Anger gone viral

Journalist and author Chris Hedges discusses the Occupy movement, his lawsuit against Barack Obama and the CBC’s resident idiot Kevin O’Leary

WHAT, ME NUTBAR? Hedges

If you’re not familiar with the work of American author Chris Hedges, of his 15 years working as a foreign correspondent for the New York Times, of his nine books or of his columns for alterna­tive news site Truthdig, then maybe you’d recognize Hedges from the video that made him an unwilling viral hero in Canada.

During an interview with the CBC about Occupy Wall Street last October, our public broadcaster unleashed their hound on Hedges, with their very own Bill O’Reilly-type douchebag Kevin O’Leary shamefully insulting the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist by calling him a “left-wing nutbar.”

“We have these kind of clowns who populate the airwaves in the United States,” says Hedges. “It’s just too bad they have to appear on the CBC, which has always throughout the years been a pretty respected news organization. When the interview was over, I called up the CBC and asked them not to run it. I didn’t expect that from the CBC—I felt like I had been set up.”

The author, an active supporter of the Occupy movement, will be in town this Friday, Jan. 27 to give the keynote address entitled “The Way I See It,” as part of Media, Politics and Protest Camps in the Occupy Social Movement, a day of free workshops and panel discussions organized by Media@Mcgill.

Hedges will be talking about the current situation of the Occupy movement and “the consequences of not reversing the corporate coup d’état, which are deadly, both for the eco-system and the global economy.”

DISOBEDIENCE, CIVIL AND LEGAL

The need for people to rise up against corporations is something the journalist has been encouraging through his books and columns for years before the first tent went up in Zuccotti Park.

“I certainly understood that all the impediments were lifted on corporations, that they certainly wouldn’t limit themselves and that there was no outside force at this point to impede the hol­lowing out of industrial states like the United States. I got that it was coming, I understood that civil disobedience was the only mechanism that we had left, but I didn’t predict or know what it was going to look like or when it was going to come,” he says.

And so, Hedges has been an active supporter of Occupy since the beginning, even getting arrested last November for “disturbing the peace” while participating in a rally in front of Goldman Sachs, a charge for which he was sentenced last Friday.

“It’s basically a formal probation, so if I don’t have another charge for the next six months, they dismiss the case, but if I get arrested again, I’ll be charged for that event and the subsequent one,” he explains.

While the government was going after him, Hedges was going after them, with a plan to sue President Obama and U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta over the National Defense Authorization Act, a new law that allows the military to detain citizens without a trial.

“We’re challenging the legality of the law that Obama passed. We’re doing it to overturn the law, not to make any money,” states the journalist, who is working on the lawsuit with two civil rights lawyers.

REGAINING THE OCCUPATION

Hedges has been critical of Obama since his election; in his latest book, The World As It Is, he compares the president to a brand and writes that his policies are the same as his Republican pre­decessor’s. When asked about the upcoming U.S elections, Hedges is quick to respond: “I couldn’t care less. They won’t in any way alter the structure of the corporate state. It doesn’t make any dif­ference. You can register your disapproval, but you’re not going to change the system by voting. The only route left is to pursue acts of mass protest.”

He is hopeful for the future of the Occupy movement, emphasizing the need to reoccupy a physical space even though many of the camps faced many problems, such as homelessness and substance abuse.

“Many of the Occupy encampments lost control. This happened in New York; they just didn’t have the resources, or the ability to handle the problems that the wider society threw at them. And so, they’ve got to reconfigure how to set up those encampments, so they become a base from where you carry out actions. The Occupy movement has to radiate outwards, not inwards,” says Hedges.

It’s also a movement that he easily compares to the revolutions he covered during his career as a foreign correspondent.

“It’s a legitimate movement; it’s not going away. It is at its core a revolutionary movement. That doesn’t mean it will succeed, they don’t always. I don’t know how long it will take, no one knows—but it’s real.” ■

CHRIS HEDGES SPEAKS AT THE BIBLIOTHÈQUE NATIONALE (475 MAISONNEUVE E.) AT 6 P.M., FRIDAY, JAN. 27, FREE. FOR MORE INFO, VISIT MEDIA.MCGILL.CA

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