off in really different positions kind of come together in the end. [applause] that it? we're all done. thank you. [applause] i don't know why i'm clapping. thank you. .. the author talks about advice

the apple co founder dr. lee in his career. >> one is to focus. really keep your focus. the other is empathy. not the perfect word for it but make an emotional connection to the people who are going to buy your product and the fear is not a great word. the word in cute. but it means cast an aura around whatever you do so that the minute steve throughout his career had his own personal name on the patents, packaging of the apple product so when you open up and there was an ipod cradled, it was something really cool just the way it was. >> watch the rest of the interview today at noon eastern on c-span2 or any time on line. or any time at the c-span video library. >> up next, author and

journalist chris hedges. the pulitzer prize-winning foreign correspondent called, e-mails and tweets on topics such as war, religion and politics. chris hedges told a master's in divinity and is the author of nine books including "war is a force that gives us meaning," "losing moses on the freeway: the 10 commandments in america" and his latest, "the world as it is: dispatches on the myth of human progress". >> host: in your most recent book "the world as it is: dispatches on the myth of human progress," you write brace yourself. the american empire is over 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 >> first of all i spent years on the outer >>reporter: of empire. i have seen an aspect that most people have not unless you are in the military or foreign service. and i think all of the signs, the red warning signs are there.

also the fact that i spent so long outside the united states gave me a perspective when i returned. i understood how radically the country had changed in the two decades i was a way. those who remained within the borders of the united states the changes have been more incrementally and less perceptible. >> host: what are some of the symptoms. the signs? >> guest: the biggest sign is the fact that we are following the trajectory of all empires which is that they expand beyond their capacity to sustain themselves. we have run up the largest deficit in human history which we can't repay it. we have done so at the cost of our infrastructure, public education, working class, hauling the country from the inside and the physical evidence is all around us. plunging roughly 1-third of americans into poverty or near

poverty according to the latest statistic. our bridges and rose are collapsing. libraries are being closed. fire station that being closed. these are the find of a nation--let's call it an empire that is reaching a terminal point. if we don't radically recharge our course, then the collapse is going to be very frightening and chaotic. >> host: in "empire of illusion: the end of literacy and the triumph of spectacle" which you published in 2009 you write so captive to images cast ballots based on how candidates make them feel. they vote for a slogan. a smile, perceived sincerity and attractiveness along with a carefully crafted personal narrative of the candidate. it is thailand story, not content and fact that formats

politics. >> guest: precisely. the structure of the corporate state as well as the imperial state remains untouched. doesn't really matter which political party holds off the policies of george w. bush have been assiduously carried out by barack obama. even figures like dick cheney have confirmed this. whether it is the war on terror or refusal to restore habeas corpus, eavesdropping, wiretapping and monitoring of millions of americans which under the constitution should be illegal the personal past the pfizer reform act which -- the losing of the u.s. treasury on behalf of wall street. all of these are policies which are bipartisan and that is because we have undergone in the last few decades a slow-motion corporate coup d'etat whereby the citizen is rendered impotent and it is solely the interests

of corporations which are paramount within the circles of the power. one -- to take many examples but obamacare would be a good one. i share the right wing's critique of obamacare. disastrous bill written by corporate lobbyists. 2,000 pages of it. it is the equivalent of the bank bailout bill for the pharmaceutical and insurance industry. $400 billion of subsidies. meanwhile the white house handed out exemptions because these corporations do not want to in short chronically ill children. think of it. in moral terms it means we live in a country where it is legally permissible for corporations, for profit corporations to hold sick children hostage while their parents frantically bankrupt themselves trying to save their sons and daughters. this is the world the corporate state creates. and the democrats and the republicans are handmaidens of

corporate interests. why congress has such a low approval rating. >> host: in 2010, death of the liberal class, the election of obama was the skillful manipulation in betrayal of the public by a corporate power elite. we missed folks thailand ethnicity and advertising tactic pioneered by calvin klein for progressive politics and genuine change. >> guest: obama function as a brand. in 2008 the financial collapse, wall street was terrified. they thought they had been found out. they thought they would have to pay a price for their criminal activity and malfeasance and obama functions as a brand in the same way that people of color or hiv-positive models were used by calvin klein to associate their product with the risk a lifestyle and progressive

