The Pathology of the Rich - Chris Hedges on Reality Asserts Itself (1/2)

welcome to the real news network I'm Paul Jay in Baltimore and welcome to reality asserts itself a few weeks ago we did a series of interviews with Chris Hedges and one of the things we talked about was the weakness of the left the weakness of the people's movement if you will we're going to continue that discussion now and Chris joins us again in the studio Chris as I everyone probably knows by now is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and a senior fellow at the nation Institute along with Joe Sacco he wrote The New York Times bestseller days of destruction days of revolt and he writes a weekly column for TruthDig thanks for joining us thank you so last time we talked a lot about something you had said in 2008 and you've written more recently about one of the gravest weaknesses of the left was not creating a viable vision of what an alternative politics and economy looks like a viable vision of a socialism but you've written more recently about some other weaknesses of you could say of the people's movement and here's one and I'll read read it back this a piece you wrote called let's get this class war started which I guess is a play on pink song is it let's get this party started the quote is the inability to grasp the pathology of our oligarchic rulers is one of our gravest faults what are you talking about because we don't understand the pathology of the rich we've been saturated with cultural images and a kind of cultural deification of wealth and those who have wealth we are being you know they present people of immense wealth as somehow leaders Oracle's even and we don't grasp internally what it is an oligarchic class is finally about or how venal and morally bankrupt they are we need to recover the language of class warfare to grasp what is happening to us and we need to shatter this self-delusion that somehow if as Obama says we work hard enough and study hard enough we can be one of them the fact is the people who created the economic mess that we're in were the best educated people in the country Larry Summers former president of Harvard and others the issue is not education the issue is greed and I unfortunately had the experience of being shipped off to a private boarding school at the age of 10 as a scholarship student and lived I was one of sixteen kids on scholarship and I lived among the super-rich and I watched them and I think much of my hatred of authority and my repugnance for the ruling elite comes from having been among them for so long yeah people don't understand the elite schools even at the high school level that that they get the kids get excellent education that but if they learn the whole culture of hundreds or thousands of years of how to rule right and it's a deep rich understanding of it not only that but they you know the and George Bush is a perfect example of that not so much an example of deep rich understand no but of how you know affirmative action for the rich and I came certainly on my mother's side of the family from you know lower working-class when people my one of my uncles lived in a trailer in Maine and certainly people with no means and I would chucks to pose the world I was in with that world and it was very clear that it wasn't about intelligence or aptitude the fact is if you're poor you only get one chance if you're wealthy like Bush you get chance after chance after chance after chance so you're a C student at Andover and you go to Yale and you go to Harvard Business School and you're AWOL from your National Guard unit and you're a cokehead it doesn't really matter you don't even really have a job till you're 40 and you become President of the United States so that was what was particularly insidious how those small all tight elite oligarchic circles perpetuated themselves and promoted mediocrity because many of these people like bush are very mediocre human beings at the expense of the rest of us and how with money they gain the system and of course now we live in an oligarchic state where we've been rendered utterly powerless and are the judiciary the legislative the executive branch is all subservient to an oligarchic corporate elite and the press is owned by an oligarchic corporate elite which makes sure that any critique of them is never broadcast over the airwaves it's not it's not something like inherent evilness or something but you are you brought up as a super rich or very rich in a culture in a school in a milieu where everyone's there to serve you it's your right to be served yeah it's it's it's very distasteful to see because you know I would go to the homes of friends of mine and watch and let's remember their children 11 12 years old ordering around adults their servants their nannies and I and I begin that piece by talking about Fitzgerald who came from the Midwest to Princeton and went through much the experience that I went through and that apocryphal exchange which didn't take place but but it does represent the difference between Hemingway and Fitzgerald where Fitzgerald at one point had written what the story is that he said the rich aren't like you and I and Hemingway is supposed to equipt yes they have more money well Hemingway like on many things was wrong other rich are different because when you have that much money then human beings become disposable even friends and family become disposable and are replaced and when the rich take absolute power then the citizens become disposable which is an essence what's happened there there is a very callous indifference I