'Famed' N.Y. Times Reporter Tells Michael Moore Capitalism Is 'Driving Humanity's Downfall'

The leftist blog The Raw Story is hyping an exclusive: "Famed NYT reporter tells Michael Moore capitalism driving humanity’s downfall." It’s merely an outtake from Moore’s hostile movie Capitalism: A Love Story. Former New York Times reporter Chris Hedges, the radical author of books like "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America," warns of the coming eco-catastrophe.

But in one clip cut from the documentary -- which Moore provided exclusively to Raw Story -- he interviews Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter Chris Hedges, who explains how capitalism is actually contributing to the very downfall of the human race and the "degradation of the planet."

Hedges is not a scientist. He's been a foreign correspondent. It's anybody's guess how reporting from Africa or the Middle East makes you an authority on climate patterns:

"All sorts of people who have spent their lives studying climate change, from Bill McKibben on down, have warned us that we don't have a lot of time left," Hedges said. "So it's not just that capitalism has destroyed our economic system and hijacked our political system, but it literally is extinguishing the system that sustains life.

If that's not thwarted, soon -- and we already know that the planet will continue to heat up, no matter what we do, even if we were to stop 60 percent of our emissions now, which is sort of the minimum that most people are calling for....we will begin to see massive dislocations, environmental refugees, further depleting of natural resources. Overpopulation is also an issue. The UN estimates that by 2050 the size of the planet will double."

Hedges is currently a senior fellow at The Nation Institute, a spinoff of the hard-left magazine The Nation. That’s a comfortable anti-capitalist match. He was awarded an honorary doctorate along with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright last May  from a Unitarian Universalist seminary, the Starr King School for the Ministry, in Berkeley, California.

Hedges recently wrote that Ralph Nader and Cynthia McKinney were right about Barack Obama being part of the corporate state, and that the time has come to support third-party candidates like Nader for the White House. 

If the New York Times thinks it's fair to associate the tea-party movement with its most radical elements, can we do the same with them?