Chris Hedges // Current TV

Recognizing the Language of Tyranny

Empires communicate in two languages. One language is expressed in imperatives. It is... more

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Ralph Nader: ‘The Left Has Nowhere to Go’

By Chris Hedges

Ralph Nader in a CNN poll a few days before the 2008 presidential election had an estimated 3 percent of the electorate, or about 4 million people, behind his candidacy. But once the votes were counted, his support dwindled to a little over 700,000. Nader believes that many of his supporters entered the polling booth and could not bring themselves to challenge the Democrats and Barack Obama. I suspect Nader is right. And this retreat is another example of the lack of nerve we must overcome if we are going to battle back against the corporate state. A vote for Nader or Green Party candidate Cynthia McKinney in 2008 was an act of defiance. A vote for Obama and the Democrats was an act of submission. We cannot afford to be submissive anymore.

“The more outrageous the Republicans become, the weaker the left becomes,” Nader said when I reached him at his home in Connecticut on Sunday. “The more outrageous they become, the more the left has to accept the slightly less outrageous corporate Democrats.”

Nader fears a repeat of the left’s cowardice in the next election, a cowardice that has further empowered the lunatic fringe of the Republican Party, maintained the role of the Democratic Party as a lackey for corporations, and accelerated the reconfiguration of the country into a neo-feudalist state. Either we begin to practice a fierce moral autonomy and rise up in multiple acts of physical defiance that have no discernable short-term benefit, or we accept the inevitability of corporate slavery. The choice is that grim. The age of the practical is over. It is the impractical, those who stand fast around core moral imperatives, figures like Nader or groups such as Veterans for Peace, which organized the recent anti-war rally in Lafayette Park in Washington, which give us hope. If you were one of the millions who backed down in the voting booth in 2008, don’t do it again. If you were one of those who thought about joining the Washington protests against the war where 131 of us were arrested and did not, don’t fail us next time. The closure of the mechanisms within the power system that once made democratic reform possible means we stand together as the last thin line of defense between a civil society and its disintegration. If we do not engage in open acts of defiance, we will empower a radical right-wing opposition that will replicate the violence and paranoia of the state. To refuse to defy in every way possible the corporate state is to be complicit in our strangulation.

“The left has nowhere to go,” Nader said. “Obama knows it. The corporate Democrats know it. There will be criticism by the left of Obama this year and then next year they will all close ranks and say ‘Do you want Mitt Romney? Do you want Sarah Palin? Do you want Newt Gingrich?’ It’s very predictable. There will be a year of criticism and then it will all be muted. They don’t understand that even if they do not have any place to go, they ought to fake it. They should fake going somewhere else or staying home to increase the receptivity to their demands. But because they do not make any demands, they are complicit with corporate power.

“Corporate power makes demands all the time,” Nader went on. “It pulls on the Democrats and the Republicans in one direction. By having this nowhere-to-go mentality and without insisting on demands as the price of your vote, or energy to get out the vote, they have reduced themselves to a cipher. They vote. The vote totals up. But it means nothing.”...

Continued at: http://www.indypendent.org/2011/01/03/ralph-nader-the-left-has-nowhere-to-go/By Chris Hedges Ralph Nader in a CNN poll a few days before the 2008 presidential... more

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Hope and justice live when people, even in tiny numbers, stand up and fight for them

I stood with hundreds of thousands of rebellious Czechoslovakians in 1989 on a cold... more

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US empire could collapse at any time with more actions like these by Veterans for Peace!

On Thursday December 16th 2010, snow fell as 131 people were arrested in a Civil Disobedience at the White House protesting the continuing wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan and in Iraq. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Chris Hedges provides an extraordinary anti-war soliloquy which is inter-cut with interview of Veterans of the recent wars and with Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the top secret Pentagon Papers. This action was organized by the Veterans Peace http://www.veteransforpeace.org/ Stop These Wars http://www.stopthesewars.org/ Read an interview with Chris Hedges just after the speech on the RawStory. And another Interview on Democracy Now where he discusses his most recent book, "Death of the Liberal Class" http://www.democracynow.org

