present of a great deal of heat from organized jewish groups and other voices. we believe he should -- t-shirt got a great deal of support because that the only way israel is going to survive as a jewish and a democratic country if it does achieve a two-state solution on that basis. ..

>> and the dissent is going to be horrifying. how did you come to that conclusion? >> guest: well, first of all, i spent 20 years on the outer reaches of empire as a foreign correspondent. so i've seen an aspect of empire that most people have not. unless you're in the military or the foreign service. and i think all of the red signs, the red warning signs are there. i think also the fact that i've been outside of the united states gave me a kind of perspective. i understood how radically the country had changed in the two decades that i was away. i think for those who had remained -- within the borders of the united states, those changes had been more incremental and perhaps less per

-- perceptible? >> host: what are the signs? >> guest: the signs are we are following the trajectories of all the empires they expand beyond their capacity to sustain themselves. we have run up the largest deficits in human history is the bottom line we can't repay it. we have done so at the cost of our infrastructure, our public education, our working class. we're hollowing the country out from the inside and the physical evidence is all around us. plunging roughly one-third of americans into poverty or near poverty according to the latest statistics, our bridges, our roads are collapsing. libraries are being closed. fire stations are being closed. these are the signs of a nation or let's call it an empire that is reaching a kind of -- a terminal point. and if we don't radically

rechart our course, then the collapse is going to be very frightening and very chaotic. >> host: in your book you wrote and published in 2009, you write, those captive to images cast ballots based on how candidates make them feel. they vote for a slogan, a smile, perceive sincerity and attractivivity along with the personal attractive along with a carefully crafted personal narrative of the candidate. it is the style and story not the content and fact that inform mass -- >> guest: we wills imperial state remains untouched. it doesn't really matter which political party holds office. the policies of george w. bush have been assiduously carried out for the large part by barack obama. and even figures like dick cheney have confirmed this, whether it is the so-called war

on terror, the refusal to restore habeas corpus, the eavesdropping, wiretapping and monitoring the tens of millions of americans, which understand our constitution should be illegal on the fisa wiretapping back which barack obama supported and wall street -- all of these are policies which are bipartisan. and that is because we have undergone, i think, in the last few decades a kind of slow motion coup d'etat, a corporate coup d'etat where the citizen is rendered impotent and it's solely the interests of the corporations which are paramount within the circles of the power elite one could take many examples. obamacare would be a good one. i share the right wing's of obamacare. it was a disastrous bill. it was written by corporate lobbyists. 2,000 pages of it. it's essentially the equivalent of the bank bailout bill for the pharmaceutical and insurance industry, $400 billion in

subsidies. meanwhile, the white house handed out exemptions because these corporations do not want to ensure chronically ill children -- think in moral terms where it's now legally permissible for corporations for profit corporations to hold sick children hostage while their parents franticly bankrupt themselves trying to save their sons or daughters. this is the kind of world the corporate state creates. which is congress has such a low approval rating. i mean, the american public is not fooled by this. >> host: in 2010 death of the liberal class came out. here's a quote. the election of obama was one more triumph of illusion over substance. it was a skillful manipulation and betrayal of the public by a corporate power elite. we mistook style and ethnicity an advertising tactic pioneered

by calvin klein and benetton for progressive change. >> in 2008 the financial collapse, wall street was terrified. they thought they'd been found out. >> they thought they would to have pay a price for their criminal activity, fraudulent activity and malfeasance. and obama functioned as a brand in the same way that people of color or hiv-positive models were used by benetton and calvin klein to liken their brand with a riske lifestyle and brand. we confused a brand with an experience. obama won, advertising ages top annual award marketer of the year because the professionals knew precisely what he had done. he beat nike, zappos. he became a black mascot for wall street. >> host: one of the themes in a

lot of your books is criticism of liberals. why? >> guest: because the liberal class was never meant to function as the political left. the liberal class was meant to function as the political center. and i spent a lot of time in death of the liberal class going back to the radical and populist movements which were very popular and the syndicates and the old cio, eugene debs, a socialist, pulled almost 6% of the vote, 900,000 votes. and socialist publications had wide circulations appealed to region was the fourth most widely read periodical in the country. at the time before the war. and we had about two or three dozen socialist mayors. well, what happened was the war itself. and wilson had run for re-election in 1912 on a slogan

he kept us out of the war. but with the collapse of the eastern front, with czarist russia, the collapse of czarist russia and the bolshevik reservation there was a capacity of germans to send 100 divisions to the western front and the bankers on wall street who had lent tremendous sums of money to the british and the french were terrified that if the british and french lost the war they'd lose their money. so there was heavy pressure on the white house aided by the kaiser's decision to begin to try to create a naval blockade around britain which sunk some ships had no popular support and we created -- and i spent a lot of time in death of the liberal cass the first system of propaganda. the committee for public information popular as the creole commission because it was headed by a figure named george creole. now, the committee for public information and the sort of, you know, dark figure -- the grand

inquisitor type figure becomes walter litman who ends up writing a public opinion in 1922, sort of the blueprint for control, manufacturing consent is his phrase. and it's how you use propaganda effectively to manufacture consent. and you don't actually need the harsher measures of the espionage act and sedition act except for the most recalcitrant forces or radical forces, randolph bourne jane adams debs goes to prison but propaganda becomes in the right hands -- in the hands of the state a much more effective tool to herd people where you want them. and the most important thing about the committee for public information is that it drew on the understanding of crowd psychology or mass psychology pioneered by figures several figures. that people were not moved by fact or reason but manipulated by emotion. and this system of mass

propaganda which created a kind of permanent fear of, of course, the hunt was transferred the moment the war was over to the dreaded red and there's a great writer i like very much dwight mcdonald who said, essentially war, world war i was the rock on which these movements broke. now, this is absolutely vital to understanding what happened to american democracy because these movements never took formal political power. and yet they were the true correctives to -- in terms of opening up our democracy, the liberty party that fought slavery, the suffragists into the labor rights movement. these were movements that pressured the liberal class to respond. we saw perhaps the best example of it during the great depression where you had figures like roosevelt and his vice president henry wallace. and these were liberals who responded to the plight of the underclass and made incremental

and peace meal reform possible. that's what the liberal class is supposed to do. when it works and conrad black when he writes his biography of roosevelt said that roosevelt's greatest achievement was that he saved capitalism and black was right. and what we've seen with the destruction of those radical and populist movements in the name of the red scare in the '50s remember with the mccarthy hearings we saw thousands of university professors, social workers, journalists essentially purged from their positions. i.f. stone, probably our greatest investigative journalist becomes a nonperson. he can't even get a job at the "nation" magazine. and that was disastrous because we lost the pressure on the liberal establishment and then in the name of sort of the battle against anticommunism, we hollowed these liberal institutions out from the inside, so that by the 1970s, let's say, there was no longer any bulwark to protect us from

the corporate state. and we were transferred, i think, correctly in the words of the harvard historian charles mayer from what he calls a production to an empire of construction. we began to borrow to both a lifestyle and a level of consumption as well as an empire we could no longer afford. and that the impediments to that which had been in place were essentially removed and you end up with what i would say are faux liberals. people who speak the language of traditional liberalism, like bill clinton, and yet serve the interests of the corporate state. so it's under a democratic administration that we get some of the most egregious assaults against the working class in the country. nafta, the greatest betrayal of working men and women in this country since the taft-hartley act of 1948. the destruction of welfare. i mean, one of the reasons they keep extending unemployment benefits is because courtesy of bill clinton, once those unemployment bens run out and

you do not have a job you have to attempt to live on about $143 a month courtesy of the welfare. the deregulation of the fcc so you have rupert murdoch and clear channel buying up literally thousands of stations, radio and television, stations consolidating it into one entity, the destruction of the banking system. canada doesn't have a banking crisis. we have about 100 bank closures a year but canada has done because it didn't tear down that firewall and put in place in the 1930s in the united states by the 1933 glass-steagall act. it didn't tear down the firewall between commercial and investment bank. in short it didn't allow gamblers and hedge funds to take over the banking system. this was all done under clinton and obama comes in and essentially codifies the destruction of both domestic and international law put in place by the bush administration so that he doesn't restore basic civil liberties. in fact, he carries out a

further egregious assault against them, the capacity of the executive branch to order the assassination of american citizens. this new military detention act whereby people can be picked up if they are deemed in the nebulous term a terrorist and denied due process and held in military briggs. so i think understanding the structures and the foundations of power and how they work is extremely important and some great political philosopher like sheldon woulden probably our greatest political philosophy in democracy incorporated spells it out and he calls the system we live under inverted totalitarianism by which he means that it's not classical totalitarianism. it doesn't find its impression through a demagogue or a charismatic leader but through the anonymity of the corporate state. that in inverted totalitarianism

where corporate forces purport to pay loyalty to the institution, electoral politics, the ionography and language of american patriotism and have so corrupted the levers of power as to render the citizenry powers. >> host: chris hedges, in your book back to the liberal class, that the creed of impartiality and objectivity that is infected the liberal class teaches ultimately the importance of not offending the status quo. the professionalism demanded in the classroom, in newsprint or in the arts of political discourse is code for moral disengagement? >> guest: of course. because what you end up doing is paying deference to institutions like goldman sachs which are criminal enterprises. you pay deference to power centers that have long ago walked away from responsible citizenship, whether it's coal

companies in appalachia or whether it's chemical plants that are polluting rivers or whether it's wall street. and i think that inability to make those moral judgments has rendered the liberal class not only useless but despised by large segments of american society and i think, frankly, they have every right to be despised because they posit themselves as the moral voice, the conscience of the nation. and yet i think it failed miserably and my book death of the liberal class is really an attack on the pillars of the liberal establishment, the liberal church which i come out of. i'm a seminary graduate. my father was a minister. i grew up in the church. the press and i also come out of it 15 years at the "new york times" over 20 as a journalist, labor unions which, of course, have withered and we're seeing a assault of public sector unions,

culture which has become commercialized junk largely and education itself which has become increasingly geared towards keeping people within their economic strata and giving them the vocational skills to serve the interests of the corporate state. >> host: chris hedges back to your most recent book, the world as it is, first of all, how is that book organized? >> guest: it's organized around -- these are essays. i write a weekly column for bob shear's website and i'm a great admirer of his friend and a great friend. he runs this website truth dig and i write a column. these are some of the columns that i've written and it's built around issues of the middle east. i was the middle east bureau chief for the "new york times." i spent seven years in the middle east. it's a region i know intimately well and most of that time i'm

an arabic speaker in the arab world or in the occupied territories so i have a particular sensitivity to the pain particularly i think of palestinians but also i think for many within the muslim world and i speak out -- i have spoken out quite strongly on their behalf. it's built around empire. these are sort of the themes that i hit within my books but also i tend to hit in my weekly columns. >> host: in the last column in the book, they kill alex, it's called. who is carlos arodondo. >> guest: he's a father of a young marine who was killed in iraq. it's the story the pain of that family and the loss of that son and i'm very sad to report that just a few days ago, alex's brother who was also a veteran committed suicide. >> host: what did the father do

after he found out his son was killed? >> guest: he went to the van where the two marine officers had driven to his house inform him about the death of his son with a can of gasoline and lit it on fire. >> host: in 2005, chris hedges, you wrote the book losing moses on the freeway, the ten commandments in america. who are or were patrick and tyrone? >> guest: patrick and tyrone, when i graduated from college at colgate university, i moved into -- or across the street from a housing project in boston in roxbury, the mission maine and housing project at the time -- it's since been razed and built but at the time it was one of the most dangerous spot in the city. 60% vacancy rate. i ran a small church there as a

seminarian divinity student. it had the highest homicide rate in the city of the boston. patrick and tyrone were two kids. they were heroin addicts. i always say that my two and a half years in roxbury is when i learned to hate liberals because i was commuting into harvard where everybody wanted to, you know, empower people they'd never met. they liked the poor but they didn't like the smell of the poor. and the matching the rhetoric of this classic sort of liberal christianity with the reality on the streets of roxbury was a huge wakeup call for me. and i was at the time a member of the greater boston ymca boxing team. we used to go down to charlestown and fight for $25 a fight on saturday nights. and i physically threw them off my street. they were pushing heroin on kids

on the street. i actually caught them raping a 14-year-old girl and beat them up. and i don't say any of this with any kind of pride. it was a deeply troubling time for me. and i used all of the mechanisms of authority, which in many ways i had moved to roxbury to defy, to make their lives miserable. i went -- they were skipping schools so i went to the truant officers. they had, you know -- they had petty crime -- had committed petty crime. i went to probation officers. i went to the police. they lived for a while in an abandon house and i would take out the fuses because they had, you know, rewired the fuse box. and then eventually the end, they broke into my house and were waiting for me with lead pipes and the reason they were unable to attack me is because another boy that i had been close to and tutoring -- he and one of the guys i lived with had

been tutoring him in math, stanley, found them, saw the back window broke and climbed in and informed me. but it was -- it was really earth-shattering period for me because i realized in some sense -- and i write that in the book that i was the enemy. that when i was fearful and cornered, i reached out to the very levers of control. that these people could never reach out. that i had that ability to make the system work on my behalf because i was white and privileged and educated in a way that i didn't. and it was a really important lesson for me in terms of, you know, white supremacy and white privilege and what it means. i kind of wore it as a mark of cain. >> while evangelicals have a gospel of empowerment liberals speak on behalf of the press groups they never meet,

advocating utopian and unrealistic schemes to bring about peace and universal love. neither group has much interest in testing their ideologies against reality. why did you leave the roxbury and the seminary? >> guest: well, i went into seminary to be an ordained minister and i became increasingly disenchanted with both liberal institutions like harvard divinity school as well as the liberal presbyterian church, which i came out of. that i felt that they paid lip service to the poor as well as lip service to values and, in fact, they were not willing to fight for. so it was a rupture with the institutional church, which was particularly painful because i had been raised within the institutional church, not only was my father a parish minister for all of his life but my mother as well was a seminary graduate, although went on to become a professor. so, you know, it was a really difficult time.

