America Quotes

“The New Deal, as Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, saved capitalism. It was put in place because socialists were a strong and serious threat. The oligarchs understood that with the breakdown of capitalism—something I expect we will again witness in our lifetimes—there was a possibility of a socialist revolution. They did not want to lose their wealth and power. Roosevelt, writing to a friend in 1930, said there was “no question in my mind that it is time for the country to become fairly radical for at least one generation. History shows that where this occurs occasionally, nations are saved from revolution.”95 In other words, Roosevelt went to his fellow oligarchs and said, “Hand over some of your money or you will lose all your money in a revolution.” And they complied. That is how the government created fifteen million jobs, Social Security, unemployment benefits, and public works projects. The capitalists did not do this because the suffering of the masses moved them to pity. They did this because they were scared.”
― Chris Hedges, America: The Farewell Tour

“We live in a two-tiered legal system, one where poor people are harassed, arrested, and jailed for absurd infractions, such as selling loose cigarettes—which led to Eric Garner being choked to death by the New York City police in 2014—while crimes of appalling magnitude by the oligarchs and corporations, from oil spills to bank fraud in the hundreds of billions of dollars, which wiped out 40 percent of the world’s wealth,41 are dealt with through tepid administrative controls, symbolic fines, and civil enforcement that give these wealthy perpetrators immunity from criminal prosecution.”
― Chris Hedges, America: The Farewell Tour

“All of the movements that opened up the democratic space in America—the abolitionists, the suffragists, the labor movement, the communists, the socialists, the anarchists, and the civil rights movement—developed a critical mass and militancy that forced the centers of power to respond. The platitudes about justice, equality, and democracy are just that. Only when ruling elites become worried about survival do they react. Appealing to the better nature of the powerful is useless.”
― Chris Hedges, America: The Farewell Tour

“The radical left and the radical right, each made up of people who have been cast aside by the cruelty of corporate capitalism, have embraced holy war. Their marginalized lives, battered by economic misery, have been filled with meaning. They hold themselves up as the vanguard of the oppressed. They claim the right to use force to silence those defined as the enemy. They sanctify anger. They are consumed by the adrenaline-driven urge for confrontation. These groups are separated, as Sigmund Freud wrote of those who engage in fratricide, by the “narcissism of minor differences.”105”
― Chris Hedges, America: The Farewell Tour

“America was founded on an imagined moral superiority and purity. The fact that dominance of others came, and still comes, from unrestrained acts of violence is washed out of the national narrative. The steadfast failure to face the truth, Baldwin warned, perpetuates a kind of collective psychosis. Unable to face the truth, white Americans stunt and destroy their capacity for self-reflection and self-criticism. They construct a world of self-serving fantasy. Those who imbibe the myth of whiteness externalize evil—their own evil—onto their victims. Racism, Baldwin understood, is driven by an inner loneliness and latent guilt.”
― Chris Hedges, America: The Farewell Tour

“The U.S. government, subservient to corporate power, has become a burlesque. The last vestiges of the rule of law are evaporating. The kleptocrats openly pillage and loot. Programs instituted to protect the common good—public education, welfare, and environmental regulations—are being dismantled. The bloated military, sucking the marrow out of the nation, is unassailable. Poverty is a nightmare for half the population. Poor people of color are gunned down with impunity in the streets. Our prison system, the world’s largest, is filled with the destitute. There is no shortage of artists, intellectuals, and writers, from Martin Buber and George Orwell to James Baldwin, who warned us that this dystopian era was fast approaching. But in our Disneyfied world of intoxicating and endless images, cult of the self and willful illiteracy, we did not listen. We will pay for our negligence.”
― Chris Hedges, America: The Farewell Tour

