00:01:28.820He writes a weekly column for the website Truthdig
00:01:31.440and hosts a show on Contact on RT America.
00:01:35.860Hedges spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent
00:01:38.860in Central America, the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans.
00:01:42.840He has reported from more than 50 countries
00:01:45.500during his work for the Christian Science Monitor,
00:01:48.440National Public Radio, the Dallas Morning News,
00:01:51.480and the New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years.
00:01:58.980Well, hello, Chris. Thank you so much for joining us today. I just want to say before we begin that
00:02:04.780your work has been instrumental in my life, especially in my formative years,
00:02:09.140beginning at Occupy Wall Street, and it's really a manifestation come reality to be
00:02:13.900sharing this time with you. Well, thank you. So I want to start this interview by diving
00:02:19.520right into the belly of the Trump beast. So conversations around Trump and the upcoming
00:02:25.6802020 elections are futile because our problem is not Trump. Our problem is neoliberalism's descent
00:02:32.740into fascism and the pervasiveness of corporate capitalism. To a great extent, it appears that
00:02:39.140the election of Donald Trump and our hyper focus on him as an individual has purposefully thwarted
00:02:45.920all meaningful conversations on collapsing capitalism. So my question is, what is the
00:02:51.680relationship between neoliberalism's failing credibility and the calculated rise of Trump
00:02:56.960after nearly a decade of the liberal class slash Obama era functioning as a quote safety valve in
00:03:03.480a time of crisis? Well, that's precisely both the problem and the danger. It is the failure on the
00:03:13.880part of the liberal establishment to understand the social, political, and economic forces
00:03:20.920that gave rise to a figure like Trump. And it's not accidental that we see Trump-like figures
00:03:29.860arising throughout the industrialized world, and even in countries like India,
00:03:36.420where global capitalists that perpetrate the reigning ideology of neoliberalism
00:03:45.720have in essence seized control of sovereign economies.
00:03:53.880And the inability on the part of the liberal elites
00:03:57.520to recognize and name the social inequality that they helped orchestrate
00:04:05.800I find frightening because it fosters a non-reality-based belief system, i.e. Trump is a product of Russian bots or the Podesta emails or Comey or whatever without addressing the core issue.
00:04:31.700And they engage in the same kind of demagoguery, attacking Putin in the way that Trump will attack Muslims or undocumented immigrants.
00:04:45.820But they're both non-reality based belief systems. And that failure on the part of the liberal establishment to understand how we got here and their role in how we got here and their relentless personalizing of our decay in the figure of Trump means that.
00:05:11.580the rupture of the social bonds that have been caused by deindustrialization and austerity and
00:05:22.020neoliberalism that gave rise to a demagogue like Trump are not going to be fixed. We're not going
00:05:29.720to deal with the fundamental issue that has distorted our democracy. And we're not going
00:05:38.460reverse the corporate coup d'etat that's taken place and therefore things are only going to get
00:05:44.120worse because first of all we're headed towards another financial crisis even the new york times
00:05:51.760is writing this but we're also barreling towards catastrophic climate disruption and so i i find
00:06:01.040these or this inability on the part of the mainstream establishment to name and address
00:06:08.340the real problems really scary. Thank you for being so blunt with your response. It's really
00:06:16.200helpful to hear truth in these times when there's so much misinformation and myths swirling around
00:06:23.200in the media. And I remember you said that a revolution is not possible in the span of an
00:06:31.200election cycle. But I can't help but wonder about whether or not there is even hope for reviving
00:06:37.160democracy at this point. Do you think this is possible through the election of grassroots
00:06:42.140leaders? No. I'm not opposed to the election of grassroots leaders, but they will be utterly
00:06:50.060ineffectual until we build powerful movements that put pressure on the centers of power.
00:06:57.420And history bears this out. Obviously, we want politicians or elected officials who are
00:07:06.140more enlightened than most of those who hold office. But nothing will change
00:07:12.500until we organize and carry out sustained acts of civil disobedience, whether that's around
00:07:21.380issues of labor or around establishing a rational policy to deal with the climate crisis, which
00:07:33.060means the halting of all carbon emissions by 2025 at the latest.
