Is there a short excerpt video of the main points that we can watch, and then watch the longer one if the short one grabs us? Or can you write a bit of an introductory essay to this?
I like most of what Hedges writes, but I’m so busy today I don’t have the time to watch this.
I watched about the first minute of it and did agree with many of his points yet then clicked out to write this comment about my solid and firm conviction that all of the sum total of this is deliberate, planned, engineered to be so decades in advance of our current misery. Chris here is merely echoing the symptoms of my dark conversations with the spirit guides.
The corporate managers and government officials trying to fix the economic meltdown are pouring money and resources into the financial sector because they are trained only to manage and sustain the established system, not change it.
[snip]“Bankrupt corporate capitalism is on its way to bankrupting the socialism that is trying to save it,” he added. “That is the end stage. If they no longer have socialism to save them, then we are into feudalism. We are into private police, gated communities, and serfs with a 21st-century nomenclature.”
The United States will not be able to raise another $3- or $4-trillion, especially with our commitments now totalling more than $12-trillion, to fix the mess.
It was not long ago that such profligate government spending was unthinkable. There was an $800-billion limit placed on the Federal Reserve. The economic stimulus and the bailouts will not bring back our casino capitalism. And as the meltdown shows no signs of abating, and the bailouts show no sign of working, the recklessness and desperation of our capitalist overlords have increased.
The cost to the working and middle class is becoming unsustainable. The Fed reported that households lost $5.1-trillion, or 9 per cent, of their wealth in the last three months of 2008, the most ever in a single quarter in the 57-year history of record-keeping by the central bank. For the full year, household wealth dropped $11.1-trillion, or about 18 per cent.
These figures did not record the decline of investments in the stock market, which has probably erased trillions more in the country’s collective net worth.
The bullet to our head, inevitable if we do not radically alter course, will be sudden. We have been borrowing at the rate of more than $2-billion a day over the last 10 years, and at some point it has to stop. The moment China, the oil-rich states, and other international investors stop buying U.S. Treasury Bonds, the dollar will become junk.
Inflation will rocket upward. We will become Weimar Germany. A furious and sustained backlash by a betrayed and angry populace, one unprepared intellectually and psychologically for collapse, will sweep aside the Democrats and most of the Republicans.
A cabal of proto-fascist misfits, from Christian demagogues to simpletons like Sarah Palin to loudmouth talk-show hosts, whom we naïvely dismiss as buffoons, will find a following with promises of revenge and moral renewal. The elites, the ones with their Harvard Business School degrees and expensive vocabularies, will retreat into their sheltered enclaves of privilege and comfort. We will be left bereft, abandoned outside the gates, and at the mercy of the security state.
The depraved international cabal that has a stranglehold on American political and financial power constitutes a new type of totalitarianism, pillaging the world through barbaric annihilation and creating a World Police State.
American and world citizens have not fully awakened to the monstrous, diabolical nature of this totalitarian regime; they assume it must have some modicum of concern for its people, its nation, and human decency. Wrong! Unless we arouse ourselves from this deadly self-imposed stupor of ignorance, these homicidal maniacs will destroy us and the world.
[snip]
Previously, imperialism had been the underlying policy of the cabal when it seized Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Cuba, Philippines, and the Mariana Islands and set up the German empires that led to World War I and World War II. But British and American imperialism involved a certain amount of concern for the possessed territory and the people, if no more than pride in having control over the holdings of the empire.
The new totalitarianism has absolutely no such concern; its only interest is imposing the diabolic policy of barabaric annihilation on the world, thereby reaping huge profits from its energy, financial, and “defense” industries and turning all countries into militarized police states whose peoples will be forced to become their “cannon fodder.”
“Although war is ‘used’ as an instrument of national and social policy, the fact that a society is organized for any degree of readiness for war supersedes its political and economic structure. War itself is the basic social system, within which other secondary modes of social organization conflict or conspire. It is the system which has governed most human societies of record, as it is today.” Leonard Lewin, Report From Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace, 1967
People throughout the world must become aware that this new totalitarianism is completely unlike any previous geopolitical power structure. Its very essence is annihilation; it possesses no redeeming or mitigating feature.
To allow yourself to think of these people as foolish, incompetent, irrational, or wrong-headed is as mistaken and misinformed as thinking that Hitler was merely a well-meaning but mistaken fearless leader of his people.
I think that the failure on the part of progs andliberals is that we forgot that the question is not “How do we get good people into power?” Thats the wrong question, as Carl Pauper(?) pointed out. The Question is “How do we limit the damage the powerful can do to us?” Most people who are attracted to power are at best mediocre and like GWB often venal. The true correctives of American democracy never achieved formal political power. The Liberty Party, that fought slavery, the Suffragettes who fought for women’s rights, the Labor Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, … by 1968 MLK was the most important “President” this country ever had. Because when he said he was goin to Selma, 50,000 people went with him. It is not our role to take power. It is our role to make the powerful frightened of us. And thats what we’ve forgotten. Give up that dream!
The United States (I mean Divided States) had its great
transformational/reconstructional opportunity after the Civil War. It fell flat on its face, and the corporate state was born. The South fled to Jim Crow and the North to the great Trusts and Bankers. A million kids dead for absolutely nothing. They didn’t even have a clue what they were fighting for, but they were there for the taking as they always are.
being had in the mainstream, and the mockery of the Tea Party, is Chris’s suggestion that this same mockery occurred in Bosnia of Milosevic and others. And that was shortly before they rose to power. Chris warns us not to make the same mistake and not to allow the Tea Party, a Banker’s best friend, to continue without providing alternatives. And that means we do not get to neglect our responsibility to promote and organize around our ideals and policies that could give voice to coming outrage over the depression the poor is experiencing and which the middle class is getting a taste of in the form of home foreclosures and credit problems.
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that tag has me not wanting to push play.
Is there a short excerpt video of the main points that we can watch, and then watch the longer one if the short one grabs us? Or can you write a bit of an introductory essay to this?
I like most of what Hedges writes, but I’m so busy today I don’t have the time to watch this.
I did go look up Hedges bio, even thought I know the name… he’s quite impressive. and same age as me. Ack. Now THATS depressing. lol.
I watched about the first minute of it and did agree with many of his points yet then clicked out to write this comment about my solid and firm conviction that all of the sum total of this is deliberate, planned, engineered to be so decades in advance of our current misery. Chris here is merely echoing the symptoms of my dark conversations with the spirit guides.
considering telling BOTH of my kids not to reproduce.
I will watch the rest tomorrow after work for the uplift.
Yep.
As Chris Hedges explained last August 2009 in “No Bailout Can Stop The Sinking“:
The New Totalitarianism. Rule Through Barbaric Annihilation
Norman Liverpool, July 23, 2006
yeesh.
right on.
The United States (I mean Divided States) had its great
transformational/reconstructional opportunity after the Civil War. It fell flat on its face, and the corporate state was born. The South fled to Jim Crow and the North to the great Trusts and Bankers. A million kids dead for absolutely nothing. They didn’t even have a clue what they were fighting for, but they were there for the taking as they always are.
being had in the mainstream, and the mockery of the Tea Party, is Chris’s suggestion that this same mockery occurred in Bosnia of Milosevic and others. And that was shortly before they rose to power. Chris warns us not to make the same mistake and not to allow the Tea Party, a Banker’s best friend, to continue without providing alternatives. And that means we do not get to neglect our responsibility to promote and organize around our ideals and policies that could give voice to coming outrage over the depression the poor is experiencing and which the middle class is getting a taste of in the form of home foreclosures and credit problems.