politics but as with a function of all brands we confused a brand with an experience. obama won advertising -- marketer of the year. because the professionals knew what he had done. he beat nike and apple and that is what he was. to quote cornell west became essentially black mascot for wall street. >> host: one of the themes and a lot of your books is criticism of liberals. why? >> guest: the liberal class was never meant to function as the political left. it was meant to function as a political center. i spent a lot of time in depth with the liberal class going back to the radical and populist movement at the turn of the century which were very powerful. unions like the old c i o, socialist, candidate for president told almost 6% of the

vote in 1912, publications like appeal to reason with the socialist, and the force, at the time before the war, and socialist mayors. what happened was the war itself and wilson had run for reelection in 1912 on a slogan he kept us out of the war but when the collapse of the eastern front with tsarist russia and the bolshevik revolution, the capacity of the germans to send 100 divisions to the western front and bankers on wall street who had lent some of money to the british and french were terrified that if the british and french lost the war they would lose their money. there was heavy pressure on white house to begin to try to create a naval blockade around britain which sank three or four

american ships to go into the war. it had no popular support. we created -- i spend a lot of time writing about this in "the death of the liberal class". the first system of mass propaganda, committee for public information known as the creel commission because it was headed by george creole. it the committee for public education and the dark figure, the grand income visitor type figure is walt whitman writes a public opinion in 1922, sort of the blueprint for control, manufacturing consent and it is how you use propaganda effectively to mfg. consent. you don't need the harsher measures of the espionage act and sedition act except for the most recalcitrant forces for radical forces. randolph bourne, jane addams goes to prison but propaganda becomes in the right hand, in the hands of the state a much

more effective tool to heard people where you want them. 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 like sigmund freud. people were not moved by fact or reason but manipulated by emotion. this system of mass propaganda which created a kind of permanent fear was transferred the moment the war was over to the dreaded red. has a great writer i like dwight macdonald who writes of this period and says essentially world war i was the rock on which these movements broke. this is absolutely vital to understanding what happened to american democracy because these movements never took formal political power. and yet is able the true corrective to in terms of opening up our democracy.

the liberty party that -- suffragists and labor movement and the civil-rights movement. these were movements that pressured the liberal class to respond. we saw 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 piecemeal reform possible. when it worked. and conrad black when he write his biography of roosevelt said roosevelt's greatest achievement was he stayed capitalist and black was right and with the destruction of those radical and populist movements in the name of the red scare in the 50s with the mccarthy hearings we saw thousands of university professors, social workers, journalists essentially purged from their positions. i f. stone, our greatest investigative journalist becomes

a nonperson. he can't even get a job. that was disastrous because we lost the pressure on the liberal establishment and then in the name of sort of the battle against anti-communist we followed these liberal institutions out from the inside so that by the 1970s there was no longer any ball work to protect us from the corporate state and we were transferred correctly in the words of the harvard historian charles mayer by the early 1970s from an empire. the what he calls production to an empire of consumption. we began to borrow, to maintain life style of consumption as well as an empire we could no longer afford. and the impediments to that which had been in place were essentially removed and you end up with false liberals. people who speak the language of traditional liberalism like bill clinton and yet serve the interests of the corporate state

so it is under a democratic administration under clinton that we get the most egregious assaults against the working class in this country. the greatest betrayal of working to plant women in this country since the tax harley act of 1948. the destruction of welfare. one of the reasons they keep extending unemployment benefits is because courtesy of bill clinton wants those unemployment benefits run out at you do not have a job you have to live on $143 a month courtesy of the welfare system. that the regulation of the sec so that you have rupert murdoch and news corp. and clear channel buying up literally thousands of stations. radio and television, consolidating it into one entity. the destruction of the banking system. canada does not have a banking crisis. we have 100 and closures a year. canada has done because it didn't teardown that fire wall put in place in the 1930s in the united states through the

glass-steagall act. didn't care down the fire wall between commercial and investment banks. it didn't allow gamblers or hedge funds to taint over the banking system. this was all done under clinton and obama comes in any santa recodified the destruction of both domestic and international law put in place by the bush administration so that he doesn't restore basic civil liberties and in fact he carries out a further egregious assault against them and capacity of the executive branch to ordered the assassination of american citizens, military detention act whereby people can be picked up if they are deemed a terrorist and denied due process and held in military briggs. i think understanding the structures and foundations of power and how they work is extremely important. some grateful to cool

