Pulitzer prize winning journalist chris hedges talks about his book wages of rebellion next. He discusses the causes of revolution and resistance by looking at stories of rebels throughout history and examines what it takes to be a rebel in modern times. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] hi there. Hi there. Can you guys hear me . Can you hear me in the back . Great. Im one of the owners here. Its great to see all of youd a labyrinth tonight. Welcome. Just a few practical things and then well get going. First, please turn off your cell phones if you havent done that already. Also our event season is islanding down but were planning great events for the fall so if you dont already get our email invite and would like to just leave us your email address on the back counter theres a signup sheet for that. In terms of the event tonight the logistics are i will do a very breath introduction, chris will speak and then there will be time for q a. I would just like to ask you we have cspan booktv here tonight. And id like to ask you to give me a moment to come to you with the mic so that you the whole event can be heard as well as seen. And i also want to ask you to try to formulate really a question rather than a statement in fairness to everyone else. Okay . It miss great pleasure to introduce to you and to welcome back to labyrinth a friend and neighbor chris hedges, white house new book, becames of rebellion. Were honoring and discussing tonight. Chris spent nearly two decade as a Foreign Correspondent in central america, the middle east africa, and the baskan balkans. He has report emfrom more than 50 conditioned working for major news outlets from are 15 areas he was foreign account for the new york times, where he was part of the team of reporters that was awarded the pull litter price in 2002 for the papers coverage of global terrorism. He is the author of more than a dozen chit 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 princeton and in addition to publishing what seems to be about a become a year chris writes a weekly column and teaches inmates in new jersey prisons. With wages of rebellion chris continues his work as chronicler of globalized Corporate Power. Over the suffering and harm it inflicts on humans and on the environment. But while reminding the reader always of how high the stakes of inaction are this book is dedicated mostly to understanding what it means and what it takes to take action. In particular to take nonviolent action. While its never in doubt the rebel wes immediate in the book are men and women of great moral and physical courage that courage is in this telling almost a secondary effect. Primary is the notion of sublime madness. This curious mick tours, chris explains, of gloom and hope, defiance and resignation of absurdity and meaning is born of the enormity of forces that must be defeated and the remote chaps for success in every chapter he drew us on the history of political thought and the biographies of rebels through the centuries and the world over but crucially also on a large canyon of literary tasks. Our culture patri moany is a source from which to draw strength for a struggle that is not necessary lay struggle against all odds. A rae blind over the experience of the natural word is offered as another source of strength. While chris new book is a book of history reporting and analysis and therefore for the most part is written in the third, not the first person, given the fact that social justice is the cause to which chris has dedicated his own life wages of rebellion is an intensely permanent book. The last sentence at the end of a tribute to his wife and their children is fire i have never done enough. The work of those who resist injustice, it would seem, requires not only some form of sublime madness but also a forever restless conscience. Please join me in giving chris a welcome. [applause] thank you. And thank you. One of the great joys being in princeton is having labyrinth one of the great book stores in the United States, and it would be hard to imagine living here without labyrinth and Firestone Library across the street. The three books i wrote before becames of rebellion, death of the liberal class empire of illusion literacy, and the triumph of spectacle this the dives destruction days of due instructiondoor destruction out of camden, urge, the poorest per capita city in the United States and when we were working there to the most dangerous attempted to portray a political and Economic System that no locker served the interests of the citizen but the exclusive demands of Corporate Power. In all of those books i argued that investing our hope and our energy in the formal mechanisms of power was a waste of time; that we had undergone what john ralston calls a corporate coup detat in slow motion, that its over. Theyve won. That we live, rather, in what the political philosopher sheldon woolen calls a system of inverted totalitarianism, and that is not classical totalitarianism, doesnt find its expression through a demagogue or a charismatic leader but through the anonymity of the corporate state. Making it difference from communism and different from fascism but no less as effective a totalitarian force. So we have the facade of electoral politics, of the constitution of the traditional branches of government, but internally corporations have now seized all of the levers of power to render the citizen impotent. Those were all of those arguments that the liberal class chronicled the destruction of