this was an institution that had nurtured me. i think i still speak and think in a way that it taught me. that is sort of ethically and finally perhaps even religiously. these are not values i've necessarily discarded but i had at that point a huge schism with the institution itself. and i'd always written -- i had been editor of my high school paper and all that kind of stuff and had published in the "christian science monitor" when i was in college. and very interested in what was happening in latin america at the time. these were military dictatorships, pinochet in chile, the dirty war in argentina, the death squad in el salvador, this kind of stuff. and my second year in divinity school developed a friendship with a great journalist, robert cox, who had been editor of the

buenes aires magazine and he posted those that disappeared and he himself did i get appeared and he was only saved because he was british citizen later knighted and that was a huge window into what i think journalism that had a kind of moral center could be. bob's great sort of intellectual was orwell. i left divinity school but i would go to finish and i left for latin america and i studied spanish in bolivia and when i left i took on bob's advice the collected letters, essays and journalism, that four-volume set for orwell that i carried that whole year and red and re-read and for anyone who cares about writing and cares about journalism as a kind of secular bible. >> host: in that book, moses, you write about your last night in roxbury throwing a bottle at the church. >> guest: yeah. >> host: where you had served

and then driving off. >> right. >> host: are you still a christian? are you a christian? >> guest: it depends on whose definition. you know, the london review of books reviewed a book i wrote where, you know, i've been battling these new atheists, the late christopher hitchens, dawkins and others and their judgment was i was a nonbeliever. i would call myself a nontraditional believer. but in the end, still a believer. in the core message of the gospel, in the beattitudes, i mean, i find one of my frustrations with some of the right wing evangelicals is this emphasis on law which is an amazing concept. the ten commandments -- they're a product of moses. let's put the biattitudes up in courtrooms. i'm all up for that. i think that was transformation in terms of the theological outlook of the christian gospel

as opposed to what it went before. and it's a theological outlook that i embrace and admire and seek to live by. but in terms of polity, in terms of a particular denomination, whether they would consider me a good christian, i would suspect probably most of them would not. >> host: good afternoon. happy new year and welcome to booktv's "in depth" program. this is our monthly program with one author looking at his or her body of work and this new year's day 2012, pulitzer prize winner chris hedges is our guest for the next two and a half hours. we'll put the numbers up on the screen. and you can email mr. hedges at booktv@c-span.org or send a tweet at booktv is our handle

twitter/booktv and we'll get to those calls in just a minute. mr. hedges has been writing nonfiction now for about 10 years. he began with his national book critic circle award finalist book, war is a force that gives us meaning, which came out in 2002, what every person should know about war 2003, what moses learned on the freeway, and then in 2008, a book came out. it was originally called i don't believe in atheists. it is now called when atheism becomes religion. that's in 2008. collateral damage also in 2008. empire of illusion, a bestseller came in 2009. death of the liberal class was always bestseller, 2010. and his most recent, a compellation of his columns from truth dig came out last year, the world as it is. american fascists and i don't believe in atheists or when

atheism becomes religion, where did those books come from? >> guest: i think from the same place, actually. my frustration -- part of my frustration with the liberal church is that they didn't call out the proponents of the gospel of prosperity. the idea that jesus came to make us wealthy. the idea that jesus was a pacifist would bless the dressing of armed fragmentation bombs all over the middle east is heretical and the liberal church equivocated in the name of dialog, in the name tolerance, by the way, a word martin luther king never used. and my -- i think my anger at what had been done to a religious belief system that i admired, and that i think is worthy of emulation. the infusion of the worst aspects of american consumerism and imperialism into the christian religion.

and the failure on the part of the liberal church to denounce it. and that doesn't mean i'm not against evangelicals. i, in fact, write in the book that the real opposition to the gospel of prosperity and this rapacious right wing that has seethed an element of the christian church will not come from the liberal church but will come out of the evangelical movement, i believe. and so my frustration over what had been done and then the same kind of cheap characterization of christianity that was done by the new atheists. you know, they attack a form of -- or a caricature of religion that i also detest. but they can only attack that caricature. and i've debated both members of the christian right and, of course, christopher hitchens in berkeley and sam harris at ucla, and they can't hear what i'm saying. they can only attack their caricature of who i am, and that's what the christian right does as well.

so if i'm debating the christian right as i have, then i am a proponent of godless secularism. if i am debating a new atheist then i believe in magic and angels and miracles, which i don't. and i think that fundamentalism can come in secular form. it can come through the language of scientific rationalism. the political agenda of figures such as hitchens or harris is really no different from the christian right because they elevate western civilization. so they're attacking the muslim-hords because their barbaric and the christian right they are the forces of satan but it's the same. at the core it's a remember for of self-exaltation in both cases. it's about elevating me above everyone else, morally, spiritually intellectually and abrogating the right to impose what i define as a virtue by force on those who are different. and both the new atheists do it

and the christian right does it. >> host: and when atheism becomes religion came out in 2008. it came out after public debates with sam harris and the late mr. christopher hitchens. mr. harris writes about the atheists they see only one truth their truth. human beings but become like them, think like them and adopt their values which they insist are universal or be banished from civilized society all other values they never investigate or examine are dismissed. when were you with the "new york times"? >> guest: 1990 to 2005. >> host: and why did you leave? >> guest: well, we had a little dispute over something called the iraq war. and i spent a lot of my life not only, of course, in the middle east but in iraq. i understood, like most arabists, that the arguments used to justify the invasion

occupation of iraq were nonreality based. this is not a political discussion. it's the idea that we would be greeted as liberators and doctor wouldn't be an insurgency, that democracy would be implanted in baghdad and emanate outwards across the middle east that remember the oil would pay for the reconstruction. i mean, these were just spun by people who had no idea what they were talking about. and -- but to get up and say that, despite the wealth of experience that i had within the region and within iraq itself, became deeply polarizing and i gave a commencement address that i'd been staying but, you know, it came sort of a head when i gave a commencement address at rockford college where i was booed off the stage, had my microphone cut, people stood up and started shouting things against me. at one point they stood up and sang god bless america. i was actually escorted off the platform before the awarding of diplomas since they didn't want

any fracas by close contact with students. and this got picked up by fox and the sort of trash-talk media, which looped it, you know, hour after hour and the "new york times" responded by giving me a formal written reprimand. now, we were unionized and the process is you give the employee a written reprimand and then the next time they're fired. so i faced a difficult choice which would be i would have to in essence muzzle myself in service of my career but, you know, on a fundamental level i was very close to my dad who was a great minister and activist in the civil rights movement, and the antiright movement, the gay rights movement, his brother was gay. and the thing would do to betray my father. >> host: and mr. hedges writes, i have never sought to be objective. how can you be objective about death squads in el salvador, massacres in iraq or serbian

sniper fire that gunned down unarmed civilians including children in sarajevo? how can you be supporters of profit ears to hide the crimes they commit and the profits they make. that's from his most recent book, the world as it is. and now it's your turn, david in hope sound, florida, you're on with chris hedges, please go ahead. >> caller: thank you. and good afternoon to both of you. you know, you spoke of your admiration for dwight mcdonald. the only thing with which i agree with leon trotsky that everybody has the right to be stupid but comrade mcdonald abuses the privilege. well, i'm glad that you're on so that america can see who writes for the "new york times." but get to the question i was -- i called to ask, you said -- while you were making speeches for one of your books, that if we went to war with iraq, you

would not pay your taxes. where did you get -- >> guest: it was iran, not iraq. i said if we went to iran with iran. i wrote an article for iran in the nation articles, i said i would not pay his taxes. >> host: and what about his point about liberal journalists writing for the "new york times"? >> guest: i don't think the "new york times" at this point can be considered a liberal newspaper. remember, that it was one of the chief propagandists or cheerleaders for iraq. and had to write a mea culpa afterwards. it completely missed the looming financial meltdown because instead of working into poor neighborhoods where families were being given subprime mortgages that bankers and mortgage brokers knew they could never repay and then, of course, these things were fraudulently diced up and sold as assets, they were running down and doing lunch with robert ruben.

the "new york times", you know, in the world of sid did i sanberg had a break with them as he tried to take on real estate developers who were friends with the paper, they stopped things from getting worse, which i think is right. but this is -- it sets very narrow parameters by which it operates. and the closer you get to the centers of power, the less established media institutions like the "new york times" will take those centers on. the further you get from the centers of power, i.e., within the outer reaches of empire, the more latitude you have. which is why i spent my career on the outer regions of washington. >> host: the next call is from california. mike, you're on booktv with c-span2. >> caller: thank you for both of you. i remember mr. hedges -- i remember mr. hedges book war -- [inaudible] >> caller: and writing that book back in that time era.

in california, that was gnarly, dude. mr. hedges form of music has he heard of the science fiction author who wrote the dune series which is basically science fiction telling truthful tales about power? and my third question, what does he think of the new trend in the pharmaceutical community to sort of blame everybody's genetic makeup for, you know, character defects and that sort of corporate nexus. >> host: all right, mike, thank you for all those questions. >> guest: i haven't read the dune series i can't respond to that one. i think what the caller is talking about is something called biological determinism. the idea that morality is determined by biology. i would certainly say that biology has a heavy influence in how we respond as somebody who has been repeatedly in war

zones, i know that when you're afraid, you start thinking with another part of your brain and yet i finally don't believe that biology is a prison. and that i would break with the biological determinenus. i think we do perhaps not as much as we think -- but we do have a capacity for independent action and i have seen people sacrifice even their own safety or lives to protect others. so i find the whole idea of genetic makeup or biology determining how we act and determining morality frightening because i think it absolves us of moral choice. >> host: in empire of illusion, at no period in american history has our democracy been in such peril or the possibility of totalitarianism as real. our way of life is over, our consumption is finished. our children will never have the

standard of living we had. this is the bleak future. this is reality. there is little president obama can do to stop it. it has been decades in the making. it cannot be undone with 1 trillion or 2 trillion in bailout money nor will it be resolved by clinging to the illusions of the past. that's what you wrote in 2010, i believe, 2009 is when empire of illusion came out. and this email we have received from bar low humphreys, i have read your books and continue to read your truth dig columns and understand the points you make when criticizing what is wrong with our government and country. i think they are brilliant. listing problems and shortcomings is useful to a point, however, i would like you to list also those positive things that an individual can do to correct the problems you so clearly outline? >> guest: i think referring to the passage that you just read, if we don't radically

reconfigure our relationship to the consumer culture, to the fossil fuel industry and to the environment, we are finished. the climate science is in. and we cannot continue to live as we have been living. this doesn't mean a diminished life. in fact, one could break from the addiction of rampant consumption is spiritually healthy. that speaking to the rest of the world, not through the language of violence but through a regained kind of humility is something that is salutary. but the fact is, we must radically confront the destruction that human kind is carrying out against the ecosystem if we are to have any kind of sustainable future. so i think the work of bill mckibben and others is extremely important, especially, against this tarsands effort to bring this pipeline down through

canada, which i think hanson calls the endgame or something to that effect. i mean, basically our nasa chief climate scientists saying nothing has happened. i'm a great supporter of the occupy movement because i think that here people are carrying out acts of a civil disobedience that within the system itself there's no way to halt corporate malfeasance and corporate criminality. and i have invested a lot of time in it. and i think that it's a huge glimmer of hope. >> host: lucius sorntino has written the occupy movement has not have a political agenda other than creating a internet mem, the 99% versus the 1%

drawing a attention of the problem. what do you think of the future of occupy wall street insofar as political activism goes? >> guest: i disagree that it doesn't have a message. i think the message is very clear. and the message is the corporate coup has to be reversed. the corporate overlords have to go. i covered the revolutions in east germany, czechoslovakia, and finally romania. and we used to hear the same criticisms leveled against the organizers for instance in east germany, that they -- what are your demands? well, the movement understands that, you know, there are certainly things that i think most people within the occupy movement would support revoking corporate person hood, campaign finance, a serious jobs program especially directed at the young, a moratorium on foreclosures and bank repossessions, all of which i support and all of which i think are important but they're not going to come as long as the

political system is held hostage to corporate interests. along we live in what sheldon calls this system of inverted of totalitarianism. and so they keep it focused on the fundamental problem. and, of course, the power criticizes the movement for not making specific demands, for not funneling this energy back into a dead system. and i think the most telling moment for me came when there was a coordinated effort by 18 cities to shut down occupy encampments including oakland, l.a., new york. and for me, that was an indication of how tone deaf and out of touch those empower are. the idea that they could physically eradicate these movements and yet not address the injustices and suffering that had given birth to these movements. if they functioned as a liberal

class should function, let's go back to roosevelt and wallace. if they were serious about attempting to save corporate capitalism, they would have immediately announced a $1 trillion jobs program targeted at people under the age of 25, a moratorium on bank repossessions and foreclosures and forgiving $1 trillion in student debt. i mean, these would have been the kind of steps that might have been able to begin to ameliorate the anger, the legitimate anger, that has gripped many, many americans and yet they think they can use a militarized police forces and i've been in the middle of it. it's like being in a star wars movie, they're storm troopers, command helicopters up in the sky. these are peaceful protests, directing traffic, you know, instances of very brutal behavior, pepper spraying, beating. i was arrested outside goldman

sachs. people were being slammed into the cement. to think that they can counter this by force, i think, is deeply misguided shows out of touch those in power are. >> host: next call for chris hedges comes from seattle, bob, thanks for holding. you're on booktv. >> caller: yeah, hi, mr. hedges. i really appreciate your work. say, you know, when the former soviet union collapsed the message that we received here was that capitalism was the victor. there was no alternative to capitalism, unbridled capitalism, and, of course, during the last great depression of the roosevelt administration, communism was an active threat to the elites here. so possibly out of fear the new deal was enacted. since there was a vacuum created by the collapse of the former soviet union, the elite -- well,

the people here had no alternative. so the elites, of course, no longer have any fear of the people because, of course, capitalism is the only answer. it's the victor. but let me ask you a question. your current crop of political people in this country, who would you pick as someone that could rebalance the equation here? >> host: okay, bob, we got the point. thank you, mr. hedges? >> guest: first of all, let me talk about capitalism. i'm not -- i'm not a marxist. i'm not against a capitalism. there's different forms capitalism. there's the penny capitalism in a small farmtown in upstate new york. the regional capitalism of the lotion hardware owner, small business owner who lived in the community, paid taxes, sat on the schooled board and then there's corporate capitalism. that's what i'm against.

