A Conversation with Chris Hedges: Corporate Totalitarianism

well welcome everybody welcome welcome welcome i'm dianne fenner from the new york city bar association and it is my great honor to introduce to you today christopher lynn hedges we are going to have a conversation on a variety of topics first i would like just to make three brief announcements thanking the sponsoring individuals and giving some information about the new york city bar upcoming events and then i will give a more detailed introduction about chris hedges and then he will have some time to talk and answer your questions at the end of that um this speech or lecture or talk is part of our 150th anniversary celebration new york city bar association has been 150 years in existence and the sponsors for today's events include our task force on the rule of law our business and human rights working group our international human rights committee and the senior lawyers committee and just briefly i want to mention three of our upcoming events in this our 150th anniversary year on monday may 17th we are having a candidate forum with the candidates for manhattan district attorney which will include discussion of the mass incarceration crisis how to address it decriminalization including increasing options for diversion and alternatives to incorp uh to incarceration our event on may 7 i'm sorry may 20th uh is about the senate filibuster um and the speakers will include russell feingold sarah binder and norman j ornstein and on june 24th the senior lawyers committee and others will sponsor an event entitled tax the rich which is based on a book by that title from the patriotic millionaires a group of high net worth americans leaders in business and investing agencies who are united in their concern about the destabilizing concentration of wealth so that's june 24th the event taxed the rich so if you were registered and you're here now you already know something about chris hedges you've already seen on the registration form that he is a best-selling author a pulitzer prize winner a tv commentator the recipient of the amnesty international global award for human rights journalism and i will briefly go over some of the things that were left out of that introduction before i give you christopher lynn hedges um in addition to the books that were mentioned there he spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in central america west asia africa the middle east uh and the balkans and has reported from more than 50 countries um he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years in the middle east and balkan bureau chief and covered the war in the former yugoslavia he has taught at columbia university new york university the university of toronto and princeton he currently teaches in the new jersey prison system and that is as part of the rutgers university ba program he during his time in latin america uh when he began his career as a freelance journalist he wrote for the washington post covered the falkland war from buenos aires for national public radio covered the conflicts in el salvador nicaragua and guatemala for the christian science monitor and for npr and worked as the central america bureau chief for the dallas morning news in 1984. um he took a sabbatical to study arabic in 1988 and then was appointed the middle east bureau chief for the dallas morning news in 1989 and in one of his first stories for that paper he tracked down robert manning the prime suspect in the 1985 bombing death in california of the head of the arab american anti-discrimination committee's western office he located him in a jewish settlement in israeli-occupied west bank and until uh chris hedges discovered manning it uh was said by israel that they had no knowledge of his whereabouts and manning was extradited to the us in 1980 in 1991 where he is serving a life sentence another couple of exciting moments i just want to flag for you before we start chris was we covered the first gulf war for the new york times in 1990 entered kuwait with the u.s marine corps was taken prisoner in basra after the war by the iraqi republican guard during the shiite uprising and was held captive for a week he was appointed the new york times middle east bureau chief in 1991 and during his reporting on the atrocities committed by saddam hussein that iraqi leader offered a bounty for anyone who killed him killed chris and other several aid workers and journalists and among them were reporters who were assassinated as well as wounded in 1995 hedges was named the balkan bureau chief for the new york times based in sarajevo when the city was being hit by over 300 shells a day from the surrounding bosnia serbs uh he reported on the serbian massacre in srebrenica and shortly after the war uncovered what appeared to be one of the central hiding places for perhaps thousands of corpses and he with a photographer were the first to travel in kosovo and later published an investigative piece in the new york times detailing how the former leader of the kosovo liberation army directed a campaign in which many leaders were assassinated and brutally purged um in 1998 to 99 he was a neiman fellow at harvard his list of accomplishments is too long for me to take up any more time here i give you mr christopher lynn hedges thank you very much and thanks for having me um i am quite beholden to uh two people in particular for my understanding of the corporate coup d'etat that's taken place in the united states to quote the canadian philosopher john ralston saul who did a good book on this process called voltaire's bastards but in particular i lean on the great political theorist sheldon wolin taught at berkeley later at princeton and his last book democracy incorporated and then ralph nader ralph uh has been fighting corporate power longer and i would argue with