vonnegut. they shared a close friend, sydney, who wrote the introduction for the last vonnegut library book that came out, but these two pieces of art, the first on the occasion of kurt vonnegut's birthday was a gift to vonnegut, and then the second was created when he found out that vonnegut had died, and that was 2007. we are in the front of the kurt vonnegut library room. this is the typewriter used in the 1970s. this was donated to us by his daughter nanny. he wrote many of his more familiar books during the 1970s. we are happy to have this

typewriter. he was not a fan of high technology and he did not use a computer. he preferred to use the typewriter through his dying day. he liked to work in his home on an office chair and a coffee table. he would slump over his typewriter. he, vonnegut would go out into the world every day. he talks about how he learned you could buy postage stamps over the internet, and he just thought that was horrible because then, you know, if he chose that route, he would not have the every day experience of going to the post office, and those every day experiences and the people he encountered during his daily wawbs were the basis for some of his stories. he met a number of very

interesting characters in new york city, and going out and meeting people, you know, was a way for him to capture new material for his works. vonnegut is timeless because these issues we still have the same issues. we are still suffering war, disease, you know, death, famine, environmental issues, you know, he said your planet's immune system is trying to get rid of you. he thought we should take care of the planet. these issues have resurfaced, and it does not like like we found any viable solutions to these problems so, you know, i think his work is timeless. >> c-span local content vehicles are traveling the country visiting cities and towns looking at the nation's history and some of the authors who wrote about it.

for more information go to c-span.org/lcv. coming up, chris hedges argues that america's liberal class collapsed and with it the citizenry's protection against what he deems the corporate state. mr. hedges contends that the liberal class that includes universities, labor movements, the press, the democratic party, and liberal religious groups has been gradually corrupted by corporate entities and without its existence, there will no longer be a structure of checks and balances against corporate interests. he presents his books at powell books in portland, oregon. it's an hour an and a half.

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>> world war i was the moment when powerful popular movements that remitted the interest of ordinary americans threatened the grip on power of the elite. dwight mcdonald, whom i admire greatly, wrote that the war on the movements is in which the rock broke. they broke because world war i saw the birth of the system of mass propaganda which ever sense saturated our culture with lies. it saw the rise of the committee of public information or the

creole commission led by a journalist who ended his career by working for nixon in the 1950s and the american affairs activity. because the war had no popular support. wilson, in fact, ran for reelection on the slogan that he kept us out of the war, but the bankers, wall street had lent tremendous sums of money to the british and the french, and if the germans won the war, that money was not going to be repaid, and so there was pressure from the financial elite to push us into a conflict that had no popular support at all, very little support, wilson and walter lipman and author all

understood this. they created this remarkable system to saturate the country with propaganda crossing the lines of many disciplines. they had their own film division, a news division that pumped out one endless prowar news story after another, manufactured all the atrocities contributed to the hated hun. they used graphic artists, radio, established speaker bureaus, and it was the first time where there was a conscious understanding that what moved the mass of people was not fact or reason, but the manipulation of emotion. they drew on the work of trodder and sigmund freud, the father of

modern propaganda, and indeed, his book was closely studied by globals as the nazis built their own propaganda machine, and this insight into mass psychology and bulard argues, one of wilson's students, and libman, how does one manufacture consent, they write to wilson as they attempt to set up the committee for public education, truth and falsehood are arbitrary terms. there is nothing in experience to tell us that one is preferable to the other. there are lifeless crews and

vital lies. the force of an idea lies in its inspare rational value. it matters very little whether it is true or false. this understanding coupled with the resources of the state to saturate the country with propaganda was affectively used by the power elite to destroy all of those broad based social movements that were bringing this country towards socialism. you remember eugene debs polled a million votes. there were huge publications, but the largest was a socialist pub my cation, the masses, we had several dozen socialist mayors, strong push within the cio, the wobblies, and so there was a kind of war propaganda

machine as not only a vehicle to garden massive support for a war, but to break the back of these movements, and they succeeded. some of the most poignant writing about this is by two of the amazingly heroic figures who resisted the tide and what depressed them so deeply was how swiftly the intellectual class, many of the socialists themselves like sinclaire louis and others were placed into the war efforts replacing the goals of high jen, good housing, good public education, fair working conditions without the goal of making the war to end all wars. the actual physical forms of repression embodied in the

sedition act, in the espionage act were used on a relatively marginal segment of the society that still held out. by the end of the war, the, those who built this system of mass propaganda and it is written about, immediately found employment on madison avenue. they went to work for corporations who upended traditional american values of thrift, of self-afacement, and replaced it with consumption as a kind of inner come pulse, with a cult of a self, they destroyed regal and ethnic -- 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 affectively destroyed. they useed the espionage and sedition agent after the war to go after the remanents after the war with the deportation of anarchists like anna goldman to russia and shut down appeal to reason, but that actually editor supported the war. they made war on the wobblies, trumped up murder charges, big bill haywood ends his life fleeing a trumped up murder charge as a refugee in the soviet union. 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 entered a state of constant fear, the dreaded pun was immediately replaced with a dreaded red, and mcdonald, i think, makes a very important point that none of the social and political theorists of the late 19th century including carl marx understood in a system of permanent war and skillful mass propaganda, you could get the masters to call for their own enslave. . the only time marx writes about war is during the prussian war and expresses the hope that prussia would win. we have essentially been emasculated ever sense. radical movements are destroyed and liberal movements engage in a kind of internal