it's super national. it doesn't care about the interests not only of the community but the nation state itself. it will tear down as it has trade barriers and drive production overseas. that's what nafta did and, of course, now we're seeing large scale factory closures over the border in mexico as these corporations move to the cut-rate embrace of china's totalitariani collateralism or bangladesh in sweat shops where people are paid 22 cents an hour or even prison labor because of globalism, because of corporate capitalism because of the destruction of nation national boundaries, workers in this country and everywhere else are told they have to be competitive on a global scale which means being competitive with people who work in sweat shops or prison labor in china. and it's corporate capitalism that i find frightening. in terms of political figures, i don't believe that given the

configurations of our political system, we are going to mount a serious challenge to it through the electoral process. i think the challenge will come through the occupy movements. and i don't think these movements are going away. you know, when you cover the revolutions in eastern europe, you became very cognizant of the timetables were impossible to predict. overthrowing the communist regime in poland took 10 years. in east germany it took 10 weeks and in czechoslovakia, it took 10 days. no one really knows. these movements have a kind of life of their own, how they spring, you know, i was in leipzig on the afternoon of november 9th, 1989, with the leaders of the east german opposition. and they said, well, maybe within a year, there will be free passage back and forth across the berlin wall, within a matter of hours, the berlin wall at least as an impediment to human traffic no longer existed and that was a huge lesson for me.

that even those most closely associated with these movements don't know where they're going. and oftentimes don't even know what their potential is. so i put my faith in movements. i think carl popper in the open society and its enemies was right. the question is not how do you get good people to rule. that's the wrong question. most people, popper writes, who are attracted to power are at best mediocre but how do you make those in power frightened of you and that comes through movements and the destruction of those movements, labor movements, all sorts of social movements including commist unions which were the first sort of integrated organizations in the country why great public intellectuals and artists like paul robeson joined them because it was the only place a blackman with any dignity could often go. these have all been decimated and that has been catastrophic to our democracy. i think we have to put our faith

back into movements which, of course, is, of course, occupy wall street is. it's a movement. >> host: in the chapter i luce of wisdom, empire of illusions mr. hedges writes our elites, the one in congress, and the ones in and business schools do not have the capacity to fix our financial mess. indeed, they will make it worse. they have no concept thanks to the education they have received of how to replace a failed system with a new one. they are petty, timid and uncreative bureaucrats superbly trained to carry out systems management. they only see piecemeal solution to carry out the structure their entire structure is profits, numbers and personal advancement. they lack a moral and intellectual core. they are as able to deny gravely ill people medical coverage to increase company profits as they are to use taxpayer dollars to peddle costly weapons systems to

blood-soaked dictatorships. the human consequences never figure into their balance sheets. the democratic system they believe is a secondary product of the free market, which they slavishly serve. next call for chris hedges comes from westport, court, lois, you're on booktv good afternoon. >> caller: it's so nice to see someone like mr. hedges on c-span. i feel strongly that the liberal media and the government work together and by doing so, they both gain advantage. one instance that gave me this idea was a few months ago, there was an article by bill keller in the "new york times" magazine with pictures of osama bin laden and obama on the bottom of that article. and since i assume that the media is corrupt and the

government is corrupt, wouldn't it be good to expose this unspoken alliance? couldn't that help our country? thanks a lot. >> guest: well, you put me in the awkward position of defending the "new york times." i don't think it's quite that black and white. i don't think the "new york times" is corrupt. i think that the "new york times" is certainly an institution whose unofficial credo and i say as someone who worked within the institution for a long time is do not significantly alienate those on whom we depend for money and access. that doesn't mean that they won't alienate them at times. i think the sin of the traditional media, like the "new york times," is more the liable mission. now, certainly they served as propagandists rather naive and

unwitting propagandists for the bush white house in the leadup to the iraq regard repeating all sorts of claims and putting things on the front page which we know is untrue with very little vetle and journalistic integrity but i think there are many people within the newspaper who care about news, who care about journalism who care about truth and the best reporters care finally about truth and we talked early about objectivity and impartiality. when one feels for the suffering of those in sarajevo and i was in sarajevo during the war, that doesn't give them an out in terms of speaking the truth and writing the truth. even about systems they may -- or people they may empathize with. i covered after the first gulf war i was in northern iraq in the kurdish-held territories and i wrote very harsh articles

about armed disputes of the kurdish factions and arm smuggles to the point where some of this stuff was even read by the propaganda broadcasts directed at the kurdish territories out of baghdad. and yet, you know, as orwell said, if you look at journalism as a product, that we as journalists have to sell, what it is our credibility. that a lie may work in a short term and a lie is a lie. but in the long term it destroys you. so it's not incompatible to feel. and also to speak the truth. and i think that the problem with the "new york times" is not so much what it covers but what it often doesn't cover. the fact as i mentioned earlier that in the buildup to the subprime mortgage crisis they weren't out there in poor neighborhoods. that they gravitate towards the centers of power. and leave the struggles and the suffering and the injustices that are visited especially on the weak and the vulnerable

unheard. i think the media has done a horrific job in outlining what tens of millions of americans are enduring. the 47 million americans who live in poverty now spend about 35% of their income just on food to eat. and yet they're largely invisible especially on the commercial media. now, we are seeing the rise of a nonreality-based media, that's fox news, cable news channels that are not rooted and verifiable fact and this frightens me very much. no matter the limitations of the "new york times," and they have them and i'm critical of them in death of the verifiable fact and with the rise of so-called media outlets that discard fact where opinion becomes interchangeable with fact, then you enter a kind of totalitarian state, because people are allowed to believe whatever they want to believe or

whatever they are made to believe. and i see the kinds of attacks that are made by the right wing against the "new york times" is not so much ideological. i don't think the "new york times" at this point can be classified as a liberal newspaper. but i think it's much more pernicious. that what they're attacking is reality-based media and essentially trying to destroy it before they drop that sort of iron curtain of propaganda around all of us. >> host: mr. hedges, from your first book, which was a finalist for the national book critic circle award for nonfiction, war is a force that gives us meaning, you write the enduring attraction of war is this, even with its destruction and carnage, it can give us what we long for in life. it can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living. you go on to write the communal march against a enemy gives a generates a warm unfamiliar bond with our neighbors, our

community, our nation, wiping out unsettling, undercurrents of alienation and dislocation, war, in times of malaise and desperation, is a poat the time distraction. you say despite all this, i am not a pacifist, there are times when the force wielded by one immoral faction must be countered by a faction that while never moral is perhaps less immoral. >> guest: i say that with a great deal of pain because i know what violence does and the poison that it is. and i said in sarajevo when it was being hit with 2,000 serbian shells a day, constant sniper fire, four to five dead a day, two dozen wounded a day, including 2,000 children being killed in that city, 45 foreign correspondents were killed there, dozens were wounded, and we understood, those of us that were in that besieged city completely surrounded, that if the serbs broke through the trenches and literally they were defended sort of by world war i style trenches around the city,

a third of the city would probably be massacred and the rest would be driven into displacement and refugee camps and we've seen it in the areas. we knew what the pattern was. we knew what the modus operandi was and one understands when you are faced with the very real possibility of not only your own annihilation but the annihilation of your family, your children, your community, how you pick up a weapon. now, unfortunately, once you do that, you cross a line. you are not free from the poison of violence. and initially, those who organized the defenses were the gangsters. they came from the criminal class and when they weren't shooting at serbs across the barricades, they were raiding the apartments of ethnic serbs in the city, looting them and sometimes executing them. and, you know, one of the reasons that i am such a strong and vocal supporter of the

occupy movement is because it is nonviolent. and the corporate corporations know only one word is more. and they will push and push and push until there is a reaction and i want that reaction not to disend into violence because i know what violence does. that violence even when it is employed in a just cause,s is nichi said, you are your monsters against their monsters and it always becomes tragic. i don't believe in just war. i think sometimes human beings are pushed to such an extent that violence is inevitable. but the consequences for those who employ violence on both sides is catastrophic. >> host: next call for chris hedges comes from lexington, kentucky, joe, thanks for holdings. you're on booktv on c-span2. >> caller: hey, c-span, happy new year to you guys. >> host: you too. >> caller: happy new year, chris

hedges. i like your stuff. >> guest: thank you. >> caller: i just wanted your opinion on the -- just your personal opinion on who actually controls our world. who controls the world, chris. tell us. i know you know. .. its price increase by 100%. i saw the human consequences of

that, the children were malnourished and even in some cases died of starvation because they couldn't afford to eat. you know, if the wars in both iraq and afghanistan had very little popular support and yet for a handful of corporations, lockheed martin, northrop grumman and halliburton, they were immensely profitable, as lord is for certain tiny segment of the power elite, and always has been. war is a racket. i think that we, unfortunately, have created a world where power has become centralized in the hands of a select group of corporations that are more powerful than the state itself. that it is within the american political system in possible to vote against the interest of goldman sachs. and unless we force that power, we are doomed because corporations, unfettered capitalism, a great book about

this in 1944 called the great transformation. turn everything into a commodity. in that sense karl marx was right. unfettered capitalism is a revolutionary force. human beings become commodities, the natural world becomes a commodity that you exploit until exhaustion or collapse and that's why the environmental crisis is in a minimally entwined within the economic rise because we don't find a way to break the power of those corporations, they will trash and continue to trash the ecosystem to the point at which life or huge segments of the human species will be unsustainable. >> host: chris hedges, david e-mailed in to you from new york city. you see today's economic and political climate as somewhat resembling that which existed in germany during the 1930s? >> guest: noam chomsky, and an great admirer of chomsky, has made that comparison. i think in some ways yes, it's

always difficult to make those historical analogies because one has to be very cognizant of the major differences, including the massive war reparations, the defeat of world war i, the fact that germany had no real tradition of illiberal democracy under its monarchy, but i think there are some frightening similarities. the most important being a kind of passionate the american working class. the disenfranchisement of working men and women, you know, used to be in this country going back to the '50s, it into the '60s, that you could work in an auto plant or a steel mill and make a salary that would actually support them and allow you to buy a small house and send your kids to college, and you have medical benefits and a pension plan, all of that has vanished. that we are thrust are working

class into the service sector economy, low-wage economy, households, not only do people tend to work within the working class more than one job, but almost everybody announces working in order to keep afloat. and that has been a devastating change. and i think one of the rise, or the rise of the christian right as i argued in "american fascists" is directly linked to this despair, because these economic dislocations bring with the destruction of communities, destruction of families, substance abuse, domestic abuse, all the problems that, when communities break down. and people retreat from this reality-based world, which frankly almost destroys them come almost has destroyed them into non-reality-based police system that all totalitarian systems, a world of magic, historical and a world where god intervenes on your behalf. and i think the only way to bring these people back into a

reality-based world is to be in franchise them with an economy. and i think this is something that we saw, that was despair and all the right -- great riders and totalitarianism, fritz stern, have used to stare at the starting point that drives people into these very frightening movement. i think that despair is a prevalent within american society and very dangerous. >> host: in his 2005 book, "losing moses on the freeway" the 10 commands in america, mr. hedges writes we watch him passively as the wealthy and elite, the huge corporations rob us, really a bummer, defraud consumers, taxpayers and create an exclusive american oligarchy that uses wealth and political power. we watch passively because we believe we can enter the club. it is greed that keeps us on. susie in l.a., good afternoon.

