Chris Hedges on Biden vs. Trump, Bernie Sanders, Corporate Media, Assange & State of the Left

[Music] thank you guys for tuning in and welcome to another episode of the source where we interview investigative journalists former insiders or whistleblowers my name is Anne Rosa and today I'll be talking to best-selling author and Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Chris Hedges Chris's latest book is called America the farewell tour Chris thank you so much for your time sure you just told me off-camera that you're based in Princeton New Jersey could you talk about how the general atmosphere is there at the moment during covert 19 and also how you are holding up personally at this time well since I'm reading a book and since I just got fired from TruthDig along with the rest of the staff for going on strike it doesn't actually affect my life purse my work life personally because this is what I would be doing every day have a deadline in November Princeton which is a university town is taking the kovat 19 very seriously but anecdotally it's clear that the United States is in chaos in terms of their inability to handle the virus there are lack of preparedness there lack of coordination it's it's just a disaster I have had three close friends who have had kovat 19:1 Joe Sacco the great cartoonist was quite ill thankfully he's much better they were never tested one of them was a doctor they were never tested it's clear that the priority among the ruling elites in the United States is to reopen the economy no matter what which means that the virus will just come in wave after wave cluster after cluster the capitalists served quite the global capitalists are quite prepared to sacrifice unnecessarily large numbers of people in order to get the economy moving again it's it's really appalling the reaction by the Congress and the ruling political elites has been to throw you know a $1,500 check at people most most people haven't even gotten it prolong unemployment benefits by a couple months again the system's crash people haven't who have applied for unemployment benefits haven't gotten it and then just leave them hanging while at the same time bailing out the cruise industry and the the airline industry and it's just exposes the internal rot the political rot of the infrastructure rot within the United States that many of us including myself have been writing about for a long time I want to dive into accord 90 and other issues later on this interview so for our European viewers that do not know about your personal journey I want to talk about this at this time you spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America the Middle East Africa the Balkans all in the hall you've reported from in more than 50 countries for mainstream outlets including the New York Times you were part of the New York Times team of reporters that was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for your global coverage on terrorism talk about your personal journey the lessons you were able draw from it and then the last part of the question why you left in New York Times well I began as a freelance reporter in Central America I covered the war in El Salvador for five years and as you pointed out spent 20 years overseas 15 of them with the New York Times mostly in conflicts I was seven years in the Middle East I was the Middle East bureau chief for the New York Times I covered the war in the former Yugoslavia and Kosovo I was the Balkan bureau chief for the New York Times always in places where there was tremendous oppression often violence months of my life in Gaza I'm an Arabic speaker and that was my career I came back to the United States and was very vocal in my denunciations of the call to invade Iraq for all of the now obviously I'd spent you know months and months in Iraq I knew the Middle East I knew the fiasco that this would engender not to mention the incredible human cost of these endless wars and for that I was eventually booed off of a commencement stage giving a commencement address which the trash talk FoxNews right-wing media picked up rush limbaugh and stuff and the paper was pressured to respond and they issued me a formal written reprimand for quote-unquote impugning the impartiality of the New York Times and telling me that I was not allowed to speak out about the war and that's under or guilt so reunion so you give the employee the reprimand and then under guild rules if the employee violates that reprimand they can be fired so I left the paper before they fired me because I wasn't gonna stop speaking about the war I'm gonna be melodramatic but I had people I cared about in places like Iraq who I knew would not survive and indeed they did not and I felt I had a kind of moral obligation to especially as an Arabist especially as somebody who came out of the region to speak out against what I think is the probably the greatest strategic blunder in American history a lot of European viewers I'm talking about the general population do not watch independent mute independent media outlets and for example one of the leading newspaper called a zoo tight society in Germany has even a cooperation with the New York Times where they publish special editions in cooperation with the New York Times talk about the internal workings of the New York Times and also about the general perception your perception of the mainstream media in Germany and what European viewers should be very about when they consume the