Chris Hedges: They seek to exploit life for short-term profit

Chris Hedges (Photo credit: Dandelion Salad)

with Chris Hedges
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
April 5, 2012

MICAmultimedia on Apr 4, 2012

Hedges writes a weekly column for Truthdig and has been very involved in the Occupy Wall Street Movement and was arrested with others in New York this past November as part of a demonstration.

Police State Much? by Cindy Sheehan

by Cindy Sheehan
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox Blog
Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox
June 9, 2011

Image by sakuraknight2000 via Flickr

“Totalitarianism is patriotism institutionalized.”

– Steve Allen

“Patriotic” Americans are still berating me for “demeaning” my son’s “sacrifice.” A typical message goes something like this:

Recognizing the Language of Tyranny by Chris Hedges

by Chris Hedges
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Truthdig
February 7, 2011

Empires communicate in two languages. One language is expressed in imperatives. It is the language of command and force. This militarized language disdains human life and celebrates hypermasculinity. It demands. It makes no attempt to justify the flagrant theft of natural resources and wealth or the use of indiscriminate violence. When families are gunned down at a checkpoint in Iraq they are referred to as having been “lit up.” So it goes. The other language of empire is softer. It employs the vocabulary of ideals and lofty goals and insists that the power of empire is noble and benevolent. The language of beneficence is used to speak to those outside the centers of death and pillage, those who have not yet been totally broken, those who still must be seduced to hand over power to predators. The road traveled to total disempowerment, however, ends at the same place. It is the language used to get there that is different.

Chris Hedges and Derrick Jensen on Totalitarianism and Resistance

with Derrick Jensen and Chris Hedges
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Truthdig
Jul 12, 2010

What is it going to take for concerned and engaged citizens to finally feel as though some crucial threshold has been crossed—that our nation’s political system and the global corporate culture it both serves and feeds into will never represent them or serve their needs? Continuing along that line, what’s to be done once that realization has hit home, as it has for authors Chris Hedges and Derrick Jensen? Both Hedges and Jensen offer their ideas in this July 5 interview with Mount Royal University professor Michael Truscello.

The Transnational Homeland Security State and the Decline of Democracy by Andrew Gavin Marshall

by Andrew Gavin Marshall
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
April 15, 2010

When Empire Hits Home, Part 4

Part 1: War, Racism and the Empire of Poverty – When Empire Hits Home

Part 2: Western Civilization and the Economic Crisis: The Impoverishment of the Middle Class

Part 3: The Global Economic Crisis: Riots, Rebellion and Revolution by Andrew Gavin Marshall

As the western world is thrown into debt bondage and the harsh reality of the draconian economic ‘reforms’ to follow, a social collapse seems increasingly inevitable. We will soon witness the collapse of western ‘civilization’. The middle classes of the west will dissolve into the lower labour class. The wealthy class, already nearly at par with the middle class in terms of total consumption, will become the only consuming class.

The Zero Point of Systemic Collapse by Chris Hedges

by Chris Hedges
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Feb. 12, 2010

Crossposted from Adbusters Culturejammer Headquarters Feb. 8, 2010

Image by Dandelion Salad via Flickr

Aleksandr 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.” All resistance must recognize that the body politic and global capitalism are dead. We should stop wasting energy trying to reform or appeal to it. This does not mean the end of resistance, but it does mean very different forms of resistance. It means turning our energies toward building sustainable communities to weather the coming crisis, since we will be unable to survive and resist without a cooperative effort.

Chris Hedges: Democrats and Republicans watched over corporate rape of US

Image by Dandelion Salad via Flickr

with Chris Hedges
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad

RT Top Stories
09 February, 2010

American journalist and Pulitzer winner Chris Hedges told RT the United States has developed a new form of corporate totalitarianism.

“We have to break the back of the consumer economy,” Hedges said.

The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle by Gary Corseri

By Gary Corseri
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
August 27, 2009

Welcome to the Tipping Point! The End Times. The Bizarro Hall of Mirrors. The Funny Farm. The Monkey House.

order here

Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle
By Chris Hedges
Hardcover: 232 pages
Publisher: Nation Books (2009)
ISBN: 9781568584379

If you’re looking for one of those treacly Oprah books—The Secret, and its variants—avoid this one. Those books nourish like potato chips and leave most people more confused, more desperate, more thirsty for fantasies than before. No amount of wishing, earnest yearning, visualizing and New Age mysticism is going to get us out of the morass we’re in. In Empire of Illusion, Chris Hedges takes a sober look down our hall of distorting mirrors. The son of a minister, with a degree in theology from Harvard, a columnist for Truthdig.com, Hedges has worked as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. His books include War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning and American Fascists. He was part of the New York Times team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for the paper’s coverage of global terrorism. Here are some of the pertinent facts he contemplates:

• The top 1% of Americans now control more wealth than the bottom 90% combined.
• World-wide porn revenues, including in-room movies at hotels, sex clubs, and the Internet, topped $97 billion in 2006—more than that of Microsoft, Google, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo!, Apple, Netflixs, and EarthLink combined.

The Looming Collapse of the American Empire by Chris Hedges

by Chris Hedges
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
February 17, 2009

Image by Dandelion Salad via Flickr

Transcript of Chris Hedges’ presentation at the University of Missouri, Columbia, February 17, 2009.  University Lecture sponsored by College of Arts and Science, Peace Studies Program, and Center on Religion and the Professions.

The daily bleeding of thousands of jobs will soon turn our economic crisis into a political crisis. The street protests, strikes and riots that have rattled France, Turkey, Greece, Ukraine, Russia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria and Iceland will descend on us. It is only a matter of time. And not much time. When things start to go sour, when Barack Obama is exposed as a mortal waving a sword at a tidal wave, the United States could plunge into a long period of precarious social instability.