The Collapse of the American Empire - Lecture Featuring Chris Hedges

I [Music] ladies and gentlemen good evening and thank you for bringing something like Clement weather with you for the first time in well rather a while my name is David where's Lee the co-owner of Wordsworth books in Waterloo I would like to acknowledge that we are on the traditional territory of the Otter water on an ashabi and hoda no Shani people's the center for international governance innovation is situated on the hall to attract that the land proposed promised right to the Six Nations that includes six miles on each side the Red River any proper noun mistakes and that were entirely my own along with CG the center for international governance innovation Wordsworth is thrilled and honored to welcome Chris Hedges to Waterloo this evening I'd like to thank the CG staff in particular Andrea Harding and Bryan Atchison for their help in putting all of this together for getting all of the details right and for crossing all of the crossing all of the eyes and T's penguin Random House of Canada for all looking a whole bunch of unpaid invoices from Wordsworth and who's still getting copies of America the failed war tour to to us this evening Thank You pentagram thank you paying with Random House C G's mandate focuses on the among many other things realized the global economy global security and politics international law when we heard from the aforementioned penguin Random House the Christmas tour in Canada we asked the CG would co-host a possible book launch given the content of the new book there is well simply not a better partner or venue Chris Hedges is the author of 13 books username Minister he was a foreign correspondent for about 20 years reporting from all over the world he is a columnist for the progressive news site TruthDig wish which in addition to this is required reading right from the first book war is a force that gives us me Chris Hedges has established himself as a progressive voice in American discourse with a reporter's eye for story the evocative with the evocative and fluid nature of his writing and his singular ability to bring politics into the home into the street at a time when mere facts are in dispute to say nothing of political solutions and the mechanics to bring them to the fore we need both infrastructure like CG and voices like Chris Hedges more than ever Chris will be up here in a mere moment he will be joined a little bit later by Darren Malloy Darren is the chair of the history department at Wilfrid Laurier University and he teaches widely on American history with a particular interest in the US since the end of the Second World War Darren has written three books including the just-released enemies of the state the radical right in America from FDR to Trump that is my time ladies and gentlemen please welcome Chris Hedges thank you I am gonna 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 Donald Trump is the result of a long process of decay of democratic institutions 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 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 sacra lies 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 you 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 in 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 denuded and scarred Appalachian Mountains where the tops blown off and the trees gone and 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 John Ralston saw I had dinner with last night in Toronto talks about corporate coup d'etat in slow motion and that's a phrase I often use because I think it's correct we saw and it hardly unique to the United States an assault by global corporations beginning in particular in the early 1970s to roll back with 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's 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 democra capitalism what we call neoliberalism taking control of media platforms and most importantly capturing screw corporate money our two major political parties we only really at this point in America have one political party it's called a corporate party you have the right wing of the corporate party promoting the kind of nativism and Islamophobia and demonization of undocumented workers and then you have the the court of more enlightened wing of the corporate party 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 and I spent a lot of time in death of the little 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 anti-war sentiment and then destroyed afterwards and the Palmer Raids and the Red Scare and and but Clinton we had we had we had a couple resurgence as one being with the 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 NAFTA or the 1994 omnibus crime bill which exploded our prison population from 700,000 to two million or the deregulation of the FCC which now allows about five or six corporations to control what 90% of Americans watch or listen to glass-steagall and canter did not have a banking crisis because Creta 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 it except was accelerated by the betrayal of the Democratic Party 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 fund raising parity with the Republicans and when Barack Obama ran for president in 2008 he actually got more corporate money than his rival his Republican rivals so this the the devastation was accelerated the deindustrialization was Excel raided 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 nickel-and-dime calls the plight of the working poor in the United States one long emergency at the same time we became captive to or entertainment let's say seeped into every aspect of American life including of course info entertainment but also in terms of politics politicians surrounded themselves with very skillful public relations mandarins who created fictional personalities if you remember you know George Bush is somebody'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 political rhetoric became almost childlike so cliche ridden so slogan ridden as to be utterly devoid of content and what we watched in this last presidential election with Trump and Trump of course himself is is a is a menu for 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 numerous bankruptcies defrauding contractors and creditors and and you when you watch the Muller investigation it's very clear that what they are what they have on Trump is not any serious collusion with Russia or Russia to not steal our elections but dirty money from Russian oligarchs and the Russian mob that Trump laundered I hear through Cypriot banks 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 vulgarity all of this stuff for a population that has largely 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 it 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 airtime of Bernie Sanders because Trump was unpredictable mercurial entertaining in a way that Sanders wasn't and the the since the election as the head of CBS and others sucker 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 accelerates the assault against American democracy it is all gossip from porn stars or the lawyers of porn stars who want to run for president or former reality television personality like Omarosa or endless speculation about you know what a member of the power league will or won't do and meanwhile the plight of the vast majority of Americans goes unrecognized and unreported and 