Pushing him. Richard mur dock was the more shocking one. He was smart and you would think he would be a good one and he turns around talking about a pregnancy and the case of rape being a gift from god after the aikin thing. As just a political comenitator i argue with both points and that is why you should never run me for any office. That is why one thing i think tea partyers and i say that about people who were not involved in politics but are getting involved you have to learn these are different skills of being a politician and running for office. You can see it with democrats having a lot of good politicians and i dont mean about their ideas just in political skills and i would recommend to you and you may laugh but i am right. Joe biden, dick durbin, mcconnell is good politically and they know how to say things in a way that attracts voters. The job of a commenitator is we are trying to change peoples mind. A politician has to take the voters like they are and win their vote. Aikin could have withdrawn. He claims he cares about abortion and he made it harder and impossible to overturn roe versus wade. The Senate ConfirmSupreme Court nominees and we need to take the senate. It wasnt like the Republican Party went into the poll and said we think the other candidate is stronger would you withdraw . No this was a selfinflicted wound. He should have said say no more, i am out. He checks with his campaign manager, wife, his publicist, his son and they pray together and decide he is going to stay in the race and we lost an easy pickup. Keep your eye on the ball, republicans. We have to win elections. We cannot do anything if we dont win elections. You notice there is one senator, my second mosthated senator, mccains number one, is Lindsay Grahm and i didnt say anything about that election because i didnt think he had a strong candidate. It didnt seem worth expending one ounce of my energy unless we are going to win. And that is how i look at races. If you are going to challenge a republican, i wrote a column about this, number one i dont want to hear about it unless he voted against amnesty. All republicans are against obamacare that only leaves amnesty. So first i am not interested unless you can tell me he voted against. Second you better have somebody good so they can beat them and third make sure it isnt a race where we will lose the seat all together. Thank you very much for coming. Thank you. One more thing, i am going to be signing. We have some books out there and there is one crazy thing yowl not have seen. These ann coulters dvds. It is now on sale because i dont want to have to kerry them on the plane from 30 down to 20 so please buy them so i dont have to kerry them on the plane. Carry them on the plane. You would hear from edward cline talking about the clintons versus obama. Booktv is in prime time during august here on cspan2. Is there a Nonfiction Author or book you would like to see featured on booktv . Send us an email, tweet us or post on our wall. A panel from left forum. A left wing progressive Conference Held annually in new york city. The panel talks about Thomas Paines most recent work. This is about an hour and 20 minutes. These are times angela davis told the forum for deep thinking and feminist analysis of the interlinkage of our issues. Among those we live in a nation that locks seven million of us behind bars. That is engaged in the longest, costly war on terror and 46 million face the terror of hunger and poverty at home. A terror that forces many to sign up to serve in the nosame wars. We live in a nation where the richest. 01 percent, those with 20 million or more, doubled the system of wealth. The wealth of the top 1,000 compounds as does the poverty. And the two parties of property with their police and their borders and their drones and their detention camps keep it that way and our money media calls it a democracy. These are the times that try mens souls wrote thomas paine in 1776 speaking of life under british rule. In this special, three men acustomed to deep thinking are applying themselves to the legacy of thomas paine and considering the standards be identified for rebellion. Are they met today in the corporate age of the coch brothers as they were under the george the third east India Company. Davis urged us to call on our history. I briefly sketched thomas paine and i would say his common sense and rights of reason were the most commonly read essays in the 18th century. Common sense, the rights of man, and the age of reason gave retoreical fire and a vision of a state without a constitution. He gave us the terms United States and counter revolution, too. And he lived long enough to see and participate in his way in both. He died in 1809. The idea of the book came from the uk where he was born in 1737. It was rebellious times where the levelers and diggers hung in the air. Common people who fought private land and incarcerated people because they wanted natural rights. He was a carpet maker and women were being taken down from being equal participants in life to child bearers. At least women of a certain class. In 1757, he went to sea bord the king of pressure as the sailors and pirates protested impressment, forced labor, forced service in the military. He stood up against impressment and the rights of man. Aboard ship as historians taught us he would have served with people from all over the world including africans, irishs and blacks from the caribbean. He would have participated or witnessed their grumbling and perhaps their rebellions on board ship. He certainly was aware of their rebelli rebellions against the british throughout the 1700s in which caribbeans, blacks, africans, irish and some of the colonized americans, too. But certainly the hetero, homo multi general mob carried with them the word of slave revolt in the streets of what would be new york city streets. Jamaica, bermuda, surnom, british honurus, st. Croix, saint thomas, saint kits. There were rebellions throughout the 1760s. They moved to the south. Alexander, virginia, perth, new jersey, st. Andrews, south carolina. Thomas paine arrived in america in 1774 and immediately wrote against slavery. We have it in our powers to begin the world