[party conversations]
[bottle pop, clinking glasses]
> So first of all I want to welcome all of you to All Souls. I'm David Robb, and I'm one of the ministers here
and we do this program, Lifelines, about once a month. 
We tend to focus on topical issues,
issues of some substance that are happening in our world right now that are often controversial. 
Chris Hedges is a journalist spent about two decades working for various newspapers including the New York Times for 15 years. 
As a war correspondent, foreign correspondent in war zones,
he was in Central America, Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans. 
And he was asked to leave the New York Times when he took a public position against the war in Iraq. 
He was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for that paper's coverage of global terrorism, 
and in the same year was given Amnesty International global award for human rights journalism.
Chris is a graduate of Colgate University where he earned a B.A. and also Harvard Divinity School. 
He studied with James Luther Adams which probably won't mean anything to you unless you're a Unitarian universalist;
Adams was a prominent Unitarian universalist and professor of social ethics.
He was given an honorary doctorate by the Starr King School for the Ministry 
which also is a Unitarian universalist seminary in the west coast.
and he is the author of a number of bestselling books including 
War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, "What Every Person Should Know About War", 
"Losing Moses on the Freeway, The 10 Commandments in America", 
"American Fascists, Christian right and the war in America",
"the Empire of Illusion, The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Respect" 
those are some of the books, he's also about to publish another book very soon here.  
but tonight we're focusing. he also writes a weekly blog on the website truthdig.com.
Chris is going to be talking tonight, as many of you know he was very active in the Occupy Wall Street movement
and continues to be, and has written widely about that.  He will be talking about that but
he's also going to tie this to a recent book that he wrote called the "Death of the Liberal Class"
> Thank you very much. 
I grew up in the church; my father was a parish minister. 
So I was sitting in your library with a portrait of Forrest Church who I knew, listening to the choir practice a familiar sound. 
And I picked up a book by my great mentor, or about my great mentor, a collection of his essays James luther Adams. 
Who was a remarkable scholar and he never used notes. he would show up to the classroom with a stack of books,
he could cross disciplines something great intellectuals like Cornel West can do.
And at one moment--he was a great musician--he would be talking about Schoenberg and the next minute he would be talking 
about Barth and frauback? and then he would be talking about Thomas Mann and Tillich who was a close friend of his. 
Really remarkable--what I loved about him was he was just a great radical until the very end.
I had him when he was 80 at Harvard, 
and I went over to his house and I don't think there was anybody in the house except him over the age of 25. 
His formidable experience was being in Nazi Germany in 1935 and 1936 and he was at the University of Heidelberg, 
swiftly left his studies and worked with Niemoller, and the Confessing Church, Bonhoeffer, Albert Schweitzer, Karl Barth, 
until he was picked up by the Gestapo and expelled from Germany.
And the fear of the rise of totalitarian movements is something that consumed him for the rest of his life. 
He used to tell us--this was in the early 1980s--that when we were his age, we would all be fighting the Christian fascists. 
And however apocalyptic that sounded, it did sound apocalyptic, watching the rise of that movement,
he understood the danger of fusing the iconography and language of religion with the iconography and language of the state 
coupled with the dispossession of the working class, the Weimarization of the American working class which of course is taking place. 
He said that all was very frightening phenomena, he once told us if the Nazis took over America, 
he said you can be sure half or 60% of Harvard faculty would willing begin all their lectures with the nazi salute.  
[crowd chuckles]
There's a wonderful essay I won't read it in this book, but he spoke fluent German.
After the war he was invited to give lectures to officers who were going to occupy Germany
and he gave one lecture before they threw him out, it's in this book.
[crowd laughter]
I'll just summarize it. He gets up and he calls them on their racism and elicits from them their feelings about African Americans. 
at the end of the lecture he said well there is no difference between you and the Nazis.
And they swiftly found another interpreter of German culture. He was really a great man. 
I was saying to my wife the other day, you know there's a part of me that just wishes that I could go 
one more time across Francis Avenue into his house and sit with him. He was a tremendous influence on me. 
Somehow I don't know how he managed to do it but he always was on the verge of being thrown out of the Unitarian church. 
[crowd laughter]
I can't image what you'd do to get thrown out of the Unitarian church.
[crowd chuckles]
So I want to talk a little bit about Occupy and what's happened in the country but in order to get there
I want to talk around some of the themes that I looked at in a book that I wrote called "Death of a Liberal Class". 
The book had a funny kind of genesis. It began as a book about the press.
Knopf had asked me to write it and it was the first time I had a publisher come and suggest an idea to me; 
it's a really good lesson for writers in the room never write anybody else's idea.
And I finished the manuscript and turned it in and Knopf hated it. 
They objected to my critique of the mainstream media 
they called it "negativity" which they volunteered to assign an editor to excise all the negativity and then they would publish it. 
Well of course that's the mythic version of the press. 
I actually think the decline of the traditional press is catastrophic for our democracy 
and yet at the same time I'm not about to hide its many deficiencies. 
I spent 15 years at the New York Times where on the front page it says all the news that's fit to print.
I can tell you the unofficial and far more correct credo of the New York Times 
is do not significantly alienate those on whom we depend for money and access.
[crowd chuckle]
Sometimes you'll do it, but reporters who kept pushing became management problems and got shoved out of the newsroom. 
Sydney Schanberg some of you may know, they made the movie The Killing Fields around Sydney
came back from Cambodia was on the Metro desk and started going after real estate developers 
who happened to be close personal friends of the publisher and that was the end of Sydney's career. 
David Halberstam, Ray Bonner I mean there's a long list. If you push too hard on these issues 
if you care ultimately about truth a little more than your career you don't tend to last at these places. 
And yet they're reality based news organizations and with the rise of cable news networks like Fox, et cetera,
what's terrifying is that we are creating a system of information where you can believe whatever you want to believe where lies are true. 
Whatever the deficiencies of the Times--and they were many--it is a newspaper that remains rooted in verifiable fact. 
You go out you seek out a story you seek out information it's vetted it's edited and it's printed,
not that we didn't make mistakes but we try very hard not too, and all of that is going with the death of newsprint. 
The commercial airwaves had been which at this point destroyed. 
