Chris Hedges | Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt

I'm John Jim Payne I work at The Enquirer well for The Enquirer yes please what me no inquiry yes Chris Hedges is one of the most prominent public intellectuals of our generation and one of our finest assists he published the best essay written by anyone of my generation I know that in 2002 with war is a force that gives us meaning i well remember first reading it I knew of course well who Chris was he'd won the Pulitzer that year having covered nearly every major military conflict in the world in the preceding 15 years for the New York Times seeing more of bombs and bullets than almost any soldier war as a force was written out of that experience it was all at once a statement of something I knew was true deep down inside and a statement of an obvious truth and also something you're not supposed to say his point was that while we say we hate war we actually deeply viscerally embrace it war gives us direction unifies us gives life purpose connection exaltation you're not supposed to say that and Chris did saying true this you're not supposed to say that's the job of the Prophet and it's the job Chris Hedges has taken on again and again in his assiduously researched articles opinion pieces and books he's gone to unexpected and sometimes outrageous places and brought back news that unsettles and challenges in his book American fascists the Christian Right and the war in America he punctured the aims and purposes of Christian conservatives that earned much praise from the intellectual left who were dismayed at his next book I don't believe in atheists which took down the piety of secular leftism an empire of illusion he examined and disassembled the media circuses of popular culture in one darkly memorable chapter he takes on pornography and implicitly the liberal platitude that it's a great thing and everyone should feel free to use it but Chris actually went there and saw the industry in action and after his account of it I don't see how a truly conscientious humane person would ever again go near it in decline of liberal classes he showed how those who congratulate themselves on being forward-looking in our country East Coasters most of them sorry it's true are in fact you want a round of applause for the East Coast region as it showed how those who congratulate themselves on being forward-looking in our country are in fact working cozily with the forces of oppression and those folks didn't much like that and I especially admire days of destruction days of revolt which Kris co-created with the marvelous artist Joe Sacco a book that if you don't have you should get Joe and Chris go to the scarred drug infested towns of West Virginia to the Native American reservations to Camden to many places where capitalism richly displays its failures and the people of failures fails he comes tonight I hope in fact I know to speak of his new book wages of rebellion the moral imperative of revolt which again asks questions you shouldn't ask and draws forth answers you shouldn't draw some say his vision is too much of the jeremiad that it has too much of Jonah walking across Nineveh that town of three day's journey across they don't see for example how a man so often associated with the Left can be so outspoken against Israel or Obama but as he is often made clear compromises often the problem the very blindness that leads to destruction it's also good to keep in mind that we need our prophets in the Old Testament Nineveh does not listen to not whom and it's destruction is and I quote strange and sudden but it does listen to the cranky reluctant Jonah and is spared Chris comes before you as a man with a very beautiful family and Labradoodle a vegan a former boxer a linguist and classic scholar and a tireless lecture and debater willing to shred hapless figures such as Sam Harris in public in a single bound he is also since October a Presbyterian minister which grows out of his very exciting work with prison in including an inmate written play created under his coordination I've heard some passages it is shattering and truly haunting not to say the Chris doesn't have his faults he tends to make imprudent life choices such as his choice to make a living via writing I told him it was a bad idea and yet he persists so do i strangely enough go figure he is also a tragically deluded player of board games believing that he is for example good at boggle when he is in fact hopeless as I have noticed several times above all his is a voice that reports reasons warns and seeks to cleanse dark as it may seem at times its main motivations seems to me to be philia the category of love directed toward one's kind toward humanity itself we need our reporters our prophets our voices of love others have said it and I say it to Chris Hedges is a force that gives us meaning please welcome Chris Hedges [Applause] thank you John that was really beautiful I has John mentioned with my last three books I said about diagnosing American society death of liberal class the destruction of those liberal institutions the Democratic Party labor the press academia at once made incremental and piecemeal reform possible the decimation of the radical movements that opened up the spaces in American society as Howard Zinn illustrated in the people's history of the United States book I admire very much as John mentioned I teach in a prison in New Jersey when you write a course description it has to get through the prison administration so it's the exact opposite of writing a course description to put in a catalog to entice undergraduates lots of movies class on the lawn so I submitted this American history the Constitution the three branches of government and it all passed and then I went out and got all of my students Zins book the people's history of the United States and Zinn understood that our system was created as a closed system a system that was meant to disenfranchise the majority of the deimos women African Americans Native Americans men without property and on top of that the Electoral College which gave us george w bush not ralph nader gore won 500,000 more votes than bush and yet Bush became president courtesy of judicial Fiat and then that long destruction starting in World War one in the name of anti-communism when not only where our radical movements snuffed out but our liberal institutions were disemboweled every liberal institution Ellen trekker has written two fine books on this no ivory tower and the other one I think is called such were the crimes but even I didn't understand until I read those books the extent of the assault FBI agent showing up at high schools with lists of teachers with no evidence of course deemed to be communist or soft on communism and they immediately are removed from their posts and blacklisted and cannot find work thousands upon thousands of Americans shoved out of the system much the same way John Paul under rotzinger purged the Catholic Church and I was in Latin America at the time removing brothers sisters priests laypeople who had a conscience what was called a preferential option for the poor and the Catholic Church was paying for that just as we are paying for the destruction of all of those mechanisms that acted as a kind of safety valve that we're able to moderate and adjust and address the grievances of the underclass the working-class and even the middle class because the true history of the breakdown of capitalism in the 1930s is not that a beneficent oligarch by the name of Franklin Roosevelt decided to shower us with gifts it is that there were powerful radical movements the Progressive Party the Communist Party which we've whitewashed from our history powerful unions especially around the CIO that went to Roosevelt and said look it's it's not working people are destitute and either you respond or you get revolution and Roosevelt went to his fellow oligarchs and