cannibalization where they push out figures with a moral conscious, some kind of atonmy branding them as sympathetic to communism. many were not, but having lived in europe and italy, there is nothing under our constitution that prohibits a communist party. i believe that we purport to support the free exchange of political thought and ideas, and the liberal class without that counterweight of radical movements to keep them hoppest began to break them apart. it serves a critical function in a state, and that function is two-fold. it acts as a safety valve. it meeks peace --

it makes peace possible, and an example of how the liberal class works is a break down of capitalism in the 1930s and the rise of the new deal. we had essentially figures like franklin roosevelt or the great henry wallace later in his own presidential campaign in 48 tarred and smeared for being so off communism. the last major political figure with the exception of george mcgovern to challenge the permanent war economy and the resources 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 injustices and suffering of working men and women could be redressed.

that is the role of the liberal class, and it's why traditional power elites toller lit liberal institutions and the liberal class so they are not tone death to the suffering 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 liberal's hate the most is not glenn beck. norm chomsky shows the power elite and the way they serve the power elite. the danger is that when liberal institutions no longer function, when they call, then there's no

mechanism by which the grievances of large sectors can be expressed within the system. we saw, of course, immediately after world war ii the final round of the assault on radical and progressive movements, the remanents of them. universities purged themselves of thousands of professors, many of these cases it was a silent purge where people were 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, that's probably how

oh greatest 20th century journalist became an outcast because he refused to take the loyalty oath and ends up putting the stone's weekly in his basement. he writes -- there's a nice biography of stone that came out recently. he said he felt at the time like a ghost. he began a talk and he said fellow subversives and the fbi -- [laughter] because, of course, the fbi wasted tremendous amounts of

resources following around stone and others. i used some of the files on zen that were just released to describe the folly of security, and i can assure you homeland security is just as -- someone they said were in the detailed activities. the only problem is that zen didn't even have a sister, and the liberal establishment by the end of the mccarthy period was so craven in its embrace of the cold war politics that you had institutions like the ncau carrying out internal hunts for people who were either pink or red, and, of course, the people carrying out those hunts were

the most craven careerists, the people with the least moral center, the least moral as the capacity to say no, so that not only did we decimate radical progressive popular movements, but at the same time, we destroyed the core of liberal institutions as well. this coincided with the rise of the corporate state. it saw probably the last great champion in this country and we will rue the day we walked out on this guy. it was ralph nader. [applause] who pushed through one piece of great legislation after another, ralph was a good friend of mine and says the last liberal president we had was richard nixon. [laughter] well, in terms of legislation,

that's true. osha, the clean water act, the mine 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 everybody who read the book was to take nader down, and they created and funded powerful right wing corporate think tanks in centers like the heritage foundation, the business round table to destroy any kind of populist activity especially the kind of activity that nader was so successful at when he still had allies in the democratic party in the 1960s. once all of these checks were gone, we began to see what can

only be described in slow motion by corporations where they dismantled everything that impeded the maxization of corporations. they made war on labor unions, passed nafta. bill clinton is the poster child of bankrupt liberalism. [applause] clinton understood that if he did corporate bidding, he could get corporate money. the working class and labor would have nowhere else to go and by the 1990s, the democratic party had fundraising party with

the republicans, and by the time barak obama ran for president, they got more, but the price of that was a betrayal of the working class that traditionally the democratic party and liberal institutions had once protected. our great failure for those of us who care about ordinary, the rights of ordinary citizens is that in 1994 with the passage of nafta, we did not stand up for the working class and turn our back on the democratic party. we continued to support democratic politicians who spoke in the traditional language of liberalism, but betrayed every single core liberal value. welfare reform, we now face the prospect with this new midterm election of unemployment benefit s for tens of millions of

citizens running out or being allowed to run up without being extended which will mean that many of these people will have to attempt to survive on the $143 a month you receive from welfare curtesy 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 walls between their commercial and up vestment banks -- investment banks which had been protected for us under the 1933 act to be ripped down. we saw the liberal class evolve

into 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 the obama administration and exposed the deep cynicism and hypocrisy of the liberal class. the tragedy of tragedy -- tragedy if that's the right word of barak obama is that he made a bargain with corporate interests. he sold us out whether it's the foreclosure isa re-- fisa act that retroactively made legal but under our constitution is illegal, the wiretapping and ease dropping on tens of millions of americans and whether it is to continue the looting by wall street speculators and swindlers who

engaged in fraudulent acts that are criminal, using mortgage brokers and bankers to falsify information on loan applications that they knew were false to hand sums of money to people they knew could never repay it in selling these subprime mortgages as assets, whether it is the continuation of our imperial wars in iraq, in afghanistan which preemptive war under post laws are defined as criminal wars of aggression. they are a crime, and we have no right as a nation to debate the terms of the occupation. whether it is the -- [applause] whether it is the swindle that became the so-called health care reform bill.

