I've been aware of the crumbling of democracy in this country, the corruption of the Supreme Court, the lack of integrity in most politicians, but listening to this conversation has helped me to understand the way greed and power-hungry forces have corrupted economic/political/social systems. Thank you.
The "deep state" is not conspiracy fiction. Maybe Monbiot has never heard of Edward Snowden, John Stockwell, Wiki Leaks or the many whistle blowers that have allowed us a peak. The ending of the talk completely blew his credibility.
Darn, George’s credibility completely blown. You suggest this investigative journalist may not have heard of Snowdon or WikiLeaks, maybe it’s time to have a quick peek at your own credibility rating Drake.
great conversation thanks - as so often when someone lays out a history one realises that things always go back further than one thought. So the neo-liberal idea came about in the 1940's as a response to the rise of unions and collective working class power which the corporate and aristocratic empire managers saw as a danger to their continuance of Victorian and colonial era of exploitation and theft. And further, through Thatcher and Reagan's relatively benign desire for stable capitalism with no worker's rights and no nationalised services to the gradual takeover of the international oligarch class with the harder, warlord capitalism wee see today.
"but a conspiracy fiction is one is a story about a conspiracy which doesn't actually exist. That's what we should call them. And Trump and Vance and many others peddle these conspiracy fictions precisely for those reasons, because they say, I am your sole savior. There's nothing you can do to sort things out yourself. I will fight these vague forces out there which are destroying your life, trust in me to do so. And they are fantastically disempowering, those fictions, their whole purpose is to disempower people and that's why people like them. It's why they embrace them."
---George Monbiot
Sounds a lot like orthodox religion to me. However, thanks to information and digital technology, what took the Roman Catholic Church centuries to achieve, is now being achieved by neo-liberialism in mere decades.
interestingly he follows that with the next line:
"Because actually a lot of people find the idea of involvement in political change, the idea of political agency, as being quite scary and frightening. I'm going to have to make a huge effort. I'm going to have to talk to other people. I'm going to have to combine with others and mobilize to create change. I don't want to do that"
--George Monbiot
And we wonder why we don't have a functioning Democratic Republic in the United States or the U.K.! Look folks: If you choose to ignore your duty to hold your government accountable for infringement of your civil rights, then it's really quite pathetic to wonder why you lost them in the first place. Civil rights are meaningless if you don't exercise them. Bottom line: most folks are programmed to be ignorant and lazy--just the way oligarchs like it. What to do about it? I suggest you get informed and proactive...(shortly*) before you are no longer able.
* just ask Chris's last "guest" about recent, draconian, laws enacted in the U.K. that have landed him in jail simply for talking about (of course, I surmise the U.K. government would call it conspiring for an act of terrorism) organizing a climate change protest.
Thanks, I agree that it is about time that we start talking about whether capitalism (which is not the same as markets) is compatible with democracy. This question was hidden from us during the cold war which pitched capitalism/democracy against socialism/authoritarianism. But hasnt it become clear, since 1990, that the alignment of capitalism and democracy was a historic coincidence?
I haven't listened to this yet (I will), but I do want to point Chris' readers to Jonathan Cook, if they have not already heard of him. He writes eloquently and informatively, day after day, about Gaza, and Western media propaganda generally, but he has also written extensively about George Monbiot and the Guardian and why they are problems to be reckoned with for anyone interested in justice, particularly in their stances on Julian Assange and Western imperialist "humanitarian" wars. Cook has a Substack. People should subscribe. I would also want to ask Chris if he has heard of Cook (it's hard to believe he hasn't) and, if he did not cross-examine Monbiot in this interview with Cook's criticism, why he didn't do so.
I would love to see Chris have Jonathan Cook on. I just posted something it seems I was literally writing at the same time as you. Jonathan Cook and Aaron Maté are very much among the journalists whose integrity I trust. Monbiot is kind of a Bernie Sanders amongst 'journalists' to me. If that.
Agree largely with the main points the lads talked about - here’s my little anti neoliberal rant I’d written earlier -
People are tiring of constantly having to react to the incessant monetisation of every aspect of our human existence, from the moment of being born to the moment of your last breath and after. It’s so depleting of the human spirit, spending an inordinate amount of your time in an adversarial ecosystem worrying about a thing called MONEY, in an evolutionary sense it has replaced our hunter gather instincts.
