Transcripts For CSPAN2 Book Discussion On Wages Of Rebellion 20150530

I want to thank helen thorpe so much. Thank you. [applause] thank you. [applause] please dont forget shell be signing upstairs. Thanks. [inaudible conversations] booktv is on twitter and facebook and we want to hear from you. Tweet us, twitter. Com booktv, or post a comment on our Facebook Page, facebook. Com booktv. And this is booktv on cspan2, and we want to know whats on your Summer Reading list. Send us your choices. booktv is our twitter handle. You can also post it on our Facebook Page facebook. Com booktv. Or you can send an email to booktv cspan. Org. Whats on your Summer Reading list . Booktv wants to know. Here are some of our featured programs for this weekend on the cspan networks. On cspan starting at noon, politicians, white house officials and Business Leaders offer advice and encouragement to the class of 2015. Speakers include former president george w. Bush and melody hobson, chair of dreamworks animation. And at 9 15 p. 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Get our complete schedule at cspan. Org. Pulitzer prizewinning journalist chris hedges talks about his book, wages of rebellion, next on booktv. He discusses the causes of revolution and resistances by looking at stories of rebels throughout history and examines what it takes to be a rebel in modern times. Hell be joining us on booktv for a live callin today around 12 45 p. M. Eastern. Hi there. Hi there. Can you guys hear me . Can you hear me in the back . Yes. Great. Im one of the owners here. Its great to see all of you at lab ript tonight. Welcome. Just a few practical things, and then well get going. First, please turn off your cell phones if you havent done that already. Also our event season is sort of winding down, but were, of course planning great events for the fall. So if you dont already get our email invites and would like to just leave us your email address on the back counter. Theres a signup sheet for that. In terms of the event tonight the logistics are that i will just do a very brief introduction. Chris will speak, and then there will be time for q a. I would just like to ask you, we have cspan booktv here tonight, and and id like to ask you to give me a moment to come to you with a mic so that the whole event can be heard as well as seen. And i also want to ask you to try to to formulate really a question rather than a statement, in fairness to everyone else, okay . So it is my great pleasure to introduce to you and to welcome back to labyrinth a friend and neighbor, chris hedges, whose new book, wages of rebellion the moral imperative of revolt, were honoring and discussing tonight. Chris spent nearly two decades as a Foreign Correspondent in central america, the middle east africa and the balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries working for many major news outlets. For 15 years he was Foreign Correspondent for the New York Times where he was part of the team of reporters that was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for the papers coverage of global terrorism. He is the author of more than a dozen criticallyacclaimed books which continue to influence and inspire those looking for ways to understand and resist structural inequality and injustice. Chris is a senior fellow at the nation institute. He has taught at Columbia University nyu, princeton and in addition to publishing what seems to be about a book a year, chris writes a weekly column for truth dig and teaches inmates in new jersey prisons. Finish with wages of rebellion, chris continues his work as chronicler of globalized Corporate Power, of the suffering and harm it inflicts on humans and on the environment. But while reminding the reader always of how high the stakes of inaction are, this book is dedicated mostly to understanding what it means and what it takes to take action; in particular, to take nonviolent action. While it is never in doubt that the rebels we meet in wages of rebellion are men and women of great moral and physical courage, that courage is, in this telling almost a secondary effect. Primary is the theologians notion of sublime madness. This curious mixture chris explains, of gloom and hope defiance and resignation, of absurdity and meeting is born of rebels awareness of the enormity of the forces that must be defeated and the remote chances for success. In every chapter he draws not only on the history of political thought and the biographies of rebels through centuries and the world over but crucially also on a large canon of literary texts. Our cultural patrimony is offered as a source from which to draw strength for a struggle that is necessarily a struggle against all odds. A reminder of the experience of the Natural World as sacred is offered as another such source of strength. While chris new book is a book of history reporting and analysis and therefore, for the most part is written in the third, not the first person, given the fact that social justice is the cause to which chris has dedicated his own life, wages of rebellion is also an intensely personal book. Its last sentence coming at the end of a tribute to his wife, eunice, who is here and their children is i fear i have never done enough. The work of those who resist injustice, it would seem, requires not only some form of sublime madness but also