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The Current Transcript for February 17, 2016

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

[Music: theme]

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

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Sid’s glass of beer just fell from his hand and Rishi says it was the oddest thing he's ever seen. He asked Sid is everything okay and Sid said no, no, it's fine, I just let go.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: It was such a small thing dropping that beer glass. But it was also a sign that something was very wrong and within hours Sid Gupta's life would change forever, as friends and family scattered across the globe were called together to make decisions about surgery, about his brain, about his very life. What they would learn and experience has lessons for us all. Today we bring you the compelling story of one man whose unexpected stroke at the age of 30 took everyone who loved him into territory they'd never expected, Saving Sid in half an hour. Also today, the S word.

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You call yourself a Democratic Socialist? How can any kind of Socialist win a general election in the United States? We're going to win, first we're going to explain what Democratic Socialism is.

AMT: Bernie Sanders bid for the Democratic Presidential nomination is peppered with the unapologetic declaration that he is a socialist. It is creating real debate inside the party, generating gratitude among long-time socialists and incredulity among others. In an hour Chris Hedges and John Nichols debate the merits of Sanders’ Socialist Revolution. But we begin with the joys of a mosquito apocalypse.

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Let's try for a moment to imagine a world without mosquitoes. No Malaria, no Yellow Fever, no Dengue Fever. A world without mosquitoes sounds like it doesn't suck.

AMT: There has never been much love for the mosquito, the only creature responsible for more deaths of humans, than humans. And now with Zika Virus threatening a growing number of countries, the chorus clamoring to wipe out the mosquito is even louder. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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Zika virus renews calls to eradicate disease-carrying mosquitoes

Guests: Jo Lines, Phil Lounibos, Melanie Challenger, Bryan Giordano

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[mosquito buzzing]

West Nile Virus was first detected here in Hamilton County last week [voice trails off] 80 percent of malaria cases are in sub-Saharan Africa [mosquito buzzing]… This all started in Brazil but now 21 countries have confirmed cases of the Zika Virus.

[slapping]

AMT: Well, wouldn't it be nice at times such as these to just pick up a giant flyswatter and be done with a mosquito for good. As the Zika Virus spreads mosquito to human across Latin America with an apparent link to a wave of birth defects, it has never been clearer that mosquitoes are more than merely an annoying past. The billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates has dubbed them the deadliest creatures on Earth, responsible for nearly three-quarters of a million deaths every year, mostly due to Malaria. But it is the spread of Zika that has people talking seriously about the notion of wiping mosquitoes out, or at least certain species of mosquito. Jo Lines has thought a lot about this, he is a Reader of Malaria Control and Vector Biology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. And we have reached Jo Lines in London England, hello.

JO LINES: Hi.

AMT: Is it time to wipe mosquitoes off the face of the earth?

JO LINES: I think it's true that we have been reprehensively complacent about the spread of these two species of Aedes mosquitoes, Aedes Aegypti and now Aedes Albopictus, this is the Asian Tiger mosquito. We just sit back and watch them and sort of struggle against them with little local measures and well actually I was thinking about this about a year ago when Chikungunya was spreading through the Caribbean. Dreadful epidemic in the Caribbean and that too came with, we'd underestimated it because it's a non-fatal virus. But it too came with unexpectedly common and severe side effects. And now comes Zika and all of this attributable to the one mosquito which we already know is dangerous for Yellow Fever, for Dengue.

AMT: It's an invasive species isn't it?

JO LINES: That's right. It's just like the Norwegian rat, it's just like lots of other things that we have spread with us to places where those things cause a lot of damage because they're not part of the local ecology. And yes it's time we turned our attention to being okay we say okay enough is enough. Are we going to deal with each of these viruses? In turn how many different vaccines are you going to need? Or are we going to say, actually if we put our minds to it we don't have the technology yet, but we could get the technology that would bring this mosquito to extinction.

AMT: Are we really talking about the two kinds of mosquitoes you mentioned?

JO LINES: Yes. The point about Aedes Aegypti as a single target to start with is that, as far as we know it is the one thing everywhere. So if we were to find a really good, well reproducible way of attacking it as a species that would be of wider application.

AMT: There are entomologists who think that the eradication of certain species of mosquito would simply not work, and that there are more effective and maybe less dramatic ways to fight mosquito borne illnesses. I have a clip I'd like to play for you. Phil Lounibos is a professor at the University of Florida's Medical Entomology Department. In their lab he says that we have tried to eliminate the species of mosquitoes linked to Zika before in the 50's, and it didn't work.

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It was the difficult biology of the species which is invasive all over the world, and is a hitchhiker of humans. It is in domestic environments where its eggs can resist desiccation for not only months but even years at a time. So giving it a biological advantage for hiding out is invasive because it is rapidly transported by humans from one place to another. So if one is able to even quash it locally, you can be absolutely sure that it will be reintroduced. So I think it's a pipe dream.

AMT: Okay, well, Jo Lines, he thinks it's a pipe dream. What do you say?

JO LINES: But he's saying yes. He says we needed it in the fifties. And he said it didn't work. Well. Yeah. The people I speak to seem to think it didn't work because we actually lost heart. It was working. And we were making good progress. The mosquito was in retreat, when the program was cancelled.

AMT: What are some of the proposed methods that could be used to combat these particular species?

JO LINES: Apart from anything else, one of the things that we have succeeded with Agricultural insects, we made factories making millions, hundreds of millions of sterile males of these flies. That would then mate with the wild females and cause them to lay eggs that don’t hatch, gradually drive the population down.

AMT: We know that the research is going on to do that kind of genetic modification of the males.

JO LINES: The genetic modification is a kind of shortcut to that. But that's a very ordinary thing, that if we had the factories, we know we could, we have that technology now. We don't have to wait for a new tool to do it. There are people who say oh well look, actually it's just so difficult. It's more difficult to grow mosquitoes by the hundred million than it is to grow those other things. And that I think may be true, but put it like this, I think that if we were serious in adding up all the money that spent controlling these mosquitoes in North America and South America and South Asia, Southeast Asia, East Asia, throughout the tropics. All that money in all those countries adds up to quite a lot of power to eliminate, if we were ready to make it work in a concerted fashion.

AMT: Well, given the threat posed by Zika, how should global health authorities and governments then be trying to fight it in your view?

JO LINES: What I'm suggesting is not that we should not to do this short term management and efforts to control local transmission that are going on now. We do need to do that. Look in the long, long, long run, as development continue, we're going to have to continue those short term defensive management measures for ever and ever. Are we? At what point how many more new viruses do we need before we say, okay let's start with this if we can't do it with this, we can’t so it with anything.

AMT: Jo Lines, thanks for your thoughts on this.

