Seems OWS has spread to Canada, where Chris Hedges appeared on the CBC. He was interrogated by Canadian entrepeneur and representative of the 1% Kevin O'Leary. I've seen him on the ABC TV show, Shark Tank and he was an asshole there too.
Chris Hedges is one of the classiest and most intelligent gentlemen you will see on any TV program, and in the course of the interrogation, O'Leary says to him, 'don't take this the wrong way but you sound like a leftwing nutbar'.
He starts off pugilistically, with his first 'question' to Mr. Hedges coming in the form of an insult calling the movement 'low budget' and 'nothing burger'. What is everybody complaining about, he wants to know. They don't even know the names of the firms.
Chris Hedges politely and calmly responds:
They want to reverse the corporate coup that's taken place in the US and they won't stop until that happens. This is literally a fight for life. It's that serious, unfettered capitalism is a revolutionary force, it commodifies and exploits everything until exhaustion. We don't have much time left.
It's at this point that Mr. Hedges gets called a nutbar. When he responds that corporations produce nothing, O'Leary gasps in shock. Chris further clarifies that he's talking about financial instutions who produce nothing, but only gamble and speculate, aand says this character assassination sounds like Fox News and he doesn't go on Corporate News shows that are responsible for the pollution of the airways.
This exchange is like watching an intellectual Goliath battle a mental midget, where O'Leary limply attempts to spar with Hedges by labeling him a radical, or a centrist, or whatever, so this is where Hedges goes in for the kill and delivers the coup de grâce:
Those who are protesting the rise of the corporate state are the true conservatives because they want to restore the rule of law. The radicals have seized power and they have trashed all regulations and legal impediments to reconfigure American society into a form of neofeudalism. In Canada you do not have a banking crisis because you didn't tear down the wall between commercial banks and investment banks turning all banks into hedge funds.
What should be done with Goldman Sachs specifically? He very simply answers:
They should be prosecuted.
[Which is the perfect lead-in into today's prosecution of Goldman Sachs by Chris Hedges and Cornell West, taking place later this morning. I wonder if O'Leary will tune in].
And he ends by saying he will not appear on their program ever again!