philosophers like sheldon wolff in his book democracy inc. sort of spells it out and calls the system we live under inverted totalitarianism by which he means it is not classical totalitarianism. it doesn't find it expression through a demagogue or charismatic leader but through the anonymity of the corporate state. in inverted totalitarianism you have a system by which corporate forces purport to pay loyalty to the constitution, a electoral politics, iconography and language of american patriotism and yet have so corrupted the levers of power as to render the citizenry powerless. >> host: back to your book "the death of the liberal class," you write that the creed of impartiality and objectively that has infected the liberal class teaches ultimately the importance of not offending the status quo. professionalism demanded in the

classroom in newsprint, the arts or political discourse is code for moral disengagement. >> guest: of course. what you do is paid deference to institutions like goldman sachs which are criminal enterprises. you pay difference to power centers that long ago walked away from responsible citizenship whether it is coal companies in apalachicola or chemical plants polluting rivers or whether it is wall street. and i think that in ability to make those moral judgments has rendered the liberal class not wholly useless but despised by large segments of american society and frankly they have every right to be despised because they posit themselves as sort of the moral voice. the conscience of the nation and yet i think have failed miserably. my book "the 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 am a seminary graduate. my father was a minister who grew up in the church. the press. come out of the new york times. over 20 as a journalist. labor unions which have withered and now we're seeing a final assault against public sector unions, the last redoubt of unionized activity. culture which has become commercialized chung, 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: the most recent book "the world as it is: dispatches on the myth of human progress". how is that will organize? >> guest: is organized -- these are essays. i write a weekly column for bob scheer's great web site. he used to be the editor of

ramparts. i emigrated mire of his work and great friend. he runs this web site and i write a weekly column. these are over the last five years some of the columns i have written and it is built around issues of the middle east. i was a middle east bureau chief for the new york times. i spent seven years in the middle east. it is a region i know intimately well and most of the time of an arabic speaker in the occupied territories. i have a particular sensitivity to the pain particularly of palestinians but also for many within the muslim world and i have spoken out quite strongly on their behalf. it is built around empire. these are sort of the theme that i hit within my books but also tend to hit in my weekly column. >> host: in the last column in

the book who is carlos ericdarko? >> guest: the father of a young marine killed in iraq. it is the story of the pain of that family and the loss of that son and i am sad to report that a few days ago his 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 than where the two marine officers had driven to his house to inform him of the death of his son with a can of gasoline and that it on fire. >> host: in 2005 you wrote the book "losing moses on the freeway: the 10 commandments in america". who are or were patrick and tyrone? >> guest: patrick and tyrone. when i graduated from college at

colgate university are moved into or across the street from a housing project in boston and roxbury, the housing project which at the time -- was raised and rebuild but was one of the most dangerous spots in the city. 60% vacancy rate. i ran a small church. i was attending harvard divinity school but commuting into cambridge to go to class. this street in back of my house had highest homicide rate at that time. patrick and tyrone retreat to kids. they were heroin addicts and i always say my 2-1/2 years in roxbury is where i learned to hate liberals because i was commuting into harvard where everybody wanted to empower people they never met. they liked the poor but didn't like the smell of the poor.

matching the rhetoric of this classic liberal christianity with reality on the streets of roxbury was a wake-up call for me. and i was at the time a member of the greater boston team. we use to go to charles town and fight for $25 saturday night. i physically threw them off my street. they were pushing heroin on kids on the street. are caught them raping a 14-year-old girl and beat them up. i don't say this with any kind of pride. it was a deeply troubling time for me. and i used all the mechanisms of authority which in many ways i moved to rocks very to they far to make their lives miserable. they were skipping school so i went to the trend officer's. they had petty crime, committed petty crime. i went to probation officers.

i went to the police. they live for a while in an abandoned house and i would take out the views because they rewired the fuse box and eventually in this end they broke into my house and were waiting for me with lead pipes. the reasons they were unable to attack me is because another boy had been tutoring, stanley found them. on the back door of my house broken and climbed in and -- it was really earth shattering period for me because i realized in some sense -- i write that in the book that when i was the enemy. when our was fearful and quartered i reached out to be very levers of control that these people could never reach out to. i had that ability to make the system work on my behalf because i was white and came from

privilege and i was indicated in a way -- that was a really important lesson for me in terms of what's supremacy and privilege and what it means. i kind of bear it as the mark of cain and yet i did. >> host: evangelicals often championed a gospel of greed and personal empowerment liberals often speak on behalf of oppressed 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 is it you leave roxbury? >> guest: 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 they paid lip service to