00:07:39.480And there are groups, in particular Extinction Rebellion in Britain, that I think have figured
00:07:52.620And they, of course, blocked many of the roundabouts and roads and bridges in London and have
00:08:01.380called for sustained nonviolent acts of civil disobedience in capitals around the world to
00:08:11.020reverse what they call our one-way track to extinction. But they're right. This is the
00:08:17.260only mechanism we have left, and we better start employing it very soon. To somehow think that
00:08:24.420that, you know, electing a progressive or a liberal politician is going to deal with the
00:08:31.920gravity of the crisis before us is naive. Now, I know much of your work emphasizes how
00:08:39.080neoliberalism is a calculated project necessitated by corporate capitalism. It was never intended to
00:08:45.960be a rational project. It was intended to solidify class power. In a recent article of yours published0.78
00:08:52.560Sean Trutzig, you quote David Harvey, who says, quote, it's important to recognize the class
00:08:58.100origins of this project, which occurred in the 1970s when the capitalist class wasn't a great
00:09:03.840deal of difficulty. Workers were well organized and were beginning to push back. Like any ruling
00:09:10.060class, they needed ruling ideas, end quote. Harvey clarifies that neoliberalism was so successful
00:09:16.360amongst the emerging generation of the time because it appealed to a broader cultural desire
00:09:21.420for freedom. But instead of acknowledging that desire in context of social justice or change,
00:09:27.920the capitalist class channeled it into the marketplace. So do you think this message
00:09:33.360has stayed the same today, or has it adapted to the wants and needs of this generation?
00:09:39.360Like, how have we been duped again through, say, the notion that the gig economy as our
00:09:44.760generation's entrepreneurial saving grace? Right, well, the gig economy is part of the con,
00:09:50.660What the gig economy is, it's just a new name for temporary contract employment with no benefits and no job security.
00:10:02.600Yeah, Harvey's right. I like his book on neoliberalism.
00:10:06.080It was written a while ago, but I think it's probably the best explanation of neoliberalism and how it functions as an ideology.
00:10:15.880It was designed by the ruling elites after the 1960s to cope with what the political scientist Samuel Huntington called our excess of democracy.
00:10:29.320As an economic theory, it was always an absurdity.
00:10:34.300It drew from these very marginal, discredited figures like Friedrich Hayek.
00:10:43.900I mean, they'd even go around and quote the third-rate novelist, Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman.
00:10:50.320It never made any economic sense, but it was used as an ideology to discredit mainstream
00:10:57.980Keynesian economists within the academy, within the IMF, the World Bank, and within government,
00:11:07.280and sold to the media, and essentially, as an ideology, was promoted to carry out deregulation,
00:11:21.080the destruction of labor unions, government oversight, austerity, and you're right,
00:11:27.560it was a conflated with freedom. And that's, of course, after the revolutions in Eastern Europe,
00:11:35.420which freed themselves from communist control, the neoliberal economists from the Chicago
00:11:42.360School came in and gave them the same talk, that freedom of the market was about individual
00:11:51.780liberty and freedom of choice. And of course, what it really was about, or which we are now
00:11:59.220experiencing is corporate tyranny. And I think that what we're seeing at this moment in history
00:12:07.060is what Gramsci would call the interregnum. And that is when the ruling ideology has lost its
00:12:19.980credibility and no longer has any currency across the political spectrum. On the right
00:12:29.140or the left. Remember, Donald Trump was running around saying he wouldn't take money from Goldman
00:12:35.980Sachs. And that is a very dangerous moment for the ruling elites, because once a population
00:12:47.680no longer buys or believes in the ideology that justifies the ruling elite, then the institutions
00:12:59.900that buttress the ruling class inevitably begin to deflate and ultimately collapse. And that's
00:13:07.000what we're watching now with the Trump presidency. So at that moment, and Alexander Berkman writes
00:13:14.900about this in his essay, The Idea is the Thing. At that moment, you have a battle of ideas that
00:13:21.880begins to percolate almost below the surface. And it's a battle that the corporate state is losing.
00:13:29.980And that's why they are becoming much more draconian in terms of their control. They're
00:13:35.800turning more to coercion. But we haven't yet, I think, articulated an alternative vision.
00:13:43.420And so there is political ferment within the United States as the ruling ideology loses credibility. But as long as the ideas that are rising to take its place are inchoate, the state can maintain power. Otherwise, opposition is just chaotic or even anarchic.
00:14:09.420And I think that's where we are, that we're struggling to articulate a new vision. But we all have recognized that the ideology that's peddled by the ruling classes is a con. And I think that that comes from every aspect of the political spectrum.