JO LINES: Thank you.

AMT: Jo Lines is a Reader in Malaria Control in Vector Biology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, we reached him in London England. Well it may be hard to think of a mosquito as anything other than an annoyance or a danger, but our next guest says we need to consider the value of life, even when talking about that little irritating insect. Melanie Challenger is an Environmental Historian and writer, and the author of On Extinction: How We Became Estranged From Nature. Melanie Challenger joins us from Cromarty in the United Kingdom, hello.

MELANIE CHALLENGER: Hi there.

AMT: What are your thoughts about the idea of eliminating certain species of mosquitoes?

MELANIE CHALLENGER: Yeah, well, the first thing I want to be absolutely clear about is that as an environmentalist you can sometimes come into fire for arguing that the value of life are somehow less important than the rest of nature or that you're not pro humanity which is absolutely not the case in any good environmentalist. And so with this particular situation, with the disease bearing mosquito, I think it's, for me as an individual, the claims that we make as a species that the gains that we would get from this, with the eradication of the mosquito means that certainly it should be out there for debate as an option available to us. When I've argued for caution and for the idea of the broader sort of sanctity of the value of nature, what I'm really talking about there is the people. When we talk about genetically modifying a species, when we talk about a complete extinction of a species which are quite difficult ideas to get our heads around actually and very difficult to be absolutely sure of what the consequences of something like that would be. Many people will have an instinctive sense of caution. Now that could be an [indecipherable] feeling that all species have a right to life, regardless of how small it might be in comparison with our own. But it is also just the fact that our brains the lighting up with a sense that there could be unforeseen environmental consequences for even the best [indecipherable].

AMT: I want to explore that with you then. What do we need to think about because as you point out there are advantages to human life, if the mosquitoes are killing as many as 750,000 people a year, but what do we have to think about when it comes to consequences that we might not be able to see?

MELANIE CHALLENGER: So in trying to look at Zika, Malaria and the mosquito and in specific terms, it's obviously the mosquito is the host for the virus. We can’t absolutely be sure but we can make best guesses that the viruses might not go elsewhere, or there may be unforeseen circumstance. That is possible. It is within the range of possibility. Although, I know the scientists involved are doing their very, very best to mitigate that. There's also consequences for the species that may consume mosquitoes, so ecosystem consequences that we hope would be small and that people would take that into consideration, but we can't be completely sure about. We have got things terribly wrong in the past. On the very large scale the farm in China being the obvious example of the cautionary tale, but on very small scales where we've put in a species to eradicate something and that has upset the balance and that's where…

AMT: Let me stop you there because the China example is worth mentioning. This is under Mao, the sparrow. Am I right? Trying to get rid of the sparrow?

MELANIE CHALLENGER: Yes well there were lots of measures that they undertook to try to manage agriculture better and feed people better, the large numbers of people and. And the great sparrow program was to remove the sparrow but it had various knock on effects in terms of the crops and crop failures and so it had the opposite effect of what they'd hoped would happen and in…

AMT: They got locusts right, because the sparrows would have eaten the bugs?

MELANIE CHALLENGER: They would have done, exactly. We had something on a very small scale like that in Britain. They want to get rid of sparrows as well and what happened was that the Cabbage White Butterfly Caterpillar expanded very rapidly and so it became part of why we in Britain also put protective measures for farm land birds like Sparrows. So we can get these things horribly wrong, but I know that many of the sorts of individuals who are working on this kind of science they know that, and they are endeavoring to be fair to try to ensure that in this case that sort of thing wouldn’t happen. But people should heed that feeling of caution because we can get it very wrong with nature. More broadly as well I think that the more important point for me is that I think it is necessary now in the age where we do have great biodiversity loss and in the age in which the sorts of pressures that we are under, we are placing on the environment are sort of turning back onto us. I’m talking about climate change and so forth. When we are looking at really important cases of human need, Malaria really is a disease not of the mosquito, in many ways it's a disease of poverty. It was largely eliminated from Europe and America through better housing, through better infrastructure, through development. And so that's what we of course would all hope for the countries, in particular Africa, the continent of Africa that are enduring the suffering from these diseases, that their standard of living will rise to match those of other places in the world. That's the fair and better future that we all hope for and science is a hugely important part of that.

AMT: We have to leave it there but that's a very important note to end on, thank you Melanie Challenger.

MELANIE CHALLENGER: Okay.

AMT: Melanie Challenger Environmental Historian and writer, author of On Extinction: How We Became Estranged From Nature. She joined us from Cromarty, in the UK. Well it may be the frozen middle of the winter here in Canada but mosquito season will be upon most of this country before we know it. And many Canadians may be swatting at mosquitoes with extra vengeance this year. Bryan Giordano is a PhD candidate in biotechnology at Brock University. He will soon be studying Zika in Canadian mosquitoes, and we have reached him in St. Catharines, Ontario, hello.

BRYAN GIORDANO: Good morning.

AMT: Well first of all, you're going to be studying Zika in Canadian mosquitoes meaning you're going to be looking to see if it's there?

BRYAN GIORDANO: No. We're not going to be looking to see if it's there. What we're going to be testing is we’re going to be testing whether or not Ontario mosquito species are able to transmit Zika Virus. So what this means is we’ll be collecting mosquitoes from the field bringing them into our containment lab, infecting them with a strain of Zika Virus that we’ll be receiving from the Public Health Agency of Canada, and then doing those further studies to determine which mosquito species are competent vectors of this virus.

AMT: And you'll make sure they don't get loose?

BRYAN GIORDANO: Absolutely. Containment level three has extra levels and extra protocols to ensure that.

AMT: Well what do you think of what you just heard, this idea of eradicating certain species of mosquito?

BRYAN GIORDANO: Oh, I think it's a very interesting topic. My personal opinion, eradicating certain species a mosquito would be great, for example those invasive species. So we've heard Aedes Aegypti, Aedes Albopictus, there's also a third species that we're dealing with here in Ontario Aedes Japonicus, and this species has become relatively abundant over the last decade or so in Ontario. So I think it would be great to remove these invasive species from our natural fauna…

AMT: Let me just stop you. What is that last one, Aedes Japonicus, what does it carry?

BRYAN GIORDANO: Aedes Japonicus has been implicated in West Nile Virus transmission and it's one of a few mosquito species that we have kind of put on our list for Zika.

AMT: Obviously there are fears, you're checking into the possibility that mosquitoes in the South can keep moving North or the diseases they carry can keep moving North?

BRYAN GIORDANO: Absolutely. With global climate changes, the trends are showing more and more mosquito species are able to survive further north. And we've seen this in the literature with a number of different mosquito species. That Aedes Japonicus is one example and Aedes Albopictus is actually another concern of ours that we've been we've been monitoring closely in Ontario. We don't have any breeding populations of the Albopictus mosquito, but we have collected a handful of specimens over the years.