more integrity than probably any other american i had been overseas for 20 years as a foreign correspondent in many ways i had to rediscover my own country when i returned and ralph was instrumental in laying out to me the shifting political sands in the american system that had given rise to a new entity a kind of corporate duopoly i think we see how this duopoly works right now in response to the israeli attacks against palestinians there's no difference in the kind of statements that are made by ted cruz or marco rubio or uh nancy pelosi or joe biden or anyone else um that on foreign policy issues and economic issues they work in lock step that's not to say that there are not differences between the republicans and the democrats there are but they're not significant differences um and this process really if you if you have a starting date for it it's probably 1971. that was when lewis powell who was the council for the chamber of commerce wrote up this now infamous powell memo uh to cope with what the political scientist samuel huntington called america's excess of democracy and powell railed against what he called anti-business interests that had risen within the academy within the media he pointed to the widespread mass movements that had been formed in the 1960s not just the anti-war movement but the women's movement the environmental movement ralph nader in fact organized the first earth day and then you had the rise of militant movements within the african community community not only the civil rights movement but ultimately groups like the black panthers you had the american indian movement you had the young lords representing uh in particular latinos or puerto ricans um uh there was just a uh a breakdown of the hegemony of power that had traditionally been held by a narrow largely white male ruling elite and uh so powell laid out a blueprint uh that essentially was followed and it it called on the business interests in corporate america to use its significant financial resources to essentially buy off institutions the press academia to marginalize anti-capitalist critics remember if you went back to the 60s or the early 70s you could watch major american intellectuals and dissidents from malcolm x to howard zinn gore vidal noam chomsky all these people were given space on public television something that doesn't happen anymore at all in large part because public television's budget was reduced the government infusion of money and it's so reliant on corporate donors one of the biggest donors was the koch brothers for many years that it essentially neutralized uh those critics of corporate capitalism and imperialism and then you saw a kind of legislative assault the use of money to freeze out liberal democrats ralph had authored about 24 pieces of major consumer and environmental legislation including the mine and safety act the clean water act as a whole list and but then he used the liberal wing of the democratic party to push those pieces of legislation through the congress and slowly the corporate elites especially by corrupting the political system so that it became almost impossible to win a senator a house seat without massive financial backing it pushed those people out and that gave rise to uh this kind of new faux liberalism embodied in a figure like bill clinton uh and also embodied in the uk and a figure like tony blair uh margaret thatcher famously quipped that her greatest creation was tony blair uh well in many ways reagan and the business elite's greatest creation was bill clinton uh so uh clinton uh and biden was very instrumental in this uh decided that they would uh essentially transform the democratic party into the republican party tony cuello a congressman from california was instrumental in doing this so they would embrace issues that the corporate america wanted embraced that the military-industrial complex wanted embraced and they would get corporate money that was the plan and it worked so by the 1990s there was uh corporate parity in terms of fundraising between the republican and the democratic parties uh but the assault was devastating um it was certainly preceded clinton but clinton really turbocharged it so what you had was uh that uh self-identified liberal elite i write at length about this in my book death of the liberal class that uh spoke in that kind of traditional feel your pain language of the american working class and the poor uh but deciduously served corporate power so it's under clinton that you get the passage of nafta again biden was instrumental in this when he was in the senate uh probably the greatest betrayal the working class since the taft 1947 taft-hartley act which makes it very difficult to organize unions and in particular strike you had clinton overseeing the destruction of the welfare system and in the old welfare system 70 of the recipients were children uh you deregulate the fcc that's not a small move because it essentially allowed about a half dozen corporations to seize control of the airwaves and those half dozen corporations are able to control what about 90 percent of americans listen to or watch you had um the destruction of the 1933 glass-steagall act which set up a firewall between investment and commercial banks precipitating the global financial meltdown and the banking crisis canada did not have a banking crisis in 2008 because cretino who had in canada essentially put into place his own version of glass-steagall that was not revoked it was clinton and biden again who in the 1994 omnibus crime bill militarized the police tripled and quadrupled sentences including for non-violent drug offenses that's where we get the three strikes your outlaw uh and uh explode the prison population uh more than doubling it we now have about 22 or 25 percent of the world's prison population were about four 4.4 