Q: In the background is the health of the American empire and what Trump and the Republicans represent in regards to its health. How is the empire doing?
A: The fatal mistake on the part of the empire was the invasion of Iraq. Now we have nearly 20 years of warfare in the Middle East, which has cost tremendous suffering, hundreds of thousands of dead, millions displaced, seeing the creation of failed states, whether in Libya or northern Syria.
And that's characteristic of all late empires, that they embrace or engage in military fiascos in a kind of desperate attempt to recover a lost glory or a lost hegemony. I also think what's happening now in the United States around the pandemic is that it has exposed to the rest of the world that the American model doesn't work. We are unable to cope. There are very few countries, maybe Brazil, that have a worse track record than we do.
So we can cope neither with a pandemic because of our for-profit health-care system, which is not about delivering health, but of course gouging the public. So as this pandemic continues to hit us in wave after wave and just spirals out of control, we're now facing an estimated , American dead by December and , by January. Tens of millions of people have already been thrown into destitution, the ruling elites are bickering over an extension of unemployment insurance, the moratorium on evictions has been lifted, which means that some 40 million Americans are at risk of being thrown out of their homes by the end of the year.
Twenty-seven million Americans are expected to lose their health insurance because health insurance in the United States is tied to employment; it is employer-sponsored.
And real figures of unemployment are probably 20 per cent, because they fix the figure. The system was hollowed out anyway by corporations and oligarchic elite so that it couldn't withstand any stress, and that I think has been exposed by the pandemic. So the credibility of the American empire is embodied in a figure like Trump, embodied in the inability of the United States to cope with a pandemic.
How much of the fact that so much of the Treasury is spent on defence and not on infrastructure and health care plays a role in all of this chaos? A: Huge, huge. This again is a characteristic of late empires. Go back and look at the Roman Empire, there was a one-million men standing army, and all of your resources are being funnelled into it.
Editor's note: Since , the Pentagon was audited twice — and failed both times. That is completely gone. They are completely subservient to the military industrial complex that is hollowing out the country from the inside — our bridges, our roads, our public transportation, our utilities.
I live in Princeton, N. And it's all falling apart to feed essentially this rapacious military complex and defence contractors. The only thing we make any more are weapons, and that's because it's not capitalism. What do you suppose happened and did the left ever really have a shot this time around?
A: No. The Democratic Party was never going to give Sanders the nomination, and the largest and most important Democratic donors and leaders had made that publicly clear — people like Lloyd Blankfein , the former CEO of Goldman Sachs, who had said several times quite openly that if Sanders got the nomination, which wasn't going to happen, he and the rest of the donor class of the Democratic Party were going to support Trump.
So they had fixed it so the super delegates , which are appointed by the Democratic National Committee and are composed of lobbyists and the Democratic Party leadership, could vote on the second round. So Sanders if had gotten enough votes on the first round, he would have been trounced in the second. So it was organized to push out the other candidates and leave Biden alone.
There were all sorts of tricks they used in that they used again in But Sanders winning was never going to happen, and I think all the publicity around AOC obscures the fact that these people on the left are utterly irrelevant, both within Congress and within the Democratic Party. Again, the two ruling parties agree on far more than they disagree on — whether it's on trade agreements or defence spending or austerity programs or tax cuts.
Biden essentially functions for the Democratic liberal elite as a kind of symbol of nostalgia for a return to what I call the pantomime of democracy. But the political rot that is now eating away at the nation is not going to be solved by elections. And, by the way, the political class has already instituted all sorts of totalitarian forms of control, from wholesale government surveillance to the revoking of civil liberties, to the use of paramilitaries on the streets of our cities — these are all part of the twisted pathologies of all civilizations sputtering towards oblivion.
So the removal of Trump isn't going to do anything. In fact, it'll probably exacerbate the lust for racial violence and white nationalism, because both parties have built a mafia economy and out of that, a mafia state. Bush, under Bill Clinton, under Ronald Reagan — to give essentially carte blanche to corporations and oligarchs to pillage and loot.
