As We Are Ruthlessly Exploited: The Obama Brand Vs. The Bush Brand Vs. The Clinton Brand

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Chris Hedges does not.

The video below contains the following ideas (and hundreds more). Please view it as if your future economic well-being depended on it. It's probably the most life-relevant video you will ever see.

I know it was for me.

"We are shedding jobs now faster than after the 1929 crash."

"The emergence of the corporate state always means the emergence of the security state . . . to seize and maintain internal control."

"An unregulated financial system always devolves into a gangster, mafia-type system . . . such societies cannibalize themselves until they die."

"This is why the Bush White House pushed through the Patriot Act."

"Force is soon all our elites have left."

"Cultural retreat into illusion is a form of magical thinking . . . it turns a nation that wages illegal wars . . . openly practicing torture into the greatest democracy on earth."

"Methane chimneys are rising from the permafrost melting in the Arctic . . . scientists warn they could asphyxiate the population."

"We are embarking upon a time of great deprivation."

"Powerful corporate entities will make like cause with buffoons and the Christian right."

"A society becomes totalitarian . . . when the ruling class has lost its power and has no other way to rule . . . it becomes schizophrenic."

"Social reform never comes from accommodating power, it comes from fighting it."

"It is time to fight back . . . in small and large groups of all types.

"The failure to offer alternative candidates from the progressive factions . . . empowers the growing strength of a radical Christian right offering demogogues.

(Today's example: Romney slams labor report, vows 500K jobs a month)

"If we remain passive in the face of the largest transfer of wealth upward, we will become its serfs."

Chris Hedges lectures at The New School, a university in New York City offering distinguished degree, certificate, and continuing education programs in art and design, liberal arts, management and policy, and the performing arts. THE NEW SCHOOL | http://www.newschool.edu

Journalist Chris Hedges discusses his recent book Empire of Illusion: the End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. In it, he charts the dramatic rise of a post-literate society that craves fantasy, ecstasy, and illusion. Hedges argues we now live in two societies: one, the minority, functions in a print-based, literate world and can cope with complexity and can separate illusion from truth; the other, a growing majority, is retreating from a reality-based world into one of false certainty and magic where serious film and theater, as well as newspapers and books, are being pushed to the margins.

Chris Hedges, author of War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, is currently a senior fellow at The Nation Institute and the Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at Princeton University. He writes for many publications, including Foreign Affairs, Harpers, The New York Review of Books, Granta, and Mother Jones. He is also a columnist for Truthdig.com.