a forever restless conscience. Please join me in giving chris a warm welcome. [applause] thank you. And thank you dorothea, one of the great joys of being in princeton is having labyrinth one of the great bookstores in the united states. And it would be hard to imagine living here without labyrinth and Firestone Library across the street. The three books that i wrote before wages of rebellion, death of the liberal class, the end of literacy and days of destruction, days of revolt which i wrote with a great car troopist joe sacco out of the poorest sockets of the the country including camden, new jersey per capita the poorest city in the united states, attempted to portray a political and Economic System that no longer served the interests of the citizen but the exclusive demands of Corporate Power. In all of those books i argued that investing our hope and our energy in the formal mechanisms of power was a waste of time that we had upside gone what John Ralston Saul calls a corporate coup detat in slow motion that its over theyve won, that we live rather in what the political philosopher sheldon woolen calls an inverted system of totalitarianism. And that is not classical totalitarianism it doesnt find its expression through a demagogue or charismatic leader, but through the anonymity of the corporate state making it different from communism and different from fascism but no less as effective a totalitarian force. So that we have the facade of electoral politics, of the constitution, of the traditional branches of government, but internally corporations have now seized all of the levers of power to render the citizen imto tempt. Those impotent. Those were all the arguments. Death of the liberal class, of course chronicled the destruction of liberal institutions which once made piecemeal and incremental reform possible; labor the academy the arts, largely commercialized. And, of course, as noam chomsky has written, those liberal institutions acted as a kind of safety valve to ameliorate the grievances or injustices of the citizenry and write the kind of capitalism. But the destruction of that mechanism by which you could address a crisis within capitalism and, of course, the new deal addressing the breakdown of capitalism itself is gone. We are barreling towards a frightening global neofeudalism. We have empowered a rapacious oligarchic elite. We indeed, live in an oligarchy. We have destroyed the capacity of our working class to make a sustainable income and the assault on the middle class is far underway. And at the same time the state, the corporate state is squeezing more and more and more and rendering the government less and less effective in the terms of meeting the demands of citizens, and that is borne out now with these secret trade agreements the tpp and cafta and others where, essentially, the power of the state to even intervene in terms of corporate exploitation is removed from them. Now, all of this creates a very frightening kind of political paralysis, an inability of the state to respond to the vast majority of the citizens. We see that in the name of austerity, we see that in the way that the state in order to fund its activities exploits in greater and greater measure the poor and the most vulnerable. One of the engines to the revolts in Ferguson Baltimore and other places is the fact that poor, what malcolm x called our internal colonies derive up to 30 or 40 of their income from fining the poor for absurdities; not mowing their lawn standing for five seconds or walking. They make the rules up as they go along. Anybody whos worked in Marginal Community understands the nature of omni to tent policing omnipotent policing. And at the same time the legal system has been utterly inverted to strip the citizen of its most of his or her most cherished constitutional rights. We can start with the rights to privacy, the section 1021 of the National Defense authorization act, and i sued barack obama in federal court over this, won in the Southern District court of new york, and then it was appealed and overturned which permits the military to carry out domestic policing. In essence, forms of extraordinary rendition on americas city streets, seize american citizens who are deemed to be terrorists and hold them without due process indefinitely in military facilities. The inability on the courts to deal with wholesale surveillance. All of this in this room have all of our information. We know this because of the courage of edward snowden. All of our information is captured, downloaded and stored in perpetuity in government computers. Once you have a state and i covered the collapse of the stasi collapse in east germany once you have a state that has the capacity to monitor a citizen 24 hours a day you can no longer use the word liberty. That is the relationship of a master and a slave. It exploits into exhaustion or collapsed so that even when you get a figure like Bernie Sanders on many of the issues i agree with him but not on his position with israel, as soon as he signs on to the project of the Democratic Party and as rock later told us for some time the Democratic Party is as captive to power as the Republican Party, theres no way in the american political system to vote against the interests of exxon mobile or goldman sachs, and the decision by Bernie Sanders to work within the party and