liberal institutions, which once made piecemeal and incremental reform possible. Labor, the academy the arts, largely commercialized, and of course as noam chomsky has written, those liberal institutions were a kind of safety valve to amale yourate the grievances and injustices of the citizenry and right the kind of capitali democracy. Roost said his greatest achievement was that the saved capitalism and thats correct can but the destruction of that mechanism by which you could address a crisis within capitalism and of course the new deal addressing the breakdown of capitalism itself is gone. We are barreling towards a frightening global neofeudallism. We have empowered a rapicious ollie backerric elite. We indeed live in an oligarch can i. We have detroit the exalt of our working clays to make a sustainable income and the assault on the middle class is far underway, and at the same time the state the corporate state, is squeezing more and more and more and rendering the government less and less effective in terms of meeting the demands of citizens and that is borne out now with the secret trade agreements, the tpp and cafta and others, where essentially the power of the state intervene in terms of corporate exploitation is removed from them. Now, all of this creates a very frightening kind of political paralysis, an inability of the state 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 this fact that poor what malcolm x called our internal colonies, derived up to 30 honor of their income from fining the poor. For absurdities, not mowing their lawn, standing for five seconds or walking they make the rules up thats go along. Nip who worked in the major alcommunity understand the omni omni otent policing, and at the same time the legal system has been utterly inverted. To strip the citizen of its most his or her most cherished constitutional rights. We can start with the right to privacy, the section 10201 on the detective i sued barack obama in the southern ticketer court of new york and it was appealed and overturned which permits the military to carry out domestic policing in essence form some extraordinary rendition on American City streetsseize american citizens who are deemed to be terrorists and hold them without due process indefinitely in military facilities. The inability on the courts to deal with wholesale surveillance all of news this room have all of our information we mow this because of the courage of Edward Snowden all of our information is captured, downloaded and stored in perpetuity in government computers. Once you have a state and i covered the collapse of the 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 the master and a slave. The ability of the executive branch to call for the assassination of american citizens the misuse of the espionage act to shut down whistleblowers, drake, snowden and others, Chelsea Manning all of this is combining to create a very frightening dystopia. And unfettered, unregulated capitalism as karl marx understood is a revolution ther in post, stripped of external limits it exploits until exhaustion or collapse. So that even when you get a figure like Bernie Sanders on many of the issues agree with bernie although not on his position with israel as soon as he signs on to the project of the Democratic Party, and i think as ralph nader told us for some time the democratic part is as captive to Corporate Power as the republican party. There is no way within the american political system to vote against the interests of exxonmobil or raytheon or goldman samples. Its inpock and the decision by sanders to work within that party and not call it out for what it is, essentially allows him to act as a kind of sheepdog for Hillary Clinton who and clintons assault against the working class was perhaps even more draconian that that carried out by ronald reagan. And a half tacoma the omnibus crime bill in 1994, which exploded the prison population this deregulation of the fcc 77 of the children oregon the assistant act for families were stripped of their ability to receive government benefits. Glass stiegel. All of this essentially has propelled us forward to a situation where,s a things unravel, we know longer have the legal mechanisms or the protection by which we can resist and this is by design. The nsa has run numerous scenarios of the effects of climate change, and we just saw in march 400 parts per million the first time that the levels of Carbon Emissions has been that high for an entire month in roared history. These are the death throes of the planet, 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 the fort visavis climate change. That the amendment can he face, the political environment alreality were up against. The capacity of the state to control the citizen to monitor the citizen to use lethal force against unarmed citizens, and all of the marches by black lives matter, all of the coverage all of the videos, that show us the murder by militarized police forces, of unarmed citizens, do nothing. The numbers of citizens keep being killed every 28 hours usually a young man or woman of color is murdered, unarmed in this country. And so how do we react . How do we resist what does it take . And what will the state do . That is what i tried to look at in the book wages of rebellion omoral imperative of revolt. And i spend time in the book talking with those who have stood up with magnificent courage to defy the system. People like abu jamal julian assange, and the embassy the great civil rights attorney, lynn stewart