the 4 as walleyes lip service to values they were not willing to fight for. it was a rupture with the institutional church which was particularly painful because i had been raised within the institutional church. not only with my father a parish minister all his life but my mother as well was a seminary graduate and went on to become a professor. it was a really difficult time. this was an institution that nurtured me. i think i still speak and think in the way that it taught me. that is ethically and religiously these are not values i necessarily discarded but i had at that point a huge schism with the institution itself. had been editor of my high school paper and 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. peter shea and she lay and the dirty war and death squads in el salvador. my second year in divinity school to follow the friendship with a great journalist, robert cox who had been editor of the herald. bob was an amazing man. at the height of the dirty war he would publish the names of the people who disappeared the night before on the front page until he himself disappeared and he was only saved because he was a british citizen. he was at harvard. that was a huge window into what journalism had a moral center could be. bob's great intellectual mentor was george orwell and so i left divinity school. i would go back and finish but left to go to lead america to

study spanish in bolivia. when i left i took on bob's advice the collected letters, essays and journalism -- i carried or well with me through that year and read and relied and underline and for anyone who cares about writing and cares about journalism it is a second bottle. >> host: in "losing moses on the freeway: the 10 commandments in america" you threw a bottle. you serve and driving off. i eastlake christian? are you a christian? >> depends on whose definition. the london review of books reviewed a book i wrote where i have been battling these new atheist like the late christopher hichens and richard dawkins and others and their judgment was i was a non believe. i would call myself a non-traditional believer but in this end still believe. in the core message of the gospel. in the attitudes. i find one of my frustrations

with some of the right wing evangelicals is this emphasis on law which is a few birdie at concept. the ten commandments are products of moses. let's put the beatitudes up in court rooms. i am all for that. there was a transformation in terms of the theological outlook of the christian gospel as opposed to where it went before and it is a theological outlook that i embrace and admire and seek to live by but in terms of policy, in terms of a particular denomination whether they would consider me a good christian where most would not. >> host: good afternoon. happy new year and welcome to booktv's index program. monthly program with one author looking at his or her body of work and this new year's day 2012 arthur journalist and columnist, pulitzer prize winner chris hedges is our guest for

the next two hours. we will put the numbers on the screen if you like to participate. 737-0001 for those of you in the east and central time zones. 737-0002 for those in the mountain and pacific times and. you can e-mail chris hedges at booktv@c-span.org or send a tweet@booktv, twitter.com/booktv. chris hedges has been writing nonfiction for about ten years. he began with his national book critics circle award finalist book "war is a force that gives us meaning" which came out in 2002. "what every person should know about war" in 2003. the 10 commandments in america" in 2005. "american fascists: the christian right and the war on america" in 2006. in 2008, originally called "i don't believe in atheists" clippers that is now called when a season becomes religion.

that is in 2008. "collateral damage: america's war against iraqi civilians" also in 2008. "empire of illusion: the end of literacy and the triumph of spectacle" in 2009. "the death of the liberal class" was also a best seller in 2010. and his most recent compilation of his columns came out last progress". "american fascists: the christian right and the war on america" and "i don't believe in atheists" or when atheism become religion. where did those books come from? >> guest: from the same place actually. my frustration. part of my frustration with the liberal church is they didn't call out the proponents of the gospel of prosperity. the idea that jesus came to make as wealthy. the idea that jesus was a pacifist with -- drebin i and fragmentation bombs in the middle east is a radical. the liberal church equivocated in the name of dialogue. martin luther king never used.

and by a anger at what has 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 in to the christian religion and the failure on the part of the liberal church to denounce. that doesn't mean i am not evangelical. i right in the book that the real opposition to the gospel of prosperity and this rapacious right wing that seized an element of the christian church will not come from the liberal church but out of the evangelical i believe. my frustration over what had been done and the same kind of cheap characterization of christianity that was done by the new atheists. they attacked a form of -- a

caricature of religion that are also detest but they can only attack that caricature. i have debated both members of the christian right and of course christopher hichens in berkeley and sam harris at ucla and they can't hear what i am saying. they can only attack their caricature of who i am and that is what the christian right does as well. if i am debating the christian right has i have then i am up proposed 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 hichens or harris is no different from the christian right. they elevate western civilization.

