Chris Hedges Best Speech In 2018

thank you i am going to take 30 or 40 minutes and try and explain what's happened in the united states and perhaps talk a little bit about where i think it's headed [Music] donald trump is the result of a long process of decay of democratic institutions uh an assault against the economy and the culture by corporate power he's the natural consequence of a degenerate society he is the symptom not the disease and since i came back from overseas i have written several books that have attempted to diagnose what's gone wrong in the united states uh death of the liberal class empire of illusion the end of literacy and the triumph of spectacle american fascists the christian right and the war on america and i did not use the word fascist lightly i am a seminary graduate and in fact am although i don't broadcast it much an ordained presbyterian minister i look at these people as christian heretics who have distorted the biblical message to sacralize the worst elements of american imperialism and american capitalism and part of my critique against the liberal class includes the failure of the liberal church to call these people out for who they are you don't have to spend three years as i did at harvard divinity school to understand that jesus did not come to make us rich i did a book with the great cartoonist joe sacco called days of destruction days of revolt where we went to the poorest pockets of the united states literally camden new jersey for example which per capita is the poorest city in america and not surprisingly always has one of the highest homicide rates in america to talk about sacrifice zones and that of course is something new as canadians have to cope with the tar sands being one of the largest sacrifice zones in north america along with the coal fields of southern west virginia and northern kentucky where we also wrote a chapter and if you want to understand what a poisoned toxic landscape looks like when these people are finished you should fly as joe and i did over the uh denuded and uh uh scarred uh appalachian mountains where the tops blown off and the trees gone and a billion gallon toxic ponds of lead and heavy metals every two hours we were driving through these old coal fields we'd have to stop and clean off our back window because it was black with dust you went into elementary schools and you went to the nurse's office and there were just rows of little inhalers with the name of every child on it that's the world that these corporations will create as the globe becomes one big sacrifice zone um john ross and saul who had dinner with last night in toronto talks about a corporate coup d'etat in slow motion and that's a phrase i often use because i think it's correct we saw and hardly unique to the united states an assault by global corporations beginning in particular in the early 1970s to roll back what the harvard political scientist samuel huntington called the excess of democracy and if you know about lewis powell he later went on to sit on the supreme court the powell memo of 1971 it's called attack on the free enterprise system he actually names ralph nader in that memo as somebody that they have to take down at the time ralph running the largest and most effective consumer advocacy movement in the country and you saw the elites essentially seize control not only of academia whole economic departments purging critics of global capitalism unfettered democrat unfettered capitalism uh what we call neo-liberalism taking control of media platforms and most importantly capturing through corporate money are two major political parties um we only really at this point in america have one political party it's called the corporate party you have the right wing of the corporate party uh promoting the kind of uh nativism and islamophobia and uh demonization of undocumented workers and then you have uh the the the court a more enlightened wing of the corporate party uh which doesn't want to be seen as racist or misogynist but the structures of power both imperial and economic remain completely untouched which is why you have complete continuity for instance between the bush administration and the obama administration uh and i spent a lot of time in death of the liberal class i actually go all the way back to world war one with wilson because on the eve of world war one we had very powerful radical movements that were on the cusp of taking power and they were effectively crushed during the war in the name of fighting uh anti-war sentiment and then destroyed afterwards uh in the palmer raids and the red scare um and and but clinton we had we had we had a couple resurgences one being with a breakdown of capitalism in the 30s and then again in the 1960s but by the time bill clinton came to power he had essentially transformed the democratic party into the republican party and he had pushed the republican party so far to the right that it became insane and all much of the devastation that we're dealing with including uh uh nafta or uh the 1994 omnibus crime bill which exploded our prison population from 700 000 to 2 million or the deregulation of the fcc which now allows about five or six corporations to control what ninety percent of americans watch or listen to uh glass-steagall and canada did not have a banking crisis because kratienne did not allow the firewalls between commercial and investment banks to be ripped down the way clinton did precipitating both the national and the global meltdown and i would say that our moment of distress began it was or let's say an except was accelerated by the betrayal of the democratic party uh under clinton which knew that if it did corporate bidding it would get corporate money which it did so by the 90s the democratic party had fundraising parity with the republicans and when barack obama ran for president in 2008 he actually got more corporate money than his rival his republican rival so uh this the the devastation was accelerated the de-industrialization was accelerated and that american working class and in particular the white working class began to fall into a state of tremendous distress barbara ehrenreich and her very fine book nicholan dimed calls the plight of the working poor in the united states one long emergency at the same time we became captive to uh or entertainment let's say seeped into every aspect of american life including of course info entertainment but also in terms of politics politicians uh surrounded themselves with very skillful public relations mandarins who created fictional personalities if you remember you know george bush is somebody you'd want to have a beer with kind of stuff and it made we were made to confuse how we were made to feel with knowledge um political rhetoric became almost child-like so cliche ridden so slogan-ridden as to be utterly devoid of content and what we watched in this last presidential election uh with trump and trump of course himself is is a is a manufa his his public persona is a manufactured personality on the reality television show the apprentice his actual record is as a business person is abysmal uh numerous bankruptcies defrauding contractors and creditors um and and you uh when you watch the mueller investigation it's very clear that uh what they are what they have on trump is not any serious uh collusion with russia or russia not steal our elections but uh dirty money from russian oligarchs and the russian mob uh that trump laundered i hear through cypriot banks uh into his failing real estate empire but trump who comes out of that reality television culture was able to play the reality television game better than jeb bush or mitt romney or in the end hillary clinton and the invective the the volg vulgarity all of this stuff uh for a population that has largely uh lost faith in the ruling elites and lost faith in the ruling ideology of neoliberalism at least was cathartic in a sense that it expressed the rage and i would argue legitimate rage by a dispossessed american working class and in particular white working class so there's been a long period of severe decay within american society which is not reported on it it's been rendered invisible by cable outlets such as cnn which is endless burlesque which actually fuels and feeds the reality television presidency if you go back and look at the presidential election trump had 23 times the air time of bernie sanders because trump was unpredictable mercurial entertaining in