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. M. , former Staff Members reflect on the presidency of george h. W. Bush. And sunday at noon more commencement speeches from across the country with former secretaries of state Condoleezza Rice and Madeleine Albright and philadelphia mayor michael nutter. On cspan2 this morning, booktv is in new york city with events from this weeks Bookexpo America beginning at ten. And live callin segments with publishers and authors throughout the day. Sunday evening at nine on after words, we look at the case hollingsworth v. Perry which considered the constitutionally of proposition 8 in california. And on American History tv on cspan3, evening at seven eastern a conversation with white house historian William Seale on first ladies who have had the most impact on the executive mansion. And sunday afternoon just before two, the life and death of president James Garfield who served almost two decades as a congressman from ohio and was assassinated 200 days into his term as president. 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 remove