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 so that income disparity is now 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 though we always have models or writers do I do certainly models for books when I did days of destruction days revolt the with Joe Sacco the model was let us now praise famous men with Walker Evans taking the photographs and James Agee writing the book this book it was a meal Durkheim study of suicide that he published in the late nineteenth 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 is plagued by an opioid epidemic 76,000 Americans died of overdoses last year and and that's and many of them many many thousands more came 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 originally had many of its major plants now it's all they all moved to Monterrey Mexico where they're paying Mexican workers $3 an hour without benefits and so these old UAW auto workers who made 25 or $30 an hour had pension plans had medical benefits had a union to to provide or protect them from corporate abuse they they lost their jobs all of them 25,000 of them and the city went into freefall so in Anderson looks like many of the d 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 I mean 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 suffering pain that a society when it seizes up in 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 and at that point the Taj had fallen into deep 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 there was mold mildew rooms were mothballed attics 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 till I began the book most people who gamble gamble on slots 80% of gamblers go to slot machines which are designed to enesta size 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 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 again a habitual gambler will spend during his or her lifetime and I wanted in the book to I think focus on that what Durkheim call that enemy to make it clear that if we didn't radically restructure our society we these pathologies would only grow and were flirting now with a very dangerous situation another economic collapse and even the New York Times which is usually extremely cautious ran at editorial two or three days ago talking about that possibility as whatever tp'ed 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 lowered to virtually zero and you saw central banks in Europe actually paying people 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 fictitious capital and and what they do with it is not they don't they don't build new manufacturing centers they don't create jobs they use money to make money and the way they do it is through two ways debt peonage which is severe debt 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 I think is potentially extremely dangerous for the trajectory of the United States we have if you take a list of the characteristics of late dying empires whether it's the Roman Empire the austro-hungarian Empire we have managed to check almost all of them off including what is a often a common characteristic of late Empire and that's disastrous and self-destructive military adventurism I'm you saw it the Soviet Union 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 austro-hungarian Empire starting World War one over the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand and his wife Sophie this is a characteristic of late Empire and the British for instance in 1956 when they attempted to invade Egypt when Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal now that British Empire had been in a slow decline since the end of World War one but this was this is what finished them off they had to retreat in humiliation the pound sterling was dropped as the world's reserve currency and the British economy went into freefall 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 and with the weakening of the the traditional liberal class and the destruction of radical populist movements including the destruction of labor unions were in a very different situation than we were in the 1930s when you had powerful movements and people right the Communist Party out of the American history but it was an important movement the progressives the old CIO that pressured Roosevelt to respond Roosevelt's say the private sector can't create jobs then it's 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 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 and no real vision ideological vision to take its place this is very fertile ground for proto-fascist demagogues some Paul Krugman who's often very sober at 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 and I and I I I you look at Trump I mean I would just say that that you know going back and looking at those presidential elections that we went through the the the when this period of history is written I think the greatest tragedy is that if the Democratic Party leadership had not fixed the primaries against Bernie Sanders he not only would have won but he would have beaten Trump he might have been paralyzed probably would be paralyzed in Washington with a republican-controlled Congress but you wouldn't get the kinds of appointments Betsy DeVos whose privatizing education the destruction of the EPA and the you know the massive tax cuts that I will extract or over a ten-year period mean the federal revenue will decline or we'll lose 1.5 trillion dollars and I think the ruling elites are well aware that across the political spectrum they've lost credibility I 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 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 counterpunch alternate truth out TruthDig world socialist website black agenda report as disseminating Russian propaganda although it's completely false and that 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 tear 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 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 you could see Malcolm X James Baldwin Howard Zinn Ralph Nader and those voices have all vanished from the American landscape and what's risen to take its place is a kleptocrat a con artist and and and and all of the kleptocrats around him 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 very 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 as becomes privatized we have our brother Eric prince arguing now that the war in Afghanistan shall be privatized seventy percent of US intelligence gathering is privatized beause Allen Hamilton for instance where Edward Snowden left from 99 percent of its revenue comes from the government I teach in a prison every you still have a state in 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 foremost incarcerated parents the only connection they have with their children is through the telephone and now they have email you know eating absurdly priced emails I think it's 40 cents an email or something all sorts of fines that you if you go to a prison Dostoyevsky 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 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 no that workers in 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 dollars a month 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 1 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 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 becoming more and more pronounced by the day which has fuel these pathologies and created a situation whereby this cabal innocent