AMT: Are there ways to fight this without eradication, are there are just ways to keep the population down?

BRYAN GIORDANO: Like we've mentioned earlier, it can be very difficult with some of these species. They do exploit a number of different niches, they tend to travel with humans, so even if you do have local control, they may be coming in and may be reintroduced. It's also interesting I mean each female the mosquito can lay anywhere between 100 and 300 eggs. So, for total eradication to be possible, you would have to basically eliminate every single mosquito, you would not allow even one or two to survive. So it can be very difficult.

AMT: When you when you're looking at this, what about other tropical diseases that could come to Canada? Have you ever seen Malaria or have we really managed to eradicate that in North America?

BRYAN GIORDANO: Historically we have had endemic cases of Malaria. Our Anopheles mosquitoes in Ontario are able to pick up and transmit Malaria. However, this was very long ago. We live in a very closed door, closed window society, so we're not dealing with a lot of the same things that individuals in third world countries are dealing with. There was a big Chikungunya scare last summer or last winter in the Caribbean. We haven't had any locally acquired transmission of Chikungunya. We haven't had any locally acquired transition of Dengue. We believe the risk will be similar. We will have a very low risk of locally acquired cases of the Zika Virus.

AMT: But it's interesting how you're taking this seriously enough to try to figure out what might be the potential for Zika coming so that you can actually confront it before it ever gets here?

BRYAN GIORDANO: Absolutely, yeah. We're taking a very proactive stance on this. Zika Virus is relatively new to the world, so there's not a lot of research, there's not a lot of data out there. And we really I mean we really need to know, there are there are 67 different mosquito species in Ontario and it would be great if we could narrow down a list of species that are potentially able to transmit Zika.

AMT: Well, most of us have never even heard of Zika until you know several weeks ago. When did you decide to start studying this?

BRYAN GIORDANO: Well, Zika has been around since the fifties, but you’re absolutely right, it hit the media a few months ago. We decided just not long ago, actually last month, but we've been dealing, we have very close ties with the Public Health Agency of Canada here at Brock University and we've been dealing with them, working with them on our project.

AMT: Okay, so you're quick on the draw. Thank you, Bryan for speaking with me today.

BRYAN GIORDANO: Thank you for having me.

AMT: It'll be interesting to know what you find. We will have to come back to you. That is a Bryan Giordano. He's a PhD candidate in Biotechnology at Brock University. He joined us from St. Catharines Ontario. What do you think, should we target certain species of mosquito for extinction? Are there potential ripple effects that could be too dangerous that we don't even know about? Let us know what you think. Our website is cbc.ca/the current. You can click on the Contact link from there. We are on Facebook and of course we're on Twitter @thecurrentcbc.

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After stroke, family struggles with decision to remove part of son's brain

Guests: Isha Gupta, JANET THOMSON

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Hello, I'm Anna Maria Tremonti, and you're listening to The Current.

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AMT: One of the biggest questions a family can ever face, and for the Gupta family, it came right out of the blue.

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AMT: When Sidharth Gupta suffered a stroke two years ago, it took hours for anyone to recognize just what was happening to him; perhaps that's because he was just 30 years old. Sid, as he is known to his friends, was a healthy, energetic 30-year-old working hard at his Toronto advertising job, enjoying his off time, as well. But when the stroke was finally diagnosed, Sid's family and friends had to face the fact they would never truly see the Sid they knew again, and they had to make one of the most difficult choices any family can make: deciding whether there comes a point when a life is no longer worth saving. Sid did survive the experience; he lives in India today with his father. And his story is the subject of a special online news feature called Saving Sid at cbc.ca. We're going to link to it from our site, cbc.ca/thecurrent. To bring us the story, I'm joined by Sid’s sister, Isha Gupta, who is in Cardiff, Wales. And joining me in Toronto is the CBC's JANET THOMSON, who co-produced this feature, Saving Sid. Hello to you both.

ISHA GUPTA: Hi there.

JANET THOMSON: Hello, Anna Maria.

AMT: Isha, let's start, but I just want to know a little bit more about Sid. What was he like before the stroke?

ISHA GUPTA: He was a very fun-loving guy, young guy, loved to be with his friends, loved to party. He was aiming really high, he was a very ambitious, very opportunist guy. Nothing could stop him, really. He was good, he was good with his family, good with his friends, and just fond of life, so as to say.

AMT: And Janet, what have you been able to piece together about what happened to him that night two years ago?

JANET THOMSON: Well, in speaking to to Sid's friends and colleagues, Sid had been out that night at a birthday party at a downtown club in Toronto. And he was just doing his normal thing, having a couple of drinks, when his friend Rishi, who was actually celebrating his birthday that night. Rishi tells me that Sid’s glass of beer just fell from his hand, and Rishi says it was the oddest thing he's ever seen. And he asked Sid, is everything okay, and Sid said, no, no, it's fine, I just let go. And then Rishi went on and partied. I guess Sid went and got another beer. Rishi really didn't seem for the rest of the evening, and as he was leaving, he looked around and didn't see Sid, so he left. Thought Sid gone home. But it turns out that Sid was actually lying on the bathroom floor of the club, and it was the club bouncer who discovered him there

AMT: At 3:00 AM.

JANET THOMSON: Yes.

AMT: Now, that's when they found him and he was rushed to hospital, but he had symptoms. the day before and earlier that day. What, in retrospect, what were those symptoms?

JANET THOMSON: Well, I learned this from from Sid’s other friend, with whom he spoke every day. Sid texted his friend that morning to say, I can't eat my breakfast, it keeps falling out of my mouth. And his friend said, oh Sid, that sounds weird. You’d better see someone about that. So Sid thought, okay, well, I might. He went to work, he didn't want this, whatever was happening to him, to come in the way of his job, but when he got to work, his boss said, you’d better get to a doctor. So he went to walk-in clinic.

AMT: What was going on? What was…?

JANET THOMSON: Sid told them about the food, and said that, falling out of his mouth, and said that he had a pain in his in his arm.

AMT: Okay, and he thought it was a muscle strain or something.

JANET THOMSON: That's what the doctor told him at the walk-in clinic.

AMT: Okay, we now know it was a stroke. How did you find out about Sid’s stroke, Isha?

ISHA GUPTA: His friend, the same friend that Janet mentioned, he called me up and just said that Sidharth is in hospital. He didn't really say anything, and he just said, the next voice that you’re going to hear, it will be the doctors who will explain to you what happened to him. So when I spoke to the doctor, it was then that they told he had a stroke and that they needed to do a lifesaving surgery on him pretty immediately.