they are attacking the muslim wards because they are barbaric or by the christian right forces of satan. the result is the same. what it really is at its core is self exaltation in both cases. it is about elevating me above everyone else. morally, spiritually and intellectually and abrogating the right to impose what i define as a virtue by force on those who are different. both the new atheist jewish and christian right do it. >> host: when a season becomes religion came out in 2008. it came out after a public debate with sam harrison and christopher regions. mr hedges writes about the atheists. they see only one truth, there truth. human beings must become like them, think like them and about their values which they insist are universal or be banished from civilized society. all other values which they never investigate or examine are dismissed. when we you with the new york

times. >> guest: 1990-2005. >> host: why did you leave? >> guest: we had a dispute over something called the iraq war. hospital lot of my life not only in the middle east but in iraq. i understood like most arabists that the arguments used to justify the invasion and occupation of iraq were not reality based. this is not a political discussion. it is the ideas that we would be greeted as liberators and there wouldn't be an insurgency, democracy would be implanted in baghdad and emanate of words across the middle east. the oil would pay for the reconstruction. these were just spun by people who have no idea what they were talking about. but to get up and say that despite the wealth of experience i had within the region and within iraq itself became deeply polarizing and i gave a

commencement address that i had been saying -- came to an end when i gave a commencement address at rockford college where i was booed off the stage and had my microphone cuts. people stood up and started shouting things against the. at one point they stood up and saying god bless america. i was actually escord diplomas. they didn't want any sort of fracas by close contact with students and this got picked up by fox and trash talk media and loop it hour after hour and the new york times responded by giving me a formal written reprimand. we were unionized and the process is you give the employee a written reprimand and the next time you are fired. i faced a difficult choice which was that i would have to in essence muzzle myself and -- on a fundamental level was very close to my dad who was a great

minister and activists and civil rights movement, anti-war movement, his brother was gay and he spoke on gay-rights. to do so would be to betray my father. i didn't want to do that so i left the paper. >> host: in "the world as it is: dispatches on the myth of human progress" mr hedges writes i never sought to be objective. how can you be objective about death in el salvador and massacre in iraq and serbian sniper fire that gunned down unarmed civilians including children in sarajevo. how can you be neutral about masters and profiteers of the war to lie to hide the crimes they commit and the profit they make? that is from his most recent book "the world as it is: dispatches on the myth of human progress". now is your turn. david in florida. you are on with chris hedges. >> caller: good afternoon to both of you. you spoke of your admiration for dwight macdonald. the only thing with which i

agree with leon shrouds the about is when he said everybody has the right to be stupid but comrade mcdonald abuses the privilege. are am glad you are on so that america can see who writes for the new york times. but to the question that i called to ask, you said when you were making a speeches for one of your books that if we went to war with iraq you would not pay your taxes. where do you get off? >> guest: it was iran, not iraq. i wrote an article for the nation magazine that said i would not pay my taxes. that is correct. >> host: what about his back on liberal journalism writing for the new york times? >> guest: i don't think the n.y. times can be considered a liberal newspaper. remember it was one of the chief propagandas or cheerleaders for the war in iraq. it had to write a mayor culpa

afterwards. it completely missed the looming financial meltdown because instead of walking into poor neighborhoods where families were being given some prime mortgages that bankers and mortgage brokers knew they could never repay and these things were fraudulent the diced and sold as assets. they were running down and doing lunch with robert rubin. the new york times in the words of sydney's andburg who also had a break with them when he took on real-estate developers or friends of the publisher, papers like that are important since they stop things from getting worse. that is right. but it sets narrow parameters by which to operate and the closer you get to the centers of power the less the established media institutions like the world -- the further you get from the centers of power within the

outer reaches of empire the more latitude you have which is why i spent most of my career far away from washington. >> host: next call for chris hedges from california. mike peterson you are on booktv on c-span2. >> caller: hello to both of you. c-span is top notch. remember mr hedges's book "war is a force that gives us meaning" 11, that was due of -- a couple quick questions. mr hedges. form of music. has he ever heard of the science-fiction author frank herbert who wrote the deuce series which is basically science-fiction telling truthful tales about power and what does he think of the new trend in the pharmaceutical community to blame everybody's genetic makeup for character defects and that sort of corporate taxes?