not calling out for what it is in essentially allows him to act as a sheepdog for hillary clinton, Hillary Clintons assault against the working class was even more draconian convent that carried out by ronald reagan. The omnibus crime bill in 1994 which excluded the prison population, deregulation of the fcc, destruction of welfare, 70 of the children on the families were stripped of their ability to receive government benefits, glasssteagall all of this essentially has propelled for birdie to this situation where as things unravel we no longer have the legal mechanisms for protection by which we can resist and this is by design. The nsa has run numerous scenarios of the effects of climate change. We just saw march 400 parts per million, first time that level of Carbon Emissions have been that high for an entire month in recorded history. These are the death throes of the planet and corporate forces exploit until theres nothing left hand in theological terms in many ways they are forces of death quite literally when we talk of those forces like climate change. That is the reality we face. That is the political, economic, environmental reality so we are up against. The capacity of the state to control or monitor the citizen, use lethal force, all of the marches by black lives matter, all the coverage the videos that show as the murder by militarize Police Forces of unarmed citizens do nothing. The numbers of citizens keep being killed every 28 hours, usually a young man or woman of color is murdered unarmed in this country. How do we react . What does it take . What will the state do . That is what i tried to look at in the book, wages of rebellion the moral imperative of revolt and i spent time in the book talking with those who have stood up with magnificent courage to d 5 the system. People like julian assange, the Ecuadorean Embassy the great civil rights attorney lynn stork herself sent to prison, jeremy hammond, the hacker attended with cornell west the trials of Chelsea Manning and he lived at princeton and we would leave at 3 00 in the morning to drive down to fort meade and each lesson for each car ride cornell would usually drive with a less than classic soul. He knows everything including classics. He who wrote the song for james brown when he was 19 . I got a letter from Chelsea Manning after she was sentenced and imprisoned, she was not allowed to turn around and look at who was seated in the courtroom to support her and i got a letter saying she had looked out of the corner of her eye and seen cornell, myself and she wanted to send a thank you. The greatest existence of crisis of our time is accepting the reality that is before us with all its bleakness and yet finding the capacity to resist. Liberalism itself in the face of a crisis of this magnitude is any factual force. It is too intellectual. It is too passionless, too lacking in that quality that is called sublimed madness, the capacity to rise up in the face of overwhelming oppression and respond as a moral imperative. The ability of rebels to react to massive systems of oppression is driven baldwin writes about this, by a vision. A vision that takes possession of them. In the face of she actually says when she leaves the university of heidelberg that she had to unlearn everything she had been talked or studied with heidegger in the university to become a moral human being and she said at those who are most effective in terms of resisting are not those who ask for say this should not be done but to say i cant. That it is that inability on the part of the rebel to accept because of who they are complexity with systems of injustice and that is called sublime madness. Across the who lynching free, of fundamental quality, talks about the american experience. And forms of racism, legal oppression, in marginal communities that have the spiritual resource to resist in the face of overwhelming odds. We see it as the climate unravels at a faster pace than climate scientists predicted. We just saw the norwegian study in the arctic where they are saying all of the measurements in terms of the arctic ice have been wrong because that later ruffled lace is gone. It is in fact new eyes. The severe drought in california. And what happens as our society constricts politically economically and environmentally is that the forces of corporate control tighten, the lenders or mechanisms of power. The fact that Corporate Media as one example will talk about the drought in california but not talk about the Animal Agriculture industry which is fundamental to that drought. In fact the Animal Agriculture industry is arguably the primary industry behind Global Warming and and yet the power of those corporations are such that they have shut out any kind of discussion. Even this critique of Corporate Power, figures like ralph nader or known chomsky will give is shut out. Those of us who offered this critique are not offered a platform on national media, known i am about to leave for canada friday and it is one cdc show after another and last time i was in canada speaking at Rising University the cdc film the show and we think cspan for being here. They filmed the show and devoted a 1hour program to it. That is impossible with in the united states. I used to wonder whether huxley was right or George Orwell was right. It turns out they are both right. What we first