Transcripts For CSPAN2 Book Discussion On Wages Of Rebellion 20150531

You to give me a moment to come to you with the mic so that the whole event can be heard as well as seen. I also want to ask you to try to formulate a question rather than a statement in fairness to everyone else. It is my great pleasure to introduce to you and to welcome back to labyrinth a friend and neighbor subthree whose book subone wages of rebellion the moral imperative of revolt. He has reported from one of 50 countries working for many major news outlets. For 15 years he was Foreign Correspondent for the New York Times where he was part of a team of reporters that was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for the coverage of global terrorism. He is the author of more than a dozen critically acclaimed books which continue to influence and inspire those looking for ways to understand and resist structural inequality and injustice. Chris is a senior fellow at the nation institute. He has taught at Columbia University nyu and in addition to publishing what seems to be out a book a year chris writes a week to column for truth dig and teaches in new jersey prisons. With wages of rebellion chris continues his work as chronicler of globalized Corporate Power of the suffering harm it infects on humans and the environment. While reminding the reader always of how high the stakes have been this book is dedicated mostly to understanding what it means and what it takes to take action. In particular to take nonviolent action. While hes never in doubt that the rebels in wages of rebellion are men and women of great moral and physical courage that courage is almost a secondary effect. Primary is the theologian notion of supply madness. This curious mixture chris explains of gloom and hope, defiance and resignation, of absurdity and meaning is born of the rebels awareness of the enormity of the forces that must be defeated and remote chances for success. In every chapter he draws not only on the history of political thought and in the biographies of rebels through the centuries and the world over but crucially also on a large canon of literary text. Our cultural patrimony has offered a force from which to draw strength from a struggle that is necessarily a struggle against all odds. A reminder of the experience of the Natural World as sacred is offered is another such source of strength. While chris new book is a book of history reporting and analysis than they are for the most part is written in the third and not the first person given the fact of social justice is the cause to which chris has dedicated his own life wages of rebellion is also an intensely personal book. Its last sentence coming at the end of a tribute to his wife eunice who is here and their children is i fear i have never done enough. The work of those who resist injustice it would seem required not only some form of supply madness but also a forever of conscience. Please join me in giving chris a warm welcome. [applause] thank you and thank you dorothea. One of the great joys of being in princeton is having labyrinth labyrinth, one of the great bookstores in the United States and it would be hard to imagine living here without labyrinth and Firestone Library across the street. The three books that i wrote before wages of rebellion death of the liberal class and the end of literacy and days of revolt which i wrote for the great cartoonist joe sato out of the forest pockets of the country including camden new jersey percapita the poorest city in the United States and at the time we were working there the most dangerous, tempted to portray a political and Economic System that no longer serve the interest of the citizen but the exclusive demands of Corporate Power. And all of those books i argued that investing our hope and our energy in the formal mechanisms of power was a waste of time that we had undergone what John Ralston Saul calls a corporate coup detat in slow motion and then its over. They won that we live rather in what the political philosopher Sheldon Weldon calls the system of converted totalitarianism and that is not classical totalitarianism. It doesnt find its expression through a demagogue or charismatic leader but through the anonymity of the corporate state making it different from communism and different from fascism but no less as effect of a totalitarian force so that we have the facade of electoral politics of the constitution of the traditional branches of government but internally corporations have now seized all of the levers of power to render a citizen impotent. Those were all the arguments death of the liberal class chronicled, the destruction of liberal institutions which once made piecemeal and incremental reform possible labor, the academy, the arts, arts commercialized and of course as noam chomsky has written those liberal institutions acting as a kind of safety valve to ameliorate the grievances or injustices of the citizenry and write the kind of capitalist democracy roosevelt said his greatest achievement was that he saved capitalism and thats correct. The distraction of that mechanism by which one could address a crisis within capitalism and of course the new deal and the breakdown of capitalism itself is gone. We are barreling towards a frightening global neofeudalism neofeudalism. We have empowered a rapacious oligarchic elite. We indeed live in an oligarchy. We have destroyed the capacity of our workingclass to make a sustainable income and the assault on the middle class is far underway and at the same time the corporate state is wheezing more and more in rendering the government less and less effective in terms of meeting the demands of citizens and that is borne out with the secret trade agreements were essentially the power of the state can intervene in terms of corporate exploitation removed from it. Now all of this creates a very frightening kind of political paralysis, an inability of the state to respond to the vast majority of the citizens. We see that in the name of austerity. We see that in the way that the state in order to fund