Empire of Illusion

by Chris Hedges

  STEWART: This thing was ten years in the making. . . . The idea that you could have on the guys from Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch and guys that had leveraged 35 to 1 and then blame mortgage holders, that’s insane. . . .

  CRAMER: I always wish that people would come in and swear themselves in before they come on the show. I had a lot of CEOs lie to me on the show. It’s very painful. I don’t have subpoena power. . . .

  STEWART: You knew what the banks were doing and were touting it for months and months. The entire network was.

  CRAMER: But Dick Fuld, who ran Lehman Brothers, called me in—he called me in when the stock was at forty—because he was saying: “Look, I thought the stock was wrong, thought it was in the wrong place”—he brings me in and lies to me, lies to me, lies to me.

  STEWART [feigning shock]: The CEO of a company lied to you? CRAMER: Shocking.

  STEWART: But isn’t that financial reporting? What do you think is the role of CNBC? . . .

  CRAMER: I didn’t think that Bear Stearns would evaporate overnight. I knew the people who ran it. I thought they were honest. That was my mistake. I really did. I thought they were honest. Did I get taken in because I knew them before? Maybe, to some degree. . . . It’s difficult to have a reporter say, “I just came from an interview with Hank Paulson, and he lied his darn-fool head off.” It’s difficult. I think it challenges the boundaries .

  STEWART: But what is the responsibility of the people who cover Wall Street? . . . I’m under the assumption, and maybe this is purely ridiculous, but I’m under the assumption that you don’t just take their word at face value. That you actually then go around and try to figure it out. [Applause.]

  Cramer, like most television and many print reporters, gives an uncritical forum to the powerful. At the same time, they pretend they have vetted and investigated the claims made by those in power. They play the role on television of journalists. It is a dirty quid pro quo. The media get access to the elite as long as the media faithfully report what the elite wants reported. The moment that quid pro quo breaks down, reporters—real reporters—are cast into the wilderness and denied access.

  The behavior of a Jim Cramer, as Glenn Greenwald pointed out in an article on Salon.com, mirrors that of the reporters who covered the lead-up to the war in Iraq. Day after day, news organizations as diverse as the New York Times, CNN, and the three major television networks amplified lies fed to them by the elite as if they were facts. They served the power elite, as Cramer and most of those on television do, rather than the public.

  In Bill Moyer’s 2007 PBS documentary Buying the War, Moyers asked Meet the Press host Tim Russert why he had passed on these lies without vetting them—and even more damaging, he contrasted Russert’s work with that of Bob Simon of CBS, who had made a few phone calls and had quickly learned that the administration’s pro-war leaks, so crucial in fanning public and political support for going to war, were bogus. Moyers focused on a story, given to the New York Times by Vice President Dick Cheney’s office, that appeared on the front page of the paper the Sunday morning the vice president was also a guest on Meet the Press.6 Moyers began by setting up a video clip of Cheney’s performance:BILL MOYERS: Quoting anonymous administration officials, the Times reported that Saddam Hussein had launched a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb using specially designed aluminum tubes.

  Moyers then ran the clip of Cheney on Meet the Press the same morning the Times story appeared:CHENEY: . . . Tubes. There’s a story in the New York Times this morning, this is—and I want to attribute this to the Times. I don’t want to talk about obviously specific intelligence sources, but—

  Jonathan Landay, a reporter who had written news stories at the time questioning Cheney’s prior assertions that Saddam Hussein had been seeking to acquire nuclear weapons, gave us the sneaky reason the White House had leaked the information—specifically so Cheney could discuss previously top-secret information on national TV. Even though there was no corroboration of that information (and never would be, since it was inaccurate), Cheney could now speak of it publically as if it were fact. “Now,” said Landay, “ordinarily, information like the aluminum tubes wouldn’t appear. It was top-secret intelligence, and the Vice President and the National Security Advisor would not be allowed to talk about this on the Sunday talk shows. But, it appeared that morning in the New York Times and, therefore, they were able to talk about it.”

