Stories by Chris Hedges

Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, is a senior fellow at the Nation Institute. He writes a regular column for TruthDig every Monday. His latest book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. subscribe to Chris Hedges's feed

Hedges: We Distract Ourselves With Petty Spectacles While the World Goes to Hell

Posted on: Sep 3, 2012, Source: Truthdig

In America, when reality is distasteful we ignore it.

Dave Eggers' Gem of a New Novel Goes Right After the Decadence and Heartlessness of Corporate Capitalism

Posted on: Aug 27, 2012, Source: Truthdig

"A Hologram for the King" explores the horrendous toll that ruthless capitalism takes on self-esteem, on family, on health, on community and finally on the nation itself.

A World of Hillbilly Heroin: The Hollowing Out of America, Up Close and Personal

Posted on: Aug 21, 2012, Source: TomDispatch

In a new book Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco explore the poorest pockets of the United States. In West Virginia they found communities ravaged by drugs.

How Thousands of Clandestine Operatives Are Fueling a Shadow War

Posted on: Aug 20, 2012, Source: Truthdig

There are now many thousands of clandestine operatives, nearly all of them armed and equipped with a license to kidnap, torture and kill, working overseas or domestically with little or no oversight and virtually no transparency.

How Hazing, Frats and Big-Time Athletics Are Ruining University Life and Real Scholarship

Posted on: Jul 30, 2012, Source: Truthdig

Four years of college has been turned into a mindless quest for collective euphoria and athletic dominance.

Chris Hedges: How Careerism Is a Big Part of Our Social Predicament

Posted on: Jul 26, 2012, Source: Truthdig

The greatest crimes of human history are made possible by people with the blandest occupations.

A Piece of American History That the Corporate Capitalists Want Us to Forget: Battle of Blair Mountain

Posted on: Jul 26, 2012, Source: Truthdig

A reminder that all the openings of our democracy were achieved with the toil, anguish and sometimes blood of radicals and popular fronts.

Bill Moyers and Chris Hedges: How Whole Regions of America Have Been Destroyed in the Name of Quarterly Profits

Posted on: Jul 21, 2012, Source: Bill Moyers

Hedges discusses his new book with Moyers and the totally unchecked corporate power that is destroying our democracy.

We Need Free Thinkers Or Society Will Shrivel Up and Die

Posted on: Jul 9, 2012, Source: Truthdig

Artists, writers, poets, activists, journalists, philosophers, dancers, musicians, actors, and renegades must be tolerated if a culture is to be pulled back from disaster.

Time to Get Crazy: What We Can Learn from Native American Resistance to Colonists' Greed

Posted on: Jul 8, 2012, Source: Truthdig

The ideologues of rapacious capitalism, like members of a primitive cult, chant the false mantra that natural resources and expansion are infinite.

Hedges: The Christian Right's Crusade Against Gays Is Far Scarier Than You Think

Posted on: May 29, 2012, Source: Truthdig

The money available to the Christian right is solidifying institutions -- from right-wing universities to media outlets -- that propagate a culture of hate.

Colonized by Corporations

Posted on: May 15, 2012, Source: Truthdig

A change of power requires a destruction of corporate domination and a new mechanism of governance to distribute wealth and foster the common good.

Hedges: How Our Demented Capitalist System Made America Insane

Posted on: May 14, 2012, Source: Truthdig

When civilizations start to die they go insane. Let the ice sheets in the Arctic melt. Let the temperatures rise. Let the air, soil and water be poisoned. Let the forests die.

The Globalization of Hollow Politics

Posted on: Apr 28, 2012, Source: Truthdig

The emptying of content in political discourse in an age as precarious and volatile as ours will have very dangerous consequences.

Black Bloc: The Cancer in Occupy

Posted on: Feb 6, 2012, Source: Truthdig

Black Bloc adherents detest those of us on the organized left and seek, quite consciously, to take away our tools of empowerment.

Chris Hedges: Why I'm Suing Barack Obama

Posted on: Jan 22, 2012, Source: Truthdig

With the latest National Defense Authorization Act, the military can indefinitely detain without trial any U.S. citizen deemed to be a terrorist or an accessory to terrorism.

Occupy Wall Street is a Movement Too Big to Fail

Posted on: Oct 17, 2011, Source: Truthdig

The movement spreading around the United States and the world is simply too big and too radical to be co-opted by political parties or establishment groups.

Why Corporate Elites Should Be Petrified of Occupy Wall Street

Posted on: Oct 10, 2011, Source: Truthdig

The occupation of Wall Street has formed an alternative community that defies the profit-driven hierarchical structures of corporate capitalism.

No Excuses -- Join the Occupy Wall St. Movement or Stand on the Wrong Side of History

Posted on: Sep 30, 2011, Source: Truthdig

Either you obstruct the plundering by the criminal class on Wall Street or become the passive enabler.