mean these people and see right mills wrote about this and empower elite they're utterly cut off I mean the only people they ever meet who are members of the working-class or people who work for them they're gardeners or their chauffeurs they live in self encased bubbles they have no real contact with reality I mean they don't even fly on commercial airlines and yet they have absolute power now that becomes very dangerous politically because they're so out of touch and they are able to retreat into their enclaves in the same way that you saw in France under louis xvi people retreating into versailles or the end of the chinese dynasty when everybody went to the forum or let the losers in ya UN and that's I think you know so that they will extract more and more and more because they know have no self-imposed limits without understanding the economic political and social consequences of what they're doing so we have a popular uprising through the Occupy movement where people pour into public spaces to express legitimate grievances student debt the next bubble to go down trillion dollars in debt which we now saw courtesy of our Congress debt rates will act you know interest rates will actually go up in a couple years I mean more than if they just taken it from a bank it's insane and meanwhile the Federal Reserve is buying eighty five billion dollars a month worth of junk bonds and giving money at virtually zero percent interest to goldman sachs i mean it's insane the failure to address the mortgage and foreclosure crisis the failure to address the chronic unemployment underemployment which i mean half of the country now lives in poverty including the working poor or near poverty and what is the response the response is to physically shut down the encampments suspend unemployment benefits cut food stamps clothes things like head start it's crazy and and that's what happens when you have an elite that is that unplugged at which our elite is so they will push and push and push myopically out of ignorance until something erupts and that's exactly where we're at it it's interesting there are some children of some of the super-rich and i think it occupy had something to do with that who kind of woken up a bit to the situation and don't want to repeat the pattern of their parents get some of it get some of the insanity of it I don't know if they're if they're children of the super-rich I think that occupy had a lot of children of the middle class I don't mean the majority of occupy but there I just I actually know who some of these people are and it's interesting that they're children of very very wealthy people and they have decided that you know there needs to be more to life than repeating this living in this bubble well they may be out there but I don't think there are majority they're a very tiny one most of them get sucked right into that cult of the self which the super-rich managed to perpetuate at a rather nauseating level we were talking off-camera just before we started have we both knew gore Vidal and Vidal used to go on about the total immorality of the super-rich he would know yeah well he would know for a lot of reasons what in terms of his own life but also in terms he knew many of these people also did I mean and I think that's what I'm getting at exactly I mean you know I I wrote in that column about you know being at this boarding school and watching these father's pull up in their limousines fathers who had very little contact with their sons with their personal photographers and these were famous wealthy men and that picture of them playing with their son which was total fiction would be disseminated through the press yeah a morality hedonism selfishness callousness and part of it is the the total willingness to accept for example that ordinary people's families should send their kids off to war to defend the American Way of life which means essentially their way of life they can die for these things it's it's almost a kind of racism I mean when to British and slave the Irish you don't have to be black and of color to be thought of as less than human and that seems to be what the super-rich think about most most other people well not and not just the working-class mean the kind of disdain for the working class and also the middle class means some way the way they would speak about the middle class and you know in essence coming out of the middle class this was something that that struck home to me yeah they live they inhabit another world and they have very sophisticated mechanisms of public relations and well-publicized acts of philanthropy to hide their private faces but how they act when the doors close and how they act in public is very different and having as of it all was as Fitzgerald was you know having been behind those closed doors and seeing the decadence of the ruling elite it it certainly marked me for the rest of my life and it defined for me at a very early age what my enemies were you quote in your article Colonel marks writing the ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships Marx wrote the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas why did that hit you well because the whole notion of the free market lays a Fair capitalism globalization is a very thin rationale for unmitigated greed by a tiny oligarchic elite and they have made sure that that ideology is taught in universities across the country and people especially economists so deviate from that ideology have been pushed aside and become pariahs and and yet the driving ethos of that ideology is really to justify the hoarding