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- [00:00]
A
A special welcome to our Patreon friends and our supportive Patreon community. This is Economic Update Extra. It's a place where we continue the interviews and conversations we've had on the regular Economic Update program in order to respond to your interest in more material and to give our guests a chance to develop some of the thoughts they have. So I've been talking with Chris Hedges at and I'm going to pick up that conversation where we left it off.
- [00:32]
B
I want to ask you to push you a little bit. What can change all of this? What could you imagine seeing within the large society that you analyze? What are the seeds of a possible new direction or a pushback or a change that could take us away from from where the society seems to be going as you've laid it out?
- [00:57]
C
Well, there are no internal or external impediments now to corporate pillage and exploitation, both of the ecosystem and of the citizenry. They will loot and steal and exploit until exhaustion or collapse. They know only one word, and that's war. So eventually there has to be some kind of a response. But it's impossible to predict what that response will look like if it's localized and it has no ideological framework. If it's just eruptions, that's easily put down, especially with militarized police and wholesale surveillance. And of course, section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization act, which Obama signed into law, which overturns the 1878 pose Comitatus act and allows the military to be deployed as a domestic. And as you know, I sued him in federal court over that. We won. And then they denied my standing at the appellate court and at the Supreme Court. So it's law. That's how the system works. They deny the standing on the part of citizens because it's impossible to rule on that issue. It's a black and white issue. It's unconstitutional. So the other problem is if that that backlash is exploited effectively by the organs of propaganda like Fox News. And so it becomes right wing backlash. I mean, Europe in the 1930s, much of Europe went one way and we went another. And so I mean, what I hope for is acts of mass civil disobedience with a socialist vision and the direct confrontation and overthrow of corporate power. It's got to be nonviolent. This is why I have battled extensively with the black bloc and antifa. They often picket my events on the West Coast. But they are an impediment to this movement. I watched what those movements did in Eastern Europe. I covered the revolutions in East Germany Czechoslovakia, Romania. I covered the street demonstrations that brought down Slobonnama Milosevic. So I know how it's done. It's often triggered by a very trivial event because the Tinder is there, but you never know what will ignite it. And that's always true. So I hold out hope. But I'm also aware, like Blanke, who didn't believe in the myth of human progress, that, you know, we can go in a bad way as well. So it's just an unknown. I think those of us who care about an open society and egalitarianism and a populist agenda have to work as hard as we can in order to make that happen. But nothing is sure.
- [03:43]
B
What do you think in terms of the emergence of socialist candidates winning a few elections? Ocasio Cortez here in New York, and so on. Bernie, are these for you Potentials?
- [03:58]
C
Not within the confines of the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party does not function as a real political party. The base has no say. We have watched the hierarchy at the Democratic Party make war on progressives within the party, purging, for instance, Sanders supporters in California and elsewhere, or in Ocasio Ortez attempting to buy her off. I think Nancy Pelosi's now become her best friend or something. And I can't stand the governor of New York. But he said this kind of wave is not a wave, it's a ripple. I mean, when we look statistically at the Democratic candidates that are being put up for office, a huge percentage come out of the intelligence community and the military. They embrace neoliberal economics, so they sell them gender. I mean, there's a lot of women, but I don't really, if we haven't moved beyond that by now, the idea that it's great to elevate a woman. I mean, there's a big difference between Condoleezza rice and Cynthia McKinney. I mean, we have to look at what people. I mean, obviously we want more women and more people of color, but we have to look closely at what it is they're espousing. I mean, this. We got sold down the river by Obama, who turned out to be, as Cornel west says correctly, a black mascot for Wall Street.
- [05:17]
B
In the Great Depression, as you said earlier, we went another way. There was a movement from below, union, socialist, communists. There's an obvious explanation why we don't have it now, because after World War II, we destroyed all of that systematically. But nonetheless, one is entitled perhaps to believe if it happened in the 1930s, it could, even though it has to start all over again.
- [05:42]
C
We've lost our manufacturing base, which was vital to organizing and vital to putting pressure on the ownership class. We saw it in Detroit with the sit down strikes and stuff. We've lost control of the press. That's important. We used to have a diversified, decentralized press. Now press is in the hands of five or six corporations. Viacom, General Electricity, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. Where the acceptable range of opinion, as Dorothy Parker once wrote about Katharine Hepburn's emotional range as an actress goes from A to B. And so, you know, it's these ridiculous debates which aren't really debates. Well, should we just bomb Syria or should we put boots on the ground in Syria? As if those are the two choices, you know, so, and you know, we have to acknowledge the quantum leap in ability the state has over control over the citizenry with wholesale surveillance with already in our marginal communities, due process has been taken away from poor people of color. 94% of the people in our prison system never even had a jury trial. So there's a collapse of those institutions within the systems of governance that were designed once to protect the rights of the citizenry. So it's a very anemic. We're in a very anemic state. And if there is an eruption, it's not going to have the kind of foundational support that it had in the 1930s.
- [07:21]
B
Any chance of that shifting? Are there new supports that could emerge for some reason?