What passes for the nightly news on the three major networks is truly terrifying; celebrity gossip, feel good stories, it's just abominable, 
and when you remember back as I do when I began, what was there--and it had limitations--but at least they had foreign bureaus,
they reported stories, they had producers that produced 3-5 min pieces that put it on the nightly air, all that is gone. 
And so when Knopf decided they would rewrite my book for me I started hunting for a publisher anywhere that would take it.
They had paid me half of the advance, when you get an advance on a book you get 50%,
and when you turn in the manuscript you get the rest of it. 
So I got Nation books to pay the money that Knopf had paid me to buy the book.
And in that transition period, realized the press hardly existed in a vacuum that all of the pillars of the liberal establishment had collapsed
including the liberal church which I've come out of; labor which of course had been decimated
public education I mean City University of New York used to be one of the great universities of this country. 
It provided a first class education to generations of immigrants, it's gone.
Culture has been completely commercialized.
The system of public education at the lower levels, all of it has been under assault. 
So it wasn't just the press that had been degraded but all of those columns by which liberal democratic society functions. 
And the question was why? Why did it happen, how did we get here. and I think for me began in World War I.  
Dwight Macdonald who's a writer some of you may know who I admire immensely. 
I'm actually related to him at one point my family had money and he married into it. 
He used all the money he got from his wife to run a journal which he lost a ton every year called, "Politics", for 5 years. 
Which if you know about Chomsky, Chomsky talks about politics as being that publication that created his political awakening.
Never had a circulation above 5000, but it's a wonderful example of the power of ideas. 
That's it's not about the numbers you reach, it's who you reach. 
And he published Orwell, and Hannah Arendt, Bettelheim; it was really quite a journal.
He was really a beautiful writer, wrote for the New Yorker, was an anarchist,
was briefly a Trotskyite until Trotsky expelled him from the party after reading Dwight Macdonald's writings in the Trotskyite newspaper in New York. 
He actually mailed a letter from Mexico that said everyone had a right to their own stupidities, but comrade Macdonald abuses the privilege.
[crowd chuckles]
I also like him because he wrote some wonderful literary essays.
One of the greatest essays on Joyce I've read was written by Macdonald I mean he had that kind of breadth that I like very much. 
He cared as much about culture as he did about politics. 
And Macdonald writes World War I that it was the rock on which progressive movements grow, 
and he's right because on the eve of World War I, and we've had powerful progressive movements in this country.
Remember in 1912, Eugene Debs was the socialist candidate, converted to socialism in prison after taking part
in the Pullman Railroad Workers Strike where he was sent to jail, reads Marx's "Das Kapital", becomes a socialist, 
he pulls 900,000 votes or 6% of the vote; we have publications like the "Masses", 
"Appeal to Reason"--which had the 4th highest circulation of any publication in the country--a socialist journal,
the Wobblies, the old CIO, and the power elite was frightened. 
We had about 3 dozen socialist mayors in this country including in cities like Schenectady and Milwaukee, other cities. 
And what happened was that toward the end of the war, and Wilson had run for reelection with a slogan he kept us out of the war. 
There was no popular support for this war at all.
But with the collapse of the Eastern Front, and Tsarist Russia, and the rise of the Bolsheviks,
it raised the possibility of the Germans being able to transfer about a hundred divisions to the Western Front
which would have probably meant the defeat of the British and the French. 
American bankers and Wall Street had lent tremendous sums of money to the British and French governments 
which they realized that if the war was lost, they would not be repaid. 
And a lot of the slogans, the antiwar slogans, were very conscious at the time that this was a war being fought on behalf of Wall Street. 
The Kaiser certainly assisted the war effort by trying to impose a naval blockade around Britain which sank I think 3 American merchant ships. 
So Wilson enters the war and there's little support for this war 
they very quickly have to institute a draft because people are just not volunteering to serve
and you get the creation of--at this moment--the first system of modern mass propaganda. 
The Committee for Public Information, or the Creel commission, because it was headed by a former muckracker named George Creel. 
And this sort of grand inquisitorial figure of the intellectual class turns out at this moment to be Walter Lippmann, 
his book "Public Opinion" becomes a kind of blueprint for how, in his words, 
the term the phrase Chomsky uses later when he writes his book, "how you manufacture consent". 
And for the first time you have a system of modern mass propaganda that understands that people are not moved by fact
or reason, but by the manipulation of emotion. 
It draws on the understanding of mass or crowd psychology by Le Bon, Trotter, and Sigmund Freud.
Out of the Committee for Public Information comes Edward Bernays, the father of the modern public relations industry.
Bernay's book, "Propaganda" written after the war becomes one of the seminal texts 
that Goebbels uses when he establishes the Nazi propaganda machine. 
You had all the mechanisms of the state deployed to carry out this system of propaganda
including a film division in Hollywood that would make movies like the Kaiser the butcher of Berlin. 
You had speakers bureaus they called them three minute men, 45000 people fanned out around the country, 
you had its own news division that printed daily all sorts of pro war stories that had to be published in the papers, 
we had a much more diversified press at the turn of the century it wasn't as consolidated as it is now.
And if you did not editorially support the war you were not allowed to publish. 
So the "Masses" shuts down, "Appeal to Reason" publishes pro-war editorials.
And what's fascinating is how effective that propaganda is,
if you want a window into how propaganda can be read Randolph Bourne, or Jane Addams. 
Two great radicals who held out and they're constantly lamenting that all of their socialist comrades and colleagues
had been seduced by the war effort, the war propaganda.
And in fact, this was in the beginning, Wilson wanted the harsher methods of control
that he could employ through the sedition act, the espionage act 
and the argument of Lippmann was that through a system of mass propaganda
they would only have to use those harsher measures of control selectively and that is precisely what happened. 
Debs of course ends up in prison for denouncing the war 
but it was very rare that the sort of iron fist of the state had to intercede, the propaganda was that effective.
And Macdonald when he writes about this period said what happened immediately when the war was over was that 
we entered a culture of permanent war. 
Because the moment the war ended, the dreaded Hun was replaced with the dreaded Red.  
