You to give me a moment to come to you with the mic so that the whole event can be heard as well as seen. I also want to ask you to try to formulate a question rather than a statement in fairness to everyone else. It is my great pleasure to introduce to you and to welcome back to labyrinth a friend and neighbor subthree whose book subone wages of rebellion the moral imperative of revolt. He has reported from one of 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 a team of reporters that was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for the coverage of global terrorism. He is the author of more than a dozen critically acclaimed 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 and in addition to publishing what seems to be out a book a year chris writes a week to column for truth dig and teaches in new jersey prisons. With wages of rebellion chris continues his work as chronicler of globalized Corporate Power of the suffering harm it infects on humans and the environment. While reminding the reader always of how high the stakes have been this book is dedicated mostly to understanding what it means and what it takes to take action. In particular to take nonviolent action. While hes never in doubt that the rebels in wages of rebellion are men and women of great moral and physical courage that courage is almost a secondary effect. Primary is the theologian notion of supply madness. This curious mixture chris explains of gloom and hope, defiance and resignation, of absurdity and meaning is born of the rebels awareness of the enormity of the forces that must be defeated and remote chances for success. In every chapter he draws not only on the history of political thought and in the biographies of rebels through the centuries and the world over but crucially also on a large canon of literary text. Our cultural patrimony has offered a force from which to draw strength from a struggle that is necessarily a struggle against all odds. A reminder of the experience of the Natural World as sacred is offered is another such source of strength. While chris new book is a book of history reporting and analysis than they are for the most part is written in the third and not the first person given the fact of 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 required not only some form of supply madness but also a forever of 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 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 and the end of literacy and days of revolt which i wrote for the great cartoonist joe sato out of the forest pockets of the country including camden new jersey percapita the poorest city in the United States and at the time we were working there the most dangerous, tempted to portray a political and Economic System that no longer serve the interest of the citizen but the exclusive demands of Corporate Power. And 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 undergone what John Ralston Saul calls a corporate coup detat in slow motion and then its over. They won that we live rather in what the political philosopher Sheldon Weldon calls the system of converted 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 effect of 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 a citizen impotent. Those were all the arguments death of the liberal class chronicled, the destruction of liberal institutions which once made piecemeal and incremental reform possible labor, the academy, the arts, arts commercialized and of course as noam chomsky has written those liberal institutions acting as a kind of safety valve to ameliorate the grievances or injustices of the citizenry and write the kind of capitalist democracy roosevelt said his greatest achievement was that he saved capitalism and thats correct. The distraction of that mechanism by which one could address a crisis within capitalism and of course the new deal and the breakdown of capitalism itself is gone. We are barreling towards a frightening global neofeudalism neofeudalism. We have empowered a rapacious oligarchic elite. We indeed live in an oligarchy. We have destroyed the capacity of our workingclass to make a sustainable income and the assault on the middle class is far underway and at the same time the corporate state is wheezing more and more in rendering the government less and less effective in terms of meeting the demands of citizens and that is borne out with the secret trade agreements were essentially the power of the state can intervene in terms of corporate exploitation removed from it. 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 revolt in Ferguson Baltimore and other places is the fact what malcolm x called our internal colonies derived 30 or 40 of bearing, from for absurdities not mowing their lawns standing for five seconds and they would make up the rules as they went along. Anyone who has worked in a Marginal Community understands the policing some think that aaron warned about. At the same time the legal system has been utterly converted to strip the citizen of its most his or her most cherished Constitutional Rights. We can start with the rights of privacy. Section 1021 of the National Defense authorization act. It was appealed and overturned that permits the military did carry out domestic policing in essence forms and extraordinary rendition on American City streets seize american citizens who are deemed to be terrorists and hold them without due process in military facilities. The inability on the courts to deal with wholesale surveillance surveillance. We know this because of the courage of edward snowden. All of our information is captured downloaded and stored in perpetuity in Good Government computers. Once you have a state and i covered the state in east germany once you have the 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. The ability of the executive branch to call the nation of american citizens, the misuse of the espionage act to shut down whistleblowers snowed in anothers, Chelsea Manning, all of this is combining to create a very frightening and unfettered unregulated capitalism as karl marx understood as a revolutionary force imposing limits stripped of external limits and exploits until exhaustion or collapse. Even when you get a figure like Ernie Sanders and many of the issues i agree with bernie although not on the position of israel i think ralph nader has told us for some time the Democratic Party is a captive Corporate Power the republican party. There is no way for the american political system to vote against the interests of exxon mobil or raytheon or goldman sachs, its impossible and that decision bystanders to work within that party and not call it out for what it is essentially allows them to act as a kind of sheepdog for Hillary Clinton and clintons assault against the working class was perhaps even more draconian than that carried out by ronald reagan, nafta but on that this exploded the prison population the destruction of welfare, 70 of the children of were stripped of their ability to receive government benefits. Glasssteagall, all of this essentially has propelled us forward to a situation where as things unravel we no longer have the legal mechanisms for the protection by which we can resist. This is by design. The nsa has run numerous scenarios on the effect of climate change. We just on march 400 parts per million the first time the levels of Carbon Emissions have been that high for an entire month in recorded history. And corporate forces exploit until theres nothing left and in