its activities exploits in greater and greater measure the poor and the most vulnerable. One of the engines to the revolt in Ferguson Baltimore and other places is the fact what malcolm x called our internal colonies derived 30 or 40 of bearing, from for absurdities not mowing their lawns standing for five seconds and they would make up the rules as they went along. Anyone who has worked in a Marginal Community understands the policing some think that aaron warned about. At the same time the legal system has been utterly converted to strip the citizen of its most his or her most cherished Constitutional Rights. We can start with the rights of privacy. Section 1021 of the National Defense authorization act. It was appealed and overturned that permits the military did carry out domestic policing in essence forms and extraordinary rendition on American City streets seize american citizens who are deemed to be terrorists and hold them without due process in military facilities. The inability on the courts to deal with wholesale surveillance surveillance. We know this because of the courage of edward snowden. All of our information is captured downloaded and stored in perpetuity in Good Government computers. Once you have a state and i covered the state in east germany once you have the state that has the capacity to monitor a citizen 24 hours a day you can no longer use the word liberty. That is the relationship of a master and a slave. The ability of the executive branch to call the nation of american citizens, the misuse of the espionage act to shut down whistleblowers snowed in anothers, Chelsea Manning, all of this is combining to create a very frightening and unfettered unregulated capitalism as karl marx understood as a revolutionary force imposing limits stripped of external limits and exploits until exhaustion or collapse. Even when you get a figure like Ernie Sanders and many of the issues i agree with bernie although not on the position of israel i think ralph nader has told us for some time the Democratic Party is a captive Corporate Power the republican party. There is no way for the american political system to vote against the interests of exxon mobil or raytheon or goldman sachs, its impossible and that decision bystanders to work within that party and not call it out for what it is essentially allows them to act as a kind of sheepdog for Hillary Clinton and clintons assault against the working class was perhaps even more draconian than that carried out by ronald reagan, nafta but on that this exploded the prison population the destruction of welfare, 70 of the children of were stripped of their ability to receive government benefits. Glasssteagall, all of this essentially has propelled us forward to a situation where as things unravel we no longer have the legal mechanisms for the protection by which we can resist. This is by design. The nsa has run numerous scenarios on the effect of climate change. We just on march 400 parts per million the first time the levels of Carbon Emissions have been that high for an entire month in recorded history. And corporate forces exploit until theres nothing left and in theological terms in many ways they are forces of death. Quite literally when we talk about that forces it is climate change. Thats the reality that we face. That is the political, the economic the environmental realities that we are up against and the capacity of the state to control the citizen, to modern modern monitor the citizen to use lethal force against unarmed citizens and all of the marches all of the coverage all of the videos that show was military policed militarized Police Forces the numbers of citizens killed every 20 hours usually a man or woman of color is murdered in this country. And so how do we react . How do we resist . What does it take and what will the state due . Thats what i try to look at in the book wages of rebellion the moral imperative of revolt and i spent time in the book talking with those who have stood up with magnificent courage to defy the System People like mone yeah abdul jamal Julian Assange and the great civil rights attorney lynne storck herself sent to prison jeremy hammond, the hacker. I attended with cornel west that trials of Chelsea Manning and he lives in princeton. We would leave at 3 00 in the morning to drive down to fort meade and each car ride for now would usually drive with he knows everything about everything so he would say Bootsy Collins wrote that song for james brown when he was 19. And i got a letter from Chelsea Manning after she was sentenced and imprisoned. She was not allowed to turn around and look at who was seated in the courtroom to support her and i got a letter saying that she had looked out of the corner of her eye and scene cornel of myself and she just wanted to send a thank you note. I think the greatest existential crisis of our time is accepting the reality that is before us with all its bleakness and yet finding the capacity to resist. And liberalism itself in the face of a crisis of this magnitude is an ineffectual force. Its too intellectual. Its too passionless. Its too lacking in that quality of supply madness that capacity to rise up in the face of overwhelming repression and respond as a moral imperative. The ability of rebels to react to massive systems of oppression is driven and mauldin writes about this i envision, a vision that takes possession of them and aaron writes about this where in the face of when she used the inner leaves the university of heidelberg she had to unlearn everything that she had been taught when she studied with heidegger in the University University to become a moral human being and she said those who are the most effective in terms of resisting are not those who say it should not be done or we oughtnt to do this but to say i cant. It is that inability on the part of the rebel to accept because of who they are. Complicity with systems of injustice and that is what neighbor called the supply madness. The cross and the lynching tree which i urge you all to read also plays this as a fundamental