I don't set my alarm clock very often, but somehow yesterday morning it went off at 7am, and my dark, peaceful bedroom was infiltrated by this:

We stand on the cusp of one of the bleakest periods in human history, when the bright lights of a civilization blink out, and we descend for decades, if not centuries, into barbarity... As long as the mass of bewildered and frightened people, fed electronic images that permit them to perpetually hallucinate, exist in this state of barbarism, they may periodically strike out with a blind fury against increased state repression, growing poverty, and food shortages, but they will lack the ability and self confidence to challenge, in big and small ways, the structures of control. The fantasy of widespread popular revolt and mass movements breaking the hegemony of the corporate state is just that---a fantasy.

I didn't budge for the next 40 minutes as the speaker kept it coming, hardcore. Turns out it was author and journalist Chris Hedges speaking to Veterans for Peace, a speech that was aired on KEXP's Mind Over Matters show (watch the full video here).

Hedges is the kind of thinker who makes me feel like a mental midget and naive optimist for being so obsessed with local, sustainable development. Undaunted, he spells out circumstances most of us would prefer to ignore, prospects likely to trump and negate our best intentions:

Too many opposition movements buy into the facade of electoral politics, parliaments, constitutions, bills of rights, lobbying, and the appearance of a rational economy. The levers of power have been so contaminated that the needs and voices of citizens have become irrelevant, and the election of Barack Obama was yet another triumph of propaganda over substance, and a skillful manipulation and betrayal of the public by the mass media. We mistook style and ethnicity, an advertising tactic pioneered by the United Colors of Benetton and Calvin Klein, for progressive politics and genuine change... Obama, now a global celebrity, is a brand... The Obama campaign was named Advertising Age's marketer of the year for 2008, and edged out runners up Apple and Zappos. Take it from the professionals: Brand Obama is a marketer's dream. President Obama does one thing, and brand Obama gets you to believe another.

Last I checked, criticizing Obama still doesn't qualify as polite liberal dinner conversation. Nor does this:

We can march in Copenhagen, we can join Bill McKibben's valiant worldwide day of climate protests, we can compost in our back yards, and hang our laundry out to dry, we can write letters to our elected officials, and vote for Barack Obama. But the power elite is impervious to the charade of democratic participation. Power is in hands of moral and intellectual trolls, who are ruthlessly creating a system of neofeudalism, and killing the ecosystem that sustains the human species.

Want more?

A self regulating market, Karl Polanyi wrote in 1944, turns human beings and the natural environment into commodities, a situation the ensures the destruction, of both society and the natural world. A society that no longer recognizes that nature and human life have a sacred dimension and intrinsic value beyond monetary value commits collective suicide. Such societies cannabalize themselves until they die. And that is what we are undergoing.

At this point you may be thinking, okay okay, I get it, but what the hell do we do about it? In a word, says Hedges, resist:

The indifference to the plight of others, and the supreme elevation of the self is what the corporate state seeks to instill in us. It uses fear, as well as hedonism to thwart human compassion. We will have to continue to battle the mechanisms of the dominant culture, if for no other reason than to preserve, through small, even tiny acts, our common humanity... Hope endures even in these often imperceptible acts of defiance. This defiance, this capacity to say no, is what the psychopathic forces in control of our power systems are seeking to eradicate. As long as we are willing to defy these forces, we have a chance, if not for ourselves, then at least for those who follow. And as long as we defy these forces, we remain alive. And for now that may be the only victory possible.