00:14:33.700now i want to expand a little bit further into this conversation on the gig economy
00:14:39.920because i know so many are forced to hold multiple low-paying part-time jobs in all sectors that are
00:14:46.600totally devoid of security and growth or benefits and it's perhaps one of the most glaring examples
00:14:53.340of wealth inequality in today's society when an uber driver in detroit makes around nine dollars
00:14:58.600an hour, while the former CEO and co-founder of Uber has a net worth of $4 billion. So what is
00:15:06.180the fate of the working class should we continue to buy into the gig economy as a functional system?
00:15:12.200And I wanted to also mention this quote that American productivity, as the New York Times
00:15:17.280pointed out, has increased 77% since 1973, but hourly pay has grown only 12%. If the federal
00:15:26.120minimum wage was attached to productivity, the newspaper wrote, it would be more than $20 an
00:15:31.380hour now. So how do we shatter through this fantasy of the gig economy and see it for what
00:15:37.560it really is? Right. Well, it's just a form of neo-feudalism because you're not covered,
00:15:46.700protected by labor laws. You're often working for the minimum wage or below the minimum wage.
00:15:54.320You don't get benefits. You don't have job security. And these companies are unregulated.
00:15:58.440This is how Bezos, the head of Amazon, becomes worth $140 billion. And you have people working
00:16:08.520in these 12-hour shifts living in camper vans, often whom are elderly, because they'll hire
00:16:16.460the elderly who've lost their homes. There was a book about this called Nomadland that was pretty
00:16:23.040good. So that's the gig economy. I mean, look, they've always got some term to kind of sell you
00:16:30.580on the very old system of the abuse of labor. And you can see in all of these
00:16:41.420enterprises, you know, whether it's Amazon, whether it's Uber, whatever it is,
00:16:49.060uh, that these workers are totally stressed out, have no protection. Um, you know, for instance,
00:16:57.600if they're injured, if you're injured while working in an Amazon warehouse, uh, before you
00:17:03.180leave, you have to sign a document that says that the injury was not a work related. And, uh, it's
00:17:10.000Jessica Bruder who wrote Nomadland, surviving America in the 21st century. She does a really
00:17:15.020good job of just painting what the conditions are like in this gig economy, in these warehouses
00:17:21.700where you get a job for a few months and then suddenly you're tossed out, oftentimes with
00:17:27.720disabilities or injuries, and then you can wait months before you find something else.
00:17:35.060So yeah, the gig economy is a sham, but of course these corporations invest quite a bit
00:17:40.100of money in terms of romanticizing it and selling it to us.
00:17:45.020Yeah, I see it growing more and more and constantly get ads for these types of live, work, always work, but somehow it's creative, like you're in creative control or something.
00:17:58.860We should be clear that, you know, with the gig economy, those sectors, you see it in the taxicab industry in New York, that those sectors of the economy that were once organized are destroyed.
00:18:14.920And that's why you have all these taxi cab drivers in New York committing suicide, because Uber is taking their business and they are they are regulated.
00:18:29.640The yellow cabs are limited in terms of numbers. They have to adhere to safety codes. A lot of the drivers are in unions, and they have to buy medallions, which are quite expensive but have dropped in value.
00:18:50.260So what you're doing is unleashing desperate drivers onto the streets who are pushing rates below operating costs and forcing professional cab drivers out of business.
00:19:07.520So suddenly, in order to survive, you're working 100 or 120 hours a week.
00:19:13.820And it's brutal. And it's making, as you pointed out, figures like the CEO of Uber, extremely rich, worth $4.8 billion, or Logan Green, the CEO of Lyft, has a net worth of $300 million, while the serfs who work for them are living in tremendous distress. That's what the gig economy is.
00:19:43.820When I go down that funeral road, Lord, I'm going to be dressed up fine
00:19:56.520I'm going to hand me a nice new suit and tie like I never could have afforded when I was alive
00:20:02.240Well, I ain't dead yet, let me wear that suit right now
00:24:38.840If you look at like the book that I just wrote, America, the Farewell Tour, I open it in
00:24:43.840Scranton, Pennsylvania, as the city has, in essence, struggling not to go bankrupt.
00:24:51.820And it's reduced all of its municipal employees, including the mayor, to minimum wage.