Indeed to make the transition, the propagandists spun out a story about how it was the Germans that funded the Bolsheviks
and the Russian revolution. Clearly there was collaboration
you know they let Lenin and there was about 160 Bolsheviks from Switzerland go on a sealed train through Germany into Russia
and Macdonald says well there was all of the political and social theorists of the 19th century none of them anticipated
including Marx this idea of permanent war.This psychosis of permanent war where you're constantly looking for
the internal enemy and it is immediately after the war that you see the sort of residue of radical publications and movements get squashed. 
That's when the Wobblies get squashed.
Of course Joe Hill, union organizer, gets hung in Utah on trumped up murder charges.
Big Bill Haywood, another leader of the Wobblies, another falsified charge of murder, he flees the country
and Big Bill Haywood spends the last ten years of his life in exile in Moscow.
You have Emma Goldman, and Alexander Berkman, and about 300 other radicals deported to Russia, 
the "Masses" is shutdown, "Appeal to Reason" even though they took pro-war editorial stances throughout the conflict, is shutdown, 
the Palmer raids, and that began the power elite's assault against popular and radical movements.
Now in any functioning democracy, the liberal establishment is not designed to be the political left, 
it's designed to be the political center. 
I think Chomsky has done a pretty good job in defining what the role of the liberal class is: 
that it acts as a kind of safety valve that makes possible incremental and piecemeal reform
when there are disruptions in the society and grievances and injustices so that in the New Deal 
you have a liberal establishment under Roosevelt that responds to the massive unemployment and poverty by creating programs.
And when Conrad Black wrote his biography of Roosevelt, he said that Roosevelt's greatest achievement
 was that he saved capitalism, and I think that's right. 
That's what a liberal class does, it sets the parameters of debate so one can critique of the excesses, 
for instances, of capitalism, but one can't critique capitalism itself. 
And all of those who step outside the boundaries set by the liberal class become pariahs.  
So these assaults against popular movements were accompanied by of course the red scare and witch hunts 
which culminated in the 1950s with the McCarthy Hearings and the purging 
of thousands of intellectuals, professors, journalists, artists, writers from the mainstream society. 
I taught at the University of Toronto, a year ago, fall, and met spent time with a guy named Chandler Davis 
who was one of the great--great--mathematicians of this country who got caught up in the red scare 
who actually went to prison for six months fled to Toronto, has taught at the university for the rest of his life and never came back.
Many people were not fortunate enough to get employment. 
Social work unions were decimated, social workers used to advocate on behalf of their clients.
And so with the destruction of the radical movements and the disembowelment of the liberal class itself, 
witch hunts inside the ACLU, journalists like I.F. Stone, probably our greatest investigative journalist, becomes a pariah, 
he can't even get a job at the Nation magazine. We lost pressure, some of you laugh, and I know why. 
We lost that pressure from populist forces that had always been the correctives within American Democracy. 
All of the changes, you go back and look at the way governance was constituted by the founding fathers 
they were terrified of popular rule and they installed numerous mechanisms to prevent popular rule.  
Of course huge segments of the American population were utterly disenfranchised from the start,
not only Native Americans, African Americans, women, indentured servants, people without property. 
It was always a White, wealthy elite because of speculation in Indian lands, 
by the time Washington became president he was the wealthiest person in the United States. 
And American history and Zinn writes about this really well, has been a struggle by these forces to open up that democracy, 
it has been a constant struggle to open it up. 
Labor unions without question created the middle class in this country.
And with the decimation of these populist forces, none of which achieved formal positions of power, 
the Liberty Party that fought slavery, the Suffragists, the labor movement, the Civil rights movement, 
although by 1968 Martin Luther King was probably the most powerful figure in the United States because when he went to 
Memphis, or Selma, 50 thousand people went with him. 
And with the destruction against these radical movements, and the weakening of the liberal class, 
what we lost were the impediments against a rapacious corporate capitalism. 
And it began probably with the Taft-Hartley Act and every achievement of the New Deal was rolled back. 
The last one probably being in 1999 given to us by Lawrence Summers with the destruction of Glass-Steagall 
which protected our banking system; there's no banking crisis in Canada
because Chrétien did not tear down the firewalls between commercial and investment banks.
And by the early 1970s, in the words of the Harvard historian Charles Maier,
we began to shift from what he called an empire of production to an empire of consumption, 
which meant that we started to borrow to maintain both a lifestyle and an empire we could no longer afford.  
We saw the decimation of the manufacturing base in this country
 and the ability of global corporations to create a kind of worldwide neo-feudalism.
There's actually a pretty good story in the New York Times a few days ago
 about the conditions of workers in China when they make Apple products. 
And what happens is the American worker are told they have to be competitive in a global marketplace 
which means they have to be competitive with sweatshop workers in Bangladesh who make 22 cents an hour, or prison labor in China. 
And in that two-part series in the Times, they quote Steve Jobs when Obama asks him why, 
and there's between some sort of subsidiaries of Apple of 700 thousand people are employed, 
why some of those jobs can't come back, and Jobs curtly answered back those jobs aren't coming back. 
So we lost our radical movements, our liberal institutions were severely weakened,
that's how figures like Henry Wallace, Roosevelt's Vice President in 1948 runs for President himself, 
is tarred with being soft on communism, it's the tactic that Nixon used quite effectively 
whether against Helen Gahagan Douglas or other candidates including of course, McGovern. 
It becomes a way of shutting out anybody with a conscience
 anybody who seeks any kind of redress to the rising social inequities that are taking place in the country. 
Manufacturing start to leave, you have a huge rise in deficits, 
of course now we have I think one of the largest deficits in human history which we can't repay. 
And for me one of the sort of low points in American history comes with the arrival of Bill Clinton. 
Clinton that speaks that traditional language of that feel-your-pain language of liberalism,
but assiduously serves the interests of corporations, and that becomes the template for the new liberal. 
The words don't in any way match the actions. 
So it's Clinton that shoves through NAFTA, the greatest betrayal of the working class in this country since Taft-Hartley,
it's Clinton that destroys welfare, 
it's Clinton that deregulates the FCC so Clear Channel, and Rupert Murdoch's News Corp can buy up,
I think Clear Channel runs 1500 radio stations across the country. 
It's Clinton that deregulates the banking system under Larry Summers, 
and like Obama, Clinton certainly knows where the centers of power lie.
