America The Farewell Tour Read online

  ALSO BY CHRIS HEDGES

  Unspeakable

  (with David Talbot)

  Wages of Rebellion:

  The Moral Imperative of Revolt

  War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning

  Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt

  (with Joe Sacco)

  The World as It Is:

  Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress

  Death of the Liberal Class

  Empire of Illusion:

  The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle

  When Atheism Becomes Religion:

  America’s New Fundamentalists

  Collateral Damage:

  America’s War Against Iraqi Civilians

  (with Laila Al-Arian)

  American Fascists:

  The Christian Right and the War on America

  Losing Moses on the Freeway:

  The 10 Commandments in America

  What Every Person Should Know About War

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA

  Copyright © 2018 Summit Study, Inc.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2018 by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto, and simultaneously in the United States by Simon & Schuster, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., New York. Distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  Knopf Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Hedges, Chris, author

  America, the farewell tour / Chris Hedges.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 9780735275959

  eBook ISBN 9780735275966

  1. Social values—United States. 2. Political culture—United States. 3. Corporate power—United States. 4. United States—Politics and Government—21st century. 5. United States—Social conditions—21st century. I. Title.

  HN59.2.H434 2018    306.0973    C2018-900100-3

                       C2018-900101-1

  Text design by Lewelin Polanco

  Cover design and photo illustration by Oliver Munday

  v5.3.2

  a

  For Eunice,

  She’s all states, and all princes, I, Nothing else is.

  Princes do but play us; compared to this, All honor’s mimic, all wealth alchemy.

  Actually, I hardly feel constrained to try to make head or tail of this condition of the world. On this planet a great number of civilizations have perished in blood and thunder. Naturally, one must wish for the planet that one day it will experience a civilization that has abandoned blood and horror, in fact, I am…inclined to assume that our planet is waiting for this. But it is terribly doubtful whether we can bring such a present to its hundred—or four-hundred-millionth birthday party. And if we don’t, the planet will finally punish us, its unthoughtful well-wishers, by presenting us with the Last Judgment.

  WALTER BENJAMIN, letter from Paris, 19351

  This nothingness into which the West is sliding is not the natural end, the dying, the sinking of a flourishing community of peoples. Instead, it is again a specifically Western nothingness: a nothingness that is rebellious, violent, anti-God, and antihuman. Breaking away from all that is established, it is the utmost manifestation of all the forces opposed to God. It is nothingness as God; no one knows its goal or its measure. Its rule is absolute. It is a creative nothingness that blows its anti-God breath into all that exists, creates the illusion of waking it to new life, and at the same time sucks out its true essence until it soon disintegrates into an empty husk and is discarded. Life, history, family, people, language, faith—the list could go on forever because nothingness spares nothing—all fall victim to nothingness.

  DIETRICH BONHOEFFER, Ethics2

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1 – DECAY

  Chapter 2 – HEROIN

  Chapter 3 – WORK

  Chapter 4 – SADISM

  Chapter 5 – HATE

  Chapter 6 – GAMBLING

  Chapter 7 – FREEDOM

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  1

  DECAY

  Hard as it may be for a state so framed to be shaken, yet, since all that comes into being must decay, even a fabric like this will not endure forever, but will suffer dissolution.

  PLATO, The Republic1

  I walked down a long service road into the remains of an abandoned lace factory. The road was pocked with holes filled with fetid water. There were saplings and weeds poking up from the cracks in the asphalt. Wooden crates, rusty machinery, broken glass, hulks of old filing cabinets, and trash covered the grounds. The derelict complex, 288,000 square feet, consisted of two huge brick buildings connected by overhead, enclosed walkways. The towering walls of the two buildings, with the service road running between them, were covered with ivy. The windowpanes were empty or had frames jagged with shards of glass. The thick wooden doors to the old loading docks stood agape. I entered the crumbling complex through a set of double wooden doors into a cavernous hall. The wreckage of industrial America lay before me, home to flocks of pigeons that, startled by my footsteps over the pieces of glass and rotting floorboards, swiftly left their perches in the rafters and air ducts high above my head. They swooped, bleating and clucking, over the abandoned looms.

  The Scranton Lace Company was America. It employed more than 1,200 workers on its imported looms, some of the largest ever built.2 I stood in front of one. The looms, weighing nearly twenty metric tons and manufactured in Nottingham, England, were twenty feet tall. They stretched across the expanse of the old factory floor. The word “Nottingham” was embossed on the black arms of the machines. Another age. Another time. Another country.