got was huxley and as we were fleeced as we reach a stage where we cant get credit where all of the cheap manufactured Consumer Products are no longer easily accessible and that is called access to cheap credit and consumerism one of the two primary forms of political control. Once those are removed we increasingly get the iron boot the iron fist that George Orwell predicted. It turns out George Orwell and huxley were both right and we are seeing that transformation. As we get a huge underclass pushing 50 of this country in terms of poor and near poor, unable to sustain a living, chronic underemployment or unemployment which statistics mask once you stop looking for work you are no longer counted as unemployed or if you have a parttime job at walmart, most workers at walmart, at average, still below the poverty line so you are given applications for food stamps and qualified. We subsidize the Walton Family making 11,000 a year. I think ultimately when i come out of a theological background, resistance is finally not determined by what empirically is a around as. That gets to what father Daniel Berrigan when he defines faith, he says faces is called to do that is why virtually everything about us which corporations sell all this stuff and have everything on you. But that is why it is fair and that fusion of corporate and political power which is in distinguishable, 16 intelligence agencies why ed snowden was working for private contractor 70 of intelligence outsource to private corporations and they are using that intelligence as assiduously as the state itself. There is no difference. The misuse of the judiciary by judicial fiat, strip us of constitutional rights, for instance the right to privacy is not addressed by the courts in nefarious and dark ways. When i sued the president , the losses that reached the Supreme Court, that was challenging the warrantless wiretapping, this was before the ed snowden regulation and government lawyers stood up in the Supreme Court and said it is speculation. Plaintiffs charge they are being monitored by the state is speculation and if they were being monitored the government would tell them, which we now know from ed snowden is a lie. But the court bought it. At the same time the Obama Administration which had challenged, the day of the ruling, the temporary injunction declaring section 1021 unconstitutional, the day of the ruling they send lawyers not just government attorneys, federal attorneys but attorneys from security agencies into her chambers and demanded that she be in state, lift the temporary injunction to reinstate the law in the name of National Security which to her credit refused and the next week went to the Appeals Court the Second Circuit, demanded the same thing and they did put it back into defect. Karl mayer was here, father arnold, the great historian, and bruce e. Is here great lawyers on this case it all the work. I just had to show up in a coat and tie, but we all wonder why and our supposition they were already using the law, and so the Second Circuit waited until the Supreme Court ruled and the case was called hedges versus obama and he said the plaintiffs in the Supreme Court dont have standing or credibility, therefore they dont have it in hedges versus obama. That is an example of how the court plays a dirty game by which it doesnt rule on nuclear and constitutionality of deploying the military as a Domestic Police force and seizing american citizens as terrorists and stripping them of due process split skirts it in the same way Citizens United defines unlimited Corporate Cash as petitioning the government to free speech. This is over and over and over. Support systems have been used to strip as legally. We have created omnipotent policing beginning in marginal communities, places where doors can be kicked down in the middle of the night, militarized police enter with one barrel weapons for nonviolent warrants entire families that terrorized, at only 94 of people in america actually get a trial. The police stack you with so many charges most of which you didnt commit and offer to strip off a few as a plea. If you actually go to court they will make an example of you. Your sentence is going to be longer and i can give you numerous examples from the students that i teach when you get inside the prison system aint you see what has been done to the poor. The system of neo slavery because it was built on the exploitation, 100 million prisoners worked mostly for large corporations. They are the model where. If you want to know what the corporate state wants for the rest of us, watch inside the system of mass incarceration because theres the model, no benefits, no hot insurance, they always show up to work on time and should they actually protest their conditions or attempt to organize a i sent off to solitary confinement where theyre locked away for so long they often go insane. Tens of thousands of american prisoners are in solitary in this country. Britain puts three to four prisoners a year in solitary. The economic engines that drive it mean that the ease corporations are writing the legislation. So those prisons become a kind of model for where we are headed. As we are steadily stripped of our rights. The struggle before us is one where we are going to have to face an assault on the ecosystem which even if we stop emitting carbon today