Rob Kall: "Sacrifice Zones," what are Sacrifice Zones, and "Internal Colonies?"
Chris Hedges: They are places where citizens have been utterly dis-empowered and forced to kneel before the dictates of the marketplace. So, it's the marketplace that determines the relationship to the environment, to work, to politics, the law, to everything, and that is very true. I mean, Big Coal owns Southern West Virginia. Natives have been dis-empowered, you know, since they were corralled into Indian agencies. That's also true for Camden, which is, you know, per capita, not only the poorest city in this country, but has fifty two [52] homicides, which seems pretty certain that by the end of the year they'll also be, per capita, the most dangerous city in the country. So, these are the places that went first and we turned our back on them. In Biblical terms, we "forgot our neighbor." And now, what's being done to them, is being done to us, as we watch as corporations reconfigure the global economy into a form of Neo-feudalism and workers around the world are told that they have to be "competitive;" in essence, with prison labor in China and sweatshop workers in Bangladesh who make twenty two [22] cents an hour.
Rob Kall: Now, what do you think of the Electoral System and electoral politics, and the hope that change will come through there?
Chris Hedges: Well, I think it should be completely evident to anybody who escapes from this massive bombardment of Propaganda, which is costing 2.5 billion dollars, that change is not coming. Change has not come and will not come through the political system.
Rob Kall: So, does it matter who wins this election?
Chris Hedges: No, the personal narratives of the candidates don't in any way disrupt the operation of the Corporate State, and the best example of that is the complete continuity between the policies of the Bush Administration and the Obama Administration: whether that's on civil liberties, Wall Street, the expansion of imperial war, you know. Yeah.
Rob Kall: So, you refer in your book, while writing about West Virginia about a couple of things. You talk about Massey Coal, which controls one and a half million [1,500,000] acres in the U.S., and then you talk about Blair Mountain, the largest civil uprising since the Civil War. Can you comment on that whole world, and that uprising, and where we can find something like that?
Chris Hedges: It's an important part of our history to remember that all of the rights that workers in this country gained were paid for with the blood, literally, of workers in Homestead and Ludlow and Blair Mountain and other places, because these companies hired gun-thugs, and Pinkertons, and "goon squads." You know, whether it was in Scranton, Pennsylvania or Welch, West Virginia, to physically intimidate workers who were trying to organize. And unfortunately with the breaking of labor unions, and the passages of laws that have been detrimental to the American working class, whether it's the Taft-Hartley Act of 1948, which makes it difficult to organize, or Clinton's NAFTA, we are sort of back to where we started from, with this difference: now, it's a global economy. So, workers in country after country can be played off of each other, and that part of our history has largely been erased. I would venture to say that very, very few American school children have ever heard of Blair Mountain.
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