The Chris Hedges Report Podcast with Cornel West

Dr. Cornel West, the moral philosopher and civil rights activist, is running for president on the Green Party’s ticket. Dr. West will be a singular voice for serious social and political change in an electoral system saturated with corporate money and rigged to crush third parties. He calls for “a paradigm shift,” a realignment of “the ideological landscape,” demanding that we redirect the focus of governing institutions from the demands of markets and corporations, the military machine, empire and the ruling oligarchs, to poor and working people. His decades-long commitment to the oppressed, his fierce opposition to American militarism and empire, his condemnation of the grotesque avarice of the billionaire class, and his determination to halt the ongoing ecocide, will see him contemptuously dismissed by the establishment, which is why we must support him. If this campaign becomes a movement, and it will need a lot of organizing to get Dr. West on the ballot and build grassroots support, the array of forces that will seek to discredit and sabotage his candidacy will be formidable. The Israel lobby, the war industry, the courtiers in the media, the corporatists, the billionaire class and the Democratic Party leadership, will be as vicious to Dr. West as these forces in Britain were to Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters. But at the same time if we do not mount a political revolution and overthrow he ruling corporate duopoly we are headed not only for corporate tyranny but ultimately the extinction of the human species, along with most other species. Joining me to discuss his presidential campaign is Dr. Cornel West.