“We cannot pick and choose whom among the oppressed it is convenient to support. We must stand with all the oppressed or none of the oppressed. This is a global fight for life against corporate tyranny. We will win only when we see the struggle of working people in Greece, Spain, and Egypt as our own struggle. This will mean a huge reordering of our world, one that turns away from the primacy of profit to full employment and unionized workplaces, inexpensive and modernized mass transit, especially in impoverished communities, universal single-payer health care and a banning of for-profit health care corporations. The minimum wage must be at least $15 an hour and a weekly income of $500 provided to the unemployed, the disabled, stay-at-home parents, the elderly, and those unable to work. Anti-union laws, like the Taft-Hartley Act, and trade agreements such as NAFTA, will be abolished. All Americans will be granted a pension in old age. A parent will receive two years of paid maternity leave, as well as shorter work weeks with no loss in pay and benefits. The Patriot Act and Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act, which permits the military to be used to crush domestic unrest, as well as government spying on citizens, will end. Mass incarceration will be dismantled. Global warming will become a national and global emergency. We will divert our energy and resources to saving the planet through public investment in renewable energy and end our reliance on fossil fuels. Public utilities, including the railroads, energy companies, the arms industry, and banks, will be nationalized. Government funding for the arts, education, and public broadcasting will create places where creativity, self-expression, and voices of dissent can be heard and seen. We will terminate our nuclear weapons programs and build a nuclear-free world. We will demilitarize our police, meaning that police will no longer carry weapons when they patrol our streets but instead, as in Great Britain, rely on specialized armed units that have to be authorized case by case to use lethal force. There will be training and rehabilitation programs for the poor and those in our prisons, along with the abolition of the death penalty. We will grant full citizenship to undocumented workers. There will be a moratorium on foreclosures and bank repossessions. Education will be free from day care to university. All student debt will be forgiven. Mental health care, especially for those now caged in our prisons, will be available. Our empire will be dismantled. Our soldiers and marines will come home.”
― Chris Hedges, America: The Farewell Tour

“The decision by the ruling elites in ancient Rome—dominated by a bloated military and a corrupt oligarchy, much like the United States—to strangle the vain and idiotic Emperor Commodus in his bath in the year 192 did not halt the growing chaos and precipitous decline of the Roman Empire. Commodus, like a number of late-Roman emperors, and like Trump, was incompetent and consumed by his own vanity. He commissioned innumerable statues of himself as Hercules and had little interest in governance. He used his position as head of state to make himself the star of his own ongoing public show. He fought victoriously as a gladiator in the arena in fixed bouts. Power for Commodus, as it is for Trump, was primarily about catering to his bottomless narcissism. He sold public offices to the ancient equivalents of Betsy DeVos and Steven Mnuchin. Commodus was replaced by the reformer Pertinax, the Bernie Sanders of his day, who attempted in vain to curb the power of the Praetorian Guards, the ancient version of the military-industrial complex. The Praetorian Guards assassinated Pertinax three months after he became emperor. The Guards then auctioned off his position to the highest bidder. The next emperor, Didius Julianus, lasted sixty-six days. There would be five emperors in AD 193, the year after the assassination of Commodus. Trump and our decaying empire have ominous historical precedents.”
― Chris Hedges, America: The Farewell Tour

“We are in the grip of what Kierkegaard called "sickness unto death" - the numbing of the soul by despair that leads to moral and physical debasement.”
― Chris Hedges, America: The Farewell Tour

“The idiots take over the final days of crumbling civilizations. Idiot generals wage endless, unwinnable wars that bankrupt the nation. Idiot economists call for reducing taxes for corporation and the rich and cutting social service programs for the poor. They project economic growth on the basis of myth. Idiot industrialists poison the water, the soil, and the air, slash jobs and depress wages. Idiot bankers gamble on self-created financial bubbles. Idiot journalists and public intellectuals pretend despotism is democracy. Idiot intelligence operatives orchestrate the overthrow of foreign governments to create lawless enclaves that give rise to enraged fanatics. Idiot professors, "experts", and "specialists" busy themselves with unintelligible jargon and arcane theory that buttresses the policies of rulers. Idiot entertainers and producers create lurid spectacles of sex, gore and fantasy. There is a familiar checklist for extinction. We are ticking off every item on it.”
― Chris Hedges, America: The Farewell Tour

“Prisoners are ideal employees. They do not receive benefits or pensions. They earn under a dollar an hour. Some are forced to work for free. They are not paid overtime. They are forbidden to organize and strike. They must show up on time. They are not paid for sick days or granted vacations. They cannot alter working conditions or complain about safety hazards. If they are disobedient, or attempt to protest their pitiful wages and working conditions, they lose their jobs and are often segregated in isolation cells. The roughly one million prisoners who work for corporations and government industries in the American prison system are a blueprint for what the corporate state expects us all to become. And corporations have no intention of permitting prison reforms to reduce the size of their bonded workforce. In fact, they are seeking to replicate these conditions throughout the society.”
― Chris Hedges, America: The Farewell Tour

“Our capitalist elites have used propaganda, money, and the marginalizing of their critics to erase the first three of philosopher John Locke’s elements of the perfect state: liberty, equality, and freedom. They exclusively empower the fourth, property. Liberty and freedom in the corporate state mean the liberty and freedom of corporations and the rich to exploit and pillage without government interference or regulatory oversight. And the single most important characteristic of government is its willingness to use force, at home and abroad, to protect the interests of the property classes. This abject surrender of the state to the rich is illustrated in the 2017 tax code and the dismantling of environmental regulations. This degradation of basic democratic ideals—evidenced when the Supreme Court refuses to curb wholesale government surveillance of the public or defines pouring unlimited dark money into political campaigns as a form of free speech and the right to petition the government—means the society defines itself by virtues that are dead.”
― Chris Hedges, America: The Farewell Tour