America's military and economic empire could collapse at any time, but predicting the precise day, week or month of its potential demise is unattainable, according to a former New York Times war correspondent who spoke with Raw Story. "The when and how is very dangerous to predict because there's always some factor that blindsides you that you didn't expect," Pulitzer-winning journalist Chris Hedges said in an exclusive interview. "It doesn't look good. But exactly how it plays out and when it plays out, having covered disintegrating societies, it's impossible to tell." He explained that he learned this lesson as events unfolded around him in the fall of 1989. Then, members of the opposition to the Soviet Empire told him that they predicted travel across the Berlin Wall separating East from West Germany would open within the year. "Within a few hours, the wall didn't exist," he said. Hedges was one of the 131 activists were arrested in an act of civil disobedience outside the White House yesterday, even as Obama was unveiling a new report citing progress in the Afghanistan war. Speaking to Raw Story on Wednesday night, he said the signs of US collapse are plain to see and compared the country's course through Afghanistan to Soviet Russia's. "We're losing [the war in Afghanistan] in the same way the Red Army lost it," he said. "It's exactly the same configuration where we sort of control the urban centers where 20 percent of the population lives. The rest of the country where 80 percent of the Afghans live is either in the hands of the Taliban or disputed." "Foreigners will not walk the streets of Kabul because of kidnapping, and journalists regularly meet Taliban officials in Kabul because the whole apparatus is so porous and corrupt," he said. One day after this interview was conducted, reports hit the global media noting the CIA's warning to President Obama, that the Pakistan-supported Taliban could still regain control of the country. Hedges predicted that President Obama's war report released Thursday would "contradict not only [US] intelligence reports but everything else that is coming out of Afghanistan." His prediction came startlingly true: the CIA's own assessment was said to stand in striking contrast with President Obama's report. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, however, insisted that the US controlled more territory in Afghanistan than it did a year ago. 'A corporate coup d'état in slow motion' Hedges said he attended the protest and planned to get arrested because he is against the corporate powers that have enveloped the nation. "We've undergone a corporate coup d'état in slow motion," he said. "Our public education system has been gutted. Our infrastructure is corroding and collapsing. Unless we begin to physically resist, they are going to solidify neo-feudalism in this country." "If we think that Obama is bad, watch the next two years because these corporate forces have turned their back on him," Hedges warned. Hedges, author of "Death of the Liberal Class," said that his vision of America is one with a functioning social democracy, which stands in stark contrast to the nihilism of the corporate state. "American workers, as they are repeatedly told, will have to become competitive with prison labor in China," he said. "That's where we're headed, and all the pillars of the liberal establishment are complicit in this." "At least if you get sick in the UK, you don't go bankrupt or die," he added. Hedges said that another pressure point is the US dollar, which he pointed out had been dropped by Russia and China in favor of modified ruble/renminbi exchanges. "A few more deals like that, and our currency becomes junk," he said. Hedges continued, "As long as we have relative stability, these lunatic fringe movements can be held at bay, but if we don't undertake serious structural reform, which we're not doing, then it is inevitable that we will come to a tremendous crisis - economic and political as well as environmental."

Iraq Veterans Against The War Operation Recovery 678.986.0617 http://www.ivaw.org

This is a zgraphix production. Produced by Jeff Zavala. http://zgraphix.orgOn Thursday December 16th 2010, snow fell as 131 people were arrested in a Civil... more

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Hedges claims US Could Fall At Any Time

America’s military and economic empire could collapse at any time, but... more

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Your Efforts are All IN Vain!!!- a response to defeatism

If there's one thing I hate, it's defeatists.

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Calling All Future-Eaters - Truthdig - Chris Hedges

We sit passive and dumb as corporations and the leaders of industrialized nations... more

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Hurt Locker Wins Big at Oscars, Kathryn Bigelow takes Best Director

It was the first Iraq war movie to really break through, and now “The Hurt... more

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Chris Hedges: Boycott FedEx

Dean Henderson’s career with FedEx ended abruptly when a reckless driver plowed into his company truck and mangled his leg. His doctor will decide this week if it needs to be amputated. No longer able to drive, stripped of value in our commodity culture, he was tossed aside by the company. He became human refuse. He spends most of his days, because of the swelling and the pain, with his leg raised on a recliner in the tiny apartment in Fairfax, Va., he shares with his stepsister. He struggles without an income and medical insurance, and he fears his future.

Henderson is not alone. Workers in our corporate state earn little when they work—Henderson made $18 an hour—and they are abandoned when they can no longer contribute to corporate profits. It is the ethic of the free market. It is the cost of unfettered capitalism. And it is plunging tens of millions of discarded workers into a collective misery and rage that is beginning to manifest itself in a dangerous right-wing backlash.

“This happened while I was wearing their uniform and driving one of their company vehicles,” Henderson, a 40-year-old military veteran, told me. “My foot is destroyed. I have a fused ankle. I have had over a dozen surgeries. It hurts to wear a sock. I was limping pretty badly, but in the spring of 2008 FedEx said I had to come back to work and sit in a chair. It saved them money on workers’ compensation payments. I worked a call center job and answered telephones. I did that for three months. I had my ankle fused in January 2009, and then FedEx fired me. I was discarded. They washed their hands of me and none of this was my fault.”

