In this week’s episode of On Contact, Chris Hedges sits down with Alison Flowers, author of “Exoneree Diaries: The Fight for Innocence, Independence, and Identity”. They discuss flaws in the justice system that result in wrongful convictions and the challenges people face after spending years in prison for a crime they did not commit. RT Correspondent Anya Parampil measures the scale of known exonerations in the U.S.
In this week’s episode of On Contact, Chris Hedges goes inside Israel and the Occupied Territories with Amira Hass. Hass is the Haaretz Correspondent for the Occupied Territories and author of “Drinking the Sea at Gaza”. RT Correspondent Anya Parampil joins the show with a report on the public manifestations of racism in Israeli society.
This week marks the fifth anniversary of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange taking refuge at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, as he remains wanted in Sweden for questioning on alleged sex crimes. Assange’s fear is that extradition to Sweden could lead to extradition to the US, where he could face prosecution for his work with WikiLeaks. For more on this, Chris Hedges, investigative journalist and host of ‘On Contact’ on RT America, joins Anya Parampil.
In this week’s episode of On Contact, Chris Hedges explores how to counter establishment politics with Kshama Sawant, the only socialist on the Seattle City Council. RT Correspondent Anya Parampil reports on the obstacles third-party candidates face in trying to enter the race for the White House.
In the first episode of ‘On Contact’, host Chris Hedges discusses the global revolt against corporate capitalism with radical intellectual and author Tariq Ali. Ali talks about how the world banking system got Greece and other European countries in trouble, and how big capital may be behind the impeachment of Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff. RT Correspondent Anya Parampil joins the show with a report on global inequality.
Chris Hedges joins us in the Hawk’s Nest to promote the new RT show “On Contact.”
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Being poor in America is one long emergency. You teeter on the edge of bankruptcy, homelessness and hunger. You endure cataclysmic levels of stress, harassment and anxiety and long bouts of depression. Rent strips you of half your income—one in four families spend 70 percent of their income on rent—until you and your children are evicted, often into homeless shelters or abandoned buildings, when you fall behind on payments. A financial crisis—a medical emergency, a reduction in hours at work or the loss of a job, funeral expenses or car repairs—can lead inexorably to an eviction. Creditors, payday lenders and collection agencies hound you. You are often forced to declare bankruptcy. You cope with endemic violence, gangs, drugs and a judicial system that permits brutal police abuse and ships you to jail, or slaps you with huge fines, for minor offenses. You live for weeks or months with no heat, water or electricity because you cannot pay the utility bills, especially since fuel and utility rates have risen by more than 50 percent since 2000. Single mothers and their children usually endure this hell alone, because the men in these communities are locked up. Millions of families are tossed into the street every year.
We have 5 percent of the world’s population and 25 percent of its prison population. More than 60 percent of the 2.2 million incarcerated are people of color. If these poor people were not locked in cages for decades, if they were not given probationary status once they were freed, if they had stable communities, there would be massive unrest in the streets. Mass incarceration, along with debt peonage, evictions, police violence and a judicial system that holds up property rights, rather than justice, as the highest good and that denies nearly all of the poor a trial, forcing them to accept plea bargains, is one of the many tools of corporate oppression.
In this episode of teleSUR’s Days of Revolt, Chris Hedges and Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein lay out the solutions to issues like economic inequality and climate change, and explain the need for sustained civil disobedience and a unified grassroots movement.
The political crisis in America is severe. The old ideas that buttressed the ruling class and promised democracy, growth and prosperity—neoliberalism, austerity, globalization, endless war, a dependence on fossil fuel and unregulated capitalism—have been exposed as fictions used by the corporate elite to impoverish and enslave the country and enrich and empower themselves. Sixty-two billionaires have as much wealth as half the world’s population, 3.5 billion people. This fact alone is revolutionary tinder.
We are entering a dangerous moment when few people, no matter what their political orientation, trust the power elite or the ruling neoliberal ideology. The rise of right-wing populism, with dark undertones of fascism, looks set in the next presidential election—as it does in parts of Europe—to pit itself against the dying gasps of the corporate establishment.
We are caught between the jaws of the monsters Charybdis and Scylla, and our escape route is narrow and diminishing. Playing the old political game, attempting reform using the old rules, won’t work. We must focus exclusively on revolt, on overthrowing corporate power to reclaim our liberty and save the planet from a coup de grâce delivered by the fossil fuel industry.
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