>> caller: chris, i want to thank you order of thoughts and your books, they're very deep and they really open many of our minds. very important concepts. and you've really tried, at least from my observation, to present a lot of deep thought and objective reality. i was troubled, however, in the area when you talk about the middle east because you talk about your history in terms of knowing arabic and the people there, but i was wondering also if you had an equal knowledge of hebrew and the people on that side? >> guest: well, i lived in jerusalem for two years. i don't speak hebrew. that was a conscious decision because when i worked in the middle east, to be working in syria or baghdad and to speak arabic and have any hebrew words creep into your arabic could immediately land you in prison, although i have to say that eventually in both iraq and

iran, i was thrown in prison anyway, or jailed for brief periods of time. i have a great admiration and affection for israel. and i think that the parameters of the debate about the middle east and about the israeli-palestinian conflict in israel are far broader than they are in the united states. my opinions are not particularly controversial. in jerusalem among most of my friends who sort of jan and for themselves another beer. but they are in the united states. the newspaper, the israeli newspaper, i think has probably the best coverage of the palestinians of any paper in the country. and all of these articles are written by israeli jews. danny rubinstein, gideon levy, these are really great, great,

great journalist. and to israel credit. so, i think that the frustration for many of us old middle east end is that we saw possibilities in oslo and in the relationship between yitzhak rabin and king hussein, and i knew king hussein and covered rabin. and with the assassination of rabin, we watched that hope essentially vanished. and israel, as the united states has, essentially become captive to a really rapacious right wing. for instance, the israeli foreign minister who is openly called for the ethnic cleansing of israeli arabs and palestinians, this was unthinkable when i first got to jerusalem in 1980. for me it's really a debate about the health of the middle east and the health of the

middle east it's a. i don't that responding to historical injustice through the use of force and occupation is in a long-term productive for the state of israel itself. yet at the same time of course i'm adamantly opposed, and there are those within the arab world who call for the destruction of the state of visual. no states, including our own, i spent a lot of time in heinrich for new book, founded on historical injustices, but i think we're to work out as whipping wanted to come and accommodation were by which both people can live in dignity. >> chris hedges, what is pine ridge and when will this new book about? >> guest: i've been working for two years with the comic artist joe socko on a book called days of destruction from the face of evil, that would be out in june. and we have gone to the

sacrifice zones, the poorest pockets of the united states, canada new jersey, per capita is a poor city in the country. also the most dangerous. pine ridge south dakota is a lakota reservation, where the average life expectancy for males is 48. the lowest in the western hemisphere outside of haiti. we have worked a lot in the coalfields of southern west virginia. i mean, the destruction of the appalachian mountains is truly frightening. unicom instead of sort of borrowing for cold they're just blocking them out into the moonscape, destroying the water and destroy the air. none of this is going to come back. it's cannibalism. and then finally in tomato fields and agricultural fields in florida with primary undocumented but not exclusively undocumented workers. the last chapter, when we began the book we did give it the

title days of destruction coming days of result but the result was conjecture. and towards the end of it suddenly flowered this movement which became a kind of expression of what we felt would be a response that we did know what the response is going to look like but we felt there would be a response, a popular response. and it's a look at, unicom what happens when you kneel before the marketplace. when human lives, the course of human life and human communities are determined by the dictates of the marketplace, and there are no impediments to corporate control because the sacrifice zones are now expanding outwards across the country. roughly one-third of this country already lives in pretty extreme poverty, or certainly struggles. that will only grow if the corporate state is not stopped, because their goal is to reconfigure, we are already very far down the road come into the kind of oligarchic neo-feudalism why have it replace just money

entitled elite which controls the economy, systems of communication, education, as well as political power. a sort of the managerial class, and then two-thirds of the country are left scrambling to survive. >> host: you are watching the tv on c-span2, in depth" program. chris hedges, author, journalist, pulitzer prize winner is our guest this month. sonora california, good afternoon. >> caller: hi, mr. hedges. you mentioned earlier about going into i think the other car, i think he said iraq and we talked about iran. and i'm kind of wondering, what you think it would take for us to get into iran out and then what do you think would be the advantages and the consequences if we don't? >> guest: well, first of all, and i covered iran, i spent a lot of time there including some

time in iranian jail cells. i was deported at one point in handcuffs. my best guess is that the arena regime is trying to build a nuclear weapon. but having coming out of the middle east, spent as long as i have in the middle east, that doesn't worry me. what worries me is the transference of that technology to nonstate groups. iran has an address, and states that have an address our i think very unlikely to use those weapons. i think that iran wants it as a defensive measure. i think they understand that if iraq, for instance, had had a nuclear weapon in a way that north korea has nuclear weapons, that probably the americans would not have invaded. i'm not pretending to speak for the iranian regime, but this is my assessment. i think pakistan is probably in fact in terms of the proliferation of nuclear

technology more dangerous than iran. and, frankly, pakistan is more unstable. pakistan frightens me more than iran does. so okay, will they eventually get a weapon? i suspect they will. i think attacking them would be deeply counterproductive. first of all, there are roughly 1000 sites that have been picked up, many of these are in highly populated areas so the loss of civilian life would be catastrophic. remember, that iraq is primarily shia, and i think that an attack on iran would be interpreted throughout the muslim world as an attack on shi'ism if so. 2 million shiites in saudi arabia, bahrain is primarily shia. shia minorities in countries like pakistan itself. and i think then you would have a kind of conflict, though

regional. it is my understanding that the iranians, if attacked, even if americans are not directly involved, it is primary and israeli attack, although i'm not sure that's possible because i think they have to fly over iraqi airspace, they will obliterate any american bases, including the green zone. in iraq with of course heavy loss of american life. so, i don't want to defend the iranian regime. yet at the same time, i think that attacking iran would really be a disaster. >> host: chris hedges, how did you earned the honors of being handcuffs and deported from iran? and if people want to read one of your books and hear that story, which book should be read? >> guest: i don't know if i put that story in a book. it's a meditation on war.

starting out it's a chronological but it's a meditation on what war does to individuals and societies, and i draw from many other conflicts that a cover roughly a half-dozen from surrey able and kosovo to the first gulf war were i was actually captured and taken prisoner by the iraqi republican guard in basra. and you know, i've never go back and reread. is such a painful book to write, so i can't say whether the arena store is in there. but in short it's just a silly for correspondents were. we can go three hours of those if you want. but what happened was i was supposed to interview the president, rossen didn't shot, and i went to get a visa, rafsanjani. espoo to get a visa and at the embassy, recommend what was, bahrain or summer, they get a multiple entry visa by mistake.

the iranian official took wideout and wideout the multiple entry and wrote like when visitors i got to the airport very late at night, and these border guards, you know, sort of customs police accuse me of forging visa. so they locked me in a room at night, and i did precisely what you are not supposed to do, which was throw a fit. and actually broke chairs against the wall. it was just juvenile behavior, but i did. and, of course, they got even angrier. the next flight out was that five or six anymore, turkish airlines flight, and so these big guards came in and handcuffed me and took my passport and escorted me on to the turkish airlines flight. and by this time i had been 24 hours without sleep so my eyes are sort of right and i was unshaven. i had to go onto the turkish airlines flight and go. so of course all the passengers thought i was selling drugs or

something in iran. and they gave my passport to the captain of the plane and said that i was not allowed to have my and i can passport back until i had reached turkish airspace. >> host: did he get it back to? >> guest: he did. that was not going time i was in a jail cell anorectic i was also picked up in a cast into i didn't have permission to be, and they have militias called the cg. so they captured me and they decide to put me on trial in the morning with went away for a big crowd, a fun event. they put me in a jail cell there, and i always carry a book with inside the idiot, i read 170 pages of the idiot in eyed iranian jail cell. my translator was out there frantically and sort of charmingly trying to get us out. and at about two in the morning and arena police officer came, opened my cell door, said he would escort us to the limits of the province, and and when we

got to the limits of the province can we get out of the carpet i tried to get the money actually, and he said no, no. he said i hate this urging. he said get in your car and drive all the way to tehran and don't stop. so i was spared the people stronger which i'm sure i would have been found guilty. >> host: richard, laurel maryland good afternoon. you're on tv on c-span2. >> caller: thank you. i have a question in my mind ever since 9/11. there never has really been, then address rather sparsely in the media, but pat buchanan, on the clock for show, and going to paraphrase what he said, we need to realize with the occupation of religious sites, or sacred areas of the middle east by the united states and united states support of israel, these are

reasons why 9/11 occurred perhaps. and until we address those issues, we will continue down the same path. >> host: mr. hedges? >> guest: the caller raises an important and delicate point. what were the attacks of 9/11? huge explosions and death above a city skyline, as a peculiar form of communication. it was straight out of hollywood. where did these attackers learned this tactic? from us. when robert mcnamara began bombing north vietnam, bombing attacks that would leave hundreds of thousands of civilians dead, he said it was come and ago, a means of communication with hanoi. and what happened on 9/11 was that those means of

communication were brought home to us. 9/11 for me was one of the great tragedies, historical tragedies, of our country. because the only way to fight terrorism, and terrorism has been with us since it was written about, is to isolate terrorists and terrorist groups within their own societies. and you do that by garnering empathy of those people. in those countries where terrorist groups operate. and i covered al qaeda for the new york times based in paris after 9/11, and we had garnered the empathy, not only of the world but the muslim world. muslims were appalled at what had been done in the name of their religion. you had senior islamic clerics in cairo announcing 9/11 as a

crime against humanity, which it was. and then going on to denounce osama bin laden as a fraud. somebody with no theological training or theological religious legitimacy and, therefore, no right to issue $5. and if we have the courage -- fought off. if we had built on that empathy we would be far safer and more secure today than we are. instead, we responded just as these terrorist groups want us to respond. and that was to begin by dropping iron fragmentation bombs all over the middle east. the search for al qaeda is not a war. you can have a war on terror. care is a tactic. it should've been handled by the intelligence committee in the same way that blacks of timber was handled by the mossad, and even then innocent people died. they killed up waiter at one point in sweden. but certain not by conventional military forces.

so we played right into the hands of the very forces that we've been trying to defeat, 9/11 and al qaeda were used as excuses to curtail democracy, civil liberties at home. we openly began to employ torture here that only places like guantánamo, but our class -- black sites around the globe as well as a dissident, bradley many but there's been a frightening emotion of everything we value and hold dear and that we consider sacred. and you know, the people who perpetrated these crimes of 9/11 probably couldn't be happier. >> host: steve, uniontown, pennsylvania, please go ahead with your question or comment for chris hedges. >> caller: high, peter. it was only a few months ago i called in and i got through and when michael moore was there, and i suggested getting chris hedges on. wolof, here here he is. i am so powerful. >> host: i will give you the

credit. >> caller: thanks. question about corporate personhood. they hate jews, corporations exploit exploit the 14th amendment, like get more power. and i was wondering if it's possible, and this is a facetiousness, the 13th amendment outlaw slavery, right? so if these legal persons are owned by private people or shareholders, wouldn't it be possible to free them, free the corporations from this ownership through the 13th amendment, in some, somehow to disempower them? and i would like to see cornel west on some time, thanks. panties that would be great, if we had a judicial system that didn't serve the interests of the corporate state. and citizens united is a clear example as to the supreme court serves. it's not us, it's been. and i think that power of the

occupy move is that it realizes that so many segments of our government, and institutions including much of the media are just wholly owned subsidiaries of corporations, that we have to confront that power directly through civil disobedience which includes the willingness to be arrested. that is the only hope we have left. i think of affecting any kind of fundamental and real change. appealing to the systems of power including the judiciary i think at this point is not going to work. >> host: this is booktv's "in depth" program. our monthly dutch mother off program where we focus on one author and his or her body of work. this month it is chris hedges. for the last caller, cornell west has done "in depth." you can watch that at booktv.org in its entirety. just use the search function in the upper left and corporate the produce of this program is tiny davis. fargo, north dakota, you're on with chris hedges. >> caller: mr. hedges,

speculative question. what might mr. blank fine, the recent chairman of goldman sachs have meant when he respond to the question about goldman sachs market activities by saying i think i or we were doing gods work. i or we were doing god's work. drama thank you. thank you self-delusion would probably be the first word that would come to my mind. for me, figures like blank fine and others should be put on trial for the activities that they have carried out. and i think the failure of a functioning judiciary to prosecute what are clear acts of fraudulent activity and manipulation of markets, the ability of these corporations to not only, as essentially borrow money without interest while the rest of us are shackled in a

kind of debt painted. this is just indefensible in a functioning democracy. you know, it's an odd situation to be dissident, or a critic, and call for the rule of law. the political spectrum traditionally, those who call for the rule of law and the restoration of the rule of law are considered conservatives. and yet that's essentially people such as myself are doing. i think it's the radicals who take the power because that's essentially what we're asking for. we are asking for the application of law to be applied against all people impartially, and cherry-pick and it's not being done. >> host: philippe e-mails into you, mr. hedges, interested in hearing your opinions concerning wikileaks, antagonism with a new times, julian assange and bradley many. >> guest: "the new york times," i wouldn't call it missed a antagonism because of

course they printed much of the wikileaks documents. what you had was they took the information. there was a vote on the editorial page even within these pages the kind of characters fascination of julian assange. i think wikileaks was, you know, whoever leaked it, whether bradley many early to we don't know, but whoever leaked it exposed clearly war crimes including the killing of reuters journalists in cold blood and many civilians through that video where helicopters are attacking civilian fans. and i think that there is a moral imperative for those who see war crimes. this is what post-nuremberg laws are about, to report them, even when they are in, they contravene security requirements. this is what happened with the pentagon papers but i think we go back to the pentagon papers

for an nlg, although i think the pentagon papers were probably far more destructive in terms of the release of the information. a lot of the wikileaks, there's so much of it i can hardly claim to read all that but i bet a lot of it, is just gossip, frankly. cables of foreign leaders we don't buy, sort of embarrassing things that ambassadors said. we had hillary clinton calling on diplomats to spy on people at the u.n., this kind of stuff. but within it was some significant information that i think should be made public, should have been made public so we could begin to understand what has been happening in the conflict in iraq and in afghanistan post that we have an hour and have left with chris hedges. he is the author of nine nonfiction books beginning in 2002, "war is a force that gives us meaning." 2003, "what every person should know about war." "losing moses on the freeway"

came out in 2005. "american fascists" in 2006. i six. "i don't believe in atheists," which is now in its reprint called when atheism becomes religious. that came out in 2008. "collateral damage" in 2008 as well. "empire of illusion," 2009. "the death of the liberal class" in 2010. and his most recent book, the world as it is came out in 2011. well, every month we have the author on can we always ask them about what they're reading from some of their favorite books, influences, as we continue our program we want to show you that now.