Our destitute working class is beginning to grasp that Barack Obama and other elected officials in Washington, who speak in a cloying feel-your-pain language, are liars. They are not attempting to prevent wages from sinking, unemployment from mounting, foreclosures from ripping apart communities, banks from looting the U.S. Treasury or jobs from being exported. The gap between our stark reality and the happy illusions peddled by smarmy television news personalities and fatuous academic and financial experts, as well as oily bureaucrats and politicians, is becoming too wide to ignore. Those cast aside are reaching out to anyone, no matter how buffoonish or ignorant, who promises that the parasites and courtiers who serve the corporate state will disappear. Right-wing rage is being fused with right-wing populism. And once this takes hold, a protofascism will sweep across our blighted landscape fueled by a mounting personal and economic despair. Take a look at Sinclair Lewis’ “It Can’t Happen Here.” It is a good window into what awaits us.

READ MORE AT LINKDean Henderson’s career with FedEx ended abruptly when a reckless driver plowed... more

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EMPIRE OF ILLUSION

How Are We Kept In Line By Our Own Shallowness & Well Entertained Psychopath &... more

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Vigil for Fahad Hashmi, NYC, Martin Luther King Day, 2010

On January 18th, as our Nation commemorates Martin Luther King Day, for the slain civil rights leader who peacefully spoke out against war, racism and injustice, members of THAW (Theaters Against War) and friends, family and supporters of Fahad Hashmi invite you to join us for a special Free Fahad Vigil across from the MCC, Metropolitan Correctional Center, in New York City, where Fahad Hashmi has been detained for over two and half years before trial under conditions of severe solitary confinement.

January 11, 2010 marks the 8th year of the Guantanamo prison establishing indefinite detention, torture and operating outside the established rule of law and Geneva Conventions by the United States government against international terror suspects. Last year President Obama declared and then voided a deadline for closing this prison. Some of the Guantanamo detainees have even been cleared for any "wrongdoings" by the Dept. of Defense yet remain imprisoned there. While these detainees and the conditions they are being held under at Guantanamo have received worldwide attention and due criticism, similar unlawful abuses and inhumane treatment of U.S. Citizens that is happening here in NYC has not. The case of Fahad Hashmi is particularly disturbing because he has been held at the MCC, Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City for over two and half years before trial under "Special Administrative Measures", known as SAMS, that keep him in perpetual solitary confinement, under electronic surveillance and subject to a regime of severe deprivation, equivalent to torture and in violation of Habeas corpus. The U.S. government has a very weak case against him, accusing him of allowing an acquaintance to sleep on his couch who then traveled with waterproof socks and ponchos to his birth country of Pakistan (his family immigrated to the U.S. when he was three). The U.S. Government argues this as material support to al Qaeda and justifies Fahad's harsh detention conditions under the threat of terrorism. There is also a lot of ancillary evidence being used by the U.S. Government against Fahad pertaining to his reputation as a devout Muslim and student activist that suggest a pre-crime, racist and discriminatory profiling, prosecution and torture of a man based more on his ethnicity and religion than for anything else. To learn more about the case go to: FreeFahad.com and educatorsforcivilliberties.org.

Please join members of THAW (Theaters Against War) and friends, family and supporters of Fahad Hashmi for a special Free Fahad Vigil featuring Kathleen Chalfant, Andre Gregory, Chris Hedges, Bill Irwin, Cindy Sheehan, Wallace Shawn and folksinger Dar Williams across the street from the MCC at 150 Park Row and Pearl Street from 6 to 7 pm on Monday, January 18th, this Martin Luther King Day, as we stand up and say to NYC and the Federal Government No Guantanamo's at Home or Abroad.On January 18th, as our Nation commemorates Martin Luther King Day, for the slain... more

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Globlalization Goes Bankrupt

From Chris Hedges Columns on truthdig!
Posted on Sep 20, 2009

The Photograph: AP / Gene J. Puskar
Free-speech zone?: The David L. Lawrence Convention Center in Pittsburgh, where the G-20 global economic summit will be held Thursday and Friday, as seen from the parking lot, which is being leased by the city as the only sanctioned area for protesters to gather within sight of the center.

By Chris Hedges

The rage of the disposed is fracturing the country, dividing it into camps that are unmoored from the political mainstream. Movements are building on the ends of the political spectrum that have lost faith in the mechanisms of democratic change. You can’t blame them. But unless we on the left move quickly, this rage will be captured by a virulent and racist right wing, one that seeks a disturbing proto-fascism.

Every day counts. Every deferral of protest hurts. We should, if we have the time and the ability, make our way to Pittsburgh for the meeting of the G-20 this week rather than do what the power elite is hoping we will do—stay home. Complacency comes at a horrible price.