a way that sanders wasn't and the the since the election uh as the head of cbs and others zucker have admitted trump has proved to be extremely good for business cnn made more money a billion dollars last year than they've ever made but of course it's it it it accelerates the assault against american democracy um it is all gossip from porn stars or the lawyers of porn stars who want to run for president or former reality television personalities like omarosa or endless speculation about you know what a member of the power elite will or won't do and meanwhile the plight of the vast majority of americans goes unrecognized and unreported and uh what i set out to do in this book as opposed to the other books was visit and i was all over the country for two years visit communities that had been hit by this economic assault and this concentration of wealth into the hands of an american oligarchic class uh so that income disparity is now a greater than it was in the gilded age it's worse than it's ever been in the united states what that was doing to people psychologically emotionally as well as physically and we always have models or writers do i do certainly models for books uh when i did days of destruction days revolt the with joe sacco the model was let us now praise famous men with uh walker evans taking the photographs and james agee writing the book this book it was emil durkheim study of suicide that he published in the late 19th century in france where he went and tried to explore what is it that drove people to commit suicide and that's where he coins the term anomie that alienation that disconnectedness that sense of stagnation despair a loss of worth that plunged people into a state where they wanted to take their own life and american society and again this is these you know this is something that canadian society copes with uh is a plagued by uh an opioid epidemic 76 000 americans died of overdoses last year um and and that's and many of them many many thousands more came close and were revived gambling and suicide the rise of white hate groups and so i went to these i was with heroin addicts i was with white hate groups i was with dispossessed workers for instance in anderson indiana where gm uh originally had many of its major plants now it's all they all move to monterey mexico where they're paying mexican workers three dollars an hour without benefits uh and so these old uaw auto workers who made twenty five or thirty dollars an hour uh had pension plans had medical benefits had a union to uh uh to provide or protect them from corporate abuse uh they they lost their jobs all of them 25 000 of them and the city went into free fall so in anderson looks like many of the de-industrialized wastelands across the united states which is suffering from of course they built a casino as a form of economic development and with the opioid abuse and it's all of those attendant problems all of those pathologies that come out of a decayed or destroyed culture and i wanted to look at those pathologies explain the personal uh suffering pain that uh a society when it seizes up and flicks on its citizenry i wrote my chapter on gambling out of the trump taj mahal in atlantic city before donald trump ever announced he was running for president uh and at that point the taj had fallen into a deep uh decline there was rodents all over the place i mean people would sit in one of the downstairs restaurants and watch the mice run across the floor uh there was mold mildew rooms were mothballed uh addicts were shooting up in the elevators a kind of window into the world or the america donald trump is about to create and the common denominator that i found most people i didn't know this until i began the book most people who gamble gamble on slots eighty percent of gamblers go to slot machines which are designed to anesthetize you to to turn you into kind of zombie like state much like heroin or opioids and the gaming industry or the gambling industry is quite astute about how to uh build an environment by which you lose all sense of time or space that's why there are no clocks there are no windows people will sit for hours and it's called time on device and of course they're completely tracked many of the mechanisms of the security and surveillance state are actually taking from the gambling industry which creates very sophisticated profiles i mean even to the point where they have projected how much a habitual gambler will spend during his or her lifetime and i i wanted in the book to i think focus on that what durkheim called that anime to make it clear that if we didn't radically restructure our society um we these pathologies would only grow uh and we're flirting now with a very dangerous situation another economic collapse and even the new york times which is usually extremely cautious ran an editorial two or three days ago talking about that possibility as whatever tepid reforms have been were created under dodd-frank being removed under the trump administration but this time around the financial elites don't have a plan b they can't lower interest rates any more than they were already lower to virtually zero and you saw central banks in europe actually paying people to to borrow money so you have these huge financial institutions like goldman sachs and within the american political system it is impossible to vote against the interests of goldman sachs you can't do it doesn't matter who you vote for that extract and numbers vary for seven trillion dollars much of it just printed money fabricated money what marx called uh fictitious capital uh and and what they do with it is not they don't they don't build new manufacturing centers they don't create jobs uh they use money to make money uh and the way they do it is through uh two ways debt paintage which is severe debt uh student loan debt for instance in the united states is now almost 1.5 trillion dollars which is not these kids are cannot pay it back i mean this is probably the first bubble to go and now we saw with these recent tax cuts what they're doing is buying back their own stock that's why the stock market is so inflated so they're buying back their own stock because their compensation packages are tied to the value of the stock of the major managers and ceos but all of this is unsustainable in the long term and the failure on the parts of the elites to deal with the pathologies that they have unleashed and the rise of a demagogue like trump uh i think it is potentially extremely dangerous for the trajectory of the united states uh we have if you take a list of the characteristics of late dying empires whether it's the roman empire or the austria-hungarian empire we have uh managed to check almost all of them off including what is a often a common characteristic of late empire and that's uh disastrous and self-destructive military adventurism um you saw the soviet union uh in afghanistan you can go all the way back and look at ancient athens in the athenian empire when they invade sicily and their entire navy is destroyed and most of their soldiers are killed the empire breaks apart austria-hungarian empire starting world war one over the assassination of the archduke ferdinand and his wife sophie um this is a characteristic of of late empire and uh the british for instance in 1956 when they attempted to invade egypt when nasser nationalized the suez canal uh now the british empire been in a slow decline since the end of world war one uh but this was this is what finished them off uh uh they had to retreat in humiliation the pound sterling was dropped as the world's reserve currency and the uh british economy went into free fall so that's that's i think the fear of you know major historians and writers about empire alfred mccoy and others is that once that the dollar is dropped as as the world's reserve currency the empire contracts very swiftly and very violently although foreign wars become unsustainable imports become very expensive um and with the weakening of the the traditional liberal class and the destruction of radical populist movements including the destruction of labor unions uh we're in a very different situation than we were in the 1930s when you had powerful movements and people write the communist party out of the american history but it was an important movement uh the progressives the old cio that pressured roosevelt uh to respond roosevelt's saying if the private sector can't create jobs then it's just