The Mafia State
First we got a mafia economy. Then we got a mafia
state. We must rid ourselves of the ruling criminal
class or become its victims.
Chris Hedges
Feb 15, 2025
Type your email...
Subscribe
Kiss the ring. Grovel before the Godfather. Give him
tribute, a cut of the spoils. If he and his family get
rich you get rich. Enter his inner circle, his “made”
men and women, and you do not have to follow rules or
obey the law. You can disembowel the machinery of
government. You can turn us and the natural world into
commodities to exploit until exhaustion or collapse.
You can commit crimes with impunity. You can make a
mockery of democratic norms and social responsibility.
Perfidy is very profitable at first. In the long term
it is collective suicide.
America is a full blown kleptocracy. The demolition of
the social and political structure, begun long before
Trump, makes a few very, very rich and immiserates
everyone else. Mafia capitalism always leads to a mafia
state. The two ruling parties gave us the first. Now we
get the second. It is not only our wealth that is being
taken from us, but our liberty.
Since the election of Donald Trump, Elon Musk,
currently worth $394 billion, saw his wealth increase
by $170 billion. Mark Zuckerberg, worth $254 billion,
saw his net worth increase by nearly $41 billion.
Tidy sums for kneeling before Moloch.
At least 11 federal agencies that have been affected by
the slash and burn campaign of the Trump administration
have more than 32 continuing investigations, pending
complaints or enforcement actions, into Musk’s six
companies, according to a review by The New York Times.
The mafia state ignores legal constraints and
regulations. It lacks external and internal control. It
cannibalizes everything, including the ecosystem, until
there is nothing left but a wasteland. It cannot
distinguish between reality and illusion, which
obscures and exacerbates gross incompetence. And then
the hollowed-out edifice will collapse leaving in its
wake a shell of a country with nukes. The Roman and
Sumerian empires fell this way. So did the Mayans and
the sclerotic reign of the French monarch Louis XVI.
In the final stages of decay for all empires, the
rulers, focused exclusively on personal enrichment,
ensconced in their versions of Versailles or The
Forbidden City, squeeze the last drops of profit from
an increasingly oppressed and impoverished population
and ravaged environment.
Unprecedented wealth is inseparable from unprecedented
poverty.
The more extreme life becomes, the more extreme
ideologies become. Huge segments of the population,
unable to absorb the despair and bleakness, severs
itself from a reality-based universe. It takes comfort
in magical thinking, a bizarre millennialism — one
embodied for us in a Christianized fascism — which
turns con artists, morons, criminals, charlatans,
gangsters and grifters into prophets while branding
those who decry the pillage and corruption into
traitors. The rush towards self-immolation accelerates
intellectual and moral paralysis.
The mafia state makes no pretense of defending the
common good. Trump, Musk and their minions are swiftly
repealing executive orders regarding health,
environmental and safety regulations, food assistance,
as well as child care programs such as Head Start. They
are fighting a court order to halt their dismantling of
the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which has
ensured that Americans have been reimbursed with more
than $21 billion due to cancelled debts, financial
compensation and other forms of consumer relief. They
are abolishing the U.S. Agency for International
Development. They are closing federal defenders’
offices, which provide legal representation to the
poor. They have cut billions of dollars from the budget
of the National Institutes of Health jeopardizing
biomedical research and clinical trials. They have
frozen permits for solar and wind projects, including
sign-offs needed for projects on private land. They
fired more than 300 staffers at the National Nuclear
Security Administration, the agency that manages our
nuclear stockpile. They are gutting the workforce of
the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, National
Park Service, Fish and Wildlife Service and the United
States Geological Survey.
The mafia state, its blueprint contained in Project
2025, ignores the dire lessons from history of extreme
social inequality, political disintegration, wanton
ecological plunder and the evisceration of the rule of
law.
We are, of course, not naturally destined for freedom.
It was two millennia before democracy reappeared in
Europe after its collapse — largely because Athens
became an empire — in ancient Greece. The mafia state,
not democracies, may be the wave of the future, one
where the wealthiest one percent of the globe owns some
43 percent of all global financial assets – more than
95 percent of the human race — while 44 percent of the
planet’s population lives below the World Bank’s
poverty line of less than $6.85 per day. These
calcified regimes endure solely because of draconian
systems of internal control, wholesale surveillance and
the evisceration of civil liberties.
