Chris Hedges: How Do You Take Your Poison?

[marmar]

from truthdig:


How Do You Take Your Poison?

Posted on Sep 24, 2012
By Chris Hedges


We will all swallow our cup of corporate poison. We can take it from nurse Romney, who will tell us not to whine and play the victim, or we can take it from nurse Obama, who will assure us that this hurts him even more than it hurts us, but one way or another the corporate hemlock will be shoved down our throats. The choice before us is how it will be administered. Corporate power, no matter who is running the ward after January 2013, is poised to carry out U.S. history’s most savage assault against the poor and the working class, not to mention the Earth’s ecosystem. And no one in power, no matter what the bedside manner, has any intention or ability to stop it.

If you insist on participating in the cash-drenched charade of a two-party democratic election at least be clear about what you are doing. You are, by playing your assigned role as the Democratic or Republican voter in this political theater, giving legitimacy to a corporate agenda that means your own impoverishment and disempowerment. All the things that stand between us and utter destitution—Medicaid, food stamps, Pell grants, Head Start, Social Security, public education, federal grants-in-aid to America’s states and cities, the Women, Infants, and Children nutrition program (WIC), Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and home-delivered meals for seniors—are about to be shredded by the corporate state. Our corporate oligarchs are harvesting the nation, grabbing as much as they can, as fast as they can, in the inevitable descent.

We will be assaulted this January when automatic spending reductions, referred to as “the fiscal cliff,” begin to dismantle and defund some of our most important government programs. Mitt Romney will not stop it. Barack Obama will not stop it.

And while Romney has been, courtesy of the magazine Mother Jones, exposed as a shallow hypocrite, Obama is in a class by himself. There is hardly a campaign promise from 2008 that Obama has not broken. This list includes his pledges to support the public option in health care, close Guantanamo, raise the minimum wage, regulate Wall Street, support labor unions in their struggles with employers, reform the Patriot Act, negotiate an equitable peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians, curb our imperial expansion in the Middle East, stop torture, protect reproductive rights, carry out a comprehensive immigration reform, cut the deficit by half, create 5 million new energy jobs and halt home foreclosures. Obama, campaigning in South Carolina in 2007, said that as president he would fight for the right of collective bargaining. “I’d put on a comfortable pair of shoes myself, I’ll … walk on that picket line with you as president of the United States of America,” he said. But when he got his chance to put on those “comfortable pair of shoes” during labor disputes in Madison, Wis., and Chicago he turned his back on working men and women. ................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/how_do_you_take_your_poison_20120924/

[xchrom]

1. du rec. Nt

[GreenPartyVoter]

2. He's right. The gov't has become just one more tentacle on these strangulating corporations.

[bread_and_roses]

3. K & R - also see Hedges vs Dinesh D’Souza

in long interview over at Alternet

http://www.alternet.org/chris-hedges-tells-dinesh-dsouza-his-obama-film-void-facts-reality-intellectual-depth

Uprising Radio [1] / By Sonali Kolhatkar [2]
comments_image
Chris Hedges Tells Dinesh D’Souza That His Obama Film Is 'Void of Facts, Reality, Intellectual Depth'
September 23, 2012 |

Timed for release in the thick of the 2012 presidential campaign season, a new film called "2016: Obama’s America" has hit 2,000 theater screens nationwide and earned an estimated $30 million at the box office. The film is based on a book by conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza titled The Roots of Obama’s Rage, and produced by Gerald R. Molen. Since it first screened at a theater in Houston in July, the low-budget documentary was heavily promoted by Houston-based conservative talk show host Michael Berry, after which it spread by word of mouth and opened in even more theaters locally and then nationally. "2016: Obama’s America" has been endorsed by Glenn Beck and Rupert Murdoch, while Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Gleiberman has called the film “an outrageously unsubstantiated act of character assassination,” which espouses “the standard right-wing argument that Obama has always been out to hide what a radical he is." President Obama’s reelection campaign has called the film “nothing more than an insidious attempt to dishonestly smear the President by giving intellectual cover to the worst in subterranean conspiracy theories and false, partisan attacks.”

Sonali Kolhatkar: Chris, I want to start with you to get your impressions first of this film. You had the chance to watch the documentary, and then, I’d love to get Dinesh to respond to you. What did you think overall of this film, 2016: Obama’s America?

Chris Hedges: Well, Dinesh is a better propagandist than he is psychoanalyst. It is vile in terms of its underlying racism, its pandering to stereotypes, its demonization of Obama—and I’m no fan of Obama. But the film is in essence a sort of elongated attempt that we saw during the Kerry campaign at swiftboating a politician by using half-truths, innuendos and lies to turn him into a monster. And Obama is a politician. He had some of the roots and connections that Dinesh points out. But he shed them as fast as he could, as he rose within the political machine in Chicago, jettisoning not only whatever principles, in my mind, he had. And I was a good friend of Edward Said, all the way back to Jim Friedman, the president of Dartmouth. When Dinesh was at the Dartmouth Review, he characterized him, or dressed him up as a Nazi—Jim was Jewish—and put him on the cover. He threw Jeremiah Wright away, I mean, that’s in the film, and that’s correct, and they did try and, the Democratic party, buy Wright’s silence. And the tragedy of Obama, and it is a tragedy, is that he, in the service of his ambition, was very quick to toss off any principled position that he had until, of course, he became a servant of the corporate state. Which is the real tragedy of Obama.

[banned from Kos]

4. STFU, Chris Hedges - with your "both parties are the same"

bulshit.

They most certainly are not.

[Odin2005]

5. Why are you posting this false equivalency shit during election season?

[marmar]

6. Why are you trying to play thread parent?

I post Chris Hedges' truthdig column every monday -- always have, always will. You're free not to read it, n'est-ce pas? It will save you the trouble of posting strident responses.

[JEB]

8. Ignore the voice of your conscience

at your peril. And Chris Hedges is the conscience of the left.