percent of the world's population and close to 50 percent of the people in our prison population most of whom are of color and poor uh have never been charged with a violent crime they've never been charged with physically harming another person um uh and and then of course it uh this uh process essentially contributed to the deindustrialization of the country thrusting the working class into profound economic despair so in urbanized centers where there once was some kind of industrial work you've left largely communities of color and the two forms of social control are the police militarized police that you know function as de facto armies of occupation and of course the prison system itself we hear more from the dispossessed and disenfranchised white working class those people who supported trump and i think that's because the draconian forms of social control have not been as effective against the white working class that's number one and number two james baldwin writes about this there is always a feeling if you're a white american that the american dream is a possibility baldwin actually writes about how african americans don't have the same kind of mid-life crisis that white in particular white male americans have because they never believed that they always knew that that dream was a fiction and i think that's why you have uh perhaps or most of the suicides that are uh carried out in the united states are carried out by middle-aged white men men in their 40s and 50s who've realized that they've been discarded that that that american myth that american dream is a lie now the consequences of this reconfiguration of wealth and the dispossession of the american working class are social cultural political and psychological in my last book uh america the farewell tour i started as kind of my foundation with emil durkheim the great french sociologist durkheim had explored suicide this was a book he wrote i think was 1898 but he asked the question what is it that drives individuals and societies to carry out either singular or collective acts of self-annihilation and he targeted this rig of the term anomie but he targeted the rupture of social bonds those bonds that integrate you into the society which are not just about work but work is important and john paul ii actually wrote a very fine and cyclical about the importance of work and how work is not just about exchanging labor for a wage uh but about the dignity about a sense of place about a sense of meaning uh and john paul even argues that it's about the cohesiveness of family because uh it is it's about the the ability for a family as a unit uh to live uh and to sustain itself uh in a society uh and all of that goes um uh with de-industrialization uh so i think the reason we see such a strong kind of crypto-fascist movement uh which was first embodied by the way in the christian right it was before trump and about a decade ago and i graduated from seminary about a decade ago i wrote a book called american fascists the christian right and the war in america and i didn't use the word fascist lightly in fact when i finished the book i spent several hours with at the time probably our country's two greatest scholars on fascism fritz stern uh who had taught at columbia and that fled germany as a refugee in the 1930s as a teenager and robert paxton who wrote the book the anatomy of fascism um stern wrote the classic book the culture of despair uh i remember stern telling me uh that in germany there was a yearning for fascism before the word fascism was invented uh and i think that uh that uh all of that embodies the christian right which upends the core message of the christian gospel it's about material the acquisition of material wealth and power that's an anathema to the gospel it acculturates or sacralizes the worst aspects of american imperialism capitalism and white supremacy i mean the whole notion that america has anointed uh to bring about the kingdom of god uh and that the white race is somehow lifted up above other races is uh paralleled in the so-called german christian church german christian church was set up in the 1930s by the nazis and it was again about sacralizing fascism and state power i when i went to harvard divinity school and my great mentor at harvard uh was the scholar james luther adams adams had been at the university of heidelberg in uh 1936 35 and 36 i believe uh and uh he'd actually been in a lecture hall watching heidegger give the fascist salute before he began his lectures and he started working with the underground so-called confessing church this was run by martin niemoller bonhoeffer uh was eventually killed by the nazis was part of this albert schweitzer carl bart and others um and uh i remember adams this was in the early 80s when we were students uh in the and the christian right was not a powerful force it was a marginal force but he immediately uh labeled these people as christian fascists and saw the danger that they posed especially as a working class was dispossessed um and i think even at the time although he was certainly one of the most brilliant scholars i studied with we found his analysis perhaps a bit hyperbolic a bit overheated but when i came back 20 years later and i had watched how the christian right had built parallel institutions like liberty university patrick henry law school its own media system its christian schools which betsy devos of course spent four years of the trump administration federally funding i saw that adams had seen something that we hadn't seen and these people were all integrated into the trump administration that's where pence comes from uh and trump really played to this uh i think that these people uh who uh and it's magical thinking of course these people have essentially retreated from the real world and what was interesting when i wrote my