both of us. it a great time doing it and so the writing of that was shockingly much easier than either one of us expected it would be. >> booktv is on twitter. follow us for a regular updates on our programming and news on nonfiction books and authors. twitter.com/booktv. here is our primetime lineup for tonight. ..

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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 were seduced into the war effort, replacing the tangible goals of hygiene and good public housing and good public education and fair working conditions with that abstract goal of making the world safe for democracy, the war to end all war. as the actual physical forms of repression embodied in the sedition act and the espionage act were used on a relatively marginal segment of the society that still held out.

by the end of the war, those who had built the system of mass propaganda, and was well writes about this in his book, immediately found clement on madison avenue. they went to work for corporations who attended traditional american values of thrift, self-effacing and replaced at with consumption as a kind of inter compulsion with the colts of the self. the homogenized culture. they destroyed regional and ethnic cultures and replaced it with corporate culture which is of course what we call american culture but it's not american culture was effectively destroyed. they used the espionage and the sedition act after the borat to

go after the remnants of these movements with the palmer raids, the deportation of anarchist's like emma goldman and to russia, the shut down the appeal to reason although the appeal to reason under pressure had actually editorially supported the war during the war along with the masses. they need war on the wobblies, trump double-murder charges, so joe hill is executed, big bill haywood in statin here's his life fleeing a from act of murder charge as a refugee in the soviet union. so there was a new paradigm that was created, which dwight mcdonald writes about as one where we entered essentially a state of permanent war. we enter a state of constant fear. the dreaded pun was replaced and mcdonald i think makes a very important point that none of the social and political theorists

of the late 19th century including karl marx understood that in a system of permanent war and skillful mass propaganda you could get the masses to call for their own enslavement marx writes about war is touring the prussian war and he expresses the hope that prussia will win because the will make the german workers state closer to coming to fruition. and we have a essentially been emasculated ever since. so radical movements are a consciously destroyed and liberal movements engage in a kind of internal cannibalization where they pushout figures who have a moral conscience, who have some kind of economy, branding them as sympathetic economies. of course many of these people

who were pushed out or not communists, although having lived in europe including italy there is nothing under our constitution that prohibits a communist party. i believe that we purport to support the free exchange of political thoughts and ideas, and the liberal class without that counterweight of radical movements to keep them honest began to disembowel themselves. now the liberal class serves an important function in a state, and that function is to fold. it acts as a kind of safety valves. it makes piecemeal and incremental reform possible. and the sestak sable how the liberal class works would be with a breakdown of capitalism in the 1930's and the rise of the new deal. we had essentially figures like

franklin roosevelt or the great henry wallace leader in his own presidential campaign in 48 smeared for being soft on communism and turned into a political pariah. the last major political figure we had with me be the exception of george mcgovern to challenge the permanent war economy and the resources, taxpayer resources that are pumped into the huge defense industry. so we saw the liberal class provide channels or mechanisms within the power structure by which the grievances and the injustices and suffering of work of men and women could be redressed. that's how the liberal class, that is the role of the liberal class, and it's why traditional power elites tolerate liberal institutions and tolerate the liberal class so that they are not completely tone of to the

suffering of those outside the power elite. but at the same time, they are used to discredit radical movements that challenge traditional structures and assumptions, which is true today. the figure that self identified liberals hate most is not glenn beck because he exposes the collaboration of the liberal class and the power elite and the way that they serve the power elite. the danger is that when the liberal institutions no longer functioned, when they lost as become ossified, houseify, then there is no mechanism by which the grievances of large sectors of the dispossessed population can be expressed within the

system. we saw of course immediately after world war ii the final round of the assault on a radical and progressive movements, the remnants of them, universities purge themselves of thousands of professor, many of these cases a was a silent purge where people were not granted tenure dismissed for no reason after the fbi visited a dean's office, including hundreds of high school teachers, social workers, many, many social workers were purged. the press is probably our greatest 20th century journalist i.f. stone became an outcast and a pariah because he refused to take truman's loyalty oath and