herself sent to prison, Jeremy Hammond the hacker. I attended with cornell west the trials of Chelsea Manning and wed leave princeton at 3 00 in the morning to drive down to be at fort mead and each lesson was each car ride cornell would drive was a lesson the classic soul. He knows everything about everything including cassic soul so re left side go booty collins wrote that sock 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 seen cornel, myself and she just wanted to send a thank you note. I think the greatest existential cries 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 that he called sublime 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 baldwin writes about this by a vision, a vision that takes possession of them. Hannah errant writes about this where in the face of she actually says when she leave this university of heidelberg, that she had to unlearn everything that she had been taught of course she studied with hiderger in the university to become a moral human being, and she says that the those who are most effect enough terms of resisting are not those who ask or say this should not be done, or we oughtnt do this but who say i cant. Its that inability on the part of the rebel to accept because of who they are complicity with systems of injustice. And that is what neber called sublime madness, james koehn in his great book, from the lynching tree, which i suggest you read, plays with the fundamental quality in those who he talks about the africanamerican experience, who endure the horrific 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, and we see it as the climate unravels at a faster pace than climate scientists predicted, we just saw we have seen the norwegian study in the arctic where theyre saying all of the measurements in terms of the arctic ice has been wrong because that layer of old ice is gone, all the old its in fact new ice. The severe drought in california and what happens as that society as our society constricts politically economically and environmentally, is that the forces of corporate control tighten, the levers or the mechanisms of power. The fact that the corporatized media, as one example will talk about the drought in california and not talk about the Animal Agriculture industry which is fundamental to that drought. And 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 nateer or noam chomsky will give is shutout. Those of us who offer this critique are not offered a platform on National Media noam, ralph and i all find im about to leave for canada on friday expats one cbc show after another, and last time i was in canada the cbc filmed the show we want to thank cspan for being here 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. It terms out they were both right. What we first got was huxley and as we were fleeced as we now reach a state where we cant get credit where all of those cheap manufactured Consumer Products are no longer easily accessible or available and shelledon woolen in this great book called that those the access to cheap credit and consumerism one of the two primary forms of political control. Once those are removed we increasingly get the iron boot, the iron fist, that orwell predicted. So turns out that orwell and huxley were both right and we are seeing now that transformation. As you get a huge underclass pushing 50 of this country in terms of poor and near poor, enable to sustain a living unable to sustain a living, chronic underemployment or unemployment which of course the statistics mask once you stop looking for work, youre no longer counted as unemployed or if you have a parttime job at william, 28 hours a week most workers a walmart thats the average they work your still put below the poverty line so your given applications for toad stamps and you qualify. We subsidize the Walton Family make 11,000 a year. I think that ultimately for me i come out of seminary i come oust of theological background that resistance is finally not determined by what empirically is around us, and that gets to what father Daniel Bergen who baptized our youngest daughter, when he defines faith help says that faith is the call to do the good or at least the good insofar as as you can determine it and then you let it go. Faith this belief that enif awe up of the evidence around you says otherwise the good goes somewhere. And i think that for the rebel like the religious mystic, it is this faith that finally defines our capacity to resist. Because the forces that we are facing are deadly and immense and unlike any to at that totalitarian force that human societies have faced 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 on 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. Its 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 electron ic correspondence, our medical records extraordinarily everything about its which by the way is a big business. Corporations sell all this stuff and they have everything on you. But thats why its there. And its that again that fought of both corporate and political power which is indistinguishable of our 16 intelligence agencies this is why snowden was working for a private contractor 70 of the intelligence is outsourced to private corporations. And they are using that intelligence as cruelly as the state itself. At 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 sued the president i was also part of the lawsuit that reached the Supreme Court clapper versus amnesty international, and that was challenging the warrantless wire tapping under the fisa