$400 billion in subsidies to our for-profit health care industry, the equivalent of the bank bailout bill for etna, and sidna, and we are watching barak obama hand these corporations exemptions because they don't want to ensure chronically ill children. i spent enough time in 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. that includes 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 comity, human beings are commodities, the natural world is a commodity which corporations exploit until exhaustion or collapse means

that this coo is essentially cannibalizing not only our country, but the planet, and it is not accidental that the environmental crisis is twinned with the economic crisis because profit comes before the urgent task toó÷&

because their impotence in the face of the corporate state is one that they seek or use to discredit the very values that saved us during the new deal. during the new deal we could have gone either way trabuco back and read. hired by a bunch of industrialists to carry out a coup d'etat. there was tremendous support for fascism in the early 1930's. fortune magazine but mussolini on the cover and allotted is breaking of labor unions and his exultation of the industrial class at the expense of workers. we were saved because we had a liberal class the work. they were able to push through the kinds of reforms that we incorporated a disenfranchised working-class back into the

economy. we face now the situation and the possibility of an economic collapse that will rival the great depression. i'm sure there are many of you in this room who 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 town. the social upheavals are spreading throughout the country. there are serious questions about italy's by ability and its ability to handle its debt. there is a limit. how much can be borrowed and and how much can be lent. we have allowed our corporate

oligarchs to take from us the final resources that could have saved us from --. another stimulus plan to create jobs. instead the jobs bill which was just passed which turns out in fine print to be $15 billion in tax credits to corporations. and he's right. he said i'm terrified, i'm terrified. we aren't going to get that money. , we aren't going to get another chance. we took $12 trillion handed it to speculators who are sitting on it and the gambling on

currency. in the 17th century in europe speculators were hung. it was a crime. [applause] i'm against the death penalty after seven but hanging until choking i could embrace. [laughter] assessed with the breakdown of liberalism at the end of the 19th century in czarist russia. it is what it notes from underground is about. notes from underground is probably philosophically the most important book for our time. it is about the rational, liberal, defeated grammar who went to all of the obama rallies

and chanted yes, we can and then was betrayed and angry. retreated underground. he said, well, only fools and idiots and the phones take power. rational, educated people are discarded. and he knew that once the liberal institutions cease to function you enter in what he called an age of moral and realism which, of course, eventually opened the door for lenin and the bolsheviks, the breakdown of liberalism that vomited up adolf hitler, and it was the breakdown of the centrist liberal establishment in the former yugoslavia, which i covered for the new york times that gave us the repugnant figures.

the failure of the liberal 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 coopted, as the tea party is and has been, by the very forces that created this direction and sita wipe away the last remnants of liberalism. and so the question, obviously is what we do? what must be done? there is an interview in the book with daniel berrigan, one

of my great heroes. i come out of the religious left. my father was a presbyterian minister and we sort of had a habit of being thrown out of one church after another. first for his stance is on the civil-rights movement and then the anti-war movement and finally the gay rights movement. my uncle, his youngest brother, was gay. with his partner in greenwich village, my father had a particular sensitivity to the pain of being a gay man in america and the 1950's and '60', a stance that was deeply unpopular in the presbyterian church in the 1970's and 80's. but daniel berrigan writes, correctly, that we must hold fast to moral imperatives to

what we can define as best we can define it as the good and stop lawrie about where the good coast. it is our task to remember that all of the great correctives to american democracy never achieved formal political power ever. the liberty party that fought slavery, the suffragist, the labor movement, civil rights movement, the most powerful figure in the united states in 1968 was dr. martin luther king. because he scared the hell out of them. when king went to birmingham, 50,000 people went with him. win can get up in april of 1967 and riverside church and denounced the vietnam war and called america the greatest purveyor of violence in the world, lyndon johnson took away

before plan -- plant closed fbi agents that had been assigned to protect king. they knew what that meant. it was a beautiful moment. remember, can, like malcolm, became a pariah at the end. he would be booed by the back -- black power movement, dissension within his own ranks. southern christian was disintegrating as an organization. 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, till death do us part. only by going back and standing for these moral imperatives we have any hope of protecting what is left of our anemic democracy.