The vast majority of planetary citizens spend large amounts of energy engaged on this, mostly not through choice but through fear.
Our very existence/societal worth is measured in the success or failure of this struggle.
Why has finding shelter (even of the most humble type) become so very difficult? Homes are a commodity to be speculated on and exploited. Makes perfect capitalistic sense if you are an owner but otherwise amplifies inequality in ‘democratic’ societies. Getting sick is not recommended in this system unless you are situated on the right side of the equation. Perhaps avoid getting old too.
None of us invited capitalism to the party, it invited itself and brought its own bouncers.
Opponents of the system face the potential ire of capitalism’s baby, The Military Industrial Complex, I’m not kidding, ask a Palestinian (yes, I know it’s complex)
What is clear to me is an economy based on the extraction of finite resources (and the degrading of earth’s life support systems caused by using them) with rampant consumerism baked in as a vital component deemed necessary to achieve the constant ‘growth’ required to provide ’wellbeing’ is so unhealthy for us and our planet.
In its present form, neoliberal capitalism is looking evermore insane.
Monbiot remains problematic for me. He remains primarily affiliated with a deeply corporate and capitalist outlet, which (as an entity) has been very much on the wrong side of things in acting as a silencer/buffer or even propaganda outlet on many, many issues over the years. From Assange, to Israel/Palestine, to (and here Monbiot has been a particularly partisan and vociferous mouthpiece) Syria. He may be correct in his take on capitalism... but he seems to sit kind of pretty in it.
What concerns me is that his vocalizations on this topic may make him seem trustworthy well beyond his actual fiber. I have had an eye on that, because I was very taken by him until I saw just how 'usefully intransigent' he was on several issues that, to my mind, warranted at the very least a great deal of curiosity. Instead, I saw a great deal of arrogance.
Jonathan Cook sums up the man who threw Assange and Corbyn under the bus….and parroted the lies about Assad probably to cheer lead liberals into supporting a war in Syria.
Exactly this!! Thank you. Jonathan Cook has written several articles on Monbiot's hypocrisy, and his usefulness to the system he decries. He holds a cushy spot within that system. Cook summarizes the main concern perfectly at the end... his book on this topic is probably good. But that doesn't mean that he is to be trusted on anything else. I wouldn't worry so much about that, either, if people were more discerning consumers of opinion and information.
Incredible interview - so many dots connected in breadth and depth! I learned so much in these 50 minutes and will share this broadly. Thank you both, George and Chris, so very much!!!
Back to Plato (I know Hedges has studied in depth) - - and Churchill - - democracy doesn't work except at a small scale. 150 people would work. 350 million does not. We need a fundamental re-think and re-write of our government structure. But, bread-and-circus + wifi distractions and cheap food and entertainment = won't happen. Just go out and look around.
As a blue collar worker most of my adult life, I witnessed the abandonment of the New Deal, deregulation, and the turn to neolib econ theory by the Dem elite along with similar Euro and Canadian pols. A theory that simply assumes its own premises; an ideology benefitting only the oligarchical few. So much for the common good.
And so much for logic. Economics is considered to be the most scientific of the social sciences and economists are defined as scientists. Science is supposed to be done for the sake of knowledge alone. But capitalist economics holds the utility function (fancy words for self interest) as paramount. If economists are motivated by the utility function, as theory asserts, then their science is suspect. If they claim science as motivation, then there must be something other than the utility function and their theory is incomplete. David Korten and Steve Keen, alt. economists, told me my reasoning is correct.
There are other illogical aspects. Corporate capitalism defines away devastation of human communities and the destruction of entire ecosystems as irrelevant externalities. Implied is that as owners of what they term human and natural resources, they have the right to do with them whatever they want. They also believe the econ system must continue to expand. So then the Earth's resources must be assumed as infinite.
We radical reformers do need to clarify for the general public there is a difference between capitalism and private enterprise. Private enterprise ("free" enterprise is NAM propaganda from the '50s) is the privately owned production of physically real goods and services. Including co-ops and worker owned businesses. As well as a barber shop, veterinary clinic, corner grocery, artists selling their own works, fix-it places, a bar and the band playing there. Local people providing services that benefit the community, generating spending and profits that stay local. AKA the Real Economy.
