“Corporations Have Carried Out a Coup d’état in My Country.”

This quote is from Chris Hedges.  He’s written for the New York Times and the Christian Science Monitor.  He won a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for a series of articles profiling al Qaeda and the terrorist attacks on the United States.

Over the weekend Chris Hedges spoke to one of the Occupy Wall Street rallies:

“I spent 20 years overseas, I’m a war correspondent.  I came back and realized that corporations have carried out a coup d’état in my country…

“I covered the street demonstrations that brought down Miloševic, I’ve covered both of the Palestinian intifadas, and once movements like this start and articulate a fundamental truth about the society that they live in, and expose the repression, the mendacity, the corruption and the decay of structures of power, then they have a kind of centrifugal force, you never know where they’re going…

“What happens, and it’s true in all of these movements as well, is the foot soldiers of the elite, the blue uniform police, the mechanisms of control, finally don’t want to impede the movement. At that point, the power elite is left defenseless. So, where’s it going? No one knows. Even the people most intimately involved in the organization don’t know. All of these movements take on a kind of life and color that in some ways is finally mysterious. The only thing I can say, having been in the middle of similar movements, is that this one is real … And this one could take ‘em all down.”

Or as somebody else once said, “the times they are a-changin’”