quality in those comedy talks of course about the africanamerican experience who wonder if they corrected forms of racism economic and legal oppression that are not unfamiliar in marginal communities and yet have that spiritual resource to resist in the face of overwhelming odds. What is coming we see it as the climate unravels at a faster pace than climate scientists predicted. We just have seen in a region study in the arctic where they are saying that all of the measurements in terms of the arctic ice has been wrong because that layer of ice is gone. Its in fact a new ice. The severe drought in california and what happens is that society society, as our society restricts politically, economically and environmentally is the forces of corporate control tightens the levers are the mechanisms of power. The fact that the corporatized media and is one example we will talk about the job in california and not talk about the Animal Agriculture industry which is fundamental to that drought. In fact the Animal Agriculture industry is arguably the primary industry behind Global Warming and yet the power of those corporations are such that they have shut out any kind of a discussion. Even this critique of Corporate Power, one that figures like nader or noam chomsky will give is shut out. Those of us who offer this critique are not offered a platform on national media. Gnome and ralph and i find im about to leave for canada on friday and is one cbc show after another. The last time i was in canada speaking at Ryerson University the cbc film is shown and we want to thank cspan for being here but they filmed the show and devoted a onehour program to it. That is impossible within the United States. I used to wonder whether huxley was right or orwell was right and i think it turns out they are both right. In a sense what we first got was huxley in this week now reached a state where we cant get credit were all of those cheap manufactured Consumer Products are no longer easily accessible or available and sheldon noel in his grave look Democracy Incorporated caused those consumers in one of the two primary forms of political control. Once those are removed we increasingly get the iron boot the iron fist that orwell predicted. Turns out i think that orwell and huxley were both right and we are seeing now that transformation as we get a huge underclass pushing 50 of this country in terms of the poor and near poor, unable to sustain a living chronic underemployment or unemployment which of course statistics mask. When you stop looking for work you are no longer counted as unemployed or if you have a parttime job at walmart, most workers at walmart, you are still put below the poverty line so your given application for food stamps if you qualified. The Walton Family making about 11,000 a year. I think that ultimately for me and i come out with seminary and i come out of the theological background that resistance is finally not determined by what empirically is around us and that gets to what father Daniel Berrigan who baptize daughter when he defined state. He says that faith is the call to do the good or at least the good insofar as you can determine it and then you let it go. Faith is the belief that even if all of the empirical evidence around you says otherwise the good go somewhere and i think for the rebel like the religious mystic, it is this faith that finally defined our capacity to resist. Because the forces that we argue are deadly and immense and are unlike any totalitarian force that human societies have made in the past. Why is there wholesale surveillance and we can look at past totalitarian regimes to understand. It is because you gather all of the information of the citizenry so that the moment that you need it you can use it. Its not about justice. Its not about innocence. Its not about who committed a crime or who didnt. It is about that moment that they decide to criminalize an entire segment of the population and have whatever it is on your file that they can reach out and twist and use against you. That is why all of our electronic correspondence, our medical records, virtually everything about us which by the way is now picked business. Corporations sell all the stuff and they have everything on it but thats why its there. It is that fusion of corporate and political power which is indistinguishable of our 16 intelligence agencies. Snowden was working for a private contractor. 70 of the intelligence is outsourced to private corporations and they are using that intelligence as assiduously and as cruelly as the state itself. That this point there is no difference. The misuse of the judiciary by judicial fiat to strip us of Constitutional Rights so that for instance the right to privacy is not addressed by the courts in very nefarious and dark ways. When i see the president i was also part of the lawsuit that reached the Supreme Court clapper versus Amnesty International and that was challenging the Wireless Phone tapping in the government stood up in the Supreme Court and said speculation the plaintiff is speculated then that 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 the same time the Obama Administration which had challenged the day of ruling with the temporary at judge injunction declaring section 1021 of the nsa on constitutional the day of the ruling they sent lawyers not just government federal attorneys but attorneys from security agencies into her chambers and demanded that she reinstate the law in the name of National Security roots to her credit she refused and then the next week they went to the Appeals Court they seventh circuit and demand the same thing and they did put it back into effect. Carl mayor who is here the great historian ambriz avenue from. I dont know or is this here the great lawyers in this case who did all the work or they i just had to show up in it coat and tie but we all wonder why. I think our supposition is they are already used in the law. There are sites like bagram and others so the Second Circuit waited until the Supreme Court ruled and then the case called hedges versus obama