Whereas capitalism is the privileging of that abstraction known as money. The financial sector now dominating the entire econ system. It's extraction by the real parasites who feed off of the production of others. An egregious example is stock buybacks that further enrich CEOs and their finance vulture allies while devastating workers by mass layoffs.
Worst of all, this ideology has nearly subsumed democratic political systems as a de facto one dollar, one vote plutocracy. Milton Friedman of the Chicago School of Econ, heir to Hayek et al. flat out said he preferred the Pinochet government because democracy was a detriment for (neolib) market based economics.
Shame Monbiot was many of the Guardians journalists that threw Corbyn and Assange under the bus….was very surprised to see Chris Hedges interview him….many think he’s a deep state actor.
Regarding that lead photo of a homeless person with US flag blanket...
In July 2009 I was a hotel engineer (maintenance) in downtown Seattle. The city center temperature that afternoon was 105 F. As I walked down the hill to catch the ferry home, I saw lots of people outside who were most probably residents of the old Pioneer Square hotels turned low income small apartments. The upper floors must have been like ovens.
One guy with uncombed hair had on worn pants too short for him, no socks, and mismatched shoes. Along with a tee shirt proclaiming "Proud To Be An American."
I've told that story many times--and all too often the reaction has been something like: that's nice, or good for him, or some other missing the point mildness.
I've been aware of the crumbling of democracy in this country, the corruption of the Supreme Court, the lack of integrity in most politicians, but listening to this conversation has helped me to understand the way greed and power-hungry forces have corrupted economic/political/social systems. Thank you.
The "deep state" is not conspiracy fiction. Maybe Monbiot has never heard of Edward Snowden, John Stockwell, Wiki Leaks or the many whistle blowers that have allowed us a peak. The ending of the talk completely blew his credibility.
Darn, George’s credibility completely blown. You suggest this investigative journalist may not have heard of Snowdon or WikiLeaks, maybe it’s time to have a quick peek at your own credibility rating Drake.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-150032781
Yeah I read that too with interest. Left a comment there too if you have a look.
great conversation thanks - as so often when someone lays out a history one realises that things always go back further than one thought. So the neo-liberal idea came about in the 1940's as a response to the rise of unions and collective working class power which the corporate and aristocratic empire managers saw as a danger to their continuance of Victorian and colonial era of exploitation and theft. And further, through Thatcher and Reagan's relatively benign desire for stable capitalism with no worker's rights and no nationalised services to the gradual takeover of the international oligarch class with the harder, warlord capitalism wee see today.
"but a conspiracy fiction is one is a story about a conspiracy which doesn't actually exist. That's what we should call them. And Trump and Vance and many others peddle these conspiracy fictions precisely for those reasons, because they say, I am your sole savior. There's nothing you can do to sort things out yourself. I will fight these vague forces out there which are destroying your life, trust in me to do so. And they are fantastically disempowering, those fictions, their whole purpose is to disempower people and that's why people like them. It's why they embrace them."
---George Monbiot
Sounds a lot like orthodox religion to me. However, thanks to information and digital technology, what took the Roman Catholic Church centuries to achieve, is now being achieved by neo-liberialism in mere decades.
interestingly he follows that with the next line:
"Because actually a lot of people find the idea of involvement in political change, the idea of political agency, as being quite scary and frightening. I'm going to have to make a huge effort. I'm going to have to talk to other people. I'm going to have to combine with others and mobilize to create change. I don't want to do that"
--George Monbiot
And we wonder why we don't have a functioning Democratic Republic in the United States or the U.K.! Look folks: If you choose to ignore your duty to hold your government accountable for infringement of your civil rights, then it's really quite pathetic to wonder why you lost them in the first place. Civil rights are meaningless if you don't exercise them. Bottom line: most folks are programmed to be ignorant and lazy--just the way oligarchs like it. What to do about it? I suggest you get informed and proactive...(shortly*) before you are no longer able.
* just ask Chris's last "guest" about recent, draconian, laws enacted in the U.K. that have landed him in jail simply for talking about (of course, I surmise the U.K. government would call it conspiring for an act of terrorism) organizing a climate change protest.