“The leaders of the G-20 are meeting to try and salvage their power and money after everything that has gone wrong,” said Benedicto Martinez Orozco, co-president of the Mexican Frente Autentico del Trabajo (FAT), who is in Pittsburgh for the protests. “This is what this meeting is about.”

The draconian security measures put in place to silence dissent in Pittsburgh are disproportionate to any actual security concern. They are a response not to a real threat, but to the fear gripping the established centers of power. The power elite grasps, even if we do not, the massive fraud and theft being undertaken to save a criminal class on Wall Street and international speculators of the kinds who were executed in other periods of human history. They know the awful cost this plundering of state treasuries will impose on workers, who will become a permanent underclass. And they also know that once this is clear to the rest of us, rebellion will no longer be a foreign concept.

The delegates to the G-20, the gathering of the world’s wealthiest nations, will consequently be protected by a National Guard combat battalion, recently returned from Iraq. The battalion will shut down the area around the city center, man checkpoints and patrol the streets in combat gear. Pittsburgh has augmented the city’s police force of 1,000 with an additional 3,000 officers. Helicopters have begun to buzz gatherings in city parks, buses driven to Pittsburgh to provide food to protesters have been impounded, activists have been detained, and permits to camp in the city parks have been denied. Web sites belonging to resistance groups have been hacked and trashed, and many groups suspect that they have been infiltrated and that their phones and e-mail accounts are being monitored.

Larry Holmes, an organizer from New York City, stood outside a tent encampment on land owned by the Monumental Baptist Church in the city’s Hill District. He is one of the leaders of the Bail Out the People Movement. Holmes, a longtime labor activist, on Sunday led a march on the convention center by unemployed people calling for jobs. He will coordinate more protests during the week.

“It is de facto martial law,” he said, “and the real effort to subvert the work of those protesting has yet to begin. But voting only gets you so far. There are often not many choices in an election. When you build democratic movements around the war or unemployment you get a more authentic expression of democracy. It is more organic. It makes a difference. History has taught us this.”

continuing...From Chris Hedges Columns on truthdig! Posted on Sep 20, 2009 The Photograph:... more

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Media Meltdown

News organizations are flooded with statistics and facts released by the government... more

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Chris Hedges: The Empire of Illusion

How did such a sizeable portion of modern society develop into a post-literate,... more

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Chris Hedges: Our Moral Collapse

“Our moral collapse is as terrifying, and as dangerous, as our economic... more

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Israel Violates US Law

What will it take to change US policy in the Middle East? Former U.S. congresswoman... more

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Creating a Non Violent World - Is it Really Possible?

Introduction—Confronting the Ideological Beast

America is desperately searching for heroes! If this were not true we would not see the incredible success of blockbuster action movies featuring mostly males with superhuman powers who fight for the underdogs by battling greed, injustice, and corruption of power. We have all seen time and again, story after story, encounters between the forces of good and the forces of evil; and we are constantly being challenged to take a side and fight. The emphasis of popular culture in mass media is a perpetuation of violence as the primary solution to the problem of enforcing the American Dream—“The Myth” (Hedges); like Superman fighting for “truth, justice, and the American way of life.” This portrayal of violence as a necessary judicial tool works inevitably to subjugate the most vulnerable people of our planet, namely women and children. It accomplishes this by portraying unrealistic ideologies and distorting and exaggerating differences among race, class, gender, age, sexuality, and especially religion. The media uses images that “shock and awe” our sensibilities—causing us to constantly react—deflecting our attention away from resistance and away from collective empowerment. “One of the most obvious signs of widespread acceptance of violence is the amount of it that routinely appears in media.” (Wood 314) Violence has become a pervasive part of our reality causing us to react with fear—a state in which we can be easily controlled and manipulated.

The media is a multinational enterprise—an “Eminent Domain”—which is the luxury of a privileged few who influence our popular culture and control the mechanism through which the mythologies of popular culture are transfixed. Its primary existence serves to preserve their control of global socio-economics in posterity by bombarding us with so much violence that we scarcely have time to be aware of the fact that we are being manipulated. However, there are those subtle geniuses who emerge from the frontlines and through personal experience have concluded that the status quo is a never ending merry-go-round leading to the annihilation of both sides. In other words, they have come to realize that hero fixation is a sickness that symbiotically—Ying Yang, 69—enforces victimization. These geniuses work behind the scenes influencing the media content, often changing its’ focus or challenging accepted norms. Although there are many people who are actively participating in efforts to transform the socio-economic landscape on many different fronts whether through academia, media, or politics, the most effective means to communicate ideas is through writing.Introduction—Confronting the Ideological Beast America is desperately... more

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