AMT: You and your mom had to talk to the doctor from London, right?

ISHA GUPTA: Yes.

AMT: And you had to consent to the surgery. Was it you?

ISHA GUPTA: Well, my mom did. So basically, the doctor...sorry, I just kind of went back to that day. But what I understood from the whole conversation that I had with the doctor was that there was something that was needed to be done immediately in order to save his life. So my mother, she understood that it was pretty serious, so she spoke to the doctor for a few minutes, and then she gave her consent to go through the first surgery.

AMT: Janet, how did you come to meet Sid and his family?

JANET THOMSON: Sid was at Toronto Western Hospital, and that's where I took my father after he had a stroke, in April 2014. My father was, he was 88 years old, and his stroke was devastating to my family. And we didn’t know what was going on, it was a very, it's a very crazy time when someone you love has a stroke, because there's so many unknowns. And almost instantly, you're dealing with someone else but in the same shape, and looks the same as they always looked. But there's something missing. My father was taken to a room with two beds, semi-private, I guess, with a curtain down the middle. And he was sort of stabilizing a bit. But I heard Hindi music coming from behind the curtain, and I looked around, and I saw an older gentleman sitting in a chair, and in the bed was the most gorgeous, handsome young man I think I've ever seen. And that was Sid. And he looked at me, and he just captured my attention immediately. He gave a half smile, and I just wanted to know more about him immediately.

AMT: That man, of course, is your dad, eh, Isha? He was there in the room.

ISHA GUPTA: Yes.

AMT: Yeah, and maybe we’re shooting ahead a bit, because after that first surgery, Sid was in danger, and doctors talked to his friends about a second surgery. One of Sid's friends taped that conversation. Let's hear a bit of that recording.

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VOICE 1: Just trying to figure out whether he needs to go back for surgery again. If the swelling persists, he will need to go for a surgery to take out some of the brain tissue that’s swelling. It entails a lobectomy, so a part of the brain tissue has to be removed.

[monitor beeps]

VOICE 2: Uh-huh.

VOICE 3: What effects does it have on him later on?

VOICE 1: That I can’t say for sure. It may have some effects and deficits, it may have.

VOICE 4: Do we know if the swelling’s better or worse or the same since the first CT yesterday?

VOICE 1: So, the swelling’s gotten significantly worse.

AMT: Isha, were you there at that time?

ISHA GUPTA: No, I wasn't, no.

AMT: What do you think as you hear that now?

ISHA GUPTA: While I’m listening to it again, I’ve got goosebumps. I feel like my whole body’s shut down again. I’ve, obviously, this is not the first time that I’m listening to it, but every time that I listen to it, it kind of has the same effect on me.

AMT: Janet they're taking a piece of his brain right away.

JANET THOMSON: Right, so this is the second surgery. The brain flap, or the a skull flap had already been taken away, and now they're going into the brain to take out a portion of the brain so that the whole brain does not swell and die. Into the brain stem.

AMT: Janet, a lot of families are faced with a decision like that. What stands out for you in what this family faced?

JANET THOMSON: Part of it is the youthfulness of Sid, 30-year-old with great ambition, a breadwinner in the family. Part of it is the distance; they're all in disparate parts of the world. Sid's father was on his way from India at the time of the second surgery. He didn't even know there was a second surgery until he got to Toronto.

AMT: And we are talking a dramatic surgery. In your online story, basically, you show him but you also show a drawing. It's literally, they hollow out a piece so that there's, where we have a rounded skull, there is a dent, a very pronounced dent.

JANET THOMSON: Correct. So the dent comes partly because a piece of the actual hard skull was removed in the first surgery. In the second surgery, the flap that had replaced the hard skull is lifted up, and then at that point, Dr. Bernstein, the second surgeon, described in his notes that the brain exploded out of the skull. Which indicates that there was so much swelling, that it just, it could not be contained inside of his skull.

AMT: Isha, this is still really hard to talk about, isn’t it?

ISHA GUPTA: Yeah.

AMT: After this, your brother, you saw your brothers file. And you saw on the word futile.

ISHA GUPTA: Uh-huh.

AMT: What did that mean?

ISHA GUPTA: Well, I later on found out lit it means something, something like kind of useless, something that doesn't really have a point to kind of do, or something that's useless, in other words.

AMT: And what did you think at the time when you saw that? Did you think that it was right that they did the surgery?

ISHA GUPTA: Yes, because for them, it was more like that although they knew that it might not yield any results, but if they didn't do anything, that he's going to go anyways. So if they did it, even if there was very little chances that might still work, then they kind of, you know, gave that chance to Sid. Because if they didn't do it, or if the surgery did not work, then it would have kind of come back to the same results. So for them to kind of, even if it had like, one percent chances, or one one percent hope, so as to say, they still went ahead and did it, so, yeah.

AMT: And what is Sidharth like now?

ISHA GUPTA: He's obviously, he's nowhere as he was. He's a different person. I mean, I compare him to my three-year-old son, to be very honest. But then, there are glimpses of how he was. There is a little, sometimes, there is a little stubbornness that we can see in him coming back that he had before. And so he's obviously not anywhere near to what he was before, but he's much better than what we had hoped for, or what the doctors prepared us for.

AMT: Janet, this is one of the things you look at in your piece, which is the decisions that people are forced to make as they try to grapple with this. We've got a clip. Judy Illes is a professor of neurology at the University of British Columbia, holds the Canada Research Chair in neuroethics. She's examined the ethics around the very type of surgery that Sid underwent. This is what she told us about that question of futility.

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Futility is anything but a black and white term. You know, a very old person who suffers, who has a really bad medical history, chronic disease, neurologic or not, and suffers a stroke, for example, there, an aggressive intervention might truly be futile, the likely of outcome is so poor that there really is futility there. In the case of a 30-year-old with no prior medical history, it would be very difficult to assert a black and white call of futility in in that context.

AMT: Janet, what do you think of Judy Illes’ approach to that question of futility?

JANET THOMSON: Well, I thought about this quite a bit and I learned that futility actually goes back to the early days of medicine in ancient Greece where it's described as if someone has overcome by their disease or by their illness, then - they use the term overmastered by the disease - if you are overmastered by the disease, then it is futile to try and save the life. And I guess that really is a matter of, you know, whether you want to have someone there to carry on their life in whatever state that might be or whether you're prepared to let them go and let them go fade away, remembering them as they were. And there's no one answer. It's a tough question and I know that Isha did struggle with that herself.

AMT: And it's interesting that you were doing this story because your own father had a stroke. We just hear a doctor kind of separating it by age. It's not even for a lot of people, that is not the issue either, is it?

JANET THOMSON: No. You want to keep your loved one with you as long as you can. If you feel that there's any semblance of them still there, you are compelled to want them to stay with you.