over again, he wrote in common sense and 20 years later in agarian justice he acknowledged that after independence the world still needed remaking. He wrote it is odious and unjust and the opposite of what it should be and it is necessary that a revolution should be made in it. The contrast of influence meeting and offending the eye is like dead and living bodies chained together. It was a global party and the great mass of the people in the country and it is next to impossible for them to get out of that state for themselves. For the sake of justice and humanity he said not in 76 but 1796 that it is necessarily to make change and make property productive of blessing extending to every individual not just a few. Are we in times that try our souls . For sure. Lets hear it. Are we . Are we in revolutionary times . That is the question we are going to address today. And we will recall angela davis who said we should not be afraid to ask for what we want. What kelly is calling our freedom dreams and need not bear the imprint of compromise. To address all of this and more we have richard wolff, professor at the university of massachusetts amherst and author of many books including democracy at works and capitalism hits the fan. Host the update on wbfim in new york. Chris hedges spent 15 years with the New York Times and was part of a team that won the Pulitzer Prize and he is the author of empire of the illusion and war is a force that gives us meeting and writes a weekly column for the website truth day. [applause] cornel west is a blues man in the life of a mind. He is best known for race matters, democracy matters and his memoir brother west living and loving out loud. He is on many programs frequently when they let him. As well as on his dear brothers smilely pbs show and can be heard weekly on smilely and west. And i believe heard on wb as well. Thank you, all. [applause] the format is as follows. We distributed cards and if you have questions you should write them down. We dont guarantee to answer of them but we will sort through and discover themes and post questions to the speakers once they laid out their argument. For about 45 minutes i will get a chance to pose questions of my own and we will have you out of here in 90 minutes or fewer. Enjoy [applause] we collected louder how is that . We selected thomas paine for a couple reasons. He is the only real revolutionary theorist that america has produced. We have some anarcist and powerful prophetic voices from opressed communities whether that is Fredrick Douglas or malcolmx or cornel west and others. But revolutionary we have almost none. He never tied himself to a political party. I thought i would open the discussion with rick and cornel by highlighting some of the major strengths. Ones i think we can learn from. The first would be that paine understood the monarchy and bribri britibrit british power. Part of his job in common sense, the rights of man, and the age of reason was to explain the structure of powers for people that didnt them. Even Benjamin Franklin up to the last minute wanted to build a relationship with the king and it was part of paines job to say this isnt possible. I think there has been a misreading on the part of the american left and even among the Progressive Community of the structures of power and that rendered us impotent. We have been channelling our energy into a dead system. I wrote many of naders speeches in 2008 and there were a lot of people on the left forum who had drank the cool aid for obama and i think that was because they were diverted into a personal narrative of a candidate which is irrelevant in terms of und understanding the mechanisms of power. And just as paine understood the imperil power of the british blinded itself and was hubris made it impossible of listening. And that is why you had 350 ships descend on new york. I think we are in a similar moment as well. And maybe begin cornel west with you and talk about the idea of structure of power. Yeah. Did you want to Say Something brother wolff before i do . It isnt just a question of the structural power. It is true thomas paine comes at 37 years old to the new world and already has a critique of not just good and bad kings but monarchy as a whole. He is talking about an analysis that most of the americans at the time had not moved toward. In 1776 there were ever 400 pamphlets published and one is what we read common sense. This 37yearold lays bear the critique of the power. But keep in mind who he was. His father was a quaker and he inherited a fundamental solidarity with those who were excluded. He was always cutting radically against the grain and his conception of himself at 37 was he was going to be willing to die if it would ensure he would act honorablely, think critically and he would be willing to sacrifice his popularity for truth and justice and would always fuse what other folks on the ground and grass roots movement. Even with the power he has the conception of himself that is quakerli quakerlike. He was a diest and hated religious dogma and viewed himself as first and foremost a member of those people called every day people. He was a commoner to the core and engaged in a revolutionary act in how he wrote and not just what he wrote because how he wrote was a critique of the absecurity of the latin, Greek Language of the edminburgs and others. He was going to speak a language that was so clear. He said i want to write as plain as the alphabet for the common folk because i come out of the common folk. It was a revolution in form and style and the first time folks could read it at all and read through and get through a language that was part of their style. It was part of how they communicated. He was an artson and he identified with the common folk. What we dont have today is intellectuals who havent been seduced by the professional manager characters and the subculture of the university who are committed to the flight and predicament of commoners, every day people and poor people and viewing their calling not their career as having an organic connection with their struggles. The are some that do that fewer and fewer. Why . Because he didnt have to do with the backdrop of possible nuclear cata nuclear catastrophic. The sipping teas in the cafes with the sharp analysis and the no willingness to cut radically against the grain. And of course he dealt with the consequences. He died right here in greenwhich village. 