and we have to stop asking whether it is practical or even rational. we have to believe, as these great figures before us understood, that the good attracts could. we have to do so with nonviolence because if we do not and if we do not do it now then the opposition to this corporate state and these corporate forces will embrace the violence of the state itself, and i have been there. i spent 20 years as a war correspondent. i know the poison of violence. i know what it does. i know, as nietzsche said, how it fits monsters against their monsters and it is incumbent upon us to walk away from these established institutions, even

if we are alone. believe and trust that holding fast to these moral imperatives will give our country and other narrative and reclaimed the populism that was decimated. it's not going to be easy, especially as we see the price of the lunatic fringe of the republican party come to power. they will try and use of fear to make us conform. simple pride should drive us at 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 is the whole point. there has to be a line that cannot be crossed.

and i fear for our country. i fear for where we are going. i covered the breakdown of yugoslavia, and icy all of the same flashing red lights, the economic crisis, the bankrupt liberalism, the way that the airwaves are taken over by idiots who have won talent and that is to mobilize hatred with undercurrents of racism toward muslims, toward undocumented workers, toward barack obama himself, and it is in our hands. it is in our hands. defenseless under the night, a world in super lives yet adopted everywhere, ironic points of light flashed out wherever the just exchanged their messages

may i composed like them of heiress and dust, beleaguered by the same negation and despair show an affirming flame. think you. [applause] [applause] [applause] [applause] so please wait for the microphone before you ask a question. go ahead. wait for the microphone, please. >> thank you very much. really spectacular. climate scientist jim hanson has

said that if we burn all available fossil fuels, which we show every sign of doing, it will create a dead senate like phoenix, although not as hot as this room now. the powers that be are dedicated to having thus ignored that and not address it. what can we do to take appropriate action to say, well, everyone and everything. >> well, i wrote a book before this called "empire of illusions" which is about the retreat in to these electronic hallucinations, the kind of magical thinking that is fed to us by the corporate machine, reality is never an impediment to what we want. of course that is tossed to us by oprah and the christian right and self-help gurus and hollywood. magical thinking. it is what all, the twilight of

all dying civilizations engage in bitter 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 roth wrote about it with the collapse of the austrian hungarian empire. that is precisely what has happened because all of the evidence is staring us in the face, not only the evidence, but scientific reports, the physical evidence of the death rattle of the planet itself. yet we pretend it is 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 serve him and ambitions, most of which at this point our military and corporate. that is why barack obama, the leaders of the industrialized world, and they're corporate puppeteers in copenhagen allowed kyoto to be shredded. you're right, if we stopped

imaging fossil fuels today we would still, by many estimates, rise to 550 parts per million, 350 parts per million being the level by which we can sustain life as we know it. and we have to understand that these forces are not going to protect us. they are not going to save us. as things melt down, as miami has pointed out, they will retreat into a heavily guarded enclaves where they will have access to security, goods that are denied to the rest of us, which is one of resistance now is local. the more we can do to be self sustaining the more freedom and power we have. that is why sustainable energy, the food movement, absolutely crucial. don't be fooled. these are soon going 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 port city in the united states and not surprisingly the most dangerous. there is no supermarket in the center of camden because we have allowed agribusinesses to create a system. i also live in new jersey. all of my efforts and vegetables are trucked across country. poor people cannot afford to maidens, so we don't sell it to them. if you want to eat in camden you have either church's fried chicken or doughnut shops. greece and sugar. food desert. you can go to a cold out areas of west virginia, and it is the same. these post industrial pockets, as our society is reconfigured by corporate forces into a knee of feudalism will only expand. it is incumbent upon us to wake

up, 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 in and have a market and sell their vegetables and fruit. it is distinct from the regional capitalism of the small-business owner who has a factory or a hardware store and lives in the town and sits on the school board. corporate capitalism is something else. it is super natural that destroys like a parasite the host state that allows it to thrive, which is what nafta is. now we are watching large-scale factory closures over the border in mexico as these industries moved up, move overseas and to the cut rate embrace of china or

vietnam totalitarian capitalism. there was a good book written by berkeley anthropologist on working conditions in southern china, and he said in sort of classical economic turns, many of these people don't even receive their wages. they cannot 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 with prison labor. and so, yes, you're right. i speak at the end of the book about climate change and how it is twinned with this magical thinking, this divorce from reality, from fact. of course courtesy of exxon mobile. how many millions of dollars to they spend to confuse people

about the science of climate change? wait for the microphone please. go ahead. >> a little scary. thank you so much for your talk tonight. you have written a lot recently about losing hope and suddenly have spoken quite a bit about that tonight. i understand, as has been told to be by my veterans for peace friends that you are planning on joining the action in december on december 16th in washington, the veteran lead action against the current wars that are continuing to perpetuate themselves. i was wondering, a, why now. the, what would you say to people who are on the fence about whether or not they might want to join us? >> well, i have joined other actions. this is the first time i have agreed along with ray mcgovern and several veterans to get