couldn't even get a job finally at the nation magazine. well, i won't go to the nation. [laughter] and ends up putting the i.f. stone weekly in his basement. he rates a really nice bill murphy of stone that cannot recently, but stone says the time he felt like a ghost he began to talk, anti-war talk, and he said fellow subversives and the fbi, because of course the fbi wasted tremendous amounts of resources following around figures like i.f. stone as they did howard zinn. i used some of the files on zinn that were just released on the freedom of information act the describe the folly of internal security, and i can assure you

homeland security is just they were the most craven, the people with the least moral center, the least as says the capacity to say no so not only did we decimate pravachol

progressive popular movements, but at the same time we destroy the poor of liberal institutions as well. and this coincided with the corporate state. it saw probably the last great champion in this country, and we will roo the data we walked out on this guy was ralph nader -- [applause] who pushed through one piece of greed legislation after another. ralph was a good friend of mine and always says the last good liberal president we had was richard nixon. [applause] [laughter] welcome in terms of legislation, that's true. osha, the clean water act, the mining and safety act, some 24 pieces of legislation, because nixon was still scared of

movements and responded to those movements. and of course there was a conscious effort, as anyone who has read the cowal memo, which i quote at length in the book, to take nader down and they created and funded powerful right-wing corporate think tanks and centers like the heritage foundation, the business roundtable, to destroy any kind of populist activity, especially the kind of populist activity the nader was so successful at when he still had allies in the democratic party in the 1960's. and once all of these checks were gone, we began to see what can only be described as they could talk in slow motion by corporations where where they dismantled everything that anp

-- impeaded the maximization of corporate profits. they made war, remnants of labor unions, they passed nafta, and that was passed, for me bill clinton is the poster child of a bankrupt liberalism. [applause] clinton understood that if he did corporate bidding he could get a corporate money and that the working class and labor would have nowhere else to go. and by the 1990's, the democratic party had fund raised with the republicans, and by the time barack obama ran for president, they got more. but the price of that was a the

betrayal of the working class that traditionally the democratic party and liberal institutions had once protected. and our great fear for those of us who care about ordinary the rights of ordinary citizens is that in 1994 with a passage of nafta we didn't stand up for the working class and turn our back on the democratic party. [applause] we continued to support democratic politicians who spoke in the traditional language of liberalism of the trade every single core liberal value. welfare reform. we now face the prospect with this new midterm election of unemployment benefits for tens of millions of citizens running out or being allowed, not being extended. which will mean that many of these people will have to attempt to survive on the $143 a

month you received from welfare courtesy of the democratic party. the deregulation of the banking system, the deregulation of the fcc. i just spent the fall teaching at the university of toronto and they don't have a banking crisis in canada because they did not allow the fire wall between their commercial and investment banks which had been protected for us under the 1933 glass-steagall act to be ripped down. we saw the liberal class e dolph into the court years for the corporate state, and yet they spoke in the traditional language of liberalism and were

exposed as the two year administration of barack obama has exposed the deep cynicism and hypocrisy of the liberal class. the tragedy that barack obama is that he made -- retroactively made legal under our constitution is illegal of warrantless wiretapping and eavesdropping on tens of millions of americans. whether it is to continue the looting by all street speculators who have engaged in massive, fraudulent acts that our criminal, using mortgage brokers and bankers to falsify information on loan applications that they knew were false to hand the sums of money to people

they knew could also never repaid and selling the subprime mortgages has assets. whether it is the continuation of our imperial wars wars in afghanistan which preemptive war under the postal laurinburg laws are defined as criminal wars of aggression. they are a crime and we have no right as a nation to debate the term of the occupation. whether it is -- [applause] the swindel that became a so-called health care reform bill, $400 billion of subsidies to the for-profit health care industry, the equivalent of the bank bailout bill for etna, cigna, and we are watching

barack obama hand these corporations exemptions because they don't want to ensure chronically ill children. i spent enough time in the seminary to tell you that we can only define these kinds of institutions as institutions of death. they make their money directly off of human suffering and pain and death, including the death of children. it is legally permitted in the united states to hold sick children hostage, while their parents frantically bankrupt