amendment act, before the snowden revelations, and the government lawyer stood up in court next Supreme Court and said, its speculation, the plaintiffs charge that theyre being monitored by the state is speculation, and if they were being monitored the government would tell them. Which we now know from snowden is a lie. But the court bought it. And at that same time, the obama administration, which had challenged the day of judge reside ruling, a temporary injunction declaring section 1020 of the mga institutional the day of the ruling they sent lawyers not just government attorneys but attorneys from security agencies into her chambers and demanded that she reinstate, lift the temporary injunction, renne state the law in the name of National Security which to her credit she refused. The next week they win to the Appeals Court demanded the same thing and they did put it back into effect, the law back into effect and carl mayer who is here and bruce affron, the great lawyers on the case who did all the hard work. Gist showed up in a coat and tie. We all wondered why, and i think our such signifies such signifies was theyre already using the law in sights like bag baghdadram and other places. So the Second Circuit waited until the Supreme Court ruled and then the case was called hedges versus obama. He said the plaintiffs in hedges vs. Obama, the plaintiffs in the Supreme Court chapper versus dont have stand organize credibility and therefore they dont have any hedges versus obama. Thats an example of how the court plays a very dirty game. By which it doesnt rule on the clear unconstitutionality of deploying the military as a Domestic Police fees and seizing american citizens as terrorists and stripping them of due process. Its skirts them in the same way that Citizens United defines unlimited Corporate Cash as petitioning the government as free speech. This is over and over and over thats correct Court Systems have been used to strip us legally, we have created omni potent policing, beginning in marginal communities places where doors can be kicked down in the mid of to the night police entered with long barrel rifles,ing for warrants. Entire families are terrorized. Only 94 of people in america actually get a trial. The police stack you with so many charges most of which you didnt commit, and then they offer to strip off a few as a police. And if you actually good to court, theyre going to make an example of you. Your sunshineses going to be longer and i can give you newman louse examples from the students i teach when you get inside the prison system and you see what has been done to the poor, the system of neoslavery because it is built on the exploitation, hundred million prisoners now work mostly for large corporations target, Pierre Cardin the model worker. I you want to know what the corporate state wants for the rest of us, walk inside our system the system of mass incarceration, because theres a model worker, no benefits no Health Insurance they always show up to work on time, and should they actually protest their conditions or attempt to organize theyre sent off to solitary confinement where theyre locked away for so long they often go insane. Tens of thousands of american prisoners are in solitary in this country. Britain puts three to four prisoners a year in solitary. And the economic engines that now drive it mean that these corporations are writing the legislation. And so those prisons i think become a kind of model for where were headed. As we are steadily stripped of our rights. And the struggle before us is one where we are going to have to face the an assault on the ecosystem, which even if we stopped emitting carbon today would still trigger catastrophic change it is the creation and we see it, these trade deals which are just nafta on steroids weakening the power of the government to curb or halt corporate exploitation, and all of that means that the only mechanism left by which we can save ourselves and save our children is to begin to carry out acts of massively disobedience and that requires taking to the streets. I cover the revolutions in eastern europe, east germany czechoslovakia romania, and i watch day after day hundreds of thousands, 500,000 people in alexander platz. Half a Million People in the square in prague, and i was every night in czechoslovakia and the Magic Lantern theater and hovel was a kind of model of what it means to be a disdidnt dissident. What it means to rebel. He had begun with charter 77, in 1977 in 1978, writing his great essay the power of the powerless, calling upon to us live in truth to not by living in truth exposing the system for what it was. And that of course is the great terror of the system. That it is exposed for the predatory creature that it has become. And hobble was not a particularly charismatic figure or a good speakunder but he had the moral authority no question in prague. I remember that winter, all through the streets in the city there were posters of a Young CharlesUniversity Student who to protest the soviet invasion, which had overthrown dubkek and reinstate ate professor soviet regime, went to square and lit himself on fire. Four days later died of his wounds and the funeral procession of students from charlesant to the graveyard was broken up by the police. I was never report. It was a nonevent. We have manien in events now in this country including the poor in this country who have been rendered invisible by a Corporate Media unless they cater to the stair youre continue of what our president