The Chris Hedges Report Podcast

Shireen Abu Akleh, the Al Jazeera reporter with more than two decades of experience covering armed conflicts, knew the protocol. She and other reporters remained in the open, clearly visible to Israeli snipers about 650 feet away. Her flak jacket was emblazoned with the word “PRESS.” There were two initial rounds of shooting that were fired at the journalists. In the first, producer Ali Al-Samoudi...

Narrated by Eunice Wong Text originally published May 12, 2023 With Sammy at the graduation ceremony for formerly incarcerated students at Rutgers University in Newark on Friday Newark, N.J. — We know the story. The absent father who leaves when his son is five-years-old and moves back to Puerto Rico. The single mother, rarely at home because she works long hours to keep her three children fed and...

Narrated by Eunice Wong Text originally published: May 3, 2023 And Our Flags Are Still There - by Mr. Fish The detention and persecution of Julian Assange eviscerates all pretense of the rule of law and the rights of a free press. The illegalities, embraced by the Ecuadorian, British, Swedish and U.S. governments are ominous. They presage a world where the internal workings, abuses, corruption, li...

When the new 20-dollar bill is issued in 2030 it is scheduled to have on one side a portrait of Harriet Tubman, the fiery abolitionist who made over a dozen clandestine trips south to free enslaved people and later served as a scout for the Union Army during the Civil War. The back of the bill is supposed to have a statue of the slaveholding 7th president, Andrew Jackson, who was one of the princi...

The integrity and quality of public higher education in America has been under assault for decades, as Ellen Schrecker documents in her new book The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s . The American dream of high-quality, affordable mass higher education is no longer within reach of many Americans. Tuitions, once low, if not free, have soared, and with them tremendous student debt. A...

Narrated by Eunice Wong Text originally published April 30, 2023 You Are What They Eat - by Mr. Fish America is a stratocracy , a form of government dominated by the military. It is axiomatic among the two ruling parties that there must be a constant preparation for war. The war machine’s massive budgets are sacrosanct. Its billions of dollars in waste and fraud are ignored. Its military fiascos i...

The real story of war is never told by Hollywood. Its senselessness, cruelty, gruesomeness and impersonalized wholesale industrial slaughter of innocents are redeemed for the old cliches of glory, honor, heroism and patriotism. The power of the lie makes it nearly impossible for those who return from war and speak the truth about war to be heard. Talia Lugacy in her new independent film This is No...

Narrated by Eunice Wong Text originally published April 23, 2023 Follow the Money - by Mr. Fish Political paralysis is snuffing out what is left of our anemic democracy.  It is the paralysis of doing nothing while the ruling oligarchs, who have increased their wealth by nearly a third since the pandemic began and by close to 90 percent over the past decade, orchestrate virtual tax boycotts as mill...

Narrated by Eunice Wong Text originally published April 15, 2023 No Respect - by Mr. Fish New Brunswick, N.J. — Here are some of the senior administrators I did not see joining us on the picket lines set up by striking teachers and staff at Rutgers University. Brian Strom, the chancellor of Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences, whose salary is $925,932 a year. Steven Libutti, the vice chancellor...

Narrated by Eunice Wong The text of this talk was posted on April 6, 2023 Blessed Be The Protesters - by Mr. Fish We are not here to debate the moral squalor that defines the life of the hedge fund billionaire and chair of the seminary’s trustee board, Michael Fisch . We are not here to denounce him for the personal fortune, reportedly worth at least $10 billion, a fortune he built preying on the...

Roger Hallam, the co-founder in 2018 of Extinction Rebellion, was recently released after nearly four months on jail. He was imprisoned for making a 20-minute speech on zoom. He was arrested and jailed because he called for civil disobedience by climate activists, specifically the blocking of major road networks in London. Hallam is one of the most important and fearless leaders in the climate mov...

In Eric Hobsbawm’s book Bandits he examined how outlaws such as Salvatore Giuliano, Robin Hood, and Pancho Villa, transform themselves into social revolutionaries. The filmmakers Dan Cohen and Kim Ives have done the same in their three-part film “Another Vision: Inside Haiti’s Uprising.” They tell the story of Jimmy ‘Barbecue’ Cherizier, who has united half of Port au Prince’s slums, and the Revol...