AMT: You spoke to many specialists in producing the story and a comment that really struck me was something that Dr. Tim Jones said. He's a consultant, neurosurgeon at St. George's Hospital in London, England. Let's listen to what he told you about research into decompression surgery, the kind that was performed on Sid Gupta.

SOUNDCLIP

The conclusions of all of these studies are that decompression very, very good at keeping patients alive. So, if you were to take a hundred patients who don't have the decompression and a hundred that do, those hundred that do more of them will be alive than the other hundred, but the ones that survive obviously have a poorer neurological function. So, just to summarize it, basically, what decompression does is it generates lots of disabled people opposed to lots of dead people.

AMT: Generates a lot of disabled people as opposed to lots of dead people. That's a very powerful statement. What did you take from that?

JANET THOMSON: Well, Dr. Tim Jones did-- He's not familiar with this particular case, but he is familiar with these types of cases, with decompression and allowing the brain to have a place to swell. He said that doctors don't want to see dead bodies stacking up on their files. They want to have success stories and a success story could be seen as allowing the patient to live with the hopes that there might be some recovery, rather than letting them go, letting them die knowing that that is the end.

AMT: And I guess we should be clear, when it comes to these kinds of decisions the person about whom the decision is being made cannot be part of this. They are in a state that they cannot. So this is always about other people deciding.

JANET THOMSON: That is the horrible irony of all of this.

AMT: Isha, is there any way to guess what Sid could be thinking now about his life and?

ISHA GUPTA: I think I have a very strong feeling in all my conversations with him what goes on on a daily basis that I think he understands what’s happened to him, but then gradually I also see a few clues which tell me that he's probably accepted what's happened, you know, because there have been many times--When I visited him few months back and just while saying goodbye I started crying and I was crying on his shoulder and I saw his hand kind of patted me on my head as if, it’s okay. No need to cry. I'm fine. I could see that gesture, I could see his expression. So my very strong gut feeling is that I think he knows what happened and how his life has changed. But then I also see a certain kind of acceptance and a certain kind of moving forward attitude that, yeah, I what’s happened with me, but it's okay.

AMT: When you say you able to have-- Like, you talk to him even when you're in the UK?

ISHA GUPTA: Oh, yes. I speak to him almost on a daily basis.

AMT: And how does he-- Can he communicate a little bit back with you?

ISHA GUPTA: Oh, he can’t speak, but then he nods his head. I would ask him questions. He would say yes, no. He would nod his head. So he speaks to me with gestures, yeah.

AMT: And so when he patted you when you were crying was a real-- That was something from, like, you recognize that's your brother, huh?

ISHA GUPTA: Yes. Yes. I did. Even a few days back, just a couple of days back actually. Because it's February and February is always tough on me. Last February was very tough on me and as the date is approaching I can see myself not having to be in a good place. So, I was just speaking to him a few days back and then while speaking to him I just couldn't stop myself again and once again I saw him in his gestures, like asking me what’s happened? What’s the matter? It’s okay. You know. Just ignore it. So, yes, it was very, very good and sad at the same time to have that kind of feeling coming back that, yes, he is there somewhere. He's still there somewhere.

AMT: What would you tell families going through these kinds of very difficult life and death decisions, Isha?

ISHA GUPTA: To be very honest, my whole take on this now is that it depends on many, many, many factors, as the doctors and the specialists you’ve just heard, because my brother was young. So when it comes to other families I think they just have to see that the circumstances around it and the situation around it and they really feel, because at the end of the day, yes, it's the patient’s life, I understand that, but it's also the family who has to live with that decision. So, I know, for example, had we not taken that decision and if Sidarth were to pass away before the second surgery, all my life I would have wondered, did he ever have a chance? Like, what if would have done the second surgery? So, as my own personality, I know I would have always wondered about it. So there is no really right or wrong answer. You just have to see what the circumstances is, what medical professionals are telling you. And we always got told that the recovery subjective. It could be one year and that you might recover, it could be another ten years, so if anything subjective, we wanted to take that chance.

AMT: Janet, Canada’s in the midst of reviewing end of life care. We see this story-- so many different things to take away from this. There are people who might say, oh, we should have this discussion and then, you know, don't do this kind of surgery. At the same time, what our impressions of someone might be in the abstract are not the same as-- You know, we just heard Isha talking about her real connection with her brother still. What should we think about all this? What do you think?

JANET THOMSON: Well, faced with this decision, had it been my father who was in the same state that Sid was – and it turns out his swelling was not as bad, my father’s swelling did actually dissipate on its own - and so we were offered the decompression surgery. We declined and eventually the swelling did go down. And we're very grateful to have my father around for another year and a half. He just passed away this September. The idea of letting him go even as - he turned 89 after his stroke and he died at the age of 90 – but the idea of letting him go even at that age was very, very, very difficult. I don't think there's any one answer. I think it really is subjective as Isha said. And, certainly, if this were my son or my brother as a young person like this I think it would have been unthinkable to let him go. I think I would actually agree with the surgeons on this one. Futility is something that is hard to measure. You don't know how much of the brain is actually still there, still able to make some connections.

AMT: But Isha, your brother is now in Delhi and the decisions that were made were the right ones for you.

ISHA GUPTA: For us--

AMT: And for him.

ISHA GUPTA: Yes. For us and for him for now, yes, for sure because there are hundreds of things that the doctors told me that he won’t be able to do. But for us even the fact that he's able to chew his own food and eat his own food with himself, oh, you know, brush his own teeth, for example, for us those are things which considered as bonus. As for the doctors, he wasn't being able to do any of that and they also prepared us that he might not be able to eat properly, we might have to feed him through the feeding tube all his life. But here he is eating his own food, swallowing his own food with no problem. He's even making jokes sometimes when he’s in that state of mind and he still kind of makes fun of me in his own little way, so for us, yes. I would have regretted not having that surgery done, seeing him after two years now.

AMT: It's so important to hear your story, Isha. Thank you.

ISHA GUPTA: No problem. Thank you very much.

AMT: And, Janet, thank you.

JANET THOMSON: Thank you very much, Anna Maria. Thanks, Isha.

ISHA GUPTA: Thank you, Janet.

AMT: Isha Gupta is Sid’s sister. She’s in Cardiff, Wales. JANET THOMSON is a CBC producer in Toronto, co-author of Saving Sid. You want to see what Janet and her co-producer Andre Mayer put together in telling Sid’s story, including really fascinating graphics to explain those different surgeries, we have linked to it from our site cbc.ca/thecurrent. You've got to check it out online. If you have faced the same kind of decisions that we've been talking about, we also would like to hear from you. Go to our website, click on Contact, send us an e-mail. Tweet us @thcurrentCBC or add to the conversation by posting on the story on our Facebook page and stay with us.

