Lizard put up this video in the comments over at 4&20. I long ago quit doing this, realizing that people just don’t have or won’t take the time to invest such affairs. But Hedges is so good that I’m doing it anyway. Give it a watch, report back.
How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo that work again! (Mark Twain)
Piece of Mindful 
Wow, 45 minutes. Does seem like a big chunk in the fractured internet age.
I’ve listened for a couple minutes. He waxes a bit nostalgic for the good old days when newspapers had the time and resources to do extensive research, and he distinguishes between the fact driven old days and the image/emotion driven new days, with the obligatory swipe at corporate ownership and manipulation of the news. I call BS. The old days were as emotional as today, and fact checking is an order of magnitude greater today with all the web info and the added eyeballs on the subjects.
I’m six minutes in, and it is shaping up to be the standard “evil corporations have co-opted the good (Left) people.”
I had the nurse here in the rest home prop the laptop up for me, but it slipped to the floor. It struck me that Chris Hedges sounds like Newt Gingrich.
I dozed off as I am wont to do, but it looks like he touched on the usual themes: the Powerful have propagandized the Masses into voting against their self interest; we must cater to the dispossessed or they will destroy the environment.
He mentioned Camden, NJ, and how it had no grocery stores and the nation’s highest crime rate. Fifteen years ago I drove through Camden with a friend who lived nearby. He said, “Yeah, the Governor has announced another big program to fix Camden. These come out every so often.” I said, “why don’t the people of Camden fix themselves?” He said, “I suppose if they are going to fix themselves, they would have done so by now.”
My friend worked for a time as a doctor in a Public Health Clinic. Among his signature events were otherwise healthy men coming in for someone to sign the SSI form indicating they were still disabled. Some would threaten his life unless he signed. I would think these guys could open a grocery store.
This highlights the Thing That Cannot Be Discussed by such as Chris Hedges: the demographic component of the decline he decries. I note that Nixon was the last president he liked. We had a restrictive immigration policy from 1924 to 1965, when we kicked the door open. Now our future looks like Bell, California and wages for working people peaked circa 1970. The good old days indeed.
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Since I doubt you’re going to make the full 45 minutes before your morning nap, I’ll cut to the quick for you:
Nixon was not the last president he “liked.” Nixon happened to be president at a time when popular movements were threatening entrenched power. That’s why Nixon appears to so many people who look in the rear view mirror to be some kind of liberal. It just happened to be him in power at that time.
Your lens for taking in Hedges is far too narrow. He is touching on a theme that is seldom discussed – why the U.S. has lasted this long as a somewhat free country. It is not because we love freedom. We do not. We hate it. But we had what he calls a “liberal class,” people as disdainful and arrogant as anyone in power now, but who saw a need for expression of popular power as a means of keeping the lid on popular power. These are people like Bernays, Lippmann, Niebuhr, Dewey, Peirce, Holmes, James and the hated Creel. To survive as a totalitarian state, we had to allow a certain amount of freedom, and that expression of freedom’s traditional outlet (and also the vehicle used to contain it) was the Democratic Party.
Don’t kid yourself that these “liberals” were anything more or better than people in power now. Remember that it was “liberals” like JFK and LBJ and
CameramanMcNamara, Sorenson and Bundy who gave us the Vietnamese invasion, and the millions of deaths that followed.Hedges’ thrust is that even that mild expression of dissidence is now shut down, and yes, you can say “evil corporations” with a wave of your hand, but we are talking about absolute power in a few hands, and no matter the hands, it will be abused. Think back to the post below – it wasn’t that Clear Channel was evil, but rather that it represented concentrated power, and having that power, could not resist using it. The problem is concentrated power.
And Hedges laments that without that outlet, what is left? You answer that for me. If we cannot affect power by popular will, what are we? If we cannot have a public option because health insurance companies don’t want it, what are we? If they take away Social Security because Wall Street doesn’t want it, what are we?
What are we? Answer that please.
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Hedges’ thrust is that even that mild expression of dissidence is now shut down
I don’t see it that way, but let me dwell on it some more. It seems that there are a lot of ways to express dissent. There are more media outlets, more travel, more communication than ever before. What is not being said and heard?
