The
1 Percent’s Useful Idiots
By
Chris Hedges
August 01,
2016 "Information Clearing House"
- "Truthdig" - PHILADELPHIA—The
parade of useful idiots,
the bankrupt liberal class that long ago sold its soul to corporate power, is
now led by Sen. Bernie Sanders. His final capitulation, symbolized by his
pathetic motion to suspend the roll call, giving Hillary Clinton the Democratic
nomination by acclamation, is an abject betrayal of millions of his supporters
and his call for a political revolution.
No doubt the
Democrats will continue to let Sanders be a member of the Democratic Caucus. No
doubt the Democrats will continue to agree not to run a serious candidate
against him in Vermont. No doubt Sanders will be given an ample platform and
media opportunities to shill for Clinton and the corporate machine. No doubt he
will remain a member of the political establishment.
Sanders
squandered his most important historical moment. He had a chance, one chance,
to take the energy, anger and momentum, walk out the doors of the Wells Fargo
Center and into the streets to help build a third-party movement. His call to
his delegates to face “reality” and support Clinton was an insulting
repudiation of the reality his supporters, mostly young men and young women,
had overcome by lifting him from an obscure candidate polling at 12 percent
into a serious contender for the nomination. Sanders not only sold out his
base, he mocked it. This was a spiritual wound, not a political one. For this
he must ask forgiveness.
Whatever
resistance happens will happen without him. Whatever political revolution
happens will happen without him. Whatever hope we have for a sustainable future
will happen without him. Sanders, who once lifted up the yearnings of millions,
has become an impediment to change. He took his 30 pieces of silver and joined
with a bankrupt liberal establishment on behalf of a candidate who is a tool of
Wall Street, a proponent of endless war and an enemy of the working class.
Sanders, like
all of the self-identified liberals who are whoring themselves out for the
Democrats, will use fear as the primary reason to remain enslaved by the
neoliberal assault. And, in return, the corporate state will allow him and the
other useful idiots among the 1 percent to have their careers and construct
pathetic monuments to themselves.
The
Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) will be pushed through whether Donald Trump or
Hillary Clinton is president. The fracking industry, fossil fuel industry and
animal agriculture industry will ravage the ecosystem whether Donald Trump or
Hillary Clinton is president. The predatory financial institutions on Wall
Street will trash the economy and loot the U.S. Treasury on the way to another
economic collapse whether Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton is president. Poor,
unarmed people of color will be gunned down in the streets of our cities
whether Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton is president. The system of neoslavery
in our prisons, where we keep poor men and poor women of color in cages because
we have taken from them the possibility of employment, education and dignity,
will be maintained whether Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton is president.
Millions of undocumented people will be deported whether Donald Trump or
Hillary Clinton is president. Austerity programs will cut or abolish public
services, further decay the infrastructure and curtail social programs whether
Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton is president. Money will replace the vote
whether Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton is president. And half the country,
which now lives in poverty, will remain in misery whether Donald Trump or
Hillary Clinton becomes president.
This is not
speculation. We know this because there has been total continuity on every
issue, from trade agreements to war to mass deportations, between the Bush
administration and the administration of Barack Obama. The problem is not
Donald Trump. The problem is capitalism. And this is the beast we are called to
fight and slay. Until that is done, nothing of substance will change.
To reduce the
political debate, as Sanders and others are doing, to political personalities
is political infantilism. We have undergone a corporate coup. Donald Trump and
Hillary Clinton will not reverse this coup. They, like Barack Obama, know where
the centers of power lie. They serve these centers of power.
Change will
come when we have the tenacity, as many Sanders delegates did, to refuse to
cooperate, to say no, to no longer participate in the political charade. Change
will come when we begin acts of sustained mass civil disobedience. Change will
come when the fear the corporate state uses to paralyze us is used by us to
paralyze the corporate state.
The Russian writer
Alexander Herzen, speaking a century ago to a group of anarchists about how to
overthrow the czar, reminded his listeners that it was not their job to save a
dying system but to replace it: “We think we are the doctors. We are the
disease.”
We are here
not to reform the system. We are here to overthrow it. And that is the only
possibility left to restore our democracy and save our planet. If we fail in
this task, if this system of corporate capitalism and globalization is not
dismantled, we are doomed. And this is the reality no one wants to speak about.