information from corporate media outlets well having worked for many years for you know probably America's premier elitist publication the New York Times should you know begin by saying that I read the New York Times every I listen to BBC every day and yet of course I'm as somebody who comes out of that environment acutely aware of their deficiencies the New York Times can do and has done good investigative journalism it remains rooted and verifiable fact but it also caters to both the financial and the power elites those on whom they depend for money ie through advertising and access accesses of primary importance to a publication like the New York Times and so when I was overseas in places like El Salvador I wasn't working for the New York Times when I covered the war in Salvador but this would be a good example that certainly was in the Middle East you would write a story off the ground that often contradicted the official narrative coming out of Washington and the response of a paper like the New York Times is to then interview policymakers and give that their version which was untrue let's be honest equal play you know equal length equal play within the paper so the readers could believe what they wanted to believe this was classic and for those of us especially you covered conflicts this was during the Reagan administration you know Salvador or who were in Israel covering the Israeli atrocities and war crimes against Gaza the Palestinians in Gaza this was classic I mean one of the one of the tricks that and tricks is probably the right word The Times would use when you reported atrocities out of Gaza is every other paragraph getting a response from the IDF the Israeli Defense Force spokesperson in Jerusalem even though they weren't in Gaza and so you know Achmed would be describing how the Israeli soldiers obliterated their house and shot their children when they ran outside a rather common occurrence in Gaza and then you'd have a paragraph from the IDF spokesman saying it's completely untrue and it's not verified and Achmed and with the kind of racial prejudice I think we can't excuse me we can't underestimate and I know this because I covered wars such as the Wars in Central America or the conflicts in the Middle East I covered the civil war in the Sudan Yemen Algeria and when people of color are dying and I noted I saw this when I got to Yugoslavia because they were white there's just far more concern on the part of white primarily white readers in the United States so the paleontology ins were just discredited from the start and also because of the very fierce and decades-long attempt to vilify and discredit the Palestinian people on the part of Israel the Israel lobby and and their supporters primarily in the United States so yeah The Times focuses this is a number they use on the top 30 million wage earners in the United States that's why their lifestyle sections are always about you know the struggles of maintaining your second house and the Hamptons or lifestyles that neither you nor I nor probably anyone watching this show lead so yeah that's that's that's it but we should be clear that the media landscape since I began in the 1980s has degraded tremendously especially within commercial broadcasting so you used to have a handful I don't know what it was like in Germany of main channels with a very boring middle-of-the-road presenter who was quote-unquote impartial or neutral which is that is just was a kind of way that they used to give themselves credibility and attract a wider audience that all broke down with the 24-hour news cable operations and the rise of partisan news outlets like Fox News so everybody's become partisan CNN's become partisan MSM MSNBC becomes partisan I don't think MSNBC is any better than Fox News and it's it's like what Orwell said you're three minutes of hate what they do now is rather than preach to reach a very broad audience they focus on a particular segment if you're watching MSNBC that's that would be a you know kind of Democrat with a big D a Democratic Party if if you're watching fox or CNN would be the same and it's really about selling hate and vitriol and and and also turning politics into a kind of sports event if you look at the way they set up the their roundtables it's their host with three or four commentators who can never come to agreement and always fight over stupid and inane things it's just like the same thing we do and they do you know a football game it's exactly the same that looks the same with the scores posted behind this it's really burlesque and very frightening because it's not news it's entertainment and it masks the fact that on almost all the major issues the two ruling parties in the United States whether that's trade agreements imperial war the security and surveillance apparatus are in complete and total agreement what they argue about is what Freud called the narcissism of minor difference those are largely cultural issues which I'm not dismissing them they're important but they're they're not politics that's kind of anti politics so yeah the media landscape has deteriorated markedly I mean however flawed it was and it was always flawed when I was covering the wars in Latin America the major networks all had bureaus and they had producers and camera people and reporters and they went out and did a three to five minute piece of course they liked the bangbang stuff you know they and it wasn't into nuance or complexity in any way but at