72 years old. 6 people at this funeral. Two people were black because of the critique of the slavery led to the first abolition in the new world. He critiqued white supremeacy which was rare. The list is so short we can call it off. I am not taking about making a symboling gesture. Then you make the connection and that was the kind of brother thomas paine was and it is very difficult to build on his legacy even though we have to acknowledge how crucial the challenge is. I want to pick up on something you all did when laura was speaking before he started. She asked how much change was needed or some words that affected that and it was a strong clear statement. Yes and she asked about revolution. Much less strong. Much more wobbly. Thomas paine is exactly about that difference. Just as the name of the conference, the name we chose for the conference is reform and revolution. Faced with a situation that is becoming more and more unfair, unjust and intolerable what are we going to do . What makes thomas paine stand out is the care he takes to go after that question. And the way i hear it is this we now face, he says about his time, more than enough evidence, decade upon decade of accumulated outrages, injustice, attacks on our freedoms, our rights and our security. In this sense, we have tried to address this one and that one, to work out an accommodation and get a reform over there. We have been there. And we have done it. And it hasnt worked. And we got to face that. We cant make reforms most of the time because the power structure against us blocks us. But even worse, when occasionally we get a reform, that same power structure loosing the effort to block it goes to work to undo and reverse and go back to where they were. Therefore the conclusion he reaches and tries to teach the American People then is the same one i think many of us want to teach now. You have to change the system. Not because it is an alternative to being achieving reforms but because changing this system is the only way to make a reform that is durable. Revolution is the way you complete the reform process just as it is the condition for the reforms you get to last and mean what you wanted them to mean when you fought for them. That is why the word revolution rang and things work so powerfully. It is big change. But that we have to say in the king of england go home. You are out of here. It is over. The british empire. Hundreds of years of dominance. You are out of here. A powerful ending of the colonial relationship that gave this country its modern birth. Its whole history. An amazing thing to say to the people to separate. And yet arent we in the same . Isnt that the legacy for us, too . To finally, and let me pick up on one theme here because i think many of you have encountered references to or if you had a lot of time you read the book by thomas spaghetti. It is 600 pages. He is a good economist but writing . Not so much. His point is the same, isnt it . He says he studies capitalism for 250 years. He and his colleagues in california at berkeley are the goto statisticians to understand this. And he said capitalism anywhere and everywhere it is established reduces the growing inquality of health and income. Periods have people getting freaked, pushing back and we are a reform and then the same capitalism undoes the reform and we know that. And when chris said to me initially lets start with thomas paine, now i see what was in his mind. He is teaching us the youve got to have the courage to make a systemic change. Youve been to the reform and youve tried it repeatably. You have to learn that lesson that we are at this stage of taking this major step. So we are a little bit nervous as was indicated. But the logic now is something that we can understand thank you paine, thanks to him pushing through. I think that the thing about paine is that language. What a linguist called mutual knowledge and Steven Pinker has written about this that the language is a vehicle by which reality is filtered through this. Part of his power, which is the power of all great revolutionary writers is that he has ended that language to the extent that he redefined the terms like democracy and republicanism was pejorative. So he reclaim those words and the other thing which he also mentioned which is important is that spoke in the language what he wrote in the language of everyday people. As a writer, that is deceptive because it is extremely difficult and he once said that as a writer i want to be that clear windowpane by which people can see through and he did that. And so when he writes his response in the rights of man, he goes after his very florid style and i think that language is extremely important because we live in a society now were those who have power and we have specialized vocabularies that shut the rest of us out. Economists have been particularly good at this. And we have a specialized vocabulary that those of us on the outside are not able to penetrate and that becomes a kind of barrier in terms of our ability to exercise our right as citizens and that is why his writings are so effective. Common sense is arguably one of the greatest essays of english. When he writes the rights of man come it becomes extremely important. In the second part of rights of man, he outlines the whole welfare state. And the pit government goes nuts and they pass this law which bans, just as we see large public gathering and makes it a lot easier to prosecute people for treason and he has tried for sedition and have to flee to france and he ends up as one of two foreign delegates and a National Convention and stands up and opposes this and ends up in prison. And it was in far worse economic state in the White Working Class in the United States and three out of four and that includes worker organizations and the pit government drives it underground and i bet they make this point that one of the reasons that they are actually better known is because they gave him the whole vocabula