said you better give up some of your money or are you gonna lose all your money and that's how we got heavy government intervention 15 million jobs Social Security Public Works which created the parks the libraries the schools the post offices many of which we use today which of course we're now watching them being closed power concedes nothing without a demand and they took away the mechanism by which we can make a demand and this is what we are facing today is the result of our disempowerment Empire of illusion the end of literacy the triumph of spectacle which looks at the rise of a spectacle based society that is severed itself from the world of ideas from print the as John mentioned hornoff ocation of American society which is really the commodification of human beings in this case women but we've all become commodities in the eyes of the corporate state the degradation of education into vocational training that's what standardized testing is about it is about dictating what we should learn rather than teaching our children how to think the assault against teachers unions and then days of destruction days of revolt which looks at the sacrifice zones these places that have been completely sacrificed to corporate capital including Camden New Jersey across the river as you know per capita the poorest city in the United States southern West Virginia the coal fields Pine Ridge South Dakota where the average male has a life expectancy of 48 that is the lowest in the Western Hemisphere outside of Haiti and the produce fields where undocumented workers work not in a condition that can only be described as serfdom and often replicates actual slavery and the point of that book was to say we've all become one vast sacrifice zone and it's incumbent upon us to look at what has happened in these sacrifice zones because what has happened there is about to be visited upon the rest of us this book is different in the sense that I have begun from that argument the argument that there are no mechanisms left by which we can affect the system that the consent of the governed the most cherished constitutional rights that we once possessed our ability to influence power is no longer feasible and I think we have seen that in the last few years in innumerable examples if you go back to the financial meltdown of 2008 constituent calls across the political spectrum were a hundred to one against the bailout and yet the bailout passes anyway the looting of the US Treasury by those who committed fraud and the imposition in the name of austerity upon the victims who were who were the targets of this criminal behavior in terms of having to pay the costs of that fraud we've seen it with wholesale wiretapping and surveillance the evisceration of privacy we've seen it in court decisions such as citizen United which reinterprets the Constitution to argue that unlimited corporate cash is the right to petition the government an act of free speech as some of you are aware I sued President Obama in federal court over section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act this is a section that permits the US military to seize US citizens who quote-unquote substantially support al-qaeda the Taliban or something called associated forces another nebulous term strip them of due process and hold them indefinitely in military facilities including our offshore penal colonies we won in the Southern District Court of New York and when judge Katherine before us t'roat her opinion justifying her temporary injunction she said that this section opens the way for the government to criminalize an entire category of people and she brought up the internment of 110,000 Japanese during World War two japanese-americans when they ran opinion polls on section 1021 of the NDAA it had a 97% disapproval rating and of course the Obama administration appealed the decision and they didn't just appeal it actually they sent in addition to federal attorneys attorneys from the NSA in to judge Forrest chambers the day she issued her temporary injunction and demanded that she put the law back into effect that she revoke her injunction which she to a credit refused that was a Friday afternoon 9:00 a.m. Monday morning there in the Second Circuit or the appellate court demanding the same thing and unfortunately the Second Circuit agreed in the name of national security and overruled judge forces temporary injunction and put the law back into effect and the lawyers Bruce Afrin and Carl Maher and I were mystified as we knew they would appeal but why were they so aggressive and I think the only thing that we could conclude is that they're already using the law probably on us-pakistani dual nationals in some of our black sites like Bagram and what happened next is kind of a classic example of how the judiciary has been turned against us the Second Circuit the panel of judges reviewed the case and then wouldn't rule month after month after month and I had also been a plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging the FISA Amendment Act that reached the Supreme Court clapper versus Amnesty International and in that case the government lawyers said that the charge made by myself and the other plaintiffs that we were under surveillance was quote/unquote speculation this was before the Snowden revelations and then they added that if the government was conducting surveillance against us we would be informed and the Supreme Court bought this argument and then the Second Circuit and said therefore we didn't have standing to bring the case the Second Circuit immediately after that ruling said hedges doesn't have standing in clapper versus Amnesty International therefore he doesn't have standing in hedges versus Obama and they threw the case out these are just examples example after example the whole debacle were undergoing with these trade agreements the CAFTA and the TPP and the game's not over if you're following what's going on in Washington unfortunately but the whole idea that we as a citizenry don't have a right to even know what is inside of these agreements and not only do we not have a right our elected officials don't have a right to tell us that if they go in and read if you're following it they go in and they can read it in a secure room but any notes they take are confiscated and they are forbidden from speaking about what is in the agreement itself we know only because of some leaks from WikiLeaks that this is one more assault as NAFTA was against our environmental what's left of them regulations we've just seen Obama issue it's not a final authorization but issue permission to shell to go up and begin drilling in the summer Arctic sea ice you know dropping half billion dollar drill bits to profit off the death throes of the planet we don't we don't have a right to anymore control our own destiny not only as citizens but finally as workers and and those who care about protecting our own community a small example of that has been occurring in Denton Texas where a community rises up to say that they don't want fracking they do not want to suffer the toxins that are visited upon them and especially their children and the Texas Senate passes a law that bans the ban and this has happened in fracking areas in Pennsylvania as well all of this is symptomatic of a system that runs completely roughshod over the most basic desires and rights of the citizenry and assiduously serves corporate power Sheldon Wolin our greatest living political philosopher author of democracy incorporated and the classic 1960 work which is an amazing study of just the history of Western political thought politics and vision he's in his early 90s guess 92 or 93 now taught at Berkeley for many years and taught at Princeton in the 1980s calls out neoliberalism for what it is a giant con game and he is immediately pushed out of the mainstream he had been writing for The New York Review of Books and other publications