least it was still a form of journalism that's all vanished why is alternative media important well alternative media has always been important because they're freed from commercial restraint and so they often shame the traditional press into doing their jobs that's precisely what WikiLeaks dig you know why did Derek Spiegel and Guardian and The New York Times publish the cables that were courageously released by Chelsea Manning or later the Podesta emails it's because if they didn't they knew the alternative press would and would expose them for who they are what they did of course as soon as they used that material was turned with a with a vengeance upon Julian Assange who was a friend of mine and who I admire immensely and and were complicit in the character assassination that made it possible for the global security state to destroy him and and now attempt to extradite him to the United States where he will be charged under the Espionage Act which is the equivalent of our British foreign Secrets Act it was passed in 1917 by Woodrow Wilson and it's it was used to prosecute people who gave classified or secret information to a foreign enemy well Julian Assange is not an American citizen WikiLeaks is not a us-based publication it's a complete misuse of the Espionage Act but is an yet one more example of a kind of breakdown of the rule of law corruption of the rule of law that is endemic now with and used by these global corporate elites and of course the whole trial in Belmarsh is farcical the judge is openly prejudicial you know prejudiced against Assange and his defense team and ignoring I think it's though I can remember the 1993 extradition Act which prohibits extradition for political famine so it's all it's all part of the pretense of the rule of law which gets into a whole other issue I mean the breakdown of the rule of law which is quite extreme now within the United States a lot of European viewers are watching the US election very closely because what is the Sun in the US whether it's NATO policies towards nuclear-armed States just Russia or whether it's escalating with Iran and we saw how the you invasion in Iraq where the basis for the refugee crisis which get a lot a lot of fuel to the fire to the far-right and even things like the United States pressuring other countries such as Germany to increase their military spending all of this affects all of the actions of the US affects European countries so with that concept context which candidate do you think Trump or Biden will be more favorable if they come into power towards European perspective the the whole project of open hostility with Russia is a Democratic Party project for two reasons although Trump despite his rhetoric hasn't been very good towards Russia and that's because US policy towards Russia is driven by the arms industry remember that after the fall of the Berlin Wall I was there actually I was in Berlin I was in staying his rights are off I was there two weeks before the wall fell so I was in Leipzig every day and then went on and did the revolutions in Czechoslovakia Romania but so after the war fell there was a promise made to Gorbachev that NATO would not extend beyond a unified Germany well there were gigantic arms markets in Eastern Europe that if those countries became part of NATO would make and are making billions and billions of dollars to reconfigure those military those militaries into into NATO make them NATO compatible and that's precisely what's happened all the way up to Russia's border and then you have the demonization of Russia is used by the Democratic Party as a way not to address or accept their own responsibility for the deindustrialization and offshoring of jobs that have hollowed the United States out from the inside turned most of our cities into industrial wastelands thrusts hundreds of thousands of people out of work that's it that was a Democratic Party pride was a bipartisan project but very actively a democratic party project and so Russia is used also you know there's some surd idea that Russia stole the election is a way for the Democratic Party and Biden was one of the major architects of all this including the security the mass and Karsa the mass incarceration we have 25 percent of the world's prison population we are 5% of the world's population almost all these people are poor people of color from these d industrialized urban areas what Malcolm X called our internal colonies and it is really lethal police terror and I don't use that word lightly coupled with mass incarceration that is the primary form of social control all this the 1994 omnibus crime bill all this came with Biden and Clinton Biden was used to go around bragging about how how he had expanded the death penalty crimes from a handful to I think 50 or I think they're up to 90 now so the policies towards Russia will become more aggressive under the Democrats ironically than Trump although the actual mechanics of what's happening visa V Russia won't change dramatically because that's not being run by Trump that's being run by the defense contractors who actually set the policy visa vie NATO there's a huge debate taking place on the Left even European viewers are watching this and it's between boarding for Joe Biden or boarding for a dong Trump who is a lesser evil for example Nam Chomsky has repeatedly stated that big small differences in huge power can have large effects and with that I'm trying to say that he thinks that Joe Biden is the