the plaintiff hedges versus obama the plaintiffs in the court clapper versus international and and thats an example of how the court plays a very dirty game by which it doesnt rule on the clear unconstitutionality of the flying the military and seizing american citizens as terrorists and stripping them of due process. It skirts in the same way that Citizens United defined Unlimited Unlimited Corporate Cash and petitioning the government to free speech. This is over and over and over that the Court Systems have been used to strip up legally. We have created omnipotent omnipotent policing places where doors can be kicked down in the middle of the night he these are for nonviolent warrants, drug warrants. Entire families are terrorized. Only 94 of people in america actually get a trial. The police stack it with so many charges most of which he didnt commit and then they offered to strip off a few in a plea. If you ask to go to court they are going to make an example of you. Your sentence is going to be longer and i can give you numerous examples from the students that i teach. We can get inside the prison system in d. C. Whats been done before the system of neoslavery which of course is built on the exploitation 100 million prisoners work now mostly for large corporate corporations. If you want to know what the corporate states wants for the rest of us walk into the system of mass incarceration. No benefits no health insurance. And should they actually protest their conditions or attempt to organize their set off to solitary confinement where therell walked up for so long that they often go insane. Tens of thousands of american citizens are in solitary in this country. Britain are but three or four prisoners he and solitary in the economic engines that now drive it mean that these corporations are writing the legislation. So those prisons become a kind of model for where we are headed as we are steadily stripped of our rights. And the struggle but for us is one where we are going to have to face the an assault on the ecosystem which even if we stop emitting carbon today would still trigger catastrophic change. It is the creation and we see it in trade deals which is nafta on steroids weakening the power of the government to corporate exploitation and all of that means the only mechanism left by which we can save ourselves and save our children is to begin to carry out acts of mass civil disobedience. That requires taking to the streets. I cover the revolutions in Eastern Europe germany czechoslovakia, romania and i watched day after day hundreds of thousands 500,000 people half a million and then solicit where improv and every night and czechoslovakia in the Magic Lantern theater all the people who would inherit the government. Hobbled to me was a kind of model. What it means to be a dissident, what it means to rebel. He had of course begun with charter 77 in 1978 writing this great essay the power of the powerless calling upon us to live in truth and 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. Kabul was not a particularly charismatic figure or even a very good speaker but he had the moral authority. There was no question. A number that winter all through the streets of the city there were posters of the Young Charles University Student named jan pawlik who protested the soviet invasion which had overthrown loop check and reinstated a prosoviet regime and he went to times square and lit himself on fire. Four days later he died of his ones and the funeral procession of students from Charles University was broken up by the police and never was reported of course. It was a mob event. We have many nonevents now in this country including the poor in this country who have been rendered invisible by the Corporate Media must they cater to the stereotype of what our president called thugs are criminals without understanding the law and slow trip that humiliation pain and despair instrument of violence that causes them to react as we would react if we were enduring the same form of oppression. And when they buried pollux body he became a shrine. They examined his cremains and gave them to his mother. A week after the communist government fell 10,000 people went to Red Army Square and renamed it. That winter there were also, i was also in the square when the singer walked out on that balcony and she had sung the anthem of defiance that was a call to resistance in 1968 and when the object was overthrown herb recording stock was destroyed. She was banned from the airwaves and in the intervening years she had worked on Assembly Line and a toy factory. She walked out on that balcony and begin to sing the prayer for martha and every jax in the crowd knew every word. That is the moral power of persistence of living in truth and that is what he talked about that when you stand up for justice even at that moment when it seems that everyone around you is happy and doesnt see you were here you, in fact that truth seeps out and thats what i took away from those revolutions, from people like hovel. There are those ironic points of light. They hold forth that narrative that at a certain moment becomes the configuration. 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 fascists because they are fascists. And that is the moral imperative 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 and indeed most of us may not succeed but we cannot use the word hope if we are not willing to rebel. Thank you. A positive. [inaudible conversations] im going to go from here over there. As someone who has written about democratization in the rest of the world, not here i have been stripped of the protests come at the street protests in the last years that deal with corruption lack of democracy and people some countries. One of the issues or problems with those protests however is that they are not connected our networking sufficiently with other forces in their own society such as what i call democratization ngos. For example they are 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 is an inherent problem with protest movements, with street to test. You raise a good point, that if there is not an alternative political vision and if there is not a political expression of that vision than those movements become chaotic and anarchic and are easily put down and thats where we have to look for greece or spain. 