Finding Freedom in Handcuffs
by Chris Hedges, truthdig.com -- Nov 7, 2011
Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges, an activist, an author and a member of a reporting team that won a 2002 Pulitzer Prize, wrote this article after he was released from custody following his arrest last Thursday. He and about 15 other participants in the Occupy Wall Street movement were detained as they protested outside the global headquarters of Goldman Sachs in lower Manhattan.
The World As It Is, Chris Hedges Speaks in Pasadena
http://youtu.be/...
Uploaded by ianmasterstv on Apr 28, 2011
Moral Memory
by Allen Wilcox, brooklynrail.org -- Nov 2011
Chris Hedges -- The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress
In his essays, Hedges describes a world no longer valued for its innate gifts and natural beauty. He sees a world that is valued instead according to its commodity price, its market value -- and in the capitalist explanation of reality there is a market for everything.
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Liberal institutions and liberal values, Hedges argues, such as freedom of the press, the public education system, the existence of trade unions, credit unions, and the like, were developed to safeguard the most vulnerable in society from predation, despair, poverty, and crisis. They help maintain crucial legal and social protections for regular people against the hegemony of the powerful and the wealthy. As he writes:
The Liberty Party that fought slavery, the suffragists who battled for women’s rights, the labor movement, and the civil-rights movement knew that the question was not how we get good people to rule -- those attracted to power tend to be venal mediocrities -- but how we limit the damage the powerful do to us.
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Resistance means a radical break with the formal structures of American society. We must cut as many ties with consumer society and corporations as possible. We must build a new political and economic consciousness centered on the tangible issues of sustainable agriculture, self-sufficiency, and radical environmental reform.
Chris Hedges Q&A "The Death of the Liberal Class"
http://youtu.be/...
uploaded by mediasanctuary on Oct 18, 2010
Hedges Laments The 'Death Of The Liberal Class'
NPR: Talk of the Nation
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"For millions of Americans, including the 15 million unemployed Americans," Hedges tells NPR'S Neal Conan, "the suffering is becoming acute."
He cites a recent trip to Camden, N.J., per capita the poorest city in the nation, as an example.
"When you get up and see the human cost of what this has done -- these foreclosures, these bank repossessions, the fact that one in eight Americans and one in four children depend on food stamps to survive," Hedges says, it's clear the system has failed.
But how is that the fault of, say, the universities?
Hedges describes a "kind of withering of the humanities" in which the liberal education that would normally ask broad questions and challenge structure and assumptions has become corporate. Academic departments now carry the burden of raising their own funds. "This is pretty hard to do if you're in the classics department," Hedges notes.
Hedges says he also faults the "purging within economics departments and business schools of people who challenged what I call the utopian vision of globalization -- the idea that somehow the marketplace should determine human behavior and guide human activity."
Finding Freedom in Handcuffs
by Chris Hedges, truthdig.com -- Nov 7, 2011
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A glass tower filled with people carefully selected for the polish and self-assurance that come with having been formed in institutions of privilege, whose primary attributes are a lack of consciousness, a penchant for deception and an incapacity for empathy or remorse. The curious onlookers behind the windows and we, arms locked in a circle on the concrete outside, did not speak the same language. Profit. Globalization. War. National security. These are the words they use to justify the snuffing out of tiny lives, acts of radical evil. Goldman Sachs’ commodities index is the most heavily traded in the world. Those who trade it have, by buying up and hoarding commodities futures, doubled and tripled the costs of wheat, rice and corn. Hundreds of millions of poor across the globe are going hungry to feed this mania for profit. The technical jargon, learned in business schools and on trading floors, effectively masks the reality of what is happening -- murder. These are words designed to make systems operate, even systems of death, with a cold neutrality.
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[pg 2]
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It is vital that the occupation movements direct attention away from their encampments and tent cities, beset with the usual problems of hastily formed open societies where no one is turned away. Attention must be directed through street protests, civil disobedience and occupations toward the institutions that are carrying out the assaults against the 99 percent. Banks, insurance companies, courts where families are being foreclosed from their homes, city offices that put these homes up for auction, schools, libraries and firehouses that are being closed, and corporations such as General Electric that funnel taxpayer dollars into useless weapons systems and do not pay taxes, as well as propaganda outlets such as the New York Post and its evil twin, Fox News, which have unleashed a vicious propaganda war against us, all need to be targeted, shut down and occupied. Goldman Sachs is the poster child of all that is wrong with global capitalism, but there are many other companies whose degradation and destruction of human life are no less egregious.
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Those who resist -- the doubters, outcasts, renegades, skeptics and rebels -- rarely come from the elite. They ask different questions. They seek something else -- a life of meaning. They have grasped Immanuel Kant’s dictum, “If justice perishes, human life on Earth has lost its meaning.” And in their search they come to the conclusion that, as Socrates said, it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong. This conclusion is rational, yet cannot be rationally defended. It makes a leap into the moral, which is beyond rational thought. It refuses to place a monetary value on human life. It acknowledges human life, indeed all life, as sacred.
Amen.