the job of the government as last resort to create to create employment and that's where you get 12 million jobs and social security and roosevelt says that his greatest achievement is that he saved capitalism uh but our situation today is extremely different and you have with the with a loss of credibility of both democratic institutions and the ruling ideology uh and no real vision ideological vision to take its place this is very fertile ground for proto-fascist demagogues some paul krugman who's uh often very sober had a column yesterday that talked about the united states becoming hungry which is about as close to a modern version of fascism as you can get uh and i and i i i you look at trump i mean i i would just say that that you know going back and looking at those presidential elections that we went through the the the the when this period of history is written i think the greatest tragedy uh is that if the democratic party leadership had not uh fixed uh the primaries against bernie sanders he not only would have won but he would have beaten trump he might have been paralyzed uh probably would be paralyzed in washington with a republican-controlled congress but you wouldn't get the kinds of appointments betsy devos who's privatizing education the destruction of the epa um uh and the you know the the massive tax cuts that uh i will uh extract or uh over a 10-year period mean the federal revenue will decline uh or will lose 1.5 trillion dollars um and i think the ruling elites are well aware that across the political spectrum they've lost credibility um i think that that fear of a loss of credibility manifests itself in what they're doing to critics of capitalism and imperialism who already are pushed off of public broadcasting pushed to the margins of the internet but you see this attempt to attack uh figures such as myself as as agents of a foreign power you have anonymous and shadowy groups prop or not propaganda or not which we still don't know who's behind it trumpeted on the front page of the washington post listing sites including all major left wing sites in the united states counter punch alternet truth out truth dig rural socialist website black agenda report as disseminating russian propaganda although it's completely false and that has triggered google twitter facebook to impose algorithms to divert traffic away from these sites so for instance i write a weekly column every monday for truthdig and you have what they call impressions so if you went to google and you typed in imperialism and i had written a column recently on imperialism it would come up with other articles now it won't because those algorithms serve as filters so the referrals from algorithms on truthdig alone have fallen in the last 12 months from over 700 000 to below 200 000. and alternates traffic is down by 63 and i think that's because the the ruling elites don't have a counter argument anymore and so therefore these critics become more dangerous you couple that with the abolition of net neutrality where you can tier the internet and you have a very effective mechanism by which you can already take marginalized voices and critics and analysis which does not appear on media platforms including public broadcasting which is now a wholly owned subsidiary of the koch brothers and and you further uh diminish its ability to reach a public i mean we sometimes forget in america that if you went back to the 1960s and you looked at public broadcasting you could see noam chomsky who's been blacklisted for years including by my paper the new york times my former paper uh you could see malcolm x james baldwin uh howard zinn ralph nader and those voices have all vanished from the american landscape and what's risen to take its place is uh a kleptocrat a con artist and and and and all of the kleptocrats around him uh who have turbocharged or accelerated the pillage of the nation and i should say the pillage of the very structures of government that are that maintain a capitalist democracy and this of course was an understanding that karl marx had when he wrote about the late stages of capitalism he said there comes a point when capitalists unable to extract profit from an exploited working class that who's had its wages decline i mean wages in the united states are technically they're stagnant but in real terms of course they've declined since the 70s then they start cannibalizing the various systems of the governmental systems that that that make that capitalist democracy possible and that of course if you look at the department of education under betsy devos it's about privatizing public education because the federal government in the united states spends about 63 billion dollars a year on public education and the hedge funds want it and they're going to get it it is about everything is becomes privatized we have our brother eric prince uh arguing now that the war in afghanistan should be privatized seventy percent of u.s intelligence gathering is privatized uh bose allen hamilton for instance where uh edward snowden left uh from uh 99 of its revenue comes from the federal government i teach in a prison every you still have state and federal structures nominally running the prison but internally for-profit corporations have taken over every aspect the commissary the money transfer the phone rates which are astronomical far higher than and this is for me particularly cruel since for most incarcerated parents the only connection they have with their children is through the telephone and now they have email you know absurdly priced emails i think it's 40 cents an email or something uh all sorts of fines that you you if you go to a prison dostoevsky once wrote that if you want to understand the true nature of a society go to a prison and watch what they do to the most vulnerable and now we are seeing corporations uh being lobbied by prison officials in the united states to come back and use bonded labor in the prisons they said you don't need to be in bangladesh and pay 22 or 32 cents an hour you can come to the prison and pay 20. the workers in the if you're in prison and you have a job you're paid 22 cents an hour in the state of new jersey that's 28 a month uh if you're in alabama you're not paid at all and we now have huge corporations mcdonald's for instance makes its uniforms in prison you have huge corporations one million prisoners working in china-like conditions within the american prison system and of course they can't strike they can't complain about their working conditions they're not paid for sick days there's no vacation time obviously no benefits and if they ever cause a problem they're locked in solitary confinement for one or two years um and this is the natural trajectory of where we're headed unless we rise up and stop it and none of the political figures within the united states have any intent of addressing the social inequality which is uh becoming more and more pronounced by the day which has fueled these pathologies and created uh a a situation whereby uh this cabal in essen this cabal of oligarchs and and corporatists have redirected the mechanisms that that once made piecemeal and incremental reform possible towards enriching and empowering themselves and anytime a cabal whether it's monarch fascist communist or corporate seizes power the political system in essence seizes up it doesn't work as it's supposed as it's designed to work it works to to concentrate more and more wealth and power for this cabal and the propaganda that is fed to this disenfranchised uh working class which began under reagan and thatcher is that and of course this is reagan's uh great line government is not the solution government is the problem well government is also the only mechanism by which the citizens can defend themselves from predators from especially corporate predators and they change the narrative to one of your personal identity is under assault they did this thatcher did this in britain and of course we've ended up with brexit and figures like boris johnson and reagan did it in the united states and you have a proliferation now of nihilistic violent acts constant mass shootings and the rise of heavily armed right-wing proto-fascist hate groups who are being increasingly as things deteriorate being given license by the highest levels of the uh federal government by the white house to carry out acts of violence and you watch trump's rhetoric which is an incitement to violence you look