00:24:58.800But it's in order to save itself, and it had lost, I think, 40 percent or something of its
00:25:04.440city pension funds because of the financial fraud of 2008. Nobody's bailing them out,
00:25:11.000of course. But what it is doing is selling off what few assets it has left. So it's selling
00:25:18.480off the sewer system, it's the utility system, the parking authority, and private corporations
00:25:24.280are buying up those utilities and jacking up the rates. So you ask about private contractors,
00:25:30.880that's part of this much wider privatization of public institutions so that corporate entities
00:25:39.780can extract this money. And that, at least according to Marx, is an indicator of kind
00:25:45.680of the twilight stage of the capitalist state, because in essence, they're hollowing these
00:25:50.920institutions out from the inside. You see it in the prisons. It's not just that we have private
00:25:56.580prisons. It's that every function within a prison, a state or federal prison, is being privatized.
00:26:02.820the money transfer service, J-Pay, the telephone service, Global Telink, the food service,
00:26:12.300R-Mark, the medical services, the commerce. It's all privatized. It's now a multi-billion dollar
00:26:19.600industry. So unable to extract the kinds of profits because they've destroyed the middle class
00:26:26.520and dispossessed the working class, which has very little disposable income. And in fact,
00:26:31.800The only way they extract money from them is through debt peonage, by forcing them into debt. They eat away at the very institutions that make the system possible, and that's true in the military as it is in almost every other aspect of public life.
00:26:49.740I'm really interested in asking a question about how our internal controls are based off of our actions and military interventions abroad.
00:27:00.480Especially thinking about this with the news from Haiti last week of several Americans who were previously in the Navy SEAL,
00:27:06.940or employed by Blackwater in the U.S.'s Diplomatic Security Service, were found in Haiti on a, quote, government mission,
00:27:14.640armed with rifles, drones, and pistols, driving around in an unmarked car.
00:27:20.720And this just happens to be happening right as protests are mounting in Haiti
00:27:25.640as their president refuses to step down.
00:27:28.860Yeah, there's a kind of fusion between corporate power and government power.
00:27:37.840So if you go back to Occupy, it came out, I think it was in the New York Times,
00:27:41.780That there was a kind of command center set up by the New York City Police Department that was jointly run with corporate security.
00:27:53.440I mean, I was, Cornel West and I did a people's hearing of Goldman Sachs in Zuccotti Park, and then several of us marched on Goldman Sachs to shut it down, and we were arrested.
00:28:03.660But what was interesting is that during the arrest, there was no differentiation between the Goldman Sachs security and the NYPD, many of the people being from formerly police officers or from the security apparatus or the military apparatus.
00:28:23.840And so the incident that you just described is an example of this, the blurring of the lines between the security services of corporations and the security services of the state. And that's very dangerous.
00:28:39.720I mean, the fact that 70 percent of intelligence work is carried out by private corporations means that those corporations are hardly limiting their surveillance and monitoring of American citizens to solely government issues.
00:28:55.820We know that corporations follow quite closely activists and dissidents and use the same tools that the state uses to do so because they often administer those tools for the state.
00:29:12.400thank you for going into that detail chris it's really scary to hear about the privatization
00:29:20.280of the military abroad and here but it's so important for us to be aware of so thank you
00:29:27.300for that i'd like to move on to another topic and as i understand it both neoliberalism and
00:29:35.240christianity are equally susceptible to fascism at this point in time and to some extent it's
00:29:41.700largely inevitable. But I'm curious to learn more about how the rise of religious fundamentalism
00:29:48.640coincides with the ruling of corporate forces and the elite. And additionally,
00:29:54.240how is the Christian right emboldened by the left's failure to address the ills of American society?
