.. i saw what happened during the great depression, and, you know, it wasn t the wonderfulness of fdr, it was the sit-down of course. and whole cities being shut down. that s right. how do we get back there? we have to stop trusting in bankrupt institutions, and we have to, you know, we have to go out and, look, i m not, i ve held anti-war rallies in lafayette park. i don t expect to go down there and see thousands of people. i m not going to pretend that being handcuffed is a pleasant experience. but that s the kind of thing we have to begin to do. and, you know, i ve watched in war zones how solitary acts of defiance have an immense power that ripple outwards. across a society. and at the moment are often seemed futile. 1968 in prague you have a czech student to protest the occupation who walks, i believe, in the square, joe, and burns himself to death. hushed up in the state media. nothing said. and yet in the velvet revolution which i covered, a poster with
if off [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] to saturate the country with propaganda was effectively used by the power elite to destroy all of those broadbased social movements that were bringing this country toward socialism. you remember eugene pulled a million votes that were huge publications appeal to reason, the fourth largest publication in the country was a socialist publication, the masses. we have several dozen socialist mayors and a strong push within this giglio, wobblies, and so there was a kind of twinning of the war propaganda machine has not only a vehicle to garner a massive support for the unpopular war but break the back of these movements. and they succeeded in the most poignant writing about this is done by randolph and jane addams, two of the amazingly heroic figures who ve resisted the tie. and what depressed them so deeply was how swiftly the intellectual class, many of the socialists themselves like sinclair lewis and others
mr. hedges contends that the liberal class, which includes universities, labor movements, the press, the democratic party or and liberal religious groups, has been gradually corrupted by corporate entities and without its existence it will no longer be a structure of checks and balances against corporate interests. chris hedges presents his thoughts at powells books in portland, oregon. it s an hour and a half. .. when i turn the manuscript and, they hated it. they describe my critique of the american media as filled with negativity, which they generously offered to remove before they published the book. you can imagine how that went over. so i was out the door with the manuscript and as i i wrote the book, i kept running into the fact that the press was hardly existed in a vacuum, that the press was one of the pillars of the liberal establishment that has certainly failed us. but there were other pillars in the liberal establishment, all of the pillars of the liberal estab