at his recent speech to evangelicals uh uh and it you know that's hofstetter's the paranoid style of american politics projecting acts of violence or or saying that they're that their opponents in particular the democratic party intend to carry out violence uh and what i fear is that you know we live in a period at this moment of of relative stability but at that moment that the next crash comes at that moment when finally the dollar is dropped as the reserve currency we have set in place political forces that will create a very frightening dystopia and make america at least as we have known it throughout our lifetimes unrecognizable one has to always be cognizant of the fact that the dna of american society is deeply violent we are a nation founded on genocide and and uh and on on slavery and we believe to this day in violence as a form of purification regeneration through violence we fetishize the guns and the gun culture um the nra which is just a creation of the arms lob of the weapons manufacturers is disseminating assault style weapons throughout the country and rather than rationally respond to this madness our latest solution is to teach put concealed handguns on kindergarten teachers so i i will close by saying that unless and i'm not predicting this but unless the united states builds mass movements that can carry out sustained acts of civil just non-violent civil disobedience such as we saw at standing rock such as you had here in canada with the first nations peoples or the quebec student movement any mechanism to hold uh this slide into corporate tyranny uh will be taken from us uh and um the ripple effect will be you will feel it canada's not immune it won't become uh the problems will never be as pronounced as they are in the united states uh because empires themselves are by nature fragile entities they depend on the extraction of resources abroad the control of foreign labor um whereas canada not being an imperial power is more self-contained but nevertheless uh you you won't be free we saw it we see it with the election of ford you don't have anywhere near the mass shootings we do but you have them um these you have uh uh you know your prime minister is uh very much oh very obama-like in uh and we see it with his with the uh his refusal to stand up to the fossil fuel industry and the tar sands uh and the consequences of that are dangerous i mean the the the the tragedy of obama's election is that uh he came in with a kind of mandate um and he uh perhaps because of political inexperience he had only spent two years in the senate perhaps because of cynicism i don't know he re-empowered these elites by reinflating these financial houses and banks uh which had defrauded uh the american citizen and defrauded institutions uh you know city uh city pension plans were wiped out by 40 percent and nothing was ever done to [Music] to address the crimes that were committed against the victims i didn't even mention climate change um but you throw climate change in there and every climate change report that you read uh has one subtext which is is that it's happening far faster than any of us predicted um and so as i write in the book you know we have to resist um because if we don't resist we can't use the word hope and yet at the same time and perhaps that's our greatest existential crisis we also have to understand how bleak the situation is around us um that there is a moral dimension to resistance uh you know i i fight i don't fight fascists in the end because i'll win i fight fascists because they are fascists um what kant or hannah aaron would have called radical evil forces of thanatos or death as freud would have pointed out and there's very very little time left uh we will stand up to these forces that are disemboweling our nations uh that are destroying our democratic institutions and that have commodified the ecosystem for short-term profit or we will soon have to begin to face the very real possibility of the extinction of the human species we are at a moment in human history this 10 000 year period uh when the climate uh created conditions by which we built human civilizations uh move from several societies to cities um is is rapidly drawing to a close um and to be complacent uh is to be complicit uh i'm not the only person in this room to have children and yes you know we may fail but at least let's rise up so that our own children can look back and say we tried thank you very much [Applause] uh thanks christopher really wonderful book and a stimulating talk as well um so let me explain how this this part of the evening will work um i have uh three or four questions i'll ask of chris to get things going and then you'll see there are two microphones in here one uh each at the front of the room here i'll turn it open to you and you can come down and ask questions of chris i'd ask if you just asked one question per speaker uh that would be ideal and i also have some questions from people who are watching in the um the overflow room around the corner um okay chris so uh america the farewell to is an angry book um it's one that also has a great deal of compassion i think in it for the people that you've met and the dire circumstances that they find themselves in i would like to begin with a question about the political utility of anger particularly as it seems to be anger is one of the defining features of the age that we can refine ourselves in so it can anger be constructive is it useful yes i i i teach in a prison if you don't walk out the door of that prison you're not angry what has been done to these people then you lack compassion augustine said that hope has two beautiful daughters anger and courage anger at the way things are encouraged to see that they don't remain the way they are that's different from hatred but if you can't be angry at what they're doing to the natural world to democratic open societies uh to the poor and to the young i would one of the things that's so heartbreaking and it was something that i constantly ran into reporting this book was the hopelessness of these kids who could if if they were fortunate they got a low-wage job but it wasn't a sustainable income it wasn't a job that offered them any kind of meaningful future it wasn't a job where they felt they were contributing to society and that i think was most heartbreaking to crush the dreams of the young uh in the name of prophet uh and uh you know was is one of the greatest crimes of corporate power um can we talk about american stories and american myths um one thing that's always struck me about that is how persistent some of these myths are uh and one that seems to have undergone like a real revival in recent years is the myth of american exceptionalism and you point out in the book this is one that's shared by liberals and conservatives throughout the united states society so why do you consider the myth american of american exceptions to be such a damaging one a toxic brew right well james baldwin i think uh probably addressed this as well as any american writer and his argument was that the longer essentially the white power structure refused to confront what they had done and who they were the longer they manufactured this foe innocence and goodness and virtue the more monstrous they became and donald trump is a kind of figure that exemplifies this utter inability to be not just self-critical but truthful and american society i mean one of the reasons that corporate power assaults public education and in particular make makes war on the humanities is because when the humanities are taught right they teach you not what to think but how to think they are by nature subversive because you are meant to critique structures of power ask questions that the ruling elites don't want asked and so from every level from the bottom to the top of american society it has become vocational so if you are in a marginal community you are given enough literacy numerical literacy to work in a fast food restaurant or stack shelves in a walmart if you're at princeton and i've taught there and the the biggest major at princeton is computer science which is also true at harvard you are trained vocational you've given vocational training to work at goldman sachs so you become a systems manager at simply a higher level you become a manager who's compensated quite a bit but your job is to maintain the system not to question it so when we had the 2008 crash there was no ability to question the