00:30:01.060So I wrote a book 10 years ago called American Fascist, the Christian Right,0.65
00:30:06.020and the War on America. And I didn't use the word fascist lightly. I come, I'm a seminary
00:30:11.140graduate. I grew up, my father was a minister, my mother was a seminary graduate. So I grew up in a
00:30:16.740religious tradition. These people are Christian heretics. They have perverted and deformed the1.00
00:30:23.280Christian religion to acculturate it with the worst aspects of capitalism and American imperialism0.79
00:30:29.960and white supremacy. The megachurches function like little tiny dictatorships invariably run by0.99
00:30:38.480white men who prey on the despair of those people in those churches to become quite wealthy in that0.80
00:30:45.340they're very similar to Trump. And in the book, and I spent two years on it, and I spent a lot0.66
00:30:52.460of time in these churches and in creationist seminars and pro-life retreats, etc., it's clear
00:31:00.160that the de-industrialization and economic stagnation and despair that has gripped,
00:31:09.540in this case, in particular, the white working class, has pushed them into the arms of these0.85
00:31:14.220charlatans. And they have embraced this magical thinking, magic Jesus who watches out for them0.71
00:31:20.980and is going to reward them and make them wealthy and protect them and cure them of cancer, et cetera,
00:31:27.240because the real world just crushed them. And I couldn't, you'd have to be heartless not to
00:31:33.780feel a great deal of empathy for what, I think the movement's dangerous, but what the followers
00:31:39.700went through, constant stories of sexual and domestic abuse and a struggle with addictions
00:31:47.540and including opioids, evictions, unemployment, underemployment, homelessness. And finally,
00:31:56.440they couldn't deal with the reality-based world, and they were captured by those peddling this form
00:32:05.680of magical thinking. Part of the deep hostility they have to those of us who remain rooted in a
00:32:14.620world of science and verifiable fact is that they're terrified of being pushed back into
00:32:20.720this world that almost destroyed them. I was in Detroit for the book with Tim LaHaye, who wrote
00:32:26.560the End Times series, and there was these gruesome descriptions, none of which are in the Bible,
00:32:30.940the rapture is not even in the Bible, gruesome descriptions of the end times and how non-believers
00:32:36.440would, their blood would boil and their eyes would pop up. I mean, it was quite graphic.
00:32:43.020And I realized, I think, sitting there that part of their lust for the apocalypse,
00:32:48.280or these apocalyptic stories, is that finally that world out there that almost crushed them
00:32:55.740is destroyed. And so you ask how neoliberalism, well, when you distort a society to the extent
00:33:04.520that ours has been distorted, when people have feelings of entrapment and rage, then inevitably
00:33:13.880you give rise to movements. I mean, Hannah Arendt writes, all totalitarian movements
00:33:19.860peddle their own form of magical thinking. And that's what's happened. It's been given
00:33:27.660the veneer of Christianity, this Christianized fascism, and it is organized quite effectively0.95
00:33:35.540through mega churches and Liberty University and Patrick Henry Law School and this huge0.91
00:33:43.400radio and television empire. And what we're watching is it's filling the ideological vacuum
00:33:50.880of Donald Trump, because Trump has no real ideology. But the Christian fascists,0.96
00:33:57.780they've been organizing and preparing now for power for decades. So what I fear is another1.00
00:34:04.200economic collapse, which I think is inevitable, or maybe another catastrophic terrorist attack,
00:34:09.640or a new war or another climate catastrophe, usually economic dislocation or crisis is what
00:34:17.740brings these people to power, but they're ready. And of course, as Noam Chomsky points out, you can
00:34:24.380get rid of Trump, but because Michael Pence comes out of this Christianized fascism, Chomsky argues,
00:34:32.580I think correctly, he'll be worse. I think about this magical thinking,0.96
00:34:38.000Another word for it that I've used is the prosperity gospel, which is what I've seen a lot in megachurches.
00:34:45.020This idea that Jesus wants you to have a new Cadillac.
00:34:48.960Jesus wants you to have, you know, that four bedroom house in the two car garage, you know.
00:34:53.280And if you just keep following this path, then you will be rewarded with these material goods.
00:35:00.300And I do think it makes sense when people have been up against so much hardship that they are looking for a way out and they do want the system that has oppressed them to collapse.0.51
00:35:14.040And I know that it's been suggested that one way to curb the rise of Christian fanaticism is to reintegrate disenfranchised right wing communities back into the economic system.
00:35:29.260I mean, I said the only way you're going to break this movement is to reintegrate them into the economy.
00:35:33.800Trying to argue them out of creationism isn't going to work.
00:35:36.820But what exactly does this mean when our economic system is clearly broken and the dollar might implode altogether in the next decade or so or, you know, the next economic crash will happen?
00:35:47.360Well, then it means they'll be empowered even further and become more fanatic.
00:35:50.940So, I mean, this is, you know, the Nazis, and I'm not telling you that Trump is Hitler or the Christian right or Nazis, but we do learn from history.0.70
00:36:03.420So the Nazis are polling in the single digits in 1928, and you have the 1929 crash, and you have Ebert and the Social Democrats in the Weimar Republic imposing draconian forms of austerity, including abolishing unemployment insurance, and the Nazis' popularity explodes.
