The Pathology of the Rich - Chris Hedges on Reality Asserts Itself (1/2)

welcome to the real news network I'm Paul Jay in Baltimore and welcome to the

reality

that is stated a few weeks ago we did a series of interviews with Chris Hedges and one of the things we talked about was the weakness of the left, the weakness of the popular movement, so to speak, we'll continue that discussion now and Chris joins us again in the studio. “Chris, as everyone probably already knows, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and a senior fellow at the National Institute along with Joe Sacco,” he wrote. The New York Times bestseller, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, and he writes a weekly column for TruthDig.

Thanks for joining us. Thank you. Last time we talked a lot about something that you had said in 2008 and that you wrote more recently about one of the most serious weaknesses of the left was not creating a viable vision of what an alternative politics and economics look like a viable vision of a socialism, but you have written more recently about some other weaknesses that you could say about the popular movement and here is one and me. I'll read, read this again, an article you wrote called "Let's Start This Class War," which I guess is a play on pink songs, "Let's Start This Party." The quote is the inability to understand the

pathology

of our oligarchic rulers.

It is one of our most serious faults, what are you talking about because we do not understand the

pathology

of the

rich

, we have been saturated with cultural images and a kind of cultural deification of wealth and those who have wealth are being, you know, presented as people of immense wealth. . wealth as somehow the leaders are equal to the Oracle and we do not internally understand what an oligarchic class is ultimately about or how venal and morally bankrupt they are, we need to recover the language of class struggle to understand what is happening to us and we need shatter this self-deception that somehow if, as Obama says, we work and study hard enough we can be one of them, the fact is that the people who created the economic disaster we are in were the best educated people in the country.

Larry Summers former president of Harvard and others, the problem is not education, the problem is greed and unfortunately I had the experience of being sent to a private boarding school at the age of 10 as a scholarship student and lived as one of sixteen children scholarships and I lived among the super

rich

and watched them and I think a lot of my hatred of authority and my disgust for the ruling elite comes from having been among them for so long, yeah people don't understand elite schools even In secondary school. level that they receive, children receive an excellent education, but if they learn the entire culture of hundreds or thousands of years about how to govern correctly and it's a deep and rich understanding of it, not only that, but you know, and George Bush is a perfect example of that, not so much an example of the deep rich, I don't get it, but how do you know affirmative action for the rich and I certainly come from my mother's side of the family, you know, from the lower working class when The people of one of my uncles lived there. in a trailer in Maine and certainly people without means and I was trying to raise the world I was in with that world and it was very clear that it was not about intelligence or aptitude, the fact is that if you are poor you only get one chance, if You're rich like Bush, you have opportunity after opportunity after opportunity, so you're a C student at Andover and you go to Yale and you go to Harvard Business School and you're away from your National Guard unit and you're addicted to coke, it doesn't really matter, you don't even have a job until you're 40 and you become president of the United States, so that was what was particularly insidious about how those little elite oligarchic circles perpetuated themselves. and promoted mediocrity because many of these people like bush are very mediocre human beings at the expense of the rest of us and how with money they win the system and of course now we live in an oligarchic state where we have become completely powerless and they are the judicial branch the legislative branch the executive branch is subordinated to an oligarchic corporate elite and the press is owned by an oligarchic corporate elite who make sure that any criticism of them is never broadcast over the airwaves it's not something like inherent evil or anything but If you were raised super rich or very rich in a culture in a school in an environment where everyone is there to serve you, you have the right to be served, yeah, it's very unpleasant to see because you know I would go to my friends' houses and Let's watch and remember your 11- to 12-year-old children giving orders to adults, your servants, your nannies, and me, and we begin that article by talking about Fitzgerald, who came from the Midwest to Princeton and went through many of the experiences I went through. through and that apocryphal exchange that didn't take place, but it does represent the difference between Hemingway and Fitzgerald where Fitzgerald at one point had written what's the story that he said the rich aren't like you and me and Hemingway is supposed to be equip, yes, they have more money, well, Hemingway, as in many things, was wrong, other rich people are different because when you have so much money, human beings become disposable, even friends and family become disposable and are replaced, and when the rich take absolute power, then the citizens become disposable, which is an essence, what happened there, there is a very cruel indifference, I mean these people, and look, Mills wrote about this and empowers the elite, they are completely isolated, I mean the only people they know who are members of the working class. or the people who work for them are gardeners or their drivers live in self-enclosed bubbles they have no real contact with