system it was only about re-inflating it as ralph nader pointed out with that kind of money we could have created public banks in every state we could have given them 10 billion dollars each they could have leveraged themselves ten to one and all these people whose mortgages were under water could have been given new mortgages but that that the the the the mandarins in power who come out of these institutions are not even trained to ask those questions and i think what's so frightening about the elites now is that they're utterly unplugged from the real world they don't fly commercial airlines uh they live a writer for the new yorker called they don't even live in america they live in richistan and it's global and yet they have total power so if you read joseph taner's the collapse of complex societies where he talks about how societies collapse he looks at 24 civilizations he said in that final stage the elites retreat into their version of versailles or the forbidden city utterly unaware of what's happening outside the gates and to maintain a level of opulence and hedonism they push a population with diminished resources harder and harder and harder until it until it goes down and that's precisely what's going on uh in this book and in previous books you alluded it uh to earlier today you've been highly critical of christian right united states uh so can you help us understand the seemingly unwavering yet also incredibly hypocritical support that the christian right has for the current incumbent in the white house see i don't look at it as hypocritical uh i i spent two years uh writing that book and i went and like any reporter and that's the only way you understand i think i went to mega church services i went to creationist weekends actually i went i took a course to be certified to teach creationism but it's fascinating because it's in the details that you understand the absurdity of it so according to creationism the account of the creation of the world in genesis is factually true but it does create a problem because god doesn't create a light until the fourth day so our teacher was saying well just tell them that god created a temporary light that's not in genesis but it's it's there that you see uh the the species of magical thinking that is endemic as hannah aaron points out to all forms of totalitarianism these mega church pastors are trumpian they are phenomenally wealthy they pray men make their fortune their own millionaires off of people's despair by promising them that magic jesus will solve all of their problems as long as they keep giving seed gifts and buying prayer cloths and all this kind of stuff they have created a classic system of totalitarian indoctrination where you invite people into the service which has nice music and unlike the presbyterian church there's like comfortable chairs to sit and but then they suck you into what again going back to aaron calls the systems of indoctrination which we don't see so suddenly all of your educational time your leisure time your religious time is devote is is occupied by this church you are assigned a discipler any kind of questioning becomes backsliding and i i read when i was writing this book margaret singer's book called colts in our midst and i really came to believe that this was cultish and i i went in there with the usual prejudices of the liberal christian uh but the more i interviewed these people the more they their stories broke my heart sexual abuse domestic abuse evictions prolonged and chronic underemployment or unemployment splintered families opioid addictions alcoholism and that's why they have this lust for the end times and i went to an end times weekend in detroit it was appropriately located with with tim lahaye and and they have this whole you know the rapture is never in the bible i mean this stuff's just totally invented but i really came to see by being around these people that they're they hate i think the core emotion of this movement is hate they hate the world they hate the real world for almost destroying them and at the end of that book i came to the conclusion that the only way we will break this movement is to reintegrate these people back into the economy to give them stability to give them a sustainable income to give them hope and you you will never talk them out of this belief in fact if you begin to try and challenge them they get incredibly defensive and incredibly angry so trump is a natural uh and you know the sexual proclivities of these mega pastors is right in sync with trump's lifestyle um i mean look at jim and tammy faye baker uh so uh people say it's hypocritical how could trump no no they're it's it's a perfect marriage um they're a political movement they're they're about the prosperity gospel they're not about the gospel they're about their perversion of the gospel they're about praying on people in despair um they are about sacralizing the american empire fusing the iconography and language of american patriotism with a christian religion and we saw that in germany with the german christian church and that's what they are and and my attack on liberals especially liberal christians is that in the name of tolerance they gave these people a credibility they should never have had that was one of my other questions was you know why why do you give liberals such a hard time because they are hypocrites they they want the appearance of morality without actually engaging in a moral struggle they want to posit themselves as the moral center while never taking risks i mean king saw this at the end of the civil rights movement so liberals were willing white liberals in the north were willing to support king's efforts for desegregation but once king called for economic justice and king understood that if there was not economic justice there would never be racial justice the liberals went for the door and uh the the the liberal class um had and chomsky i think has done for me the best job of explaining the role of a liberal class in a capitalist democracy the liberal class functions as a safety valve so that it can ameliorate or adjust the system like roosevelt did it can decry the excesses of the system without ever questioning the system itself but but in exchange for in a in a capitalist democracy in exchange for giving liberals their positions in universities or on the media the quid pro quo is that they discredit radicals they discredit people who question the motives of those who started the war in vietnam or those who started the war in iraq uh and i've been a victim of that i mean i was very outspoken against the war in iraq and uh i was a prime target because i had been the middle east bureau chief for the new york times so actually understood the middle east had spent months of my life in iraq and understood the instrument of war and so by name i was fiercely attacked by the liberal class who were all useful idiots for george bush and because they had to take me down now once the war went bad they were able to do mia culpa's and say well we are we meant well they meant well but it was misguided it was wrong and that that's really mendacious because um they didn't make a mistake they played the role to which they were allotted uh and that's why all of these people who were completely wrong about the war in iraq starting with thomas friedman are still have the purchase that they have because they they played their role very well and uh and and you know in my book death of liberal class i talk a lot about this uh but as i told noam i should have put him in as a co-author because i think my entire understanding of liberal liberalism comes from noam chomsky yeah so this is my last question then so i invite you to start to come down if you have any questions you'd like to ask chris um so the singer-songwriter steve earl often describes himself as a socialist who lives in a country without a viable socialist party and i'm wondering if you feel the same and also what you think would be required to change this now is the creation of a viable socialist party and even remotely likely that the near future the united states it's extremely remote sadly because i believe that if we responded in a rational way to what's happening that would mean a massive jobs program especially targeted at people under the age of 25 a rational health care system for all citizens i know your systems is underfunded by and that's intentional but um you know where uh people had access to good