themselves trying to save their sons or daughters. that is what corporations do. and the failure of the liberal class to stand up on behalf of the weak and the sick, to challenge the perverted idea that nothing is sacred, that everything is a commodity, human beings are commodities, the natural world as a commodity, which corporations exploit until exhaustion or collapse means that this coup is essentially cannibalizing about only our country, the plan -- planet. and it is not accidental that the environmental crisis is intimately twinned with the

economic crisis, because profit comes before the urgent task to save the ecosystem on which human life depends. the rise of provo fascist movements leading up around the fringes of american society expressed in the emotionally consistent but irrational political beliefs of groups like the tea party and the militia brings with it a hatred of government for the betrayal that government carried out, but also hatred of the liberal class itself. for the hypocrisy that the liberal class carried out. in their rage is a legitimate rage. has been our rage and it should be our rage now.

[applause] the tragedy is that the court's liberal values, which those of us who care about our dispossessed working men and women, those values have been utterly discredited. it's why you have the trash talking cable news and radio talk-show hosts attempting to tar obama and the democratic party which only the tad of liberalism, but it had of socialism because their impotence in the face of the corporate state is one that they see or they used to discredit the very values that saves us during the new deal. remember during the new deal we could have gone either way. go back and read smeadley

butler, who was hired by a bunch of industrialists to carry out a coup d'etat. there was support for fascism in the early 1930's. fortune magazine put mussolini on the cover and lodded his braking of labor unions and his exultation of the industrial class at the expense of workers and we were saved because we had a liberal class the worked and was able to push through the kinds of reforms that reincorporate a disenfranchised working-class back into the economy. we face now situation and the possibility of an economic collapse that will rival the great depression, and i'm sure there are many of you in this room that read the front pages of "the wall street journal" and "the new york times" this morning.

the euro is collapsing because of course they bought all our junk. the social upheavals are spreading throughout the country. there's serious questions about italy's liability and its ability to handle its debt, and there is a limit to how much can be borrowed and how much can be lent. and we have allowed our corporate oligarchs to take from us the final resources that could have saved us from precisely that kind of social upheaval. if you read paul krugman's columns in "the new york times,"

krugman, and he's right, keeps calling for another bailout, another stimulus plan to create jobs instead of jobs bill which was just passed which turns out in fine print to be $15 billion of tax credits from corporations and krugman is right. the end of the column a few weeks ago said i'm terrified, i am terrified. but we are not going to get that money. we are not going to get another chance. we took $12 trillion handed it speculators who were sitting on that and gambling on currency. in the 17th century in europe, speculators were hung. a was a crime. [applause] line against the death penalty,

but hanging until choking i could embrace. [laughter] he was obsessed with the breakdown of liberalism at the end of the 19th century in czarist russia. that's what demons is about and notes from underground is about. notes from underground is probably philosophically the most important look for our time. is this about the rational liberal defeated dreamer who went to all of the obama rallies and chanted yes we can and then was betrayed and angry and retreated underground and said well only fools and idiots and buffoons take power.

rational, educated people were discarded. and he knew that once the liberal institutions ceased to function, you enter in what he called an age of moral knealism that opened the door for lenin and the bolsheviks, was the breakdown of liberalism that some of it up adolf hitler and was the breakdown of the centrist liberal establishment in the former yugoslavia, which recovered for "the new york times" that gave us the repugnant figures slobodan milosevic and travon. the class has grave political and social consequences because that rage, when it has nowhere

else to go, is expressed through mechanisms that make war on the traditional liberal establishment and are easily calotte to devotee -- tea party that is and has been the force that create destruction and that's why the way the last remnants of liberalism. and so the question obviously is what do we do. what must be done, to quote when -- lenin. daniel brennan, one of my great heroes, i come out of the religious left, my father was a presbyterian minister who sort of had a habit of being thrown out of one church after another. [laughter]

first for his stance is on the civil rights movement and the entire war movement and finally the gay rights movement. my uncle was gay and lived with his partner in greenwich village. my father had a particular sensitivity to the pain of being a gay man in america in the 1950's and 1960's, a stance that was deeply unpopular in the presbyterian church in the 1970's and 80's. but he writes correctly that we must hold fast to the moral imperatives to what we can define as best we can define it as the good and stop worrying about where the good goes. it is our task to remember that all of the great correctives to american democracy never achieve