called thugs and criminals without understanding the long slow drip of hugh hillation pain disspace, indiscriminate violence that caused them to react as we would react if we were enduring the same form of oppression. And when they buriedy the body, his grave became a shrine, they exhumed his remains cream mated them and gave them to his mother and said she could not bury them. A week after the communist government fell, 10,000 people went to Red Army Square and remaimed it pollack square. That winter there are i was also in the square when the singer martha, walked out on the balcony and she had sung the prayer to the anthem of defiance that was a call to resistance in 1968 and when dubkek was overthrown, he recording stock was destroyed she was banned from the air with as and in the intervening years she worked on an Assembly Line in a toy factory. She walked out on the balcony and began to sing the prayer for mart to, and every czech in the group new the words. Thats living in truth. That it is whatberry began talked about. When you stand up for justice even at that moment when it seems that everyone around you is passive and doesnt see you or hear you in fact, that truth seeps out. And thats what i took away from those revolutions from people like havel. They are those ironic points of light. They hold forth the narrative that at a certain moment becomes a conflagration rebellion finally is not carried out for what we succeed but for who it allows us to become. I fight fascists, not because im going to win but i fight fast cysts because they are fascists and that is the moral impeartive of revolt. It is the call to stand up and do what is right in the face of overwhelming and even deadly odds with the recognition that we may not succeed. Indeed most of us may not succeed. But we cannot use the word hope if we are not willing to rebel. Thank you. [applause] [inaudible] conversation [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] im going to go from here to over there. As someone who has written about democratization in the rest of the world not here, ive been struck by the street protests in the last few years that deal with corruption, lack of democracy in peoples own countries. One of the issues or problems with the protests however is that they are not connected or networking sufficiently with other forces in their own societies, such as what called democratization ngos, theyre not tied to the institutions which might help them or support them. I dont know whether you want to make a parallel here but it strikes me that thats an inherent problem with protest movements, with street protests. Right. You raise a good point. If there is not an alternative political vision, and if there is not a political expression of that vision, then those movements become chaotic and an an narkic and easily put down. Thats wheel we have to look at greece. Ten years ago they were polling four percent and ive spoken to the socialist City Council Woman in seattle about this, at length and i think her point is correct. We have to begin to build movements that have a political expression. This wasdithink bernie sands great mistake in not runs as an independent. But the system gamed. I worked for ralph mader and a longtimed a mirier and supporter of nader, so i understand all the obstacles they throw up to essentially lock out anybody who doesnt conform to the democratic or republican mold. But if we see elections as essentially furthering a movement rather than an end in and of themselves and this is something we are going to sham and i will meeting with others in new york. Ill kick off her Campaign Rally in seattle on the 6th. And i dont want to run and she doesnt want to run so we got to find some sacrificial lamb. We tried to convince cornel bus the doesnt want to do it. This is where we have to look at current. The secret is building the movement because its the movements, as howard zen understand, its the movements none of which achieve formal positions of power that opened up the space in the american democracy, the Liberty Party that fought slavery the Labor Movement the Civil Rights Movement and the most powerful political figure in america until he was murdered, assassinated in april 1968, was king because when he went to memphis or went to sell marks 50,000 people went with him which is why johnson and the power establishment were terrified of him and that is the point. Carl popper makes they point in the open society and its enemies. The question is not how do you get good people to rule. That the wrong question, he writes. Most people attracted to power are mediocre or venal. The question house do you make the power elite frightened of you so that theres in kissingers memoirs dont buy the book his and nixon are looking out the window think a huge ann dewar demonstration there are not city buses as barricades around if the white house. And nixon is going henry theyre going to break through the barricades and get us, and thats just where we want people in power to be. Thats why nextan was the last liberal president we had. Not because he was liberal or hat a heart but because he with frightened of movements. The mine and safety act osha, is pushed through, with a functioning liberal wing hoff the democratic part that has now been destroyed courtesy of bill clinton, and we lost that understanding. That its not our job to take power. Its our job to build movements that hold power accountable and thats what unfortunately we have lost those movements. In the name of anticommunism. Its