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7 November 2011 from Truthdig Website
while others march nearby, in New York, October 14, 2011.
(Photo: Robert Stolarik / The
New York Times)
Editor’s note: Truthdig
columnist Chris Hedges, an activist, an author and a member of a reporting
team that won a 2002 Pulitzer Prize, wrote this article after he was
released from custody following his arrest last Thursday. He and about 15
other participants in the Occupy Wall Street movement were detained as they
protested outside the global headquarters of Goldman Sachs in lower
Manhattan.
Faces appeared to me moments before the New York City police arrested us Thursday in front of Goldman Sachs.
They were not the faces of the smug Goldman
Sachs employees, who peered at us through the revolving glass doors and
lobby windows, a pathetic collection of middle-aged fraternity and sorority
members.
They were not the faces of the demonstrators around me, the ones with massive student debts and no jobs, the ones whose broken dreams weigh them down like a cross, the ones whose anger and betrayal triggered the street demonstrations and occupations for justice.
They were not the faces of the onlookers - the construction workers, who seemed cheered by the march on Goldman Sachs, or the suited businessmen who did not. They were faraway faces. They were the faces of children dying.
They were tiny, confused, bewildered faces I had
seen in the southern Sudan, Gaza and the slums of Brazzaville, Nairobi,
Cairo and Delhi and the wars I covered. They were faces with large, glassy
eyes, above bloated bellies. They were the small faces of children convulsed
by the ravages of starvation and disease.
War brings with it a host of horrors, including famine, but the worst is always the human detritus that war and famine leave behind, the small, frail bodies whose tangled limbs and vacant eyes condemn us all.
The wealthy and the powerful, the ones behind
the glass at Goldman Sachs, laughed and snapped pictures of us as if we were
a brief and odd lunchtime diversion from commodities trading, from hoarding
and profit, from this collective sickness of money worship, as if we were
creatures in a cage, which in fact we soon were.
The curious onlookers behind the windows and we, arms locked in a circle on the concrete outside, did not speak the same language.
Profit. Globalization. War. National security. These are the words they use to justify the snuffing out of tiny lives, acts of radical evil.
Goldman Sachs’ commodities index is the most heavily traded in the world. Those who trade it have, by buying up and hoarding commodities futures, doubled and tripled the costs of wheat, rice and corn. Hundreds of millions of poor across the globe are going hungry to feed this mania for profit.
The technical jargon, learned in business schools and on trading floors, effectively mask the reality of what is happening - murder. These are words designed to make systems operate, even systems of death, with a cold neutrality.
Peace, love and all sane affirmative speech in temples like Goldman Sachs are, as W.H. Auden understood,
We seemed to have lost, at least until the advent of the Occupy Wall Street movement, not only all personal responsibility but all capacity for personal judgment.
Corporate culture absolves all of responsibility. This is part of its appeal. It relieves all from moral choice. There is an unequivocal acceptance of ruling principles such as unregulated capitalism and globalization as a kind of natural law. The steady march of corporate capitalism requires a passive acceptance of new laws and demolished regulations, of bailouts in the trillions of dollars and the systematic looting of public funds, of lies and deceit.
The corporate culture, epitomized by Goldman Sachs, has seeped into our classrooms, our newsrooms, our entertainment systems and our consciousness. This corporate culture has stripped us of the right to express ourselves outside of the narrowly accepted confines of the established political order. It has turned us into compliant consumers.
We are forced to surrender our voice.
These corporate machines, like fraternities and sororities, also haze new recruits in company rituals, force them to adopt an unrelenting cheerfulness, a childish optimism and obsequiousness to authority. These corporate rituals, bolstered by retreats and training seminars, by grueling days that sometimes end with initiates curled up under their desks to sleep, ensure that only the most morally supine remain.
The strong and independent are weeded out early so only the unquestioning advance upward. Corporate culture serves a faceless system.
It is, as Hannah Arendt writes,
Our political class, and its courtiers on the airwaves, insists that if we refuse to comply, if we step outside of the Democratic Party, if we rebel, we will make things worse.
This game of accepting the lesser evil enables the steady erosion of justice and corporate plundering. It enables corporations to harvest the nation and finally the global economy, reconfiguring the world into neofeudalism, one of masters and serfs. This game goes on until there is hardly any action carried out by the power elite that is not a crime.
It goes on until corporate predators, who long ago decided the nation and the planet were not worth salvaging, seize the last drops of wealth.
It goes on until moral acts, such as calling for those inside the corporate headquarters of Goldman Sachs to be tried, see you jailed, and the crimes of financial fraud and perjury are upheld as lawful and rewarded by the courts, the U.S. Treasury and the Congress.
And all this is done so a handful of rapacious,
immoral plutocrats like
Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs who
sucks down about $250,000 a day and who lied to the U.S. Congress as well as
his investors and the public, can use their dirty money to retreat into
their own Forbidden City or Versailles while their underlings, basking in
the arrogance of power, snap amusing photos of the rabble outside their
gates being hauled away by the police and company goons.
Attention must be directed through street protests, civil disobedience and occupations toward the institutions that are carrying out the assaults against the 99 percent.
...all need to be targeted, shut down and occupied.
Goldman Sachs is the poster child of all that is
wrong with global capitalism, but there are many other companies whose
degradation and destruction of human life are no less egregious.
To be intelligent, as many are at least in a narrow, analytical way, is morally neutral.
These respectable citizens are inculcated in their elitist enclaves with “values” and “norms,” including pious acts of charity used to justify their privilege, and a belief in the innate goodness of American power. They are trained to pay deference to systems of authority. They are taught to believe in their own goodness, unable to see or comprehend - and are perhaps indifferent to - the cruelty inflicted on others by the exclusive systems they serve.
And as norms mutate and change, as the world is steadily transformed by corporate forces into one of a small cabal of predators and a vast herd of human prey, these elites seamlessly replace one set of “values” with another.
These elites obey the rules. They make the system work. And they are rewarded for this.
In return, they do not question.
They have grasped Immanuel Kant’s dictum,
And in their search they come to the conclusion that, as Socrates said, it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong.
This conclusion is rational, yet cannot be rationally defended. It makes a leap into the moral, which is beyond rational thought. It refuses to place a monetary value on human life. It acknowledges human life, indeed all life, as sacred.
And this is why, as Arendt points out, the only morally reliable people when the chips are down are not those who say,
There are streaks in my lungs, traces of the tuberculosis that I picked up around hundreds of dying Sudanese during the famine I covered as a foreign correspondent.
I was strong and privileged and fought off the disease. They were not and did not.
The bodies, most of them children, were dumped into hastily dug mass graves. The scars I carry within me are the whispers of these dead. They are the faint marks of those who never had a chance to become men or women, to fall in love and have children of their own. I carried these scars to the doors of Goldman Sachs. I had returned to living.
Those whose last breaths had marked my lungs had not. I placed myself at the feet of these commodity traders to call for justice because the dead, and those who are dying in slums and refugee camps across the planet, could not make this journey. I see their faces.
They haunt me in the day and come to me in the dark. They force me to remember. They make me choose sides.
As the metal handcuffs were fastened around my wrists I thought of them, as I often think of them, and I said to myself:
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