Chris Hedges "We have shifted, , from a democratic state to a species of corporate totalitarianism. [View all]

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Chris Hedges "We have shifted, I think, from a democratic state to a species of corporate totalitarianism."



Transcript



CHRIS HEDGES, JOURNALIST AND WRITER: Thank you.
JAY: Millions of people unemployed, millions of people have lost their houses, and for a long time the left was saying the crash is coming, the crash is coming, the people will rise up. Well, the crash came, and some people rose up, but not in the kind of critical numbers that would have shaken or, as in the previous episode you said, terrified the elites. Why?
HEDGES: Because the traditional liberal elite divorced itself from the issue of justice to embrace for the last few decades issues such as gender equality, multiculturalism, identity politics, all of which I support. But while they busied themselves with these activities, the working class was being destroyed through NAFTA and the outsourcing of jobs, the stagnation, in essence reduction of the minimum wage.
The Democratic Party used to watch out for the interests of labor and even for the poor. But that all changed under Bill Clinton. Although Clinton, like Obama, continues to speak in that feel-your-pain language of traditional liberalism, they've completely betrayed the very people that they purport to represent and defend.


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HEDGES: The forces arrayed against us, the security and surveillance state knows the moment anything is going to be organized. They've essentially shut down all public space for any kind of serious dissent because they don't want to see a resurrection of the Occupy movement. We are the most surveilled, monitored, eavesdropped, controlled, watched population in human history, and I speak as somebody who covered the Stasi state in East Germany. We are kept in a state of perpetual fear that we could lose our jobs [incompr.] so many people in this country now are living at subsistence level. To lose their job is catastrophic. We are seeing the corporate state dismantle programs that once provided benefits like unemployment payments or social programs to the poor, to the elderly, to students, to make us even more frightened and more easily manipulated. I mean, there's a kind of awful logic to what they're doing. And, you know, it is--those forms of repression are quite effective. We have shifted, I think, from a democratic state to a species of corporate totalitarianism.




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