been a century of destruction, labor the old cio the wobblies, the communist party, whatever you think of the communist party was sitting down integrating lunch counters long before king and the Civil Rights Movement. That is history completely erased from american consciousness, and the destruction of the state Allen Schrecker writes about this thousands upon thousand offered journalists, social workers high school teachers, artists a all of whom were pushed out of the sew putt and and blacklifted. The fbi would show up at a high school with a list of six or seven teachers no evidence, they were gone and do never get another job. The aclu is purged. All purged. And this was done by design. And all of the blood that was spilled, the American Labor wars were the bloodiest in the industrialized word. The blood of those works that created the middle class that opened up the space in our society, all of that sacrifice has been rolled back, and we have to rise up with that same sacrificial spirit and the same ferocity of holding fast to moral imperatives to build movements, because in that sense im an anarchist i think power is always the problem and we must build movements that hold power accountability and we have to start now. Thank you. Thank you for your talk. Its very interesting. We certainly need a Critical Mass of people, very large number of people to stand up against the power elite our government the corporations. But dont you think its going to take a massive catastrophe on the level of you raise a good point. Its a very important point. If you look i write i do look back at 1848, other cycles, historians write revolutions come in waves and this wafer is this wave is beginning but its usually a crisis. So all the tinder there is, but what is it that sets it off . Its often something relatively banal. The first palestinian an accident where seven palestinian day workers are killed with an industrially driver in a truck. People are fed up. The murder by militarized forces of occupation that we call the police of people of color is not new. But its finally enough. And but youre right. The encroachment of the state in terms of the stripping away of our rights and the more draconian forms of control in a moment of crisis, it exposes itself. So when errant writes about omni potent policing, sher is writing about the stateless and she was stateless left germany stripped of their passport and has no rights in frap france. When he create physical mechanisms of omni appoint tent policings which we have done in the war on drugs and the criminalization of poverty then when the society breaks down it becomes very dangerous because you already have both the legal and the physical mechanism to use those forces against the society at large. But youre right it is a crisis. I cover the breakdown of yugoslav jugging you go slava. We have to understand is a violent Culture Society found own genocide and slavery that faulkner gets it. Thats the original sin. We carry it within our dna today. The systems of mass incarceration is neoslavery. It has been changed or mutated. Has a quality but its also slavery by another name, and the moment that the state feels seriously threatened is the moment that the mask will fall, and what is a common experience for the poor, especially urban poor will become an experience for the rest of us. So that moment of crisis, if were not prepared, could be seized by proto fascist movements. We have no shortage in the christian right the tea party the lunatic fringe of the republican party. We have to give clinton his due. He turned the Democratic Party to into the republican party. And he pushed the republicans so far to the right they became insane. And the state if it feels it already feels its already worried. The nsa has run scenario after scenario on climate breakdown. They know what is coming. Theyre ready. This is not the rise of these forces of thats what happens when empires go down. You bring the draconian and violent forces of controlling on the outer reaches of pompier that we dont see back into the heart of empire and thats how we get mill farized police, wholesale surveillance, drones, stripping away of civil liberties. Those are the standard mechanism by and empire perpetuates itself. So its the keys disease of empire come back to visit on us who are complacent while crimes are being committed in our name. Can you hear me . Mr. Fugiamo was here recently and he spoke but not as strong as as you did about the current situation. I agree with everything you said and i dont know whether we need a disaster but when i observed occupy wall street, which was a grassroots movement, nothing really happened in the end. When you look back at the antivietnam war movement, you had powerful leaders powerful minds, committed with moral authority. Youre one of those persons. Why dont you start one . There will be thousands of people who will follow you. People who write about it are committed. But we need powerful voices and leaders like you to gather the grassroots. That is my differentiation in the end im a writer, and i dont go before audiences even in the park and tell them what they want to hear. I was critical of anarchists which did not i told people in the occupation movement, the moment i need youred your adulation, im finished. I think the occupy movement was a profound and seismic event in modern American History because it was the rise of what was called the day class intellectuals. Marx dismissed the day class intellectuals of both marx and lenin