  Moyers went back to the clip of the Cheney performance:CHENEY: It’s now public that, in fact, he has been seeking to acquire, and we have been able to intercept to prevent him from acquiring through this particular channel, the kinds of tubes that are necessary to build a centrifuge, and the centrifuge is required to take low-grade uranium and enhance it into highly enriched uranium, which is what you have to have in order to build a bomb.

  Moyers, in the studio, asked Bob Simon of CBS what he thought of Cheney’s actions:MOYERS: Did you see that performance?

  BOB SIMON: I did.

  MOYERS: What did you think?

  SIMON: I thought it was remarkable.

  MOYERS: Why?

  SIMON: Remarkable. You leak a story, and then you quote the story. I mean, that’s a remarkable thing to do. . . .

  Moyers continued the video clip, with Meet the Press host Russert asking a question that appears to accept, credulously and uncritically, the very statement Cheney had just made.TIM RUSSERT [TO CHENEY]: What specifically has [Saddam] obtained that you believe will enhance his nuclear development program?

  Moyers, back in the studio, asked Russert, who was with him, why he had not been more incisive and skeptical with his questions, especially with material that was so unprecedented and potentially explosive:MOYERS: Was it just a coincidence in your mind that Cheney came on your show and others went on the other Sunday shows, the very morning that that story appeared?

  TIM RUSSERT: I don’t know. The New York Times is a better judge of that than I am.

  MOYERS: No one tipped you that it was going to happen? RUSSERT: No, no. I mean—

  MOYERS: The Cheney office didn’t leak to you that “there’s gonna be a big story”?

  RUSSERT: No. No. I mean, I don’t have the—this is, you know—on Meet the Press, people come on and there are no ground rules. We can ask any question we want. I did not know about the aluminum tubes story until I read it in the New York Times.

  MOYERS: Critics point to September 8, 2002, and to your show in particular, as the classic case of how the press and the government became inseparable. Someone in the administration plants a dramatic story in the New York Times. And then the Vice President comes on your show and points to the New York Times. It’s a circular, self-confirming leak.

  RUSSERT: I don’t know how Judith Miller and Michael Gordon reported that story, who their sources were. It was a front-page story of the New York Times. When Secretary [Condoleezza] Rice and Vice President Cheney and others came up that Sunday morning on all the Sunday shows, they did exactly that. My concern was, is that there were concerns expressed by other government officials. And to this day, I wish my phone had rung, or I had access to them.

  Moyers then told the audience, “Bob Simon didn’t wait for the phone to ring,” and returned to his conversation with Simon of CBS.

  MOYERS [to Bob Simon}: You said a moment ago when we started talking to people who knew about aluminum tubes. What people—who were you talking to?

  SIMON: We were talking to people—to scientists—to scientists and to researchers, and to people who had been investigating Iraq from the start.

  MOYERS: Would these people have been available to any reporter who called, or were they exclusive sources for 60 Minutes?

  SIMON: No, I think that many of them would have been available to any reporter who called.

  MOYERS: And you just picked up the phone?

  SIMON: Just picked up the phone.

  MOYERS: Talked to them?

  SIMON: Talked to them and then went down with the cameras.
. . .

  Walter Pincus of the Washington Post suggested that Russert’s failure indicated a larger failure of many media figures: “More and more, in the media, become, I think, common carriers of administration statements, and critics of the administration. And we’ve sort of given up being independent on our own.”7

  Russert, like Cramer, when exposed as complicit in the dissemination of misinformation, attempted to portray himself as an innocent victim, as did New York Times reporter Judy Miller, who, along with her colleague Michael Gordon, worked largely as stenographers for the Bush White House during the propaganda campaign to invade Iraq. Once the administration claims justifying the war had been exposed as falsehoods, Miller quipped that she was “only as good as my sources.” This logic upends the traditional role of reporting, which should always begin with the assumption that those in power have an agenda and are rarely bound to the truth. All governments lie, as I. F. Stone pointed out, and it is the job of the journalist to do the hard, tedious reporting to expose these lies. It is the job of courtiers to feed off the scraps tossed to them by the powerful and serve the interests of the power elite.