this cabal of oligarchs and and corporatists have redirected the mechanisms that that that once made piecemeal and incremental reform possible towards enriching and empowering themselves and anytime a cabal whether it's maniacal fascist communist or corporate seizes power the political system in essence seizes up it doesn't work as its 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 working-class which began under Reagan and Thatcher is that and of course this is Reagan's 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 redditors and they change the narrative to one of your personal identity is under assault they did this Thatcher did this in Britain and would and of course we've ended up with Breck brexit and figures like Boris Johnson and Reagan did it in the United States and you have a proliferation now of knee allistic 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 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 and it you know that's Hofstadter's the paranoid style of American politics projecting acts of violence or saying that they're that their opponents in particular in the Democratic Party intend to carry out violence and what I fear is that you know we live in a period at this moment 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 the 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 and on slavery and we believe to this day in violence as a form of purification regeneration through violence we fetishize the the guns and the gun culture the NRA which is just a creation of the arms lot 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 will close by saying that unless and I'm not predicting this but unless the United States spills mass movements that can carry out sustained acts of civil just nonviolent civil disobedience such as we saw it standing Rock such as you had here in Canada with the First Nations peoples or the Quebec student movement any mechanism to hold this slide into corporate tyranny will be taken from us and the ripple effect will be you will feel it Canada is not immune it won't become the the the problems will never be as pronounced as they are in the United States because empires themselves are by nature fragile entities they depend on the extraction of resources abroad the control of foreign labor whereas Canada not being an imperial power is more self-contained but nevertheless you you won't be free we saw it we see it with the election of Ford you you don't have anywhere near the mass shootings we do but you have them these you have you know your Prime Minister's very much very Obama like in and we see it with his with the his refusal to stand up to the fossil fuel industry and the Stark tar sands and the consequences of that are dangerous I mean the the the the tragedy of Obama's election is that he came in with a kind of mandate and he perhaps because of political and experience he had only spent two years in the Senate perhaps because of cynicism I don't know he reimpose elites by re-inflate houses and banks which had defrauded the American citizen and defrauded institutions you know city city pension plans were wiped out by 40% and nothing was ever done to to address the crimes that were committed against the victims I didn't even mention climate change but you throw climate change in there and every climate change report that you read has one subtext which is is that it's happening far faster than any of us predicted and so as I write in the book you know we have to resist 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 that there is a moral dimension to resistance you know I fight I don't fight fascists in the end because I'll win I fight fascists because they are fascists 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 we will stand up to these forces that are disemboweling our nation's 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 when the climate created conditions by which we built human civilizations move from settle societies to cities is rapidly drawing to a close and to be complacent is to be complicit 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] [Applause] thanks Christopher really wonderful book and a stimulating talk as well um so let me explain how this this part of evening will work I have three or four questions that I asked of Chris to get things going and then you'll see there are two microphones in here one 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 ask one question per speaker that would be ideal and I also have some questions from people who are watching in the the overflow room around the corner okay Chris so America the fair will too is an angry book 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 but like to begin with a question about the political utility of anger particularly as it seems to be angry as 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 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 than you lack compassion Augustine said that Hope has two beautiful daughters anger and courage anger 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 society to the poor [Music] 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 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 in the name of profit and you know was is one of the greatest crimes of corporate power we talk about American stories in American myths one thing that's always struck me about nights is how persistent some of these myths and one that seems to have undergone like a 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 it's writes it's slightly so why do you consider the myth American American exceptionalism be such a damaging one toxic brew right well James Baldwin I think 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 faux 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 [Music] 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 reinf lating 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 ten billion dollars each they could have leveraged themselves ten to one and all these people whose mortgages were underwater 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 they live a writer for The New Yorker called it they don't even live in America they live in richest an and its global and yet they have total power so if you read Joseph Tanner'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 until it goes down and that's precisely what's going on in this book and in previous books you alluded it to it earlier today you've been highly critical of Christian right the United States so can you help us understand the seemingly unwavering yet also credibly hypocritical support that the Christian Right has for the current incumbent in the white house see I don't look at it as hypocritical I spent two years 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 4th 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 the the species of magical thinking that is endemic as Hannah Erin points out to all forms of totalitarianism these mega church pastors are trumpian they are phenomenally wealthy they pray man make their fortune there are 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 haven't created a classic system of totalitarian indoctrination where you invite people into the service which has nice music and like the Presbyterian Church there's like comfortable chairs to sit and but then they suck you into what again going back to errant crawls 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 disciple