political power, ever. the liberty party that fought slavery, the suffragists, the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the most powerful figure in the united states in 1968 was dr. martin luther king, because he scared the hell of them. when king went to birmingham, 2000 people went with him. when king got up in april in 1957 at riverside church and announced to the imam war and called america the greatest purveyor of violence in the world lyndon johnson took away the four plainclothes fbi agents that had been assigned to protect king commanded both king and johnson knew what that meant. there's a beautiful moment,

remember king what malcolm became a pariah. he would be booed by the black power movement, sanctioned within his own ranks, southern christian leadership was disintegrated as an organization, and the king stood up two months before he was assassinated in front of his staff and said i take non-violence to be my lawfully wedded wife in sickness and in health until death do us part. that is only by going back and standing for these morrill in paris that we have any hope of protecting what is left of our anemic democracy. and we have to stop asking whether it's practical or even rational. we have to believe has these great figures before us understood that the good

attracts the good. we have to do so with nonviolence because if we do not come and if we do not do it now, in the opposition to this corporate state and these corporate forces will embrace the violence of the state itself, and i've been there. i spent 20 years as a war correspondent. i know the poison of violence. i know what it does. i know as said how it puts our monsters against their monsters, and it is incumbent upon us to walk away from these established institutions, even if we are alone and believe and trust that holding fast to these moral imperatives will give our country another narrative and reclaim the populism that was

decimated, and it's not going to be easy, a specially as we see the rise of the lunatic fringe of the republican party come to power. they will try to use fear to make us conform to supply the this point not to be used again by these institutions and by the democrats. there has to be a breaking point if you make a moral stance. that's the rubble, that's the whole point. there has to be a line that can't be crossed. and fear for the country, the fear for where we are going. i covered the breakdown of yugoslavia, and i see all of the same flashing red lights, the economic crisis, the bankrupt liberalism, the way the air

waves are taken over bye idiots who have won talent, and that is to mobilize hatred with the undercurrent of racism towards muslims, towards undocumented workers, towards barack obama himself, and it's in our hands. it's in our hands. defenseless under the night, our world and superliners that dotted everywhere, ironic points of light flashed out wherever the just exchange their messages may i compose like them of a rose in the dust, beleaguered by the same negation and despair, show and affirming hand.

thank you. [applause] [applause] please wait for the microphone before you ask a question. go ahead. just wait for the microphone, please. the top climate scientist jim henson said if we were all available fossil fuels, which we show every sign of doing, it will create like venus, although quite not as hot as this room now. [laughter] so that we are dedicated to

having to ignore that and to not address it, what can we do to take appropriate action to say well, everyone and everything? >> i wrote a book before this called in high-resolution which is about the retreat into these electronic hallucinations. the kind of magical thinking of it is said to us by the corporate machine that reality is never an impediment to what we want and of course the is cost to us by oprah's and the christian right and self-help gurus in hollywood and is magical thinking. it is with all of the twilight of all of the don young civilization is engaging. you can read cicero complaining about the arena and how the spectacle in the arena has poisoned political and civil discourse in the declining days of ancient rome. joseph rauf wrote about it with the collapse of the hungarian

empire and that is precisely what happened. because all of the evidence staring us in the face not only the evidence of scientific reports, but the physical evidence of the death rattle of planet itself, and yet we pretend it's not happening. we believe in the false magic of science and technology as if somehow these are natural forces that will save us. science and technology service human invention most of which at this point our military and corporate and that is why barack obama and leaders of the industrialized world and their corporate puppeteers in copenhagen allowed keogh to be shredded. you're right. if we stop emitting fossil fuels today, it would still by many estimates rise to 550 parts per million. 350 parts per million being a level which we can sustain life as we know. we have to understand these

forces are not going to protect us. they are not going to save us. as things went down, they will retreat into enclaves, heavily guarded enclaves where they will have access to security goods and services that are denied to the rest of us, which is why all resistance now is local. the more we can do to be self sustaining, the more freedom and power we have. and that's why sustainable energy, the food movement are absolutely crucial. and don't be fooled. these are smuggling to become expressions of a political, politicized expressions. i just did a story for the nation magazine on camden, new jersey, which per capita is the poorest city in the united states command not surprisingly, the most dangerous. and there is no supermarket in the center of camden. because we have allowed the agribusiness to create a system