00:36:21.840So the danger is that the longer the liberal elites remain ineffectual and refuse to address in a meaningful way the root causes behind the disintegration within society, the more these fanatics and charlatans and con artists and demagogues are empowered.
00:36:42.460And I watched that in Yugoslavia with the economic meltdown of Yugoslavia in the late 1980s.
00:36:48.220And you vomited up figures like Radovan Karic and Slobodan Milosevic and Franju Tuzman for the same reason.
00:36:56.180So by welcoming them back into the economic system, meaning into like a unionized economic system or, you know, maybe the economic system of our dreams, you know, something that isn't so, gosh, just corrupted.
00:37:12.460Because I'm wondering, like, if welcoming them back into a corrupted economic system, what does that – how does that support what – I guess support the health of our societies or what – I don't know if I'm just kind of looking for the devil in the details here.
00:37:26.820Well, but you can't welcome them back into a system that doesn't give them economic stability, and a sense that they can find a place within society, and that the society is a form of meritocracy. In essence, it really boils down to having a sense of hope.
00:37:46.400I mean, this was—I covered Yitzhak Rabin and the Oslo Agreement, and Rabin understood, number one, that the occupation was poisonous to Israel itself, but also, more importantly, that if the Palestinians had a stake in the Israeli economy, if Ahmed could find a good job in Tel Aviv and go back and buy a refrigerator in Gaza for his family and send his kids to school, you would do far more to mitigate fanaticism and even terrorism.0.76
00:38:14.040And that's correct. So if we don't pretty radically reconfigure the economy into a form of socialism that protects and provides services to the working class and the working poor, then these problems will only get worse.0.83
00:38:36.380All of the kind of theorists of revolution have been quite clear about what it is that causes a revolution. Crane Brinton in Anatomy of a Revolution is one of the best books on this.
00:38:58.080But one of the most important elements is a sense that you can find a place within the society where you have the possibility of advancement.
00:39:15.500And when that is taken away from you and when you know it's taken away from your children, then this creates huge distortions that give rise to these kind of radical or fanatical movements that we're seeing within the United States.
00:39:45.500I want my son to have this when I'm dead
00:40:01.880It's a book I always start but I'd never read
00:40:07.420I was born to follow the steps my dad tread
00:41:40.280now this next question that i want to ask is really very deep in my own personal life right
00:41:54.560now especially as i'm analyzing movements and millennials involvement in them and we've spoken
00:42:01.880about the rise of the christian right but i'd also like to look at the opposite side of the coin
00:42:07.140Now, reflecting on your own religious identity and the radical teachings of Christ, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on religion and spirituality as a moral compass and means of accountability.
00:42:18.720And I ask this question thinking about those of us who have been raised in secular households or cling to the titles of agnostic or atheist as identities, but then find ourselves without faith in a world that has reinforced individualistic and capitalistic behaviors.
00:42:37.140So I'm wondering, do you think we need a religious or spiritual background as we navigate these very tragic times?
00:42:44.180And if so, what must our religious or spiritual beliefs be grounded in?
00:42:51.280So we do have to distinguish between institutional, you know, the institutions, religious institutions, and what it means to have religious faith.
00:43:01.440because all institutions, as the theologian Paul Tillich wrote, are inherently demonic,
00:43:06.740including the church. And we see that with the abuse of power and the pedophilia within the
00:43:11.760Catholic Church. But the Catholic Church is not alone. So yes, we need an element of faith,
00:43:17.740not necessarily grounded in any religious orthodoxy. I asked Daniel Berrigan, the great
00:43:24.740radical priest once, how he defined faith. And he said it was the belief that the good draws to it
00:43:30.860the good, even if empirically all the evidence around you proves otherwise, that that's ultimately
00:43:38.780what faith is. And I think that we need to have a vision of a just society, which may be impossible,
00:43:50.720it may be completely unattainable, but we hold it before us as a kind of goal and we strive
00:43:58.440towards it. I mean, Max Weber wrote the great essay, Politics as a Vocation. In it, he argued
00:44:06.140that one had to be constantly vigilant against power, that as soon as movements achieved or
00:44:15.360built a more equitable society, ruling elites would begin to work assiduously to dismantle
00:44:21.300whatever gains have been made, that it was a constant struggle. And I think that that act of
00:44:30.460resistance itself is, in many ways, at least for me, empowering. Especially those of us who follow
00:44:43.520the climate catastrophe, to do so without resisting just increases our despondency and
00:44:52.200our feelings of helplessness, even paralysis. And that by acting out, by saying no, by pushing
00:45:01.240back against, I mean, I don't think I'm being hyperbolic when I talk about the fossil fuel
00:45:07.520industry and these corporations pushing back against this culture of death and the bleakness
00:45:14.640because we've already done so much to destroy the ecosystem. Even if we stopped all carbon
00:45:21.420emissions today, the climate disruption will be catastrophic. Finally, in the end, it's not,
00:45:28.620or it's about more than winning. It's about finding a life of meaning. It's about personal
00:45:33.820empowerment. It's about a public declaration that we will not live according to the dominant lie.
