Chris Hedges: Well,
that comes at the end of the book, which is an attempt that both Joe and I made
to describe a system that has been seized by political paralysis, and is
dominated by [a] narrow corporate elite that no longer responds to the needs of
citizens. It attempts to illustrate, by going into the poorest pockets of the
country, that the formal mechanisms of power that once made incremental and
peaceful reform no longer work, and that the only solution we have is civil
disobedience. But that comes after detailing the conditions that people are
living, in places like Camden, New Jersey, which per capita is the poorest city
in the United States; Pine Ridge, South Dakota has the second poorest county in
the country; The average life expectancy for a male on Pine Ridge is 48--that
is the lowest in the western hemisphere, outside of Haiti; The coal fields of
southern West Virginia; the produce fields where largely undocumented workers,
without any kind of legal protection, organizing power or rights, pick the
nation's produce. And by the time you get there, I think, hopefully the reader
has seen what happens when individuals in communities are forced to kneel
before the dictates of the marketplace.
It's a kind of absurdity, it's a Utopian ideology, but it's one that has
gripped not only neo-Conservatives, but neo-Liberals, like Bill Clinton or
Barack Obama.
Rob Kall: Now, you
start the book talking about American Indians, and how they were treated, and
how that was the beginning of where many Americans are treated...
Chris Hedges: Well
that's the template for what's happened. You had this ideology of limitless
expansion and exploitation, because the reason the indigenous communities were
not only pushed off their land, but slaughtered, was because the timber
merchants, and the land speculators, and the mining concerns, and the railroad
companies wanted the land, wanted the resources. And that became the model by
which we then went on to places like Cuba, the Philippines, up and down Central
America, the Dominican Republic, and of course today in Iraq and
Afghanistan. And not only that, but it
destroyed a competing ethic, another way of forming community. Indigenous
societies were communal. Those who hoarded goods for themselves were despised.
It had a different relationship to the natural world and to life, which it
understood had a quality of the sacred.
All of that is foreign to forces that commodify everything, including
the natural world that it then exploits until exhaustion or collapse. So, these forces were unleashed on what we call sacrifice zones, first. They broke the self sufficiency of indigenous
communities: [they] originally put them in prisoner of war camps, a name that
later became Indian agencies, and finally reservations, and created this
culture of dependence. It's something that you see in West Virginia among the
poor; you see it in Camden among the poor.
And that's what's happening. As
we reconfigure American society into a form of neo-Feudalism, we are in an
essence all put on one reservation, hemmed in by a very efficient security and
surveillance system. I mean, this is
something that is not foreign to the experience of native communities in this
country, and I think that's why it is important to look at what's happened in
these places, because as we have created a system where we've lifted all
impediments or restrictions on corporate capitalism--what they did there, they
are going to do everywhere; they already are.
There is a business term for it. Romney has actually used it on the
campaign. It's harvesting. I mean, they are just harvesting the country. They
are grabbing as much as fast as they can on the way down. And you see it with the melting of the arctic
summer sea ice. Forty percent of the
arctic summer ice melts, and the response of our corporate masters is to mine
the last vestiges of oil, gas, minerals, and fish stocks. It's insane, of
course because what we doing is attempting to extract profit literally from the
collapse of the ecosystem, and that is the awful logic of these forces, and the
only way at this to stop them is to challenge the mechanisms of power, because
both of the two major political parties are hostage to corporate money.
Rob Kall: Yeah, I call
it "strip-mining America." In the book later on, you write about what is
happening in West Virginia, how they removed hundreds and hundreds of
mountaintops. I think the mountaintops
they are removing are the peaks of our values as Americans: democracy, freedom,
and independence. In that chapter on Native Americans, you say at one point,
describing how they took away what they had, how the Native Americans became
"what most of us have become: prisoners." Do you see us that way?
Chris Hedges: I see
that as where we're headed. I mean, we have built the most efficient security
and surveillance system in human history.