were intellectuals and bacunin was right. Walt you got in occupy were the sounds and daughters of the white middle class who had taken only tremendous loans, horrible loans, found themselves thrown into horrific debt, couldnt get jobs and there was no place for them in the society as they assumed and have been told by all through their lives and by the institutions in which to which they went into debt to attend that there would be. So that role, the rise of the day class intellectuals uniting with Service Workers and the working poor in this country i think was extremely important. We have tomorrow there were all sorts of problems internally, especially after the tents went up. Thats when the drugs came in. We saw sexual assaults. But in the end the occupy movement was destroyed. It was destroyed in a coordinated federal effort led by president barack obama. And i think we have to look at occupy as a tactic, as in the same way that the freedom rides were a tactic. And then the integration of buses in montgomery were tactics. These are tactics and something is coming. May not look like or call itself obama. Were seeing it with the radicalization of black youth who are showing in places like ferguson political sophistication. Remember jess city jackson and al sharpton were booed out of ferguson. When . When they tried to hold events there. Jackson was literally driven out of the city and never came back because they looked at the black elite the way and thats how that black elite functions. It functions this is corporate colonialism so you push faith you push out a barack obama who does the bidding of Corporate Power and those kids in ferguson who didnt attend princeton get it in way i suspect some of those kids at princeton do not get it, and because they have been victims of that oppression, and one of the leaders of hands up united was invited to the white house and obama asked him did you vote for me . He said, no, im not going to vote for you just because youre blank that would be shallow. Those were his words. And so that is a level of the whole sort of focus on gender or race is antipolitics. Its antipolitical. Theres no political content to it. What we have in president ial elections are and hillary is about to spend 2. 5 billion . They are manufacture erred personalities. They use the sophistication of the Public Relations industry to make us confused how we are made to feel with knowledge and they create fictitious personas that appeal to us and that we vote for. This is not politics. Its absurdist political theater. And those students i niche a prison and those kids in ferguson are probably way ahead of most of the people in princeton. In your latest column, you write against a Bernie Sanders campaign. But it seems to me that a campaign led by a selfdescribed socialist in this country that was able to generate some grassroots support from rankandfile democrats and independents would only help to build a radical movement. Right. It wouldnt hurt it. Right. But that would be if it was carried out outside the Democratic Party. And that wassed sanders mistake. It i if you waugh dont find out what happens when your we do claire yourself as a socialist and then serve corporate part, you can look at holeland in fronts who has speak detroit the socialist party in france for a generation. I would couldnt it help to build an independent radical movement . All the followers once theyre disappoint or betrayed, theyre going to need somewhere else to go. They werere disappointed and betrayed by barack obama. The problem is he wont be allowed to run unless he endorses Hillary Clinton. So by next aim he is out and what he does is he then works to push his supporters, those selfdefined liberals and progressives back into dead space of the Democratic Party and he did not run as an independent because he didnt want to lose his championship and he saw what the Democratic Party did to ralph naadir and thats not speculation base asked him about it. Several of us asked him to run as an independent and he refused. Thats what we have the to do. Its not the leaders that are going to save us. Radical change is only ratified or acknowledged in parliaments or congresses. It comes from the street. And you see in a moment of seismic change a kind of swinging back and forth. You saw it in the french revolution so you create the National Guard under lafayette which is a counterrevolutionary force, which is firing, and then the french rise up again. A shrinking back and forth as the counterrevolutionary elite seek to seize control and push back on the revolution and the advance of the revolution. So the whole point is that without movements its a sterile exercise. That we have to invest or energy into Building Radical movements that push back, and frighten centers of power. Occupy frightened wall street. Occupy fright can more than i think the occupiers realized. They david the state. What really terrified the state is when mothers and fathers from new jersey were coming in and push to go their strollers up and down. That frightened them because essentially it was mainstreaming the movement. Which is why they had to demonize it. The state is fragile. The chicago teachers are marching through the streets of chicago go into a Precinct Office to use the bathroom and the police applaud. Thats terrifies the state. A couple years ago im with a veterans for peace, 133 of us, mostly vets, are rest arrested in front over the white house and turn outs the cops have been in the National Guard in iraq and