10 years ago cerese a was pulling 4 and i have spoken to the socialist city councilwoman 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 was i think bErnie Sanders raid mistake in not running as an independent. I worked for ralph nader and i am a longtime admirer and supporter of nader so i understand intimately all the obstacles they throw up to essentially lockout anybody who doesnt conform to the democratic or republican mold. But if we see elections as essentially furthering a movement and this is something we will be meeting with others in new york. Im going to go out and kick off her Campaign Rally in seattle on the sixth and i dont want to run and she doesnt want to run so we have to find some sacrificial do we try to convince cornel but he doesnt want to do it but i think thats right. This is where we have to look at europe but its building the movements because its the movements as howard zinn understood to the movement none of which achieve formal positions of power that open up the space in american democracy. The Liberty Party that fought slavery and the suffrages in the Labor Movement in the Civil Rights Movement and the most powerful political figure in american till he was assassinated in april making 68 with king. Because he went to memphis for selma, 50,000 people went with him much as i jumped in the power establishment were terrified of him. Thats the point. He makes a point in the open society and the question is not how do you get good people to rule. Thats the wrong question the rights. Most people attractive power he says are mediocre or venal. The question is how do you make the power elite frightened of you so in kissingers memoirs and dont buy the book, he and nixon are looking out of window in the white house. I think its 71 and theres a huge antiwar demonstration. They have empty city buses as there are kids all around the white house and nixon is going henry they are going to break through the barricades and get us and that is just where we want people in power to be. That is why nixon was the last liberal president we had. Not because he was liberal or had a heart but because he was frightened of movements. The mine and safety outcome the clean water act all of which were altered by nader is pushed her with a functioning liberal wing of the Democratic Party that has not been destroyed courtesy of bill clinton and we lost that understanding. Its not our job to take power. It is our job to build movements that hold power accountable and unfortunately we have lost those movements in the name of anticommunism. There has been a century of destruction. The old anarchist movement, the old cio the communist party. Whatever you think of the communist party was sitting down integrating lunch counters long before king and the Civil Rights Movement to that is history has been completely erased from american consciousness and the destruction of the state that ellen trevor writes about this annoy every tower the purging of the University Center other books thousands upon thousands of journalists, social workers, high schoolteachers artis all of whom are pushed out of society and blacklisted. The reaction rates would show up with a list of teachers, no evidence they were gone and they could never get another job. The aclu are all and this was done by design. All of the blood that was spilled in American Labor wars were the bloodiest in the industrialized world the blood of those workers that created the middle class and open up the space in our society, all of that sacrifice has been rolled back. We have to rise up with that same sacrificial spirit and that same ferocity of holding fast to moral imperatives to build movements because in that sense im an anarchist and i think power is always the problem. [applause] we must build movements that hold power accountable and we have to start now. Thank you for your talk. We certainly need a Critical Mass of people, very large number of people to stand up to the power of the elite in our government and corporations that dont you think its going to take a massive catastrophe like world war ii world war ii . Is a very important point because if you look and i do look back 1848 and other cycles and historians write revolutions tend to come in waves in this way this beginning but its usually a crisis. So while at the tender is there and i think all of the tender is there but what is it that sets it off . Is often something relative relatively then also the first antifather is set off by a driver of an israeli track. Its just a point where people have had enough. The murder by militarized forces of occupation that we called the police of people of color is not new but its finally enough. But you are 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 in rights about it was stateless. She said when you create legal and physical mechanisms of omnipotent policing which we have done of course in the war on drugs and the criminalization of poverty than when the society breaks down and becomes very dangerous because you already have both the legal and physical mechanism to use those forces against the society at large. But you are right it is a crisis. I covered the breakdown of yugoslavia. It was hyperinflation that triggered the unrest and theres a chapter in a book called vigilante violence. We have to understand that americans are deeply violent culture. Culture society founded on genocide and slavery. Faulkner gets it. Thats the original sin. We carry it within our dna today today. The systems of mass incarceration is neoslavery. It has been changed or mutated and has a protean quality but its slavery by another name. 