And by the 1990s, the Democratic Party has fundraising parity with the Republicans 
and by the time Obama runs for president in 2004, the Democrats are getting more; 2008, right, yes 2008. 
We see within the establishment a system cemented into place by corporations that cross party lines 
and finally make it impossible for citizen's voices to be heard. 
John Ralston Saul who's a Canadian philosopher I like very much, wrote a book called "Voltaire's Bastards"
calls it a coup d'état in slow motion and I think that's right, and I think that's what we underwent 
and you end up with a system and of course I think that system is finally… 
democracy sort of had a final moment it would have been in January 2010 with Citizen's United.
It's not that corporate money wasn't coming into the system before…
but now there was no restrictions left on corporate money and that money could be used anonymously
and it was today in the Times, there's an article about how Obama is trying to get donors to give money to pursuit democratic superpacs 
something Obama said he would never do because those superpacs now are so powerful 
that if you don't pay fealty to corporate interests you know you can be destroyed.  
 And so every piece of legislation that the fossil fuel industry or the pharmaceutical industry wants passed gets passed. 
It's how the Obama health care bill ends up being 2000 pages written by corporate lobbyists, 
the equivalent of a bank bailout bill for the pharmaceutical and insurance industry, 400 million dollars in subsidies. 
No caps on co-pays, premiums which can be raised against the elderly, or against those who are so sick they've lost their work.
You know in moral terms we now live in a country where it is legally permissible for corporations to hold sick people hostage
while their parents bankrupt themselves trying to save their sons or daughters, that's what the corporate state... 
Corporate capitalism unfettered is a revolutionary force, Marx was right,
there's a wonderful book by Karl Polanyi called "the Great Transformation" written in 1944 about unfettered capitalism, 
it's a really great book he actually uses the words "sacred". 
When societies lose the capacity for the sacred, when nothing has an intrinsic value, when everything becomes commodity,
then corporations will exploit those commodities whether its human beings, or the natural world until exhaustion or collapse. 
And built within that system of unregulated, unfettered capitalism is self-annihilation because there are no limits. 
The book that I'm writing--I've spent two years on--which would be out in June
I'm doing with a great graphic illustrator named Joe Sacco so fifty pages of it are drawn, 
but we work out of the poorest pockets of the United States. 
These sacrifice zones including Camden, NJ which per capita is the poorest city in the United States 
along with southern West Virginia, and some of you may have been to southern West Virginia. 
When you fly over it, we are blasting the Appalachian Mountains into toxic heaps of rubble 
because coal companies don't want to bury down anymore, they'll just knock the top 400 feet off of mountains
all of that carcinogens poisons the streams, poisons the air.
We were in towns in Southern West Virginia where every single person in that town including the children had their gall bladders removed; 
cancer is absolutely epidemic.
You can't drive more than two hours on the roads in southern West Virginia, 
we had to carry Windex and big rolls of paper towels because after two hours the whole back of the window is black,
and people are breathing this stuff.
There is no limit, there are no impediments as Dan Bergan says the only word corporations now understand is "more".  
And we have to make a distinction between penny capitalism which is the capitalism of the farmers
and the town in Upstate New York where I grew up would bring their produce in and sell it,
regional capitalism which is the hardware store owner or the small business owner,
and corporate capitalism which is a radical force and which is supernational.
It has no loyalty in the nation state as Ralph Nader told me recently why don't people call these people for what they are which are traitors? 
They are quite happy to destroy and disembowel the country which they are doing for corporate profit. 
So with the destruction of the manufacturing base you get the rise of a class of speculators embodied by institutions such as Goldman Sachs
speculators in the 17th century were hung, speculation was a crime, a capital crime. 
Today of course they not only run the economy but run the government. 
And there's a really good book by Matt Taibbi "Griftopia"
I don't know how anybody can write so well about a subject that's so obtuse but he does. 
He makes a really good point in that book that there's really two sets of laws for the elite. 
For corporations like Goldman Sachs which are bailed out with taxpayer money 
and then given virtually interest free loans by the government after they're bailed out; 
I'm not sure what you call it, I don't think its capitalism I don't know what the right word for it is. 
And then there's the laws for the rest of us, and that we fail to see those distinctions
that the intrusions of regulations and laws for the small business owner and for us is a nuisance, 
and often an impediment but on the upper levels they write the laws. 
They get whatever they want. 
And I think there's just one piece of legislation after another that illustrates that. 
The Pfizer reform act being one of the most egregious, the Pfizer reform act
which retroactively makes legal which under our constitution has traditionally been illegal the warrantless wiretapping
monitoring, and eavesdropping of tens of millions of American citizens 
and the reason it was retroactive is because you had large telecommunications companies like AT&T
and Verizon and Sprint turnover tens of millions of records of American citizens to the government 
and that intrusion into privacy was being challenged and working its way up in the lower courts
and they knew they'd lose and that's why they put the retroactive measure in. 
and of course lobbyists descended on Washington with generous amounts of campaign contributions
and everybody folded including Obama who said he would filibuster it, came back and voted for it.
And so as all of the traditional impediments by which we've protected ourselves were erased.
You had this kind of snowballing effect where the crimes of the corporate state
became increasingly egregious and harder and harder to ignore. 
They did a very good job and have done a very good job with spectacle, with entertainment, with the tawdry, 
the collapse of dying empires whether it's the Austro-Hungarian empire, or the Ottoman empire, or even the Roman empire 
they always descent into these kind of twilight periods and Cicero writes about it where it's all about spectacle and violence and sex. 
And Cicero actually writes about how--you know at this point you're seeing the rise of figures like Nero, and Caligula
--and he's saying you know Romans just go to the coliseum and they invest their emotional and intellectual life in entertainment 
which became vaster and vaster and vaster; 2000 slaves battling it out to replicate the sacking of Carthage, 
it became quite immense the spectacle. 
And I don't think it's accidental in the Civil War Cicero became a deeply detested figure because he spoke a very uncomfortable truth to power 
and he's actually in the middle of the Civil War hunted down by Marc Anthony who decapitates him and cuts off his hands. 
And they bring Cicero's severed head and his hands to the Coliseum and they say he will never speak or write again
and 40,000 roar their approval; that's what happens when societies die. 
And I wrote a book a few years ago called "Empire of Illusion, the end of Literacy and Triumph of Spectacle"
 that looks about how illusion our society has become.  