he becomes a pariah even within the political department at Princeton I guess that's not that surprising and and is forgotten and he is you know without question one of the most important intellectual voices in the country and the Lannon foundation sent out a film crew we with myself several months ago to his retirement community which is about an hour outside of Portland he hadn't been interviewed for over a decade he'd been a bomb adir and world war two we didn't have any idea what to expect we he told the film crew they could set up in his office he said it's in the room with a small with a large white dog and when the film crew went in in horror they found a small white cat but it turns out the dog was being walked by the housekeeper so is alright have you watched it John you should pull it up it's on YouTube everything's on YouTube but watch it I can hardly keep up with this guy it was one of the most stunning interviews I've ever done and I certainly went prepared I mean we swung from Aristotle to Hegel to Nietzsche to Weber to Marx - yeah there was nothing I could couldn't throw at him but it is you know it's except it's seven parts in twenty minutes but I think somebody may have even put the whole thing together but go watch it it's you know it's the kind of thing that we that that if we had a functioning system of public television or even public radio you that that's what it's for and the fact that a mind of that calibre is essentially silenced and pushed aside is quite frightening but of course that's what's happened as we have seen the media seized by corporate forces roughly a half dozen corporations control of ninety percent of us what most Americans watch or listen to and and the important thing about the rise of these corporate media conglomerates is that unlike the old Hearst newspaper Empire media is just one of hundreds of revenue streams and they all have to produce there's no even attempt or even there's no even understanding finally of what journalism is and that's how you have seen on the electronic airwaves everything reduced to kind of info entertainment celebrity gossip salacious garbage and it has narrowed you know dramatically acceptable ranges of opinion you sought with the debates on Syria so you know that you you get all these retired generals and colonels all of whom are working for defense companies that are gonna make huge profits dropping cruise missiles all over Syria saying well should we bomb them or should we bomb them and put boots on the ground as if those are the two options you know rational options I speak as someone who's spent seven years in the Middle East the the problem is that as Sheldon Wolin pointed out we have undergone a system or a process John Ralston Saul calls it a coup d'etat in slow motion where we have reconfigured power into what he calls inverted totalitarianism and by that he means it's not classical totalitarianism it doesn't find his expression through a demagogue or a charismatic leader but through the anonymity of the corporate state that in a classical totalitarian regime you have a force that replaces a structure replaces its iconography its language whereas in inverted totalitarianism you have corporate forces that purport to pay fealty to electoral politics the Constitution American patriotism and yet internally have seized all of the levers of power to render the citizen impotent and unfettered unregulated capitalism as Karl Marx understood is a revolutionary force it commodifies everything the human beings become commodity the natural world becomes a commodity that it then exploits until exhaustion or collapse which is why the environmental crisis is intimately twinned with the economic crisis and in theological terms these absolute forces that control our lives not only our lives but the lives now most of the people across the planet our forces of death they assault attack and destroy all the systems that sustain life including the ecosystem itself and there is nothing within them or nothing now outside of them that will stop this assault you have seen this writ large across the American landscape as we are reconfigured into a frightening neo feudalism a world of masters and serfs we have seen corporate forces build systems of both legal and physical control that can only be described as totalitarian militarized police forces tanks on the streets of Ferguson against unarmed demonstrators Washington Post ran a story a couple weeks ago that said that the figure we had all been using of a person being shot killed by militarized police in this country one every 28 hours was wrong that because it's self reporting it's at least two a day and once again you watch people march through the streets Baltimore Ferguson New York Philadelphia and they keep killing we as citizens have many of us in this room have watched video of one of our fellow citizens who did not commit a crime being choked to death by police on the streets of New York City and those police walking away and what has happened with the evisceration of the legal system with the turning of the courts into a wholly owned subsidiary of the corporate state has been accompanied by the rise of what Hana arrant called omnipotent policing and in the origins of totalitarianism she herself stateless stripped of her German citizenship after being spending three weeks with the Gestapo and almost killed she said that when a society creates a mechanism by which a certain segment of that society is stripped of their rights the way we have with people of color in marginal communities through drug laws and through a court system where 94% of people are forced to plea out and they stack you with so many charges most of which they know are bogus so the prosecutor can play a kind of card game with you and if you actually go into the system and go to court I speak as experience from my students in the prison they're gonna make sure you get the maximum as a kind of message to everyone else I have a student from Elizabeth New Jersey who had been on the US Army boxing team they offered him a 16-month plea deal he said I didn't do the crime they gave him 30 years when he went to trial I have a kid not a kid anymore but he was a kid when he was arrested in Camden for a knifing I'm a hundred percent certain he didn't commit it he was held in that police station over in Camden all night 14 years old he was crying he was scared he want to go home they wouldn't let any of his relatives in to see him until he signed a paper which was a confession and then he could go home he spent two years from the age of 14 to 16 on the top floor of the Camden County Jail which is where the felons are he goes to trial at 16 he is not eligible to go before a parole board until he's 70 years old I could spend the whole night telling you stories like this the the the creation of omnipotent policing and a dysfunctional legal system that essentially allows whole sections of the citizenry to be thrown in cages and let's be clear as to why we have to go back to Marx again why our prison population constitutes 25% of the world's prison population we constitute 5% of the world's population it's because in an age of redundant and surplus labor these bodies are worth nothing to corporate forces when they're just wandering the streets in North Philadelphia but they generate 40 or 50 thousand dollars a year when you put them in a cage they generate that money for prison contractors prison guards unions Global tel link which is because everything's been privatized so if you want to make a phone call which you have to pay in advance it's gonna be five six seven times higher than you and I pay for phone calls and they're gonna tack surcharges on it you want $20 on your account they're gonna charge you for ninety five the privatization of commissaries and money transfer services so I got a list of commissary prices in 1996 and commissary prices today everything