Crowd: Ninety nine percent.
Louder.
We are the 99 percent.
We are "
We are the 99 percent.
Louder.
We are a 99 percent.
Chris Hedges: I'm Chris Hedges. I'm a writer. I write books. I spent 20 years overseas as a war correspondent. I came back and realized that corporations had carried out a coup d'Ã ©tat in my country and I've been fighting back although not effectively as you, guys. Well, I've covered movements. I've covered all of the revolutions in Eastern Europe. I covered the street demonstrations that brought down MiloÃ... ¡eviÄ"¡. I've covered both of the Palestinian intifadas. And once movements like these start and articulate a fundamental truth about the society that they live in and expose the repression, the mendacity, the corruption and the decay of the structures of power, then they have a kind of centrifugal force. You never know where they're going.
You know, I was with the leaders of the movement, the opposition movement in East Germany in Leipzig on the afternoon of November 9, 1989, and they said that perhaps within a year, there would be free passage back and forth across the Berlin wall. In a few hours, the Berlin wall did not exist.
What happens is, in all of these movements, this was true in Prague as well, is that the foot soldiers of the elite, the blue uniform police, the mechanisms of control, finally do not want to impede the movement, and at that point, the power elite is left defenseless.
So, where is it going?
No one knows, even the people most intimately involved in the organization don't know. They had - all of these movements take on a kind of life and color that is in some ways finally mysterious. The only thing I can say having been in the middle of similar movements is that this one is real and this one could take "em all down.
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