- [07:27]
C
I mean, they would have to. Yeah, I mean they would have to emerge very quickly because we can't forget that the right since the early 1970s had, has built the institutional base that we on the left lack. So instead of union halls, you have megachurches, you have Liberty University, Liberty Law School, Patrick Henry Law School, you have the Christian right. We can't ignore them. Have created powerful systems of indoctrination through Christian media and have pioneered the whole concept of magical thinking and essentially cutting people off from the real world, making fact interchangeable with opinion, making how you look at the world dependent on your emotional rather than your intellectual understanding. So we're in a different place than we are in the 30s and a much more dangerous place. I mean, I watched in East Germany, I was in Leipzig with leaders of the eastern. And they had a very fuzzy. They didn't really know what they were doing. Most of them were Lutheran clergy. It probably explains why. But you had, essentially with the collapse of the Berlin Wall, I mean there's a good. I was with them on the afternoon of November 9th and so, as with the leaders of the East German uprising, and they were saying maybe within a year there will be free passage back and forth across the Berlin Wall. By that evening, the Berlin Wall did not exist as an impediment to human traffic, which shows you how even the purported leaders of the movement don't know where it's going. So, I mean, the problem we saw in Eastern Europe was that, and I knew Havel, I was in the Magic Lantern Theater with him every night in Prague, is that they got sold this bill of goods, that the free market is synonymous with freedom. And we've now seen in Eastern Europe this swing back towards fascism or proto fascism. Orban, in Hungary or in Poland, they've just destroyed their judicial system. I mean, I was in Poland a while ago, and on state tv, Lech Walents is described as a Soviet agent. I mean, and that's usually always attached to his name. Gazeta, the great newspaper founded by Solidarity. It's not sold at the kiosk. The government stopped it from being distributed, largely.
- [09:45]
B
So the Hungarian government literally this morning criminalized homelessness. It will now arrest and put into jail the people for whom it doesn't provide a home. That's right.
- [09:57]
C
Well, we're headed in that direction. I mean, I think the model for the global capitalist is China. It's a kind of corporate totalitarianism where you are. I mean, there are cameras everywhere in China. They're setting up face recognition, and that's the world we're headed towards. And it's a very frightening and dystopian one. The whole idea that IT technologies are a benefit to humankind flies in the face of who? All these IT companies like Google or Bezos has a $600 million contract with the CIA. I mean, they're fused at the hip with the security and surveillance apparatus. Their business model is to make profiles of us so they know everything about us. And you can be sure they are sharing that with the. So we're up against it. I mean, it's a very dark time in human history. And I think we fool ourselves by believing somehow the inevitable myth of human progress, that we're always going to go forward. Well, no, we don't. I mean, read history. We often roll backwards. I mean, the Dark Ages lasted a very long time in Europe.
- [11:09]
B
That's right. And when you look at the fascisms of Europe in the 1930s, things could have gone quite differently with a few different adjustments.
- [11:18]
C
Well, sure. I mean, you know German history better than I do, but you had Ebert and the Social Democrats responding to the 1929 crash by catering to the international banking system and imposing draconian forms of austerity, including abolishing unemployment insurance.
- [11:34]
B
Right.
- [11:35]
C
Which was a gift to the loonies and the buffoons and the killers in the Nazi party.
- [11:40]
B
And it split the country into two parts. And the business community chose the right wing to.
- [11:45]
C
Just like here. So the business community here, the corporations find Trump an embarrassment, clearly. But he gives them what they want in the same way the Nazis gave IB Farben and Krupp what they wanted. In the same way they gave the Wehrmacht what they wanted, which was eradicating the brown shirts. So, you know, Trump, you know, one wonders if he has enough brain cells to free. But he. Look what he's done to the military. 10% increase and do whatever you want. Drop the mother roll bombs on the CIA tunnels, tunnels built by the CIA in Afghanistan for God knows how many hundreds of millions of dollars or whatever it was. Do whatever you want. We're not going. There's no civilian oversight of the military at all.
- [12:21]
B
And it's basically the same to the banking community.
- [12:23]
C
Yeah.
- [12:24]
B
The reason Jamie Dimon and others like him support Trump is he just gave them unbelievable. In December of 2017, this tax cut to end all tax cut. At the end of 30 years, we when they were doing better than the stock market ever before. I mean, it boggles the mind, this kind of. And then to have the ability to position as though he is in some way helping the little guy or the little. Extraordinary.
- [12:50]
C
Yeah, but that's classic totalitarian. And you know, the thing that Trump does, which is so dangerous, and I write about it in the book, is engage in the permanent lie. So all politicians lie, all governments lie, as if Stone said. But for Trump, what he does is what the Christian right does. He denies reality itself. So you can have a picture of Obama's inauguration crowd and his. And it doesn't matter. He still has the largest inauguration crowd in history. And that's what the Christian right does. And Hannah Arendt writes about this in Origins of Totalitarianism. And the danger of the permanent lie is that it throws the population into kinds of schizophrenia because you're looking at reality and it's being denied, denied, denied. And it's also an exquisite kind of torture in economics.
- [13:34]
B
You keep telling the American people there's a recovery and they don't experience it, so it turns inward. There must be something wrong with me because everybody else is having this thing that I don't have because no one is there to explain to them. No, you're the norm. That's a load of it.
- [13:51]
C
Well, and meanwhile, what is cnn? What is the media doing? It's endless carnival barking and burlesque and Stormy Daniels and Stormy Daniels lawyer and Omarosa. And then we had the Kavanaugh show, which was like Chronicle of a Death foretold by Marquez. I mean, anybody who thought that that wasn't predetermined just didn't understand what American politics has become.
- [14:13]
A
No.
- [14:14]
B
Evidently, Mr. Trump gave a recent interview in which he was asked this question. He said, it doesn't matter whether Kavanaugh is guilty or not. We won. So he was summarizing what was at stake. Chris, thank you very much for taking time out of your book tour. Good luck with this book, the Farewell Tour. You articulated beautifully and clearly, and it's much for our audience to think about. Thank you. Thank you very much.
- [14:42]
A
And thank you all in the Patreon community for joining with us and getting this continuation of the interview from the regular economic update program. And I look forward to speaking with you again next week.
- [15:16]
B
Sam.