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 the urban poor will become an experience for the rest of us. Could be seized by the protofascist movements and we have no shortage with the christian right the lunatic fringe of the republican party. We have to give in to and is due. He turned the Democratic Party and republican party. The Democratic Party would be a far right party and push the republicans so far to the right they became insane. [laughter] and the state already feels, its already worried. The nsa a scenario after scenario climate breakdown and they know whats coming. They are ready. This is not the rise of these forces and thats what happens when empires go down. You bring the draconian violent forces that control on the outer reaches of that into the heart of empire and thats how we get to look for as police on wholesale Surveillance Drones stripping away of civil liberties. Those are the standard mechanisms by which empire perpetuates itself so its the disease of empire come back and visited upon all of us who are complacent while crimes are being committed in our name. Can you hear me . Mr. Fukuyama was here recently. He spoke not as strongly as you did about the Current Situation and i agree with everything you said. 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. And when you look back at the antivietnam war movements you have powerful leaders, powerful minds committed with moral authority. You were one of these persons. Why dont you start one . There are thousands of people who will follow you. People who write about it but we need powerful voices and leaders like you to gather the grassroots. That is my differentiation because in the end im a writer and i dont go before audiences even zucotti park and tell them why they want to hear. I was critical of anarchist which did not win me friends in the occupy movement but as i told many the people the moment i need your adulation im finished. Its my job as a writer to speak the truth and so far as i can determine it. I think the occupy movement was a profound and seismic event in modern American History because it was the rise of the declasse intellectuals. Remember marx dismissed the declasse intellectuals although both marx and lenin were intellectuals and the koonin was right. What he got an occupy were largely the sons and daughters of the white middle class who have taken out tremendous loans, horrible loans and found themselves thrown into perfect dad, couldnt get jobs than and there is no place for them in society as they had been told all the dirt laipson by the institutions to which they went into debt to attend that there would be. So that role, the rise of the declasse intellectuals uniting the Service Workers and the working poor in this country i think was extremely important. You have to remember that they were all sorts of problems internally especially after the tense when up and thats when the drugs came and we saw Sexual Assault in zucotti but in the end the occupy movement was destroyed. It was destroyed in a coordinated federal effort run by president barack obama 30 think we have to look at occupy is a tactic, and in the same way that the freedom rides were a tactic. And then the integration of buses in montgomery were a tactic paid these were attacked dixon something is coming. It may not look like occupying it may not call itself occupy. We are seeing it with the radicalization of black youth who are showing in places like ferguson and political sophistication. Remember Jesse Jackson and al sharpton were wooed out of ferguson. When . When they tried to show up and hold events there. Jackson was literally driven out of the city and never came back because they look at that black elite and thats how that black elite functions. This is corporate crony with him so you push phase, you push out of barack obama who does the bidding of Corporate Power and those kids in ferguson who didnt attend princeton get it in a way that i suspect some of those kids at princeton do not edit. Because they have been victims of that oppression and one of the leaders of hands of united was invited to the white house and obama asked him did you he vote for me is that im not going to vote for you just because you are black. That would be shallow. Those were his words. The great hiphop artist and so the whole sort of focus on gender or race is antipolitics. Its antipolitical. Theres no political content to with what we have in president ial elections and hillary is about to spend 2. 5 billion they are manufactured personalities. They used the sophistication of the Public Relations industry to make us confuse how we are made to feel acknowledged and they create fictitious personas that appeal to us and that we vote for. This is not politics. Its absurdist political theater theater. And those students i teach in the prisons and those kids in ferguson are probably way ahead of most of the people at princeton. In your latest colon the right against the bErnie Sanders campaign. 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 would only help to build a radical movement or it wouldnt hurt it. Right, that would be if it was carried out outside of the Democratic Party and that was sanders mistake. Thats what he is not doing so if you want to find out what happens when you declare yourself as a socialist insert Corporate Power you can look at france who has destroyed the socialist party in france for a generation. Why couldnt he helped to build an independent radical movement . All of his followers were betrayed. They are going to need some rows to go. They were already disappointed and betrayed by barack obama. The problem is he is not going to be allowed to run unless he agrees to endorse Hillary Clinton so by next april he is out and what he does is he then works to push his supporters those self defined liberals and progressives back into the dead space of the Democratic Party. He did not run as an independent because he didnt want to lose his Committee Chairmanships eddie knew at the Democratic Party would do to him because he salivated to ralph nader. That is not speculation because im asked him about it. There were several of us who asked him to run as an independent and he refused to do it. Thats what we have to do. Its