On this week’s episode of On Contact, Chris Hedges sits down with Guillaume Long, Ecuador’s Minister of Foreign Affairs and Human Mobility. They discuss the effect of neoliberalism on Latin American development, combatting inequality and standing up to corporations and foreign powers in Ecuador. RT Correspondent Anya Parampil looks at Ecuador’s decision to provide refuge to Wikileaks’ founder Julian Assange at its embassy in London.
In this episode of Redacted Tonight VIP, Lee Camp interviews Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Chris Hedges. They jump right into it concerning startling evidence about how the US has become a corporate totalitarian state, compared to the democracy it claims to be. They go on to discuss how the two-party system duopoly is leading to the demise of our country. Hedges also explains just how dangerous it is for leftists to vote for Hillary Clinton, even with the specter of Donald Trump looming in the background. This information is explosive. Enjoy and share.
We live in two Americas. One America, now the minority, functions in a print-based, literate world. It can cope with complexity and has the intellectual tools to separate illusion from truth. The other America, which constitutes the majority, exists in a non-reality-based belief system. This America, dependent on skillfully manipulated images for information, has severed itself from the literate, print-based culture. It cannot differentiate between lies and truth. It is informed by simplistic, childish narratives and clichés. It is thrown into confusion by ambiguity, nuance and self-reflection. This divide, more than race, class or gender, more than rural or urban, believer or nonbeliever, red state or blue state, has split the country into radically distinct, unbridgeable and antagonistic entities.
There are over 42 million American adults, 20 percent of whom hold high school diplomas, who cannot read, as well as the 50 million who read at a fourth- or fifth-grade level. Nearly a third of the nation’s population is illiterate or barely literate. And their numbers are growing by an estimated 2 million a year. But even those who are supposedly literate retreat in huge numbers into this image-based existence. A third of high school graduates, along with 42 percent of college graduates, never read a book after they finish school. Eighty percent of the families in the United States last year did not buy a book.
In this depth psychology oriented discussion (powered by Pacifica Graduate Institute, Pulitzer Prize Winning Journalist Chris Hedges speaks with Depth Psychologist, Bonnie Bright, Ph.D, about how, as both individuals and civilizations, we encounter cycles of growth, maturation, decadence, and decay, and death.
In contemporary society—especially modern society—we can see the signs of morbidity around us, in our boundless use of harmful fossil fuels, in much sought-after expansion beyond the capacity to sustain ourselves, and in the physical decay of the environment and in the places we inhabit.
There are common patterns and common responses to decline and collapse across eras and cultures, Hedges notes. While our culture is more technologically advanced in comparison with that of Easter Island, for example, it is arguable that human nature has not really changed. Who was it that cut down the last tree on Easter Island, for example?
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges discusses the Manhattan bombing and the lack of media coverage of the impact of U.S. wars abroad.
Chris Hedges joins us to discuss the 2016 Presidential Election.
On this week’s episode of On Contact, Chris Hedges sits down with economist Mark Blyth to discuss the detrimental ramifications of austerity programs following the 2008 financial crisis. Professor Blyth, author of Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea, addresses the political effects of the spending cuts and considers why the elites will not take responsibility for the fallout, while RT Correspondent Anya Parampil examines the impact austerity measures have had on America’s working class and poor since 2008.
On this week’s episode of On Contact, Chris Hedges is joined by journalist and author Adam Hochschild to remember the rebels in history whose moral conviction drove them to battle. Hochschild chronicles rebels who joined the fight against fascism in his latest book “Spain in Our Hearts: Americans and the Spanish Civil War”. RT Correspondent Anya Parampil provides a brief history on why the idealists from the U.S. and Europe made the journey in the 1930s to join the civil war.
Hillary Clinton recently railed against the rightwing movement known as the “alt-right.” Chris Hedges, host of RT’s ‘On Contact’ joins RT America’s Anya Parampil to discuss this fringe ideology and whether Clinton’s attack on the movement will have any impact. He says that the alt-right movement has “overt characteristics of racism” and that it is “utterly impervious to anything Hillary Clinton says.”
Corporate forces, long before the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, carried out a coup d’état in slow motion. The coup is over. We lost. The ruling is one more judicial effort to streamline mechanisms for corporate control. It exposes the myth of a functioning democracy and the triumph of corporate power. But it does not significantly alter the political landscape. The corporate state is firmly cemented in place.
The fiction of democracy remains useful, not only for corporations, but for our bankrupt liberal class. If the fiction is seriously challenged, liberals will be forced to consider actual resistance, which will be neither pleasant nor easy. As long as a democratic facade exists, liberals can engage in an empty moral posturing that requires little sacrifice or commitment. They can be the self-appointed scolds of the Democratic Party, acting as ifthey are part of the debate and feel vindicated by their cries of protest.
Much of the outrage expressed about the court’s ruling is the outrage of those who prefer this choreographed charade. As long as the charade is played, they do not have to consider how to combat what the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls our system of “inverted totalitarianism.”
Inverted totalitarianism represents “the political coming of age of corporate power and the political demobilization of the citizenry,” Wolin writes in “Democracy Incorporated.” Inverted totalitarianism differs from classical forms of totalitarianism, which revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader, and finds its expression in the anonymity of the corporate state. The corporate forces behind inverted totalitarianism do not, as classical totalitarian movements do, boast of replacing decaying structures with a new, revolutionary structure. They purport to honor electoral politics, freedom and the Constitution. But they so corrupt and manipulate the levers of power as to make democracy impossible.
Always Question Authority 