health care without having to have for-profit insurance corporations hold their sick children hostage while they try and bankrupt themselves to save their sons or daughters a guaranteed minimum income reparations for african americans that's very high on my list because it's not only a matter of justice it is a matter of white america coming to grips with what they did and who they are the i mean as john roston saul has often pointed out these trade agreements are really masked they're not really trade agreements they have been used as a subterfuge to create gigantic tax havens for huge financial industries and corporations at the expense of the citizenry to gut all sorts of labor and environmental regulations i'm not against trade agreements i'm against what these uh that the trade the the you know what's what's advertised as trade agreements um the forgiving of student debt i mean it's obscene what we've done to these kids if we began to institute these are all you know socialist i gave a talk at i think it was the university of winnipeg and i finished and in the back row was the economics faculty and before i could begin to answer questions one of the professors stood up and said i just want all the students to know that he's not a marxist he's just a radical keynesian and it turns out they were all marxist which i thought was so healthy you'd never see that in america if you didn't sign on to neoliberal economics you would never get an appointment anywhere um and actually he's right i'm i'm i'm a kind of radical keynesian i mean my idea of socialism comes out of the scandinavian countries in the 1980s and they've had roll backs of course where they eradicated poverty where mentally ill people did not have to sleep on heating grates or were thrown in prison 25 of our prison population has severe mental disorders and i'm in the prison they are drugged with psychotropic drugs all day long they sleep all day um where uh a public school teacher a senior public school teacher would earn as much as a doctor um this is we have created worlds like that um and um that is the only way our society will heal um unfortunately you're right the the left has been destroyed the liberal class has been destroyed um we don't even have a media platform to get there's no debate if you watch american media certainly the electronic media they never debate health care they never allow proponents of single-payer universal on because factually we spend more than any other industrialized country i think it's 18 of gdp and we have the least efficient healthcare service in the world with all the statistics to prove it um but the the for-profit insurance pharmaceutical healthcare they have a lock on what information gets out and what doesn't so with a corroded media platform with the destruction of even the liberal wing within the democratic party with the death of labor unions six percent of the american workforce outside the public sector is even unionized and the union leadership is often completely bankrupt so you saw it with the teachers strike which in oklahoma and other states which is a sign of hope virginia or west virginia and but they defied their own people don't often remember they've defied their own union leadership which call them to sign the contract so if we don't have that kind of movement and we continue to barrel towards the kind of economic collapse that is coming um then we will go the way countries in europe went in the 1930s i mean people if the nazi party in 1928 was in the single digits then you had the 1929 crash you had the social democrats in power but what did they do they catered to the demands of the world banking system imposed punishing austerity measures this was ebert including revoking unemployment insurance it was insane and suicidal and it it it elevated these and and believe me in germany and weimar germany the nazis were as buffoonish as donald trump and that was true also in yugoslavia everybody knew radovan heritage was a nut but they were so angry at the system and they had every right to be angry at the system um and i i don't take trump's very open incitements to violence lightly because i watched slobodan milosevic heritage and others use the same kind of rhetoric in the lead-up to the war in yugoslavia thank you so uh let's open it up to the audience um first question there yeah thank you segal sayway giggle welcome to the grand river watershed um so it's one of the largest watersheds very important in southwestern ontario and a bit of a bellwether so things that we do here have a habit of catching on you know because we're trendy uh we discharged into lake erie and lake erie as far as the great lakes are concerned if you by any measure is a lake in trouble one of the great lakes in trouble so um one of the things that we're considering here with things like the water school for decision makers and whatnot is integrating with a public school curriculum which is then available to any school but creating curriculum and specifically combining indigenous science with modern technology in order to bring the standards and the regulatory framework up to where it needs to be to for the public to fight off predatory development and then integrate that with our legislative framework so my question for you is on your side of the medicine line what's your feel for the willingness or the desire of educators in the public system on the american side to co-create um some new water laws uh for our shared watershed since uh i think it's in the great lakes region there's ontario the province of ontario and like seven states or something that actually maybe could be eight well the public school system in the united states is in deep distress they don't even have basic supplies um teachers have to often out of diminished salaries buy the supplies including toilet paper either send out letters where parents have to send in items like toilet paper for the kids and this is all by design it is about creating charter schools which are it's that stem model uh where it's all about science technology math uh as a way uh to create to slot people into the corporate mechanism so we're very far away i mean much of the textbooks for instance in the united states are controlled by these right-wing entities like texas i mean it's kind of appalling actually what is inside school textbooks in the united states which glorify robert e lee minimize the slavery essentially erase the labor struggles uh and the radical movements and the radical figures that as howardson pointed out opened up democracy um uh so we're we're not anywhere near i mean maybe you'll get there canada has a habit of copying us years later but right now you're in a far healthier situation than we are so one of the things that is proposed that puts us in that healthier situation oh sorry oh sorry just grab grab me afterwards i'm not going anywhere oh that's okay this is the third time i've heard you mr hedges i just want to say once again thank you for being the prophet amos in our midst i much appreciate that very much i do have a question there i'm i take some heart in the 50th anniversary the second resurrection city campaign in the states could you comment on that the 50-year where william barber the second and uh liz theoharis that strikes me as a good step in the right direction yeah you're from the poor people's campaign yeah because they're addressing the issue um i know the democratic party is trying as hard as they can to co-op barber of course which i hope they don't do because the democratic party is as culpable for what's happened is the republican party amen um but i have a 10 i did attend their protests in washington uh and and i i think they're doing heroic work yeah cool thank you hello there um as a recent undergraduate graduate of economics from the waterloo university of waterloo you mentioned about something about um sustainable finance and how it's being or it's not being taught in the harvard and stanford schools um i i specialized in trade and finance the major in economics i'm wondering what you think would be the best education available in sustainable finance it's something that i've looked at and looked into tried tried to find programs in that realm i haven't been able to find anything well the sustainable finance means taxing the rich at 90 percent that's sustainable finance that's what we used to have under eisenhower was 91 for the wealthiest elites uh when i even when i lived in