will still trigger a catastrophic change. It is the creation and we see it, these trade deals which are nafta on steroids weakening the power of the government to curb or halt corporate exploitation and the only mechanism left is to carry out acts of mass civil disobedience. That requires taking to the streets. I covered the revolutions in eastern europe, east germany, czechoslovakia, romania and i watched day after day hundreds of thousands, 500,000 people, half a Million People in prague, and every night in czechoslovakia in the Magic Lantern theater, all the people who inherit the government, it was a model of what it means to be a dissident, what it means to rebel. It began with charter 77, 1977. In 1978 writing this great as a the power of the powerless, calling to live in truth, by living in truth, and exposing the system for what it was. And that is the great terror of the system that it is exposed for the predatory creatures that it has become. Hobble was not a charismatic figure or a very good speaker but he had the moral authority. There was no question in prague. I remember all through the streets of the city there were posters of a Young Charles University Student who to protest the soviet invasion which had overthrown and reinstated a prosoviet regime with himself on fire. Four days later he died of his wounds and the funeral procession of students from Charles University to the graveyard was broken up by the police, was never reported, it was a non event, we had many non events in this country including the poor who have been rendered invisible by corporate me the and catered to the stereotyped of the president called thugs and criminals, without understanding the long slow drip of humiliation, pain despair indiscriminate violence that causes them to react as we would react if we were and during the same form of oppression. When they buried the body, the grave became a shrine, they exhumed his wonts, and said she could not bury them. After the communist government fell, 10,000 people went to Red Army Square and named it began public square. That winter there were all so the singer walked out on the balcony, some prayer the anthem of defiance, was a call to resistance in 1968 and when he was overthrown her recording stock was destroyed, she was banned from the airwaves and in intervening years worked on an Assembly Line in a toilet factory. She walked out on that balcony and began to sing the prayer for martha and every check in the crowd knew every word. That is the moral power of resistance. Living in truth. That is what berrigan talked about. When you stand up for justice even at that moment when it seems everyone around you is passing and doesnt see you or hear you, in fact that truth seeps out. That is what i took away from those revolutions from people like that. Those with the ironic points of white. They hold for the narrative that a certain moment becomes a conflagration. Rebellion finally is not carried out, for who it allows us to become. High fight fascists. Not because i am going to win. And it was the moral narrative, imperative, it was a call to stand up to do what is right, and that the odds with the recognition that we may not succeed, and may not succeed but we cannot use the word hope. If we are not willing to rebel. [applause] [inaudible] [inaudible conversations] i will go from here. Thinking about democratization in the rest of the worlds, i have been struck with street protests to deal with corruption, democracy in peoples own country. One of the issues or problems with those protests there not connected or networking sufficiently with other forces in their own society like what i call democratization. There are not tied to the institutions that might help or support them. Dont know if you can make a parallel here there is an inherent problem with protest movements with street protests. You raise a good point. If there is not an alternative political vision or a political expression of that vision, it could become easily put down. That is where we have to look for Robert Brinkmann look for greece or spain. Ten years ago they were pulling 4 . I have spoken to the socialist city councilwoman in seattle about this, the point was correct, we have to build movements that have a political expression Bernie Sanderss great mistake in not running as an independent but the system is changed, i worked for ralph nader, longtime admirers and supporter of ralph nader so i understand the obstacles we are going to throw up to essentially lock out, who doesnt conform to the democratic republican mold. If we see the elections as furthering a movement rather than an end in and of themselves this is something we are going to be meeting with editors in new york at the end of the month, i will kick off a Campaign Rally in seattle on the sixth, i dont want to run she doesnt want to run so we need to find a sacrificial lamb. We tried to convince cornell but he doesnt want to do it. I think that is right. This is where we have to look at europe. The secret is building the movements because it is the movements as howard zinn understood, that none of which achieve formal positions of power that open up the space in american democracy. The Liberty Party brought slavery, suffragists, the labor movement, the Civil Rights Movement and the most powerful political figure in america until he was murdered