And I think one of the most pernicious forms of illusion is this mantra that is fed to us across the political and cultural spectrum
that says we can have everything we want. 
The reality is never an impediment to what we decide.
That if we focus on happiness, if we dig deep enough within ourselves 
if we grasp that we are truly exceptional if we believe in Jesus, but its magical thinking. 
And it's fed to us by Oprah, it's fed to us by the Christian Right, it's fed to us by Hollywood 
and what it does is essentially leave a populace reduced to a state of infantilism where you never grow up. 
But as that gap opens up between the illusion of who we think we are and where we're going
and the reality when it's our home that's foreclosed when we go bankrupt because of medical bills 
when we realize that that job that we lost is not only not coming back but that good job will never be there for our children, 
then those that are kept in a state of infantilism react like infants which is to cry for a demagogue,
or a charismatic leader, or savior for moral renewal, and new glory. 
And I think the Tea Party has elements within it that can adequately or accurately be described as fascist.
They focus on the vulnerable within the society, of course is a very dark undercurrent,
a kind of coded racism toward African Americans, a very overt racism toward Muslims,
a hatred of undocumented workers, homophobia, a celebration of the language of violence, a celebration of the gun culture. 
And I think part of the failure of the liberal establishment is that their anger toward that liberal class, 
that traditional liberal class that speaks in the language of empathy,
and yet has failed them means that they're sense of betrayal is not misplaced. 
But unfortunately their hatred toward self-identified liberals brings with it a hatred of traditional liberal values as well.
When Sacco and I began the book we gave it the title "Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt". 
Now revolt was conjecture, we began it two years ago, and of course in September of this year we've saw the rise of the Occupy movement. 
I think what's fascinating for me about the Occupy movement, 
and they clearly don't like to think about themselves like this is that they are a mainstream movement. 
In this sense, if you look at the opinion polls, 
most Americans, a majority of Americans agree on the fundamental issues that are raised with the Occupy movement 
whether that's about the malfeasance of Wall Street whether that's about our never ending imperial wars.
Whether it's about the failure to create a jobs program, 
and if you go onto the Occupy DC website, all the statistics are there on all the major issues. 
And the danger of this movement, for the power elite, was that it is a mainstream movement.
It articulated concerns and issues that swept across class lines, political lines, and racial lines. 
And for the power elite, and let's be clear who the power elite is, it's Lloyd Blankfein and Robin Rubin, and all these guys. 
This was truly terrifying, and it was really terrifying for the Democratic Party. 
And let's not (forget) all these occupying encampments were shut down by a Democratic president 
who publically just kept silent about Occupy 
there's no question certainly with the shutdown of those 18 encampments that that was a coordinated national effort 
done by the Obama administration.
And it was done because Occupy called Democrats out for who they were. 
[applause]
And for that reason the movement was dangerous 
so for me when they shut those 18 encampments down that was kind of a seminal moment for me. 
Because it was an illustration of how tone-deaf the corporate state is, how out of touch they are. 
There's a kind of Versaille quality, a Forbidden City quality to our elite 
0:45:56.160,0:45:01.210
who because they are so wealthy has so utterly severed themselves from the mainstream.
I think it was a "New Yorker" writer who said these people don't live in America, they live in Richistan.
[crowd chuckles]
And so they thought they would physically erase these encampments. 
Now all of the issues that pushed people into these encampments of course are still there and getting worse. 
they were astute, if we had a Roosevelt, Henry Wallace New Deal classical Liberal power elite still within the structures of power 
they would have immediately forgiven the 1 trillion dollars in student debt, they would have called a moratorium on foreclosures, 
and bank repossessions, and they would spend a trillion dollars on a jobs program especially targeted to people under the age of 25.
And instead by trying to shut it down that was I think for me an indication how woefully out of touch they are
with the suffering that is sweeping across the United States. 
And of course all you have to do is go back and look at what the US Government did to radical movements in the 1960s 
as a template for what they are doing now. They tried to physically remove them, and internally destroy them.
And I wrote a column that did not endear me to black bloc anarchists on Monday calling the black bloc the cancer of the Occupy movement. 
They used the occupy movement as a cover to carry out acts of petty vandalism and embrace a kind of repellent cynicism
that they confuse with revolution and I can assure you the corporate state could not be happier.
Every sort of example of what the movement should not become can be found on what the New York Post says it is.
If you read the New York Post in all of those days before they shut the encampment down it was vicious, 
hate-filled fabricated propaganda. 
And any step you take however inadvertent in fulfilling that vision, all of the warning lights should go off. 
I have no evidence that they're agent provocateurs inside the black bloc, 
I do know they were in Canada we know because they testified against the people after the G20
 but my guess is that certainly where they would be. 
And we've seen some frightening trials coming out of, for instance, a protest at the last convention 
where there were these two kids in Texas, I forget their names who were completely setup by a police agent.
It's such an old story, they're giving them the bottles with the gasoline, and showing them how to stuff the rags in, 
and the next thing you know they spend  23 months in prison. 
So the movement's not going to go away. How will it manifest itself no one knows. 
I've covered enough movements to understand they're kind of mysterious forces. 
I was in East Germany for the overthrow of Honecker and the East German government.
You had mostly clergy out of Leipzig, candlelight vigils, 100 people would show up, 70 people would show up,
and then suddenly 20 thousand people showed up, and then 70 thousand people showed up. 
And then Honecker decided to send down an elite paratrooper division to shoot them and the paratroopers wouldn't shoot,
it was over, Honecker would last another week, after 19 years in power was out. 
In Czechoslovakia it was the same where you pull a half million people into Wenceslas Square 
and the foot soldiers of the elite finally would not carry out the forces of control
 that a corrupt and discredited group  within the inner circle wanted carried out. 
That's how revolutions always happen. 
People forget that the Russian revolution was a bloodless revolution 
not on the part of the Cossacks and the Tsar and the [?] but on the part of the people. 
On the abdication of the Tsar there was no armed uprising to get the Tsar to abdicate. 
What happened in the Russian revolution and Paul Avrich has written a very good book about this called "The Russian Anarchist" 
is that all of those local Soviets which were primarily anarchists in nature which have risen up and were ruling Petrograd,
Lenin infiltrated them there was assassinations of large numbers of anarchist leaders,
 we don't know a lot about them because so many were killed, because he wanted centralized control.