or any kind of questioning becomes backsliding and I read when I was writing this book Margaret singers book called cults 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 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 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 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 and you know the sexual proclivities of these mega pastors is right in sync with Trump's lifestyle I mean look at Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker so people say it's hypocritical how could Trump no no and there it's it's a perfect marriage 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 preying on people in despair they are about sacrificing the American Empire fusing the iconography and language of American patriotism with the 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 one of my other questions was you know why why'd you give liberal 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 we're 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 they would never be racial justice the liberals went for the door and the the the liberal class and Chomsky I think is 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 and universities are 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 and I've been a victim of that I mean I was very outspoken against the war in Iraq and I was an 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 Copas 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 they didn't make a mistake they played the role to which they were allotted 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 and and you know I in my book death of liberal class I talked a lot about this but as I told no 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 and so I invite you to start to come down if you have any questions you'd like to ask Chris so the singer-songwriter Steve Earle often describes himself as a socialist who lives in a country without a viable Socialist Party and I'm wondering if you feel same and also what you think would be required to changes though is the creation of a viable Socialist Party and even remotely likely but 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 healthcare system for all citizens I know your systems is underfunded buying and that's intentional but you know where people had access to good healthcare 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 just it is a matter of white America coming to grips with what they did and who they are the I mean as John Ralston Saul has often pointed out these trade agreements are really masks 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 that the trade you know what's what's advertised as trade agreements 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 socialists I gave a talk and I think 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 and actually he's right 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 we're a public schoolteacher a senior public school teacher would earn as much as a doctor this is we have created our worlds like that and that is the only way our society will heal unfortunately you're right the the left has been destroyed the liberal class has been destroyed 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 health care service in the world with all the statistics to prove it but the the for-profit insurance pharmaceutical health care 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 6% 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 then we will go the way countries in Europe when 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 elevated these and and believe me in Germany and vimar 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 and I I don't take Trump's very open incitements to violence lightly because I watched slobodan milosevic Karadzic and others use the same kind of rhetoric in the lead-up to the war in Yugoslavia thank you so let's say we have to the audience first question that yes thank you say go say my guy go welcome to the Grand River watershed so it's one of the largest watersheds very important in southwestern Ontario in a bit of a bellwether so things that we do here have a habit of catching on you know because we're trendy we discharge 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 one of the things that we're considering here with things like the water school for decision makers and whatnot is integrating with 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 Americans side to co-create some new water laws for our shared watersheds since 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 it could be eight well the public school system in the United States is in deep distress they don't even have basic supplies teachers have to often how to diminish 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 it's that stem model where it's all about science technology math as a way 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 minimised the slavery essentially erase the labor struggles and the radical movements and the radical figures that as howard zinn pointed out opened up democracy so were 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 healthcare situation 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 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 Liz Thea Harris that strikes me as a good step in the right direction of the Poor People's Campaign yeah yeah because I they're addressing the issue I know the Democratic Party is trying as hard as they can to co-op barber which I hope they don't do because the Democratic Party is as culpable for what's happened is the Republican Party amen but I have a tent I did attend their protests in Washington and I I think they're doing heroic work yeah cool thank you hello there as a recent undergraduate graduate of economics in from the Waterloo University of Waterloo you mentioned about something about sustainable finance and how it's being or it's not being taught in Harvard and Stanford schools 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 it 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% that's sustainable finance that's what we used to have under Eisenhower was 91% for the wealthiest elites when I live even when I lived in Switzerland taxes were about 50% 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 I David Cay Johnston was written about this you know these large corporations many of them have just orchestrated tax boycotts and that that is socialism we have to begin to tax the hell out of these people to rebuild our society 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 an Exxon Mobil and Citibank and Raytheon and everyone else I mean Bank of America didn't pay any taxes zero they you know the the we can't fun 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 economic decay within the United States yeah well we be quite I mean we we spend a trillion dollars a year on the military so I mean that's also a characteristic of leyte Empire I mean the late Roman Empire was trying to fill to 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 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 we are going to rest back control so that we focus not on maximizing profit but on the common good or all gonna go down 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 isn't the one you can answer in more detail how can we as members of this of this society address this issue I think we have