lesser evil because there is more channels available to the public to influence policy under a Biden presidency Biden signed the Iran deal which under Obama and even things like that trumped it was not done under the obama administration which includes the arms treaty INF which was signed to limit nuclear weapons with the ranges of 500 to 5,500 kilometers and we also saw the complete dissolution and abolishing of the climate change treaty how do you see this do you think that biden given this track record that I mentioned is a better president than Donald Trump or do you view them as being part of the same point look the the ruling elites made it very clear during the election and there were a series of articles in The New York Times where they stated this that if primarily Sanders but war in our Sanders but primarily Sanders was the Democratic Party nominee they would vote for Donald Trump this whole notion of the least worst only applies to us not to them they ensure that whatever candidate is in there Trump Hillary Clinton Barack Obama protects the interests of the global oligarchic elites and corporate power of course they prefer Biden just as they preferred Clinton Trump is patently inept and a narcissist and you know an embarrassment to the Empire but they know full well that the maintenance of empire will be carried out whether it is Trump or Biden I of course known Chomsky is and I know Noam and like Noam very much he is our most important intellectual but he has for you know always repeated this mantra of voting for the least worst in fact what that has done in terms of those of us who care about an open society and equality and racial justice has rendered or neutered our effectiveness because the Democratic Party knows full well that it doesn't matter what they do we will comply we will surrender whatever values we have you know the whole anti-war movement which I was part of collapsed once Kerry ran was the Democratic nominee because we had to get Kerry elected and so if you don't put pit power against power if you don't put pressures on the center of power you just move irrevocably further and further to the right I mean the Democratic Party in Europe would be considered a far-right party and this is the problem that that that I think that the Democratic Party or those who care about the working-class within the Democratic Party should have walked out of the party when Bill Clinton signed NAFTA in 1994 which was the greatest betrayal of the American working class since the passage of the 1948 taft-hartley Act so we didn't we didn't stand with a working class we betrayed the working class we busy ourselves with kind of boutique activism inclusiveness and multiculturalism I'm not in denying that that's all important it is important that people have rights whether that's gender rights or anything else but you can't divorce that from economic justice and so now you have given rise to these proto-fascist forces gathering around Trump largely comprised of a betrayed white working-class and they have been betrayed and their vitriol is especially fierce towards the Democratic Party which traditionally had at least taken into account their interests and so that's the problem so if you look at it in the short term would Biden be better than then Trump yeah but the fact is the mess we've gotten into is because progressives and the left didn't stand with the working class as it was being decimated and that working class found its voice in a demagogue like Trump and that isn't going to change I mean Trump is the symptom Trump is not the disease I saw that in the former Yugoslavia when we vomited up these figures like Radovan CAIR addiction Slobodan Milosevic and Franjo Tudjman that's what happens when society sees up and a cabal takes power you can go back and look at vimar exactly the same kind of situation I'm not saying that Trump is Hitler or the Nazi is that it's none but there are lessons to be learned from a dysfunctional decayed society and everybody forgets which is also true in the United States that the erosion of the rule of law in Germany was carried out by Ebert because of the negative majorities within the Reichstag the inability to function to the legislative process didn't function Ebert had decree after decree after decree well this also happened in the United States and of course it's what the Nazis used to consolidate power but they weren't the first to use it it had been normalized so the the problem is that the the political system no longer functions it's dominated by corporate money the legislation is written by corporate lobbyists including the latest quote-unquote stimulus package was directed and written by corporate lobbyists and the whole consent of the governed is a joke politicians need such massive amounts of money in order to run and stay in office where are they going to get it it's just a form of legalized bribery and so the danger and unknown is not doing this but the danger with reducing it to who do you vote for is to personalize a dysfunctional political system and I you know I have two disagreements with Noam and one is on this mantra of the least worst which just frankly hasn't worked and of course I'm a strong supporter of the BDS movement which he is not but otherwise I admire him immensely I want to talk about the state of the left and break it down into two parts part number one is Bernie Sanders had an experience in 2016 when he was sidelined which weaken leaks revealed