Image by David Shankbone via Flickr
with Chris Hedges
RT America on Jul 31, 2017
On this week’s episode of On Contact, Chris Hedges is joined in Washington D.C. by Russell Mokhiber, editor of Corporate Crime Reporter. They explore how corporations have used their money to take over the nonprofit organizations and regulatory agencies that once protected the citizen from predatory corporate practices. RT correspondent Anya Parampil looks at how the animal agriculture industry has silenced nonprofits.
from the archives:
Strengthening Corporate Power–New NAFTA Worse Than the TPP by Pete Dolack
Chris Hedges: We Need To Dismantle the Power of the Corporate Oligarchy
Ralph Nader: Corporate Crime, Corporate Violence, Corporate Welfare, and Corporate Regulations
Ralph Nader: The Road to Corporate Fascism (must-see)
Supreme Court Legalizes Influence Peddling: McDonnell v. United States by Rob Hager
Circus of Deceit–The Big Boys of The Fortune 500 by Wayne Burn
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Great interview, the cynical hypocrisy of greed, ignorance and insecurity is nauseating.
The cost of doing ‘neo-liberalized’ business, is the profitable business of monitoring itself. It’s a circular necessity, because the artificial scarcity model of competitive frenzy is similar to the hydrological cycle, whose epicycles and fluid dynamics are complex. Financial reservoirs are in certain respects almost like huge dams, with powerful sluice gates that can generate energy at will, to power urbanization but also drown entire cultures.
If a ship is your chosen metaphor, it’s pointless to steer the rudder without the means to navigate. Our world is blindly dependent on Byzantine exponential algorithms that funnel the most valued resources through a hyperactive, cumulative turbo-charged, unaccountable globalized market..
If you want to know the nitty-gritty reality you need to be either a lawyer, a corrupt politician, a geochemiical materials scientist, a precocious mathematician ~ or an accountant. Accountants are surely the most privileged personnel on Earth! I’d say their accidental mortality statistics must be (dis)proportionately low….as dead cooks tell no tales & the ‘books’ are (by definition) closed.
Accountability, consequently is a PR myth. A scam. Just as glamour is not beauty but the illusion of beauty, the USA is a totalitarian illusion; but with an omnipotent capacity & appetite for extreme violence.
As I see it, the only way we can achieve a resilient, ethical civilization is by guaranteeing through constitutionally reciprocal means, the independence of synergistic organs of open jurisprudence ~ internationally. Qualified assemblies that operate under a metaphysical mandate that is neither dogmatic nor preferential; but obeys universal principles & protocols of due diligence…rules that can generate empirical, falsifiable, adaptive and ecological hypotheses of emergent proportionality ~ fit for purpose.
Hedges rarely attacks capitalism itself. Instead he usually rails against “unfettered capitalism,” as though some “fettered” kind were possible. But as long as our society is based on private property, there will be an incentive for people to commit the kinds of crimes Hedges discusses in this video.
I like the recent article “What Socialism Means,” by Fredik deBoer. The subtitle of the article is, “It’s not about regulating profit, but doing away with it entirely.” That’s because even if you could somehow make the regulations effective, they wouldn’t stay that way (my words, not deBoer’s). The only way to avoid rule by the wealthy class is to not have a wealthy class, and that requires a different economic system, and that requires we get more people talking about it — not just talking about better regulations on the present system.
Here’s the link to the article:
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/07/what-socialism-means
Thanks for suggesting it.
Hedges says he is a Socialist but not a Communist/Marxist. He sounds more like a Democratic Socialist.
The problem is that economics is/are detached from context, and that context in ‘real world’ terms is determined by ‘our’ planetary boundaries.
Those boundaries are ecologically regulated, shaped by time and biospherical forces like geology, not political ambition. They are framed through (metaphysical) indigenous experience and understood pragmatically by the methods of science.
It is taking a very long time for power to concede to intelligence, but that eventuality is inevitable if power is to have any enduring meaning or relevance.
Wielding a huge sword may be impressive in an ostentatious (even theatrical) display that is in the open, in conditions that are unconstrained; but try it in a limited space….not so clever.
David, when you say “the problem is that …” you make it sound as though overlooking ecological considerations is the only problem with capitalism. That is not so. It is not even the only extinction-level problem with capitalism — the risk of nuclear war is very real, and it too can be traced to the people who are only concerned with short term profits. Plus there are other problems, smaller than extinction level, all motivated by the pursuit of private gain, such as poverty, smaller wars, and all the corporate crimes discussed in the Hedges video.
The irony is that having more money won’t make the plutocrats happier.
Thanks for responding….fair enough, but I’d include (potential) nuclear war as a severe breach of planetary boundaries. Of course you’re right, but it isn’t just a matter of the ‘bigger’ picture; I envisage scale in reciprocal fractal terms, so yes totally agree about the local.
However its hard to escape or deny the degree of interconnectivity and mutual dependence that have arisen from globalization. Somehow we must find ways of working independently for maximum collective, & creative benefit.
I can’t see any way around this except through reordering reality, ie redefining our perceptual logic through active engagement & ‘enlightened ‘ingenuity’ ~ whatever that may mean in practical, coherent social & symbolic terms.
We all need to play our part, unrestricted, unintimidated and unencumbered by structural redundancies & (superannuated) obsolescence. I’m quite keen on the idea of a guaranteed income for all, but it still relies upon replicable institutional integrity & healthy inter-active biodiversity to make it work.
The White House seems to be imploding, displaying a repulsively contorted act of autosarcophagy; something (elsewhere?) is needed to pick up the vulgar slackness, fill the moral void….the mental health of the US certainly does not ‘look great.’
I agree that we need to “reorder reality” through a big change in our perception. My own belief is that private property was a wrong turn we took 10,000 years ago. I don’t think we can or should return to being hunter-gatherers, but we must relearn how to share. We can no longer afford separate property and separate lives. We have only one atmosphere, one ocean, one planet, one human species, and it’s all connecteded to that. It’s hard for any of us to imagine a world of sharing, but I now find it impossible to imagine our continued survival separately.