Part of it is that the “progressive” ideas championed by Hedges aren’t that good. Helping the dispossessed turns out not to be so rewarding. The dispossessed often turn out to be slackers in need of a border.
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Since you are not a dissident, you probably aren’t aware of much repression of dissidents. Your avenues are wide open, as you are part of the majority view.
So you don’t know about FBI raids, how anyone with any dissident viewpoint is now connected to “terrorist” groups (once “communist – a convenient name change). You probably cannot name the presidential candidate who had to run his campaign form prison. You probably can’t name two Green candidate who were arrested for merely trying to attend D-R debates and sit in the audience. You probably don’t know that the FBI collects license plate numbers and monitors email for environmental activists.
This is all going on all the time. You don’t know about it because it does not affect you. And, importantly, so long as we are not organized, we do not seriously threaten power. This is why the right wing hates labor unions. They are by definition organized.
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You don’t know about it because it does not affect you.
My side has a lot to complain about, from the body counts at Ruby Ridge and Waco Texas, to the IRS audits of Glen Beck and other Enemies of the State, to Federal Judges releasing sealed documents to embarrass political candidates, e.g. Jack Ryan, through the publication of donor lists and the boycotting of businesses and advertisers.
I’ve seen cases where people go to the Legislature and testify against various ordinances, and then go home to be targeted by the agency they testified against.
I guess free speech doesn’t mean consequence free speech.
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There are many reasons for intimidation campaigns – one, to suppress free thought, two, to intimidate enemies. If you want evidence that it is going on on your side, you can always find it, but you need a lot to get beyond anecdotal. After all, on your side are all of the massive corporations and pools of wealth that control most of the politicians and the Pentagon in addition to the agencies that monitor our thoughts. Right now, your side is mounting troops in Colombia, running cross-border operations and internal destabilization campaigns against Hugo Chavez, the ultimate goal to murder him and his colleagues and replace his government with the oligarchy.
That’s not an anecdote, like Glenn Beck being audited. It is a massive concentration of power set about to commit a serious and violent crime.
Our side, well, we got nothing like that. And, as with the people arrested and whose computers were confiscated in Minnesota and Illinois, we are constantly being monitored in search of evidence fo thought crime. The thought crime, in that case, appears to be the crime of exposing the horrendous crimes that are being committed in Colombia and Venezuela.
Tell me, where is the power of popular organization every going to murder you or imprison you for decades?
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on your side are all of the massive corporations and pools of wealth that control most of the politicians
I’m not feeling particularly powerful at the moment. “My side” wants less federal spending, less illegal immigration, and we’re not particularly fond of foreign military adventures.
Illegal immigrants commit somewhere around 4500 murders a year and kill about the same number in drunk driving accidents. Section 8 housing vouchers, SBA minority loans and such are putting me in this contrail of “popular organization”, so just keep rooting for your side and the likelihood increases that you will get your wish.
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If you understand that your side and the ‘other’ side are the same side, then you might no worry about immigrants and concentrate on the people we put in power.
Your 4,500 figure sounds made up. Document it please.
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And unions hate non-union labor activists because they can’t be bought. Any decentralized, organized activist group scares the crap out of the (right or left) establishment. It’s what the t-party had, and quickly lost to the money spent to coopt the viral fiscal conservative movement. The fed and the debt resonated. Now it’s Rovian psycho-Christian babble. They never saw it coming.
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The number isn’t zero. I would think a politician could get some traction by promising to save 9000 or so lives a year.
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Your source is pretty damned suspect. I don’t even have to read between the lines to realize they made that number up.
But you’re probably right – it is greater than zero. So?
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I’ll grant the number might be high, but it gives an idea of the magnitude.
We write burdensome regulations to save hundreds of lives. There is loud hand wringing about how many civilians are killed in Iraq, complaints about how many homosexuals are killed in the fields of Wyoming, how many Blacks are killed by Klansmen, how many children are killed by CEOs, etc. I don’t hear many complaints about illegal aliens killing current citizens, yet it seems a relatively easy thing to fix. This tells me there is more to it. Maybe illegals and other crime groups are a proxy army for our country’s elite to wage war on the lower classes that they despise.
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