switzerland taxes were about 50 percent but we had a great educational system we had probably the best health care system one of the best health care systems in the world david k johnston has written about this uh you know these large corporations many of them have just orchestrated tax boycotts uh and uh that that is socialism we have to begin to tax the hell out of these people to rebuild our society but no specific programs you have in mind well that's a specific program believe me if goldman sachs had to pay 90 income tax that would and every and exxon mobil and citibank and uh raytheon and everyone else i mean bank of america didn't pay any taxes zero uh they you know the the we can't fund it's got money's got to come from somewhere and of course we have to slash the military i mean the bloated us military is is one of the primary causes of the uh economic decay within the united states yeah well we we beat you qui i mean we we spend a trillion dollars a year on the military uh so i mean that's also characteristic of late empire i mean the late roman empire was trying to fill the 1 million man army but i think i think taxation it's not about a matter you can't teach people how to responsibly manage their money when they don't have any money um and and and the the you know ralph nader is not wrong he calls these supranational global corporations traitors to the nation state and that's what they are and um we are going to rest back control so that we focus not on maximizing profit but on the common good we're all going to go down thank you so before we go to another question in this room i have a question from the overflow room so considering the polarization occurring in the us and also globally what do you foresee happening to our societies and perhaps the second question is the one you can answer in more detail how can we as members of this of the society address this issue i think we have to look to the revolutions in eastern europe which i covered east germany uh the former czechoslovakia romania where large numbers of citizens just took to the streets half a million people every night in venezuela square in prague and i was there i was in the magic lantern theater every night with vaslaval the demonstrations in leipzig um and ending with again a half a million people in alexanderplatz in east berlin um and you know moral force is on our side because internally these people know how gamed rigged and corrupt the system is and as the the theorists of revolution like crane brinton jeffrey davies and others have pointed out and i am talking about revolution although non-violent because revolutions are fundamentally non-violent uh even lenin whose brother was hanged because of an assassination the assassination of alexander ii um even the russian revolution was non-violent in this sense that once significant uh sectors of control uh defect the the government crumbles so for instance when uh the cossacks are sent to crush the bred riots and refuse and join the crowd the tsar's finished he can't even get back he asked to abdicate in a railway carriage on a siding same was true in east germany where honaker sent down an elite paratroop division to fire on the demonstrators in leipzig when the paratroopers got there the local communist authorities refused to deploy them in the streets hanukkah was out in a week and i think the elites are well aware of how discredited they are and that is why they have passed a series of laws including section 1021 of the national defense authorization act in the united states which overturns the 1878 posi commentators act which banned the military from acting as a domestic police force that was actually done under obama i sued him in federal court i won to his chagrin and the chagrin of the nsa and they it's a long story but they appealed and uh they won on appeal by denying me standing not by actually going to trial so uh you have the wholesale surveillance the militarization of police uh the revoking of uh due process i mean 94 percent of the people in our prison system never had a jury trial and hannah erin to go back to hannah aaron again writes about this when she talks about the status of the stateless in europe she herself drip stripped over german citizenship after being held by the gestapo for three weeks and is in france and she said when you have a segment of your population that is stripped of their rights then rights become privileges and you have already created both a legal and a physical mechanism that in a period of unrest means everyone can be stripped of their rights or their privilege and uh they're running scenarios right and left uh pretty cold-blooded scenarios um they are certainly preparing for unrest uh and the way they are repairing for it is the iron boot um so uh we're never going to win the game of violence this is my battle with antifa and the black bloc um who you know you just saw trump refer to antifa which is the idea that antifa is even worthy of mention as a serious counterweight to the state but part of my battle is that they are they are effective only in allowing the power elites to demonize the resistance and to justify more draconian forms of control in the streets they play into the hands of the state but if we were able to build a sustained if we pull those kinds of numbers if we did what the spaniards did we surrounded the congress if if people were able to uh non-violently um essentially put themselves out in the street to discredit there are enough people within the system who who are tasked with defending that system who would not and that's what they fear i mean i spent a lot of time in zuccotti park in occupy and what frightened the elites was the these couples who would come in on the weekend from new jersey with their strollers up that terrified them um and uh they know and and you know the the relationship with the new york city police was quite fascinating to watch because the the actual violence was almost always carried out by we call them the white shirts the officers um but when the white shirts weren't around uh there was quite a bit of uh of uh fraternization between the blue uniform police and the kids in the park uh you saw with the chicago teachers strike that the teachers when they went on strike would the chicago police opened up the precinct houses so that they could use the bathrooms off and often applauded them that terrifies the state that's the way we're going to bring them down i'm not saying we will bring them down but that is the only mechanism by which we will bring them down yes sir okay um forgive the metaphor i'm about to use but after listening to your dress i feel a lot like we're small boats bobbing on a large wave and when you talk about rebellion i wonder if you would address the how this room full of people after we leave and go to our various parking lots go about that whom do we rebel against and how well every community has issues of uh corporate abuse every single one so for instance in denton texas where the city was is near fracking sites and children were getting respiratory and all sorts of other diseases the city voted to ban fracking or mobilized and voted to ban fracking the state legislature passed a bill denying the city the right to ban fracking i mean you can be sure that they're not going to take this lying down they will respond i don't i'm not from waterloo but i can guarantee you that there's stuff going down your railroad tracks that should be blocked uh there are corporations in your midst that are destroying your community i'm just not versed in but it's everywhere well you can't escape it and i think in the end resistance will be local it'll begin local uh i was at standing rock and that was very very powerful and very moving indigenous-led uh it had a deep spiritual element seven months of resistance and this was under obama the state responded with such ferocity and fear over 700 arrests numerous beatings the use of attack dogs spraying using water cannons to spray protesters in subfreezing temperature and the water was often laced with pepper spray constant surveillance overhead you saw them the drones the planes when i got there in november they'd already blocked most of the roads and i had to go all the way around and come in from the other side on these dirt roads but even then i would be stopped and i would be stopped not by law enforcement but by people who were wearing dressed in black wearing kevlar vests carrying long barreled