not the leaders that are going to save us. Radical change is only ratified or acknowledge and parliaments or congresses. It comes from the street and you see in a moment of seismic change that kind of swinging back and forth grade you saw 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. Theyre swinging back and forth as the counterrevolutionary seeks control and pushes 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 our energy into Building Radical movements that pushback and frighten centers of power. Occupy frightened wall street. Occupy frightened more than i think the occupiers realized. It may terrify the state. What really terrify the state was when mothers and fathers from new jersey were coming in to cincotti in pushing their strollers up and down. That really frightened them because essentially it was mainstreaming the movement which is why they had to demonize it. The state is fragile. The chicago teacher, teachers are marching through the streets of chicago going to present up is to the bathroom and the police applied. That terrifies the state. A couple of years ago im with veterans for peace with 133 of us mostly thats arrested in front the white house and it turns out that the cops have been in the National Guard and iraq and afghanistan and as they cuff us and it happened to me they whisper in your ear, keep protesting. The state knows that and thats why the state passed the ndaa because it doesnt trust the police to protect them. All revolutions are not violent. Not colonial wars are colonial uprisings but revolutions because no revolution succeeds Great Britain and other theorists of revolution no revolution succeeds until the foot soldiers of the elite the Security Forces the police the military will no longer defend them. Thats how bizarre was overthrown the bread riots. They refused and fraternized with the crowd bazaars rushed back on railway lines. He doesnt even get back and when i covered the revolution in east germany honecker had been in power for 19 years. He sends a division to fire in the crowd and they get then they wont do it. Honecker is out in another week and because we have the most dangerous weapon at our hands which is the truth about power about the state, once we stand up and are no longer afraid in their manufacturing fear in this country at a rate. I was at amtrak and they say if you see something say in the end of the video the person is being cuffed and taken away just as a reminder. Kreme have no time left. I agree with you if it is a topsyturvy time. I would like to know how many fascists you have met that know that they are fascists since you call them the enemy . That does not count those who know they are part of the chain and want to break it. There is a good book by a german called male fantasies and he argues correctly fascism doesnt have any ideology just like mussolini or corporatism. Fascism it has an uncomfortably relationship with business because like inverted toward totalitarianism where takes profit over everything but fascism the book democracy inc. You will carry out things that dont economically make sense. The Railway System is being bonded to smithereens bayou use it to ship more jews to auschwitz. So how many fascists know . The most they define themselves as patriots. I would describe the whole celebration of america eggs a form of fascism and all those who decided to cheer every time in the movie an iraqi was killed to express fascists sentiments. Professions and is alive and well and always has been. The client plan is a kind of quintessential fascist organization and what they do is general the most retrograde elements of american a and capitalism a legitimate rage to the undocumented workers or muslims are liberals homosexuals i have a long list of who they despise. And that is part of the current American Society that is why i wrote a chapter called vigilantes violence. Because we have a very dark we have a very violent culture and in times of distress. Those workers who died were usually shot by vigilantes. Bed and thugs, pinkerton thugs, pinkerton, not to mention the terror visited upon africanamericans not only through the klan and the but the red shirts and on and on. That is also part of the dna. And a frightening part which means the backlash could be a frightening rate rightwing backlash where people call up for authority or hyper masculine authority but that notion of hyper masculinity is very insightful reseal it with the military and the United States with the celebration of military virtues. The hierarchy and there is a religion at this point built around the military that is very scary. We have time for one more question. I have been reading your column for a few years and i want to recommend to everyone i thought it was the most precise distillation of years worth of your thinking. The tennis match began in the block after your column of people crying out lung both sides for you have to vote in the next election. Local or national. Youre not voting is the protest. Can you comment . If voting was the Effective Date would be illegal. [laughter] i will vote as a protest i supported nader through 2008 iran for jill stein but my fear that people think voting is important to every totalitarian state i covered including Saddam Hussein had elections dahlin had written the most enlightened constitution in Human History am promulgated in the 30s. So it isnt so much locally that is where i work to support someone to do the fundraiser at the end of new york then rigo out to seattle to help her because the democratic establishment not justin the state of washington but nationally that is determined to destroy her because like ralph nader she exposes them, the bankruptcy and that is why she has to be destroyed. Your right. Locally they can be important because she dont need the massive sums of cash to buy the tiny get to the national stage, i do vote but i just dont think it means that much. We can continue the conversation but for now join me to thank our guest. [applause] [inaudible conversations] also he will sign books at the book table