And then of course the Bolsheviks carry out an armed putsch against Korensky and the cadets, not against the Tsar, the Tsar was gone. 
And from my time in Eastern Europe I am convinced that the corporate state, corporate centers of power are as corrupt
 and as rotten as the regimes we saw in East Germany. 
How it will take place, how long it will happen, none of us can answer. 
In Poland it took ten years, in East Germany it took ten weeks,
in Czechoslovakia it took 10 days, and by the time I got to Romania, that guy was gone in 4 days. 
We don't know, no one knows, or even will it succeed. There's no guarantee that it will succeed.
It's got to be smart, it's got to be organized, it's got to be disciplined, it's got to be non-violent 
because as long as it continues to articulate those mainstream complaints,
and suffering that has been inflicted on two-thirds of this country, 
and as long as it is a movement that in a physical form makes that mainstream feel comfortable 
then the power elite in this country is really really serious trouble.
I'll just finally end by saying that it is not accidental that our economic crisis is twined with our environmental crisis. 
That when corporations unleash like this they will not only destroy human beings, as commodities, 
but of course destroy the ecosystem for profit on which human beings depend for life. 
And if you read Jim Hansen, or Bill McGivern, Clyde Hamilton or any else who writes about climate crisis,
you know they're talking about a window of 3-4 years, there's little little time left.
In theological terms, unfettered unregulated corporate capitalism are systems of death and I think this resistance,
as long as it remains nonviolent, as long as it continues to remain focused on the fundamental issue which is corporate power, 
everything flows from corporate power whether it's the health insurance industry, or the fossil fuel industry, or the war industry, 
 it is breaking the back of the corporate state that gives us the possibility for life.
And if this movement does not succeed both economically, and environmentally I fear our future. Thank you.
[applause]
> Thank you so much that was wonderful to hear you.  
I heard you when you spoke at the Occupy Wall Street rally two weeks ago, again Citizen's United and corporatocracy.  
What I'm wondering about is what your suggestion would be strategically 
strategically because I'm part of that group and on email online right now that group is having a discussion about
whether they will continue to focus on corporations or will they go to a broader focus of electoral reform and get the money out of politics. 
And it seems to me about making a choice on which one they want to work on.
> I think they two most pernicious forces inside the Occupy movement are those
who are trying to draw that energy back into the Democratic Party, 
and the second being those who want to draw it into acts of violence.
And of course we want money out of politics, of course we want to overturn Citizen's United. 
But we have to recognize the configurations of power. 
There's no sense appealing to centers of power for the impossible. 
I have sued Barack Obama and Leon Panetta over the National Defense Authorization Act
[applause]
And we're waiting to see if they'll hear it in the Southern District in New York. 
Some of the judges in Southern District are pretty good on this stuff. 
But look the way the Supreme Court is stacked,
even if it makes it to the Supreme Court the chances of that will all being overturned are slim to none. 
That doesn't mean we shouldn't try and shouldn't do it. 
But both I and the lawyers feel that if nothing else 
we've at least raised a public awareness about the reality of this legislation
which is really truly terrifying piece of legislation. 
But do we want to revoke corporate personhood, do we want electoral reform? 
That fact is, given the fact is our elected officials have now become corporate employees, 
appealing to them for this kind of reform is a waste of time.
And for me a lot of the important moral voices in this country, Wendell Berry, Bill McKibben, Cornel West,
they have all come out categorically and said civil disobedience is all we have left 
and they have all been arrested including Wendell who is 77 years old. 
And we'll occupy the governor's office in Kentucky to protest mountaintop removal. 
So as Wendell Berry says,"Going to jail is more time I care to donate to the US Government." 
But I do think that in that sense Occupy latched onto something really important
that trying to work within the traditional mechanisms of power at this point is futile unless you're Exxon Mobile.
> Thanks I want to second the sentiment, that was a wonderful talk and I have a brief comment 
about the life and career of George Orwell leading up to a question about you. 
Basically in the 30s, he fought in Spain, had a direct experience of industrial warfare and totalitarian movements 
and the way they tend to operate, came back to Britain to work for a major media organization, the BBC 
and then kind of parted ways with them. And wrote a novel that was a kind of definitive portrait of totalitarianism
and that led to a sort of popular notion of what totalitarianism was and he was personally himself convinced 
there was going to be a nuclear war and that the world was heading in a totalitarian direction. 
And at least in periods in his own lifetime of several decades that followed didn't exactly go the way he thought it would
but there are arguments out there that by putting out such a dark image of the future 
he himself like helped to inoculate the populace against totalitarian tendencies to a certain extent.
But there was a somewhat ambiguous and double edge phenomenon in that he was also
portraying radical movements in a way that were to some extent scary
in that it was a portrait of Stalinism in this type of Marxism and anarchism. 
And so I'm wondering do you feel like in some of your own darker work, 
I've had conversations about this with several of my friends about your work in particular Empire of Illusion, 
there's such a dark image of where American society is at and the direction it's heading 
you might be carrying out a similar sort of act and possibly whether it might have some of the same ambivalence 
built into it and that it's both sort of radical and may also sort of encourage a certain sort of conservatism.
> Well Orwell is my guiding light.
And as you know when he came back from Spain in "Homage to Catalonia" he included a chapter
and the book was published while the war was still going on about the Barcelona riots 
which was the drive by Comintern at that point republican government to wipe out the anarchists the POUM  
that Orwell had fought with on the Aragon front,in fact he was shot through the neck and nearly killed, and wounded. 
And that book was only sold 600 copies during his lifetime and he was utterly disowned by the left because of that. 
Because the argument was that you by exposing that event and writing about that event betrayed la [?] and orwell repeatedly 
throughout his writing says the only thing I have is the truth and that's my most powerful weapon 
that in the short time a lie will work but in the long term it destroys my credibility and my power 
and therefore, he actually write at one point a good writer is like a window pane for the reader to see through.
 Orwell he was hated by the left as you know as much as the right.
In that sense he was a true radical and a great intellectual. 
His vision of 1984 was really 1948 of course inverted it was very much a book about Stalinism. 