00:45:40.440It is a message to the elites that you do not own us. It's about defending our dignity,
00:45:46.900our self-respect, our agency. It's about freeing ourselves from fear. And when you
00:45:54.640rise up to resist, and I experienced this as a war correspondent when I documented the
00:46:01.840crimes against humanity and the atrocities in numerous wars around the country to shame the
00:46:07.040killers, you experience a kind of euphoria, even. You certainly obliterate that despair
00:46:14.580and that sense of lethargy and acts of defiance, even if, in the ultimate sense, you're not
00:46:20.540victorious. And you do that as a group. You find solidarity. The courage itself is contagious. It
00:46:30.240sparks others to act and even revolt. And I think that, in the end, that resistance,
00:46:38.420which I see as a form of faith, because it's built on perhaps an unachievable vision,
00:46:44.340is now, given what is arrayed against us, the only force that will allow us to remain
00:46:51.120psychologically whole. It's also acts of sustained mass civil disobedience is the only
00:47:56.820I mean, nobody works harder in this country than the poor. They're often working three jobs, 70,
00:48:03.76080 hours a week. And these are jobs that are physically very punishing. Indeed, in the end
00:48:09.280of the book, I think she's at this point working in a Walmart. Ehrenreich just walks out. You're
00:48:15.780sleeping in your car. You're in constant stress because if your car breaks down, you can't get
00:48:22.380to work, you can't pay your rent. I mean, it's, as she says, being poor in America is one long
00:48:27.580emergency. And that, coupled with deindustrialization, has left huge segments of the
00:48:36.200American population desperate. You, you know, by taking away industrial jobs, especially in
00:48:44.860the inner city, you have created huge pools of what Karl Marx would call redundant or surplus
00:48:50.760labor, and then you need forms of social control because there are no jobs. That's how you get an
00:48:55.780explosion of the mass incarceration system under Clinton at the same time that, of course, he's
00:49:00.640pushing through NAFTA. That's how you get militarized police who kill primarily poor people
00:49:07.580of color with impunity, almost all of whom are unarmed. That's how you get wholesale surveillance.
00:49:15.480I mean, what we've created now in these, what Malcolm X used to call these internal colonies
00:49:20.260are really mini police states where militarized police use terror to maintain control
00:49:27.880because you have shunted aside such large segments of the population that if you didn't have the
00:49:36.400mechanisms of mass incarceration, militarized police, and I should mention evictions, because
00:49:41.260on the average, every six months, families, usually single women with children are being
00:49:46.480evicted, so you can never create any sense of community or solidarity or network to resist.
00:49:51.860These are all by design. And the whole program of austerity and the two-tiered legal system,
00:50:00.780where those who commit financial fraud and crimes at the highest levels never go to prison,
00:50:05.920whereas because of budget shortfalls, like in St. Louis County, where Ferguson is,
00:50:11.620you've got about 30% of your budget is made up of fines. So they just invent fines.
00:50:16.480You know, open carry fines, not mowing your lawn. There's a fine called obstructing pedestrian traffic, which means standing on a sidewalk. Eric Garner is choked to death for supposedly selling loose cigarettes, which is a crime, although he wasn't selling loose cigarettes.
00:50:33.340So you have the elites who have, in essence, at this point orchestrated a tax boycott.
00:51:40.680What you were describing is just disgusting to see the discrepancies in criminalization
00:51:49.540between the white collar and people just trying to get by.