and assassinated in april of 1968 was king because when he went to memphis or selma, 50,000 people went with him which is why johnson and power establishment were terrified of him and dad is the point. Carl offer makes the point in the open society. It is not how do you get good people to rule, that is the long question. Most people attracted to power he says are mediocre or venal. The question is how you make the power frightful of you. Henry kissingers dont buy the book he and nixon are looking out a window in the white house had a huge antiwar demonstration there are empty city buses as barricades all around the white house and nixon is going henry they are going to break to the barricades and get us and that is where we want people in power to be and that is why nixon was the last liberal president had. Not because he was liberal or had a hard because he was fearful of movements, the clean water act, all of adopted by ralph nader, poised for with the functioning liberal wing of the Democratic Party that has been destroyed courtesy of bill clinton. And we lost that understanding. That is not our job to take power. Is our job to build movements the old power accountable. We have lost those movements in the name of anti communism. A century of destruction, labor the old Anarchist Movement the communist party which whatever you think of the communist party, was integrating lunch counters long before king and the Civil Rights Movement. History is completely erased from the american consciousness. The destruction of the stage, no ivory tower, purging of universities and other books thousands upon thousands of journalists, high school teachers, artists, all of them were pushed out of the society and blacklisted. The fbi would show up at high school with a list of 7 teachers can never get a better job. The aclu are purged, this was by design. All of the blood that was spilled, the American Labor wars where the latest in the industrialized world, the blood of those workers that created the middleclass, open up space in our society all of that sacrifice has been ruled back and we have to rise up with the same sacrificial spirits and the same feel ferocity of holding fast to moral imperative to build movements because in that sense i an anarchist. I think power is always the problem. We must build a movement the volt power accountable and we have to start now. Thank you for your talk, very interesting. We certainly need a Critical Mass of people, very large number of people to stand up against the power elite government and corporations that dont you think is going to take massive catastrophe . You raise a good point. Very important point. If you look, i do look back at 1848 and other cycles. Historians write revolutions come in waves and this wave is beginning. It is usually crisis. All of the tinder is there but what is it that sets it off . Is often something relatively bagel. The Traffic Accident where seven palestinian day workers are killed by the driver of an israeli truck. It is the point where people had enough. The murder by militarized forces of occupation we call the police of people of color is not new. But it is finally enough. But you are right. The encroachment of the stake in terms of the stripping away of our rights and the more draconian forms of control, in a moment of crisis it exposes itself. When origins of to italianism, writing about the stateless and she was stateless, left germany, stripped of her passport, no rights or friends, when you create a legal and physical mechanisms of omnipotent policing which we have done in the war on drugs and criminalization of poverty, when the society breaks down it becomes dangerous because you already have the legal and physical mechanism to use those forces against the society at large but it is a crisis. I cover the breakdown of yugoslavia, it was hyperinflation that triggered the unrest. There was a chapter in the book called vigilante violence. We need to understand america is a deeply violent culture, a culture that is a society founded on genocide and slavery. That is the original sin. We carry it with a known dna today. The systems of mass incarceration, neo slavery it has changed for mutated but it is all slavery by another name. The moment the state feels seriously threatened is the moment that the mask will fall and a common experience for the poor, especially urban poor will become an experience for the rest of us. That moment of crisis if we are not prepared can be seized by pro fascist movements, the christian right, the tea party, the lunatic fringe of the Republican Party we have to give clinton his due. He turned the Democratic Party into the Republican Party the Democratic Party in europe would be a far right party and push the republicans so far to the right they became insane. The state, it already feels, it is already worried. The nsa has run scenario after scenario on climate breakdown they know what is coming they are ready. This is not the rise of these forces that happens when empires go down you bring the draconian violent forces of control on the outer reaches of empire we internal and dont see back into the heart of empire and that is how we get militarize police wholesale surveillance, drones, stripping away of civil liberties, those are the standard mechanisms by which empire perpetuates itself. It is the disease of