America to the World: We Want Everything -- If You Stand in the Way We'll Kill You

Posted on: Sep 5, 2011, Source: Truthdig

Once our seizure of Libyan oil becomes clear it will only ramp up the jihadist hatred for America that has spread like wildfire across the Middle East.

How Corporate and Political Forces Have Almost Neutralized All Avenues of Resistance in US Culture

Posted on: Aug 29, 2011, Source: Truthdig

The only commodity our state offers is fear.

Militarized Police: Why Is the FBI Treating Americans Like Enemy Combatants?

Posted on: Jul 11, 2011, Source: Truthdig

The widening use of militarized police units effectively nullifies the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which prohibits the use of the armed forces for civilian policing.

Lies Become Truths: The Demise of the Newspaper Leaves Americans Dumber, Blinder and Prone to Ideological Manipulation

Posted on: Jun 27, 2011, Source: Truthdig

The loss of print journalism is impoverishing our civil discourse and leaving us less and less connected to the city, the nation and the world around us.

The Eco-Hero Who Didn't Stand A Chance

Posted on: Jun 20, 2011, Source: Truthdig

How an environmental advocate faces jail time for peacefully derailing the government's auction of Utah land.

Hedges: SAMs -- The Creepy, Inhumane Legal Weapon the State Uses to Break Prisoners

Posted on: Jun 13, 2011, Source: Truthdig

The program, renewed by Barack Obama in October, severely isolates the prisoner, cutting them off from family, friends and the outside world.

The Sky Really Is Falling and Our Only Salvation Is the Rapid Dismantling of the Fossil Fuel Industry

Posted on: May 31, 2011, Source: Truthdig

The rapid and terrifying acceleration of global warming has been confronted by the power elite with self-delusion.

Why Liberals Attack Progressive Heroes Like Cornel West

Posted on: May 25, 2011, Source: Truthdig

Liberals often prefer comfort and privilege to justice, truth, and confrontation.

The Corporate State Will Continue its Inexorable Advance Until We're Locked into a Permanent Underclass

Posted on: Apr 29, 2011, Source: Truthdig

They will continue to exploit the nation, the global economy and the ecosystem. And they will use their money to hide in gated compounds when it all implodes.

Hedges: We Must Defy the Corporate Monsters Laying Waste to Our World

Posted on: Apr 18, 2011, Source: Truthdig

Once we demand that a society serve the needs of citizens and the ecosystem that sustains life, rather than the needs of the marketplace, we make hope visible.

Our Public Schools Are Churning Out Drones for the Corporate State

Posted on: Apr 11, 2011, Source: Truthdig

Unconscious civilizations become totalitarian wastelands.

Is a Real Resistance Movement to the Big Banks Finally on the Rise?

Posted on: Apr 3, 2011, Source: Truthdig

There is no way to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs. Civil Disobedience is the only tool we have left.

Can You Face the True Consequences of War? The Horrors of Bagging Soldiers' Bodies in Iraq

Posted on: Mar 21, 2011, Source: Truthdig

Those who die end up in the care of fellow servicemen and women who have to carry out gruesome work while struggling to hold on to their own sanity.

Hedges: Power Concedes Nothing Without Demand -- We Must Say, "NO!" to Wall St., the Kochs, and Our Cowardly Political Class

Posted on: Mar 14, 2011, Source: Truthdig

If enough of us say "no," if enough of us refuse to cooperate, the despots are in trouble.

Vision: Fight for a World Without Coal

Posted on: Feb 15, 2011, Source: Truthdig

Philosopher Wendell Berry helped stop the building of the Louisville International Jetport, the damming of the Red River Gorge, and the nuclear power plant on the Ohio River.

How Our Empire Crushes Opposition

Posted on: Feb 7, 2011, Source: Truthdig

The corporate state does not have a Politburo. It does not dress its Homeland Security agents in jackboots. There is no raving dictator.

Corporations Win Big Whether Wars Are Won or Lost

Posted on: Jan 10, 2011, Source: Truthdig

Power rests with corporations. And corporations gain very lucrative profits from war.

Hedges: Every Act of Rebellion Helps Tear Down Our Corrupt System

Posted on: Dec 13, 2010, Source: Truthdig

Hope and justice live when people, even in tiny numbers, stand up and fight for them.

Hedges: We're Losing Our Intelligence -- How the Purge of True Dissent Has Starved Our Discourse

Posted on: Nov 15, 2010, Source: Truthdig

True intellectual dissent was wiped out long ago. For the most part, universities stand cowardly, silent accomplices of the corporate state, doing corporate bidding.

Hedges: A Collapsed Economy, Hateful Conservatives and Ineffectual Liberals Are a Recipe for Fascism

Posted on: Nov 8, 2010, Source: Truthdig

American politics, as the midterm elections demonstrated, have descended into the irrational.

Hedges: Meet Progressive Heroes for the Beaten, Foreclosed On, Imprisoned Masses

Posted on: Oct 18, 2010, Source: Truthdig

The Lynds, a progressive activist couple, have spent their lives among the oppressed.

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