{"id":315943,"date":"2026-05-11T12:00:39","date_gmt":"2026-05-11T11:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=315943"},"modified":"2026-05-08T19:08:32","modified_gmt":"2026-05-08T18:08:32","slug":"usas-suicide-pact","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2026\/05\/usas-suicide-pact\/","title":{"rendered":"USA\u2019s Suicide Pact"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Live or DIY – by Mr. Fish<\/p><\/div>\n

USA\u2019s suicidal march began long before Donald Trump. Trump and the buffoons around him are the inevitable final chapter of the decaying empire. <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

8 May 2026 –<\/em>\u00a0Civilizations, as the historian Arnold J. Toynbee famously argued, \u201cdie from suicide, not by murder.\u201d They collapse from within. They fall prey to moral, social and spiritual decay. They are seized by a parasitic ruling class. Democratic institutions seize up. The citizenry is immiserated, wealth is funneled upwards to the ruling class and coercion is the principle form of control.<\/p>\n

Our suicidal march began long before Donald Trump and his bizarre court of buffoons, sycophants, grifters and Christian fascists took power. It began when the ruling class, especially under the Reagan and Clinton administrations, set out to harvest the country and empire for personal profit.<\/p>\n

There is a word for these people. Traitors.<\/p>\n

These traitors, ensconced in the leadership of the two ruling parties, stripped us of assets and power slowly. They used subterfuge, lies and legalized bribery. They pretended to honor electoral politics, checks and balances, a free press and the rule of law while subverting all of these democratic pillars. That old system, however flawed, was hollowed out. It was turned over to the amoral and the idiotic \u2014 look at the Supreme Court or Congress \u2014 those willing to do the bidding of the billionaire class.<\/p>\n

Armed with billions by the mortal enemy of the demos<\/em> \u2014 the oligarchs and corporations \u2014 the political elites, Republicans and Democrats, destroyed the careers of those politicians who resisted. They crushed<\/a> labor unions. They blacklisted<\/a> honest journalists and consolidated<\/a> the press into the hands of a handful of corporations and oligarchs. They slashed<\/a> regulations that constrained unfettered greed and protected the population from predatory corporations and environmental toxins. They passed legislation that created a de facto tax boycott<\/a> for the rich \u2014 Trump famously paid no<\/a> federal income taxes in 10 of the 15 years prior to his presidency \u2014 while stripping the country of its industry and throwing<\/a> some 30 million people out of work. Wealth is no longer created by producing or manufacturing. It is created by manipulating the prices of stocks and commodities and imposing a crippling debt peonage on the public.<\/p>\n

These parasites cut or abolished<\/a> social programs, militarized<\/a> the police, built<\/a> the largest prison system in the world and pumped<\/a> funds into a bloated and out-of-control war industry. German socialist and politician Karl Liebknecht, on the eve of the suicidal folly of World War I, called<\/a> German imperialists \u201cthe enemy at home.\u201d Our rulers, our enemies at home, mounted a series of futile wars that degraded the empire\u2019s global hegemony and poured trillions of dollars of taxpayer money into their bank accounts. Iran is the most recent example.<\/p>\n

Trump is not an outlier. He is the naked, stripped-down expression of this suicidal pact. He does not pretend the system he inherited works. He lies with less finesse. He crassly enriches<\/a> himself and his family. He speaks in crude vulgarities. He dismantles any government agency dedicated to the common good, including the Environmental Protection Agency<\/a>, the Department of Education<\/a> and the U.S. Postal Service<\/a>. But he embodies what came before him, albeit without the liberal fa\u00e7ade.<\/p>\n

\u201cTrump is not an anomaly,\u201d I wrote in \u201cAmerica: The Farewell Tour<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n

He is the grotesque visage of a collapsed democracy. Trump and his coterie of billionaires, generals, half-wits, Christian fascists, criminals, racists, and moral deviants play the role of the Snopes clan in some of William Faulkner\u2019s novels<\/a>. The Snopeses filled the power vacuum of the decayed South and ruthlessly seized control from the degenerated, former slaveholding aristocratic elites. Flem Snopes and his extended family \u2014 which includes a killer, a pedophile, a bigamist, an arsonist, a mentally disabled man who copulates with a cow, and a relative who sells tickets to witness the bestiality \u2014 are fictional representations of the scum now elevated to the highest level of the federal government. They embody the moral rot unleashed by unfettered capitalism.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Epstein files, a window into the degeneracy of our ruling class, included not only Trump<\/a>, but former U.S. president Bill Clinton<\/a> \u2014 who allegedly took a trip to Thailand with Epstein \u2014 Prince Andrew<\/a>, Microsoft founder and billionaire Bill Gates<\/a>, hedge fund billionaire Glenn Dubin<\/a>, the former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson<\/a>, former secretary of the treasury and former president of Harvard University Larry Summers<\/a>, cognitive psychologist and author Stephen Pinker<\/a>, Epstein\u2019s lawyer and arch Zionist Alan Dershowitz<\/a>, billionaire and Victoria\u2019s Secret CEO Leslie Wexner<\/a>, the former Barclays banker Jes Staley<\/a>, former Israel prime minister Ehud Barak<\/a>, magician David Copperfield<\/a>, actor Kevin Spacey<\/a>, former CIA director William Burns<\/a>, real estate mogul Mort Zuckerman<\/a>, former Maine senator George Mitchell<\/a> and disgraced Hollywood producer and convicted rapist Harvey Weinstein<\/a>. They all orbited Epstein\u2019s perpetual Bacchanalia.<\/p>\n