  Cramer continues to serve his elite masters by lashing out at government attempts to make the financial system accountable. He has repeatedly characterized President Obama and Democrats in Congress as Russian communists intent on “rampant wealth destruction.” He has referred to Obama as a “Bolshevik” who is “taking cues from Lenin.” He has also used terms such as “Marx,” “comrades,” “Soviet,” “Winter Palace,” and “Politburo” in reference to Democrats and asked whether House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is the “general secretary of the Communist Party.” On the March 3, 2009, edition of NBC’s Today, Cramer attacked Obama’s purported “radical agenda” and claimed that “this is the most, greatest wealth destruction I’ve seen by a president.” Statements like these from courtiers like Cramer will grow in intensity as the economic morass deepens and the government is forced to be increasingly interventionist, including the possible nationalization of many banks.

  The most egregious lie is the pretense that these people function as reporters, that they actually report on our behalf. It is not one or two reporters or television hosts who are corrupt. The media institutions are corrupt. Many media workers, especially those based in Washington, work shamelessly for our elites. In the weeks before the occupation of Iraq, media workers were too busy posturing as red-blooded American patriots to report. They rarely challenged the steady assault by the Bush White House against our civil liberties and the trashing of our Constitution. The role of courtiers is to parrot official propaganda. Courtiers do not defy the elite or question the structure of the corporate state. The corporations, in return, employ them and promote them as celebrities. The elite allow the courtiers into their inner circle. As Saul points out, no class of courtiers, from the eunuchs behind the Manchus in the nineteenth century to the Baghdad caliphs of the Abbasid caliphate, has ever transformed itself into a responsible and socially productive class. Courtiers are hedonists of power.

  The rise of courtiers extends beyond the press. Elected officials govern under the pretense that they serve the public, while, with a few exceptions, actually working on behalf of corporations. In 2008, a Congress with a majority of Democrats passed the FISA bill, which provides immunity for the telecommunications companies that cooperated with the National Security Agency’s illegal surveillance over the previous six years. Such a bill endangers the work of journalists, human rights workers, crusading lawyers, and whistle-blowers who attempt to expose abuses the government seeks to hide. This bill means we will never know the extent of the Bush White House’s violation of our civil liberties. Worst of all, since the bill gives the U.S. government a license to eavesdrop on our phone calls and e-mails, it effectively demolishes our right to privacy. These private communications can be stored indefinitely and disseminated, not just to the U.S. government but to other governments as well. The bill will make it possible for those in power to identify and silence anyone who dares to make information public that defies the official narrative or exposes fraud or abuse of power. But the telecommunications corporations, which spent some $15 million in lobbying fees, wanted the bill passed, so it was passed.

  Being a courtier requires agility and eloquence. The most talented of them should be credited as persuasive actors. They entertain us. They make us feel good. They persuade us; they are our friends. They are the smiley faces of a corporate state that has hijacked the government. When the corporations make their iron demands, these courtiers drop to their knees. They placate the telecommunications companies that want to be protected from lawsuits. They permit oil and gas companies to rake in obscene profits and keep in place the vast subsidies of corporate welfare doled out by the state. They allow our profit-driven health-care system to leave the uninsured and underinsured to suffer and die without proper care.

  We trust courtiers wearing face powder who deceive us in the name of journalism. We trust courtiers in our political parties who promise to fight for our interests and then pass bill after bill to further corporate fraud and abuse. We confuse how we are made to feel about courtiers with real information, facts, and knowledge. This is the danger of a culture awash in pseudo-events. The Democratic Party refused to impeach Bush and Cheney. It allows the government to spy on us without warrants or cause. It funnels billions in taxpayer dollars to investment firms that committed fraud. And it tells us it cares about the protection of our civil rights and democracy. It is a form of collective abuse. And, as so often happens in the weird pathology of victim and victimizer, we keep coming back for more.