A: It will restore the decorum of our version of monarchy, and it will restore the civic religion that is built around our government power. That's all. It may also bring with it a rational response to the pandemic. But remember, the pandemic may be beyond control by then. The militarized police that terrorize people in poor neighbourhoods aren't going away.
The endless wars, they're not going to end. The bloated military budget we just saw passed is not going to be reduced. The world's largest prison system — 2. The manufacturing jobs are not going to return, the social inequality is already growing exponentially, the for-profit health-care system, which are huge donors to the Biden campaign, will continue to gouge the public and price millions of people out of the health-care system. The language of hate and bigotry has already been normalized as the primary form of communications.
And you find that once you consider yourself part of this collective and valued by this collective, you express it through rituals, elections, democratic participation, patriotism, all these shared national beliefs.
And these bonds, as Durkeim writes, provide meaning, they give a sense of purpose, they give status, they give dignity. In essence, they offer psychological protection from the meaningless that comes with being isolated and abandoned, as well as impending mortality. And once you break these bonds, you push individuals and societies into very deep and self-destructive psychological distress.
And that is writ large across the United States. The self-destructive pathologies of opioid addiction, gambling, suicide, sexual sadism — the rise of armed white hate groups.
Durkheim wrote that people who seek the annihilation of others, are driven by desires for self-annihilation, nihilistic mass shootings — this is all a product of this anomie, as is our political dysfunction. And that's not going away with Biden. Q: On top of all this, you've had the George Floyd murder and other African-Americans killed by the police. What is the significance of the reaction to this police brutality? A: Well, again, that's a product of this dislocation, this anomie, this shunting aside of poor people of colour and African-Americans and having a state that treats them as human refuse.
And the two forms of social control, as I mentioned before, the prison system and these militarized police, what you've seen is a gaslighting on the part of the elite. But I think that the gaslighting isn't working. It worked in the past, but it's not working anymore, and my sense is that those who are in the streets have come to the realization, the correct realization, that the system is beyond reform, that we can't reform the police. All these tricks — more body cameras, consent decrees, revised use of force policies, banning chokeholds, civilian review boards, banning no-knock search warrants, training de-escalation tactics — they've all been proposals that have been proffered in the past, and in several cases, have been adopted in the wake of other police murders, like the killing of Eric Garner and Michael Brown.
So again, it's the structure. Police unions are very powerful because they are big donors to political campaigns. And they have been able to push aside any reformers within the system, like community review boards, even mayors and police chiefs who are reformers. So these are all smoke and mirrors, it's a pantomime of a faux anguish and empathy by the ruling elites. But I don't think people are buying it. I think my sense is that in the street, there's a kind of political sophistication, and that's why you see people calling for the abolition of police, not the reforming of police.
Are they doing an adequate job, or does it depend? Or are they doing a terrible job? A: They're not covering it. They cover the eruption of a crisis, but don't cover the issues. And that doesn't matter which wing of the media landscape you're in, including the New York Times. I worked there for 15 years. It doesn't cover day in and day out the suffering and humiliation and economic distress that is now visited on half the country, and, in particular, poor people of colour in urban areas.
I think it's important to note that the media landscape has changed from when Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky wrote Manufacturing Consent in It's changed quite radically. You don't need the old print media to connect sellers with buyers. Sellers can go directly to buyers, they have all of our profiles, courtesy of our digital platforms.
And so that whole notion of faux objectivity and impartiality is gone, and the media landscape is splintered into people who seek out their particular demographic, whether it's MSNBC or whether it's FOX News or Breitbart or whatever. So you have a media that still, as Chomsky and Herman pointed out, manufactures consent, but it does this by setting group against group.
And it does this by catering to the particular opinions and prejudices of that group, which are reinforced and then sold back to us. So it's kind of packaged anger just for us. And the danger is that as those divides widen, you can't communicate across them. And that's how you have huge sections of the country essentially cut off from each other, unable to communicate and entranced by the fake dissent of the cultural wars and conspiracy theories.
