Excerpt from a Chris Hedges, journalist and writer, interview titled
America is a Tinderbox:
"... we have allowed ourselves to embrace an ideology which, at its core, states that all governance is about maximizing corporate profit at the expense of the citizenry. For what do we have structures of government, for what do we have institutions of state, if not to hold up all the citizenry, and especially the most vulnerable?
You know, if you go back and look at the 1980s in especially the Scandinavian countries, they eradicated poverty, virtually. I lived in Switzerland, I studied French in Switzerland, and there were no homeless. The mentally ill were taken care of. It has, arguably, one of the best health-care systems in the world. My oldest son was born in Lausanne. And that was--it's actually a privatized system, but it's heavily regulated. Everybody pays into it, but everybody has health insurance. Senior public school teachers earned about as much as doctors."
And with the wealth given to us as Americans, we could have eradicated poverty. We could have created a country that was much different than what we have created. And what's happening now is that we are being rapidly reconfigured into a kind of neo-feudal society, an oligarchic society where increasingly the bottom two-thirds of Americans are hanging on by their fingertips. You have a shrinking, diminishing middle class and an elite that is just making obscene amounts of money at our expense.
And you can't sustain--first of all, you can't sustain a democracy in an oligarchy. That's not a new idea. Thucydides wrote about that about ancient Athens. But secondly, because there are no self-imposed limits--and in this sense Karl Marx was right, that unfettered, unregulated capitalism, especially on a global scale, is a revolutionary force. They will push and push and push until there is a backlash.
And I think part of what we're seeing with the security and surveillance state is a preparation for that backlash--the destruction of civil liberties, which has been brutal, the wholesale surveillance and monitoring of, you know, virtually every American citizen, which I think many of us suspected and Edward Snowden, through his disclosures to Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian, made, you know, palpably real. The National Defense Authorization Act.
And I sued the president in the Southern District Court of New York, and I won. We're now--the Obama administration has appealed it. But this permits the military to seize, arrest American citizens, strip them of due process, and hold them in military detention centers, including our offshore penal colonies in places like Guantanamo or Bagram. And when Judge Katherine Forrest wrote her 112-page opinion, which I think is worth reading, she actually brings up the plight of the 110,000 Japanese Americans who were interned during World War II and stripped of due process and said that this provision in the NDAA essentially allows the state to criminalize an entire group of people and lock them away without any legal redress. And they know what's coming. The NSA has run all sorts of scenarios on economic collapse, and especially climate change. And they're preparing."
Full video with transcripts of "America is a Tinderbox":
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=10461