chain myself to the fans of the white house. [applause] because it is all we have left. it is our bodies. i think time, we don't have much time left. we cannot keep borrowing much longer to sustain an empire on a level of consumption that we can't afford. collapsed, especially when it is not expected, when people are not emotionally, psychologically, and intellectually prepared for it, as i saw with the economic breakdown in yugoslavia, unleashes very, very frightening movements. 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 this exposes my anarchist roots. you know, i discussed our in any guise, any ideological form. at think the moral life requires constant rebellion, a constant push against centers of power, and i believe that we have certainly reached a point where in non-violent form we must begin to take radical measures because as was said, we live in a moment when best have conviction and the worst are full of passion and intensity. >> at first glance this looks like an impressive turnout. i would like to see you speaking to 10,000 or 70,000 people, which is a number that came out to your barack obama 18 in his campaign speech. i would like to know if you are

seeing an increase in awareness and the things you're talking about, an increase in interest in your speeches around the country. who are the leaders? are there any leaders and office are potentially an office to raise awareness and talk about these things? >> there are seven naked people that have elected office. at think electoral politics is not going to be on the national level. it is pretty clear it is not going to be a solution to our problems. even when you get people that have a conscience to look at the health care bill, when it came down to the public auction -- option, not one senator or house member voted for it, not one, ig those people who stood up and said they would fight for it. that is indicative of absolutely how much control the corporate state has. there is a very good book by probably our greatest living political philosopher sheldon roland called democracy incorporated. sheldon, who taught at berkeley and later princeton uses the

word inverted totalitarianism to describe the political system we live under. by that he means it is not like classical totalitarian movements are you have a radical or reactionary force that seeks to overthrow a decaying structure and replace it, but you have a totalitarian and that finds its expression in the anonymity of the corporate state. you have these forces that purport to the pay loyalty or fealty to the constitution, electoral politics, the iconography and language of american patriotism and yet they have so corrupted the levers of power as to render the citizenry and the tent. and that in inverted totalitarianism you have a situation where economics always trumps politics. in classical totalitarianism politics comes economics. rowland said that the way that the masses are pacified is your credit because real wages for

90% of americans have been on a steady decline. cheap mass-produced goods. now credit is gone for most people. the mass-produced goods are becoming, because of the deprivation among or permanent underclass an affordable. i spoke to of roland not long ago and asked him, if you take away those two mechanisms of control can you see the possibility of inverted totalitarianism flipping? a kind of classical totalitarianism. he agreed that we could. we are not immune from it. we are not immune from these forces. we are no different from, you know, the germans who were in despair in the late 1920's or the yugoslavs or anyone else. unfortunately the systems of mass propaganda and the

resources in the hands of those who oppose democracy at this point, especially after citizens united. for every ad on tv there were five or six trashing him, and we didn't even know who paid for them. the new york times just found 40 percent of the chamber of commerce's budget, $803 billion is paid for by the pharmaceutical insurance company, and they use the chamber of commerce as the attack dog. we never knew until now. >> and the first two chapters of your book as you are laying out the different elements of a real powerful movement that the first world war destroyed, the only ankle of people of faith that you mentioned was the social gospel and theology of walter. i wonder if you could --

something was notable, the evangelicals, the fundamentalists at the time such as william jennings. >> he was not of fundamentalist. he was an evangelical. there is a difference. >> i wanted to comment on figures such as jim wallace. could we see a return of the fundamentalist? >> well, i don't want to -- fundamentalists and evangelicals at that time were at war with each other because the fundamentalists who believe in the strict bible who sought evangelicals who were charismatic and that there are many ways to come to christ and spoke in times as satan worshipers. so you had a progressive evangelical movement. a very critical. what happened with all of these progressive movements is that made the fatal error of trusting in the state. they put all of their faith in

the mechanism of the state without realizing that social movements always had to be antagonistic to power and always had to force power toward a corrective. karl popper in the open society, his enemies rights that we should not ask how do we get to get people to rule. that is the wrong question. most people attracted to power are at best mediocre, which is obama or vino which is bush. [laughter] the question is how do we stop the powerful from doing as much damage as possible. and that, you know, there was after the self slaughter of world war all of the dreams of human progress being achieved through social movement shattered. it was a great deal of despair, and there was a book,

in the aftermath of the board it took down this 90 believe that we were going to create a utopian or christian society on earth. and the liberal church never recovered from that. by anger toward the liberal church comes over the issue of the christian right. i have a problem with wallace, by the way, because i can -- you know, i have read the bible. as closely as jim wallace has. i can tell you that it is utterly inconsistent. there are passages that are morally repugnant and to somehow deified that book, which will list does, i just find that kind of thing intellectually bankrupt and frightening. there are many ways to achieve the moral life. every society, every religion produces valiant and great figures including islam, i would add, who rise up on behalf of

the oppressed to fight the oppressor. some embrace religious iconography and language. some cannot. there are numerous routes. i happen to come out of the church, but i hardly believe that is an exclusive path to defining authority. i think that my anger toward the liberal churches that they watched the price of the christian right which, let's be clear. these people are not questions. is our heritage. [applause] they have cut really perverted and deform the fundamental message of the christian gospel. it jesus did not come to make us rich. jesus did not come to bless iron fragmentation bombs all over the muslim world. liberal ministers who went to

seminary as i did study the christian gospel, walked out the door, saw these heretics, and saw nothing. they remained silent. that is why they have nothing to say to us now. of course it would be difficult and painful to challenge these people. they have resources that we don't. how can you closely study the life of jesus christ who was turned on by the crowd, abandoned by his friends, stripped, hung on a cross with criminals and left to die and not get it? that is the christ with a moral life. as martin luther king said in one of his great sermons, jesus did not come to bring peace of mind. my sadness over the church is they forgot the radical message of the gospel itself.