afghanistan and as they cuff us, and it happened to me, they whisper in your ear keep protesting these wars. The state knows that. And thats why the state passed the nbaa because it doesnt trust the police to protect us. V. Bazaars rushed back on a Railroad Line and they just need to get back. He sends down an elite Paratrooper Division to fire on the crowd and they wont do it and honecker is out in another week and because they have the most dangerous weapon in our hands which is the truth about power and about the state once we stand up and are no longer afraid in their manufacturing gear in this country at a rate i was an amtrak and they said if you see something say it and a pivot end of the video the person is being cuffed and taken away just as a reminder. They are terrified and if we lose the capacity for fear and if we stand up in a nonviolent manner to live in truth and i saw it in the stasi state in east germany then it creates paralysis within the systems of power. They may use violence but they ultimately wont use it effectively because there are too many people who dont want to carry it out. There are too many people who have relatives out in those crowds. When they went to get those paratroopers and bring them into the streets they were crying because their families and friends were on the streets and they didnt want to shoot the men they did not shoot them. We have that capacity to build a Critical Mass, to expose Corporate Power for what it is but it requires us to go out in the street, getting arrested and theres more time than i wish to donate to the u. S. Government but im afraid thats the only option we have. And we have no time left as the latest report on Carbon Emissions in the month of march has shown us. We have no time left. Thank you. I agree with you that its the turkey topsy time. I would like to know how many fascists that know they are fascists since you are calling them the enemy, and that doesnt count those who know they are part of the chain and they want to break it. There ares a good look by a german and he argues i think correctly that in the end fascism doesnt really have any ideology despite this thing about corporatism and miscellany. Fascism has it very often uncomfortable relationship with business because unlike inverted totalitarianism where the primacy of corporate profit takes precedence over everything everything, and fascism and woolen makes this point in this great look you will carry out things that dont economically make sense so your Railway System is being bombed to smithereens and at the end of the war you are using it to ship more jewish off to auschwitz. So how many fascists know they are fascists . Most fascists are themselves patriots. I would describe the whole celebration of american sniper is a form of fascism and all of those people who decided to cheer every time in that movie some iraqi was killed as expressing fascist sentiments. Protofascism is alive and well in america. It always has been. The plan is a kind of quintessential fascist organization and what fascist movements do is they channel with the most retrograde elements of american capitalism april sun, the Koch Brothers hmos are legitimate rays towards the undocumented, muslims, liberals feminists, have a long list of people they despise and that is part of the current of American Society and thats why i wrote a chapter called vigilante violence because we are not canada. We have a very dark, we are very violent culture and in times of distress those workers who died were usually shot by vigilantes pinkertons, gun thugs and not to mention the terror that was visited on africanamericans not only from the clan but the white leagues and the red shirts in north carolina, on and on and on so that is also part of our dna and a very frightening part of our dna which means that the backlash that is coming could very possibly be a very frightening right wing backlash where people cry out for authority for hypermasculine authority but i think that notion of hypermasculinity i think is very insightful. We see it in the celebration of the military in the United States the celebration of the military for virtues of the hierarchy of the military. Theres a kind of state religion at this point built around the military thats very scary. We have time for one more question. Ive been reading your column for quite a few years now and i want to recommend to everyone who has read the most recent. I thought it was the most precise, the most precise concise distillation. A tennis match in the blog of people crying out on both sides. You have to vote in the next election locally nationally. If you cant vote in the next election youre not voting will be the protest. Well as emma goldman said if voting was that effective it would be illegal. I will vote as a protest vote so i supported nader in until 2008 and they voted for Joe Jill Stein in 2010 and i think jill is running again but my fear is that people think voting is important. Every totalitarian state i covered including Saddam Hussein had elections. Stalin had the most enlightened constitution in Human History and he promulgated it at the height of the burgess in the 30s so voting is utterly tangential not so much locally and thats why im working to support someone. I will do this fundraiser in new york at the end of the month and then we will go out to seattle and help her with her campaign because the democratic establishment, not just in the state of washington but nationally is determined to destroy her because like nader