We will have
to be in the political wilderness, perhaps for a decade. But a decade ago
Syriza, the party now ruling Greece, was polling at only 4 percent. This is
what the Green Party is polling today. We will not bring about systemic change
in one or two election cycles. But we can begin to build a counterweight to the
corporate state. We can begin to push back.
We must find
the courage not to be afraid. We must find the courage to follow our conscience.
We must find the courage to defy the corporate forces of death in order to
affirm the forces of life.
This will not
be easy. The corporate state—once its vast systems of indoctrination and
propaganda do not work to keep us passive, once we are no longer afraid, once
we make our own reality rather than accommodating ourselves to the reality
imposed upon us—will employ more direct and coercive forms of control. The
reign of terror, the revocation of civil liberties, the indiscriminate violence
by the state will no longer be exercised only against poor people of color. The
reality endured by our poor sisters and brothers of color, a reality we did not
do enough to fight against, will become our own.
To allow the
ideological forces of neoliberalism to crush our ideals and our values is to
fall into a deadly cynicism and despair. To allow the consumer culture and the
cult of the self, which lies at the heart of capitalism, to seduce us is to
kill our souls. Happiness does not come with the accumulation of wealth.
Happiness does not come from possessions or power. These are narcotics. They
numb and kill all that is noble and good within us. Happiness comes when you
reach out in solidarity to your neighbor, when you lend your hand to the
stranger or the outcast, when you are willing to lose your life to save it.
Happiness comes when you have the capacity to love.
Our span of
life, in the vastness of the universe, is insignificant. I will be 60 soon. The
arch of my own life is beginning to draw to a close. We all will die. How do we
use the miracle of this flash of light that is called life?
Albert Camus
wrote, “One of the only coherent philosophical positions is revolt. It is a
constant confrontation between [human beings] and [their] obscurity. It is not
aspiration, for it is devoid of hope. That revolt is the certainty of a
crushing fate, without the resignation that ought to accompany it.”
He said
further, “A living [person] can be enslaved and reduced to the historic
condition of an object. But if he [or she] dies in refusing to be enslaved, he
[or she] reaffirms the existence of another kind of human nature which refuses
to be classified as an object.”
There is only
one way to rebel. You fight for all of the oppressed or none of the oppressed.
You understand that there is no country. Our country is the earth. We are
citizens of the world. Nationalism is a disease. It is a disease we must purge.
As long as a Muslim family suffers in a refugee camp in Syria or an LGBT person
suffers from the bigotry imposed by the Christian heretics in the Christian
right, we all suffer.
There are
desperate single mothers struggling to raise children on less than $10,000 a
year in some Philadelphia neighborhoods. Many of these children go to bed
hungry. There are unemployed workers desperate to find a job and restore their
dignity. There are mentally ill and homeless we have abandoned to the streets.
There are Iraqi and Afghan families living in terror, a terror we have
inflicted on them, in the futile and endless wars waged to enrich the arms
industry. There are men and women being tortured in our worldwide archipelago
of secret detention centers. There are undocumented workers whose families we
have ripped apart, separating children from parents, or imprisoned.
This is
reality. It is the only reality that matters. It is a reality we must and will
change. Because, as the great socialist Eugene V. Debs, who upon being
sentenced in 1918 for violating the Sedition Act by defying the madness of
World War I, said, “I recognized my kinship with all living beings. I made up
my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then,
and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there
is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not
free.”
Augustine
wrote that hope has two beautiful daughters, anger and courage—anger at the way
things are and the courage to see that they do not remain the way they are.
The fight will
be hard and difficult. It will require love and self-sacrifice. It will require
anger and courage. It is the greatest moral imperative before us. Those who do
not defy the evil become its accomplice. We may not succeed. But we must be
among those of whom future generations will say: They tried. They dared to dream.
They dared to care. They dared to love. They enabled those who followed to
press on in the struggle.
Who
Should Bernie Voters Support Now? Robert Reich vs. Chris Hedges on Tackling the
Neoliberal Order
August 02,
2016 "Information Clearing House"
- AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!,
democracynow.org. Our special, "Breaking with Convention: War, Peace and
the Presidency." I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: As
we continue to talk about the Democratic National Convention, we’re joined now
by two guests. Joining us from Berkeley, California, is Robert Reich, who
served as labor secretary under President Clinton and is a professor at the
University of California, Berkeley. And here in Philadelphia is Chris Hedges,
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. His most recent book is Wages of
Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt.