book was how uh when i interviewed members of the christian right and i went there with a kind of liberal prejudice my father was a minister but came out of the social gospel and the barrigans and was involved in the anti-war movement civil rights movement and the gay rights movement i went in there with a kind of prejudice towards them but you know you couldn't listen to what they had went through without uh feeling a great deal of empathy for their suffering which was real the domestic and sexual abuse the struggle with addictions alcoholism gambling the uh constant barbara aaron reich says that being poor in america is one long emergency that certainly typified their lives and they retreated into this is what anthropologists will call crisis cults they retreated into this magical world where jesus would take care of them and and minister to their their physical needs in terms of blessing them with wealth but this is always a very pernicious ideology because what it really says is that those who are poor uh are poor because they deserve to be poor and that's why you have many corporations tyson foods and uh all sorts of corporations funding the christian right uh not because they particularly embrace the magical thinking but because the ideology that comes with it is so uh conducive to laissez-faire capitalism to the lifting of regulations you don't need labor unions you don't need health care if jesus is going to take care of you and just on that one point before i get into trump uh i certainly came away from that experience i spent two years on that book believing that you couldn't argue these people there was no rational way to argue these people back into reality um i had been in detroit for the book with tim lahaye wrote the end time series and they were talking about the coming armageddon and apocalypse and these blood curdling descriptions of what would happen to non-believers including jews that's why the alliance with the christian right in israel has always somewhat mystified me and the in the excitement within this i was in a church a large church within this gathering and i think i really came to understand it's only really when you sit through those experiences that you can i think fathom what they're about i came to see that these people really wanted that secular humanist world as they described it destroyed and looked forward to that moment because uh it uh destroyed all of those forces that it almost destroyed them uh and i at the end of the book really came to the conclusion that unless these people were reintegrated in particularly economically back into the society there was no hope for uh though the protection uh of american democracy and of course things have gotten exponentially worse with the levels of social inequality being on unlike anything we've seen in american history that dislocation those rupturing of social bonds play out in self-destructive behaviors uh durkheim argues and so my last book america the farewell to her looked at all of those self-destructive pathologies that have gripped huge segments of the population the opioid crisis those with heroin addicts the sexual sadism where a fortified culture but it's it's uh that uh porn is violent usually uh it includes torture i was at a place called kink.com which is the largest bdsm operation uh in the world i think where people can pay money have live stream into these sessions and women are literally waterboarded i mean i spent time with the three percenters knights of the alt-right and some of these proud boys uh because as durkheim argues those who seek the annihilation of others are driven by longings for self-annihilation um uh gamblers i wrote my chapter on gambling out of the trump taj mahal before trump announced uh and and this is that deep social sickness which feeds these proto-fascists movements uh that predated trump uh and that are still with us uh and i think extremely frightening and dangerous they just you just saw cheney removed from her position uh which i think although trump's platform is been removed he's been removed from social media uh these uh this deep alienation and these kinds of antagonisms have not left us uh and what i fear is that with the cementing into place of the corporate state there's no way within the american political system to vote against the interests of goldman sachs uh the longer that dispossession continues uh the more danger our anemic democracy is in biden was anointed or appointed however he wanted by the democratic donor elite because he has long served their interests indeed obama chose biden as the vice president his vice presidential candidate because biden in essence voted republican he comes out of delaware his nickname used to be senator credit card he's been involved in the worst aspects of the assault on civil liberties he was one of the primary authors of the patriot act again nafta as i mentioned mass incarceration militarized police deregulation that's all biden um and uh he i think the democratic party realizes uh there's a crisis um but they're limited by their fealty to corporate powers so when biden proposes the care act the arp if you look at it closely that money is going either to states or corporations yes there's a one-time check of 1400 there's an extension of unemployment benefits there's a tile child tax credit but structurally it doesn't do anything to alter the unfairness of the system and in most cases by the end of this year that money will have run out fourteen hundred dollars really isn't going to deal much when you have millions of americans behind on their rent uh credit card companies you know waiting to snap up that money uh medical for-profit insurance companies uh landlords etc so uh the inability to deal and then on the infrastructure issue uh again this is another version of trickle-down economics