of immense amounts of wealth by a very tiny percentage of you know the upper ruling class that's what it is it mean the the whole lie of globalization perpetuated by people who popularize it like Tom Friedman has already been exposed I mean the idea that it's going to lift all of us up and create middle class and you know well compensated working-class families in the third world I'm in all of it's been exposed and and I think part of the his point is that this isn't just some innate ideas that everyone is essentially greedy these people just happen to be rich and you're not as lucky or as smart as they are it's that it comes from what he calls the kanima Tyrael conditions about like how stuff is owned who has power as a result of concentration of ownership how things are distributed it's not that every you know it doesn't have to be this way it's a product of how the society is writing so in that sense the ideology serves the system the intellectual class serves the system those economists whose voices are heard who get tenure serve the system and those who don't serve the system don't have a job and that's what Marx was getting at and I and I think that's extremely true I mean we don't live in a free-market society we live in a society where corporations that will loot the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve and are bailed out by the taxpayer and yet that fact of kind of corporate socialism for corporations is ignored and yet it you know it is it and that's dangerous because there's an utter disconnect of from the language that we use to describe our economic system and the reality of our economic system which is essentially a system where corporations have become predators on government and taxpayer money and we're all going to pay for it because most of this stuff though these bonds that they're buying up is is garbage you know it is things like foreclosed homes that on the books are worth $600,000 but in reality the because the electricity has been turned off the basements flooded you'd have to spend money to raise it to put up anything of any kind of value and that that is going to blow right up in our face and this this idea that you're expressing that the majority of professional paid intellectuals professors and writers and pundits the idea that the free market is the fundamental assumption and starting point to suggest anything else might work is sacrilegious and then some people say well that's because America has always been like this America is the center-right country but but it's not true and you know pre-world War Two in the 1930 and right after world war ii there was a big public debate of all about what kind of economy what kind of politics and there was a real campaign wage to get rid of public intellectuals get rid of union militants get rid of actors and directors anyone that wanted to have this public discourse was hounded out of office I write death liberal classes really that story how all of these people were silenced pushed to the margins stripped of employment including like even high school teachers and we'd Ellen trekker the historian has done a good job on this just quickly for people know we're talking about we're talking about the house of an American right if ities McCarthyism and a real campaign to try to move anyone with a kind of progressive socialist idea I'll write anything and they were effective I mean in a way far more effective than in Europe I mean in Europe you'll still have a residue we've been robbed a language by which we can express the reality of what what we're undergoing and that's because you know our radical populist dissident movements those who offered a critique of the power elite have been banished or silenced now you you write something here which you know if you you would not be allowed to say on mainstream news anywhere you write class struggle defines most of human history Marx got this right the sooner we realize that we're locked in a deadly warfare with our ruling corporate elite the sooner we'll realize that these elites must be overthrown there's a massive campaign not even to use the words class warfare in fact if you talk class people accuse you of being essentially anti-american I don't think you can understand the nature of capitalism if you don't understand the nature of class warfare you know if I was running a Wall Street firm I'd only hire Marxian economists because they understand that capitalism is about exploitation Marx got that right and that gets back to the nature of the ruling elite I mean we are the most illusion society on the planet the airwaves are awash in lies you know they very skillfully know how to humanize figures I mean even idiots like Donald Trump to mask what it is they're actually doing to the rest of us and I think we have to begin to puncture the very effective mirages that have been created and corporations of course spend billions of dollars to create these mirages to understand our reality I mean look at BP you'd think BP was Greenpeace given the amount of commercials that they're running about how much they care about the Gulf when in fact they turn the waters of the Gulf into a dead zone and poisoned the shrimp and all the other which they're selling us to eat and yet we don't have mechanisms by which are there certainly within the mainstream what major network is going to go do a serious documentary on BP you're not you're not going to confront those interests because at this point these interests you know they own or control the systems of information as well as the systems of Education your article so it ends