empire come back and visited upon all of us who were complacent while crimes were being committed in our name. Can you hear me . Fugiamo spoke recently, not as strongly as you did about the current situation. I agree with everything you said and dont know if we need the disaster but when i observed occupy wall street, it was a grassroots movement, nothing really happened in the end lands when you look at the entire Vietnam War Movement you had powerful leaders, powerful minds committed with moral authority. Why dont you start . There will be thousands of people who will follow you, people who write about and are committed but we need powerful voices and leaders like you to get to the grassroots. In this end i am a writer and i dont go before audiences even in makati par can tell the what they want here. I was critical of black anarchists which did not win the friends in the occupy movement. The moment i need your adulation i am finished with my job as a writer is to try to speak the truth in so far as i can determine it. I think the occupy movement was a profound and seismic event in modern American History because it was the rice of the intellectuals. Marks dismiss the intellectuals marks and london were in collectibles and what you got in occupy were the sons and daughters of the white middle class who had taken a tremendous loans, there is no place for them in society. As they had been told all through their lives by institutions to which they went into debt that there would be. So that role uniting with Service Workers and the working poor in this country i think was extremely important. There were all sorts of problems internally after the cants when the ban drugs came in and we saw sexual assaults but in this end the occupy movement was destroyed in a coordinated federal effort led by president barack obama. We have to look at occupy as a tactic in the same way freedom rides were a tactic. And the integration of buses in Montgomery Ward tactics and something is coming. It may not call itself occupy, we are seeing it with the radicalization of black youth who are showing in places like ferguson of political sophistication. Jesse jackson and al sharpton were booed out of ferguson when they tried to show up and hold the events. Jackson was literally driven out of the city and never came back because they looked at that black police that is how that black hole of the functions. This is corporate colonialism so you push faith, push out barack obama who does the bidding of Corporate Power and those kids in ferguson who didnt attend princeton get it in a way that i suspect some of those kids at princeton do not get it and because they have been victims of that oppression, one of the leaders of hands up united was invited the white house and obama acid you vote for me . I am not going to vote for you just because you are black. That would be shallow. Those were his words. And so that is a level the whole sort of focus on gender or race is anti politics, anti political. There is no political content to. What we have in president ial elections, hillary is about to spin 2. 5 billion, and manufactured personalities. They use the sophistication of the Public Relations industry to make as confused how we are made to feel with knowledge and they create fictitious personas that appealed to us and we vote for. This is not politics. Cit isit is absurd as political theater. And the students i teach in prison are probably way ahead of princeton university. In your latest column, you write against a Bernie Sanders campaign. But it seems to meet at a campaign led by a selfdescribed socialist in this country that was able to generate some grassroots support from rankandfile democrats and independents would only help to build a radical movement. It wouldnt hurt it. That would be if it was carried out outside the Democratic Party and that was Bernie Sanderss mistake. That is what he is not doing. If you want to find out what happens when you declare yourself a socialist and serve Corporate Power you can probably destroyed the socialist party in france for a generation. Why couldnt it possibly help to build an independent radical movement . All those followers, once they are disappointed or be afraid they will meet somewhere else to go. They were already disappointed and betrayed by barack obama. The problem is hes not going to run unless he agrees to endorse hillary clinton. By next april he is out and what he does is he then worked to push his supporters, those cells divide liberals and progressives back in the dead space of the Democratic Party and he did not run as an independent because he did not want to lose as Committee Chairman and he knew what the Democratic Party would do because he saw what they did to ralph nader. That is not speculation because i have asked him about it and several of us pushed him to run as an independent and he refused to do it. That is what we have to do. It is not the leaders that are going to save us. Radical change is only ratified or acknowledged in parliaments or congresses, it comes from the street. You see in a moment of seismic change a swinging back and forth. You saw if in the french revolution so you create the National Guard under lafayette which is a counterrevolutionary force which is firing and french fries again, there is a swinging back and forth, counterrevolutionary elys