reality

, I mean they don't even fly on commercial airlines and yet now they have absolute power, that becomes very dangerous politically because they are so disconnected and able to retreat to their enclaves in the same way that you saw in France under Louis XVI people retreating to Versailles or at the end of the Chinese dynasty when everyone went to the forum or let in the losers. already UN and I think you know that, so they will extract more and more because they know they have no self-imposed limits without understanding the economic, political and social consequences of what they are doing, which is why we have a popular uprising through Occupy. movement where people go to public spaces to voice legitimate grievances student debt the next bubble that will lower trillions of dollars in debt that we now saw courtesy of our Congress debt rates will act, you know, interest rates will actually go up by a couple of years, I mean more than if they just took it out of a bank, it's crazy, and meanwhile the Federal Reserve is buying eighty-five billion dollars a month in junk bonds and giving money away at virtually zero percent interest. to Goldman Sachs, I mean, it's crazy not to address the mortgage and foreclosure crisis the failure to address chronic unemployment underemployment, meaning half the country now lives in poverty, including the working poor or on the brink of poverty. poverty, and what is the answer, the answer is to physically close the camps stop unemployment benefits cut food stamps clothes things Like getting a head start, it's crazy and that's what happens when you have an elite that is as out of touch as ours elite, so they will push and push and push shortsightedly out of ignorance until something explodes and that's exactly where we are, it's interesting.

There are some children of some of the super rich and I think it had something to do with that, that they somehow woke up to the situation a little bit and don't want to repeat the pattern of their parents. of the madness of this, I don't know if they are children of the super rich, I think the occupation had many children of the middle class, I don't mean the majority of the occupation, but there just In fact, I know who some of these are people and it's interesting that they are children of very rich people and they have decided that there must be something more to life than repeating this living in this bubble, well, they may be out there, but I don't think there is a majority, they are very small , most of them are absorbed by that cult of self that the super rich managed to perpetuate to a pretty nauseating level, we were talking off camera right before we started.

If we both knew that Gore Vidal and Vidal used to talk about the total immorality of the super rich, he would know, yes, well, he would know for many reasons, in terms of his own life, but also in terms of he knew a lot of these . People did too, and I think that's exactly what I'm talking about. I mean, you know, I wrote in that column about, you know, being at this boarding school and seeing these parents pull up in their limousines, parents who had very little contact with their children with their personal photographers and these were rich and famous men and that photo of them playing with their son, which was total fiction, would be spread through the press, yes, a morality, hedonism, selfishness, insensitivity and part of it is the total willingness to accept, for example, that the families of the Ordinary people should send their children to war to defend the American way of life, which essentially means their way of life, they can die for these things, it's almost a kind of racism, I mean, when you enslave the British and the Irish, you don't have to be black and colored to be considered less than human and that seems to be what the super rich think of most other people, well no and it's not just the working class that means the kind of disdain for the working class and also the middle class means in some way the way they would talk about the middle class and you know, in essence, leaving the middle class was something that caught my attention, yes, they live, they inhabit another world and they have very sophisticated public relations mechanisms and well-publicized acts of philanthropy to hide their private faces, but how they act when the doors close and how they act in public is very different and to have it all was like Fitzgerald, you know, having been behind those doors closed and seeing the decline of the ruling elite certainly marked me for the rest of my life and defined for me from a very early age who my enemies were.

You quote in your article Colonel Marks writing the dominant ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relations Marx wrote dominant material relations understood as ideas, why did that resonate with you? Because the whole notion of free markets establishes a fair capitalism. Globalization is a very weak justification for absolute greed on the part of a small oligarchic elite and they have made I am sure that that ideology is taught in universities across the country and that people, especially economists, who deviate so much from that ideology have been pushed aside and have become pariahs, and yet the driving spirit of that ideology is actually to justify the hoarding of immense amounts of wealth by a very A small percentage of you know the class dominant high, that's what it means, the whole lie of globalization perpetuated by people who popularize it like Tom Friedman has already been exposed.

I mean the idea that it will elevate us all and create middle classes. class and, you know, well-paid working class families in the third world, I'm all for what's been laid out and I think part of your point is that it's not just some innate ideas that everyone is essentially greedy, this people just happen to be rich and not as lucky or as smart as them is that it comes from what he calls Tyrael's kanima conditions about how things are owned, who has the power as a result of the concentration of ownership, how things are distributed.

It's not that everything you know doesn't have to be like that, it's a product of how society writes, so in that sense ideology serves the system, the intellectual class serves the system, those economists whose voices are heard and who obtain tenure serve To the system. and those who do not serve the system do not have jobs and that is what Marx and I were referring to and I think that is extremely true. I mean, we don't live in a free market society, we live in a society where corporations will loot the United States Treasury and the Federal Reserve and be bailed out by the taxpayers, and yet that kind of corporate socialism is ignored to corporations and yet you know it is and that is dangerous because there is a total disconnection from the language. which we use to describe our economic system and the reality of our economic system, which is essentially a system where corporations have become predators of government and taxpayer money and we are all going to pay for it because most of these things a through these bonds that What you're buying is junk, you know, it's things like foreclosed houses that on the books are worth $600,000 but in reality, because the power went out and the basements flooded, you would have to spend money to raise it and build anything. of any kind of value and that is going to blow up in our faces and this idea that you are expressing that the majority of paid professional intellectuals, professors,writers and experts, the idea that the free market is the fundamental assumption and starting point.