>> host: thank you for those questions. >> guest: i haven't read the do and --dune series so i can't respond to that. you are talking about biological determinism that morality is determined by biology. i would certainly say biology has a heavy influence in how we respond. as somebody who has been repeatedly in war zones i know when you are afraid you start thinking with another part of your brain and yet i finally don't believe biology is a prison. in that i would break with the biological determinants. i would think 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. and so i find the whole idea of

genetic makeup or biology determining how we act and determining morality frightening because it absolves us of moral choice. >> host: at noaa period in our history has democracy been in such peril or possibility of totalitarianism. our way of life is over. profligate 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 and cannot be undone with $1 trillion or $2 trillion in bailout money nor will it be solved by clinging to the illusions of the past. that is what you wrote in 2010--or in 2009 is when "empire of illusion: the end of literacy and the triumph of spectacle". this e-mail from barlow humphries. i read your books and continue to read your columns and understand the points you make

when criticizing what is wrong with our government and country. i think they're brilliant listing problems and shortcomings is useful to the point. however of like you to list all so those things that an individual can do to correct the problems you so clearly outline. >> guest: referring to the passage you just read, if we don't radically reconfigure our relationship to the consumer culture, to the fossil fuel industry and 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 argue that breaking from the addiction of rapid consumption is spiritually healthy. speaking to the rest of the world not through the language of violence but through a regained kind of humility is

something that is are you tory. but the fact is we must radically confront the destruction that humankind is carrying out against the eco system if we are going to have a sustainable future. work of bill mcgibbon and others is important against this tarzan effort to bring the pipeline down through canada which i think hanson called the end game or something to that effect. basically our chief climate scientist. that is insane. it is over and yet we are sitting by pretending it is not happening. shredding kyoto. we have to nothing in copenhagen. what can we do? imus supporter of the occupy movement because i think here people are carrying out acts of civil disobedience, understanding that within the system itself there is no way to hold corporate malfeasance and

corporate criminality. i have invested a lot of time and it and i think it is a glimmer of hope. >> host: lucius sorrentino e-mails see the occupy movement has been criticized as not having a political agenda, a more purpose other than creating an internet and beam. 99% versus 1% and draw attention to the problem. what do you see as the future of occupy wall street in so far as political activism goes? >> guest: i disagree that it doesn't have a message. i think the message is very clear. the message is a corporate coup has to be reversed. the corporate overlord's have to go. i covered the revolution in east germany, czechoslovakia's, we use to hear the same criticisms leveled against the organizers in east germany.

what are your demands? the movement understands there are certainly things most people within the occupy movement would support, revoking corporate personhood liberal campaign finance. purchase will serious jobs program especially direct that the young, moratorium on foreclosures and bank repossessions all of which are important but they're not going to come as long as the political system is held hostage. to corporate interests. as long as we live in the system of inverted totalitarianism. they keep it focused on the fundamental problem. of course the power league criticizes the movement for not making specific demands or not funnelling this energy back into a dead system. and i think the most telling moment for me came when there with a quart unaided effort by 18 cities to shutdown occupy

encampments including in oakland, l a, new york. for me that was an indication of how tone deaf and out of touch those empowered are. the idea they could physically eradicate these movements and yet not address the injustices and suffering that have given birth to these movements. if a function as the liberal class should function, let's go to roosevelt and wallace, if they were serious about attempting to save corporate capitalism they would if he immediately announced a $1 million jobs program targeted at people under the age of 25, a moratorium on bank repossessions and foreclosures and for giving the one trillion dollars in student debt. these would have been the kinds of steps that might have been able to begin to ameliorate the

acre, the legitimate anger that has gripped many americans. and yet they think they can use a militarized police force and are have been in the middle of it. it is like a star wars movie. storm troopers in essence, command helicopters in the sky. these are peaceful protests. directing traffic. instances of very brutal behavior, i was arrested outside goldman sachs. people were being slammed into the cement. to thinks they can counter this by force is deeply misguided and shows how our out of touch those in power are. >> host: next call for chris hedges from seattle. bob, thanks for holding. you are on booktv. >> caller: i really appreciate your work. when the former soviet union collapsed the message we received here was that capitalism was the victor. there was no alternative to

capitalism, unbridled capitalism. and during the last great depression, the roosevelt administration, communism was an active threat to the league. possibly out of fear that the new deal was enacted since there was a vacuum created by the collapse of the former soviet union. the delete, people here had no alternative so the elites no longer have -- because capitalism is the only answer. it is the victor. let me ask you question. your current crop of political people in this country. who would you peck as someone that could rebalance the equation. >> host: we got the point. mr hedges? >> guest: let me talk about capitalism. i am not a marxist. i am not against capital.