  The factory, started in 1891, was once among the biggest producers of Nottingham lace in the world.3 When it closed in 2002—the company’s vice president appeared at mid-shift and announced that it was shutting down immediately—it had become a ghost ship with fewer than fifty workers.4 On the loom before me, the white lace roll sat unfinished. Punch cards, with meticulous, tiny holes for the needles to pass through, lay scattered on the floor. The loom was stopped in the middle of production, arrested in time, an artifact of a deindustrialized America.

  For more than a century, the factory stood as a world unto itself. I wandered through the remains. The old bowling alley, the deserted cafeteria with its rows of heavy cast iron stoves, the company barbershop, a cluttered and dusty gymnasium, the auditorium with a stage, the infirmary, and outside, the elegant clock tower with the cast iron bell and large whistle that once signaled shift changes.

  The company had its own coal mines and cotton fields. It made products that the workers, including Hillary Clinton’s father and grandfather, viewed with pride.5 They could hold them in their hands. Curtains. Napkins. Tablecloths. Valances. Shower curtains. Textile laminates for umbrellas. During World War II, the facility manufactured bomb parachutes and mosquito and camouflage netting. The employees had unions. The unions ensured that workers were paid overtime and had medical care, pensions, and safe working conditions. But the company gave more than a wage to the thousands of men and
women who worked here. It gave them dignity, purpose, pride, a sense of place, hope, and self-esteem. All of that was gone. It had been replaced in Scranton and across America by desperation, poverty, drift, a loss of identity, and a deep and crippling despair.

  Scranton mayor Christopher Doherty, when I interviewed him, was fifty-four, trim, articulate, and the father of six children. He had been mayor for eleven years. He did not seek reelection in 2014 and was replaced by another Democrat who accelerated the selling off of city assets.

  Doherty spoke to me in his shirtsleeves. The room was stuffy in the summer heat. The air-conditioning was turned off to reduce electric bills. The mayor had just negotiated a deal with his antagonistic five-member City Council to pull Scranton back from bankruptcy. By the summer of 2012, banks would no longer lend the city money.6 With only $5,000 left in its bank account and facing a $1 million payroll in July, Scranton was forced to reduce every city employee’s income, including the mayor’s, to the minimum wage: $7.25 an hour.7 His deal to save the city from default included a 29 percent increase in real estate taxes over the next three years, less than half of the 78 percent he proposed,8 along with a new commuter tax, a sales tax, an amusement tax, and higher real estate transfer fees, license and permit fees, and business and mercantile taxes.

  The plan came with requisite austerity measures. City departments saw their budgets cut by $1.6 million, which meant further job losses.9 Doherty had already reduced the city employment rolls from five hundred to four hundred.10 Scranton’s universities, including the University of Scranton and the Commonwealth Medical College, were asked to contribute $2.4 million—instead of the current $300,000—to the city’s $70 million operating costs.11 The University of Scranton complied with the city’s request.12 Borrowing and refinancing raised nearly $17 million13 to bridge the budget gap, but unless the city created reliable new revenue streams, disaster was, Doherty admitted, merely postponed. The Scranton school district has an annual deficit of more than $20 million.14 Seventy percent of the residents pay less than $500 a year in property taxes.15 The average per capita annual income is about $20,000 and less than $38,000 for a family.16

  “We are government, education, and medicine,” Doherty said of the city’s principal institutions, “and if you look at all cities, that is what they are. There is really no manufacturing anywhere.”

  This is not quite true. Scranton makes munitions. Weapons are one of the last products still produced in America. The Scranton Army Ammunition Plant (SCAAP), surrounded by high fencing with coils of razor wire, makes a series of projectiles, including 105-millimeter and 155-millimeter shells. It is housed in a brick complex that once repaired locomotive steam engines. Most of the shells end up as useless shards of metal in Iraq or Afghanistan. SCAAP is part of America’s militarized capitalism, which plows vast sums into a permanent war economy. Upward of half of all federal dollars are spent on the war industry. The Pentagon consumes nearly $600 billion17 a year. Our real expenditure on the military, when military items tucked away in other budgets are counted, is over $1 trillion a year.18

  The heaviest strain on the budget, the mayor said, are municipal employees’ pensions and health care costs. The 2008 economic crisis wiped out as much as 40 percent of the city’s investments.19 Scranton, like many cities and institutions, invested in Wall Street financial cons such as collateralized debt obligations (CDOS)—pooled assets such as subprime mortgages, bonds, loans, and credit card debt that the banks often knew were toxic. This high-risk investment was certified by ratings agencies such as Standard & Poor’s as AAA—meaning the investment had “an exceptional degree of creditworthiness.” When the financial bubble burst, financial firms saw their assets plummet. American International Group (AIG) posted a quarterly loss of $61.7 billion20 and turned, like most of the big banks, to the U.S. Treasury to bail them out. But no one bailed out the victims.