you will fund large infrastructure companies and um and and you're not recreating uh the kind of uh policies that were embraced by fdr during the new deal when the federal government literally put 12 million americans to work created social security uh lifted the bans on labor unions so people could organize and if we don't have those kinds of structural issues then i think even by the midterms we will see and traditionally this is what happens the republican party which i think is a crypto this at this point a kind of crypto fascist party my friend glenn ford calls it the white man's party um uh retake power i mean even with biden's tax credits he's not uh bringing them back to he he's uh they're not even reaching the levels uh before trump slash them and if you go back to the reagan administration uh the highest percentage of wage earners and corporations were taxed at 40 and if you want to go back to the eisenhower administration because of the legacy of the new deal they were attached attacked sorry they were taxed at 91 um we see with the current uh assaults by israel against the palestinians complete lockstep by biden which is true of course with the funding of the military over 750 billion dollars biden has in his proposed budget has increased this by 1.6 about 11 billion dollars in fact of course the military budget needs to be dramatically reduced and resources need to be reconfigured to address the deep social malaise that has gripped the united states uh ralph always calls these corporations traitorous or traitors uh because they are supranational um they have no real loyalty to the nation state uh their lobbyists have in essence uh orchestrated a tax boycott that's how uh companies like amazon don't pay any federal taxes in fact they got money back from the federal government their last tax season um and that concentration of wealth is also unlike anything we've ever seen so when when john d rockefeller died he actually spoke at my uh went to prep school the scholarship student he was my high school graduation speaker when he died he was worth about three billion dollars even the worst kind of corrupt authoritarian or dictatorial rulers around the world didn't amass anything like the money bezos is worth about 180 billion dollars and that's going up uh elon musk is about the same uh bill gates isn't far behind uh but i think imelda and fernand marcos were estimated to have stolen between uh 10 and 20 billion uh mabutu the congo maybe over his reign 10 billion uh but the concentration of wealth is really not uh it is no precedent within uh human history i mean certainly recent human history uh and that uh um concentration of wealth by a rapacious tiny elite and the inability on the part of the citizenry in our system of legalized bribery um to essentially have any kind of organized power to thwart it is pushing us closer and closer to the um to the kinds of eruptions that we all saw on january 6th um uh you know to blame that on trump uh i think misses the point he to blame uh you know what the the the uh racist crypto fascist anti-democratic um uh white uh almost 75 million people uh you know white working class on trump is to miss the point first of all as i said before it predated trump uh but uh trump tapped into what was already there he is or was the uh symptom he's not the disease and and what frightens me about the democratic party it's inability to address the disease uh the whole notion that trump uh won in 2016 because of russia is ridiculous first of all the country that interferes most aggressively in the american electoral process is israel to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars i mean you had netanyahu show up i think was 2015 and invited by boehner and the republicans to address the congress and denounce barack obama's iranian nuclear deal i mean this is just uh staggering um and then of course all the junkets and all the congress people that are flown to israel and i think again we see how little daylight there is on what's happening in in uh in israel and in palestine at the moment uh uh so that the problem is that we're not addressing the gross disfigurations that have been caused by corporate power and for me the biden administration is a kind of short reprieve and my fear is that they will their legacy will be that they cement into place uh perhaps a competent uh demagogue uh i mean what saved us in many ways was the incompetence of trump this short attention span and uh you know uh he was unable to really organize he he certainly wanted to carry out a coup uh but he didn't have the organizational uh ability or infrastructure to make it succeed but he certainly tried but that may not be true for a mike pompeo or tom cotton i don't know who's coming next maybe somebody we don't know and we can't rule out the fact that trump may you know rise like the phoenix uh uh so the uh the the corporate coup d'etat has um struck deep at the roots of american democracy in american society and uh my fear with the democratic party and the democratic leadership is that they're dealing cosmetically largely with a problem that's systemic and unless that corporate coup d'etat is reversed we certainly have built now within the state machinery uh systems of almost instantaneous dictatorial power including wholesale surveillance uh the revoking of habeas corpus and due process the use of anti-terrorism laws against uh domestic critics they've already used it against environmental activists and even against animal rights activists the censorship that silicon valley can impose because they have a monopoly on the systems of information for instance you saw it in the campaign when the new york post was locked out of its own twitter account because it had reported on the contents of hunter biden's laptop left-wing kind of anti-imperialist anti-capitalist