has risen often by over a hundred percent we're talking about soap toothpaste razors shaving cream shampoo that kind of stuff and yet they're the income they earned in the prison remains the same twenty eight dollars a month that's a dollar thirty a day so that when now you want to transfer money into the commissary account you're also gonna get charged up to forty percent so these the poor families remember the phone is often the only connection that a parent who is incarcerated has with their children so the cruelty of it is staggering and now in New Jersey they're not issuing things like shoes you got to buy your shoes cost forty five dollars to buy a pair of Reeboks you want to visit a family member who is either dying or has died you get 15 minutes 15 minutes as a deathbed visit or 15 minutes of a viewing you have to pay the overtime for the go that's $900 so you're now seeing people leaving prison who have worked 8 hours a day for a few decades in heavily in debt and if they can't pay those fines just like they can't pay their warrants they go right back into prison so it's it's important on all of us to look at what's happening to the most vulnerable among us those who have the least defenses the least protection because this is the model system that the corporate state seeks to impose on the wider society if you look at the unrest in places like Ferguson or Baltimore much of that is driven by this economic oppression 40% of municipalities in st. Louis County I mean the municipalities in st. Louis County have to raise 30 to 40 percent of their revenues through fines and the way that those fines are raised is by resting people for them for not mowing their lawn for standing on the street for more than five seconds I'm not making that one up and that's and then of course if you're poor you can't pay those fines so when your car gets stopped because your taillight it out it has nothing to do with your taillight it has to do with you owing money to the state you can't pay and getting thrown back into the system and you run and you're shot in the back all of this is as arrant points out when you allow this to happen to a certain segment of a society which is demonized then the moment that there is widespread unrest it's the flick of a switch and you can use it on the rest of society and that's the system that is being created by this system of inverted totalitarianism and it presents us with a very difficult existential crisis because if we accept this very bitter reality including the devastating effects of climate change we just saw March every single day in March carbon emissions were above 400 parts per million that has never happened since we have recorded weather patterns for how many years maybe you know John 107 years I think it's never happened before this year will once again be the hottest year on record people are talking about the complete disappearance of the summer Arctic sea ice within a few years by 2020 the destruction of coral all coral reefs we already seen massive droughts in California and yet the response of those who have absolute power is to send gigantic rigs and drilling stations up to the Arctic as well as of course a huge naval exercise by the US Navy which is taking place in the open Arctic on Monday as the world begins to battle over the last remaining stocks of fossil fuel and this reality is very unpleasant reality this understanding that there is no way now to appeal to the system to become rational this understanding that the system has created legal and physical mechanisms to shut us down should we begin to resist presents to us I think a moral quandary and that is how will we resist these forces if all of the mechanisms of a functioning capital democracy capitalist democracy are closed off to us and I think in that sense for me we have to look at rebellion standing up to these very frightening monolithic forces as a kind of moral imperative an understanding that we can't be where we can't allow our resistance to be defined by whether or not we succeed but we have to understand that the importance of rebellion is what it allows us to become because what is happening while it may be inflicted on us in this room will be devastating for our children and will snuff out in many ways the possibility of life for many of the generations that come after us if we do not radically reconfigure our relationship to each other and to the ecosystem and that's where this book begins it opens with a long sort of meditation on Moby Dick the great novel by Melville which is CLR James pointed out is really about the collapse of a civilization that demented embodied an Ahab drive for profit the commodification of course of not only whales but especially the white whale the inability of Starbuck a man of physical courage to defy the captain to exhibit moral courage dooming of course everyone all but one on the Pequod a ship named after the Pequod Indian tribe that in New England that was rendered virtually extinct by the Puritans and their Native American allies and in moments such as these moments that I think Manuel Conte and Ana era would call one of a radical evil the characteristics of a liberal are useless and Reinhold Niebuhr writes this saying that in moments of extremity liberals are too intellectual too ineffectual and too little emotional of force to deal with radical evil that those who rise up and resist are possessed by what he calls sublime madness and I speak to many figures in the book who are possessed by this sublime madness who have resisted against overwhelming odds including Mumia abu-jamal Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy living on verge of virtually house arrest jeremy hammond the hacker who broke into stratford and released 5 million emails Lynn Stewart the great civil rights attorney herself in prison and released because she has stage 4 cancer Ronnie Kasrils who founded the armed wing of the ANC with Nelson Mandela and rebels have that quality rebels are are not particularly good at ruling and they're often ornery difficult eccentric individuals but they have the baldwin says that it's not so much that they follow a vision when he bald one writes this great essay on the commonality between artists and rebels and he said it's not so much that they follow a vision as they're possessed by it so you see in figures like Victor Sayers whose memoirs I just finished Ronnie Kasrils himself Che Guevara figures who once they get into power are wholly unsuited for exercising power and yet these rebels are they aunt Erin says that in moments of radical evil you turn to those not to those who say this shouldn't be done or this oughtn't to be done but those who say I can't there's just something within them that makes it impossible for them to compromise and in this moment that we live in we are going to have to foster and finally follow those who have this peculiar quality I covered the Velvet Revolution in Prague I spent every night in the magic lantern theater with Vaslav Havel and Den's beer and Klaus and all the people who would inherit the government and Havel I think rights for us a very important essay 1978 the power of the powerless in which he talks about that capacity to live in truth no matter what and habul life exemplified that so he was a non-person in Czechoslovakia from 1977 when he found her charter 77 up until 1989 he his plays were not performed as essays weren't published he was in and out of jail but it is that capacity to live in truth when you face despotic power that terrifies despotic power because those within the systems of power understand how corrupt and broken it is and I can see it unfortunately I have relatives to work on Wall Street who are as cynical as I am about where we're going or I'm not a cynic they're cynical because their response is they're going to steal as much as fast as they can on the way down and the cynicism is if you understand why