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Bernie's Sanders's socialist revolution is a sham, says author Chris Hedges

Guests: Mimi Soltysik, Chris Hedges, John Nichols

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Hello, I'm Anna Maria Tremonti, this is The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

BERNIE SANDERS: People say, are you with democratic socialist, I say, yes. I do.

AMT: The 2016 road to the White House has been filled with plenty of twists and turns. Going back to just a year ago, it would have been hard to believe that an avowed socialist could be giving Hillary Clinton a run for her money on the Democratic ticket. That is just what Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders is doing, and as much as candidates and pundits on the right are taking glee in describing Mr. Sanders as a socialist, he seems more than happy to keep wearing the moniker.

SOUNDCLIP

BERNIE SANDERS: We have to ask ourselves, what does it mean to be a democratic socialist? What is that about? And what I do is look at countries around the world: often countries like Denmark, Norway, Finland, Scandinavia, Germany occasionally. And when I look at social democratic countries, this is what I see: I see in every major country on Earth, not just Scandinavia, health care is a right of all people. It’s no longer a debate. So you want to call me a democratic socialist because I believe that health care is a right, fine, call me a socialist. I accept it.

AMT: Well, that's a Bernie Sanders on a radio call-in show last year, and it seems his message is resonating with the electorate. After strong showings in Iowa and New Hampshire, all eyes will be on him as the Nevada primary takes place this weekend. So today, we're taking a look at the brand of democratic socialism Bernie Sanders is selling, and we're starting with Mimi Soltysik. He has an interesting perspective on the question, because he is also running for President of the United States, for the Socialist Party USA. Mr. Soltysik joins us from his home in Los Angeles. Hello.

MIMI SOLTYSIK: Hello.

AMT: As the presidential candidate for the Socialist Party USA, I think it's safe to call you a socialist.

MIMI SOLTYSIK: Yes, absolutely.

AMT: Do you think Bernie Sanders is right in calling himself a socialist?

MIMI SOLTYSIK: I mean, it's hard to say how he perceives himself. Generally, what we see him advocating is more of, he used the word social democracy. He seems to be advocating for more of a social democratic type of proposal. An expanded welfare state, you know, a stronger safety net, social safety net, things like that. What, I as a socialist, the first thing that comes to mind for me is worker control over the means of production, community control over the institutions that most directly affect our lives. So again, I can't say how he perceives himself, but the vision that I hear him sharing with folks sounds, you know, more of a social democratic vision.

AMT: And so, because he's advocating for what would be seen as dramatic reforms to the existing capitalist system, whereas you move away from the capitalist system altogether.

MIMI SOLTYSIK: We do seek the overthrow of the capitalist system. It does appear that what he's advocating is more reform to the capitalist system, and we see the capitalist system is being inherently racist, sexist, terrible for the climate, and when we hear talk about reforms within that system, in many ways it sounds like we're saying we're okay with the kinder, gentler, racism, sexism, imperialism, oppression. So there are some key distinctions to be made, I think.

AMT: Well and, we just heard in that clip, he was making a point of calling himself a democratic socialist. I have another clip of him, he was on Saturday Night Live earlier this month to point out that democratic socialism is different than old school socialism. Listen to this.

SOUNDCLIP

[Crowd roars]

BERNIE SANDERS: I am so sick of the one percent getting this preferential treatment.

[Crowd applause and cheers]

BERNIE SANDERS: [enunciating clearly and slowly] Enough is enough. We need to unite and work together if we’re all going to get through this.

VOICE 1: Sounds like socialism to me!

[Crowd laughs]

BERNIE SANDERS: Democratic socialism.

VOICE 1: Ah, what’s the difference?

BERNIE SANDERS: [exaggerates accent, dropping the H] Huge difference.

VOICE 1: [mimicking] Huge?

BERNIE SANDERS: [exaggerated accent] Huge.

[Crowd laughs]

AMT: Huge. And Mimi Soltysik, so when you look at the differences, just talk to me a little bit more, then, how people in your party perceive Bernie Sanders.

MIMI SOLTYSIK: I think, by and large, the perception is that he is advocating social democracy. It’s like a New Deal Democrat kind of proposal. I think his use of the word democratic socialism is, it's sort of a strategy to, I guess, to kind of create a separation from what people the US might see is being, you know, there is somewhat of a Cold War hangover here still with folks thinking of socialism in terms of Stalinism, and that sort of thing. But I don't think, I think his use of the word democratic socialism, it's just a way to try to distinguish himself from the perception that many folks still have about the Cold War era propaganda that they perceived. Stalinism and that sort of thing.

AMT: [interposing] Well--

MIMI SOLTYSIK: What we hear him putting forth is very much in line with the social democratic type proposal. And another thing, I think, I don't see and I don't think we see, imperialism or this support for Israel, as part of any sort of responsible democratic socialism or socialist program.

AMT: Okay, well I was just going to ask you about your own campaign. What has his campaign meant for the cause of socialism in the United States?

MIMI SOLTYSIK: The one thing I think it's done, first and foremost, is for the US left, it's really put folks on notice. I think that the US left, and by saying that, I don't mean the Democratic Party left, but the US left has to be prepared to engage in a dialogue, and perhaps to a greater extent than any time certainly in my lifetime. And, you know, to be able to have this discussion about what socialism means, how do we get there, and certainly, that floor has opened up quite a bit since he's been in the campaign.

AMT: Are you telling me he's helping your campaign, your cause?

MIMI SOLTYSIK: Well, he's certainly, that discussion has opened up tremendously. So in that regard, it's been it's been pretty extraordinary. The extent to which we're able to freely have that discussion about what socialism means, the number of folks who are curious about it, that has certainly opened up.

AMT: And so what are you hoping to accomplish with your own campaign?

MIMI SOLTYSIK: Well what we do, I mean, because the Socialist Party USA comes from the Socialist Party of America, the party of Eugene Debs, etcetera. It's got a tremendous history, but on a daily basis, the mainstream media is not, they're not banging down our door to find out what we're doing. And it until the general election pops up, and acknowledging that with the inclusion of Bernie Sanders into this election cycle, that focus and that attention is, it’s enhanced. So using that focus, and using these media opportunities, we're able to share this message of, how do we achieve that revolutionary transition to socialism? And for us, that means bottom up. It's not something that you can, that comes from Washington DC. This is something that happens through people's movements, and as we've been using the media to put forth that message, part of our strategy was, the hope was, is that people would be curious and they would contact the campaign. And as they did that, we would be able to help plug them into movement work on the ground, wherever they might live in the country.

