“Courage is not the absence of fear or despair; it is the capacity to continue on despite them, no matter how great or overwhelming they become.”

- Robert Fanney

I just read an article by Chris Hedges in which he states our democratic system “is no longer a viable mechanism for change.”  Hedges goes on to say, “Investing emotional and intellectual energy in electoral politics is a waste of time.”  Our only hope is to transform our way of life into a more socialist society cutting “ties with consumer society and corporations.”  He believes we “must build a new political and economic consciousness centered on the tangible issues of sustainable agriculture, self-sufficiency and radical environmental reform.”

The villain which has brought us to this point, in Hedges’ view, is corporate America which “operates increasingly in secrecy.”  The Corporate State, argues Hedges,  ignores suffering,  sacrifices  human lives for profit, controls and manipulates all levers of power and mass communication, muzzles the voices and concerns of citizens and uses “entertainment, celebrity gossip and emotionally laden public-relations lies to seduce us into believing in a Disneyworld fantasy of democracy.”

Couple Hedges’ view with information from Robert Reich’s new book, “Aftershock,”   and a very bleak picture, indeed, emerges.  According to Reich,

• In the 1970s, the top 1 percent of income earners took in between 8 and 9 percent of total income in the United States;
• In the 1980s, the figure rose to between 10 and 14 percent;
• In the late ‘90s, it was between 15 and 19 percent; and
• In 2005 it passed the 21 percent mark.
• By 2007, the top 1 percent of income earners garnered more than 23 percent of all income.

And one of the most astounding figures - the richest one-tenth of 1 percent, which is just 130,000 U.S. households, took in more than 11 percent of total income in 2007.

Reich writes of the lesson we have not learned from the Great Depression, “…when the distribution of income gets too far out of whack, the economy needs to be reorganized so the broad middle class has enough buying power to rejuvenate the economy over the longer term.”

In the 1970s and 1980’s, when things started getting tight for the middle class, many families sent the wife back into the workplace.  But this double income only relieved the situation for a decade or so.  Then families began falling back on credit card debt as the way to make ends meet.  The resulting soaring credit card debt was a major component of the recent economic crash.

Now, with unemployment hovering just below 10%, Wall Street bankers and corporate CEOs raking in huge bonuses and corporations so flush with cash they can afford to spend millions lobbying (or buying, depending on how jaded your view) the U.S. Congress, the middle class is finally on its knees.

Jobs are scarce; good jobs even more so.  Government and corporate policies have been whacking working Americans every which way for the past three or four decades.  While globalization and technological wizardry were wreaking employment havoc, the movers and shakers in government and in the board rooms of the great corporations were embracing privatization and deregulation with the fervor of fanatics.  American jobs were sent to Southeast Asia, unions were brutally attacked and demonized, employment training and jobs programs were eliminated and higher education costs skyrocketed.

Beneath it all, the nation’s infrastructure, a key to long-term industrial and economic health, has deteriorated to the point that only an effort even more massive than building the interstate road system or putting a man on the moon will rescue it.

One is forced to ask, how can we possibly recover?  With so much of the wealth concentrated in the hands of such a small portion of the population, there is not enough spending power with the rest of the population to sustain a flourishing economy.

Without massive government programs that would dwarf the 2009 bailouts, it is hard to see how we will ever be able to put enough people back to work, revitalize our educational system, modernize our national infrastructure and reinvigorate the economy to return to the America we all want.

Can it really be that our alternatives are to either choose the socialistic path advocated by Chris Hedges or follow the surging Conservative Right into oblivion?  I, for one, hope not.