And I’d like
to begin with Robert Reich. You’re a—you were a Bernie Sanders supporter. You’re
now backing Hillary Clinton. You’re not at the convention, but your perspective
on what you saw last night and the possibility of the Democratic Party uniting
behind Hillary Clinton, or a group of the Sanders supporters going with Jill
Stein?
ROBERT REICH: Well,
it’s very hard to tell what the delegates are going to do. And it’s very hard
to tell—even harder to tell what the electorate is going to do. You know, this
is a very agonizing time for many Bernie Sanders supporters. I, with a great
deal of reluctance initially, because I’ve known Hillary Clinton for 50
years—50 years—endorsed Bernie Sanders and worked my heart out for him, as
many, many people did. And so, at this particular juncture, you know, there’s a
great deal of sadness and a great deal of feeling of regret. But having worked
so long and so many years for basically the progressive ideals that Bernie
Sanders stands for, I can tell you that the movement is going to continue. In
fact, it’s going to grow.
And right now,
at this particular point in time, I just don’t see any alternative but to
support Hillary. I know Hillary, I know her faults, I know her strengths. I
think she will make a great president. I supported Bernie Sanders because I
thought he would make a better president for the system we need. But
nonetheless, Hillary Clinton is going to be the nominee. I support her. And I
support her not only because she will be a good president, if not a great
president, but also, frankly, because I am tremendously worried about the
alternative. And the alternative, really, as a practical matter, is somebody
who is a megalomaniac and a bigot, somebody who will set back the progressive
movement decades, if not more.
AMY GOODMAN: Chris
Hedges?
CHRIS HEDGES: Well,
reducing the election to personalities is kind of infantile at this point. The
fact is, we live in a system that Sheldon Wolin calls inverted totalitarianism.
It’s a system where corporate power has seized all of the levers of control.
There is no way to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs or ExxonMobil or
Raytheon. We’ve lost our privacy. We’ve seen, under Obama, an assault against
civil liberties that has outstripped what George W. Bush carried out. We’ve
seen the executive branch misinterpret the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force
Act as giving itself the right to assassinate American citizens, including
children. I speak of Anwar al-Awlaki’s 16-year-old son. We have bailed out the
banks, pushed through programs of austerity. This has been a bipartisan effort,
because they’ve both been captured by corporate power. We have undergone what
John Ralston Saul correctly calls a corporate coup d’état in slow motion, and
it’s over.
I just came
back from Poland, which is a kind of case study of how neoliberal poison
destroys a society and creates figures like Trump. Poland has gone, I think we
can argue, into a neofascism. First, it dislocated the working class,
deindustrialized the country. Then, in the name of austerity, it destroyed
public institutions, education, public broadcasting. And then it poisoned the
political system. And we are now watching, in Poland, them create a 30,000 to
40,000 armed militia. You know, they have an army. The Parliament, nothing
works. And I think that this political system in the United States has seized up
in exactly the same form.
So, is Trump a
repugnant personality? Yes. Although I would argue that in terms of megalomania
and narcissism, Hillary Clinton is not far behind. But the point is, we’ve got
to break away from—which is exactly the narrative they want us to focus on.
We’ve got to break away from political personalities and understand and examine
and critique the structures of power. And, in fact, the Democratic Party,
especially beginning under Bill Clinton, has carried water for corporate entities
as assiduously as the Republican Party. This is something that Ralph Nader
understood long before the rest of us, and stepped out very courageously in
2000. And I think we will look back on that period and find Ralph to be an
amazingly prophetic figure. Nobody understands corporate power better than
Ralph. And I think now people have caught up with Ralph.
And this is,
of course, why I support Dr. Stein and the Green Party. We have to remember
that 10 years ago, Syriza, which controls the Greek government, was polling at
exactly the same spot that the Green Party is polling now—about 4 percent.
We’ve got to break out of this idea that we can create systematic change within
a particular election cycle. We’ve got to be willing to step out into the
political wilderness, perhaps, for a decade. But on the issues of climate
change, on the issue of the destruction of civil liberties, including our right
to privacy—and I speak as a former investigative journalist, which doesn’t
exist anymore because of wholesale government surveillance—we have no ability,
except for hackers.
I mean, this
whole debate over the WikiLeaks is insane. Did Russia? I’ve printed classified
material that was given to me by the Mossad. But I never exposed that Mossad
gave it to me. Is what was published true or untrue? And the fact is, you know,
in those long emails—you should read them. They’re appalling, including calling
Dr. Cornel West "trash." It is—the whole—it exposes the way the
system was rigged, within—I’m talking about the Democratic Party—the denial of
independents, the superdelegates, the stealing of the caucus in Nevada, the
huge amounts of corporate money and super PACs that flowed into the Clinton
campaign.
