Chris Hedges Quotes

To me, regardless of who's in office, the government is strangled by business. And the government's priorities are dictated by business. I mean, why does America, even after healthcare reform, still not have free universal healthcare? I'm sure it has something to do with the insurance lobby.

Populism is not a style, it's a people's rebellion against the iron grip that big corporations have on our country - including our economy, government, media, and environment.

The economical policies that are instigated really makes you think that the American government is a bunch of evil bastards. So just because you're black, you're still representing that government, and when Obama came into office he enacted the same policies that we would critique other presidents for.

We're headed towards a fascist economy in which you have big government, big corporations and big labor, and they're all in cahoots to strangle the entrepreneur.

Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, for the people and by the people, but a government for Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street. The great common people of this country are slaves, and monopoly is the master…Let the bloodhounds of money who have dogged us thus far beware.

I am a citizen of a country that has just undergone a thieved election, a country deeply and dangerously divided between rich and poor, but also between rich and middle class. What I believe in and what my government represents are not the same thing.

In America, we are living in a society which is moving more and more toward an oligarchic form of society where government is dominated heavily by big-money interests.

No one in this country need go hungry, and alleviating the problem is primarily a matter of readjusting our priorities. In both the government and the private sector, self-interest has displaced the ideal of community that made this country great. The old world view of "us, we, our" has been replaced by "I, me, mine." The reasons for this are manifold and complex, but at the end of the day, we need to remember that, if one of us is suffering needlessly, all of us are diminished.

I have named the destroyers of nations: comfort, plenty, and security - out of which grow a bored and slothful cynicism, in which rebellion against the world as it is, and myself as I am, are submerged in listless self-satisfaction.

If ever this vast country is brought under a single government, it will be one of the most extensive corruption.

There are many major crises facing our country. At the top of the list is the need to overturn Citizens United. If billionaires are able to buy elections and elect right-wing candidates, there is no way we will ever address climate change, college education, affordability, job creation, raising the minimum wage and taking on Wall Street.

Innocent pleasures in moderation can provide relaxation for the body and mind and can foster family and other relationships. But pleasure, per se, offers no deep, lasting satisfaction or sense of fulfillment. The pleasure-centered person, too soon bored with each succeeding level of "fun," constantly cries for more and more. So the next new pleasure has to be bigger and better, more exciting, with a bigger "high." A person in this state becomes almost entirely narcissistic, interpreting all of life in terms of the pleasure it provides to the self here and now.

Very big business is in bed with very big government in Washington, and has more to do with what the average person sees, hears and reads than most people know.

It's ginned up by the corporate plutocracy as a way of distracting the working-class people that it's screwing. We hamstring our own natural progressivism in this country, and that's really stupid.

To my mind, if we do not get a handle on money in politics and the degree to which big money controls the political process in this country, nobody is going to bring about the changes that is needed in this country for the middle class and working families.

While free markets tend to democratize a society, unfettered capitalism leads invariably to corporate control of government.

There is a long American tradition of suspicion of concentrated economic power because of its tendency to corrupt government and turn it from a democracy into a plutocracy.

The failure so far of the governments of so many of the worlds most powerful countries in the face of such egregious unfairness ... to make the slightest progress on the issue of fair trade is hard to explain.

The whole privatisation of health and education, of natural resources and essential infrastructure - all of this is so twisted and so antithetical to anything that would place the interests of human beings or the environment at the center of what ought to be a government concern - should stop. The amassing of unfettered wealth of individuals and corporations should stop. The inheritance of rich people's wealth by their children should stop. The expropriators should have their wealth expropriated and redistributed.

Nonviolent attainment of self-government presupposes a non-violent control over the violent elements in the country.

I do not trust self serving misinformation coming from corporations and their media trolls. I do not trust politicians who are taking millions from those corporations either. I trust people. So I make my music for people not for candidates.

Once politics become a tug-of-war for shares in the income pie, decent government is impossible.

I was there in Washington in the '90s. It was pretty bad then. It's much worse now [in 2015]. And that vicious cycle is you've got again big corporations, executives, Wall Street, very wealthy individuals in both parties who are calling the shots.

The root cause of poverty is social injustice and the bad government that abets it

Commercial concerns have expanded from family business to corporate wealth which is self-perpetuating and which enlightened statesmen and economists now dread as the most potent oligarchy yet produced.