AMT: Okay. So I'm going to pick up on what you're saying with our next guests, but thank you very much for speaking with me today.

MIMI SOLTYSIK: Thank you so much.

AMT: That is Mimi Soltysik, presidential candidate for the Socialist Party USA. He joined us from his home in Los Angeles. Well, his socialist pedigree may be up for debate, but there's no doubt that Bernie Sanders is a card-carrying member of the Democratic Party. And as many observers are fond of pointing out, the Democratic Party is often aligned with the very corporate entities Mr. Sanders says he wants to overhaul. So could a President Sanders really deliver on socialist ideals? Chris Hedges is not so sure. He's a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist; his most recent book is Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt. Chris Hedges joins us from Princeton, New Jersey. And we’re also joined by John Nichols, he’s an optimist on this one, I’m told. John Nichols is national affairs correspondent for The Nation magazine, and author of The S Word: A Short History of an American Tradition ... Socialism. John Nichols joins us from Madison, Wisconsin. Hello gentlemen.

CHRIS HEDGES: Hello, it’s good to be with you.

AMT: Well, welcome to both of you. Chris Hedges, let's start with you. In the past, you have spoken about the moral imperative to revolt in America, which is the topic of your latest book. Is the movement around Bernie Sanders what you envisioned?

CHRIS HEDGES: No. No effective revolt is going to be built within the confines of the Democratic Party. We have seen, you know, movements like this, you can go back to the 2008 election with Barack Obama. The Rainbow Coalition, which was built by Jesse Jackson in 1984, 1988. And what happens is that this movement ultimately gets folded into the deadly embrace of the Democratic establishment. The Clintons in 1992 rose to political promise, largely by dismantling the diversity that had been built by Jackson. Obama, who ran a very similar kind of populist campaign in 2008, betrayed his constituency. I think Sanders and Obama are very different political characters, I think Sanders has far more integrity than Obama. But he is playing a very duplicitous game. He has long worked as a Democrat, he has seniority, he campaigned in 1992 for Clinton, and 1996. And this was after Clinton had passed NAFTA, destroyed our welfare system, exploded the prison population. He has long been an obstacle to third party movements, in 2004 calling on Ralph Nader not to run. And I think that, without going into a long explanation of the corporate coup d’état that's taken place in the United States, the Democratic Party has served corporate interests for the last few decades as assiduously as the Republican Party. And he has said that, should Hillary Clinton be the nominee, and the party establishment is working overtime to make sure that happens. Remember that he got 60 percent of the vote in New Hampshire, but it looks like Clinton got more of the delegates because of the super-delegate system where the party hierarchy appoints people to the convention. And my fear is that he will, if Clinton is the nominee, and he has said as much, will funnel this energy back into the Democratic establishment and chant that mantra of the least worst.

AMT: Okay.

CHRIS HEDGES: That we have to vote for Clinton. And I think we have to build, and I was Ralph Nader’s speechwriter, I think we have to begin to build third party moments, as difficult and hard as that is given the obstacles thrown up in front of third party movements in the United States by the two parties.

AMT: Okay, well let's get John in on this, as well. What do you think, John Nichols? Is this Sanders campaign a revolution, is it a bit of a sellout?

JOHN NICHOLS: I don't think we know, and that's why I like to like to cover politics. What I can tell you is this. A year ago, we would have been having this conversation, at least not in any realistic sense. The notion that a democratic socialist, and I always disliked the term self-avowed, or, you know, avowed democratic socialist, because that's a that's a game American media plays that suggests that being a socialist or a democratic socialist or a social democrat or whatever is something you have to admit to, that you might be accused of it. That's how negative our media coverage has been, and how absurd our media coverage has been for so long. But the notion that a democratic socialist is competing seriously for the nomination of one of the two major parties in the United States - winning a primary, tying in caucuses, potentially winning more, and actually building a relatively muscular movement that does draw together a lot of folks who have been involved in non-party and coalition politics - that's a pretty amazing thing. And what I would suggest to you is this: our political parties are relatively fluid. And our political process, unfortunately, is not. And so there have been many efforts to build third party alternatives to the major parties, and I think I've celebrated all of them, and I continue to. In fact, I loved your interview that you just did. That was probably one of the better interviews with a Socialist Party nominee in the United States done in recent years. Unfortunately, it was done on Canadian radio.

AMT: I have to tell you, my background for Mr. Soltysik yesterday, there were just two little articles, and one of them was a high school newspaper article.

JOHN NICHOLS: Oh, it’s just astounding.

AMT: So, yeah, so, okay. Let's keep-- [laughs]

JOHN NICHOLS: So, yeah.

AMT: So yeah, there's not a lot of coverage in the US. Okay, keep going.

JOHN NICHOLS: Well yes, of course. And I love that intervention, that's exactly right. The coverage has been so absurd, and so awful. I have written a good deal over the years about the Socialist Party, and will continue to, as well as the other parties on the left, and even the right, that are trying to challenge the two party system. But what Sanders did was wrestle for a long time, and rather publically, with the question of whether he should run in the Democratic primaries. He chose to do so, I think because of a frustration with the process, not necessarily a full regard for the Democratic Party. He's in it, though, and what Chris says is legitimate. This fear that you steer this energy into a political party that then might reject it. That's a legitimate concern. By the same token, at the end of the day, I think that our political process is so constrained, so dysfunctional, that I'm sympathetic to any effort to open it up, to push the boundaries, from within the parties and from outside of them because, ultimately, in the United States, we have so many issues that have not been addressed. We haven't wrestled with some of the core concepts that are in play, and one of the barriers to that has been the S-word. The fact of the matter is, for a very long time, when anybody has suggested even a mild liberalism in the United States, they've been called a socialist, and somehow that’s supposed to shut things down.

AMT: No, and this is why this is very different. Let's just bring Chris back in here. Chris, you actually asked Bernie Sanders why he didn't run as an independent. What did he tell you?