The fact is,
Clinton has a track record, and it’s one that has abandoned children. I mean,
she and her husband destroyed welfare as we know it, and 70 percent of the
original recipients were children. This debate over—I don’t like Trump, but
Trump is not the phenomenon. Trump is responding to a phenomenon created by
neoliberalism. And we may get rid of Trump, but we will get something even more
vile, maybe Ted Cruz.
AMY GOODMAN: Robert
Reich, I remember you, on Democracy Now!, talking about your time
as labor secretary when President Clinton signed off on welfare reform, and you
described walking the streets of Washington, D.C., wondering where the protests
were, that you had vigorously objected. And it was also an issue, a bill that
Hillary Clinton had supported. So, can you respond to Chris Hedges on these
three points, including, so, you take a walk in the political wilderness for a
little while?
ROBERT REICH: Well,
Amy, it’s not just taking a walk in the political wilderness. If Donald Trump
becomes president, if that’s what you’re referring to, I think it is—there are
irrevocable negative changes that will happen in the United States, including
appointments to the Supreme Court, that will not be just political wilderness,
that will actually change and worsen the structure of this country. I couldn’t
agree with Chris Hedges more about his critique, overall, of neoliberalism and
a lot of the structural problems that we face in our political economy today.
I’ve written about them. But I’ve done more than write about them. I’ve
actually been in the center of power, and I have been doing everything I
possibly can, as an individual and also as a mobilizer and organizer of others,
to try to change what we now have.
I think that
voting for Donald Trump or equating Hillary Clinton with Donald Trump is
insane. Donald Trump is certainly a product of a kind of system and a
systematic undermining that has occurred in the United States for years with
regard to inequality of income and wealth and political power. But we don’t
fight that by simply saying, "All right, let’s just have Donald Trump and
hope that the system improves itself and hope that things are so bad that
actually people rise up in armed resistance." That’s insane. That’s crazy.
What we have to do is be—we’ve got to
be very, very strategic as progressives. We’ve got to look at the long term.
We’ve got to understand that Bernie Sanders brought us much further along than
we were before the Sanders campaign. We owe a lot to Bernie Sanders, his
courage, his integrity, his power, the fact that most people under 30 voted for
Bernie Sanders. In fact, if you look at the people who voted for Bernie Sanders
under 30, that was more people than voted for Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton
together under the age of 30. We are building a progressive movement in this
country. But over the next four years, I don’t want Donald Trump to
irretrievably make it difficult, if not impossible, for us to move forward with
that progressive movement.
Now, I understand Hillary Clinton is
not perfect. I’ve known her , as I said before, for 50 years. I met her when
she was 19 years old. I know her strengths, and I know, pretty well, her
weaknesses. She is not perfect. And as Chris says, you know, she is also very
much a product of many of the problems structurally in this country right now.
We fight those structural problems, yes. Hand in hand, Chris, with you,
shoulder to shoulder—I’m very short, maybe it’s my shoulder, and it’s your rib
cage—but it doesn’t matter, we continue to fight. I will continue to fight.
Many people who are watching and listening will continue to fight. We must
continue to mobilize. I hope Bernie Sanders does what he implied he would do
last night—that is, carry the movement forward, lend his name, his energy, his
email list. This is not the end of anything. But we have got to be, at the same
time, very practical about what we’re doing and very strategic about what we’re
doing. This is not just a matter of making statements. It’s a matter of
actually working with and through, and changing the structure of power in this
country.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Chris, I’d like to ask
you—you’ve written that liberals are tolerated by the capitalist elites because
they do not question the virtues of corporate capitalism, only its excesses,
and call for tepid and ineffectual reforms. Could that have also have been said
of FDR in the 1930s? Because you were one of the folks who did not
back Bernie Sanders from the beginning.
CHRIS HEDGES: That’s right.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: So, you’ve—
CHRIS HEDGES: Well, I didn’t back Bernie
Sanders because—and Kshama Sawant and I had had a discussion with him
before—because he said that he would work within the Democratic structures and
support the nominee. And I think we have now watched Bernie Sanders walk away
from his political moment. You know, he—I think he will come to deeply regret
what he has done. He has betrayed these people who believed in this political
revolution. We heard this same kind of rhetoric, by the way, in 2008 around
Obama.
