Chris Hedges: One angry man, still asking questions

Why did none of the Wall Street fat cats whose unchecked greed led to the banking collapse of 2008 ever go to prison?

Why hasn't a single official from the last two White House administrations been prosecuted for assassinating, rather than arresting, American citizens as Islamist combatants?

Why did the news media cheerfully adopt the euphemism "enhanced interrogation" when describing torture perpetrated by intelligence personnel?

These are some of the questions Chris Hedges has asked over the last dozen years in his columns for Truthdig.com and in such books as Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle and Death of the Liberal Class.

In his most vociferous attack yet on the political and civic culture of America, Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt, the author contends they are the sorts of issues that continue to anger Americans of all political leanings.

Hedges, 58, will discuss his book at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday at the Free Library of Philadelphia's Central Library. An expanded collection of eight previously published essays, the book argues that the U.S. electorate has been abandoned by a government that serves only the needs of the superrich and the corporations they run.

"At this point in history," Hedges said in a phone interview from his home in Princeton, "we have a system where money has replaced the vote, where unlimited corporate cash, in a ruling of the Supreme Court, is counted as the right to petition the government."

In that respect, Hedges said, there is no difference between Republicans and Democrats. Both have abandoned their responsibility to the people.

Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former New York Times foreign correspondent, said our system drowns out the voice of individual citizens in favor of corporate cash - a system, he writes in Wages of Rebellion, that eventually will inspire widespread discontent and possible rebellion from its citizenry.

He fills the book with examples of this kind of disenfranchisement.

"We stand on the cusp of one of the most nefarious moments of the universe as the ecosystem is being destroyed and we squander trillions on futile conflicts," he said.

"The response of the [corporate] owners and the elites, including [President] Obama, is to authorize drilling in the Arctic, where the ice is already melting."

Middle East wars do not serve the American people, he said. "People are frustrated by these never-ending imperial wars that are making a small group of arms manufacturers" and oil companies rich.

And Hedges said he's afraid the civil rights we have given up in the name of security will never be returned.

"No one wants wholesale surveillance," he said. "But in a calcified, dying regime, it doesn't matter what the citizenry wants."

Hedges said people who try to work for change within the political system are frustrated at every turn by corporate interests. He cited a recent case in Denton, Texas, where community action led the city to outlaw fracking.

"The community in Denton organized to oppose fracking because people there have suffered horrific health deterioration from [pollutants] in the air and water," he said.

In response, the Texas state Senate passed legislation outlawing Denton's right to outlaw fracking. The Senate's primary concern, Hedges argues, is to please energy companies, not its electorate.

"The Senate denied one of the basic tenets of democracy - a community's right to define its own fate."

He has contempt for the media, which he says have abandoned political coverage for gossip. On issues that matter, he said, they are "merely an echo chamber of the elite."

Hedges, who teaches at Princeton University, writes that in such an atmosphere, it's become useless to try to make change by working within the system, whether by petitioning representatives or by voting.

"Look at the 2008 bailouts of the banks. The constituents' calls [to Congress] were 100 to one against the bailouts. Yet they passed. There is a loss of faith across the board in the traditional mechanisms of power."

Wages of Rebellion also addresses growing wealth inequality and the increased rate of incarceration, especially as these issues affect African Americans. "The state," Hedges said, "continues to remain utterly tone deaf to the increasing suffering of the underclass."

He sees an almost apocalyptic future. Citing the ideas of thinkers from Aristotle to Karl Marx and Reinhold Niebuhr and the work of such rebels as Nelson Mandela and Julian Assange, he argues that it's time for Americans to take up active, nonviolent rebellion. He applauds the anti-fracking movement and the drive to raise the minimum wage to $15 as examples of grassroots civil disobedience that aim to create change from outside the system.

"We must build organizations of mass resistance," he said. The decision to act cannot be calculated by the possible success rate - there is a moral duty to rebel, he insists.

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Chris Hedges, "Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt"

7:30 p.m. Tuesday at the Free Library of Philadelphia's Central Library, 1901 Vine St.

Admission: Free.

Information: 215-567-4341 or www.freelibrary.org/authorevents

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