  Our political and economic decline took place because of a corporate drive for massive deregulation, the repeal of antitrust laws, and the country’s radical transformation from a manufacturing economy to an economy of consumption. Franklin Delano Roosevelt recognized this danger. He sent a message to Congress on April 29, 1938, titled “Recommendations to the Congress to Curb Monopolies and the Concentration of Economic Power.” In it he wrote:the first truth is that the liberty of democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism—ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. The second truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if its business system does not provide employment and produce and distribute goods in such a way to sustain an acceptable standard of living.8

  The rise of the corporate state has grave political consequences, as we saw in Italy and Germany in the early part of the twentieth century. Antitrust laws not only regulate and control the marketplace. They also serve as bulwarks to protect democracy. And now that they are gone, now that we have a state run by and on behalf of corporations, we must expect inevitable and terrifying consequences.

  As the pressure mounts, as this despair and impoverishment reach into larger and larger segments of the populace, the mechanisms of corporate and government control are being bolstered to prevent civil unrest and instability. The emergence of the corporate state always means the emergence of the security state. This is why the Bush White House pushed through the Patriot Act (and its renewal), the suspension of habeas corpus, the practice of “extraordinary rendition,” the practice of warrantless wiretapping on American citizens, and the refusal to ensure free and fair elections with verifiable ballot-counting. It is all part of a package. It comes together. The motive behind these measures is not to fight terrorism or to bolster national security. It is to seize and maintain internal control.

  Hints of our brave new world seeped out when the director of national intelligence, retired admiral Dennis Blair, testified in February and March 2009 before the Senate Intelligence Committee. He warned that the deepening economic crisis posed perhaps our gravest threat to stability and national security. It could trigger, he said, a return to the “violent extremism” of the 1920s and ’30s. “The primary n
ear-term security concern of the United States is the global economic crisis and its geopolitical implications,” Blair told the Senate:The crisis has been ongoing for over a year, and economists are divided over whether and when we could hit bottom. Some even fear that the recession could further deepen and reach the level of the Great Depression. Of course, all of us recall the dramatic political consequences wrought by the economic turmoil of the 1920s and 1930s in Europe, the instability, and high levels of violent extremism.9

  The road ahead is grim. The United Nations’ International Labor Organization estimates that some 50 million workers will lose their jobs worldwide in 2009. The collapse had already seen close to 4 million lost jobs in the United States by mid-2009. The International Monetary Fund’s prediction for global economic growth in 2009 is 0.5 percent—the worst since the Second World War. There were 2.3 million properties in the United States that received a default notice or were repossessed in 2008. And this number is set to rise, especially as vacant commercial real estate begins to be foreclosed. About 20,000 major global banks collapsed, were sold, or were nationalized in 2008. An estimated 62,000 U.S. companies are expected to shut down in 2009.

  We have few tools left to dig our way out. The manufacturing sector in the United States has been dismantled by globalization. Consumers, thanks to credit card companies and easy lines of credit, are $14 trillion in debt. The government has spent, lent, or guaranteed $12.8 trillion toward the crisis, most of it borrowed or printed in the form of new money. It is borrowing to fund our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And no one states the obvious: We will never be able to pay these loans back. We are supposed to spend our way out of the crisis and maintain our part of the grand imperial project on credit. We are supposed to bring back the illusion of wealth created by the bubble economy. There is no coherent and realistic plan, one built around our severe limitations, to stanch the bleeding or ameliorate the mounting deprivations we will suffer as citizens. Contrast this with the national security state’s preparations to crush potential civil unrest, and you get a glimpse of the future.