critics like myself have been hit now with algorithms that's not conjecture i wrote for 16 years for a left-wing site called truthdig it's now shut down we all went on strike to protest the attempt by the publisher to fire the editor-in-chief bob scheer and then we were all fired which kind of gives you a window into the hollowness of american liberal class unions are good for everyone else but not for us um we wanted to form a union to protect ourselves and protect bob um but that last uh year they did uh the the the it people did a graph uh and they uh followed impressions so impressions are like when you go into google if you typed in the word imperialism and i had written a column on imperialism along with anything else that was recent it would come up well that gets erased by the algorithm so you're not referred to that article or that site so the referrals from impressions according that graph over the last 12 months had fallen from over 700 000 to well below 200 000 probably even lower now as the algorithms are protected uh that the all of this these mechanisms were used to shut down wikileaks i'm a strong supporter of julian assange indeed he's a friend of mine and visited him when he was in the ecuadorean embassy in london uh but there you had it was really pioneered against wikileaks so julian was locked out of all of his credit card and bank accounts uh it became impossible to donate to wikileaks because all of the servers that would handle donations were shut down and then when wikileaks posted material or hosted events there was heavy electronic interference so people couldn't see it or hear it or get into the events and we are certainly seeing this kind of creeping authoritarianism that in the hands of a competent demagogue and coupled with the refusal on the part of the state to address the core issues that push people into the embrace of the christian right the embrace of magical thinking uh or and this of course all demagogues pedal magical thinking indeed hannah aaron in origins of totalitarianism argues that totalitarianism itself is always a form of magical thinking um my hope is such as it is is that we will reclaim the kind of militancy that we saw in the 1930s i think you know too often when history is presented it's about the beneficence of great white men uh roosevelt uh his first term did very little to deal with the impression but the social upheaval was such you had the famous sit-down strikes in flint that crippled gm and then led to the entire country's automotive industry becoming uh unionized you had hunger marches you had organizations within cities like chicago so that when they went in to do evictions uh people organized to physically block uh the sheriff's departments from evicting uh families um and roosevelt and his private correspondents which i've read which was published after he died sends a letter to his brother and says quite openly if if we don't respond we will get revolution and you still have the specter of the russian revolution hanging over industrialized countries and i think that roosevelt was right and i think we are moving towards a period in american history that again replicates that kind of extremism that extremism was part of weimar although the difference being of course you had the reparations and you had the uh effects of the war the the huge losses caused by the war um but you know history doesn't uh uh repeat itself but it rhymes i think that's what mark twain said um and what you had by the 1930s the end of the 1930s in weimar was the international banking system imposing uh uh in essence austerity uh for bank loans so you had a social a liberal government social democratic government uh um uh of banishing unemployment insurance at a time of massive unemployment and so this really fed the fascist movement in 1928 the nazi party pulled in the single digits uh by 1930 they were on the cusp of achieving power so uh i think the problems that are gripping us are severe and frightening and i worry the ruling elites whether through a lack of understanding or a lack of will are not responding and the consequences for american democracy are catastrophic thank you thank you so much um we have an awful lot of questions to get through uh in about 15 minutes so i'm jumping right into this um first one how do you deal with deindustrialization when technology has changed the landscape well technology hasn't really changed the landscape i mean you have 700 000 people working for the subsidiaries of apple in china alone things still have to be made the textile industry cars i mean i went on my last book i was in anderson indiana anderson was one of the big cities that produced gm cars after nafta they moved down to monterey mexico where they pay workers three dollars an hour without benefits that city has fallen into the traditional tailspin of de-industrialized cities including explosion of the opioid crisis supermarkets are boarded up churches are boarded up houses are abandoned and things still have to be made and the fallacy of those people who promoted neoliberalism and de-industrialization is that america would somehow become a high-tech a producer of high-tech um no the producer of high-tech is not in america it's in china or vietnam or you know clothes are made in bangladesh so high tech still needs intensive labor uh but it's not here it's overseas um another question in a different direction do you see the gamification of the securities markets as evidenced by reddit an example of the self-destruction impulse to gambling well that's all the market is is gambling at this point are things you know it's like commodities are things going to rise i bet they are no they're not you sell short you sell long it's not investment and one of the i think disturbing things about the bailout of 2008 is that money didn't go into