Narrated by Eunice Wong Text originally published March 26, 2023 Make Me Great Again - by Mr. Fish Donald Trump — facing four government-run investigations, three criminal and one civil, targeting himself and his business — is not being targeted because of his crimes. Nearly every serious crime he is accused of carrying out has been committed by his political rivals. He is being targeted because h...

The national emergency and public health emergency declarations related to the COVID-19 pandemic will terminate on May 11, 2023. These emergency declarations, in place since 2020, waived or modified requirements in a range of areas, including in the Medicare, Medicaid, and CHIP programs, as well as in private health insurance. The end of these special measures will see between 5 and 14 million Ame...

I first encountered Lori Grinker’s remarkable work as a photographer in her book AFTERWAR: Veterans from a World in Conflict , where a century of war is represented by and through portraits of individuals and their haunting stories of war. Her other books include  Dear Grinkers , a photographic series on diaspora,  Six Days From Forty , an installation revolving around her brother’s life and his d...

Narrated by Eunice Wong Text originally published: 03/11/2023 Proxyboy - by Mr. Fish There are many ways for a state to project power and weaken adversaries, but proxy wars are one of the most cynical. Proxy wars devour the countries they purport to defend. They entice nations or insurgents to fight for geopolitical goals that are ultimately not in their interest. The war in Ukraine has little to...

On April 28, 2012 an intruder broke through the metal door leading into the garden patio of the investigative reporter Regina Martínez. He apparently surprised the Mexican journalist in her bathroom, where her body was discovered. The diminutive reporter, barely five feet tall, tried to fight off her attacker – skin was found under her fingernails. Her jaw was broken with brass knuckles. A rag was...

Narrated by Eunice Wong Text originally published 03/19/2023 We’re Number One — by Mr. Fish Two decades ago, I sabotaged my career at The New York Times. It was a conscious choice. I had spent seven years in the Middle East, four of them as the Middle East Bureau Chief. I was an Arabic speaker. I believed, like nearly all Arabists, including most of those in the State Department and the CIA, that...

On Monday, September 26, 2022, a series of underwater explosions blew huge holes into the Nord Stream 1 and 2, two pairs of pipelines, constructed to carry Russian natural gas to Germany under the Baltic Sea. These four pipelines, steel-reinforced concrete cables built to withstand the direct impact of the anchor of an aircraft carrier, were destroyed in a clandestine act of sabotage, according to...

Kshama Sawant, a socialist who served for over a decade on the Seattle City Council, has announced she will not seek reelection. Instead, she will launch a national coalition called Workers Strike Back this March in cities around the country. This coalition will organize for a $ 25 an hour minimum wage, build grassroots labor unions in corporations such as Amazon and advocate for a shorter work we...

Narrated by Eunice Wong Text originally published 03/05/23 Executing the Law - by Mr. Fish There is little that unites me with those who occupied the Capitol building on Jan. 6. Their vision for America, Christian nationalism, white supremacy, blind support for Trump and embrace of reactionary fact-free conspiracy theories leaves a very wide chasm between their beliefs and mine. But that does not...

Working men and women kept the country from disintegrating during the pandemic. They staffed the hospitals, stocked the shelves, drove the buses, manned the cash registers, cooked and delivered the food, grew the produce, drove the trucks and collected the garbage. While they were recognized as essential frontline workers they were also sacrificed in disproportionate numbers in a system of grotesq...

Narrated by Eunice Wong Text originally published 02/26/2023 De-Pressed - by Mr. Fish Reporters make mistakes. It is the nature of the trade. There are always a few stories we wish were reported more carefully. Writing on deadline with often only a few hours before publication is an imperfect art. But when mistakes occur, they must be acknowledged and publicized. To cover them up, to pretend they...

Walter Lippmann in his 1920 book Liberty and the News warned that when journalists “arrogate to themselves the right to determine by their own consciences what shall be reported and for what purpose, democracy is unworkable.” Perhaps no other quote sums up the debacle known as Russiagate, the hundreds if not thousands of stories and news reporters that falsely painted the Trump administration as a...

Narrated by Eunice Wong Text originally published 02/19/2023 Murder King - by Mr. Fish Idolatry is the primal sin from which all other sins derive. Idols tempt us to become God. They demand the sacrifice of others in the mad quest for wealth, fame or power. But the idol always ends by requiring self-sacrifice, leaving us to perish on the blood-soaked altars we erected for others.  For empires are...