<media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2FtPuhTDyM" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/x2FtPuhTDyM" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="The Chris Hedges YouTube Channel" caption="Chris Hedges: The American Ruling Class Explained"> A partial transcript from the 2-minute video. <bq><b>Our political class does not govern; it entertains.</b> It plays its assigned role in our fictitious democracy, howling with outrage to constituents and selling them out. The squad and the progressive caucus have no more intention of fighting for universal health care, workers rights, or defying the war machine than the freedom caucus fights for freedom. These political hacks are modern versions of Sinclair Lewis's slick con artist Elmer Gantry <b>cynically betraying a gullible public to amass personal power---power and wealth.</b> This moral vacuity provides the spectacle. As HG Wells wrote of a great material civilization halted, paralyzed. It happened in ancient Rome. It happened in Weimar Germany. It is happening here. Governance exists but it is not seen. It is certainly not democratic. It is done by the armies of lobbyists and corporate executives from the fossil-fuel industry, the arms industry, the pharmaceutical industry, and Wall Street. Governance happens in secret. <b>Corporations have seized the levers of power, growing obscenely rich.</b> The ruling oligarchs have deformed national institutions---including state and federal legislatures, and in the courts---to serve their insatiable greed. <b>They know what they are doing. They understand the depths of their own corruption. They know they are hated. They are prepared for that, too. They have milixtarized police</b> forces and have built a vast archipelago of prisons to keep the unemployed and underemployed in bondage. All the while, <b>they pay little or no income tax and exploit sweat-shop labor overseas.</b> <b>They lavishly bankroll the political clowns who speak in the vulgar and crude idiom of an enraged public [Trump] or in the dulcet tones used to mollify the liberal class.</b> [Harris] And, when they see one of their political puppets faltering, as Joe Biden was, they step in cut off the funds and stage a party coup. <b>The media plays its anointed role in this farce as courtiers to the powerful</b>, amplifying their fictitious narratives and lies. There are only a handful who call them out.</bq>