>> host: we are back with our "in depth" guest, chris hedges. mr. hedges, you are currently reading the cross and the lynching tree. what is that? >> guest: one of the most important books of theology of the last few decades.

he is an amazing theologian. this book, which he spent 10 years writing, is a look at the utter failure on the part of white theologians and the white charge to respond to the lynching of black men and women, the reign of terror and jim crow of the south. and he argues, correctly, that the failure on the part of the white church to understand the crucifixion meant that it couldn't see the power of the crucifixion, and fundamentally the message of the gospel itself. and it is really a stunning, stunning work. it's just filled with intellectual and emotional depth charges that, when you are a believer or not, you should pick up and read.

>> host: a tweet, can cruise talk about the issues, a black man might face same saying the same dangerous antiwhite audience? >> guest: well, look at what's happened to cornell west when he is gotten up and criticized barack obama. he has been attacked roundly, including within the black mainstream media. to get up and speak an uncomfortable truth as cohen has done throughout his life, is to a lot of people turn away from it, to turn their backs on you. i spent over two decades of my life living among people who were not white. and i speak spanish as well as arabic and french.

and it has been a long process as a white privileged mail to begin to understand the reality of white supremacy, both as it manifests itself within the heart of the empire and on the outer reaches of empire. there are all sorts of assumptions that i can make that people who live in margin committees, people of color cannot make. it's important i think for those of us who come out of positions of privilege, and we spoke about the two and half years i lived in roxbury, to put ourselves in the environments, because we are forced to confront our own linus. and when you develop close relationship with people who suffer, whether palestinian or whether they're african-american, inner-city, when they become people you love and care about, then you see how

entire systems conspire against them. it becomes painful for you, but i think more importantly you begin to see all the things that up until then you're unable to see. and that blindness, there'll always be a kind of gulf between you and those who are oppressed. there will always be an inability to understand. you get as close as you can come to work as hard as you can, and then you except your own deficiencies. and i think that very, very few people, one of the books you put up there was the story is really remarkable historian, wrote a trilogy of books. i teach in a prison, i'm about to start a couple of weeks and in teaching those those three

books. it's the aftermath of the civil war, reconstruction, jim crow. then he wrote a beautiful thin essay called when is free free? but a very few -- howard zinn had come but i think very few people managed to cross those lines but it really takes a lot of time, a lot of effort, a lot of work and a lot of self reflection and self-criticism. >> host: (202) 737-0001 for those of you in the east and time zones. to mountain and pacific time zones. booktv@c-span.org is her e-mail address. at booktv is our twitter handle. angel in farmington california you're on with chris hedges. >> caller: thank you for taking my call. can you hear me? >> host: we are listing. please go ahead. >> caller: good show, mr. hedges did you and others like you, -- [inaudible] can you be so kind?

who is constitutional attorney is disheartening that -- [inaudible] can you lend an opinion please? it is very, very disheartening. thank you. >> guest: well, i think one of the tragedies of the obama administration is that you have a chief executive who is clearly intelligent. he is trained as a constitutional lawyer, and yet he's done so little to not only defend our constitutional rights, but reversed the assaults against constitutional rights that were put into place by the previous administration. obama clearly understands where the centers of power line. he knows that in order to remain in office he must serve the centers of power, but sadly it's opportunism. it's careerism.

he has decided to betray the majority of the citizenry in order to accrue for himself. on many levels, most of us are probably clueless. i don't think obama is clueless. and in some ways that makes an even more guilty. >> host: mr. hedges writes in "the death of the liberal class," election obama was more one more trial of illusion of substance but it was a skillful manipulation and betrayal of the public by corporate power elite. we mistook style and ethnicity, and advertising tactic pioneered by calvin klein for progressive politics in genuine change. john is in chicago. john, you're on booktv. >> caller: mr. hedges, so nice to listen to you. i do feel that you disparage the democracy in the united states. i've been working on a southside

chicago for about 15 years and i think the promise that has been made, in my area, is substantial and been done in a democracy. i feel that obama has all sorts of problems. yet at the same time i think he is a leader, of significance. and i'm sorry that you seem to be against democracy being practiced in the united states. >> guest: well, i wish democracy was practice, and should become in the united states. and i certainly feel that i, as a writer any citizen, am fighting as hard as i can to reinstate democratic prerogatives, and democratic rights that have been taken from us. not simply by obama. this up in something that has

been going on for a while. but i think we have to restore power to the citizenry by wresting it away from corporations began to do believe obama has been complicitous in the diminishing of our rights and of our political power. >> host: next call comes from anchorage, alaska. you're on booktv with chris hedges. it helps if i push the button. sorry about that. >> callertransit am ion now? post that you are. >> caller: good afternoon. i want to go back to your book, data destruction, and ask you, do make any mention of the chinese in africa? i'm interested in your thoughts on this issue. >> guest: days of destruction, days of revolt has not come out yet but it is coming out in june and it is focused solely on the united states. so, we don't write anything

about africa. joe socko and i are provided what's happening internally within the united states. >> host: mr. hedges, we are getting a lot of e-mails, tweets on this topic, so i want to have you address this. this is from "empire of illusion," 2009. universities have trained hundreds of thousands of graduates for jobs that soon will not exist. they have trained people to maintain a structure that cannot be maintained. the elite know how only to feed the beast until it dies. once it is dead they will be helpless. don't expect them to save us. they don't know how. >> guest: there you go. that's the occupied movement. we are the people, we have been waiting for. i think the power of the occupied movement is that they understand that political truth. that the elites are not going to save us. the elites are through by the most sophisticated system of

mass propaganda in human history, and they are causally taking our polls, focus group to find out what we think so they can parrot it back to us. that's what the public relations industry does and does very well. to manipulate our emotions. i think that those who have gravitated toward the occupy movement understand that the elites essentially served interests that are not our interests. and that it is incumbent upon those of us took it out and carry out acts of civil disobedience if we're going to protect those interests. >> host: next call for chris hedges comes from new milford connecticut. george, you are on booktv. >> caller: hi, mr. hedges. i would like to ask you about, you mentioned smedley butler a little bit ago. could you talk of a more butler and his role in the 1930s, plot to seize the white house? and also if you could speculate

on why we know so little about that plot and about general butler himself? thank you. >> guest: butter, and i think served 33 years and for much of something in the u.s. marine corps, after the war began to reflect, i think we had a current figure, a colonel in the military, also he engage in that kind of reflection after he left service, begin to look at why interventions were carried out on whose behalf they were carried out, and butler writes that he commanded units that invaded, you know, the dominican republic to make it sure for -- make a safer sugar interests. cuba to make it safer banking interests. and wrote this pamphlet, which is a very long, calls wars abroad to which he lays out that it's also interesting as you point out, it's a kind of a historical footnote in a position to roosevelt and the new deal there were industrial us, powerful industrialists.

henry ford and others, who wanted to carry out a coup d'état. i'm not 100% on henry ford thing, so i would go have to go back and check the history books. trying to recruit butler to carry out a coup, and he exposed them. >> host: chris hedges is our guest. gretchen from arlington, virginia, e-mails into you. i would like to thank you for helping me with your writing to navigate these last several bleak years. i met you during desert storm shield. you were interviewing my marine corps husband, a battalion commander come in particular i thought you were clear eyed and unsentimental in seeing that the people in uniform were honorable, smart and savvy and often far more skeptical of the coming conflicts than their civilian masters. the beat goes on. iraq, afghanistan and so much more. how can our leaders continue to be so out of touch? gretchen, arlington, virginia,. >> guest: i'm a huge fan of

her husband, carl, who commanded a marine corps battalion that i spent a lot of time in the first battalion first greens, and that went into kuwait, when the first battalions that went into kuwait. you know, when the military is good, it's really good. when they are bad they are really bad. and the marine corps is sort of the extreme example of that. when they come in like profiling, they were marked men, and he, if i'm ever after the war, i remember to moment. colonels are sort of isolate figures in the time so we talked a lot. i'm at one time he asked me what because i never sort of like to interview above anybody the level of lance cooper. the hire of you in the food chain the more sort of spin you get. so i tend to, like ernie back,

stay with the low rates. but he asked me what do women think of it. and i said, to be honest, they don't we like officers but i'll say colonel fallon cares about his men and the kind of choked up at the end of the war, he had seven wounded, one of the producers of the anatolian, you know, i haven't spent weeks and weeks with you. i think you're a really great commander. and a great leader. and he said, i got all my men home. and you know, on that level he is a vietnam vet. in some ways he go to people like that and there's no one who hates more work than they do. the colonels. they want to take all of that home. and because of my relationship with the marine corps, i spoke to about 250 colonels, lieutenant colonels on the eve of the iraq war, and got up and gave his hour-long talk. still thought it was not a good idea.

and all those people come because they were putting their men on the line, because of them, there was a disagreement. they understood this. they did their duty. but they knew it was insane. and you saw a few military leaders at fairly high level walk out of this program. so the idea that somehow the military is a monolith, or that you don't have figures like colonel fallon, and having spent time in military, they have tremendous respect. i think we've done a terrible disservice to them. the idea somehow it's a volunteer force and, therefore, they ask for what they get. we have plunged thousands of families in this country into perpetual grief and loss. and for what? we don't have a right to do that but we don't have the right to do that to these men and women.

as i said, i'm not a pacifist, but you only go to war as a last resort. as a final imperative because the costs are so grave. and so, that comment from gretchen means a lot to me because i'm a great admirer of her husband. >> host: why did you choose to make his speech at rockford college in 2003? why did you choose that college? why did you choose then? did you know what the reaction was going to be? >> guest: no, i didn't. i have been saying similar kinds of things for some time. my book, had come out that fall. inevitably i would be asked about the impending invasion of iraq. now if there was a good careers i would've dodged the question, but i felt i was morally not permissible. the only thing i knew about rockford college, when my heroes jane addams had graduate from

the. i did note that subsequent the trustee board have posthumously tried to revoke her diploma. so i thought oh, well, they are just all pacifist socialist like jane adams. no wonder they invited me. and got their and ran right into the bustle. so no, i wasn't at all prepared for what i had to do. was a uncomfortable. you can watch it on youtube, to be booed by the crowd. edu-con at one point of people actually climb up on a podium and try to push me away, and then be attacked over and over, you know, hour after hour. and yet someone said to me, when my friend said maybe you should have given the average follow your dream speech, or maybe should've tried to moderate you. i got about five or six letter some students there who think me for what i was doing. i was really only talking to them. everyone else, i don't care about. i think i did the right thing. i paid a price for the recovery

like to lose their job, and i lost my pension, medical benefits and no. i paid a price for that, of course, but, you know, war is not and abstraction to be. without being melodramatic, i've lost friends in these conflicts, and i will go back there and i want to at least go back from these zones of privilege and comfort that live in and be able to say that i did everything in my power, however futile it was, against these conflicts. and i hope that coming in, maybe i will have earned the right to ask for the forgiveness. >> host: who is units? >> guest: my wife does make you dedicate several of your books to her. you take it to write it in latin, the dedication. why is that? >> guest: because i think it's beautiful. latin poetry. and it's a kind of, except for a

supposed flatness, kind of a code the twin manner. she is almost a co-author. i have to admit, she's an actor but she's a great writer, and everything i write still filters through her hands. the our pages in there were basically should vote, several pages. >> host: minnesota, sam, go ahead with your question or comment for chris edwards -- chris hedges. >> caller: thank you for taking the call. i'm going to come do you have any opinion about what corporate america has to the native american and our culture, no, the fact that poverty-stricken reservations, and an inside and his multimillion dollar casinos that they are running sometimes, some of the states as well. i was wondering what your opinion on that was? >> guest: it's the idea that camera, and this is just outside of reservations, but i think within the country at large that some of him is a form of development.

you see, of course, a big push now to build casinos in philadelphia. i live in princeton, so i'm following that debate. it's about an hour away. and this has worked for a few indian tribes. there's an indian tribe in connecticut that, of course, is working very well. but like there's one casino that nobody goes into on high and ridge pine ridge is a desolate, bleak area. so if you look at the totality of indian casinos, they have actually not been particularly lucrative. you have a few sort of sterling examples where people actually been able or tried to been able to make money. but heinrich is the port, second poorest county in the united states, at any one time 60% of people in pine ridge are living without electricity and running water. it is really, i mean, you almost have a hard time believing you're in america, frankly. >> host: chris hedges, mark peterson e-mails into you, i'm a

great admirer of which are trying to do. as a historical liberal, i find myself perplexed the passion i feel for the ron paul candidacy. >> guest: ron paul for me is sort of a funny guy. i mean, he says a lot of good stuff, but for me libertarianism is sort of a pre- and dutch of ideology. the idea, that government should be so diminished, well, i mean, the problem is that government is in munich in the face of corporations like exxon mobil. citibank and goldman sachs and bank of america. and we need to find leverage by which these monopolies can be broke and up and the power of these corporations can be true. and so, i think ron paul is pretty good in terms of empire, in terms of fiscal responsibility. in terms of constitutional rights. but the core of his message

which is essentially to get government is one that i think is going to do anything to diminish the power. >> host: this is from peter, another e-mail. your claims about the way the u.s. is run seems plausible, but hasn't it always been run alongside similar lines since 1776? haven't the least always run societies? >> guest: yes. everything that one could argue that the battle for american democracy has been one long battle against those elite. that, you know, the native americans, african-americans, women, men without property, none of these people were invited to the constitutional conventions. it became a battle to open up american society, and these radical movements do that. so, none of these radical movements achieve political power, but they were potent

forces that the power had to reckon with. i think the destruction of those movements has disempowered as. one could argue that in april, 1968, the most powerful political figure in the unit states was martin luther king. johnson was scared to death of him. the year before, team had denounced the vietnam war. it is because when king went to memphis, 50,000 people went within. i think we have to rebuild those moments. ..

