Death of the Liberal Class - Chris Hedges [102]
The system is broken. And the consumer advocate who represented the best of our democracy, and the best of the liberal class, was broken with it. As Nader pointed out after he published Unsafe at Any Speed in 1965, it took only nine months for the Federal Government to regulate the auto industry for safety and fuel efficiency. Three years after the collapse of Bear Sterns, however, there is still no adequate financial reform. The large hedge funds and banks, from Citibank to Goldman Sachs, are using billions in taxpayer subsidies to engage once again in the speculative games that triggered the first financial crisis and will almost certainly trigger a second. The corporate media, which abet our vast historical amnesia, do nothing to remind us how we got here. They speak in the empty slogans handed to them by public relations firms, corporate paymasters, and the sound-bite society.
“If you organize one percent of the people in this country along progressive lines, you can turn the country around, as long as you give them infrastructure,” Nader said:They represent a large percentage of the population. Take all the conservatives who work in Wal-Mart. How many would be against a living wage? Take all the conservatives who have preexisting conditions. How many would be for single-payer, not-for-profit health insurance? When you get down to the concrete, when you have an active movement that is visible and media-savvy, when you have a community, a lot of people will join. And lots more will support it. The problem is that most liberals are estranged from the working class. They largely have the good jobs. They are not hurting.
“The real tragedy is that citizens’ movements should not have to rely on the commercial media, and public television and radio are disgraceful. If anything, they are worse,” Nader said:In thirty-some years, [Bill] Moyers has had me on twice. We can’t rely on the public media. We do what we can with Amy [Goodman] on Democracy Now! and Pacifica stations. When I go to local areas, I get very good press, TV, and newspapers, but that doesn’t have the impact, even locally. The national press has enormous impact on the issues. It is not pleasant having to say this. You don’t want to telegraph that you have been blacked out, but on the other hand you can’t keep it quiet. The right wing has won through intimidation.
This intimidation works especially well in a culture of permanent war. In the months leading up to the war in Iraq, there were many credible critics, including former U.N. inspectors such as Hans Blix, who questioned the lies used to justify the invasion and occupation, but the media refused to include independent voices. The case for war, any war, is almost always presented without significant comment or criticism from the liberal class. Liberals are reduced to arguing over tactics.
The Philadelphia Inquirer, for example, published a front-page analysis the day after Hans Blix undermined President Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell’s plans to demand a U.N. Security Council war resolution. Blix had reported that the U.N. inspection teams were making progress. The Inquirer responded by writing: “President Bush now faces an unpleasant choice. He must decide whether to launch a final round of diplomacy aimed at repairing the breach with many U.S. allies and thus winning broader backing for war, or to abandon the United Nations, ignore global opinion, and launch an invasion with whatever allies will follow.”30 The third choice, not going to war at all, was never raised.
Martin Luther King Day has become a yearly ritual that seeks to turn a black radical into a red-white-and-blue icon. It has become a day that allows us to pat ourselves on the back for “overcoming” racism and “fulfilling” King’s dream. It is a day filled with old sound bites about little black children and little white children that, given the state of America, would enrage King. Most of our great social reformers are sanitized for mainstream public consumption after their deaths, and turned into harmless props