Thanks, I agree that it is about time that we start talking about whether capitalism (which is not the same as markets) is compatible with democracy. This question was hidden from us during the cold war which pitched capitalism/democracy against socialism/authoritarianism. But hasnt it become clear, since 1990, that the alignment of capitalism and democracy was a historic coincidence?
I haven't listened to this yet (I will), but I do want to point Chris' readers to Jonathan Cook, if they have not already heard of him. He writes eloquently and informatively, day after day, about Gaza, and Western media propaganda generally, but he has also written extensively about George Monbiot and the Guardian and why they are problems to be reckoned with for anyone interested in justice, particularly in their stances on Julian Assange and Western imperialist "humanitarian" wars. Cook has a Substack. People should subscribe. I would also want to ask Chris if he has heard of Cook (it's hard to believe he hasn't) and, if he did not cross-examine Monbiot in this interview with Cook's criticism, why he didn't do so.
I would love to see Chris have Jonathan Cook on. I just posted something it seems I was literally writing at the same time as you. Jonathan Cook and Aaron Maté are very much among the journalists whose integrity I trust. Monbiot is kind of a Bernie Sanders amongst 'journalists' to me. If that.
Agree largely with the main points the lads talked about - here’s my little anti neoliberal rant I’d written earlier -
People are tiring of constantly having to react to the incessant monetisation of every aspect of our human existence, from the moment of being born to the moment of your last breath and after. It’s so depleting of the human spirit, spending an inordinate amount of your time in an adversarial ecosystem worrying about a thing called MONEY, in an evolutionary sense it has replaced our hunter gather instincts.
The vast majority of planetary citizens spend large amounts of energy engaged on this, mostly not through choice but through fear.
Our very existence/societal worth is measured in the success or failure of this struggle.
Why has finding shelter (even of the most humble type) become so very difficult? Homes are a commodity to be speculated on and exploited. Makes perfect capitalistic sense if you are an owner but otherwise amplifies inequality in ‘democratic’ societies. Getting sick is not recommended in this system unless you are situated on the right side of the equation. Perhaps avoid getting old too.
None of us invited capitalism to the party, it invited itself and brought its own bouncers.
Opponents of the system face the potential ire of capitalism’s baby, The Military Industrial Complex, I’m not kidding, ask a Palestinian (yes, I know it’s complex)
What is clear to me is an economy based on the extraction of finite resources (and the degrading of earth’s life support systems caused by using them) with rampant consumerism baked in as a vital component deemed necessary to achieve the constant ‘growth’ required to provide ’wellbeing’ is so unhealthy for us and our planet.
In its present form, neoliberal capitalism is looking evermore insane.
Monbiot remains problematic for me. He remains primarily affiliated with a deeply corporate and capitalist outlet, which (as an entity) has been very much on the wrong side of things in acting as a silencer/buffer or even propaganda outlet on many, many issues over the years. From Assange, to Israel/Palestine, to (and here Monbiot has been a particularly partisan and vociferous mouthpiece) Syria. He may be correct in his take on capitalism... but he seems to sit kind of pretty in it.
What concerns me is that his vocalizations on this topic may make him seem trustworthy well beyond his actual fiber. I have had an eye on that, because I was very taken by him until I saw just how 'usefully intransigent' he was on several issues that, to my mind, warranted at the very least a great deal of curiosity. Instead, I saw a great deal of arrogance.
Jonathan Cook sums up the man who threw Assange and Corbyn under the bus….and parroted the lies about Assad probably to cheer lead liberals into supporting a war in Syria.
https://open.substack.com/pub/jonathancook/p/monbiot-is-right-about-the-wickedness?
Exactly this!! Thank you. Jonathan Cook has written several articles on Monbiot's hypocrisy, and his usefulness to the system he decries. He holds a cushy spot within that system. Cook summarizes the main concern perfectly at the end... his book on this topic is probably good. But that doesn't mean that he is to be trusted on anything else. I wouldn't worry so much about that, either, if people were more discerning consumers of opinion and information.
Incredible interview - so many dots connected in breadth and depth! I learned so much in these 50 minutes and will share this broadly. Thank you both, George and Chris, so very much!!!