I used to wonder ok, is Huxley right, a brave new world, or Orwell in 1984? 
And I've come to the conclusion that they're both right. 
At first we got Huxley first we got awashed in a kind of hedonism and entertainment and the cult of the self as we were stripped of power. 
And now we've been stripped of power we get Orwell. 
So they had different visions of totalitarianism. 
But I think they both grasp the truth as how totalitarian systems work.
It's precisely that the flooding, you know there's a really fine book by Sheldon Wolin called "Democracy Incorporated", 
Wolin who was Cornel West's mentor, Cornel dedicated his first book to Sheldon, without question our greatest living political philosopher 
his book on "Tocqueville", "Politics in Vision" published in 1960 is just this staggering intellectual piece of work on political theory. 
But he writes "Democracy Incorporated" and he says that the, and he calls the system we live under inverted totalitarianism 
by which he means we don't live in a classical totalitarian system ruled by demagogues or charismatic leader 
but in a system where power is expressed by the anonymity of the corporate state.
That in classical totalitarian regimes you have a reactionary or revolutionary party that overthrows the system and replaces it; 
inverted totalitarianism you have corporate forces that purport to pay loyalty to the constitutional electoral politics,
the iconography and language of American patriotism, 
and yet internally have so corrupted the levers of powers to have rendered the citizenry impotent. 
And he said the mechanisms of control within inverted totalitarianism are credit, access to credit, and mass produced cheap consumer products. 
And I actually called him and asked him if that's credit gone,
of course now that's credits drying up certainly for the lower end of the economic scale 
and those massed produced goods are no longer cheap can your system of inverted totalitarianism flip? 
Can it become a system that begins to resemble classical totalitarianism? 
And he said without those two mechanisms of control then there was no guarantee as to what will happen. 
But I love Orwell. I'm talking too long about Orwell but there's a little anecdote. 
When I was at Harvard divinity school, my second year, the former editor of the "Buenos Aires Herald" Robert Cox 
who had to flee the country came and spent a year there as a fellow, and I got to know him extremely well. 
He was the editor during the dirty war in Argentina and he would print above the folds--so the top of the paper--
he would print the names of all of the "desaparecidos" from the night before. He was the only newspaper in Argentina to do this. 
He was incredibly courageous.
And of course eventually he was disappeared.  
And he was only gotten out because he was a British citizen, he was later knighted. 
The British government intervened otherwise he would have ended like 30,000 other Argentines who never came back. 
And he told me when he was taken to his underground cell in the detention facility
that he passed on the way to the cell a huge Nazi flag that the Argentines have hung on the wall. 
And I said well if, or when you are in prison, and you could have only a book or a set of books what would it be? 
He said "The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell", a four volume set. 
For me, anybody who wants to write must read every single work that Orwell wrote. 
He cared about language, he had a moral core, he cared about the working class without sentimentalizing the working class, 
you probably read "Wigan Pier", and that's what Joe Sacco does by the way, the power of his work, 
he goes to Palestine and he shows you Palestine with all his… he doesn't cover anything up, and yet by the end your heart is broken.
I don't know, has anyone here seen "Footnotes in Gaza"? 
I spent seven years in the Middle East, I was the Middle East bureau chief for the New York Times; 
it is one of the greatest works ever written on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
It's a graphic novel he spent six years on it. And I tell you I finished it and I was just weeping.
And I think Orwell has that quality and that his bedrock honesty and integrity which would mean he would write about the Barcelona Riots. 
In the end he makes him such an incredibly moral and powerful force and of course he had courage.
think when you stand up and express uncomfortable truths and again Orwell for me is kind of model you have to expect to be kind of lonely. 
I supported Nader in 2008, and I in fact wrote Nader's speeches for him.
I did give a talk at the University of Wisconsin and somebody said but Nader's talks are so boring!
[laughter]
But that was a very uncomfortable position to take.
 Even in places like Berkeley. You know I would be booed, and hissed, and people would walk out, 
and people would be angry and you know I went through the same thing with the Iraq war. 
It was a very unpopular position to take and I think for me Orwell for me is the guy 
that you're in the end anybody who's a writer and anybody who seeks to write at least in so far they can determine the truth
must expect finally to be very lonely and to be at certain moments hated by even the people that, or the movements that they sympathize with. 
And boy that was a lesson that was really important to me.
I covered the Kurds in Northern Iraq and I was up there when the PUK and the KDP were having internal actual gun battles, 
these were the two main Kurdish factions in the north and I wrote it up in exactly the same thing.
Where all the supporters of the Kurds accused me of destroying the movement by writing what was happening. 
And in fact I had a price on my head at the time. 
Saddam Hussein would give anybody a thousand dollars for my body; 
I had seven bodyguards all from the town of Halabja, the poison gas had been dropped on Halabja, 
we had to drive in two Jeeps and everybody kept their AK-47s out at all times, my driver had a pistol 
anytime another car passed us the idea being that if the first jeep was ambushed the second jeep 
would be able to kill the people who had opened the ambush and so therefore they wouldn't do it.
I mean it worked, I lost friends up there. Lizzy Schmidt, a german photographer was killed, I mean it was nasty. 
And I was actually in my room one night; we would sleep in a room where each of these Peshmerga would 
to a different corner with their weapons all night so that if somebody burst in there was no direct line of fire. 
if you shot over here there would be a peshmerga there who could grab his AK; 
and we were listening to the Kurdish broadcast out of Baghdad one night and they were reading one of my stories 
and the mood in the room got sort of very dark. 
But in a way, if you are not exacting about your honesty and if you don't tell everything 
then you destroy the only thing you have as a writer which is your credibility. 
And the power of Orwell was that you knew--a lie of omission is still a lie--and you knew that Orwell would never engage in that lie of omission. 
And so when Orwell wrote about "Wigan Pier", or "Down and Out in Paris and London",
you understood that there was nothing romantic about it, nothing untrue about it
and I think that Sacco does this in "Footnotes in Gaza" and by the end these figures are not plastic, they're human. 
And because they're human and because finally you can emphasize with people who have human fragilities and human faults it gives that a kind of power.
I think that by sanitizing human beings I think people understand to an extent even subconsciously that it's not real. 