seek to seize control and push back on the revolution and the advance of the revolution. The whole point is without movement it is a sterile exercise the we have to invest our energy into Building Radical movements that push back and front and centers of power. Occupied frightened while street. Occupy friend, more than the occupiers realized. A terrified the relief terrified the state, when mothers and fathers from new jersey were coming into the park and pushing strollers up and down, that frightened them because he essentially it was mainstreaming the movement which is why they had to demonize it. The state is fragile. The chicago teachers marching through the streets of chicago going to present office to use the bathroom and the police applaud. That terrified the state. A couple years ago with veterans for peace, 133 of us, and arrested in front of the white house and it turns out the cops have been in the National Guard iraq and afghanistan and as they cuff us and it happened to me they whisper in your ear keep protesting. The state knows that and that is why the state it doesnt trust the police to protect them. All revolutions are nonviolent. Not colonial wars but colonial uprisings but revolutions because no revolution succeeds, who i quote in my book, no revolution succeeds until the foot soldiers of the police, security forces, police and military will no longer be sent them. That is how the czar was overthrown, they refused, fraternize with the crowd the socks rushed back on a railway line he aggravates deciding he did not get back to federal ground. Gay point wont fire on the ground he is out in another week. Because we have the most dangerous weapon in our hands which is the truth about power and about the state, once we stand up and are no longer afraid, they are manufacturing fear in this country at a rate, i within amtrak if you see something, the end of the video the person being cuffed and taken away just as a reminder. They are terrified. If we lose the capacity for fear and if we stand up in a nonviolent manner to live in truth. I saw it in east germany. It creates paralysis within the systems of power. They may use violence but they wont use it effectively because there are too many people who dont want to carry it out. Too many people have relatives in those crowds. When they went to get those paratroopers and bring them into the streets they were crying because their families and friends were on the streets and they didnt want to shoot them and they did not shoot them. We have that capacity if we build Critical Mass to expose Corporate Power for what it is, but it requires us to go out in the street getting arrested is more time than i care to donate to the u. S. Government but i am afraid that is the only option we have. And we have no time left. As the latest report on Carbon Emissions in the month of march has shown us. We have no time left. Thank you. I agree with you that it is a topsyturvy time. I would like to know how many fascists you have matched that know they are fascists since you are calling them the enemy. That doesnt count those who know they are part of the chain and want to break it. There is a good book by a german male fantasies if i pronounced it right. He argues correctly that in this end fascism doesnt have any ideology despite this thing about corporatism and mussolini. Fascism has a very often uncomfortable relationship with business because unlike inverted to talent arianism where the primacy of corporate profit takes precedence over everything in fascism, you will carry out things that are not dont economically make sense so your Railway System is being bombed to smithereens and you are using it to ship more jews off to auschwitz so how many fascists know their fascist . They define themselves as patriots. I would describe the whole celebration of americans sniper as a form of fascism and all of those people who decided to cheer every time in that movie some iraqi was killed, as expressing fascist sentiment. Proto fascism is alive and well in america. It always has been. The plan is aklan is a kind of quintessential fascist organization it channels legitimate rage still in the vulnerable undocumented workers, muslims, liberals, homosexuals, feminists, at long list of people they despise. And that is part of the current of American Society and that is why i wrote vigilante violence. We have a very dark we are a very violent culture and in times of distress those workers who died were usually shot by vigilantes, and not to mention the terror visited on africanamericans, white leagues and red shirts, n. C. On and on and on. That is also part of our dna and a very frightening part of our dna which means the\i think is coming could possibly be a frightening rightwing backlash where people cry out for authority, hypermasculine authority. That notion of hypermasculinity is very insightful land we see with the celebration of the military in the united states, the celebration of, quote military virtues, the hierarchy of the military. There is a state religion at this point built around the military that is very scary. We have time for one more question. I have been reading your column for a few years and i recommend to everyone who hasnt read the most recent it was the most precise, the most concise distillation of years. Tennis match began in the blog after your