>> you know, all of these people are figures that at no didn't me those concessions, and they never achieved formal positions of par, -- power, nor, frankly, did they strive to achieve normal positions of power. >> host: this tweet from nyc118 for you, mr. hedges, what do you think of oprah's role in the culture and religious pursuit of personal wealth? >> guest: negative. oprah peddles this fantasy that we can have everything we want if we just focus on happiness and grasp that we are truly exceptional and dig deep enough within ourselves, and this is just magical thinking. it's not just peddled by oprah, i don't want to pick on oprah. the christian right does it, hollywood does it, corporate,

corporatism does it. tony robbins, self-help gurus do it. and it's just a myth. and, frankly, it's a myth that's used to beat up on the poor. so there are no jobs in camden. they used to make campbells soup in cam men, and even that's gone. the schools are dysfunctional, gigantic dropout rate, the streets are unsafe. and to somehow tell a poor black child who who's not getting an adequate education, not being raised in an environment that provides safety and security and nurturing and upon that being tossed out into a city where there is no work, that they have to dig deep enough within themselves is really a way for us to turn our backs on the vulnerable and the poor and to say you are responsible. this is what the cultural message is, you are responsible for your fate. and that's just the way the corporate state wants it. as it sheds job after job after job. as larger and larger segments of american society are reduced to

the subsistence level without any kind of job security, without any kind of adequate health insurance, that it's sort of their fault because they haven't managed to tap into their inner strength. um, this is not only delusional, but in the end, i think, callous to the weak and to the poor and to the working class. >> host: does campbells have any presence left in camden? >> guest: yes. they have a kind of international office, but it's a complete ligated community. you take the train to cam camden, you go through the gate, and you don't go out again. they don't make soup there anymore. >> host: glenn, good afternoon, you're on booktv on c-span2. >> caller: thank you very much. mr. hedges, some people now say the holocaust is a lie. at the time, at least, some people had the excuse of saying they didn't know because there was no television and internet

and stuff like that. now with what's going on in syria, you can see the torture and the atrocities and all that kind of thing, and the peaceful protesters, they're carrying signs that say, i guess it comes primarily from the holocaust, all it takes, um, is for good people to do nothing and evil people will triumph or whatever exactly it is. um, i don't know exactly what you should do, but when you see, um, some of this atrocious stuff coming out of syria in particular and some of these other arab nations going on now, don't you think we should be -- i mean, i'm not talking as some, um, trigger-happy armchair warrior or anything. i was against the iraq war -- >> host: what's your question? >> caller: don't you think there's something more we could be doing, um, in situations like syria now?

>> guest: well, i supported the intervention in bosnia. i was much more skeptical about the intervention in libya. we became embroiled in a six-month-long civil war in libya, hundreds of people, thousands of people perhaps died, we don't know the actual count. once you stop using cruise missiles and sophisticated weaponry like that, you inevitably have civilian casualties. i think intervention in syria would probably not be quick or easy. um, and in terms of loss of life as we saw in libya may, in fact, drive up the body count. the problem with syria as is the problem with libya, is that they are sort of the chow chess cas of the middle east. if you remember the revolutions in eastern europe, the polish

government eventually built a kind of coalition with solidarity, east germany and the communist regime went down as it did in sec slovakia -- czechoslovakia relatively peacefully. there was violence, but not as we saw in chow chess ca where thousands of people were murdered in the city where the rebellion began. and i think in libya and syria we've seen the same kind of recals trance on the part of the regimes, they're quite happy to kill their own, and it's tough to know how to respond. but i think libya's an example of, perhaps, how we don't want to respond in syria, you know? what we have to do is put as much pressure as we can on the outside, but i think becoming embroiled in a is -- in a syrian civil war is not astute. >> host: about 50 minutes left with this month's "in depth"

guest, christopher hedges. for what did you win the pulitzer? >> guest: i was part of a team of reporters that won a pulitzer prize for our coverage of al-qaeda. i was based in paris, and i covered al-qaeda in europe -- not in germany, i don't speak german. >> host: and he is the author of nine nonfiction books, his most recent book is "the world as it is," a compilation of his columns from truth dig, and his newest book will be coming out in the june. will that also be published by the nation? >> guest: yes, with joe sacco who's done some amazing stuff. >> host: queens, new york, you're on. happy new year. >> caller: happy new year. thank you for what you do, sir. i appreciate what you said about men of privilege fighting for social justice. one such man, mr. john brown, who back in 1859 died along with his six sons for the cause of freedom and against slavery.

fast forward a couple of generations, and argentinean doctor went to cuba to fight, also, for freedom. and i think in today's world no matter where you are, what color your skin is, we can all see truth, and we can all see injustice. and here in new york there's a stop and frisk policy that plain bely violates the -- plainly violates the fourth amendment, however, it's only brought against poor black and latino men. and i think whatever your color is, as human beings, as americans we have to stand up for the constitution or for the spirit of the constitution, the declaration of independence that says god gives rights to men, that men cannot take away. and, again, thank you for what you do, and we would really appreciate you to help voice the stop and frisk in new york city against the violation of the fourth amendment. >> guest: well, i've already told carl dicks and cornel west the next time they go up and get arrested at a stop and frisk event in harlem, i'll join them.

i've got a court date on january 20th for my arrest in front of goldman sachs, so i want to ration my court dates, but after i go to court, i'll get arrested again. >> host: was that as part of the occupy? >> guest: yes. cornell and i did a people's hearing of goldman sachs in zucotti park where it was broadcast live by a station in new york where we had people who had lost their homes, lost their jobs come and testify and then several hundred of us marched to the headquarters of goldman sachs and then a group of us sat down and linked arms and were arrested in front of goldman sachs. >> host: i don't know if you read your erstwhile newspaper this morning or not or saw the picture of zucotti park. >> guest: i did. >> host: any reaction to the, to that picture and that story about the park? it was barren and now they're checking bags? >> guest: yeah, right. well, i mean, they -- the foolishness of these corporate forces, they think they can physically push people out of these spaces, and the problems

will go away. the problems aren't going to go away. the movement's not going to go away. and how will it manifest itself in the future, i don't know. none of us know. but because they refuse to address the core issues that have driven people into public spaces around this country, hundreds of public spaces around this country, because their only response is, essentially, draconian forms of police control then they're in for a really long fight, and i hope they lose. >> host: vince williard e-mails in, mr. hedges, i have read empire of illusion three times, probably one of the most important books i have ever read, dispels quite a few myths of what it means to be a liberal. my question to you is this: do you agree with berman in the assessment that america is a failed experiment and that it will be necessary for the u.s. to collapse as a capitalist system for us to move on? >> guest: i would agree with

morris in the sense that we are in the process of collapse. the looting of the u.s. treasury. i mean, the figures that are coming out that "the new york times" reported, the trillions of dollars that have gone into wall street which they've used for these obscene bonuses and swelling corporate profits, this is our money. and it should have gone to those people who are bearing the price and the cost of their malfeasance, and it's not. the -- unless there is a radical redirection, then i think that collapse is, you know, i'm too good a reporter to predict the future, but collapse is a possibility. i mean, let's look at the banking crisis in europe and the eurozone. hypothetically. we see a lot of -- they're bleeding money out of greece, out of italy because they don't trust the system.

well, countries like italy and greece are in a terrible bind because if they go back to their own currency, then their banking system will go under. and in order to go back to their own currency, they'd have to shut down the banks for a week or something, and you can be damn sure that by the time depositors showed up at the bank windows, what they had in euros would never be given in drachma or lira. and the political ramifications could be immense. we have a very disturbing, bubbling right wing within countries throughout europe, and i'm not saying that's going to happen. but it's certainly not beyond the realm of possibility. the problem with a financial meltdown of 2008 is that we never reformed the system. they're right back doing the same kind of speculative activity that they were engaged

in before. and, look, in the 17th century speculation was a crime, and speculators -- it was a capital offense. and now they run the economy, and we have no way of controlling them. so it doesn't look good because we've not addressed the core problem. and that is somehow that money is real, that we can destroy our manufacturing base and can make money by betting. well, in 2008 $17 trillion -- mostly in the form of small holdings by people who had 401(k) and pension plans and money they'd saved for college vanished, evaporated, and $40 trillion worldwide. and if speculators retain control of the global economy, then it's pretty certain it's going to happen again. >> host: in your book "empire of illusion, 2009," you have a chapter where you visited las

vegas for a month, or for a while. what chapter is that? >> guest: on the porn industry. and -- >> host: illusion of love. >> guest: yeah. and i get very angry with the liberal class and the left over their refusal to condemn pornography. why is it morally indefensible to physically abuse a woman in a sweat shop in the philippines or in southern china, but somehow it's an issue of free speech when it's done by the sex industry in the united states? when i started interviewing these women who came out of the porn industry having suffered from post traumatic stress disorder, they instantly after a minute or two said all these people have ptsd. and i wrote, i wrote it graphically and brutally, and i think intended to engender a

kind of disgust. i never write in the chapter we should or shouldn't ban porn. i just said if you want to defend porn, then you'd better understand what it is you're defending. these women -- and they're just thrown up, you know, they last one or two years on the sets and then, you know, if they continue within the industry, they just, in essence, become call girls shipped around the country and hotel rooms, and it's just awful. but they're popping handfuls of painkillers before they go on the sets. this violence, which sells -- and porn, it's not the soft-lit porn of the playboy channel anymore. it's so-called gonzo porn. the violence is not simulated, it's real. these women are black and blue by the time they finish. they are constantly going in for surgery for anal and vaginal tears because they're penetrated by two, three dozen men in the course of an afternoon, knocked around, abused, insulted verbally, assaulted physically. and i was as somebody who

doesn't watch porn, i was pretty blown away. it was really sick. and i end the chapter, you know, because the only emotion that women on porn sets are allowed to express is a craving desire to be degraded physically and morally, physically and verbally and morally. and i end the chapter two ways, talking about these 7,500 dollar silicone dolls which are anatomically correct and people take home and buy victoria's secret clothing for because, in essence, porn is really, finally, about necrophilia. and if you look closely at the images out of abu ghraib, they all look like stills from a porn film. the porn miuation of the culture and especially in the young, most of the viewers of porn on the internet are between the ages of about 13 and 18. it's a completely pornfied culture, and i think in this, boy, i stand with the right wing on this. i think it is a symptom of deep

moral degeneracy and an utter failure on the part of the so-called liberal class to stand up for the values it purports to espouse. it won't take a stand against it. >> host: we are talking with chris hedges on "in depth." he was just discussing his book from 2009, "empire of illusion." our next call comes from john in las vegas. hi, john. >> caller: happy new year. a wonderful way to start the new year, listening to chris hedges, a very reasoned man. and, mr. hedges, i would imagine your life experience especially as personified by your appearance at rockwell must lead you to the conclusion that no matter how bright we are, man is an emotional creature and just uses his mind to justify his prejudices. and i think the most perfect example of that is your former friend, christopher hitchens. i mean, for christopher hitchens

to look at henry kissinger and his involvement in the assassination and murder of a democratically-elected socialist in chile and conclude that he is a war criminal and then to look at the more egregious behavior of george bush and his lying getting us into iraq and the murder of thousands of iraqis and the murder of saddam hussein and conclude he is not a war criminal and the fact that christopher hitchens would totally belittle anyone who remotely questioned 9/11 leads me to the conclusion that even the sharpest mind can be dulled by privilege. now, we've lost that very sharp mind. perhaps christopher hitchens had already lost his mind before he died, and i'd just appreciate your comments. >> guest: well, as somebody who has lived in disintegrating societies, i would certainly agree that human beings are not particularly rational. freud got this in civilization

and its discontents. written on the eve of world war ii. where he talked about two forces, both within the individual and within the society. one being that force of eros, of love, of nurturing, of protection of life, and the forces of the death instinct, that instinct to annihilate all living things including, finally, ourselves. and that these two forces are in eternal conflict both within the individual and within societies at large and that whole societies can be gripped by forces of death. i think the serbian society was at the end of the war. they giddily sort of embraced their own self-destruction and death. i think if you look at the end of nazi germany, there's a wonderful movie, "downfall," that i think captures it, this german film on hitler's bunker, it's brilliant. having lived in those kinds of environments, it captures that

intoxication with death and longing for it. so, yeah, i don't think human beings are rational. my struggles with hitchens were that he, you know, when he was on the left or the right, there was never any nuance for him. he had been a former trotskyite and became a confidant of wolfowitz. unfortunately, you know, that is a vision of reality that the closer you get to the ground just doesn't hold up. >> host: how would you describe your relationship with mr. hitchens over the years? friends? adversaries? >> guest: deeply antagonistic. >> host: deeply? >> guest: yeah. >> host: in your book "wars of force that gives us meaning," you write that war finds its meaning in if death. the cause is built on the backs

of victims portrayed always as innocent, the dead become the standard-bearers of the cause, and all causes feed off a steady supply of corpses. mr. hedges, what's the worst place you've ever been? or the worst situation you've ever been in? >> guest: there have been moments, of course, where i thought i would be killed, so, i mean, but those were moments. in terms of a place, it would be share sarajevo was there was nowhere to hide. you sort of have to come out of the military to understand what it was like because you have to know the weapons systems that were being used against us. 155 howitzers, katusha rockets fired in bursts of 12 or 24 and can take down an apartment build anything a matter of seconds, killing everyone inside. this was being lobbed on top of us 24 hours a day.