“Divisions among the oppressed, Hasan said, are gifts to the oppressor.”
― Chris Hedges, America: The Farewell Tour

“When a population becomes distracted by trivia,” wrote the cultural critic Neil Postman, “when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people becomes an audience and their public business a vaudeville, then a nation finds itself at risk: cultural-death is a clear possibility.”72 Con artists and swindlers exploit the frustrations and anger of a betrayed people. They make fantastic promises they never keep. They prey on the vulnerable. They demand godlike worship. They conjure up a world of illusions and fantasy. And then it implodes. The workers and patrons at the Trump Taj Mahal were victimized first. Now it is our turn.”
― Chris Hedges, America: The Farewell Tour

“Chomsky writes in “How (Not) to Challenge Racist Violence.” They may boycott certain products, refuse to eat certain foods, or they may show up to marches or rallies whose only purpose is to demonstrate the moral superiority of the participants. White people may loudly claim that they recognize their privilege or declare themselves allies of people of color or other marginalized groups. People may declare their communities “no place for hate.” Or they may show up at counter-marches to “stand up” to white nationalists or neo-Nazis. All of these types of “activism” emphasize self-improvement or self-expression rather than seeking concrete change in society or policy. They are deeply, and deliberately, apolitical in the sense that they do not seek to address issues of power, resources, decision making, or how to bring about change.108”
― Chris Hedges, America: The Farewell Tour

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exists. HANNAH ARENDT, The Origins of Totalitarianism”
― Chris Hedges, America: The Farewell Tour

“These believers, like all fascists, condemn the reality-based world as contaminated, decayed, and immoral. This world took their jobs. It destroyed their future. It ruined their communities. It doomed their children. It flooded their lives with alcohol, opioids, pornography, sexual abuse, jail sentences, domestic violence, deprivation, and despair. And then, from the depths of suicidal despair, they discovered that God has a plan for them. God will save them. God will intervene in their lives to promote and protect them. God has called them to carry out his holy mission in the world and to be rich, powerful, and happy. The rational, secular forces, those that speak in the language of fact and reason, are hated and feared, for they seek to pull believers back into “the culture of death” that nearly destroyed them. The magical belief system, as it was for impoverished German workers who flocked to the Nazi Party, is an emotional life raft. It is all that supports them. The only way to blunt this movement is to reintegrate these people into the economy, to give them economic stability through good wages and benefits, to restore their self-esteem.”
― Chris Hedges, America: The Farewell Tour

“In nearly all of the country’s nineteen thousand municipalities,117 declining or stagnant property tax revenues, along with mounting costs, have reached crisis proportions. The opioid crisis, the mass shootings, the rising rates of suicide, especially among middle-aged white males, the morbid obesity, the obsession with gambling, the investment of our emotional and intellectual life in tawdry spectacles, and the allure of magical thinking, from the absurd promises of the Christian right to the belief that reality is never an impediment to our desires, are the pathologies of a diseased culture. They have risen from a decayed world where opportunity, which confers status, self-esteem, and dignity, has dried up for most Americans. They are expressions of morbidity.”
― Chris Hedges, America: The Farewell Tour

“We have been stripped of due process and habeas corpus and run the largest prison system in the world. Police are militarized and authorized to kill unarmed citizens, especially poor people of color, with impunity. The 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, which once prohibited the military from acting as a domestic police force, was overturned with the passing of Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act. Section 1021 permits the state to carry out “extraordinary rendition”95 on the streets of American cities and hold citizens indefinitely in military detention centers without due process—in essence disappearing them as in any totalitarian state. The executive branch of government can assassinate U.S. citizens.96 Corporate loyalists in the courts treat corporations as people and people as noisome impediments to corporate profit.”
― Chris Hedges, America: The Farewell Tour

“Capitalism would, in the end, Marx said, turn on the so-called free market, along with the values and traditions it claims to defend. It would in its final stages pillage the systems and structures that made capitalism possible. It would resort, as it causes widespread suffering, to harsher forms of repression to maintain social control. It would attempt, in a frantic last stand, to extract profit by looting and pillaging state institutions, contradicting its stated nature.”
― Chris Hedges, America: The Farewell Tour