Politics is reduced to political personality, civil discourse is defined by insults and invective, and meanwhile, the superstructure of power, of corporate power, is never examined and never challenged, and that creates political impotence among the populous. So the media is a junior partner in the destruction of American democracy, and, of course, we're a huge factor in publicizing Trump — because he's good for profits.
And that kind of moral swamp that the media has created is a very fertile place for demagogues like Trump. Q: Do you think the corporate elites, the billionaire class —— are they worried about what's happening to the United States in any regard? A: The billionaire class doesn't live in the United States, it lives in its self-created entity, as a writer for New Yorker magazine once called it, Richistan. They don't fly commercial airlines, they only hang out with other billionaires.
They make insane amounts of money, and this pandemic has made them even wealthier. So I think they're fairly clueless. I think they think Biden is the solution. They don't have any contact with the working class other than the people who serve them.
So that's again, always very dangerous when you allow an elite to essentially seize complete political and economic power, and they are utterly disconnected from the reality around them. And, of course, they're driving all the policies, and yet they really are clueless about what they're doing and where we're going. Even under Nero and Caligula there was still a Senate. So that's what's happened. The facade has remained, but our democracy seized up and stopped functioning, beginning in the early s, but certainly, I would say, going all the way back to Clinton.
That's when it really kind of stopped working completely. So you had Clinton — and Biden was at the epicentre of this — speaking in the traditional feel-your-pain language of the Democratic Party while assiduously serving corporate power.
That was done, as I mentioned, through NAFTA, it was done through the omnibus crime bill that militarized the police and exploded the prison population, the deregulation of the Federal Communications Commission, which allowed a half-dozen corporations to seize control of the airwaves. The destruction of welfare was done under Clinton — and under the old welfare system, 70 per cent of the recipients were children — the ripping down of the firewalls between commercial and investment banks, which was the revoking of Glass-Steagall Act, all of this came under the Democratic Party.
So I think part of the problem was that betrayal by the Democratic Party elite saw the white working class gravitate towards the worst elements of the Republican Party — because that betrayal cuts so deep. And then we have the assault on unions.
Only 11 per cent of the American workforce is unionized, and I think six per cent of them are in public sector — and most of them can't use the only weapon that workers have to further their interests, which is to strike. So America has long been a failed state, and I've written book after book — Death of the Liberal Class, Empire of Illusion, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt — which were all reported all over the country essentially talking about the dangers of where we're headed.
And, of course, now we're there. A chilling and worrisome reflection on the present state of decay in America. It is very difficult for most individuals not part of the hierarchy to understand the present state of affairs and the journey that led to this point.
Many would like to believe that as in the Hollywood conceptualization of matters that everything will end well. This wishing will not save us from the dangerous reality that awaits us. There is a darkness that is descending around the world and our concepts of freedom and human rights are teetering on the abyss of a new age of totalitarianism much more virulent than the world has ever seen.
I have feared for some time that we are past a tipping point on many fronts. It offers no way forward. This interview is said to have been edited. Attempts by WikiLeaks to hold press conferences see the audio distorted and the visual images corrupted.
Links to WikiLeaks events are delayed or cut. Algorithms block the dissemination of WikiLeaks content. Hosting services, including Amazon, removed WikiLeaks from its servers. Julian Assange, after releasing the Iraqi war logs, saw his bank accounts and credit cards frozen. The Freedom of the Press Foundation in December closed down the anonymous funding channel to WikiLeaks which was set up to protect the anonymity of donors.
A well-orchestrated smear campaign against Assange was amplified and given credibility by the mass media and filmmakers such as Alex Gibney. Assange and WikiLeaks were first. We are next. They are attempting to try to spread their propaganda in the mainstream media. This will be the official mantra of the Democratic Party, a vicious redbaiting campaign without actual reds, especially as the country spirals out of control. I did not choose to leave the mainstream media.
I was pushed out. And once anyone is pushed out, the ruling elite is relentless about discrediting the few platforms left willing to give them, and the issues they raise, a hearing. Taibbi argues that the precedent for overt censorship took place when the major digital platforms — Facebook, Twitter, Google, Spotify, YouTube — in a coordinated move blacklisted the right-wing talk show host Alex Jones.