don't you do the same revolutions are fundamentally nonviolent and we talk about the American River Ellucian but we did not fight a revolution we fought a colonial war we overthrew a colonial power at the time the greatest imperial power in the world and that's how you had Prussian mercenaries marching up and down to England raping and burning and looting that's how you had the British form the largest Armada I think it that might have been the largest Armada ever formed up until that moment in history to beseech New York and you had the hubris of imperial power which Thomas Paine our one great revolutionary came to this city to explain to Franklin and Jefferson and everyone else who thought that they were going to build some kind of an accommodation with the British crown revolutions and we can look at the Russian Revolution where what broke the back of the Tsar was when the Cossacks were sent in to quell the Petrograd bread riots and rather than using their whips and guns on the crowd they joined the protesters the French Revolution was the same thing the Iranian Revolution of 1979 the Shah flees the country and one of the best equipped armies in the Middle East equipped with American money and American weapons and American training refuses to fight and we're watching much the same thing in Iraq and this is part of the problem with Isis is that there's no will anymore to defend what is in essence a puppet an American created puppet regime placed in Baghdad that's how revolutions work they appeal to significant segments within the power structure who refuse to defend it crane Brinton makes this point an anatomy of a revolution Jeffrey Davies also another great theorist of revolution both of whom I quote at the beginning of the book make this point and and that requires if we are going to affect change in a calcified system that we live in truth that we stand up we face the bitter reality before us and we begin to mobilize and build mechanisms of resistance that are outside the former structures of power and we are seeing those mechanisms being built whether you can go back to occupy black lives matter the movement to raise the minimum wage to 15 the Chi activists out in Seattle who are blocking attempting to block shell from transferring its huge oil rigs up to the Arctic sea the fishing communities in Alaska the debt Jubilee it's all percolating below and it's finally the state that determines the configurations of resistance because the longer the state refuses to respond rationally the more they radicalize the population that is suffering and being oppressed so the refusal by the state to address the chronic underemployment and unemployment the refusal by the state to institute a jobs program to fix our infrastructure especially targeted to people under the age of 25 the refusal of the state to institute a rational healthcare system the refusal of the state to curb the exploitation of fossil fuels by industries which have worldwide subsidies of 5.4 billion dollars the prolongation of endless wars in the middle east which have no popular support but which make companies like Raytheon and Halliburton and Northrop Grumman exceedingly wealthy I mean the tragedy for me at this particular moment in human history is the trillions of dollars we squandered in these absolutely futile and ridiculous wars which we have lost we have lost Iraq it's never coming back as a unified country everybody used to say what's worse than Saddam Hussein Isis is worse than Saddam Hussein Afghanistan's finished and and we just watched the House passed an appropriations bill where they authorized the building of 12 new ohio-class submarines at eight billion dollars apiece as far as I know Isis doesn't even have a rowboat it's not a rational response but but as Marx again understood in the final stages of capitalism capital not only creates monopolies we just saw that big LIBOR where they fix the currency rates for five years and the New York Times ran an editorial because they were charged with nine billion dollars worth of fines the big ten banks but they made almost ninety billion dollars in profit so it's a pretty good deal and of course no one goes to jail the bloomberg news estimated that because they can borrow money at zero point eight percent Interest it amounts to a subsidy of almost a hundred billion dollars and they said that if that subsidy was taken away this is bloomberg news this isn't you know I don't know Mother Jones or something they said if that subsidy was taken away those big banks would have just broken even that that subsidy accounted for the money taxpayer money that was essentially funneled through the banks to their shareholders this is what happens at the final stages of capitalism they consume the very structures that make capitalism possible Marx got that right I'm not a Marxist but his analysis of capital is dead-on and you have to read capital volume one I know it's long but you got to read it so you see an assault I mean seventy we spent about a hundred billion dollars a year on surveillance and 70% of that surveillance is carried out by private corporations like Bose Allen Hamilton nine ninety nine percent of its revenues come from the government they feed off of the government any time hedge fund managers become particularly concerned about education in the inner city it's not because they want to teach poor black and brown people how to read and write it's because the US Department of Education spends six hundred billion dollars a year and they want it and they're going to break the teachers unions turn this into vocational crap through standardized testing to get it and that's what's happening they are eating consuming the very foundations that once made it possible and they essentially as manufacturing disintegrates or is sent to places where people are earning 22 cents an hour these big banks and financial concerns become loan sharks where they land massive amounts of money so that both the Empire and we can sustain a lifestyle that we can no longer afford but it's not finally sustainable at at some point it collapses and at that moment the state is ready it is run scenario after scenario after scenario and I think that facing this reality especially in terms of climate change we stopped all carbon admissions today we would still suffer devastating effects for years to come and we're not about to stop it is exceedingly difficult and I think it requires in many ways an act of faith and I say that to people of no creeds or people of Creed's the belief that the good draws to it the good or at least the good insofar as we can determine it and then we have to let it go faith is the belief that the good goes somewhere even if empirically everything around us says otherwise and so I think all energy at this point if we're going to save ourselves from the document that we have found ourselves in requires organizing mass acts of sustained civil disobedience that there is no other mechanism left I was just in Boston and Kinder Morgan and spectrum is about to build pipelines running through Boston suburbs so tar sands from Canada can come down to the ports off of Boston and be shipped to China and they have filed petitions and letter and nothing's happened and I said you know that's over the only thing left to do is buy junk cars and when that can those construction machines show up you have to drive those cars into their path get out take the battery out and walk away these are the only mechanisms we have left and and it will require risk and it will be difficult and will be uncomfortable and some of us will go to jail when I've been in jail there's a couple people in this room been in jail with me I don't like going to jail it's more time than I care to donate to my government but I have children I have four children and I'm damned if I'm gonna stand by and let them do this to my kids and even if I fail at least my kids are