00:51:54.520It seems like so many of us are trying to fight this thrashing and abhorrent system,
00:52:00.060or at the very least are acknowledging the monstrosity of it.
00:52:04.380But I think many of us fail to recognize that we are brought up within this system,
00:52:09.860that we think within capitalism and supremacy, whether we like it or not.
00:52:15.200And this is where I think we see the left engage with issues around identity politics
00:52:19.680or multiculturalism, instead of tackling the larger frameworks at play.
00:52:25.060So as somebody who has witnessed decline and resistance globally, I'm really curious on
00:52:29.840what you see are the most effective ways to strategize and mobilize.
00:52:34.460Why is it so important that we implement intersectional resistance and begin to think
00:52:39.280in revolutionary terms rather than representational?
00:52:43.280Well, because the whole nature of identity politics is a game played by the elites.
00:52:49.680So, you know, you have the first woman running for president or you have an African-American president. This is just branding because they're still serving these oppressive economic structures. You see it within institutions, academic institutions and identity politics, multiculturalism.0.80
00:53:10.280and I'm not against any of this. I mean, we need these people to be empowered,
00:53:14.660masquerade as politics. They don't address the rising social inequality. They don't address
00:53:20.880the unchecked militarism. They don't address the evisceration of civil liberties or the omnipotence
00:53:27.280of the security and surveillance apparatus. Corporate capitalism is not going to be
00:53:32.620reformed, although it's constantly rebranding itself. It has to be destroyed. And the longer
00:53:40.600that the left or the liberal classes seek to work within this system by beautifying it with people1.00
00:53:49.420of color or whatever, women, the system can absorb it. It doesn't affect the system. And that noose
00:53:58.200will still continue to be tightened around our necks. We either rise up to bring these
00:54:06.100government and financial systems under public control, and that means nationalizing banks,
00:54:12.540the fossil fuel industry, the arms industry, or we'll be its victims. And I think that identity
00:54:17.500politics and multiculturalism has been used quite effectively by the forces of oppression0.61
00:54:22.540as a kind of cover to continue out the activity that they do.
00:54:27.420You know, there's a huge difference between Thurgood Marshall, who was real and courageous,
00:54:51.360How many of them espouse neoliberalism? How many of them are bought off by corporations? That's the more important question. And so, yes, we certainly need to elevate and amplify those voices that have traditionally been marginalized. But this has to be accompanied with a fierce commitment to destroy corporate power.
00:55:17.040And is that where civil disobedience then fits in?
00:55:21.360That's all we have left. We don't live in a functioning democracy anymore. It's what Sheldon
00:55:27.940Wolland calls inverted totalitarianism. Either we rebuild movements and carry out militant acts
00:55:33.900of sustained civil disobedience, or we talk about climate alone, we're finished. And I'm not
00:55:41.880naive enough to tell you it's going to work, but it is the only mechanism we have left to save
00:55:47.620ourselves. And civil disobedience isn't just showing up to a protest. It's not just going
00:55:54.420with your signs. That's not civil disobedience, correct? Civil disobedience means breaking the
00:55:59.420law, means disrupting the system, non-cooperation. It's like Extinction Rebellion, shutting down
00:56:06.640capital cities. We don't do civil disobedience on their terms. We do it on ours. So I did the
00:56:13.740climate, I called it the March to Nowhere, before the climate summit in New York, and everybody
00:56:19.580peacefully marched between barriers set up by the New York City police to the West Side Highway,
00:56:25.640which is on the opposite side of the UN. That's not going to work.
00:56:29.280But we actually have to organize together and create movements that are willing to
00:56:36.180break the law. More of us, not just put a few leaders out, but actually everybody stand behind
00:56:42.580each other and and get and get real like actually actually cause a ruckus instead of because i do
00:56:49.220see that a lot i mean not that i'm against um i think organizing for marches are you know it's
00:56:55.940important and it's a good place for people to get together and get to know each other but i don't
00:57:00.000see it actually moving the needle anywhere and with all the resources it takes to have like the
00:57:04.680women's march and the climate march but what's actually happening from them it's not civil
00:57:09.220disobedience. It's just almost like a photo op. No, they're flash mobs. I mean, they make people
00:57:13.840feel good. I mean, you want an example of what's real? It's Standing Rock, which was led by
00:57:18.420indigenous communities and had a deep spiritual element that we need.
00:57:39.220Thank you for listening to another episode of For the Wild podcast.