Chris Hedges at Flood Wall Street: "Capitalism Exploits Humans"

Is global warming a defect of free market capitalism?

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Chris Hedges at Flood Wall Street: "Capitalism Exploits Humans"

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"It's corporate capitalism that has commodified human beings and commodified the ecosystem that [it] then exploits to exhaustion or collapse," Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Chris Hedges told Kmele Foster (who was reporting for Reason TV) at yesterday's Flood Wall Street protest. That tipped off a fiery exchange between the two journalists over the merits of free market capitalism that touched on Reconstruction, Aristotle, factories in Bangladesh, agribusiness, grocery shopping in New York City, and much much more. It's worth watching the full 12-minute exchange!

Shot and edited by Jim Epstein.

About 12 minutes.

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Comments

[Tony G]

I couldn't watch the whole thing.

[Kure'i]

What an arrogant fuck. He's too important to get arrested on Monday night.

I thought Kmele did good job here. He raised many valid counter points, despite being repeatedly cut off by this creep.

"Go visit Camden, New Jersey." Yep, and see well-fed (to the point of obesity) people, cell phones, flat screens, and cable in most homes. Just like in every other terrible city. Just like the housing project where I worked for years. Talk about a belief system divorced from reality...

[ntart]

What are you talking about? It's the end of the world because there's a large number of people who fit the government's definition of poverty. That means we're poorer than we used to be and it doesn't matter how much or often the standards of poverty have changed

[David_B]

Poor deluded fools.

If they really wanted to make a difference, they'd be flooding the Federal Reserve or flooding the Whitehouse, but making real change isn't their objective. Their real objective is attempting to create a Marxist Utopia.

Good luck with that, it's been tried before.

[cameronorr]

Hedges' responses were admittedly a bit tangental.

The questions I would pose to the interviewer are: 1) If the state and markets are ideally separate entities, then who is protecting private property? 2) Who is regulating the currencies that are facilitating economic exchanges? and on a related note 3) if private property is the foundation of freedom and democracy, then how is it that private property is necessarily defined by who is restricted from its access and control?

Also, with regard to the Federal Reserve, I don't understand how people go on about how the FED and/or going off the gold standard is responsible for corruption and "crony capitalism" when the corrupting influence of money and oligarchic tendencies are not a phenomena unique to the U.S. or the 20th and 21st centuries, and the gilded age occurred in the U.S. way before FDR was elected. Clearly, there is something else at work besides some conspiracy specifically related to the Federal Reserve.

[ntart]

Let me rephrase your questions.

1.) If there isn't an organization with the legitimized authority to seize private property by force, then who is protecting private property?

2.) If there isn't an organization with the legitimized authority to print money on it's whim and force everyone else through force to use that perpetually devalued currency, who will create a stable currency for us to use?

3.) If not being raped is the highest moral standard, why does it deprive other people of sex?

[Nite2332]

This guy is so indicative of the system we live it. What's worse he's indoctrinating people in prison to follow his Marxist bullshit. It's just scatter shooting, blaming every problem that exists on some phantom boogieman. I couldn't finish the video I was so disgusted.