A political campaign raises
consciousness, but it’s not a movement. And what we are seeing now is furious
spin—I listened to Ben Jealous just do it—from the self-identified liberal
class. And they are tolerated within a capitalist system, because, in a moment
like this, they are used to speak to people to get them to betray their own
interests in the name of fear. And I admire Robert and have read much of his
stuff and like his stuff, but if you listen to what he’s been saying, the
message is the same message of the Trump campaign, and that his fear. And that
is all the Democrats have to offer now and all the Republicans have to offer
now.
And the fact is, from climate change
alone, we have no time left. I have four children. The future of my children,
by the day, is being destroyed because of the fact that the fossil fuel
industry, along with the animal agriculture industry, which is also as
important in terms of climate change, are destroying the ecosystem on which we
depend for life. And neither party has any intention to do anything about it.
AMY GOODMAN: What should Bernie Sanders have
done?
CHRIS HEDGES: Bernie Sanders should have
walked out and run as an independent.
AMY GOODMAN: Take—
CHRIS HEDGES: And defied the Democratic Party.
AMY GOODMAN: Take up the invitation of Dr.
Jill Stein—
CHRIS HEDGES: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: —and run on a ticket with—
CHRIS HEDGES: She offered to let him run on
the top of the ticket. That’s what he should have done. And the fact is, you
know, let’s not forget that Bernie has a very checkered past. He campaigned for
Clinton in '92. He campaigned for Clinton again in ’96, after NAFTA—the
greatest betrayal of the working class in this country since the Taft-Hartley
Act of 1948—after the destruction of welfare, after the omnibus crime bill that
exploded the prison population, and, you know, we now have—I mean, it's just a
monstrosity what we’ve done; 350,000 to 400,000 people locked in cages in this
country are severely mentally ill. Half of them never committed a violent
crime. That’s all Bill Clinton. And yet he went out and campaigned. In 2004, he
called on Nader not to run, to step down, so he could support a war candidate
like John Kerry. And I’m listening to Jealous before talk about the Iraq War.
Sixty percent of the Democratic senators voted for the war, including Hillary
Clinton. The idea that somehow Democrats don’t push us into war defies American
history.
AMY GOODMAN: Robert Reich?
ROBERT REICH: Well, all I can say is that at
this particular point in time—I mean, again, many of the things that Chris
Hedges is saying, I completely agree with. The real question here is: What do
we do right now? And what do we do to mobilize and organize a lot of people out
there who right now are not mobilized and organized? And how do we keep the
energy building? I disagree with Chris with regard to Bernie Sanders. I think
Bernie Sanders has been a great and is a great leader right now of the
progressive cause.
What I think we ought to do is develop
a third party outside the Democratic and Republican parties, maybe the Green
Party, so that in the year 2020, four years from now, we have another
candidate—it may be Bernie Sanders, I think he’s probably going to be too old
by then—but we have a candidate that holds the Democrats accountable, that
provides a vehicle for a lot of the energy of the Bernie Sanders movement to
continue to develop, that fields new candidates at the Senate, in Congress, at
the state level, that actually holds Democrats’ feet to the fire and
Republicans’ feet to the fire, that develops an agenda of getting big money out
of politics and severing the link between extraordinarily concentrated wealth
and political power in this country. That’s what we ought to be doing.
Now, we can—but in order to do that,
we cannot have—and, you know, I think that Hillary will be a good president, if
not a great president. This is not just trucking in fear, Chris. But I do fear
Donald Trump. I fear the polls that I saw yesterday. Now, polls, again, this
early in a campaign still—we’re still months away from the election, but they
are indicative. They show Donald Trump doing exceedingly well, beating Hillary
Clinton. And right now, given our two-party system, given our winner-take-all
system with regard to the Electoral College, it’s just too much of a risk to go
and to say, "Well, I’m going to vote—I’m not going to vote for the lesser
of two evils, I’m going to vote exactly what I want to do." Well, anybody
can do that, obviously. This is a free country. You vote what you—you vote your
conscience. You have to do that. I’m just saying that your conscience needs to
be aware that if you do not support Hillary Clinton, you are increasing the
odds of a true, clear and present danger to the United States, a menace to the
United States. And you’re increasing the possibility that there will not be a
progressive movement, there will not be anything we believe in in the future,
because the United States will really be changed for the worse.