CHRIS HEDGES: Well, Kshama Sawant and I, who did an event with him, asked, and he said, I don't want to end up like Ralph Nader. Which is a fair response when you look closely at what the establishment, and in particular, the Democratic Party, has done to Ralph Nader, who mounted certainly in 2000, the first credible modern third party movement. Which terrified the Democratic establishment. And Bernie understands very well how swiftly that establishment will turn you into a pariah. The Democrats, there's a kind of quid pro quo with Sanders in that he campaigns for major Democratic candidates, including in Vermont, and he's allowed to sit with a Democratic caucus, as Howard Dean said, he votes 98 percent of the time with the Democratic Party, he doesn't want to lose his seniority, and he doesn't want to lose his seat. Because if he defies the party, the party will walk into Vermont with their heavy machinery and attempt to take him down, although he's certainly a very popular Senator in Vermont. And so this was an acknowledgment of a political reality. However, I think that we have to look, when you look closely at the policies of the Democratic Party, including under Barack Obama, in Europe, it would be a far right party. The evisceration of civil liberties, the extension of imperial war, we haven't even begun to talk about misuse of the Espionage Act to shut down journalism. Wholesale surveillance, the National Defense Authorization Act, on and on and on. And the question is whether you can actually work within the confines of that party, but, yes, I think Bernie was acknowledging a very real reality, and Nader has been pushed so far on the fringes of the American landscape, his voice is almost never heard any more. All of that is true, but I still think that our only hope is to build a legitimate movement that defies the establishment, including the Democratic establishment. And part of my problem with Sanders is that he knows very well that the Democratic Party is as complicit in this corporate assault, what John Ralston calls our corporate coup d’état in slow motion, and while he'll call out Clinton for highly-paid speeches, $600,000 from Goldman Sachs, he's not going to attack the party itself. And I think this is in many ways, a kind of a lie of omission, which is still a lie.

AMT: Well, what would happen if he actually did become the Democratic nominee for president, Chris Hedges?

CHRIS HEDGES: I mean, that's a good question, and John, you know, is probably better positioned to answer that than I am. But my guess is that they would do to him what the Democratic Party establishment did to George McGovern, the last real insurgent candidate in 1972, which is conspire with the rest of the establishment to crush him.

AMT: John?

JOHN NICHOLS: Well, Chris is exactly right. In 1972 when George McGovern ran for President of the United States, he did bring in a massive new group of people. If you looked at the floor of the Democratic convention in 1972, you wouldn’t have recognized it from past conventions, it was so diverse by comparison. And also the platform they developed was, to this day, a remarkable document. And so yes, there is always that concern, and it's a legitimate and real concern, that one of two things happens: either a candidate who is a progressive starts to get viable and begins to shave the edges off his or her progressivism to fit into the party, or if they stay pretty clearly committed to their views, that a portion of the party abandons them, either explicitly, as many Democrats did in 1972,or in a in a quieter, softer way, just kind of let things go. Now here's why I think this cycle might be different, and why it's an interesting one in this regard. I think both of our political parties are in crisis. Both the Democratic and the Republican parties have kind of built an appeal, if you will, to a mass of voters on each side. And yet, at the top level, they have not delivered in any sense that satisfies their bases. And so you see in this election cycle, incredible insurgent and anti-establishment sentiment coming to a fore. Even when the establishment of both parties try to quell it, they're having a terrible time. And so where we end up is with a kind of an open book. I don't deny for a second the possibility that if a democratic socialist actually got the Democratic nomination in the United States, there would be Democrats who would be opposed to that, or uncomfortable with that. I also don't deny for a second the possibility that we might see a billionaire candidate like Michael Bloomberg wade into the competition as sort of a soft version of moderate Republican, moderate Democrat. And so we have a lot of things in play, but here's what I think is significant. Often, we talk about politics with a concern only for the structure of politics. Not for a concern with the structure of economics, and for an understanding of what people see as regards the future. And when I go out and talk to folks, and I've been around the country a lot, what I'm hearing is, frankly, a lot of what Chris writes about so well. There are people who are just burned out on the economics and the politics of these times. I think Sanders has caught a good deal of their energy, although I will tell you that folks on the right--

AMT: [interposing] I was going to say, Trump may have caught some of that energy, too.

JOHN NICHOLS: Yeah, although I want to emphasize how radically different these two are. One candidate, Trump, says you got problems, blame an immigrant, or blame somebody, blame a refugee. Sanders, very different message. So they really are radical opposites, but I think your point still, you know, that there's just this volatility out there. And so the question becomes whether looking back at examples from the past, looking back to McGovern, or something like that, is what we ought to do, or should we consider the possibility that we are at a breaking point for both of these parties, and that whether Sanders is nominated, or whoever is nominated, that to go back to the old politics, is just not going to, I don't think it's going to hold for much longer. Because I genuinely think that the thing you’ve got to look at is not the polls of particular candidates, but look at the polls as regards satisfaction with the direction of the country.

AMT: Okay. Well, we don't have a lot of time left, but Chris, can I get your view on that possibility of a breaking point?

CHRIS HEDGES: I mean, the problem is, Sanders is not building a movement any more than Obama was building a movement in 2008. It ends when the election cycle ends, whether that’s the primary cycle, or, you know, I hope he gets the nomination, the national cycle. And what we do, we need to build a movement, because the rise of these proto-fascist forces embodied in figures like Trump is not only built on a legitimate rage, despair, sense of betrayal, especially by the white underclass, but by a bankrupt liberalism. A liberalism that spouses values, but has betrayed the very people it purports to defend. And Trump is not creating this response, he's responding to it. And if we don't recover our equilibrium, if we don't wrest control of systems of power from the hands of corporations, then we will get something like Trump or worse. My fear, my deep fear is that all of this energy, all of this money, all of this passion is folded back into the Democratic establishment if Clinton ends up being the nominee, and Sanders campaigns for her, as he says he will, and we continue to devolve, as John has pointed out, politically in ways that could be truly terrifying.

AMT: But in a way, but would the public then have more of a say down the road, if the public is not heard on this, Chris?

CHRIS HEDGES: The public's not heard on what?

AMT: Well, if you're saying it would just get wrapped into the party as it is?

CHRIS HEDGES: Well, this is what happened with the grassroots movement that you saw, largely driven by young people, again, in 2008. They were utterly betrayed by the party. The difference was that Obama, although he masked it, was an establishment candidate, and Bernie Sanders is not, to Bernie's credit. So my fear is that we can't afford another four to eight years of a failed system. A system that, in essence, engenders political paralysis, the inability to respond to the most basic needs and rights of the citizenry, because we will empower these very frightening nativist, racist, neo-confederate, homophobic, anti-Muslim forces that are flocking to rallies. These are all symptoms of a political establishment that is in, not only deep decay, but in under disintegration. And much of the root of that is the decision, largely by the Clintons, to essentially sell out that segment of the Democratic Party, working men and women, the poor, and everyone else. And now we're paying for it.

AMT: Okay, we have to leave it there. Thank you both for talking about this today, really fascinating to hear what you have to say. Thanks.

JOHN NICHOLS: Pleasure, thank you.

CHRIS HEDGES: Thank you.

AMT: That’s Chris Hedges, award-winning journalist and the author of The Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt. He joined us from Princeton, New Jersey. John Nichols is national affairs correspondent for The Nation magazine, and author of The S Word: A Short History of an American Tradition ... Socialism. He joined us from Madison, Wisconsin. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti, thanks for listening to The Current.

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Feb. 17, 2016 Episode Transcript

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