Anand Giridharadas, who wrote \u201cWinners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World<\/a>,\u201d notes that the circle of powerful men, and a handful of women who surrounded Epstein, are emblematic of a privileged caste that lack empathy in the suffering and abuse of others, whether that is sexual abuse, including that of children, financial meltdowns they orchestrate, wars they back, addictions and overdose they enable, the monopolies they defend, the inequality they turbocharge, the housing crisis they milk and the intrusive technologies they refuse to protect people against:<\/p>\n

People are right to sense that as the emails lay bare, there is a highly private merito-aristocracy at the intersection of government and business, lobbying, philanthropy, start-ups, academia, science, high finance and media, that all too often takes care of its own more than the common good. They are right to resent that there are infinite second chances for members of this group even as so many Americans are deprived of first chances. They are right that their pleas often go unheard, whether they are being evicted, gouged, foreclosed on, A.I.-obsolesced \u2014 or, yes, raped.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cThe Epstein emails, in my view,\u201d Giridharadas writes, \u201ctogether sketch a devastating epistolary portrait of how our social order functions, and for whom. Saying that isn\u2019t extreme. The way this elite operates is.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIf this neoliberal-era power elite remains poorly understood,\u201d he continues, \u201cit may be because it is not just a financial elite or an educated elite, a noblesse-oblige elite, a political elite or a narrative-making elite; it straddles all of these, lucratively and persuaded of its own good intentions.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThese people are,\u201d Giridharadas reminds us, \u201con the same team. On air, they might clash. They promote opposite policies. Some in the network profess anguish over what others in the network are doing. But the emails depict a group whose highest commitment is to their own permanence in the class that decides things. When principles conflict with staying in the network, the network wins.\u201d<\/p>\n

You can see my interview with Giridharadas here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The entire system is rotten. It will not reform itself.<\/p>\n

The Democratic Party has hit on the novel campaign issue of reducing<\/a> taxes to win this year\u2019s midterm elections. It will, no doubt, anoint another vapid, issue-less and genocide-supporting presidential nominee. Democratic donors pumped<\/a> a staggering $1.5 billion into Kamala Harris\u2019s abridged 15-week celebrity-fueled<\/a> presidential campaign. She became the first Democratic presidential candidate to lose the national popular vote in two decades<\/a> and be defeated<\/a> in every battleground state.<\/p>\n

The Democratic Party is not a functioning political party. It is a corporate mirage. Its members can, at best, select preapproved candidates and act as props in choreographed conventions and rallies. Party members have zero influence on party politics.<\/p>\n

The more the diminishing power of the empire becomes apparent, evidenced in Trump\u2019s debacle with Iran, the more a confused population retreats into a fantasy world, a world where hard<\/a> and unpleasant<\/a> facts do not intrude.<\/p>\n

In the final days of a civilization, a population wallows in self-delusional hubris and trumpets false virtues. It looks for scapegoats to explain its failures \u2014 Muslims, undocumented workers, Mexicans, African-Americans, feminists, intellectuals, artists and dissidents.<\/p>\n

Magical thinking and the myth of American exceptionalism dominate public discourse and are taught in schools. Art and culture are degraded to nationalist kitsch<\/a>. Science is dismissed<\/a>, even in the midst of the environmental crisis. Cultural and intellectual disciplines that allow us to see the world from the perspective of the other, that foster empathy, understanding and compassion, are replaced by a grotesque and cruel hypermasculinity and hypermilitarism.<\/p>\n

Trump is perfectly tailored for these death throes. He is not a freak or an anomaly. He is the naked visage of our pathological sickness.<\/p>\n

______________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize\u2013winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for\u00a0<\/em>The New York Times,\u00a0where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief. He previously worked overseas for\u00a0<\/em>The Dallas Morning News,\u00a0The Christian Science Monitor, and<\/em> NPR. He used to be the host of the Emmy Award-nominated <\/em>RT America show\u00a0<\/em>On Contact.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original – chrishedges.substack.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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