by the shenanigans of the DNC instead he went on knowing full well and I talked to Glenn Greenwald about this and he was very adamant about push about talking about this point that he knew full well what the mainstream corporate billionaire media class would do which you alluded to earlier in our interview and he also knew what how the establishment would attack him in 2020 and yet he decided to Bernie Sanders decided to try to influence change within the Democratic apparatus how do you see you Bernie Sanders is he part of parcel some criticism as well or should we just attribute to external factors like the media and the DNC so that's part one of the question part two of the question is a recent discussion edit with Paul Jay and Paul Jay said the problem with the left today is that we don't have a vision when we talk about Medicare for all well we have Medicare for all in Canada and in Germany but they're still child poverty in both of these countries I know from Germany there's a huge sector of people who get play paid very minimum wages it's called the minimum wage sector as they say it so the let me summarize the two questions number one do you think Bernie Sanders is should receive some criticism and part two do you think left intellectuals of the left overall has failed to provide a vision to the population so in 2016 I did an event with Bernie Sanders and Bill McKibben and Iommi Klein and the socialist City Councilwoman from Seattle sha Misawa and Shama pushed Bernie before the event I was there as to why he wouldn't run as an independent arguing correctly that we were never going to build an effective political movement in an election cycle and we were not going to build it within the confines of the Democratic Party Sanders answer was that he didn't want to become Ralph Nader what did that mean what does it mean could you just mention who Roth - could you just mention who the Roth mirrors for our young viewers and right Ralph Nader is a was a great consumer advocate who exposed corporate power the misuse of corporate power wrote a series of he was never in office but he built a very powerful Senate grassroots movement wrote most of our major environmental law in the mine and Safety Act the Clean Water Act these in twenty four pieces of legislation protect workers in the environment got a liberal wing of the Democratic Party to pass it through and make it law and then of course with a corporate coup d'etat to quote John Ralston Saul that took over American politics the liberal wing of the Democratic Party was destroyed it existed only in rhetoric not in actuality Nader ran for president several times he actually did quite well in 2000 getting almost five percent of the vote the democratic party had to destroy him they were terrified I was Nader speechwriter and they did they turned him into a pariah and that's what Sanders meant he knew the Democratic Party machine would destroy him they would mount an intensive campaign to deny him his Senate seat that's you know what they did to McGovern people forget George McGovern our last the last Democratic nominee to take on the military-industrial establishment he took on the animal agriculture industry and I would tell all your viewers to become vegan if they care about climate change which is why I became vegan and and held hearings about the carcinogens and the danger of animal-based products as the mainstay of your diet and they they they pushed him out of his Senate seat in South Dakota so that Bernie knew what they would do and he wasn't wrong and so he I think naively believed that in the period between 2060 and 2020 he would be a loyal party member which he was he was endorsing all sorts of neoliberal Democratic candidates who espoused economic positions that he claims to be dead set against and of course after the nomination when many of his people walked out of the I was at in Philadelphia with Cornel West we were in a March with homeless people several thousand homeless people surrounding the Democratic National Convention Center appropriately named the Wells Fargo Center and so Cornell said quite pressingly to me you know Bernie missed his historical moment Bernie should have walked out and he should have spent the intervening years building a third party movement would he have succeeded I mean having worked with Ralph and seeing how dirty they play probably not but he he would have been able to begin to build something instead he he became a tool of the Democratic Party which of course on the eve of the South Carolina was the south of North Carolina primary under Barack Obama's direction turned on him he knew the dirty tricks as you pointed out the whole Democratic National Committee was fixed against him in 2016 and yet he said nothing it was left Donna Brazile who had been the you know to expose it and and I think it was political cowardice and now of course he's telling his supporters to vote for Biden I don't think he was so yeah I think it was a miscalculation a belief that somehow the Democratic Party established would ever allow him to be the nominee and as as he was surging at the beginning they made it clear what they would do he was never going to get enough votes 1900 something on the first round and in the second round you have quote-unquote super-delegates I think there's 700 of them who are appointed by the party they're all lobbyists and party officials so it was always fixed and Bernie just wanted to be part of the club I mean one