Chris Hedges on the Implosion of Global Capitalism 

AUDIO: Chris Hedges on the Implosion of Global Capitalism

Posted on May 26, 2015

theglobeandmail.com

In this sweeping survey of an international crisis caused by “global capitalism based on speculation,” author, Truthdig columnist and activist Chris Hedges delivers a stark and urgent apprisal of the worldwide catastrophe that’s sure to come if the current system isn’t confronted and forced to change.
Hedges sketches out the alarming proportions of the problem to “The Next Debate” host Rudyard Griffiths, chairman of the Munk Debates, in an audio interview posted on Canadian news source The Globe and Mail’s website.
In their discussion, which touches on a series of critical topics Hedges covers in his latest book, “Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt,” Griffiths and Hedges discuss income inequality; the master-slave relationship between the corporate state and purportedly “free” citizens in nations like the U.S. and Canada; the movement to boost the minimum wage; the uprising against oppressive and racist police forces in America; and climate change, among others.
In short, as Hedges puts it, “We live in a revolutionary moment.” Hear his take on how we got to this point and what can be done, in the clip below (via “The Next Debate” as posted in The Globe and Mail):

Chris Hedges

The Pathology of the Rich White Family

Posted on May 17, 2015 

By Chris Hedges

  Portraits of former Presidents George W. Bush, left, and George H.W. Bush, his father, part of the show “The Art of Leadership: A President’s Diplomacy.” The exhibit of portraits of world leaders by the younger Bush are on display at the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum in Dallas and runs through June 3. (AP / Benny Snyder)

 

The pathology of the rich white family is the most dangerous pathology in America. The rich white family is cursed with too much money and privilege. It is devoid of empathy, the result of lifetimes of entitlement. It has little sense of loyalty and lacks the capacity for self-sacrifice. Its definition of friendship is reduced to “What can you do for me?” It is possessed by an insatiable lust to increase its fortunes and power. It believes that wealth and privilege confer to it a superior intelligence and virtue. It is infused with an unchecked hedonism and narcissism. And because of all this, it interprets reality through a lens of self-adulation and greed that renders it delusional. The rich white family is a menace. The pathologies of the poor, when set against the pathologies of rich white people, are like a candle set beside the sun.

There are no shortages of acolytes and propagandists for rich white families. They dominate our airwaves. They blame poverty, societal breakdown, urban violence, drug use, domestic abuse and crime on the pathology of poor black families—not that they know any. They argue that poor black families disintegrate because of some inherent defect—here you can read between the lines that white people are better than black people—a defect that these poor families need to fix.

Street Democracy writes: 

Chris Hedges rightly talks about elites weaponising policies to use against mainstream society by indoctrinating minds to fear 'everyone' doing 'anything' at 'anytime'. The use of propaganda is powerful.

'Sour principles' enlarged by monumental mechanisms squander and obscures truth by our ruling elites. This mechanism emotionally herds people to believe in the direction the 'legalised terrorist's' (our leaders) want.

With 'corporate' media programmed to 'program the herd mentality',criminalising 'everyone' the indoctrination is simple and effective as is 'divide and conquer'.

If you stage 'moral panic', plant social indoctrination, repeat societal propaganda, you can manipulate, 'spellbound' the masses into divisions where before were unheard of. 

By inflicting a fierce dialogue and ferocious demeanour at particular members of communities, a siege mentality appears, divisions occur, cracks show of opinions, beliefs differing and causing frictions between groups where once they were none.

By labelling the public as potential 'nasties' there will be many who swallow such 'toxic rubbish'. 

Their wilful arrogance is spoon fed to prove commitment to their country, social position, the perfect citizenry perhaps?

The same 'divide and conquer' is in the UK with our recent General Election. The Tory's won the with a 37% majority, and locally gained seats from areas 'never' before were Tory, but Labour.

By trashing those on benefits, the unemployed, disabled people, it causes those working to raise their social status by a mere thread and divisions appear between the workers and the non-workers. 