That’s not a—that’s not a risk I’m
prepared to take at this point in time. I’m going to move—I’m going to do
exactly what I’ve been doing for the last 40 years: I’m going to continue to
beat my head against the wall, to build and contribute to building a
progressive movement. The day after Election Day, I am going to try to work
with Bernie Sanders and anybody else who wants to work in strengthening a third
party—and again, maybe it’s the Green Party—for the year 2020, and do
everything else I was just talking about. But right now, as we lead up to
Election Day 2016, I must urge everyone who is listening or who is watching to
do whatever they can to make sure that Hillary Clinton is the next president,
and not Donald Trump.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’re going to break and
then come back to this debate on both sides of the United States, as well as of
this issue. Chris Hedges is with us, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist,
award-winning author and activist. Latest book, Wages of Rebellion: The
Moral Imperative of Revolt. And who you were just listening to is Robert
Reich, who is the former labor secretary under President Clinton and professor
at University of California, Berkeley, his latest book called Saving
Capitalism. He was a Bernie Sanders supporter and now says he will vote for
Hillary Clinton. When we come back, we’ll hear some of the words of Donald
Trump and get response. Stay with us.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: "Opening Ceremony" by
Laura Ortman. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. Our special
for this two weeks, "Breaking with Convention: War, Peace and the
Presidency." I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, in a moment, we’ll return
to our debate between Robert Reich and Chris Hedges, but first let’s turn to
Donald Trump’s nomination speech at the RNC in Cleveland last
Thursday. Trump said Sanders’ supporters would vote for him in the fall.
DONALD TRUMP: I have seen firsthand how the
system is rigged against our citizens, just like it was rigged against Bernie
Sanders. He never had a chance, never had a chance. But his supporters will
join our movement, because we will fix his biggest single issue—trade deals
that strip our country of its jobs and strip us of our wealth as a country.
Millions of Democrats will join our movement, because we are going to fix the
system so it works fairly and justly for each and every American.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: That was Donald Trump talking at
the convention in Cleveland. Robert Reich, interestingly, Donald Trump and
Chris Hedges agree on one thing, that free trade deals that the—that both the
Republicans and Democrats have negotiated over the past few years, especially NAFTA,
have been disastrous for the American people. You were part of the Clinton
administration when NAFTA was passed. Talk about this, the impact
that Trump is utilizing among white workers in America over the issue of free
trade.
ROBERT REICH: Well, Donald Trump is clearly
using trade and also immigration as vehicles for making the people who have
really been hurt by trade, by globalization, feel that he is going to somehow
be on their side. He’s not going to be on their side.
Trump is right in a very, very narrow
respect, that trade has hurt very vulnerable people, working-class people. The
burdens of trade have been disproportionately fallen on those people who used
to have good unionized jobs in America. And the failure of NAFTA and
also the WTO, the World Trade Organization, Chinese ascension into the WTO,
all of those Clinton-era programs—the failure was, number one, not to have
nearly strong enough and enforceable enough labor and environmental side
agreements; number two, not to have adjustment mechanisms here in the United
States for people who lost their jobs to help them get good jobs, that were new
jobs, for the jobs they lost. The winners in trade could have compensated the
losers and still come out ahead, but they did not. And that is a structural,
political problem in this country that we have to address.
It is also a problem with regard to
technological displacement. It’s not just trade. Technology is displacing and
will continue to displace and will displace even more good jobs in the future,
but we have absolutely no strategy for dealing with that. And right now, the
burdens of technological displacement are falling, once again, on the working
middle class, lower-income people, who have very, very few alternatives,
driving a greater and greater wedge between those who are lucky enough to be—to
have rich parents or be well educated or be well connected, and everybody else.
We cannot go on like this. This is
unsustainable. And Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are symptomatic, their rise,
are both symptomatic of this great wave of antiestablishment anger that is
flooding American politics, although on the one side you have authoritarian
populism, and on the Bernie Sanders side you have a political revolution. I
prefer the political revolution myself. I’m going to continue to work for that
political revolution.
CHRIS HEDGES: Well, I think we have to
acknowledge two facts. We do not live in a functioning democracy, and we have
to stop pretending that we do. You can’t talk about—when you eviscerate
privacy, you can’t use the word "liberty." That is the relationship
between a master and a slave. The fact is, this is capitalism run amok. This
whole discussion should be about capitalism. Capitalism does what it’s designed
to do, when it’s unfettered or unregulated—as it is—and that is to increase
profit and reduce the cost of labor. And it has done that by deindustrializing
the country, and the Clinton administration, you know, massively enabled this.