theological terms in many ways they are forces of death. Quite literally when we talk about that forces it is climate change. Thats the reality that we face. That is the political, the economic the environmental realities that we are up against and the capacity of the state to control the citizen, to modern modern monitor the citizen to use lethal force against unarmed citizens and all of the marches all of the coverage all of the videos that show was military policed militarized Police Forces the numbers of citizens killed every 20 hours usually a man or woman of color is murdered in this country. And so how do we react . How do we resist . What does it take and what will the state due . Thats what i try 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 defy the System People like mone yeah abdul jamal Julian Assange and the great civil rights attorney lynne storck herself sent to prison jeremy hammond, the hacker. I attended with cornel west that trials of Chelsea Manning and he lives in princeton. We would leave at 3 00 in the morning to drive down to fort meade and each car ride for now would usually drive with he knows everything about everything so he would say Bootsy Collins wrote that song for james brown when he was 19. And 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 that she had looked out of the corner of her eye and scene cornel of myself and she just wanted to send a thank you note. I think the greatest existential crisis of our time is accepting the reality that is before us with all its bleakness and yet finding the capacity to resist. And liberalism itself in the face of a crisis of this magnitude is an ineffectual force. Its too intellectual. Its too passionless. Its too lacking in that quality of supply madness that capacity to rise up in the face of overwhelming repression and respond as a moral imperative. The ability of rebels to react to massive systems of oppression is driven and mauldin writes about this i envision, a vision that takes possession of them and aaron writes about this where in the face of when she used the inner leaves the university of heidelberg she had to unlearn everything that she had been taught when she studied with heidegger in the University University to become a moral human being and she said those who are the most effective in terms of resisting are not those who say it should not be done or we oughtnt to do this but to say i cant. It is that inability on the part of the rebel to accept because of who they are. Complicity with systems of injustice and that is what neighbor called the supply madness. The cross and the lynching tree which i urge you all to read also plays this as a fundamental quality in those comedy talks of course about the africanamerican experience who wonder if they corrected forms of racism economic and legal oppression that are not unfamiliar in marginal communities and yet have that spiritual resource to resist in the face of overwhelming odds. What is coming we see it as the climate unravels at a faster pace than climate scientists predicted. We just have seen in a region study in the arctic where they are saying that all of the measurements in terms of the arctic ice has been wrong because that layer of ice is gone. Its in fact a new ice. The severe drought in california and what happens is that society society, as our society restricts politically, economically and environmentally is the forces of corporate control tightens the levers are the mechanisms of power. The fact that the corporatized media and is one example we will talk about the job in california and 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 yet the power of those corporations are such that they have shut out any kind of a discussion. Even this critique of Corporate Power, one that figures like nader or noam chomsky will give is shut out. Those of us who offer this critique are not offered a platform on national media. Gnome and ralph and i find im about to leave for canada on friday and is one cbc show after another. The last time i was in canada speaking at Ryerson University the cbc film is shown and we want to thank cspan for being here but they filmed the show and devoted a onehour program to it. That is impossible within the United States. I used to wonder whether huxley was right or orwell was right and i think it turns out they are both right. In a sense what we first got was huxley in this week now reached a state where we cant get credit were all of those cheap manufactured Consumer Products are no longer easily accessible or available and sheldon noel in his grave look Democracy Incorporated caused those consumers in one of the two primary forms of political control. Once those are removed we increasingly get the iron boot the iron fist that orwell predicted. Turns out i think that orwell and huxley were both right and we are seeing now that transformation as we get a huge underclass pushing 50 of this country in terms of the poor and near poor, unable to sustain a living chronic underemployment or unemployment which of course statistics mask. When 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, you are still put below the poverty line so your given application for food stamps if you qualified. The Walton Family making about 11,000 a year. I think that ultimately for me and i come out with seminary and i come out of the theological background that resistance is finally not determined by what empirically is around us and that gets to what father Daniel Berrigan who baptize daughter when he defined state. He says that faith is the call to do the good or at least the good insofar as you can determine it and then you let it go. Faith is the belief that even if all of the empirical evidence around you says otherwise the good go somewhere and i think for the rebel like the religious mystic, it is this faith that finally defined our capacity to resist. Because the forces that we argue are deadly and immense and are unlike any totalitarian force that human societies have made in the past. Why is there wholesale surveillance and we can look at past totalitarian regimes to understand. It is because you gather all of the information of the citizenry so that the moment that you need it you can use it. Its not about justice. Its not about innocence. Its not about who committed a crime or who didnt. It is about that moment that they decide to criminalize an entire segment of the population and have whatever it is on your file that they can reach out and twist and use against you. That is why all of our electronic correspondence, our medical records, virtually everything about us which by the way is now picked business. Corporations sell all the stuff and they have everything on it but thats why its there. It is that fusion of corporate and political power which is indistinguishable of our 16 intelligence agencies. Snowden was working for a private contractor. 70 of the intelligence is outsourced to private corporations and they are using that intelligence as assiduously and as cruelly as the state itself. That this point there is no difference. The misuse of the judiciary by judicial fiat to strip us of Constitutional Rights so that for instance the right to privacy is not addressed by the courts in very nefarious and dark ways. When i see the president i was also part of the lawsuit that reached the Supreme Court clapper versus Amnesty International and that was challenging the Wireless Phone tapping in the government stood up in the Supreme Court and said speculation the plaintiff is sp