This despite the 'working poor' enduring back breaking, long hours of minimum wage in temporary jobs their lives exhausted and utterly spent in equal misery, socially they feel accepted into mainstream society. The unemployed have been expelled, marginalised and socially disgraced.

So attacking the poorest, those economically just above them are inclined to vote for a more right wing political party to distance themselves from the social disgrace the Tories have labelled the unemployed. 

Those desperate to prove their social status as higher because of their employment position to gain the 'Tory' societal approval, until they loose their temporay job and become unemployed, then reality hits home.

The same propaganda, 'divide and conquer' has been used to hype up 'terrorist's'. 

'Terrorist' have been placed 'malicously' penetrating innately decent societies to be anyone at anytime. Those insecure members of the public desperate to prove their 'goodness' will demonstrate by potentially informing upon others. 

It is '1984 - George Orwell' at best, watch the film if you can.

By Debbie Simmons-Street Democracy

Click to here to watch: 1984 George Orwell (1956) – Full Film

Now read Chris Hedges

A Nation of Snitches Posted on May 10, 2015

By Chris Hedges

  A Transportation Security Administration sign at Los Angeles’ main rail terminal, Union Station, urges that suspicious activities be reported to authorities. It declares, “If You See Something Say Something.” (AP / Damian Dovarganes)

 

A totalitarian state is only as strong as its informants. And the United States has a lot of them. They read our emails. They listen to, download and store our phone calls. They photograph us on street corners, on subway platforms, in stores, on highways and in public and private buildings. They track us through our electronic devices. They infiltrate our organizations. They entice and facilitate “acts of terrorism” by Muslims, radical environmentalists, activists and Black Bloc anarchists, framing these hapless dissidents and sending them off to prison for years. They have amassed detailed profiles of our habits, our tastes, our peculiar proclivities, our medical and financial records, our sexual orientations, our employment histories, our shopping habits and our criminal records. They store this information in government computers. It sits there, waiting like a time bomb, for the moment when the state decides to criminalize us.

Totalitarian states record even the most banal of our activities so that when it comes time to lock us up they can invest these activities with subversive or criminal intent. And citizens who know, because of the courage of Edward Snowden, that they are being watched but naively believe they “have done nothing wrong” do not grasp this dark and terrifying logic.

Chris Hedges Interviews Noam Chomsky 

 

Chris Hedges

Make the Rich Panic -Posted on May 3, 2015

By Chris Hedges

Protesters rush a police line after a rally at City Hall in Philadelphia on Thursday. The event followed days of unrest in Baltimore over the death of Freddie Gray. (AP / Matt Rourke)

 

It does not matter to the corporate rich who wins the presidential election. It does not matter who is elected to Congress. The rich have the power. They throw money at their favorites the way a gambler puts cash on his favorite horse. Money has replaced the vote. The wealthy can crush anyone who does not play by their rules. And the political elites—slobbering over the spoils provided by their corporate masters for selling us out—understand the game. Barack and Michelle Obama, as did the Clintons, will acquire many millions of dollars once they leave the White House. And your elected representative in the House or Senate, if not a multimillionaire already, will be one as soon as he or she retires from government and is handed seats on corporate boards or positions in lobbying firms. We do not live in a democracy. We live in a political system that has legalized bribery, exclusively serves corporate power and is awash in propaganda and lies.

If you want change you can believe in, destroy the system. And changing the system does not mean collaborating with it as Bernie Sanders is doing by playing by the cooked rules of the Democratic Party. Profound social and political transformation is acknowledged in legislatures and courts but never initiated there. Radical change always comes from below. As long as our gaze is turned upward to the powerful, as long as we invest hope in reforming the system of corporate power, we will remain enslaved. There may be good people within the system—Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are examples—but that is not the point. It is the system that is rotten. It must be replaced.

“The only way you can get the parties’ attention is if you take votes away from them,” Ralph Nader told me by phone. “So,” he said of Sanders, “How serious is he? He makes Clinton a better phony candidate. She is going to have to agree with him on a number of things. She is going to have to be more anti-Wall Street to fend him off and neutralize him. We know it is bullshit. She will betray us once she becomes president. He is making her more likely to win. And by April he is done. Then he fades away.”