of the reasons Bernie didn't go after Biden on the campaign trail is because socially especially his wife Jane Sanders they're friends with the Biden's and so yeah I think Bernie failed and we don't have any time left I mean because of climate change things are deteriorating at a rate that even climate scientists never predicted we can't fool around do we vote for Biden do we vote for Trump given the ecocide that is before us and the economic devastation that is you know weeks and months away these kinds of questions are kind of absurd because we yeah we have to begin to do what extinction rebellion is doing which is shut the damn system down and even that may not work and the second part of the question do you think the left has also generally failed to paint a vision of the future and that focused so strongly on certain issues it does seem that when we talk within the left there's a lot of criticism of water Society and rightfully so but there's no way to go forward do you think that's been the case with the left well I think the left in Europe and the left in the United States are two different entities the left in Europe and you still have communist parties in Europe fairly strong in France and Italy you have the Workers Party I'm not an expert on Germany and I'm not gonna pretend that but you do have that what does they pull about what 5% the Labour Party I mean I think the United States is in far worse shape in Europe we had a very powerful socialist movement which was just utterly decimated and destroyed over the last century the whole Red Scare the red-baiting until that you know what what constituted the American left was essentially the Cold War liberal you know the the person who was kind of liberal on social values but hawkish in terms of defense and Empire and if you weren't if he didn't fit within that paradigm you were shut out you still are shut out that's why Chomsky shut out Chomsky's given no platform when I worked at the New York Times the the the editor had actually banned trance Keys name from even even wet if it had something to do with linguistics from the newspaper so there is no American left the European left is anemic and weak but it's far healthier than where we are and that's what's so frightening because as we now head towards an economic decline that will certainly rival what we saw in the 1930s we don't have those forces that we had in the 1930s including the Communist Party which gets written out of American history that was able to build workers and into militant unions and fight back and it's all gone and and of course that empowers the very forces within the society that under the rubric of the quantum a kind of Christianized fascism will take power people forget that Trump has an ideological void Trump doesn't believe in anything you know he's just a narcissist but that ideological vacuum has been filled by the Christian fascists that's Pence that's Pompeyo that's Barr that's Betsy DeVos and there was an article in The New York Times a couple weeks ago about Betsy DeVos his brother eric prince who founded black water who uses these for-profit mercenaries he was caught infiltrating like teachers unions in the United States I mean that's kind of our equivalent of the brown shirts and I wrote a book on the Christian Right called American fascists the Christian Right and the war on America and I did not use the word fascist lightly especially since I graduated from Harvard Divinity School and grew up in the church there heretics they've fused the iconography and language of American nationality with a Christian religion just as the German Christian Church did under the Nazis and in greet indeed my great mentor at Harvard James Luther Adams was in Germany in 1935 in 1936 until he was expelled by the Gestapo working with a confessing Church and saw long before any of us did the eerie and frightening similarities between the Christian Right and German Christian Church which of course was outlawed in Germany after the war so America is in in serious serious trouble because of the the seizure of power by corporate interests the evisceration of our civil liberties under judicial Fiat so you know you have this largely through terrorism laws that have been set up initially to go after Muslims who have been seriously persecuted in the United States but then are then used against everybody environmental activists animal rights act of anybody and a country where the pretense of democratic participation is rapidly being replaced by you know the heel of the boot it's it's especially if you go into poor areas of the United States it's very frightening and very ugly I mean we have militarized police in Kevlar vests a thousand citizens in the United States are killed not to mention hundreds more shot and wounded by police every year almost all of them are unarmed this is not reported I mean the the poor in the United States who now constitute statistically half the country live in either poverty or near poverty have been rendered invisible by corporate media nobody sees their I mean I did a book with Joe Sacco we spent two years on it called days of destruction days of revolt written out of the poorest pockets of the United States including places like Pine Ridge South Dakota and Indian Reservation where the average life expectancy for a male is 48 that's the lowest in the Western Hemisphere outside of Haiti and where 60% of the people don't have running water this is the United States it's not