And, you know, we’re sitting here in
Philadelphia. The last convention was in Cleveland. These are Potemkin villages,
where the downtowns are Disneyfied, and three and four blocks away people are
living in appalling poverty. We have responded to surplus labor, as Karl Marx
says, in our deindustrialized internal colonies, to quote Malcolm X, by putting
poor people of color in cages all across the country. Why? It’s because surplus
labor—corporate entities cannot make money off of surplus or redundant labor.
But when you lock them in a cage, they make $40,000 or $50,000 a year. This is
the system we live in.
We live in a system where, under
Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act, the executive branch
can put the soldiers in the streets, in clear violation of the 1878 Posse
Comitatus Act, to see—carry out extraordinary rendition of American citizens who
are deemed to be, quote-unquote, "terrorists," strip them of due
process and hold them indefinitely in military facilities, including in our
black sites. We are a country that engages in torture.
We talk—Robert talks about, you know,
building movements. You can’t build movements in a political system where money
has replaced the vote. It’s impossible. And the Democrats, you know, their
bedside manner is different from the Republicans. You know, Trump is this kind
of grotesque figure. He’s like the used car salesman who rolls back the
speedometer. But Hillary Clinton is like, you know, the managers of Goldman
Sachs. They both engage in criminal activities that have—and Clinton’s record,
like Trump, exposes this—that have preyed upon the most vulnerable within this
country and are now destroying the middle class. And to somehow speak as if we
are in a functioning democracy, or speak as if there are any restraints on
capitalism, or speak as if the Democratic Party has not pushed forward this
agenda—I mean, Obama has done this. You know, he has been as obsequious to Wall
Street as the Bush administration. There’s no difference.
AMY GOODMAN: Robert Reich?
ROBERT REICH: Chris, you know, I—again, I find
this a frustrating conversation, because I agree with so much of what you have
said, but the question is: What do we do about it? I mean, we are in a better
position today, in the sense that Bernie Sanders has helped mobilize, organize
and energize a lot of Americans, and educated a lot of Americans about the very
issues that you have talked and written about and I have talked and written
about. But it is—the question is: What is the action? What is the actual
political strategy right now?
CHRIS HEDGES: Well, let me—let me answer that.
ROBERT REICH: And I think the political—
CHRIS HEDGES: Let me answer that.
ROBERT REICH: Well, let me just—let me just
put in my two cents. I think political strategy is not to elect Donald Trump,
to elect Hillary Clinton, and, for four years, to develop an alternative,
another Bernie Sanders-type candidate with an independent party, outside the
Democratic Party, that will take on Hillary Clinton, assuming that she is
elected and that she runs for re-election, and that also develops the
infrastructure of a third party that is a true, new progressive party.
CHRIS HEDGES: Well, that’s precisely what
we’re trying to do. There is a point where you have to—do I want to keep
quoting Ralph?—but where you have to draw a line in the sand. And that’s part
of the problem with the left, is we haven’t.
I covered the war in Yugoslavia, and I
find many parallels between what’s happening in the United States and what
happened with the breakdown of Yugoslavia. What is it that caused this country
to disintegrate? It wasn’t ancient ethnic hatreds. It was the economic meltdown
of Yugoslavia and a bankrupt liberal establishment that, after the death of
Tito, until 1989 or 1990, spoke in the language of democracy, but proved
ineffectual in terms of dealing with the plight of working men and women who
were cast out of state factories, huge unemployment and, finally, hyperinflation.
And the fact is that these neoliberal
policies, which the Democratic Party is one of the engines for, have created
this right-wing fascialism. You can go back—this proto-fascism. You can go back
and look at the Weimar, and it—Republic—was very much the same. So it’s
completely counterintuitive. Of course I find Trump a vile and disturbing and
disgusting figure, but I don’t believe that voting for the Democratic
establishment—and remember that this—the two insurgencies, both within the
Republican Party and the—were against figures like Hillary Clinton, who spoke
in that traditional feel-your-pain language of liberalism, while assiduously
serving corporate power and selling out working men and women. And they see
through the con, they see through the game.