producing they didn't produce anything they make anything uh it went back to largely to stock buybacks because ceo compensation was tied to it so that whole casino capitalism uh is is a form of gambling for the rich uh and to somehow measure the health of the economy by the stock market is ridiculous it's it's it's uh it's also a big you know bubble machine so it's why you get these periodic uh dot-com crash the 2008 crash um you know they just become kind of cyclical uh but they're divorced from the real economy um what is your take on corporations weighing in on and exerting significant influence over social justice issues such as anti-gay rights measures in indiana during pence's governorship and recent voting restrictions passed in georgia well corporations are very slow to respond to the voting restrictions uh it's just branding go back to you know calvin klein and bennington during the aids crisis they were putting hiv positive models up on their billboards because it was kind of edgy uh but in the end they're just consumers uh and i think it along with kind of the woke culture and political correctness and uh it is a way of diverting people's attention from the class warfare that's being waged by the elite against the rest of us so yeah corporations are quite happy to embrace the notion of diversity as long as those people who are selected and they are selected both within academia in the corporate world serve those systems of power my favorite story about this is when i went to i went to harvard divinity school and before right before i got there there were no professors there were no black professors at harvard divinity school and the black students occupied the dean's office and demanded that they conduct a search so they invited three black academics to apply one of which was james cohn which if you know anything about theology james cohn uh was the most important theologian in america since reinhold niebuhr i mean he was the father of black liberation theology stunningly brilliant and then they invited a sociologist again a very competent academic lincoln was his name and then they invited the third candidate who was a young professor who just had has gotten his phd and never written a book but what did they do well they hired the young professor who uh ended up getting tenure and i was there when i was there never ended up writing a book ever i don't think he's ever written a book so we have to remember that within those structures it's that white ruling elite that selects who it is i mean you know within theological circles the notion that you wouldn't hire james cohn should have been a huge embarrassment to harvard uh not that harvard has the capacity to be embarrassed uh but there you know those figures i mean that's why cornell west called barack obama black mascot for wall street obama was a product of the chicago political machine a close ally of daily there was all that exposure when obama was a state senator of torture horrific acts of torture by the chicago police under burs and obama never said a word there were all these exposures in illinois of people who had been falsely convicted uh and sent to death row obama never came out against the death penalty uh you know he he was he was selected in a way that um you know somebody who was willing to stand up against corporate power in a real way was pushed out i knew george mcgovern mcgovern was one of the last a lot of it's taken on the military-industrial complex which even bernie sanders wasn't foolish enough to do but mcgovern did a highly decorated world war ii veteran he'd been a bomber pilot and they destroyed him and they destroyed him the same way they would have destroyed sanders you had the democratic party lead in the republican party elite joining together to take down mcgovern and that was made clear by the donor class in the democratic party so lloyd blankfein for example the former ceo of goldman sachs said that if sanders was the nominee he'd vote for trump and he was expressing i think the majoritarian opinion there was no way they were going to allow sanders to be the nominee i don't think sanders ever had any chance to be the nominee uh so you know why was trump removed well i mean for all the obvious reasons he was vulgar and inept and embarrassment to the empire but his actual policies didn't alienate corporate america in the same way that biden who was quite clear in the campaign that he wouldn't uh touch the structures of corporate power which is why by the end you know biden was getting tremendous amounts of money especially from silicon valley that had formed super pacs and were putting all these anti-trump ads um the questions are pouring in we have um six minutes left i'm going to try to batch these together a little bit that mcgovern reference is a nice lead into this question given the end of conscription and the advent of the voluntary army in 1973 do you see any hope of reviving the american peace movement and dismantling the military complex well that's a really good question because they knew that if it was a volunteer army well who volunteers it's those people in economic distress my half of my family comes from working class towns in maine all of them are veterans because there's nowhere else for them to go so you have you know i don't know what the actual percentage is three four percent of the population essentially servicing the military which is also true now at west point my son was a college athlete he used to compete at west point so i would go there and it was interesting that uh you know the sons and daughters of the elites no longer attend west point at all that might have was probably not true a few decades ago uh and then of course you have the rise of mercenary armies i mean we we have thousands i don't know what the final figure is right now in afghanistan