with the only route left to us as Aristotle knew is revolt well because the the mechanisms of incremental and piecemeal reform don't work and you talked about the New Deal the New Deal was the classic example of that kind of safety valve and as Roosevelt said I mean his greatest achievement was that he saved capitalism and in the stupidity of the corporate oligarchic elite they destroyed the liberal class I mean we still have a self-identified liberal class but they no longer do anything to defend the interests of those they claim to represent whether that's the working class the middle class labor or anyone else and by destroying that safety valve by destroying that liberal class those mechanisms that made piecemeal and incremental reform possible you no longer can adjust the system so you can't ameliorate the suffering or the grievances of the underclass and now we're talking about half the country now that means that if you want to resist if you want to create change you can't do it through traditional political parties you can't do it through the courts you can't do it through a corporatized media you have to step outside the system and create popular mechanisms mass movements that will begin to put pressure in a cruder way on the centres of power that's that is the only hope we have left say you can't do incremental reform the elite can even pass regulations that would serve their own interests in terms of controlling financial speculation for example a simple change in terms of position limits of the commodities future Trading Commission that anyone that wants some kind of functioning capitalist system would want to have this so that you don't have another financial collapse as a 2008 they don't they can't even pass that but they don't the people who are running Wall Street don't give a damn about they know what's going to collapse and what they're doing is stealing as fast as much as they can on the way out the door there's a very deep so they make money they make money after the collapse as well because the states there to bail them out right but you know this time around it's going to be a little harder to pilfer state funds I mean they'll certainly attempt to do that but you know the goal is so self-centered you have I think the head of United Healthcare made a billion dollars and it's insane last year I think I have that right but certainly hundreds of millions of dollars in people and it's all about amassing little monuments to themselves little empires to themselves you know I have relatives to work on Wall Street and their critique is not any different from mine the difference is they're just grabbing as much as they can on the way out the door and I think that is always symptomatic of a kind of dying civilization yeah that Marx was asked once to describe the psychology of a capitalist and it was what we talked about a little earlier a pareja deluge after me come the floods yeah I'll get what I can today and if the society is toast later too bad and I think they know it's going to be toast and I think they think that they're going to retreat into their you know gated compounds and and survive it they may survive it longer than the rest of us but in the end climate change alone is going to get us so it's up to us don't expect anything from the oligarchs no and not only that they are creating systems in terms of exploitation not only of us but of the ecosystem that it if left unchecked will ensure the extinction of the human species it may already be too late of course but you know allowing the fossil fuel industry or these corporations to determine our relationship to the environment is a form of collective insanity at this point thanks for joining us thank you don't forget we're in our year-end fundraising campaign for every dollar you donate another dollar will be donated that means up to a hundred thousand dollars which means at the end of all this process if we're successful we'll raise $200,000 and we have all kinds of things planned for 2014 which will tell you about in other videos if you want to see more interviews like this one with Chris Hedges please click on the donate button pick up your phone there's all kinds of ways to donate but now it's the time thanks for joining us on the real news network you

Channel: The Real News Network

Views: 638,726

Keywords: therealnews, realnews, real, news, media, politics

Id: L6unS2JF8TA

Length: 23min 37sec (1417 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 05 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/FecalFingerPainting]

5:08

"It's not some sort of inherent evilness or something..."

I disagree. Slavery and oppression is always evil.

[u/[deleted]]

This really hits home to how my uncle behaves - he has about 15,000,000. He has a 'charity" and comes across as this great philantropist - yet its pretty evident he doesnt care about anyone except his immediate family (him and his son). He will watch other family members drown before he would ever use his own resources to help. Yet he has a "charity" I mean tax shelter which hides behind the cause of "building strong families" he is a die hard conservative. I hate this man.

[u/JACK9310]

america is not a country, it's a fucking business. now give me my fucking money

[u/[deleted]]

Articles cited in the video: https://www.truthdig.com/articles/lets-get-this-class-war-started/

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/why-i-am-a-socialist/

[u/[deleted]]

I have watched this several times over the past several months. I wish The Real News was better funded so we can get more of this.