And they don't care. They aren't running the show, the ruling class are. More importantly, even more disturbing, international ruling class and other governments have a vast influence on our government. I don't argue we are still a colony without reason. Their constant attempts to get Hillieary into office ended with having to try and outright rig and steal the 2016 election. Which resulted in the major exposure of a criminal scam that still looms over the country. This is the price our country pays when a select few people who are primary members of the power structure from behind the curtain that need them in place to keep their agenda alive. 2016 was a major failure on their part of predicting how our nation would react to a socialist being placed beside her. Between the Obama loss and Trump loss, and the scandals that came out of all of the above, they've been attempting to cover it all up ever since. Then relying on duface to pick up the pieces has gone totally downward for them. Just wait until the people figure out how they've been conned into funding and supporting a fascist country leading to more innocent civilian deaths and a genocide campaign. But they always manage to find a way to funnel tons of coinage to the ruling class. Even with a duface. But hey, part of the republican party is here to help? Illusion...

{The two established wings of the oligarchy, the old Republican Party represented by politicians such as Liz Cheney, one of two Republicans on the committee, and the Bush family, are now united with the Democratic Party elite into one ruling political entity. The ruling parties were already in lock step for decades on the major issues, including: war, trade deals, austerity, the militarization of police, prisons, government surveillance and assaults on civil liberties.

Bennie Thompson, chairman of the committee, talked about “domestic enemies of the Constitution who stormed the Capitol and occupied the Capitol, who sought to thwart the will of the people, to stop the transfer of power.” Liz Cheney called the Capitol “a sacred space in our constitutional republic.”

There was no acknowledgement by committee members that the “will of the people” has been subverted by the three branches of government to serve the dictates of the billionaire class. No one brought up the armies of lobbyists who are daily permitted to storm the Capitol to fund the legalized bribery of our elections and write the pro-corporate legislation that it passes. No one spoke about the loss of constitutional rights, including the right to privacy, because of wholesale government surveillance. No one mentioned the disastrous trade deals that have deindustrialized the country and impoverished the working class. No one spoke of the military fiascos in the Middle East that cost taxpayers over $8 trillion, the for-profit health care system that gouges the public and prevents a rational response to the pandemic, already resulting in over a million deaths, or the privatization of institutions of government, including schools, prisons, water treatment, trash collection, parking meters, utilities and even intelligence gathering, to enrich the billionaire class at our expense.

The gaping hole between the reality of what we have become, and the fiction of who we are supposed to be, is why spectacle is all the ruling class has left. Spectacle takes the place of politics. It is a tacit admission that all social programs, whether the Build Back Better Plan, a ban on assault weapons, raising the minimum wage, ameliorating the ravages of inflation or instituting environmental reforms to stave off the climate emergency, will never be implemented. Those who occupy the “sacred space” of “our constitutional republic” are capable only of pouring money into war, allocating $54 billion to Ukraine, and passing ever higher military budgets to enrich the arms industry.}

Wait until you get a Trump 2.0 to go with Ukraine. Can Ukraine hold on that long? We all better being hoping none of those weapons are making the way back to the US on the black market. They have the money behind them to be bought.

{In 1924, the government of Weimar Germany decided to get rid of Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, or Nazis, by trying Hitler for high treason in the People’s Court. Hitler was clearly guilty. He had tried to overthrow the elected government in the botched 1923 “Beer Hall Putsch,” which, like the January 6 riot, was as much farce as insurrection. It was an open and shut case. The trial, however, backfired, turning Hitler into a national martyr and boosting the political fortunes of the Nazis.}

{Congress is a cesspool. Corrupt politicians whore for the rich and get rich in return. This reality, which the hearings ignore, is apparent to most of the nation, which is why the hearings will not bolster the flagging fortunes of the ruling political class, desperate to prevent displacement.

The old ruling class is slated for extinction, not that what follows will be better. It won’t. But the game of pillage and corruption in the name of sacred democratic values no longer works. A new game is taking its place, one where narcissistic buffoons, who stoke the fires of hate and only know how to destroy, entertain us to death.}

In other words. The fascism that was brought home to the US after WWll and being funded and supported today is never more evident. But in reality, fascism has always been a construct of the new world. Colonialism is the mother of fascism. America began as a colony and remains a colony.