Showing posts with label liberalism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label liberalism. Show all posts

Monday 17 October 2011

Chris Hedges - Rise Of The Corporate Class





We've seen the rise of the corporate state and inverted totalitarianism* opens Chris Hedges. 

They speak in the iconography of patriotism and the constitution

Our coup d'etat in slow motion**

It's not built around a demagogue or charismatic leader

It finds expression in the anonymity of the corporate state.

The Obama administration is the poster child for the craven hypocrisy of the liberal class.

"I'm not a Marxist but any political theorist who hasn't read Marx is illiterate"

We are creating an oligarchic state and you can't have a functioning democracy in an oligarchic state. It's something Lucidities and Plutarch understood  and wrote about.

We have to understand who the enemy is and the enemy is Wall Street (said before the rise of Occupy Wall Street)


Two of the quotes Chris uses are attributed to  *Sheldon Woldin and **John Ralston Saul.

Saturday 15 October 2011

Chris Hedges - Empire Of Illusion (Society Of The Spectacle)



I was just watching Chris Hedges being insulted by Kevin O'Leary of CBC. He asked him if he was a left-wing nutbar after Chris made an uncontroversial and appropriate response about the people at the #Occupy movement being perfectly aware which institutions are at fault. Chris then went on to dismantle Kevin O'Leary live on TV before departing with a derisory comment that he wont be returning to CBC who till then, he imagined, hadn't yet sunk to the depths of FOX news. 


You can watch that video which is shooting up the Youtube charts here but for a much more comprehensive display of one of the last remaining erudite and well informed Americans I urge you to watch the video embedded above where he burrows down into the pornification of wrestling or the wrestle-fication (violence) of porn and ultimately the corporatisation and commodification of everything in the United States.

I've blogged about Chris Hedges before when I first discovered him and somehow I forgot how respectable he is. I realise now that he's a person I need to go through his entire video archive as he has an ability to articulate that is the essence of calm, thoughtful and lucid analysis. Kevin O'Leary broke CBC rules of conduct with his insult but it's a little late for him to recover any credibility he aspired to for being anything other than the odious money grubber he is.

Tuesday 16 November 2010

Chris Hedges - Death Of The Liberal Class



Chris Hedges connects more powerful political punches then I've come across from any other American commentator. Liberal limpness, the power of permanent war, propaganda to Madison avenue, evils of objectivity, Foxes pursuit of emotional consistency against truth, hedonism of power, complicity in one's enslavement, distinction between revolution and rebellion, price of virtue, hope, intellectual ghettos, the rise of fascism and the new deal in the 1930's, moral nihilism, digital tribalism and more. 

His last words in this 20 minute interview in response to the tough nature of this interview: "Why not go down swinging? What's the point of letting them wipe their feet all over our faces?".

Shoulder to shoulder Chris.