This is a great thing. You and I were raised in a system where you got punished for speech if you committed libel or slander or if there was imminent incitement to lawless action, right?
That was the standard that the Supreme Court set, but that was done through litigation. There was an open process where you had a chance to rebut charges. That is all gone now. You see a major reputable news organization like the New York Post — with a year history — locked out of its own Twitter account. The danger is that we end up with a one-party informational system. We let these companies get this monopolistic share of the distribution system.
In the Soviet Union the truth was passed, often hand to hand, in underground samizdat documents, clandestine copies of news and literature banned by the state. The truth will endure. It will be heard by those who seek it out. It will expose the mendacity of the powerful, however hard it will be to obtain.
Despotisms fear the truth. They know it is a mortal threat. If we remain determined to live in truth, no matter the cost, we have a chance. Click here to sign up for email alerts. These are things that Pope francis has been writing about and speaking about his entire time in his job as Pope. For the same reason, The Economy of Francesco is now taking place online. It will be live-streamed on the website of Vatican News. More than 2, registered participants from countries will take part in the encounter.
Thank you Chris for once again pointing out what ails us. Needless to say, perhaps, but I am deeply grateful for your sanity, clarity, courage and perseverance. Also needless to say, how pissed off I am by the Great Deceit perpetrated by the elites to mask their profound culpability. Their terrible betrayal of what is best in themselves in not just jilting the People, us, but their soiling of all the values of which Trust is composed.
We are in a David and Goliath dynamic. On Inc. This condition leads to a person growing extremely tall—but also often leads to double-vision and severe nearsightedness. The lead in the essay is this. Think of a confident competitor who is more than happy to be underestimated.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a trade unionist. It seems like the masters are just as deluded as the slaves. But the situation is unsustainable. When many millions of slaves become homeless and hungry that reality will become unavoidable. Who will they blame? Will they attack one another or will they revolt against the system?
Soon we will see. The censorship of the media is pretty bad, and it appears to be extending to social media users. I pay attention to the far-right fascists, and they get away with posting much worse. I thought it was an app problem, so I restarted it. I concluded that Facebook as a whole was having issues. No post is flagged. The error message tells me nothing else. Just no sharing. I conclude that my sharing of alternative viewpoints is the real problem here. I am a socialist. I was only banned from posting on FB once, for criticizing Israel.
No surprise there. But I suspect FB of shadow banning, i. I first learned of this practice from Craig Murray, another whose articles I post regularly. That is a chilling thought. I was shadow banned by medium. It appeared to me that my posts and comments went in, but no one else could see them. At least with them I could tell something was wrong because I had regular conversations with some people. They usually ran my comments, but sometimes they only appeared at the bottom of the heap, by the time the article was so old that few people were likely to read it.
I never use it but, just to increase availability of what I write on Medium, I shuttle all my writings to Facebook. Which, of course, I consider a badge of honor. I think the real challenge is to figure out how to get people to stop hiding from the truth. How can people like that be taught compassion? Thankful for your honesty. Huge intellect. Global experience.
What a laughable term that is these days. Bernie never would have had a chance running as a Democrat — absurd. He should have walked out of that convention four years ago and taken his supporters with him. Oh wait- you said that. World leaders and their corporate brethren are so wedded to greed And the power that comes with it, that they simply avert their eyes. The contagious cruelty extends to humans, many millions of them, nearly always black or brown, uprooted from their lands because of wars not of their making.
What we have now is a triage system. If you are wealthy, white and not old, you are worth trying to rescue from the plague. If you are among the many millions who are colored, poor or homeless, you need not apply. Up to that time, the Times ran one or two articles on Sanders it seems.
Whatever the number, it was miniscule. They almost completely ignored one of the most significant campaigns in modern history, thus helping to ensure it died on the vine. And when they did cover it one or two times, it was always negative. Yes, I too dropped donating to NPR some time before when I got clear my complaints about skewed reporting simply had disappeared into the vapors. Thanks Chris. To avoid future potential government antitrust measures or nationalisation heaven forbid!
