Part 6 of a 7-part interview from the Real News Network with Chris Hedges, author and activist following 15 years as a foreign correspondent with The New York Times.
"To even call yourself a socialist in this country is to essentially remove yourself from the acceptable parameters of public discourse."Certainly the NDP agrees with that statement - its delegates having voted 960 to 188 three months ago to expunge the word "socialism" from their constitution, presumably in the vain hope of dampening Steve's enthusiasm for flinging it about come 2015.
Well, it's only a word, right?
Thought experiment.
We are starting society over from scratch - the laws that determine our relationship to each other, to food and energy and the production of same - the works.
Hands up everyone who agrees to give corporate shareholders control over the government, the law, food production and distribution, our jobs, the life and death of our very ecosystem to do with as they please.
No? No takers for that system? Because that's what we are currently voting for over and over and over again, and the longer it persists, the more of it we're voting for and what's worse - we know it.
And this is the moment in time when we so desperately political support for an alternative vision that the NDP has chosen to deny their own roots in hopes of being mistaken for the other parties.
Because it's only a word, right?
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