and they're just completely erased from public perception even though they are functioning as highly paid troops so i think that's uh the empire realized that uh i mean if people were being drafted and middle class kids were dying in the folly that has been taking place for two decades in the middle east there would have been more reaction but as long as it's the poor they have neither the organizational capacity or enough political clout to do much other than come back and suffer with ptsd and you know that's why the suicide rate among veterans is so high and that kind of despair to come back to these empty towns that my own family comes from in maine where all the mills are closed the town where my grandparents were from even the bank is boarded up uh but that's you know that's kind of across the united states so yes i think that ending conscription was a very conscious and perhaps even astute move on the architect's event from the architects of empire because it was when middle-class kids came home in the vietnam war in body bags that you saw a real turn on the military establishment uh here's a question that i think is on more than one person's mind accepting your terrifying view of where we are what practical steps can or should we take it's a it's as history as pointed out it's it's uh it's organized sustained mass civil disobedience i mean that's what brought us the new deal uh that's what ended the vietnam war that's what gave us at least legally not economically civil rights that's what ended slavery that's what gave women the vote there's nothing surprising about it but we have a mass media that uh works quite effectively at neutralizing the population either through entertainment or limiting actual debate uh i see the whole kind of focus on the woke culture and cancel culture as just empty kind of moralizing not that i'm opposed to uh that but that that it easily fits within a corporate culture if you go back and look at the old soviet union especially right after the revolution had much the same kind of moralizing as diversion away from the bolshevik seizure of complete and total state power so um uh it's not a mystery i mean howard's in and people's history of the united states i think chronicled quite well number one that america was formed as a closed system largely by white slave holding men and that all of the openings in american democracy came through mass movements and and if we don't recover those mass movements uh and and as we did in the 1930s then we will go the way europe went or countries like italy and germany when in the 1930s will go the other way i want to make a little distinction when you're talking about mass civil disobedience what would you uh how would you uh evaluate the prospect of a third party do you see a need for a third political party or was that included when you talked about um things that we could do to reverse a trend well i was ralph nader's speechwriter so i certainly support third parties on the other hand i'm acutely aware of all of the obstacles the democratic and republican parties put up to third-party candidates um you know ralph never appeared on the debates um which was probably who'd want to debate ralph not me um uh the democratic party which was really frightened by ralph after 2000 uh made war on ralph after that so they were challenging his voter list which the consequence was about a million dollars legal fees there was nothing wrong with the voter list it was just a way to drive up his legal costs and then the whole demonization of nader that he lost florida i mean by the way gore now says that he won florida which he did they stopped the county in florida after two counties moved it to the supreme court and you had bush appointed president by judicial fiat with no legal precedent at all but the you know the ruling democratic elites and their echo chambers and the mass media really did turn ralph into a pariah so i i support the greens i support the third party movement but without serious mass mobilization it's just kind of a protest mode it doesn't it's it's in and of itself not gonna change the system it's three o'clock i'm just going to wrap up here we could go on and on and i'm sorry but uh this is our time unless there's something that you wanted to sum up with as we end the talk no i i mean i'm now i was the middle east bureau chief for the new york times so i'm very involved in what's happening now in the middle in israel and quite upset by it as an arabic speaker and somebody spent weeks of my life in gaza and the inability on the part of the ruling elites in either party to respond uh to you know these grotesque assaults by israel on a defenseless population in particular in gaza the world's largest open-air prison so that's kind of where my energy has been going the last couple days well i'm glad we could give you a platform to get that message out and i'm very grateful for the time that you've given us thank you very much okay and uh we're going to leave it there okay thank you for having me thank you

Channel: New York City Bar Association

Views: 256,492

Keywords:

Id: EiAXKiTS6HA

Length: 60min 39sec (3639 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 24 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/SaintNeptune]

He starts talking about this at the 48:30 point of the interview

[u/Particular_Web282]

Are there any other prominent leftists that haven’t lost their marbles? I used to like Nathan Robinson from Current Affairs but even he turned fully woke.

[u/BIG____MEECH]

It's obviously not just a 'distraction' and I don't understand why 'culture war bullshit' is always dismissed out of hand by certain types of people - the imposition of a bourgeoise value system onto the majority of the population is not in any way a DISTRACTION from the class war, it is a PART of the class war