to look to the revolutions in Eastern Europe which I covered East Germany the former Czechoslovakia Romania where large numbers of citizens just took to the streets half a million people every night invents a las Square in Prague and I was there I was in the Magic Lantern theater every night with Vaslav Havel the demonstrations in Leipzig and ending with again a half a million people and Alexander Platz in East Berlin and the you know moral forces 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 nonviolent because revolutions are fundamentally nonviolent even Lenin whose brother was hanged because of an assassination the assassination of Alexander the second even the Russian Revolution was nonviolent in this sense that once significant sectors of control defect the the government crumbles so for instance when the Cossacks are sent to crush the bread riots and refuse and join the crowd the Tsar's finished he can't even get back he has 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 and Leipzig when the paratroopers got there the local Communist authorities refused to deploy them in the streets Honaker 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 comment Optus 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 was a long story but they appealed and they won an appeal by denying me standing not by actually going to trial so you have the wholesale surveillance the militarization of police the revoking of due process I mean 94% of the people in our prison system never had a jury trial and a Hannah Aaron to go back to Hannah Aaron again writes about this when she talks about the status of the stateless in Europe she herself trip stripped of her 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 illegal and a physical mechanism that in a period of unrest means everyone can be stripped of their rights or their privilege and they're running scenarios right and left pretty cold-blooded scenarios they are certainly preparing for unrest and the way they are repairing for it is the iron boot so we're never gonna win the game of violence this is my battle with an Tifa and the black bloc who you know you just saw trump refer to an Tifa which is the idea that an Tifa is even worthy of mention as a serious counterweight to the state but part of my battle is that they are effective only in allowing the power leads 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 non-violently 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 and that terrified them and they know 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 the we called them the white shirts the officers but when the white shirts weren't around there was quite a bit of of fraternization between the blue uniformed police and the kids in the park you saw with the Chicago Teachers strike that the teachers when they went on strike would the 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 gonna 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 forgive the metaphor I'm about to use but after listening to your address 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 them how this room full of people after we leave and go to our various parking lots go about that whom do we repel against and how well every community has issues of 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 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 line 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 they're our 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 I was at Standing Rock and that was very very powerful and very moving indigenous led and had a deep spiritual element seven months of resistance and 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 sub-freezing 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 and not by law enforcement but by people who were we're dressed in black wearing kev our vast 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 well 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 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 and and we have to organize and you have to organize the we 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 hi Chris I've been following you for a while I'm very glad you're here and thank you for your great work recently I've become quite interested in tipping points and how did you see that did you see any sort of tipping points in those nonviolent 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 7 o'clock that night the Berlin Wall did not exist as an impediment to human traffic 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 mist what is the tipping point it's usually something so mundane so banal but it just muscies 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 Havel because Havel had been was a non-person in communist Czechoslovakia if you wanted to hear Havel you had to listen to Voice of America and many of you know the history of Havel and in turn 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 you know there were a population is often more cognizant than it appears on the surface so a story I have told before but in Prague that winter there were posters of Yann Pollock all around the city now Yann Pollock had been young Charles University student had gone to Vince Law Square to protest the 1978 1968 Soviet invasion and overthrow of Dubcek and he'd 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 his ashes were given to his mother and she was told she couldn't Ribery them a week after the communist government fell 10,000 Czechs marched to Red Army Square and renamed at Yann Pollock square mark tacuba shaiva the great singer who's saying a prayer for Marto which was the anthem of defiance that was broadcast over the airwaves as the Soviets invaded once Dubcek 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 invents a las square with half a million checks when she walked out on the balcony 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 find 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 Auden called 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 Jason just make one or two points one through thirteen 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 C G 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 Sobers up 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 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 US but through it all there's also as we saw in the question and answer in 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 sense is you have 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 u.s. and these things the fact is there's also hope left to take care of some of these chapter titles before they become reality finally I thought in the last answer Chris reminded us that as in everything else in life in Revolution too timing is everything and we don't always get it right and we can't predict it but thank you Chris Thank You Darren Malloy thank you David wohl Worsley always a pleasure to work with Wordsworth books here at cg thank you all for joining let me also say before we break that this is you've you've got a soft Chris to a great start we usually begin our programs at cg the public ones in September but you've beaten us again timing by a week and and and given us a houseful show 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 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 [Applause] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Centre for International Governance Innovation