Make the Rich Panic -Posted on May 3, 2015

The Democratic Experiment is Finished

Street Democracy writes: 

 

Our political environment is run by soulless 'love abandoned' cold and calculated suits that would never endorse democracy. 

 

We instead watch political disenfranchisement of our civil liberties. 

 

Total exclusion and a ceaseless expansion of anti-democratic administrations such as The Bilderburg very closed meetings and corporate controllings of our planet.

 

'Democracy' sticky labelled over governmental infrastructures and politicised administration is all nice and everything, but it doesn't mean it is.

 

By design it has gone wrong and has it ever been the way it should?

 

Maybe when oligarchs own it, when corporations control it and a 'Satanic religion's devour it, 'democracy' is a different form of 'democracy' and not what we envisioned. 

There is a sinister art form of dressing democracy and manufacturing a new one where people are disempowered from authority who are educated to higher standards in our unequal society who control government.

The same bloodline families own all the corporations making 'free trade' and privatisation an obvious move forward and now unfettered capitalism has grown transnational corporations to be too big to control.

 

Chris Hedges from Truthdig, claims 'coup d' e'tat' a silent take over of corporations that control everything in our political system and that means our lives.

 

Please read:Quick Study: Chris Hedges on the capitalist coup d’état

 

These corporate bullies have poured dark sinister hostile fragrance into our societies albeit silently to take over our global infrastructure they govern from a higher realm in our society.

It is essential we don't get herded into these toxic totalitarian pathways of control.

By Debbie Simmons-Street Democracy

Click here for more or continue scrolling down:

The Democratic Experiment is Finished

new Saturday 2nd May 2015 at 09:57 By David Icke

‘We in the West have lived with this thing called ‘democracy’ for a good few centuries now. It has been an important experiment, but one which has, in the end, succeeded in swallowing its own tail rather than leading society to a better place. Now its time is up and we have the task of putting something genuinely better in its place.
The most well known definition of democracy – but by no means the first – is enshrined in the Gettysburg Address of November 1863. It proclaims democracy as ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’ which – maybe for good reason – laid a strong emphasis on ‘people’.
But here also lay its weakness; people (it turned out) had other ambitions that this form of self rule was ill equipped to address. Nor did they particularly want to be responsible for deciding and managing the intricacies of the experiment that they had signed-up to. ‘The majority’, that is.’
Read more: The Democratic Experiment is Finished

Choosing Life - Chris Hedges - Truthdig

Choosing Life - Chris Hedges - Truthdig 

By Chris Hedges —
As long as we exploit animals and kill them for food, we will exploit and kill each other. The willful numbness of our life as carnivores feeds our lack of empathy for the poor, our lust for war and ecocide.

 MINISINK, N.Y.—The affable, soft-spoken dairy farmer stood outside his 70-stall milking barn on his 230-acre family farm. When his father started farming there in 1950 were about 800 dairy farms in New York state’s Orange County. Only 39 survive. Small, traditional farms have been driven out of business by rising real estate prices, genetic manipulation of cows, industrial-scale hormone use that greatly increases milk production, wildly fluctuating milk prices and competition from huge operations that have herds numbering in the thousands.

For a look at conditions in large-scale dairy farming click here, scroll down to a picture of an array of meats under a heading that begins “Watch undercover videos ...” and activate the video above the words “Milk Cow.”

I grew up in the dairy farm town of Schoharie in upstate New York. The farmers would let me pick through the rocks in their stone walls as I searched for fossils of Crinoid stems, Trilobites, Eurypterids and Brachiopods. I was in numerous cow barns and pastures as a boy. I have a deep respect for the hard life of small dairy farmers. They are up at 5 or 6 in the morning for the first milking, work all day and milk the cows again in the late afternoon. This goes on seven days a week. They rarely take vacations. And their finances are precarious.

Posted on Apr 19, 2015 READ MORE