they allowed the rise. i wrote a book about the christian right called american fascist, the christian right and the war on america. i was trying to reach out to him. [laughter] and i look at this as a mass movement, mass political movement that uses the language of american nationalism with the language of the christian religion. when that happens you get fascism. wrapped in the american flag and clutching the christian cross. >> thank you, chris. i spent the last 30 years in the labor movement trying to put the movement back in the labor movement. i was -- i came out of the

anti-war movement, but eyes on the labour movement as the way to change this country. i saw what happened during the great depression. it was not the wonderfulness of fdr. it was the sit-down strikes. >> of course. >> general strikes and whole cities being shut down. how do we get back there? >> we have to stop trusting in bankrupt institutions and we have to, you know, go out and -- look, i have held anti-war rallies. i don't expect to go down there and see thousands of people. i'm not going to pretend that being handcuffed is a very pleasant experience, but that is the kind of thing we have to begin to do. [applause] you know, i watched in war zones how solitary act of defiance have an immense power that ripples out words across society. at the moment it often seems

futile. 1968 in prague you have a check student, a protest, the occupation who walks, i believe, into a square and burns himself to death. hushed up in the state media. nothing said. yet in the velvet revolution, which i covered a poster with his face is everywhere. and i tell this story in my first book, "war is a force that gives us meaning," which for me exemplifies the power of rebellion or defiance, and it is the story of a muslim,. i heard the story from a serbian couple. they had lived in a safe area that was under intense bombardment, shelling. he wrote a great book about it.

like many ethnic, they threw their lot and with the muslim-led government and did not join the search forces. as the surge titan that the paranoia rose the muslim police came one night and took they're eldest son away. he'd disappeared and never returned. their second son who was fighting with the bosnian serbs died in a car accident. they were left car accident -- titleist. his wife was pregnant and gave birth to an infant girl. because there was no food and because of the stress she was unable to nurse the five child and the child was dying. they were feeding it week cups of tea trying to keep it alive. after ten days, at dawn there was a knock on their apartment door. and belligerent muslim farmer and a pair of rubber boots with

a liter of milk. he had three great brown and white milk cows that he milked at night to avoid sniper fire. he came back the next morning and the morning after that and the morning after that and the morning after that for one year. all of the muslim neighbors when they saw that he was giving milk which was precious, with a lot of money to keep alive a serbian infant began to spit on him and install time and revile him. i heard this story. they said, we hate the serbs, we hit the muslims. yet, it is our duty to tell you that not all muslims are bad. so, of course, i would tend and found him.

his cows had been slaughtered. his apartment, the block had been bombed into rubble. he was sleeping on a cement floor and newspapers. by day he collected with several other older men weren't even apples and selling them on the sidewalk. when i told him i had seen the socks he said, and the baby, how is she? now, in that act lies an ocean of hope. he stood up and shamed everyone around him. defend, protect, and championed the sanctity of all life. that little girl will grow up, and she may never meet that man, but she will know as a serb that she is alive because of a muslim, farmer. that kind of activity in moments of extremity ripples out word

with an undeniable power. i think we have to regain that form of resistance. it's lonely and hard. martin luther king writes about it at the end of his strength to love where he breaks down in the kitchen and thinks he can't go on. one more death threat on the phone. we have to remove our trust in broaden institutions that speak a language which no longer reflects the ultimate concern of those institutions and trust finally in ourselves. maybe by the end of your life and my life things will be worse, probably there will be, but that does not invalidate what we have done. we trust in the good. we believe the good attracts the good. we cannot know what where the

good goes, but fate is finally believing that it goes somewhere. [applause] [applause] >> having read all of your books i deeply respect what you have done tonight and what you did this afternoon. i was so glad. i have been trying to talk to unitarians about getting you to town. it kinda fell flat, but here you are. i just barely found out that you were here. thank you. i know that you deeply respect noam chomsky. i wonder if all in all when you rejected september 11th as a false claim in this country whether or not you had any question about his ability to question the corporate fascism that we live under -- >> i don't want to get into september 11th. a little close to home because i

covered all qaeda for one year. i am willing to concede that i did not do the structural studies used to talk about how the building collapsed. on the other hand, by the end of that year much of my work was retracing every step that muhammed it often took. it is my belief that september 11th would not have happened without him. it did not -- the government was asleep at the switch, which is pretty much defined eight years of george bush that is not -- i have friends who are as passionate about it as you, but it is a long and difficult argument. >> well, we have a bill before congress for the last four years this young lady next to me and i have put together a bill for the third party and presented it to 19 congressional offices to get a new investigation of 911.