Views: 237,741

Rating: 4.7420235 out of 5

Keywords: CIGI, American Empire, Chris Hedges, America the farewell tour, cigionline, lecture, public lecture, author chris hedges, book lecture

Id: csI8JLJ15Ak

Length: 93min 52sec (5632 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 30 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/Why_is_that]

"Donald trump is the result of a long process of decay of democratic institutions, an assault against the economy, and a culture by corporate power(?). He is the natural consequence of a degenerate society. He is a symptom not the disease."

The worst part about these lectures is I am just f-ing tired of them. Yes. Yes. I have heard it before. Yes. At what point are people going to get pitchforks and really start to change their lives? How much shit do we have to pile up and wallow in before people realize that we are no longer Americans (with respect to cherishing the fundamental ideals).

He is the natural consequence of a degenerate society.

As long as we keep politics in the current status quo, nothing is going to change because the conclusion is we can just blame other people. The citizens of America are to blame for the absolute shit storm we allowed to happen. Generally speaking, we, the American people, are the only ones who can resolve this before it become a global issue (if we aren't already approaching that with Trump's administrations policies).

He is a symptom not the disease.

As long as we keep remaining distracted and drugged up, there isn't really much we can do. To solve a systematic plague on our nations structure, requires a systematic, at mass response, and frankly the American people are just too uneducated to see the light (because it's been shining bright for 30-40 years).

[u/effhead]

a very dark future

Let's all hope that it isn't grimdark!

[u/[deleted]]

Like all Christians, Chris Hedges is a fatalist.

[u/helianthusheliopsis]

The USA has a long and proud tradition of proclaiming the sky is going to fall. Our cherished traditional values of times past are nothing more than historical revisionism. Nothing is decaying except for time. Things change, die and are born and life moves on and the USA will remain preeminent for the next century and it will survive us all.