We have at the same time wiped out 90 percent of the
large fish such as cod, sharks, halibut, grouper, tuna,
swordfish, and marlin and degraded or destroyed two
thirds of the mature tropical forests, the lungs of the
planet. Lack of access to safe drinking water, and the
resultant spread of infectious diseases, kills at least
1.4 million people annually — 3,836 per day — and also
contributes to 50 percent of global malnutrition,
according to the World Bank. Between 150 and 200
million children are impaired by malnourishment. Carbon
dioxide in the atmosphere is well above the 350 parts
per million that most climate scientists warn is the
maximum level for sustaining life as we know it. By May
of this year, atmospheric CO2 levels are forecast to
reach 429.6 ppm, the highest concentration in over two
million years. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change estimates that the measurement could reach 541
to 970 ppm by the year 2100. At that point huge parts
of the planet, beset with high population density,
droughts, soil erosion, freak storms, massive crop
failures and rising sea levels, will be unfit for human
existence.
Clans, in the later period of the Easter Island
civilization, competed to honor their ancestors by
constructing larger and larger hewn stoner images,
which demanded the last remnants of the timber, rope
and manpower on the island. By the year 1400 the woods
were gone. The soil had eroded and washed into the sea.
The islanders began to fight over old timbers and were
reduced to eating their dogs and soon all the nesting
birds.
The desperate islanders developed a magical belief
system that the erected stone gods, the moai, would
come to life and save them from disaster.
The belief by Christian nationalists in the rapture,
which does not exist in the Bible, is no less
fantastic. These Christian fascists — embodied in Trump
appointees such as Russell Vought, head of Trump’s
Office of Budget and Management, Vice President JD
Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Mike
Huckabee, nominated to be the ambassador to Israel —
intend to use schools and universities, the media, the
judiciary and the federal government as platforms to
carry out indoctrination and enforce conformity.
The followers of this movement defer to a leader they
believe has been anointed by God. They embrace the
illusion that the righteous will be saved, floating
naked upwards into heaven, at the end of time and the
secularists they despise will perish. This retreat into
magical thinking, which is the foundation of all
totalitarian movements, explains their suffering. It
helps them cope with despair and anxiety. It gives them
the illusion of security. It also ensures retribution
against a long list of enemies — liberals,
intellectuals, gays, immigrants, the deep state —
blamed for their economic and social misery.
Our millennialism is an updated version of the faith in
the moai, the doomed Taki Onqoy revolt against the
Spanish invaders in Peru, the Aztec prophecies of the
1530s and the Ghost Dance, which Native Americans
believed would see the return of the buffalo herds and
slain warriors rise alive from the earth to vanquish
the white colonizers.
This retreat into fantasy is what happens when reality
becomes too bleak to be absorbed. It is the appeal of
Trump. Of course, this time it will be different. When
we go down the whole planet will go with us. There will
be no new lands to pillage, no new peoples to exploit.
We will be exterminated in a global death trap.
Karl Polanyi in “The Great Transformation” writes that
once a society surrenders to the dictates of the
market, once its mafia economy becomes a mafia state,
once it succumbs to what he calls “the ravages of this
satanic mill,” it inevitably leads to “the demolition
of society.”
The mafia state cannot be reformed. We must organize to
break our chains, one-by-one, to use the power of the
strike to cripple the state machinery. We must embrace
a radical militancy, one that offers a new vision and a
new social structure. We must hold fast to moral
imperatives. We must forgive mortgage and student debt,
institute universal health care and break up
monopolies. We must raise the minimum wage and end the
squandering of resources and funds to sustain the
empire and the war industry. We must establish a
nationwide jobs program to rebuild the country’s
collapsing infrastructure. We must nationalize the
banks, pharmaceutical corporations, military
contractors and transportation and embrace
environmentally sustainable energy sources.
None of this will happen until we resist.
The mafia state will be brutal with any who revolt.
Capitalists, as Eduardo Galeano writes, view communal
cultures as “enemy cultures.” The billionaire class
will do to us what it did to the radicals who rose up
to form militant unions in the past. We had the
bloodiest labor wars in the industrialized world.
Hundreds of American workers were killed, tens of
thousands were beaten, wounded, jailed and blacklisted.
Unions were infiltrated, shut down and outlawed. We
cannot be naïve. It will be difficult, costly and
painful. But this confrontation is our only hope.
Otherwise, we, and the planet that sustains us, are
doomed.
Share
The Chris Hedges Report is a reader-supported
publication. To receive new posts and support my work,
consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
|
|