And I think we always have to make it real and for me Orwell was the exemplar of that.
> I find that you talk about East Germany and Romania and Czechoslovakia and I may say and Egypt and Libya and Tunisia,
all those countries the rulers or the people in power are so different from the ones we have here. 
In America we pretend to be a democracy but when we have to protest the war in Iraq we have to ask permission
and then they separate people into little cages so you don't make a big noise so I don't think that's real democracy. 
We've been ruled by the NYPD or the mayor or the President. 
[applause]
So do you have… one of the things I find really hard is 
I'm really afraid of being jailed by coming down to the Occupy movement and getting jailed 
because you are a famous person but I am not and they may keep me in there much longer than you so can you tell us what to do?
[laughter]
> They work to make us afraid. And they're working overtime to make us afraid. 
Anytime you fly. I think it's a kind of conditioning of the TSA. 
And as long as we remain afraid, we remain powerless.
But I'm not minimizing what you are saying, and you're right. 
You know in the end they'll get us all. 
Those who have a kind of public position have a kind of protection are certainly not mistreated. 
That was clear when I was arrested in front of Goldman Sachs. 
They didn't cuff me in front of the cameras, they cuffed me but not until I got to.. 
and I was out in 4-5 hours. And the inspector knew my name, I mean the police inspector during the arrest came over and spoke to me by name.
So yeah, you're right. You know it's interesting, I don't know if you followed Bill McKibben's Civil Disobedience when they circled the Whitehouse? 
They actually arrested several people including Bill and they held McKibben for 52 hours in a DC jail long after they let every other protester go, 
and McKibben asked why, why am I being held? 
And they said, the cops, we have orders up there to hold you longer. 
Well of course that came from the Whitehouse, what it really came from was from the fossil fuel industry. 
I think that you're right but when you become a threat in the way McKibben is perceived as a threat, then they start going after you. 
When they actually feel threatened by these movements they'll try and decapitate them. 
When the undercover cops would go into Zuccotti, 
the way that they would instantly expose themselves as undercover police aside from the fact that
 it was like a bad Doonesbury cartoon and they were sort of thirty and looked like they played football and said they were from Rawlins College
but they asked, "who were the leaders?" who do you think the leaders are? 
There's a great story a woman told me. There were some undercover cop going around doing this, 
and they went to a medic tent and said to one of the women in the medic tent,
So, who's in charge here? and she goes "I am", he goes "Really? What are you in charge of?" and she goes "Everything". 
[laughter]
And he goes "What's your title?" And she goes "God".
[laughter]
But I don't think that's a small concern, and you're right.
And yet on the other hand as long as we remain afraid, it's clear that we are going to be.. 
the disempowerment will come worse, and the dispossession will become worse. 
There is no stopping this force anymore unless we stop it and if we don't stop it, then it will be a neofeudalism where two-thirds of this country…
It will be like the Proles in 1984. 
You have the inner sanctum which is like 4%, you have the outer sanctum which is 13%, and the rest are Proles.
And Orwell's right and that's what we'll end up as.
> Has anyone thought of challenging the incumbent democrat?
I think we have to rebuild movements. 
There's a wonderful scene in one of the books about Nixon 
when the antiwar demonstrators have surrounded the Whitehouse and Nixon has got buses completely around the Whitehouse to protect the Whitehouse
and he goes to the window wringing his hands standing next to Henry Kissinger going, Henry they're going to break through and get us!
[chuckles]
That's precisely where we want people in power to be.
[applause]
It's not our job to take power. In Karl Popper, in "The Open Society" his enemies write that's the wrong question.
The question is not how you get good people to rule, the question is how do you stop the power elite from doing as much damage as possible. 
In Popper's words, most people attracted to power are at best mediocre which is Obama, or venal which is Bush. 
And it is movements that keep those in power frightened. 
If Sarkozy got up and announced today that French university students would have to pay $50,000 a year and take out massive loans, 
the French student unions would shut the damn country down. 
[chuckles] 
And Sarkozy's horrible and you have to keep these people frightened and I put my faith in movements. 
Because all of the great correctives to American democracy came through movements that never achieved formal power but forced the power. 
The last liberal president we had was Nixon not because he was a liberal, but because he was terrified. 
The Mine and Safety Act, the Clean Water Act, OSHA, it all came from Nixon, written by Nader by the way. 
I interviewed this guy, he's 90 years old, Ken Hechler, he used to be a congressman from West Virginia. 
He was a young speechwriter for Franklin Roosevelt, then he was Harry Truman's speechwriter after the war,
and during the war he was in army intelligence and was assigned to go to Nuremberg and interview all the top leaders including Hermann Goering before they were executed.
I don't know how many people in the planet knew Roosevelt, Truman, and Hermann Goering. 
But he fought for miners his whole life and he told me a great story that when they were pushing for the Black Lung legislation to give miners compensation for black lung, 
Nixon didn't want to sign it and so he said he'd held a press conference and said if President  Nixon doesn't sign that bill by tonight,
every miner in this country would go on strike immediately, and the whole damn country would shut down and there would be an energy crisis and Nixon signed it. 
And Hechler said, I didn't actually know whether he (would sign it).
[laughter]
That's the only way to deal with people in power.
> Your talk has led me to the darkest despair.
[laughter]
Your courage like a candle flickering in the mind… for one you've given me call to action.
[applause]
With morals, with wisdom, and some strategy but you've also said we're doomed unless we act. 
Yesterday was the 200th anniversary of Charles Dicken's birth. 
And he wrote about a class of people that has almost been forgotten. 
This current debate in Occupy Wall Street brought one phrase back into American political debate: "class conflict". 
We haven't heard that in a long time. 
Mitt Romney unexpectedly and I think without wanting to brought another word back, "the poor". 
When we talk about the middle class, and that's Obama's talk, and even Romney's talk, and newt gingrich all talk about middle income,
it's like in America there are no "small" eggs, there are only "large" eggs.
You go to Starbucks there's no "small" coffee, it's "tall" Everything is euphemisms. 
[laughter]
So you have, your writing, and in your talking, reminded us that the poor are beneath the middle class, the middle income, they're even worse off. 
Romney thinks there's a safety net, this has been found to be completely untrue. 
Thank you for your courage, and your inspiration.
[applause]