and coupled with the sniper fire. so that was, it was like being in a, you know, in a kind of -- it was like being a rat in a cage. i mean, you couldn't get out, and you were constantly being zapped, and it had the same kind of psychological effect where it just ground you down. it was really -- your nerves break. i mean, combat units know this. i mean, you can't keep -- i think it's, they did studies in the military that after 30 or 60 days of continuous combat, 98% of the unit will have become, um, psychologically impaired, and the 2% that aren't were psychologically impaired to begin with. in other words, you know, you stay that long in a situation like that, you inevitably go insane which is why combat units are rotated out of conflict. courage is never a constant. despite all these john wayne movies. and that was true of sarajevo,

it just ground you down. el salvador, you would go out to conflicted areas, but you came back to the relative safety of the capital. in sarajevo there was no save place to be. >> host: in your book "i don't believe in atheists," also known as when atheism becomes religion, the belief that we can achieve human perfection, that we can advance morally is itself an evil. it provides a cover for criminality and abuse, a justification for murder. it sanctifies war, murder and torture for an unattainable absolute. >> guest: yeah. the idea that time is linear. that's peculiar to both the hebrew and the christian bible. which was adopted by the enlightenment, the idea that, you know, we're getting better and better, that human progress is inevitable. it's a myth. you know, the greeks, most asian

cultures see time as cyclical, that you have both within the individual and within civilizations a time of birth and maturation and decay and decrepe tuesday and death. and i think history bears that out. i don't think there's anything in human history or human nature to justify the idea that we are advancing morally as a species. that doesn't mean we don't make moral advances, we do, but we also make moral reverses. and i think what we've done is equate technological progress with moral progress, and that's very dangerous. that technology is an instrument that serves the ambitions of humankind, but i don't think human nature changes very much. and this being lulled into this false belief that science or technology will, for instance, save us from global warming is, essentially, the modern equivalent to the ancient religious sects that people adopted as easter island was decimated and the environment,

essentially, destroyed to a point where it no longer could sustain a human population. and i think we have to wake up, that there is nothing inevitable about human progress, that it's far more important that we face and confront reality and deal with it. and if we don't, if we keep this naive believe, in essence, technology sort of serves what in medieval times would have been god, and unless we shake ourselves free from that, we're in very big trouble. >> host: in your book "the world as it is," the creed of objectivity killed the news, and you quote molly i've advance in here, and i just want to read just a little bit of that. this is molly eye venns writing. i've heard many an editor say, well, we're being attacked by both sides, so we just be right stems from the curious notion that if you get a quote from both sides, preferably in an official position, you've done the job. in the first place, most stories

aren't two-sided, they're 17-sided at least. in the second place, it's of no help to either the reader or the truth to quote one side saying cat and the other side saying dog while the truth is there's an elephant crashing around there in the bushes. >> guest: well, she got it. and that's why programs like the daily show or colbert are so popular because they poke fun at this absurdity of balance. where you get one lying pundit from the right and one lying pundit from the so-called left, and some cynical, overpaid news celebrity sitting in the middle who knows that both are lying through their teeth and refuse to say anything. and i think that that is a kind of betrayal of the viewer or the reader, that it's our job as journalists insofar as we can to tell the reader or the viewer the truth. however unpleasant that truth may be.

and however it may cost us in terms of popularity. and i think journalists are, you know, if you go into that profession and you're looking for popularity, you're in the wrong profession. we should have a kind of constant antagonism to power, whoever's in power. i don't really care where it comes from. you know, figures like i.f. stone or orwell are sort of my heros because of that, and these were not impartial people, these were not people who didn't have strong opinions, but they understood that the truth was sacred. and orwell, like stone, they were quite willing to anger their leftist support. and remember homage to catalonia, orwell's great memoir of the civil war, included a chapter where he was an anarchist, he was fighting with the plum, and the the communists gunned them all down, and orwell published the book while it was still going on. it only sold 600 copies during his lifetime, but orwell said, you know, the power of the

short-term lie is just not something i'm going to engage in. and in the long term, you know, the truth has to be told even if it ostensibly hits -- now, orwell was shot through the neck and wounded, almost killed, fighting against the fascists. and yet he wouldn't, he wouldn't lie on behalf of the republicans. and that really is the gold standard. so these people were not in the way of sort of commercial journalism defined in any way as objective or impartial, but they told the truth. >> host: chris hedges is our guest this month on "in depth." we have about a half an hour left. frieda in albany, thanks for holding, you're on the air. >> caller: thank you. mr. hedges, i'd like to know what your thoughts are on slavery, blacks in america and reparations for the oppressed. the oppressed black population. i think something similar to the marshall plan would be in order.

>> guest: well, the civil rights movement was a legal victory, but it was not a victory in the sense that martin luther king and malcolm x defined it because they knew that if there was no economic justice, there could never be racial justice. and i think part of the power of the occupy movement is that it picks up where the civil rights movement left off. that economic justice is the only way to finally overcome racial injustice. that for the bottom two-thirds of americans, the civil rights movement pulled about a third of the african-american community into the middle class, but remember, if you look at the statistics, now that the bottom is falling out on the middle class, it's african-american families that are suffering disproportionately even within the middle class itself. and i think one could argue that for the bottom two-thirds of african-americans in this country, things are worse than they were when king marched in

memphis or birmingham or zell -- selma. and so we as white americans have a special responsibility because of the long night of slavery, the destruction of families, the destruction of religion, the destruction of language, the destruction of culture, even their names were taken from them in the same way that germany has a kind of eternal responsibility for what was done to jews during the holocaust. and we have walked out on that responsibility. the best schools in this country should be in the cities like camden. the most intricate systems of familial and especially childhood support and medical care should be in the poorest aspects of this country because these are the people who have had the least chance to go anywhere. and one understands very quickly when you spend times in places like rocks bury or camden, all of the institutions that work to keep the poor poor. rents in cities like camden are

staggeringly high. any kind of ability to sustain yourself within the informal economy which often revolves either around -- and families are split. you're either working for the police in the corrections system, or often times you're on the street trying to make money selling drugs. the prison industrial complex and what it has done to african-americans as the great poet has written, you know, the cell block has replaced the auction block. and that's part of the reason i teach in a prison, because these people have had no chance. and they know that when they get out and they apply for a job even if they can find a job to apply for, they have to check that box saying they were a felon. they're stigmatized. they can't vote, they can't get loans, their credit rating is destroyed. and, you know, the last time i taught there i taught american history. what i did is bring in copies of howard zen's people's history of

the united states which, fortunately, nobody in the prison vetted and taught it. zen is particularly conscious of what african-americans have suffered throughout american history. but, i mean, there were days i just walked out into the parking lot of the prison and just wept because there were so many great minds, so many great kids, they tend to be young, who wanted, thirst for knowledge, who wanted a life. and i understood, but more importantly, they understood all of the walls that had been built around to deny them that. so i think when you use the word "reparations," i think, yes. um, not in terms of maybe cash checks, but in terms of building social programs. lyndon johnson made a step towards this, towards bringing these people back into the embrace of the country as a whole. >> host: chris hedges is the author of nine nonfiction books. in 2002, wars of force that gives us meaning, what every person should know about war in '03. losing moses on the freeway came

out in 2005. american fascists, 2006. when atheism becomes religion, 2008. that's when collateral damage came out as well. "empire of illusion," 2009, the best-selling death of the liberal class in 2010. his most recent, "the world as it is," came out in 2011. and coming out in june 2012 is -- >> guest: days of destruction, days of revolt that i'm doing with joe sacco. fifty pages will be illustrations and comic panels. >> host: and if people want to read your writing or read about you, what's the best web site? >> guest: truth dig. i don't have a personal web site, and i don't tweet. >> host: why? >> guest: oh, i'd rather read books. i think that there are too many distractions offered, these kind of virtual hallucinations. in order to think, you need quiet and solitude. you can't have anything in your ear, and you can't have somebody tweeting you, you know, that

they're going downtown to go eat -- >> host: do you think at some point, at some point you will need to develop your own web site? >> guest: no. i don't -- that's all about the culture of self-promotion, i think, and, um, it's something that i really want to guard against. i mean, i don't have a television. i read, i try and read every night for, you know, two, three, four hours. >> host: vermont, you're on with chris hedges. go ahead, jack. >> caller: hey, chris, your amazing to -- you're amazing to listen to. you and richard wolf, between the two of you, i take up a lot of my time listening. i'm going to -- i'm going toward the environment. i've got a list here of a million things, and i only have a short time. so we're running out of time. you know it, i know it, the people that know it really know it. we've been trying to tell 'em since the '70s, the environmental scientists first brought out the issue of it was

the green originally. the progress is pretty grim when you look at what we just did down in durbin, it's almost criminal, the response of the united states in terms of not taking any leadership and putting this thing off. when you have a -- scientists around the world saying we only have a short period of time here to get going on this, and we're going to tip to the other side and not be able to bring it back, somehow and how are we going to do it? we need to take this corporate. and i bet you're a marine -- were you a marine? >> guest: no, i spent time with the marines. they did make me boot which if you're a marine, you'll know what i'm talking about. [laughter] >> caller: out of the '60s. >> host: jack, quickly, if you could wrap this up. >> caller: and i'm looking at crazy horse here on the wall,

that monument they've -- yeah, okay. i'm wrapping it up. >> host: all right, jack, tell you what. a lot of comments there on the table, and we'll get an answer from mr. hedges or a comment from him as well. >> guest: well, when we talk about the giddy intoxication with the death instinct, i think the, the self-denial or self-delusion around global warming is terrifying because you have two responses equally self-delusional. one is that it doesn't exist, you had 50 members of congress sign this thing when they came in that global warming doesn't exist, or you have the self-illusion that somehow we can adapt. we'll just plant palm trees in chicago kind of thing. and the fact is, if we don't break the back of the fossil fuel industry -- and carbon emissions have gone up this past year -- we're finished, we're cooked. even if we stopped all carbon emissions, temperatures would

still rise to about 350 parts per million being what throughout human history has sustained the human species. it is, it is, you know, the book "empire of illusion," the subtext is the end of literacy and the triumph of spectacle. what are our emotional and intellectual energies diverted to what? the kardashians -- i can hardly keep up with it, anthony weiner's boxer shorts, you know? every week there's something else. and it's, go back and read the end of ancient rome. cicero, you know, in vain against the absurdities of a nero and of the coliseum and the investment of emotional and intellectual life into the arena, and look at the entertainment industry, the way sports, professional sports, college sports, celebrity culture has, essentially, they

flicker like the images on the wall of plato's cave. and we're unable to see that the world's on fire. and so i think the caller is right, it really is that dire, it really is that serious. and yet the culture of celebrity and the culture of spectacle and the culture of illusion is so powerful and is disseminated in so many ways that we're anesthetized. >> host: a couple of related e-mails here. this is from paul, and we have another one here from shepherd, and they're both talking about their grandchildren. what is the most effective action an older, dispensable war vet can do to help his grandkids have a better life, that's paul. and then shepherd asks, i want to give advice to my 13-year-old granddaughter. what country should she be thinking about emigrating to to live a happier, more moral and productive life.

canada? costa rica? singapore? norway? other? >> guest: well, canada just walked away from the kyoto accords because of the -- [inaudible] so i'm not sure canada anymore. i don't want to go anywhere. i want to save this country. my family's been here for a long time, 1633. there's a lot that i love and care about, and i think it's worth fighting for. so get up and fight. and that's going to mean civil disobedience, and it's going to mean the discomfort of being arrested. and i think, for me, the really great moral voices, wendell berry, cornel west and others, have made this decision that, you know, wendell, i think wendell's about 77, beautiful poet, writer, oral philosopher. and he went and occupied over the destruction of his beloved ap la cha mountains in kentucky, the governor's office. and as he went in there, he

said, you know, going to jail's more time than i really care to donate to the u.s. government, but he did it. and i've been arrested here in washington and new york and probably be arrested again, and it's, it's not fun. bill mckibbon was here, arrested in front of the white house, bill's another one, another person i respect a lot. and went to jail for 52 hours. and i think that's what we have to do because i'm, because of my background and because of what i've seen and experienced, i'm deeply committed to nonviolence, and i think that in order to make a better world, we have to put our bodies on the line peacefully, respectfully through acts of civil disobedience to challenge what i think in theological terms could be called these corporate systems of death. >> host: when you're on the front line like that or with somebody like cornel west, well known, are you treated with a deference, or are you treated differently at all?