gonna be able to say that their dad tried I was in Montana a few weeks ago and I had been teaching a course called conquest although every course I teach in a prison really just should be called revolt and we had read open veins of Latin America bury my heart at Wounded Knee and CLR James as black jacobins and I had one Wednesday on the syllabus where I said I won't be there and so I was in my hotel room in Montana and I got a phone call and the voice on the other end of line said this is the Special Investigations Division of the Department of Corrections of New Jersey do you know that your students just organized a sit-down strike in our prison and we think you're behind it I don't know why that was a very moving moment for me because those students understood far better than I did what would happen to them and what did happen to them their cells were strip-searched they were interrogated for hours until the prison authorities found the leaders of the sit-down strike which they did and then they were all transferred down to South Woods which if you know anything about the New Jersey South Woods by the way is not New Jersey it's in Mississippi the prison guards and South woods are white the people they transfer down there are black and there are persistent reports of large numbers of those ciothes corrections officers being part of the klan part of the white Aryan Brotherhood we had a beating while we assumed it was a beating that 28 year old kid from Trenton his body was returned to his family as just a few weeks ago his face was completely bashed in his body was covered with bruises that bones were broken and they said he died of a heart attack and and they sis family said we want an autopsy and they said well if you want an autopsy cost $4,000 well they don't have $4,000 all they have are the pictures before they buried them and yet they rose up anyway they rose up anyway because in the end it's about who they are as individuals who they are as people what it is they stand for and that for me was deeply moving and deeply empowering I see that kind of dignity all the time that the man who was arrested in Camden at 14 he was my I do grade tough in the prison and he was my only A+ and he waited at the end of the last class the end of the semester for everyone to leave and he he works all the time reads all the time and he said to me I know I'm gonna die in this prison but I work as hard as I do so that one day I can be a teacher like you I had we wrote a play John mention that will be performed in New York call caged they wrote it I helped them put it together supposed to be writing this book but I dropped it for four months and then got on my knees and begged for an extension from my publisher and it was it's all autobiographical the stories of their lives and after one class I said I want you to write me a dialogue of you and your mother just a conversation between you and your mom before you in prison and so at the end of the class one of my students comes up and says well what if we're a product of rape I said well that's what you have to write and so that went into the play and here's what it is he's in Paterson New Jersey with his half-brother he gets pulled over by the police there's a weapon in the car a gun and if nobody takes it's his half brother's gun if nobody takes possession of the gun everybody gets charged with weapons possession and so he tells the cop it's mine and then he writes the phone call from the jail that he has with his mother and it goes like this it doesn't matter MA I was never supposed to be here anyway you have the son you love when you sink to that level and you see that kind of integrity and that kind of courage it's an example of what all of us who have far less constraints must begin to carry out I'm not naive enough to stand here and tell you we're gonna win I don't even know if we are going to survive as a species but I know that these corporate forces have us by the throat and they have my children by the throat and in the end I don't fight fascists because I will win I fight fascists because they are fascists and that is the moral imperative that confronts all of us who care about restoring our democracy about giving our children and our children's children a future about defying radical evil and when you stand up to defy radical evil there is a heavy price to pay there is a cost but if we don't pay that cost then everything we cherish everything we care about everything that is important to us and every system of life that makes love and beauty and truth and justice possible will be crushed thank you [Applause] three questions thank you so we can do a few questions is there a mic or something so there's the microphone so once you start over there go ahead I'd like input on possible a peaceful resolution and that isn't possible for the people who called for a national constitutional convention like the founding fathers had right and after all out after all our discussion draw up a economic Bill of Rights something that founding father was left out of it right on purpose I think draw up an economic Bill of Rights and including the constant you know you I think you raise a good point and this is I was I worked as Ralph Nader speechwriter in 2008 which didn't make me very popular traveling around the country trashing Barack Obama the the system is so fixed that it's impossible really to run a credible third party system you're locked out of the debates in terms of things like trying to get money out of politics remember we are appealing to corporate employees isn't every single senator now a millionaire and you know as soon as they leave the house they'll become a millionaire and we are about to watch in 16 months Michelle and Barack Obama become multimillionaires these people have sold us out for corporate power and they're not about to pass legislation I mean during the NDAA case we went to Pelosi's office and we said look all you have to do is insert into section 1021 that this does not apply to u.s. citizens and we will drop our lawsuit and of course they didn't insert it because it was written for US citizens and what makes the state nervous is that they understand very well that in times of turmoil the police may not protect them you saw it in Chicago the the during the teachers strike where the teachers would go in to use the bathrooms in the precincts and the police would applaud or when we were arrested in front of the White House 133 vets many from the Iraq and Afghan war in the winter as we were cuffed it turns out most of those police were in the National Guard they'd been to Iraq and Afghanistan and as they put the zip ties around our wrists they'd whisper keep protesting that terrifies the state and and I think that's why they want the military to defend them so I have been I'm a supporter of Shama Sawant socialist City Council woman I kicked off her campaign on June 6th for her in Seattle I am a socialist by the way that's an anti capitalist which comes from being a Christian and I think that on a local level we can make inroads on a national level having watched what they did to Ralph but we've talked about maybe we do something like the Freedom Charter and you have to do it in a way that people who don't have resources can go maybe we find some abandoned farm in upstate New York and we do exactly what you said but I think at that point you build a political movement or a political expression of a movement the way sir Issa is in Greece so it's you realize that the elections are fixed yeah there you go that's a good idea does he have any acres left yeah Payne's amazing we did a we did Cornel West and Rick wolf and I did a thing on Tom Paine it's c-span film that I'm sure you can find it somewhere we decided to do ten great revolutionary writers so we started with pain we did Karl Marx although for a mortal to get up on a stage with Rick Woolf and Doug about Marx's to put it mildly