Chris Hedges gave an insightful portrayal of today’s America.
17 April 2025, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)
“Chris Hedges: Corporatists vs Oligarchs”
Here’s the transcript of that 2:23-long excerpt from this 36:25-long interview
5:04
INTERVIEWER: Is American democracy, uh, under threat? HEDGES: under threat? — Does it exist,
5:10
Mark? I don't think it exists, it's a veneer, it's it's the end of the Roman Empire, you have the symbols the
5:17
iconography and the language of a democracy, but internally corporations and oligarchs have seized all the levers
5:23
of power. I looked at this election as a battle between corporatists and oligarchs — corporatists the Democrats
5:31
they want something very different from oligarchs, corporatists want stability they want decorum the kind of decorum
5:37
that Obama had or bush had or as Bush was an idiot but at least he had some
5:42
you know they could clean him up a little bit, uh, and Biden you know whatever his cognitive failings were uh
5:50
they they because they want stability, especially in terms of trade agreements, because they make investments overseas,
5:57
takes a while for a return on a profit. Corporatists want something different from oligarchs. Oligarchs are about chaos,
6:04
they're about as Steve Bannon said, deconstructing the administrative State. Why? Because it is a pure form of rentier
6:12
capitalism, and by that I mean that they make their money by setting up toll booths. Amazon, you know, all of these
6:18
digital media platforms. It's it's not about producing goods and uh the more
6:24
that the state is deconstructed that's why they want to abolish the Department of Education everything that we need
6:29
need as a civil society becomes privatized,, and you see it in uh I wrote
6:35
a book called America the Farewell Tour, begins in Scranton Pennsylvania where everything the sewer systems privatized
6:40
the parking authority is privatized the electricity is privatized and of course they've jacked up the rates uh and the
6:47
services are not very good and they want to privatize the post office uh so we can have a dysfunctional post office
6:53
like the UK which is privatized and so that's what oligarchs want and the oligarchs have won, they won, and uh but
7:01
that's what this battle was about in in terms of if we strip away, its
7:08
you know the the kind of trivia, or the uh cultural differences between the two
7:14
parties, that at its core was what it's about, and so we have, as you point out, I mean, we have now an oligarchic system
7:21
but as Aristotle wrote, once you create an oligarchic system with those kinds of
7:27
inequities, then you our only two choices are tyranny or revolution.
That 2:23-long excerpt is from this 36:25-long interview, which has lots of good stuff also in the other parts; but at 13:50-15:13 Hedges quotes from Chomsky (who misleads many progessives — those who are foolish enough to think Chomsky is one of them) and then Hedges goes promptly into — as Chomsky did — misrepresenting what FDR meant when FDR supposedly used the term “safety valve” (the New Deal supposedly, in Chomsky’s view, being a safety valve for the working class in order to prevent a second revolution in America, such as Chomsky said was FDR’s intention for the New Deal — to allow the billionaires to continue controlling the U.S. Government); and this phrase “safety valve” actually appeared only in one speech by FDR, and it was meaning the exact opposite of what Hedges alleges (Hedges says FDR had used the phrase “safety valve” in a letter, and that’s “not conjecture,” because “I’ve read his private letters to his brother,” who didn’t actually even exist — FDR had no brother, but only a half-brother (James Roosevelt), to whom FDR never addressed any of his thousands of letters, at least during the time-period of 1928-1945, two separate published volumes, 738 pages and 877 pages, which 17-year time-period I have just now searched through FDR’s personal letters in order to find whether Hedges was lying there — and the phrase “safety valve” didn’t appear even once, in that entire 1,615-page set. Hedges (Chomsky) was misrepresenting FDR to have meant the opposite of what was his clearly stated progressive intent in the only speech where FDR did use the phrase “safety valve”, perhaps so as to deceive the public to think that FDR was ‘really’ serving the billionaires against the public, instead of the public against the billionaires. Trust NO ONE! (I always need to find a primary source before I will quote anything from anybody, because I have found that around 30% of “quotations” are instead ‘quotations’. But this particular example coming from Hedges shocked me. He’s a fool for taking Chomsky seriously. And he’s a liar for alleging that FDR had a “brother” to whom FDR wrote saying that the New Deal was intended to serve the billionaires.)
Anyway, here is from the part of the complete 36:25-long interview in which Hedges lies about FDR, so that you can see it for yourself:
“Democracy doesn’t exist in the United States: Chris Hedges | UpFront”
31 January 2025
13:49
It's a safety valve it ameliorates the suffering enough to allow capitalism
13:56
to go forward, which is what FDR did. FDR was pressured into the New Deal reforms
14:01
by the left, and that's not conjecture because I've read his private letters to his brother where he says if we don't
14:08
push through these kinds of reforms including providing employment for 12 million Americans public works, all
14:13
this social security, 8 hour workday, all of that, was being pushed by sit down strikes radical
14:19
unions, and he said if we don't carry out these reforms we will get Revolution — those are his words, that was the fear
14:26
the Spectre of the 1917 Revolution [in Russia] loom large, even in the 1930s, over the Western
14:31
world, uh, and that liberal class has been destroyed, it was used, uh, to eviscerate
14:38
the left, the Cold War liberal, and eviscerate and destroy those liberals especially with McCarthyism in the 50s,
14:44
and Ellen Schrecker has written some very good books on this, um, and so uh that
14:51
creation of the foe I would call it the faux liberal, the Clintons are kind of classic figures like this, where on the
14:57
one hand they are the engine, the political engine behind corporate
15:02
oppression, and on the other hand they're they're holding up, you know their kind
15:07
of, you know, pronoun uses and all their woke garbage.
15:13
——
Fake ‘progressive’ journalists and historians misrepresent FDR to have been intending a post-WW2 world in which the U.S. would establish the world’s first all-inclusive global empire (like Truman actually did intend); they refuse to face the fact that Truman CREATED that “neoconservatism” by utterly reversing FDR’s foreign policies and crippling his U.N.
But the excerpt that is shown in the instagram was a pithy summary of the reality in today’s America — this country is a dictatorship by America’s billionaires. Hedges was entirely correct about that (though he subsequently got the history wrong about how it came to be this way).
The change from President FDR to President Truman was the biggest sea-change in U.S. history, and ‘historians’ deny that this is so, because they have been indoctrinated so as not to understand that it was. But without understanding that it was, understanding how today’s America came to be the way it is, is impossible.
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.