I don’t actually think Bernie Sanders
educated the public. In fact, Bernie Sanders spoke for the first time as a
political candidate about the reality the public was experiencing, because even
Barack Obama, in his State of the Union address, was talking about economic
recovery, and everything was wonderful, and people know that it’s not. And when
you dispossess—
ROBERT REICH: Well, let me—let me—
CHRIS HEDGES: Let me just finish. Let me
finish. When you dispossess that segment, as large as we have—half the country
now lives in virtual poverty—and you continue to essentially run a government
that’s been seized by a cabal, in this case, corporate, which uses all of the
machinery of government for their own enrichment and their own further
empowerment at the expense of the rest of the citizenry, people finally react.
And that is how you get fascism. That is what history has told us. And to sit
by—every time, Robert, you speak, you do exactly what Trump does, which is
fear, fear, fear, fear, fear. And the fact that we are going to build some kind
of—
ROBERT REICH: Well, let me—let me try to—
CHRIS HEDGES: —amorphous movement after
Hillary Clinton—it’s just not they way it works.
ROBERT REICH: Let me try to inject—let me—let
me try to inject—
AMY GOODMAN: Former Clinton Labor Secretary
Robert Reich?
ROBERT REICH: Let me try to inject some hope
in here, in this discussion, rather than fear. I’ve been traveling around the
country for the last two years, trying to talk to tea partiers and
conservatives and many people who are probably going to vote for Donald Trump,
to try to understand what it is that they are doing and how they view America
and why they’re acting in ways that are so obviously against their
self-interest, both economic self-interest and other self-interest. And here’s
the interesting thing I found.
This great antiestablishment wave that
is occurring both on the left and the right has a great overlap, if you will,
and that overlap is a deep contempt for what many people on the right are
calling crony capitalism—in fact, many people on the left have called crony
capitalism. And those people on the right, many, many working people, they’re
not all white. Many of them are. Many of them are working-class. Many of them
have suffered from trade and technological displacement and a government that
is really turning its back on them, they feel—and to some extent, they’re
right. Many of them feel as angry about the current system and about corporate
welfare and about big money in politics as many of us on the progressive side
do.
Now, if it is possible to have a
multiracial, multiethnic coalition of the bottom 90 percent that is ready to
fight to get big money out of politics, for more equality, for a system that is
not rigged against average working people, where there are not going to be all
of these redistributions upward from those of us who have paychecks—and we
don’t even realize that larger and larger portions of those paychecks are going
to big industries, conglomerates, concentrated industries that have great
market power, because it’s all hidden from view—well, the more coalition
building we can do, from right to left, multiethnic, multiracial, left and
right, to build a movement to take back our economy and to take back our
democracy, that is—
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Robert Reich—Robert Reich, I’d
just like to interrupt you for a second, because we only have a minute left,
and I just wanted to ask Chris one last question. In less than a minute, if you
can, regardless of—you’re voting for Jill Stein, other folks are going to vote
for Clinton and Trump. Where do you feel this massive movement that has
developed over the last few years, this people movement, would have a better
opportunity to grow, under a Trump presidency or under a Clinton presidency,
assuming that one of those two will eventually be elected?
CHRIS HEDGES: I don’t think it makes any
difference. The TPP is going to go through, whether it’s Donald Trump
or Hillary Clinton. Endless war is going to be continued, whether it’s Trump or
Clinton. We’re not going to get our privacy back, whether it’s under Clinton or
Trump. The idea that, at this point, the figure in the executive branch
exercises that much power, given the power of the war industry and Wall Street,
is a myth. The fact is—
ROBERT REICH: Equating—I’m sorry. I’m sorry.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Even on immigration?
CHRIS HEDGES: What? On?
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Even on immigration?
CHRIS HEDGES: What? On immigration? I mean,
let’s look at Obama’s record on immigration. Who’s worse?
AMY GOODMAN: We’ve got 10 seconds.
CHRIS HEDGES: I mean, you know, you can’t get
worse than Obama.
ROBERT REICH: And can I just say something?
CHRIS HEDGES: I mean, the idea is, the
Democrats speak, and the—
AMY GOODMAN: Robert Reich, 10 seconds.
CHRIS HEDGES: Yeah.
ROBERT REICH: I just want to say, equating
Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton is absolute nonsense. I just—anybody who
equates the two of them is not paying attention. And it’s dangerous kind of
talk.
CHRIS HEDGES: That’s not what I—that’s not
what I did.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to have
to leave it there, but this is a discussion that will continue. Chris Hedges, I
want to thank you for being with us, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, author
of Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt. And former
Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich, professor now at the University of
California, Berkeley. His most recent book, Saving Capitalism.http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article45225.htm
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