intimidating we're gonna do Graham she luxembourg w eb des bois Franz Fennell to begin to have people to exam and hopefully read those who have examined closely the triggers of revolution how revolution works I'm fun I I'm you know fiercely nonviolent as a foreign war correspondent I or a war correspondent I've seen violence I know it's poison but the longer that this continues and the longer the state fails to respond the more it makes the propensity for violent blowback possible and we have seen a series of police officers assassinated including New York Mississippi and I worry I don't hope those are isolated incidents I don't want them to become a pattern because at that point you just have one extreme fighting another and the rest of us are left in the middle that's another reason why I think it's important while we have a moment of relative stability ie not a financial collapse or not you know catastrophic effects from climate change it's incumbent upon us to begin to to act now why don't we get her yeah hello thank you very much for your speech I was wondering if you could briefly read summarize the point you made about the subsidy reference visa V marks analysis of capital and possibly if you wish to speak to certain ideals of different forms of capitalism like libertarianism whereas I feel the economic infrastructure state the state would stay like food delivery lines makes those kind of ideals of local economy spreading outward and having sustainable growth from a small community-based environment outward if that makes sense I hope think yeah I think that the you know - coupled with active resistance has to become a movement by which we become as self sustainable as possible severing our ties from corporate control which is one of the reasons I became a vegan because the animal agriculture industry is as responsible as the fossil fuel industry for climate change and being a vegan is something everyone can wake up tomorrow and do but every little thing at this point big and small I had a great professor at Harvard Divinity School named James Luther Adams who was a real radical that he was a Unitarian and they kept trying to the hierarchy of the Unitarians Church kept trying to expel him although it mystifies me as to what you could possibly do to be expelled as a Unitarian he had been at the University of Heidelberg in 1936 or 37 and the Nazis were in power and he dropped out and he joined the underground confessing church with niemoller and Bonhoeffer and Schweitzer until he himself was expelled from Germany and this became you know a kind of the kind of foundation of his own radical theology but he talked about concentric circles it may reminds me of what you said where he said you know you have the primacy of your own immediate circle but you always have to look outwards as soon as you only look inwards to your own circle it's narcissism so yes we need to build sustainable communities sustainable agriculture sever ourselves as much as possible from all the configurations of the consumer society and corporate power but the ethical life has to be responsible to those outer circles as well so I think the point you make is an important one but stopping there and refusing to out of a community I mean we are gonna have to build communities we're not going to make it without communities or you know we're gonna have to rebuild communal society and and those communal societies will not only help us hopefully sustain ourselves but give us the kind of emotional and psychological foundation by which we can carry out acts of resistance okay last question go ahead why don't we do in the back there mr. hedges thank you again for being with us tonight greatly appreciated always enjoy your pokes very inspiring I guess my question is you know just talk to a lot just looking around tonight I know it's most crowds a bit I don't say older but there's not there's not as many yeah well you know more experience be a bit younger there's not as many younger people my generation around here tonight and I noticed to talk to a lot of my friends for my age and I helped run a youth group my church so I'm dealing with a lot of teenagers you know they have many of these concerns whether it be about you know obviously stewed debts is a big concern a lot of times for the teenagers it's standardized testing I mean they're losing sleep you know they're having emotional you know it's like a lot of breakdowns at age 14 taking standardized tests and that if they got enough problems feel about they should be dealing with that and the general response is when I try to talk to them about some of these topics it's either a I don't want signal ISM but almost a sense of well you know that's like what are we gonna do about it whether it be from the teenage perspective or whether it be from Lama you know fellow young adults who were you know working and like well you know my job sucks but never get out of it and then the other half I sense - and I know you kind of talked about this whether it be in American fascist or even death of liberal class was concerned I think even quoted Chomsky on this was concerns about you know proto-fascist right fascist movements in this country because the other sense I get from Eve including members of my own family is not only a racist backlash but I would say a pull out you know fascist backlash they're angry they're angry at the system but the response is not you know protesting and the way you would talk about it's more in the you know fascist sense so right well that's a very good question and it is something that I spend a lot of time dealing with in the book there's a whole chapter on vigilante violence the fact that our radical movements populist movements have been destroyed means we're almost starting from zero whereas these proto-fascist fascist movements let me define fascist fascist movement is where people you know who have a legitimate rage have that rage manipulated and directed towards the vulnerable Muslims undocumented workers african-americans homosexuals intellectuals liberals feminists and that typifies the Christian Right it typifies the Tea Party diplo Faiz the lunatic fringe of the Republican Party me but they're all lunatics this Klan got a hand it to Clinton I mean so he did corporate bidding NAFTA deregulating the FCC destroying welfare and seventy percent of the recipients under the old welfare system were children the omnibus crime bill was clinton's by the time he finishes office we've got two million people in cages he destroys glass-steagall but he gets corporate money and he turns the Democratic Party into the Republican Party Democratic Party in Europe would be a far-right party but he pushes the Republican Party so far to the right that they become insane so when there's a kind of method but yeah I think that that that possibility of a right-wing backlash is extremely real in fact if I had to put my money down given where we are in given American history I'd say that's probably where we're headed I desperately want to fight back before that happens but in a moment of crisis especially the way we venerate the military and we venerate the hyper masculine values that come with violence and force which is really what neoliberalism about it so it's a really frightening ideology it's not it's mindless you know it basically is reduced to if we don't like you will kill you that really is about all they have to offer they're culturally linguistically historically illiterate and you can all watch my debate with Sam Harris who you know I think amply proves my point so it's gonna be tough and it's gonna be you know some of you may be aware I've battled with a black bloc anarchists over this issue because I don't want to see movements descend into these polarized extremes both of whom embrace hyper masculinity there's a very good book by a German writer I'm gonna butcher his name it's something like this oh wait