>> guest: yes. >> host: do people know who you are? >> guest: yes. i am treated with deference, and when i was arrested in front of goldman sachs, everyone was cuffed in front of the cameras except i was not cuffed. and the police inspector was running the operation told the patrolman not to cuff me. i did get cuffed, but not in front of the cameras. i got escorted to a paddy wagon, then i got cuffed. [laughter] that's public relations. i don't know if that's deference or astute public relations. [laughter] >> host: maryland, please, go ahead. >> caller: thank you very much. mr. hedges, i think your work is wonderful. you talk about the media and how they don't like to intimidate the power centers, but there's one story out this foreign policy that is not covered and i think is really terrible. the united states supports a whole lot of dictators and thugs, some of which come back to haunt the u.s. and i would think that there

ought to be a national conversation, is it in the national interests to be supporting all these dictators? >> guest: well, i think you saw that in the middle east, the way the american government clung to hosni mubarak until the last minute deeply angered an egyptian population that was looking for genuine democratic reform. who's interests, you know, are they promoting? they're not promoting the interests of their people, and they're certainly not promoting the interests of genuine chem accuracy. and -- democracy. and yet they are reliable allies in the quote-unquote war on terror. and against the rise of islamic fundamentalism or islamic radicalism. but, you know, the war on terror has just become the new mantra in the way that we supported all sorts of very heinous dictators in the war on communism, including figures like pinochet

in chile. you know, it becomes a kind of simplistic way to deal with the world and, i think, ultimately in ways that are to our detriment. because standing up for human rights, i mean, one of the things about being in latin america during the carter administration was that carter actually tried to take human rights seriously and alienated the hundred that in around yen -- junta in argentina, bolivia, simosa himself turned away weapons ships, so the governments of latin america were screaming sort of bloody murder and announcing carter -- denouncing carter as a trader, and yet when you walk t through -- the only time in my life, really, except maybe in eastern europe or in iran which is on the street probably the most pro-american country in the world, that i go through the street, and people lauded me because i was an american.

and i think that determining foreign policy based on commercial or corporate interests is not only morally wrong, but misguided. and winning the hearts and minds of the populace itself is a far more effective tactic. unfortunately, foreign policy has dominate -- is dominated by these interests, and both military force and diplomatic policy largely sees itself as, as making host countries amenable to corporate domination. >> host: american hero twiets in to you -- tweets in to you, glad to see someone looking at camden, new jersey. it's like a city under occupation by some outside forces referencing your upcoming book. this e-mail from gary ham ill in strauss berg, pa. why is the political right much more articulate and effective than the left in communicating their political philosophy to the working class? >> guest: well, that's a good question.

and i think it's because traditional liberals in this society are hypocrites. they speak in that kind of feel-your-pain language, clinton being a good example of that, obama does it too, and yet asidously betray the interests of the poor and working men and women. and that hypocrisy is not lost on the working class and the poor. they see it, they understand it, and it enrages them. they have every right to feel betrayed, and that's why i think the occupy movement is an important movement, because it begins to speak about issues of economic justice. and it holds the democratic party and the traditional liberal establishment accountable for the destruction of those forces that once made it possible to be a working man and woman in this country and live with some kind of financial security and dignity. and those people who present themselves as liberals within

the society are, essentially, traitors to those interests, and that's why the right wing captures that and mobilizes it because, frankly, it's true. >> host: in "death of the liberal class," chris hedges write obama, seduced by power and prestige, is more interested in courting the corporate rich than in saving the disenfranchised. asked to name a business executive he admires, the president cited frederick smith of fedex, although smith is a union-busting republican. smith, who was a member of yale's secret skull and bones society along with george w. bush and john kerry, served as senator john mccain's finance chair during mccain's failed run for the presidency. smith founded fedex in 1971, and the company had more than 35 billion in revenue in the fiscal year that ended may '09. smith is rich and powerful, but there is no ethical system, religious or secular, that would hold him up as a man worthy of

emulation. such men build fortunes and little monuments to themselves off the pain and suffering of people like somebody you referred to earlier, henderson. north platte, nebraska. ann, go ahead with your question for chris hedges. >> caller: yes, mr. hedges, um, you are truly a truth sayer, and i have two things i'd like to throw out there. one is that i keep hoping it's not true, but i have come to believe that the elections and voting is just an exercise in futility. it's like theater, and it doesn't make a difference. and somehow or other we're supposed to believe that it gives us a voice and that by voting we can make a difference. and the other thing is that, um, i'm a disabled grandma who would love to be part of the occupy

movement, but in the heart of ethanol country there is no occupy movementment -- movement. and what can i do individually, um, without transportation somehow to make a difference? >> host: thank you, ann. >> guest: i think it is political theater. i think that's the problem. just about every campaign promise that was made in 2008 by barack obama whether it was filibustering the reform act or closing guantanamo or restoring civil liberties, he's failed us upon. and that's why i think that this movement and civil disobedience are the only weapon we have left, peaceful, nonviolent civil disobedience. it's not what we do with life, it's what we do with what life gives us. and, you know, we all have

limitations and struggles. you have personal limitations, and you shouldn't beat up on yourself for what you can't do. you do what you can. we change the world, i think, one person at a time. that's why in the christian gospels the concern for the neighbor is absolutely paramount, especially for the neighbor who is poor, dispossessed, suffering. that's what the story of the good samaritan is at its core, it's about a person left beaten on the side of the road, and i think it's within your circle when you see that kind of suffering reaching out in any way that you can to ameliorate it becomes an act that is not only one finally that is about compassion and empathy, but i think in the state of affairs of america even a political act. >> host: mr. hedges, who else is there to stop the wars and the banks but ron paul if u.s. lasts that long? who are we to vote for?

and i ask that in the sense of how closely are you following iowa, and what do you think of the process, the whole process? >> guest: well, i try not to follow it. i don't really care what newt gingrich said or what mitt romney said or, i mean, nobody's talking about issues, frankly. ron paul talks about issues, but for the rest of it it's just vacuous garbage for the most part, and i just don't want to fill my head with it. um, i mean, the whole republican primary has just been sort of the march of the trolls, you know, one troll replacing another week after week. i think we'll probably end up with mitt romney who's as soulless as barack obama and as captured to the interests of corporations as obama is. i just, i think there are aspects to ron paul's ideology that i find disturbing. i think that as a previous caller mentioned, there should be heavy state intervention into

impoverished areas not only in our inner cities, but in rural enclaves where poverty has become tremendous. much of my own family comes from rural areas of maine. food deserts, supermarkets closed down, loss of employment, tremendous suffering, and i, you know, in that sense am a believer of the, you know, i lived in switzerland, and i saw a state certainly not in any ways a perfect state, but one where everybody had health insurance, tax rates are very high, 40 or 50%. it has one of the best public education systems in the world. senior teaches earn as much as doctors. this is more towards the kind of society that i would like to see us build where we distribute our resources so everyone has a chance. look, i've spent a lot of time with military units, and the best military units never leave their wounded or dead on the field. even corpses. they still mean something.

they're not just commodities, although they're utility to the unit, i suppose -- their utility to the unit, i suppose, could be argued is gone. and i've seen soldiers and marines crawl out and bring these bodies back. and these were always the units with the highest morale and the most effective fighting capacity. it's the units who left their wounded and dead on the field and walked away that rapidly disintegrated, and i think that's what we're doing as a nation. we need to rebuild that solidarity, that community, that sense that when you stumble and fall, i will reach down and help pick you up if we're going to make it. and i think we have allowed corporate values whether it's through reality television -- i mean, reality tv is, essentially, about corporatism. it's about the celebration of values that are, that are characteristic of psychopaths; self-aggrandizement, incapacity for remorse or guilt, betrayal, one builds false friendships and then betrays them.

for what? for fleeting fame and a little money. and it's just writ large throughout the whole culture, and we have to begin to question our value systems if we're going to make it. and i think one of the most important questions is what are we going to do about all those people that we've turned or allowed to be treated like human refuse. >> host: eric tremont e-mails from albany, california, although my politics are far to the right of mr. hedges, i do think that "death of the liberal class" is an interesting book, in particular the book's blistering critique of higher education resonated with me. i am curious, was this critique prompted by mr. hedges' personal experience in trying to land a job in academia? >> guest: i've never tried to land a job in academia. i have taught as a visiting professor at places like princeton, columbia, new york university, university of

toronto, um, although i will admit that i'm pretty clear i probably would have great difficulty landing a job in academia. no, it was more prompted by my deep love of the humanities. you know, a belief that people need to be taught not what to think, but how to think and understanding the true intellectual activity is by its nature subversive. plato understood this. it's about questioning structures and assumptionings. the withering of the liberal arts which frightens me, you know, we see, like, university of albany has budget cuts, so it closes the classics department, its foreign language departments, theater departments, and everybody is sort of trotted off towards a major in economics. the rise of for-profit universities where they don't even teach humanities. this is, i think, very frightening because it robs us of a vocabulary and robs us of an ability to critique the systems around us, and we all end up serving systems.

we're trained how to serve these systems which is what happened in 2008. a figure like lawrence summers who had been the treasury secretary under clinton, came back to the obama white house, it's about funneling -- he sees the bubble implode, and he funnels trillions of dollars of taxpayer money to reinflate that bubble because they only know how to serve a dead system, they don't know how to critique it. >> host: el paso, texas. jack, we have a few minutes left. please, go ahead. >> caller: okay, thanks a lot. fine program. say, mr. hedges, you mentioned about campbells soup in camden? also rca victor. >> guest: yep, they used to be there. >> caller: but more important, walt whitman, he wrote a beautiful poem about the opening of public school and howard hanson wrote a magnificent oratory y'all to accompany the words.

and it's very stirring because you said that camden should have the west schools. -- best schools. well, they have one of the greatest poems by one of our greatest poets, and maybe if you would get a chance, you would -- or are you familiar with it? >> guest: not that poem. i am familiar with whitman and the chapter on camden begins with a whitman poem and, of course, joe and i visited his grave which is in the cemetery in camden as well as his house. >> host: g. wesley, altoona, pa. as a journalist who has devoted much of his work to the coverage and analysis of war, what do you make of carl van white house wit's declaration that war is a continuation of politics, and what advice would you give to a recent college graduate -- i presume it's g -- interested in pursuing foreign correspondence? >> well, war is not the continuation of politics by other means, war is about the destruction of all living systems, economic, political,

familial, social, communal. war is something very different from politics which is about compromise. war is about death. the essence of war is death. van carouse wit is wrong. in terms of a future as a print journalist, it's really tough because the monopoly that newspapers once had connecting sellers with buyers is gone. and that no nonly -- monopoly has seen newsrooms that once had hundreds of people radically diminished, the "philadelphia inquirer" once had 7, 800 reporters, they're now down to about 200. this is being replicated across the country. it is much more difficult for a young person who begins, as i did, as a freelance reporter because there just aren't the outlets, and the internet doesn't pay. these commercial interests don't need news organizations to connect anymore. with potential consumers. and i think this means that a

journalist like actors, classical actors like my wife will increasingly economically have to live on the margins, that that -- a period when you could get a job with a major metropolitan daily and earn a middle class salary are probably over. >> host: and from "empire of illusion," the government stripped of any real sovereignty provides little more than technical expertise for elites and corporations that lack moral restraints and a concept of the common good. america has become a facade. it has become the greatest illusion in a culture of illusions. it represents a power and a democratic ethic it does not possess. it seeks to perpetuate prosperity by borrowing trillions of dollars it can never repay. the absurd folly of trying to borrow our way out of the worst economic collapse since the '30s is the cruelest of all the recent tricks played on american citizens. we continue to place our faith

in a phantom economy, one characterized by fraud and lies which sustains the wealthiest 10%. that's chris hedges writing in "empire of illusion." he is the author of nine nonfiction books, and he has been our guest for the last three hours here on "in depth." very quickly, here are his books. war is the force that gives us meaning, what every person should know about war, losing moses on the freeway, american fascists, i don't believe in atheists -- which is now when atheism becomes religion -- collateral damage came out in '08, empire of illusion, a bestseller in '09. another bestseller, death of the liberal class in 2010, and the world as it is in 2011. mr. hedges, thank you for being on booktv's "in depth" program. >> guest: thanks for having me. >> host: and thank you for joining us. we wish you a happy new year. this program will reair tonight at midnight