i wanted to ask you, this is really my question. >> let's talk about it afterwards. we have a limited time. very quickly. [applause] i don't want to get into the -- its long and complicated. i get it from a friend of mine. i am not -- in the and i am enough of a reporter not to be an absolutist, and i did not report it. ultimately i don't know. go ahead. who is next? call ahead. a case. over here. okay. the right side. the. [laughter] po, that's true. definitely left side. >> i really do enjoy. i have not read your other books, but i have enjoyed this one. the youtube videos of you. i'm learning about your

analysis, and it is very helpful. i try to share your ideas with my children and young people. some of the despair and hopelessness is hard for people to take. what comes back to me in these conversations, people, kids raising things about institutions that maybe don't look like the liberal institutions that you and i are familiar with and that you write about. a whole range of grass-roots local things that have gone on today, not out of labor, bought at of anti-war, not out of poverty. that has hope for young people. they see this as a mechanism may be to bring about change with some of the institutions that we embraced over the years collapsing. could you talk a little bit -- >> i fully support. i mean, i think the argument is

that i began the last chapter by quoting the great anarchist who tells a bunch of anarchist's trying to overthrow this hour, you think we are the doctors. we are the disease. it is not our job to save a dying system. it is our job to kill it. these movements which are attempting to sever themselves from the grip of the corporate state are signs of hope. on the other hand i don't like the words pessimism and optimism. people have a very pollyannas view of the world around them did not live very long. a well-known correspondent who drove of thin skinned vehicle, which meant in essence it was not honored. i had an armored car. he spray-painted on the side of his car save your bullets, i'm immortal. in the morning -- well, you have to admire the hubris of it. he would drive across the tarmac of the airport which was

controlled by the french who we all referred to as the four warring faction in the war in bosnia to buy cigars and wood smoke them on the way back. he is a cripple now. i had another friend who somehow believed that he could not get hit. he stood up and was shot through the head and killed. look, it was our job to call the ss reality, determined what weapons systems are at the end of that road and what the capacity is to do us harm an act. if we can't understand the reality around us, no matter how bleak it is we cannot use the word help because we are not responding to the real. we are responding to the fictional. of course it is bleak, but i did not make it up. i did not make up climate science. i don't make up the american working class. i don't make up the fact that one in four children in this country depend on food stamps to eat or that almost 3 million people were driven from their homes because of foreclosure and

bank repossessions matched again by this year, about 8,000 people a day. none of this is made up. it is just that the pain has become because of corporate commercial media largely invisible to the rest of us but it may be visible on the local level, but we don't hear the cry from our own people. so i'm with these kids, and i think everything that they are doing is important in great. on the other hand i think that we also have to understand what is about to befall us and be prepared. i mean, the secret of surviving in a war zone is to know how bad it is and how bad it's going to be. in fact, that makes survival built in a physical sense and a psychological sense far more -- you are far more able to endure. >> i was wondering -- >> wait for the -- whit for the. >> i was wondering if your

bibliography if there was something in your research, since you are so well versed, that you found profound or awakening to something that you had not been aware of. >> well, you know, it is always humbling to be a reader. i found a lot of amazing stuff. at think like mcdonald is incredible, and i encourage you all to read it. a really great thinker, beautiful rider. unrepentant anarchist, thrown out -- he was briefly a trotskyite but would not follow the orthodoxy of the party. sent a message to the party in new york and said everyone has enamored to their own stupidity, but comrade macdonald abuses the privilege. he was invited up to columbia in

1968, and everybody was wearing little now buns. he goes, where are the black flags? i really rely a lot of directors of the 19 fifties, wright mills, rice men, jacobs because i think and they resonate with me to be a tremendous power. beautiful book, and sow's return which is an intellectual history of the bohemian movement after world war one. it's brilliant. brilliant and kind of searing analysis of how the bohemians and ultimately the new left essentially embraced the corporate values of hedonism and consumption. a really stunning book, again, beautifully written. so, yeah, there are a lot of books. when you begin and when you write a book you read a book, it's very humbling. they are out there. i think about 50 -- base still

remember what was destroyed. they remember what was dismantled. when you sit down with a figure like weisman, the lonely crowd, what is stunning is not only how pressing their analysis is, but how they knew the consequences, it's almost eerie that they saw what that disintegration would bring. so, those last great public intellectuals who actually wrote to be read unlike most academics. i'm not sure who they write for, but certainly it is not to be read. people who sought to communicate and understood that lucid, clear language is a form of lucid, clear thought. >> i would like to quote a definition of a liberal that i saw in wisconsin on a bathroom

wall in 1970. a liberal is someone who listens to both sides of the argument and then gets the baby in half. anyway, my question is, i am glad to see the regular use of the a as an anarchist word. i was wondering, has something changed in your thinking? you generally seem uncritical of the authoritarian currents within certainly the religious left and generally the critique other than right authority. >> i'm very critical. >> no, but anybody who had any contact with him, maniacal authoritarian, problems with authoritarian as some of the black church. >> yeah. well, you know, that great theologian wrote that all institutions, including the christian church are inherently demonic, and i'll buy that.