that's a do you know John Mayall fantasies he goes back and looks at the free corn fascists and really says really what fascism is about is about hyper masculinity and I think that's right but you see it within groups like the black bloc as well so there's no question that a certain segment and perhaps even a large segment of the American population and we're already seen it who feels distressed will find solace in this kind of fusion of the iconography and language of American patriotism with the language of American Christianity and when I wrote my book American fascists the Christian right and the war in America an attempt to reach out to them I I really wrote it for Moyer bill Moyer said don't put that on there because all my relatives and Texas won't read it and I said no no I'm not writing it for them we're gonna read it anyway I'm writing it for all those liberals who gave credibility to this movement and refused to stand up and name them for who they are which is Christian heretics they you know Christian Jesus did not come to make us rich you don't have to spend three years at Harvard Divinity School as I did to figure that out but by pretending that they had a legitimacy and refusing to step outside the confines of their churches or their liberal seminaries and fight for the gospel they lost it say the word Christian in this country and everybody thinks Pat Robertson or the repugnant jewel Olsteen or all these other who are multimillionaires Robertson's estimated to be worth 1 billion dollars personally they prey off of the despair of these people and I you know I tell a lot of heartbreaking stories in that book and there are a lot of heartbreaking stories including going up to Valley Forge Pennsylvania for a right-to-life weekend and and you know I don't have a lot of sympathy for right-to-life obviously but when I walked in there and saw these women and the first thing they did in the room of several hundred women was asked the post abortive sisters to stand and they all stood and then when I start doing interviews they've not just had one abortion they've had multiple abortions and they suffered sexual abuse domestic abuse substance abuse they've been evicted from their homes and then I watched the the Christian right groups like priests for life another give these women dolls they gave them dolls they take them on retreats they give them dolls they tell them that these are the babies they murdered they have to name the dolls they have to bathe the dolls they have to dress the dolls and at the end of the weekend they have to offer up these dolls to Jesus begged for forgiveness and promised to fight the forces of death which is us it's the manipulation of despair and and and I came away from writing that book believing the only way you'll break the back of these proto-fascist movements is not arguing with them over whether or not you know the dinosaurs and everything were created with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden in six days and that that an assault or an attempt to puncture their magical thinking takes from them the last refuge that they have the only way to fight them is to reintegrate them into the economy but of course the opposite has been happening and I was down south I write about in the book with Bryan Stevenson the great civil rights attorney who spent his entire life fighting on behalf of death row inmates in Alabama not surprisingly most of them are black and poor and we're walking around Montgomery and it's one Confederate memorial after another including when you drive half of Montgomery's black when you drive into Montgomery there is one of those big like used car American flags on a pole except it's a Confederate flag and Bryan said all these memorials of comp in the last ten years including they had just had a reenactment of Jefferson Davis's inaugural which was in Montgomery it was this first southern White House where like 200 guys dressed up like Confederate soldiers and somebody dressed up went through the streets of Montgomery in a carriage and then they and I said Bryan it's just like Yugoslavia because when you cross Slavia broke down and there was nothing left and Yugoslavia finally disintegrated under hyperinflation everybody who had nothing retreated into these mythic narratives whether the mythic narratives of the Serbs in the field of blackbirds and or the mythic narratives of the crow ATS or the mythic narratives of you know the whatever and at that point once myth replaces history there's no dialogue anymore because you're not speaking about a verifiable fact or a common reality and that that was chilling and I saw it in Memphis and lots of other places but that whole rise of the neo Confederacy movement is part of the kind of disintegration and the retreat into this in essence American form of fascism and I learned from as a war correspondent when people talk about violence about eradicating their enemy in its you know it's not a big step to actually using violence that that kind of rhetoric is very dangerous and you see it so I think all of the points you raised which I spend a very cognisant of this book and write a lot about and because I'm not I'm not here to sell you some kind of Pollyannish promise of ultimate victory because I can it's just not true but yeah it worries me as much as you because the system now in essence it the you know the the mechanisms by which we were the safety valve that once existed with those liberal institutions the mechanisms that made it possible to adjust our system have been taken from us there is no pressure now from those who care about an open society racial equality economic justice all the pressure is coming from the other side you see vigilante groups go up to clive Bundy's ranch and walk away I mean they're carrying automatic weapons imagine if those people were black what they would have done to him yeah well we know what they would have done to him because they did it to the Panthers so yeah we're in an extremely frightening moment and we've got to stop sleepwalking we've got to react while we still can react and and and really in a way you know in in in this particular moment in American history I kind of sound like a radical but I've been in societies when they disintegrate and I will never employ violence I can't I just physically am not capable of of it I know the poison of violence I know what it does and in a moment a society disintegrates people like me and many like you become the hated moderates and we are eviscerated and unfortunately you know if you you know if you're not gonna be Lenin if you're if you're if you are not going to embrace a belief system whereby you believe that you know everything and everybody is expedient for your goal which I'm not going to do then you know in moments of radical break down you're you in many ways are crippled and that's why we have to begin to build a movement now the way Havel did you know while we can because if you know let's say there's another crash and you have very sober economic business reporters like gretchen morgenson other already speculating that it's coming I mean they're all doing they're all back doing to what they were doing and and this time around it's not gonna be like 2008 I don't think the American public is gonna say go ahead loot the Treasury again left or right so we after we have to react why there's time and we have and and for those of us who care about a civil society who care about non-violence who care about respect for life it's incumbent upon us to stand up now because they'll come a day if we wait when we won't be able to stand up thank you you [Applause]

Channel: Author Events

Views: 89,649

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Keywords: journalism, war on terror, income inequality, The Nation Institute, Truthdig

Id: jAvvsxa-4Hk

Length: 82min 50sec (4970 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 02 2019