“Those who resist refuse to kneel before the idols of mass culture and the power elites. They are not trying to get rich. They do not want to be part of the inner circle of the powerful. They accept that when you stand with the oppressed you are treated like the oppressed.”
― Chris Hedges, America: The Farewell Tour

“Prisons are prototypes for the future, an example of the disempowerment and exploitation corporations seek to inflict on all workers.”
― Chris Hedges, America: The Farewell Tour

“Power is a poison. It does not matter who wields it. The rebel, for this reason, is an eternal heretic. He or she will never fit into any system. The rebel stands with the powerless. There will always be powerless people. There will always be injustice. The rebel will always be an outsider.”
― Chris Hedges, America: The Farewell Tour

“Trump is the face of our collective idiocy.”
― Chris Hedges, America: The Farewell Tour

“The cri de coeur of this lost generation, orphans of global capitalism, rises up from deindustrialized cities across the nation. This generation has been cast aside by a society that views them as cogs, menial wage slaves who will do the drudgery that plagues the working poor in postindustrial America.”
― Chris Hedges, America: The Farewell Tour

“If you care about other people that’s now a very dangerous idea,” Noam Chomsky suggests. “If you care about other people you might try to organize or to undermine power and authority. That’s not going to happen if you care only about yourself. Maybe you can become rich, you don’t care whether other people’s kids can go to school or afford food to eat or things like that. In the United States that’s called libertarian for some wild reason. I mean it’s actually highly authoritarian but that doctrine is extremely important for power systems as a way of atomizing and undermining the public.”3”
― Chris Hedges, America: The Farewell Tour

“If you look back in the 1930s, Leon Trotsky said that fascism was the inability of the socialist parties to come forth with an alternative,” Hudson said. “If the socialist parties and media don’t come forth with an alternative to this neofeudalism, you’re going to have a rollback to feudalism. But instead of the military taking over the land, as occurred with the Norman Conquest, you take over the land financially. Finance has become the new mode of warfare. “You can achieve the takeover of land and the takeover of companies by corporate raids,” he said. “The Wall Street vocabulary is one of conquest and wiping out. You’re having a replay in the financial sphere of what feudalism was in the military sphere.” The debauched ethics of all casino magnates, including Trump, define the dark, petulant heart of America. Our schools and libraries lack funding, our infrastructure is a wreck, drug addiction and suicide are an epidemic, and we flee toward the promise of magic, unchecked hedonism, and perpetual stimulation. There is a pathological need in America to escape the dreary and the depressing.”
― Chris Hedges, America: The Farewell Tour

“Johnston wrote how by 1990, “Trump’s inability to pay his debts had put him at risk of losing his casinos.”64 The rules of the New Jersey Casino Control Commission required casino owners to have enough liquidity to pay their bills or see their ownership license revoked. Trump would either get a government rescue package or declare bankruptcy. Casino regulators, Johnston wrote, documented that Trump was down to his last $1.6 million.65 He had obligations to make payments on more than $1 billion worth of bonds every ninety days on his three casinos in Atlantic City. Johnston wrote: Trump’s obvious difficulty complying with the financial stability requirements of the Casino Control Act raised a glaring question: Had regulators been monitoring Trump’s finances since he got his casino license in 1982? The answer was no. The regulators had been too busy with work they deemed more important. There was, for example, the predawn arrest of a cocktail waitress named Diane Pussehl, who was pulled from bed and charged with a felony for picking up a $500 chip on the floor of Harrah’s casino. A judge tossed the case out, so the casino regulators filed a misdemeanor charge. It also was tossed. Then they went after Pussehl’s license, arguing she was morally unfit to work in a casino. Pussehl kept her license.66”
― Chris Hedges, America: The Farewell Tour

“Slot machines cater, like the games on computers and phones, to the longing to flee from the oppressive world of dead-end jobs, crippling debt, social stagnation, and a dysfunctional political system. They shape our behavior with constant bursts of stimulation. We become rats in a Skinner box. We frantically pull levers until we are addicted and, finally entranced, by our adrenaline-driven compulsion to achieve fleeting and intermittent rewards. Behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner found that when pigeons and rats did not know when or how much they would be rewarded, they pressed levers or pedals compulsively. Skinner used slot machines as a metaphor for his experiment.27”
― Chris Hedges, America: The Farewell Tour

“There is no moral equivalency between antifa and the alt-right. But by brawling in the streets, antifa allows the corporate state, which is terrified of a popular anticapitalist uprising, to use the false argument of moral equivalency to criminalize the work of all dissidents.”
― Chris Hedges, America: The Farewell Tour