weapons who had no identification they were just private company goons mercenaries and you can be sure that when we begin to resist you'll know that you're having an effect because you will meet that kind of response so i you know local food is an issue anything that you can do to to sever your reliance on corporate power so sustainable agriculture or anything you can do to begin to corporate power i mean that's why you know i became a vegan because the animal agriculture industry many people argue is as destructive maybe more destructive than the fossil fuel industry and it's it's an easy thing for everyone to get up to do and it's also better for your health so uh you know in in both the the minutia of our daily lives as well as the lives of our community we have to be cognizant of what's happening uh and um and we have to organize and you have to organize the you have to build relationships to pit power against power and we have to recognize that those relationships can only be built the way relationships are always built and that's face to face not electronically if you sit alone in front of your computer you know writing screeds on facebook about climate change you are exactly where the corporate powers want you to be alone in your room in front of a screen so this is our last question of the evening oh lucky me um hi chris i've been following you for a while i'm very glad you're here and thank you for your great work um recently i've become quite interested in tipping points um and how did you see that did you see any sort of tipping points in those non-violent revolutions you covered in europe and how they came about well that's a fascinating question because so having covered those revolutions what i learned is that the purported leaders of the revolution spend all of their time scrambling to understand what's happening that when people rise up i mean remember that the demonstrations in leipzig began largely led by lutheran clergy and their one demand was that the government give them legal status and it ended with the destruction of the stasi state and the end of the berlin wall i mean i was in leipzig on the afternoon of november 9th with the leaders of the east german revolution and one of them said to me maybe in a year we'll have free passage back and forth across the berlin wall by seven o'clock that night the berlin wall did not exist as an impediment to human trafficking lenin six weeks before the bolshevik revolution or the russian revolution gives a speech in switzerland and said well you know people my age we won't see the revolution in our lifetime no one knows it's a mis what is the tipping point it's usually something so mundane so banal but it just it pushes a population over the edge and no one can predict it i mean that's where my hope lies i know the tinder is there i don't know what will light it i don't know when it will be lit but it's there and and so i mean what was moving about the revolution in czechoslovakia was the figure of hovel because hovel had been was a non-person in communist czechoslovakia if you wanted to hear hovel you had to listen to voice of america and many of you know the history of hovel and in and out of jail and stuff and he wasn't a very charismatic speaker or you know but he had the moral authority and everyone in czechoslovakia knew it and he had been resisting since charter 77 for a long time at great personal cost and they knew he would not sell them out um you know there were a population is often more cognizant than it appears on the surface so a story i i have told before but in prague that winner there were posters of jan all around the city now jan pollock had been a young charles university student had gone to venezuela square to protest the 1978 1968 uh soviet invasion and an overthrow of dukechek and he lit himself on fire and four days later he died of his burns his funeral which attracted hundreds maybe thousands of students was it was never covered by the state media when he was buried and his grave became a shrine his body was exhumed and his remains were cremated as ashes were given to his mother and she was told she couldn't rebury them a week after the communist government fell ten thousand checks marched to red army square and renamed it jan pollock square mart akubasheva the great singer who sang a prayer for marto which was the anthem of defiance that was broadcast over the airwaves as the soviets invaded once dupe check was overthrown and the pro-soviet regime was installed her entire recording stock was destroyed she was banned from the airwaves and for the intervening years she worked on an assembly line at a toy factory i was in venezuela square with half a million checks when she walked out on the balcony in december it was snowing and she began to sing the prayer for marta and every check in the crowd knew every word that's the power of resistance it has a moral force it is as daniel berrigan once told me when i asked him to define faith it is the belief that the good draws to it the good and empirically everything around us may say otherwise but i believe that that's right that in the end resistance against radical evil is an act of faith it is the belief that the good draws to it the good it is what arden calls that ironic point of light that flashes out wherever the just exchanged their messages that our job even however lonely it may be at that moment is to keep that narrative alive and if we can keep that narrative alive then we can use the word hope [Applause] so by way of closing and thanks let me just just make one or two points uh one uh through 13 or so books and now the last 90 minutes we know what makes chris hedges chris hedges and we've now had in this region and at cg and all of you in the overflow room speaking of electronic communication and on the web a sense of what the power of the argument is and in my sense it is that chris brings us the power of observation of the journalist and combines that with the breadth and depth and analysis of the philosopher and historian and in the process sober sobers us up a lot in fact in his most recent book by all means please buy it we have a reception and signing ceremony outside uh the chapters have such since scintillating titles as heroin hate sadism decay there's even a chapter called freedom which is actually all about the jailing system in the u.s but through it all there's also as we saw in the question and answer and the speech hope that there's things we can do both locally and nationally and globally that there are systems out there and that they're not all necessarily radical systems the scandinavian model which in some senses you highlighted has been with us as a social democratic model for a good century or so and so although it might seem dark and it might seem as if canada's just behind the us in these things the fact is there's also hope left to to take care of some of these chapter titles uh before they become reality uh finally i thought in the last answer chris reminded us that as in everything else in life um in revolution two timing is everything and we don't always get it right and we can't predict it but thank you chris uh thank you darren malloy thank you david worsley always a pleasure to work with wordsworth books here at cg thank you all for joining uh let me also say before we break that this is you've you've got us off chris to a great start we usually begin our programs at cg the public ones in september but you've beaten us again timing uh by a week and and and given us a houseful show um october 17 by the way we're showing a film here called human wave which is a film by ai weiwei on on migration and refugees and all of that and it too is uh promises to be an evening to remember but for this evening thank you again chris thank you all for joining and have a great evening [Music] you

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Length: 90min 29sec (5429 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 01 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/BravoFoxtrotDelta]

I believe that's right, that in the end, resistance against radical evil is an act of faith, it is the belief that the good draws to it the good... Our job, however lonely it may be at that moment, is to keep that narrative alive. And if we can keep that narrative alive, then we can use the word 'hope.'

• Hedges, ftv, last minute or so of his response to the final question.

The whole thing is well worth the watching.