The Corporate Coup d'État

Fred Peabody's documentary "The Corporate Coup'd Etat" draws on the work of Canadian political philosopher John Ralston Saul and American journalist Chris Hedges, among others, to trace the rise of "corporatism," the corresponding decline of democracy, and the shocking emergence of the current political regime in Washington, D.C. - a development not actually so shocking after all, as it churns out. The film brings many things the well-informed and attentive viewer might have already known about into one complex, layered overview - and the vision it details is a chilling one.

Among the film's principal concerns are so-called "sacrifice zones," areas of the American heartland that have bene cynically and deliberately abandoned to economic collapse, subsequent hopelessness, and the resulting plagues of poverty and drugs. This has largely been the result of monied elites reshaping governmental policies in order to allow transnationals to shift their wealth and work wherever conditions are most favorable to businesses, without regard for the cost in human life or prosperity. But the film also touches on deeper historical causes for the rot afflicting America's economic and political systems; the power elites have long wished to roll back protections for workers and a strong rule of and equitable system of law, all in order to consolidate an unrelenting grip on both money and control. To achieve that end, the elites have unleashed a ruthless toolkit of propaganda, judicial activism, and assault on institutions both civic and legal.

Saul's view is that America might have made the world safe for democracy by winning the Second World War, but that was a temporary victory. The eventual genuine winner of that global conflagration was Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, whose philosophy of corporatism - the idea that business interests should control government and society - is an essential underpinning of fascism. It's an argument that the film's editing hits too hard on the nose sometimes, with speeches by Donald Trump being intercut with those of Mussolini - particularly a propaganda film in which Mussolini, speaking in English, offers his compliments to fellow-travelers right here in the United States who are working to "Make America great."

For the bulk of America's citizens, of course, our greatness was long a matter of personal freedom and economic opportunity. In the decades after World War II, however, a systematic rewriting of the American code has taken place, with the emphasis being shifted from policies that enhance freedom - which includes the chance for prosperity for those who work for it - to policies that enhance the holdings of the ultra-wealthy. In order to achieve this, the film argues, the ultra-wealthy - the "owners" of the vast bulk of the nation's wealth - have created and exploited tensions between ordinary citizens. Those tensions are primarily racial, but they are increasingly rooted in differences of class, religion, and - as we see happening now with increasing regularity - sexual orientation.

None of this is new, as the journalists and writers interviewed point out. What we're left with is the notion that American exceptionalism, if it was ever real, had long since faded away; America is now one more exercise in the rich getting richer and the poor getting screwed - although the means of convincing the poor to go along with their own exploitation have become ever more refined and effectual, given the rise of the internet and the ubiquity of television, computers, and smartphones, which have become purveyors of a constant barrage of political propaganda (much of it heavy-handed, but some of it also quite subtle).

The film doesn't shy from addressing hard truths that liberals might not like hearing - such as the way the Clinton and Obama administrations, in trying to co-opt Republican talking points and messages, and in a bid to buddy up to the ruthless owner class, allowed catastrophic policies to take hold (NAFTA, the prison population-swelling Omnibus Crime Bill) or else failed to implement crucially-needed correctives (properly addressing Wall Street's misdeeds after the Great Recession of 2008).

There's also a deep dive into the Rust Belt, where American workers were left to fend off themselves with heavy industry tore up its roots and moved elsewhere in order to exploit less-protected working populations (which one journalist astutely notes was a "lose-lose-lose" for workers around the world, and a win only for the transnationals). This is, of course, the part of the country where voters who went for Obama in two elections then did an about-face and forsook Hillary Clinton in 2016. One Democratic organizer identifies the problem as the candidate herself - the moment in Columbus, Ohio when she announced that she intended to "put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business." As we're told, voters heard this message and didn't attach any sort of hope for economic stimulus to it; rather, they interpreted those words as, "You got a blue-collar job? Fuck you." Donald Trump, on the other hand, offered words of comfort - hollow words, but they were what voters wanted to hear.

To summarize, the film tells us this: The monies elites set out to enrich themselves by stripping American workers of their prosperity; in order to implement their economy-wrecking schemes, they wrecked democracy; and because this means of generating wealth is destructive and creates little or nothing of actual lasting value, the scheme could only be maintained by pursuing ever-more corrosive tactics that wrecked American society. Trumpian rhetoric notwithstanding, that wreckage has now been cemented by a tax code that will punish ordinary Americans far into the future, a stacked court system that won't hear or address the needs and problems of working people, and a crippling national debt that has effectively been deployed as a weapon to ensure the destruction of what little remains of America's social safety nets and economic equitability.

Is there hope? That's a dubious proposition. Cornel West attempts to place our accelerating wealth spiral in historic context, but although history has seen epochs of massive oppression and exploitation of the many by the very few, it's never before happened on such a coordinated global scale, nor against a backdrop of intense ecological degradation. The film tries to offer a slender thread of solace, but those who were paying enough attention to have heard these disparate observations before seeing them presented here, in all their cross-connected and alarming glory, have also probably taken note of things that the film ignores.