That ivy-league stenographers are being pressed into the service of censorship gives some indication of the desperation of the rulers. To an extent, Trump has been responsible for letting the genie out of the bottle, as the first president probably since before Andrew Jackson to have failed, repeatedly, to put lipstick on the racist, capitalist imperial pig.
And due to the insouciance of the right wing of the duopoly it looks to be happening soon. We all acquiesce in this, effectively making ourselves as a society, a larger fractal of a person without a memory.
The one conspiracy which I have not seen Chris Hedges address as a threat to the future of civilisation is the huge scientific lacuna in the study of alien abduction, which those lucky enough to be unaware of this E.
Let me say in a premature summation of the arguments no-one would stop to read here that one needs to think in terms of military strategy to get a feel for the big picture: if there is one military advantage prior to the engagement of forces even better than surprise, outside the metrics of numerical and technological superiority, what is it?
This is the level of advantage the aliens seek to bring to the engagement, having now done probably the majority the work of building their hybrid armies out of the flesh of human children.
But our scientists would consent to tell you all that if only you would give them the Nobel Prize in advance of their doing so. We had Al Qaeda pilots who used to do that.
Are journalists interested in this story? Reports enter society, by definition, as folklore, by word of mouth. But they are not myth, they are the raw material for study. Science fiction writers pick up on the folklore and are then amazed at the lower if what they take to be their own ideas.
Is Roland a troll or just a garden variety Psycho? His coherent thought process makes me lean toward troll. Du snakker om Troll? As the involuntary paradigm shift which led to these views took me some 50 of my 59 years to assimilate, I have little in the way of expectation that you will be set upon by feelings of existential dread any time soon; I would not wish that upon anyone. Sincerely, Roland vdP. This shows why Disqus is a better comment system.
A troll like Zwerich can filibuster at great length and clog the comment stream. On Discus you would only see the beginning of of it unless you opt to see more. The only place one can find such a collection of hateful, half but mostly less than that truths and outright lies as on display in the pile of demagogic propaganda bile above are the radicalized proto fascist right propaganda media outlets.
The claim that the Democratic party criticized the integrity of the election is false. All the investigations of the Russian interference concluded that without a doubt Russia tried to interfere in favor of Trump, and while the inquiries did not find strong, prosecutable Trump-Putin connection, the Muller investigation clearly stated that it cannot declare that such connections did not exist the 2nd paragraph lies.
One of the most egregious Neo Progressive fabrications is equating liberals and conservatives, a lie that each and every Trump administration action had exposed. The rest of the tiresome, delusional at times text is filled with similar gems that has very little to do with truth outside the confines of the radicalized alternative universe where Hedges comfortably and definitely reside alongside right-wing, as well as Neo Progressive propaganda stars like Greenwald, Taibbi, Scheer, and Tucker Carlson.
I would strongly recommend expanding your frame of reference to include more than Neo Progressive demagogues and propaganda buffs like Hedges, Greenwald, Taibbi, and the rest of those who are invested in forcing their narrow, partisan and alternate reality fiction on the rest of us.
The real world is a polarized one, captured by the near universal globally speaking by the two distinct world views — the liberal and the conservative, with few satellite, minority voices such as libertarian from the right and progressive from the left. Moreover, it is enforcing some of the worse human social instincts it — the mistrust, even fear and hatred of the different.
Your comment is a classic example. For the record, it is neither. Have witnessed the dramatic changes of which Hedges et al detail. So you can imagine, perhaps, how ludicrous to the point of almost hilarity, I find your point of view. Believe what I say! Existentialism is neither inherently religious or non-religious.
The Biden election proved mailing ballots is more secure than using voting machines is. It proved many of us held our noses and voted Biden. In the primaries it proved the mainstream media prefers Trump over Bernie Sanders. That said, I agree with much of the content of the article and with what Mr. Hedges has stated or implied in other articles..
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