Back to Plato (I know Hedges has studied in depth) - - and Churchill - - democracy doesn't work except at a small scale. 150 people would work. 350 million does not. We need a fundamental re-think and re-write of our government structure. But, bread-and-circus + wifi distractions and cheap food and entertainment = won't happen. Just go out and look around.
Since we in no wise live in a democracy (nor in a democratic republic), the point is academic.
As a blue collar worker most of my adult life, I witnessed the abandonment of the New Deal, deregulation, and the turn to neolib econ theory by the Dem elite along with similar Euro and Canadian pols. A theory that simply assumes its own premises; an ideology benefitting only the oligarchical few. So much for the common good.
And so much for logic. Economics is considered to be the most scientific of the social sciences and economists are defined as scientists. Science is supposed to be done for the sake of knowledge alone. But capitalist economics holds the utility function (fancy words for self interest) as paramount. If economists are motivated by the utility function, as theory asserts, then their science is suspect. If they claim science as motivation, then there must be something other than the utility function and their theory is incomplete. David Korten and Steve Keen, alt. economists, told me my reasoning is correct.
There are other illogical aspects. Corporate capitalism defines away devastation of human communities and the destruction of entire ecosystems as irrelevant externalities. Implied is that as owners of what they term human and natural resources, they have the right to do with them whatever they want. They also believe the econ system must continue to expand. So then the Earth's resources must be assumed as infinite.
We radical reformers do need to clarify for the general public there is a difference between capitalism and private enterprise. Private enterprise ("free" enterprise is NAM propaganda from the '50s) is the privately owned production of physically real goods and services. Including co-ops and worker owned businesses. As well as a barber shop, veterinary clinic, corner grocery, artists selling their own works, fix-it places, a bar and the band playing there. Local people providing services that benefit the community, generating spending and profits that stay local. AKA the Real Economy.
Whereas capitalism is the privileging of that abstraction known as money. The financial sector now dominating the entire econ system. It's extraction by the real parasites who feed off of the production of others. An egregious example is stock buybacks that further enrich CEOs and their finance vulture allies while devastating workers by mass layoffs.
Worst of all, this ideology has nearly subsumed democratic political systems as a de facto one dollar, one vote plutocracy. Milton Friedman of the Chicago School of Econ, heir to Hayek et al. flat out said he preferred the Pinochet government because democracy was a detriment for (neolib) market based economics.
Shame Monbiot was many of the Guardians journalists that threw Corbyn and Assange under the bus….was very surprised to see Chris Hedges interview him….many think he’s a deep state actor.
https://open.substack.com/pub/jonathancook/p/monbiot-is-right-about-the-wickedness?
I clicked what you linked here. Thanks for that--very much worth worth reading!
Brilliant!
Here’s a tune somewhat on this subject: https://youtu.be/YWvVuTSmwxQ?si=6uLmJG5Rq8C1olPV
https://robertreich.substack.com/?r=4ws6l&utm_campaign=subscribe-page-share-screen&utm_medium=web
Kamala has to out-smart AND KICK OUT the NUTANYAHU & TRUMP WAR TWIN BASTARDS FAST —— OR IT’S ALL OVER!
VOTES ARE IMPORTANT — BUT THE VOTES ARE GOING TO BE SECOND TO THE VIOLANCE IF FOLKS DON’T WTF-UP.
THE ISSUES WILL LOSE IF THE VIOLENCE JUST ‘EXPOSES’ IT’S WEAK CRIMINAL FASCIST UNDERBELLY.
This article from Cook brings Monbiot's contradictory role into perspective https://jonathancook.substack.com/p/monbiot-is-right-about-the-wickedness?publication_id=476450&post_id=150032781&isFreemail=false&r=2hhhto&triedRedirect=true
Regarding that lead photo of a homeless person with US flag blanket...
In July 2009 I was a hotel engineer (maintenance) in downtown Seattle. The city center temperature that afternoon was 105 F. As I walked down the hill to catch the ferry home, I saw lots of people outside who were most probably residents of the old Pioneer Square hotels turned low income small apartments. The upper floors must have been like ovens.
One guy with uncombed hair had on worn pants too short for him, no socks, and mismatched shoes. Along with a tee shirt proclaiming "Proud To Be An American."
I've told that story many times--and all too often the reaction has been something like: that's nice, or good for him, or some other missing the point mildness.