-- i also live in new jersey -- we're all of life fruits and vegetables are trucked across country, and poor people can't afford to meet those so we don't sell it to them. and if you want to eat in camden, you have either churches fried chicken or doughnut shops, greece and sugar. you can go to the areas of west virginia and it's the same. and these postindustrial pockets, as our society is reconfigured by corporate forces into a neo feudalism, will only expand, and it is incumbent upon us to wake up to understand what these forces are doing to the environment, and that corporate capitalism, which is distinct from the penny capitalism that existed in the farm town where i grew up, where farmers would come and have a market and sell their vegetables and other

fruit, and its distinct from the regional capitalism of the small business owner, who has a factory or hardware store in the town and sits on the school board. corporate capitalism is something else. it is supernational that destroys like a pair site to -- to recite the state that allows it to thrive, which is what nafta is coming and now we are watching a large-scale factory closures over the border of mexico as these industries moved up, move overseas into the embrace of china's for vietnam's totalitarian capitalism. there was a good book written by berkeley interpol which is on -- anthropologist on the working conditions in southern china, and he said in a sort of classical economic term, since many of these people don't even receive their wages they can't

actually be considered as labor. and the message that is being delivered to the american working class is you have to be competitive. you have to be competitive for prison labor. and so yes, you're right. and i speak at the end of the book about climate change and how it is twinned with this magical thinking, this divorce from reality in fact come in and of course courtesy of exxonmobil. how many millions of dollars to the spend to confuse people about the science of climate change. >> futrell when wheat for the mic. go ahead. >> thank you so much for your talk tonight. you have written a lot recently

and have spoken quite a bit about this to might come and get on the understand as has been told to me by my veterans for peace program that you're joining the action on december 16th in washington, the veteran action against the current wars that are continuing to perpetuate themselves. i was wondering a, why now, and b, would you say to people that are on the fence about whether or not they might want to join us? >> well, i've joined other actions. this is the first time i've agreed along with daniel ellsworth and several other veterans to go chain myself to the sense of the white house. [applause] because it's all we have left. it is our bodies, and i think time, we don't have much time

left. we cannot keep borrowing much longer to sustain an empire in a level of consumption that we can't afford and collapse especially when it's not expected when people are not emotionally, psychologically and intellectually prepared for it. as i saw with the economic break down in yugoslavia unleashes very frightening movements, and the undercurrent of violence in american society runs very deep. and so, i think that it is incumbent upon all of us to begin to carry out physical forms of protest and stop worrying about whether anyone joins us. because that act of rebellion, and i suppose that this exposes my anarchist groups, i distrust power and any guys in india a

logical for i think life recalls a constant push against centers of power and i believe we certainly reached a point where in the nonviolent form we must begin to take radical measures because has said, we live in a moment where the best lack all conviction and the best carl phill of intensity -- are full of intensity. >> at first glance this is like a very impressive turnout. i would like to speak to the to see talking to 10,000 people or 70,000, which is the number that came to hear barack obama when he gave his campaign speech in oregon. i would like to know if you are seeing an increase in awareness and the increase in interest in your speeches around the country, and i'd also like to know who are the leaders? are there any leaders in office or potentially in office to raise awareness and talk about these things? >> welcome there are certainly

good people who have been elected office, and i think the electoral politics is not going to be on the national level. i think it's pretty clear it's not going to be a solution to our problems because even when you get people who have a conscience, people like conyers or kucinich or barry sanders to look at the health care bill, when it came down to the public option, not one senator or house member voted, including those people who stood up and said they would fight for it. and i believe that is indicative of absolutely how much control the corporate state has. there's a jury good book by our greatest living political philosopher sheldon wolen called democracy incorporated. and sheldon, who taught at berkeley and later princeton, uses the word inferred a totalitarianism to describe the political system we live under, and by that he means it's not like classical totalitarian movements, where you have a radical or a reactionary force that seeks to overthrow the structure and replace it, but