the United States the corporate media which seeks advertising dollars and is and of course is dominated by huge corporations like Viacom and generally shows to the American public but but having traveled around this country for all of my books I report on all my books it it is it you know there are huge sections of the United States that might as well be the developing world with those disparities but where I used to live in Latin America I used to live in miraflores and lima peru so which is you know villas that look like it could be in miami except the walls are higher and they have concertina wire on them and then ten blocks away families are been squatting in hovels next to open sewers i mean that's what the United States is now it's not what we're becoming it's what we are I want to move to the last question and I want to focus on a solution aspect you mentioned this poverty in the different regions of the United States and one of the questions that I've asked myself is why do so many people not vote for example I think the United States it's somewhere between 40 to 45 percent of people in Germany it's also between two eighty thirty person people why it's not just about voting why don't they become active and go on the streets and then if I ask these questions and follow that line of logic line of questioning I also ask myself why are people not consuming independent media a let alone mainstream media like people are not consuming as much as information and then the conclusion that I arrived it arrived at is that it's due to the hamster wheel their economic system that we're part of which I've talked to certain psychologists and there they have told me when people under high stress levels for a prolonged period of time what eventually happens is that the Crick critical faculties which are which are needed to process information away in information they get shut down because you're just taking about surviving and thinking about having food in your fridge or paying your insurance bills and therefore now my question comes what do you think of a basic income even within a capitalist system would that not just give some breathing room to people to consume information politically participate and build a movement from there on do you think this could be a viable solution within the capitalist system if not what other solutions do you think would be realistic within the circumstance that we are in well I mean you're right and and part of it is exhaustion I mean people are working 70 hours a week nobody works harder than the poor Barbara Ehrenreich calls being poor in the United States remember we don't have health insurance we don't have all sorts of safety nets that still exist within Europe is it's just one long emergency there's that and the political apathy is due also to the fact that nothing changes a Democrat Republican it doesn't make any difference if you're part of the working poor nobody's gonna disarm the police nobody's gonna give you a clean functioning safe public school and neighborhood it doesn't matter they're not wrong and you're right I think it's the largest voting block a hundred million people don't vote but they've figured out as emma golden said that if voting was that effective it would be illegal so you know the left why don't people consume i mean people in order to find another narrative and hear other facts and consume alternative media you have to be proactive those people are too exhausted to be proactive they they drop in front of their screens or their you know computers or televisions and consume the electronic hallucinations corporate power feeds them and that's bread and circus i studied classics it's it's all what the arena was and it's why writers like cicero who cared about civic society invade against the bread and circus in the arenas because he saw how a beleaguered population remember there were vast economic disparities in the late roman empire between the oligarchs nervous citizenry he saw how the citizenry invested their emotional intellectual life in the in the in violence and the tawdry and the salacious and that's exactly what's happened so you know what is the response it is to recover a new militancy where we recognize that our planet will not be saved and our democracy will not be restored through existing political systems and an extinction rebellion has it right it's why I've supported them and indeed participated in their activities we shut down the street in front of the New York Stock Exchange last fall I has to be prolonged it has to be sustained it has to have larger numbers but we have to begin to do you know what indigenous peoples did at Standing Rock what the Quebec student movement did a few years ago that's our only hope we have seen popular uprisings in in in Chile and Spain and Lebanon but that that's that's the only mechanism left I don't know if it's gonna succeed but I can tell you voting for Joe Biden definitely ain't gonna succeed Chris Hedges Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and best-selling author thank you so much for your time thank you and thank you guys to tuning in today don't forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel and to do it so we can continue to produce a dependent and non profit news and analysis I'm your host and Rosa see you guys next time [Music] you [Music]

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Id: elJwNiAgcmA

Length: 45min 49sec (2749 seconds)

Published: Tue May 05 2020