  I asked Doherty what worried him most about the city’s future.

  “The ability to generate revenues so cities can make their payments,” he answered immediately. “If they can’t, you will see a breakdown of the city. You will see it in education. You will see it in crime. What happens is a domino effect, as you have in Baltimore, where even though you have these great educational institutions, the city still has a problem with crime.”

  The current mayor of Scranton, Bill Courtright, sold the city sewer authority to Pennsylvania American Water, a subsidiary of American Water Works Company Inc., for $195 million.21 Pennsylvania American Water already owns Scranton’s drinking water system.22 The city’s sewer system authority is shared with the town of Dunmore.

  The money from the sale was used to pay off the $70 million sewer authority debt.23 After 20 percent of the money was given to Dunmore, the city was left with $70 million.24 This money will repair infrastructure, such as roads, and pay shortfalls in the pension funds for city employees. The city was able to pay $29.3 million in back pay to police and firefighters, including retirees.25 It put $1.59 million into the city’s public pension funds.26

  Mayor Courtright, who declined to grant me an interview, also sold the city’s parking authority to National Development Council for $32 million.27 It costs 25 cents more an hour under the for-profit parking authority to park at a meter in the city and 50 cents more to park in one of the city’s parking garages.28

  But after the last city assets are sold, what is next? No one has an answer.

  Karl Marx knew the peculiar dynamics of capitalism, or what he called “the bourgeois mode of production.”29 He knew that reigning ideologies—think corporate capitalism with its belief in deindustrial​ization, deregulation, privatization of public assets, austerity, slashing of social service programs, and huge reductions in government spending—were created to serve the interests of the economic elites, since “the class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production”30 and “the ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships…the relationships which make one class the ruling one.”31

  The acceleration of deindustrial​ization by the 1970s created a crisis that forced the ruling elites to devise a new political paradigm, as Stuart Hall (with cowriters) explains in Policing the Crisis.32 This paradigm, trumpeted by a compliant media, shifted its focus from the common good to race, crime, and law and order. It told those undergoing profound economic and political change that their suffering stemmed not from corporate greed, but from a threat to national integrity. The old consensus that buttressed the programs of the New Deal and the welfare state was attacked as enabling criminal black youth, welfare queens, and social parasites. The parasites were to blame. This opened the door to an authoritarian populism, begun by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, which supposedly championed family values, traditional morality, individual autonomy, law and order, the Christian faith, and the return to a mythical past, at least for white Americans. Donald Trump capitalized on this perceived threat to national integrity and authoritarian populism to take power.

  Marx warned that capitalism had built within it the seeds of its own destruction. There would come a day when capitalism would exhaust its potential and collapse. He did not know when that day would come. Marx, as Meghnad Desai, the economist and Labour politician in the United Kingdom, wrote, was “an astronomer of history, not an astrologer.”33 Marx was keenly aware of capitalism’s ability to innovate and adapt. But he also knew that capitalist expansion was not eternally sustainable. And as we witness the denouement of capitalism, Karl Marx is vindicated as the system’s most prescient and important critic.

  In the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx wrote:

  No social order ever disappears before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have been developed; and new higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itsel
f. Therefore, mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since looking at the matter more closely, we always find that the task itself arises only when the material conditions necessary for its solution already exist, or are at least in the process of formation.34

  Socialism, in other words, would not be possible until capitalism had exhausted its ability to expand and increase profits. That the end is coming is hard now to dispute, although one would be foolish to predict when. Global capitalism, in its final iteration, may replicate China’s totalitarian capitalism, a brutal system sustained by severe repression where workers are modern-day serfs.

  The end stages of capitalism, Marx wrote, would be marked by developments that are intimately familiar to Scranton. Unable to expand and generate profits at past levels, the capitalist system would begin to consume the structures that sustained it. It would prey upon, in the name of austerity, the working class and the poor, driving them ever deeper into debt and poverty and diminishing the capacity of the state to serve the basic needs of ordinary citizens. It would, as it has, increasingly automate or relocate jobs, including both manufacturing and professional positions, to countries with cheap pools of laborers. This would trigger an economic assault on not only the working class but the middle class—the bulwark of a capitalist democracy—that would be disguised by massive personal debt as incomes declined or remained stagnant and borrowing soared. Politics would, in the late stages of capitalism, become subordinate to economics, leading to political parties hollowed out of any real political content and abjectly subservient to the dictates of corporations.

  But as Marx warned, there is a limit to an economy built on austerity and the scaffolding of debt expansion. There comes a moment, Marx knew, when there would be no new markets available and no new pools of people who could take on more debt. This is what happened with the subprime mortgage crisis. Once the banks could not conjure up new subprime borrowers, the scheme fell apart and the system crashed.