you have a totalitarianism that finds its expression in the anonymity of the corporate state that you have these forces they purport to pay loyalty to the constitution to electoral politics to the iconography of the language of american patriotism, and yet they have corrupted the power as to render the citizenry important. and the inverted utilitarianism you have a situation where the economics always trumps politics, where is in classic to tell the teheran as of politics from the economics, and wolen says the way that the masses are pacified is through credit because the real wages are 90% of americans have been on a steady decline since the early 1970's, and cheap mass-produced goods. well now the credit is gone for most people and the mass-produced goods are becoming, because of the

deprivation among our permanent underclass and affordable. and i spoke to wolen not long ago and i asked him if you take away those mechanisms of control, can you see the possibility of the inverted totalitarianism looking into a kind of classical totalitarianism, and he agreed that we could. we are not immune from it. we are not immune from these sources. we are no different from, you know, the germans who were in despair in the late 1920's or the yugoslavs or anyone else. and unfortunately, the system of mass propaganda and the resources in the hands of those who oppose the locker see at this point cut especially after citizens united, how they took down russ feingold, for every tv ad for russ feingold there were five or six at trashing him and we didn't even know who pay for them. "the new york times" just felt

40% of the chamber budget about $83 billion was paid for by the pharmaceutical insurance company and de use the chamber of commerce as the attack dog and we never knew until now. >> first two chapters of your book as you are leaving out the different elements of a real powerful movement that the first world war destroyed, the only a goal of people of faith that he mentioned was really the social gospel and the theology of walter roshenbuh. the evangelicals, the call themselves littleness at time, such as william jennings bryan. >> he wasn't a fundamentalist, he was an evangelical. there's a difference. >> i wonder if you can comment on today figures such as jim

wallace -- could we see a return of the fundamentalists -- >> fundamentalists and evangelicals at that time were at war with each other because a fundamentalist who believed in the bible salles evangelicals who were charismatic and thought that there were many ways to come to christ and spoken tonya satan worshipers. there was a huge division. so you did have a progressive evangelical movement. roshenbush 93 critical to because it happened with these movements is they made the fatal error of trusting the state. their fate in the mechanism of the state without realizing that social movements always had to be antagonistic to power. and always had to force power towards the corrective. karl popper in the open society of the enemy writes that we

shouldn't ask how to get the good people to rule. that's the wrong question. most people attracted to power are at best mediocre, which is obama, or venal, which is bush. [laughter] the question is how we stop the powerful from doing as much damage to us as popper. it was after the self slaughter of world war i all of the dreams of human progress being achieved through social movements shattered comet was a great deal of despair and there was a book to the romans written by carl bark that the aftermath of the war took on this naively believed that we were going to create a utopian or a christian society on earth. and the liberal church never recovered from that. my a murder towards the liberal church comes over the issue of

the christian right. i have a problem with wallace by the way because, you know, i have read the bible as closely as jim wallace has, and i can tell you that it is utterly inconsistent. there are whole passages that are repugnant, and to somehow deify that book, which wallace does, although his politics are good, i just find that kind of thing intellectually bankrupt and kind of frightening. there are many ways to achieve the moral of life. every society and religion produces great figures including islam i would add, who rise up on behalf of the oppressed to fight the oppressor. some of those people embrace religious iconography and language and some do not. and there are numerous routes. i happen to come out of the church but i believe that is an exclusive half to define an

authority. and i think that my anger towards the liberal church is that they watched the rise of the christian right, which let's be clear, these people are not christians, they are heretics'. [applause] to have utterly perverted and deformed the message of the gospel. jesus didn't come to make us rich. she's just didn't come to bless bombs all over the muslim world. and liberal ministers who went to seminary as i did and studied the christian gospel walked out the doors of those seminaries and solve these heretics and said nothing. they remained silent and that is why they have nothing to say to us now. of course it would be difficult and painful to challenge thes