We have stood by passively as a largely Democratic administration under
Barrack Obama has stripped us of our most important civil liberties, whether
that's the refusal to restore Habeas Corpus, which of course was taken
from us by George Bush, the use of the FISA Amendment Act to retroactively make
legal what under our Constitution has traditionally been illegal, the
warrantless wire-tapping, monitoring, and eavesdropping of tens of millions of
Americans, and of course it was retroactive, because the large
telecommunications companies like Verizon and AT&T had turned over our
personal information to the government in violation of our Constitutional
Rights. There were several cases working
their way up in the lower courts which they knew they'd lose, and so they
brought the lobbyists in to get legislators (including Obama) to pass this law
to grant them immunity. And now we know that all the information of tens of
millions of Americans is being stored out in these massive supercomputers in
Utah. The use of the Espionage Act six times by the Obama administration to go
after whistle-blowers, including those who have purportedly leaked war crimes to
the New York Times, in the case of Sterling, the CIA agent. Now, before the
Obama Administration, the Espionage Act, which is our Foreign Secrets Act--it
was never designed to go after whistle-blowers--was used three times against
people who had leaked information about government malfeasance to the public,
the first being Ellsberg. The effect is that it essentially shut down any
serious investigation of government activity, because government officials are
terrified to speak, even on background, because of the fear that they would be
prosecuted or charged, and go to prison.
The decision by the Obama Administration to interpret (and I think many
legal scholars would argue incorrectly) the 2001 Authorization To Use Military
Force Act, as giving them the right to order the assassination of American
citizens. And finally, of course the National Defense Authorization Act,
Section 1021, and I sued the President and the Defense Secretary in federal
court over this section, and won, that allows the military to seize Americans
citizens on U.S. soil, hold them in military facilities, strip them of due
process until, in the language of this section, "the end of hostilities." That
has been appealed. Well it had been more than appealed: the Obama
administration, once Judge Catherine Forest in the Southern District Court of
New York came down with her ruling, asked for an "emergency stay," which means
they want the law put back into effect until they can appeal. She refused. They asked for an emergency hearing at the
Appellate Court, which they got. They asked for an emergency stay from the
Appellate Court, the Appellate Court gave it to them, which means the law went
back on the books until the Appellate Court makes its decision. They started hearing the case on September 28th. Now, we knew that they would appeal. I think what surprised us, and I speak for
the lawyers and for the other plaintiff who join me later, including Noam
Chomsky and Daniel Ellsberg, is that they did so aggressively. And I think that's clearly because they are
already using the law. I would speculate that they are probably using it on
Pakistani-U.S. dual-nationals, holding them in places like Bagram.
And this is all come under Obama,
not to mention the XL pipeline, the shredding of Kyoto, the refusal to go after
Wall Street, or curb Wall Street's clearly fraudulent and criminal behavior,
the inability to build a serious jobs program, to respond to the foreclosure
crisis. I mean, all of these things when
you lay them out, I think are pretty stark evidence that the system does not
work on our behalf.
Rob Kall: First, I
want to comment on your lawsuit. Thank
you so much for doing that! It seems to me that, well I mean, I would be
hopeful that your effort in initiating this lawsuit would act as meme inspiring
others to take on similar needs for lawsuits challenging legislation that just
shouldn't be there, that totally flies in the face of the values of the Founding Fathers. Are you seeing any of that? And is there any
systematic effort being made to help identify targets, and support people who
are going after other attempts? Because I'm sure that this one is just one of
the"
Chris Hedges: These
forces have seized most of the mechanisms by which citizens were traditionally
were able to respond and defend their own interests. And then again, that's why
I go back to the first quote you read from the last chapter, "Days of Revolt,"
in arguing that it is only by building a mass movement that defies both
parties. And we saw this with the Chicago teacher's strike, would be a good
example of that, where you had organizational activity that defied not only the
traditional unions, but was battling the traditional democratic establishment
as embodied in a figure like Rahm Emanuel. So, that is the sort of denouement
of the book, is that there's where we have to go.
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