i was the only member of my reporting staff of the new york times to have a seminary. they kept trying to recruit me to cover religion. you can imagine how that went over having left 40 years of the church. i kept telling them, the last person that you want to go to a convention of southern baptists. [laughter] i have so much emotional baggage that i carry into the room. so, i do make a huge division between fealty or loyalty to religious values. religious institutions, which like all institutions serve human power. i think that, you know, the great work in the 1920's, the treason of the intellectuals, talks about in order to maintain not only intellectual independence, but intellectual honesty one must be perpetually alienated from all forms of

institution and power. i differentiate between institutions and movements. movements have, when they are right, specific goals. they are hardly free from the kind of antagonisms, jealousies, backstabbing. and read the biography of king if you want to know what he went through. movements are different in that they don't seek to perpetuate themselves. institutions can never achieve the morality of individuals because under pressure institutions always retreat into mechanisms which insure their own survival. you see that with the press. part of the failure of the dwindling print based media is that as advertising revenues decline and circulation declines, as this monopoly that newsprint once had of connecting sellers with buyers vanishes,

they become even more craven in their service. the new york times is running story after story about lifestyle stories about, you know, the house in the hamptons with a $40,000 kindergarten. not your lifestyle and not mine, but the lifestyle of the person that they want to reach into their advertisers want to reach. it is a good example how dying institutions very swiftly walk away from the very principles that once made them important. the church is certainly no exception. >> john nichols was recently talking about voter turnout. he made the statement that if we came up of more than 55% or 58 percent voter turnout we would have more socially democratic countries. to you believe that if we could get what is essentially the under class or lower class to turn out and vote that our

political institutions could become more of the public will? >> no. look at 2006. the democrats retook control of congress based on the issue of the barack war. what did they do? intended to fund the war and increase troop levels by 30 million -- 30,000. issue after issue after issue, all of the promises made are utterly repealed once they get to washington which is run by corporate lobbyists. i think until we have serious campaign finance reform, and tell corporations are not allowed to gain the system. what the 45,000 lobbyists do in washington aside from right our legislation? agrees the palms. there is a word for it. it's called corruption. the system is so far gone that we cannot depend on the system to reform itself.

it is a kind of tautology. you know, why did you become the head of the banking committee? you want the money from the banking committee. it works. the whole system is so rotten that i think that to place faith in electoral politics is extremely naive. >> i would like to hear your take on the wikileaks and our government's war. >> thank god for wikileaks. [applause] [applause] [applause] he has done as a great service. he has shamed the american press into practicing a little journalism. [applause] i'm all for him.

okay. i guess we can move. okay. go ahead. we'll do the back. >> in the last part of your book you talk about the importance of movement as a mechanism to check democracy. eleven years ago today actually a convergence of social movements in the united states led by used primarily shut down the wto in seattle. [applause] anybody remember that what? out of that came as social for movement in the united states that formed itself after katrina and organize itself for a social form and it atlanta where 10,000 activists, many of which have anarchist tendencies, but certainly were there discussing significant events and how to deal with neoliberalism. they did that again in detroit just recently in july or

something like 11,000 activists registered for all across the country. so i'm kind of hopeful that you would address those types of social movements in your discussions because i -- i knew daniel berrigan. most people are not daniel berrigan. we have to fight within groups and social movements. i know you know that. i just didn't see it addressed in your book. >> i think it is a good point. probably a fair criticism. i don't know that there is one group to fight back. my personal constitution is one that does not make me particularly amenable to grips. i cover the first call for and which i defied all of the restrictions, went out, spent

most of the time with the marine corps, public relations campaign. the whole system was run by the army and the marine corps in their infinite wisdom understood that this was just one more conspiracy by the army against the marine corps. first battalion first marines. i shaved off my hair and had a uniform and never used my press credentials and tell dick cheney who was secretary of defense sent a list of 14 journalists he wanted expelled before the invasion of kuwait of which i was a prominent member. unfortunately for them, they could not find me. the end of the war, rw apple, johnny apple said, look, i just have one question. what is it about you and authority? i don't have any problem with authority as long as they don't try and tell me what to do. [laughter] he said, you don't have. that's what authority does. so, i think that there are many

ways to resist. i think movements are really important, but as you know from coming out of movements they require a lot of emotional minutes. you know, we are all limited in terms of what we can do. my focus is as a writer which ultimately is a solitary form of protest. and so, we need the daniel berrigan, and we need