The point of suggesting that anything else could work is sacrilege and then some people say that's because America has always been that way. The United States is a center-right country, but it's not true, and you know, before World War II in 1930 and right after the world. In World War II there was a huge public debate about what kind of economy, what kind of politics, and there was a real campaign wage to get rid of public intellectuals, get rid of union activists, get rid of actors and directors, anyone who wanted to. have this audience. speech was persecuted out of office i write deathliberal classes really that story of how all these people were silenced, pushed to the margins, stripped of jobs, even as high school teachers and we, Ellen Trekker, the historian has done a good job on this quickly so people know what we're talking about.

We're talking about the home of an American right, about McCarthyism, and about a real campaign to try to move anyone with a kind of progressive socialist idea. I'll write anything and they were effective, I mean, in a much more effective way than in Europe. I mean that in Europe there will still be a residue: they have robbed us of a language through which we can express the reality of what we are going through and that is because they know our radical populist dissident movements, those that offered a critique of power. the elite have been banished or silenced now you write something here that you know if you wouldn't be allowed to say it in the mainstream news anywhere you write class struggle defines most of human history Marx understood this the sooner we realize we are locked in a deadly war with our ruling corporate elite, the sooner we will realize that these elites must be overthrown.

There is a massive campaign to not even use the words class war. In fact, if you talk about class, people accuse you of being essentially un-American. I don't think you can understand the nature of capitalism if you don't understand the nature of class struggle. You know, if I were running a Wall Street firm, I would only hire Marxist economists because they understand that capitalism is about exploitation. Marx was right. and that goes back to the nature of the ruling elite. I mean, we are the most illusory society on the planet. The airwaves are flooded with lies.

You know, they know very skillfully how to humanize figures. I even refer to idiots like Donald Trump to mask what he is. They are actually doing it to the rest of us and I think we have to start piercing the very effective mirages that have been created and corporations of course spend billions of dollars to create these mirages to understand our reality. I mean, look at BP. You would think BP was Greenpeace given how many commercials they are running about how much they care about the Gulf when in reality they are turning the Gulf waters into a dead zone and poisoning the shrimp and everything else they are selling. eat and yet we have no mechanisms by which there is certainly within the mainstream which major network is going to make a serious documentary about BP, you are not going to confront those interests because at this point these interests you know own or control the information systems, as well as education systems, your article ends with the only route left, as Aristotle knew, is revolt, because the mechanisms of incremental and gradual reform do not work and you talked about the New Deal, the New Deal was the classic example of that kind of safety valve and, as Roosevelt said, I mean his greatest achievement was that he saved capitalism and, in the stupidity of the corporate oligarchic elite, they destroyed the liberal class, I mean, us.

They still have a self-identified liberal class, but they no longer do anything to defend the interests of those they claim to represent, whether it's the working class, the middle class, or anyone else, and by destroying that safety valve, destroying that liberal class, those mechanisms that made gradual, incremental reform possible, you can no longer adjust the system so that you can't ameliorate the suffering or grievances of the lower class, and now we're talking about half the country, that means that if you want to resist If you want to create change you cannot do it through traditional political parties you cannot do it through the courts you cannot do it through corporatized means you have to leave the system and create popular mechanisms mass movements that will begin to exert pressure in a way cruder about the centers of power, that is the only hope we have left, let's say that gradual reforms cannot be made, the elite can even pass regulations that serve their own interests in terms of controlling financial speculation, for example, a simple change in terms of the position limits of the future Commodity Trading Commission, that anyone who wants some kind of functioning capitalist system would want to have this so as not to have another financial collapse like 2008, they can't even approve it, but The people who run Wall Street don't give a damn, they know what's going to crash and what they're doing is stealing as fast as they can.

Walking out the door, there is a very deep feeling. they make money, they also make money after the collapse because the states are there to bail them out, but you know that this time it will be a little more difficult to steal state funds. I mean, they'll certainly try to, but you know. The goal is so self-centered. I think the head of United Healthcare made a billion dollars and it's crazy last year. I think I'm right, but certainly hundreds of millions of dollars worth of people and it's about accumulating little monuments to themselves. empires for themselves, you know, I have relatives who work on Wall Street and their criticism is no different than mine, the difference is that they are just grabbing everything they can on the way out the door and I think that's always symptomatic of a a kind of dying civilization, yes, Marx was once asked to describe the psychology of a capitalist and it was what we talked about a little earlier, a flood of couples after me, the floods are coming, yes, I'll get what I can today and if society is toast then it's a shame and I think they know that everything will be a disaster and I think they think that they will retreat to their, you know, closed enclosures and survive, maybe they will survive longer than the rest of us, but in the end the climate. change alone will catch us, so it's up to us, let's not expect anything from the oligarchs, no and not only that they are creating systems in terms of exploitation not only of us but of the ecosystem that, if not controlled, will ensure extinction . of the human species, it may already be too late, of course, but you know that allowing the fossil fuel industry or these corporations to determine our relationship with the environment is a form of collective insanity at this point.

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