but there are different forms of capitalism. there is penny capitalism of the farmers in the small farm town in upstate new york -- there is the regional capitalism of the local hardware store owners and small business owner who lived in the community, paid taxes, sat on the school board and corporate capitalism and that i am against. supernational. 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, drive production overseas. that is what nafta did and we are seeing large-scale factory closures over the border in mexico as these corporations move to pet break embrace of china's totalitarian capitalism or vietnam or bangladesh where people in sweat shops are paid $0.22 an hour or even prison

labor and because of globalism, because of corporate capitalism, the destruction of 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 sweatshops or prison labor in cheyenne and corporate capitalism by find frightening. in terms of political figures i don't believe given the configuration of our political system we are going to mount a serious challenge through the electoral process. the challenge will come through the occupy movement and i don't think these movements are going away. when you cover the revolution in eastern europe you became very cognizant of the timetables for impossible to predict. overthrowing the communist regime in poland took ten years. in east germany it took ten weeks and in czechoslovakia's it took ten days. no one knows. these movements have a life on

their own. how they spring, i was in lipsaying on november 9th, 1989, with the leaders of the east german opposition and they said maybe within a year is a will be free passage back and forth across the berlin wall. with a matter of hours the berlin wall, its impediment to human traffic no lottery system. that was a huge lesson for me. even those closely associated with a movement don't know where they're going or what their potential is. so i put my faith in movement. karl popper in the open society and his enemies were right. the question is not how you get good people to rule. that is the wrong question. most people who are attracted power are at best mediocre which is obama or venal which is bush. the question is how do you make those in power frightened of you. that comes through movement.

the destruction of those movements, labor movement and all sorts of social movements including communist unions which were the first integrated organization in the countrywide great public intellectuals join them because it was the only place a black man with any dignity could often go. these have all been decimated and that has been catastrophic to our democracy. we have to put our faith back in movements which is what the occupy wall street is. it is a movement. >> host: in the chapter illusion of wisdom in the book "empire of illusion: the end of literacy and the triumph of spectacle," once in congress, wall street and was being produced at prestigious universities and business schools do not have the capacity to fix our financial mess. indeed they will make it worse. and have no concept thanks to the education they have received of how to replace a failed system with a new one. their petty, timid and and creative bureaucrats superbly

trained to carry out systems management. they see only piecemeal solutions that will satisfy the corporate structure. their entire focus is numbers, profits and personal advancement. they lack a moral and intellectual core. they are idle 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 figured into their balance sheets. the democratic system, they believe, is a secondary product of the free market which face lavishly serve. next call for chris hedges from westport, connecticut. lois, you are on booktv on c-span2. >> caller: so glad to see somebody like chris hedges a un c-span. i feel strongly that the liberal media and the government work together and by doing so they

both came 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. since i assumed the media is correct 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: you put me in the awkward position of defending the new york times. i don't think it is quite that black-and-white. i don't think the new york times is corrupt. i think the new york times is really an institution whose

unofficial credo, i say as someone who worked within the institution for a long time, do not significantly alienate those on whom we depend for money and access. that doesn't mean they won't alienate them at times. i think the sin of the traditional media like the new york times is more reliable mission. they serve as propaganda, rather naive and unwitting propaganda for the bush white house and the lead up to the iraq war with claims and putting things on the front page that we know are not true. very little vetting or journalistic integrity. and yet i think there are many people within the newspaper who care about news, who care about journalism and the best reporters care about truth. we talked earlier about object to the 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 empathize with. i covered after the first gulf war i was in northern iraq in the kurdish held territories and i wrote a very harsh article about disputes even on a dispute between kurdish faction leaders will corruption, cigarette smuggling to the point where some of this was read by the propaganda broadcasts directed at kurdish territories out of baghdad. and yet as orwell said if you look at journalism has a product, that we as journalists have to sell, what it is is our credibility. a line they were in the short term. in the long term it destroys you. it is not incompatible to feel and all so to speak the truth.

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 sub prime mortgage crisis they weren't out there in poor neighborhoods. they gravitate towards the centers of power. and leave the struggles and suffering and injustices that are visited especially on low weak and vulnerable unheard. the media has done a horrific job in terms of highlighting what tens of millions of americans are enduring. forty-seven million americans live in poverty spend about 35% of their income just on food to eat and yet there are largely invisible especially on the commercial media. we are seeing the rise of a non reality based media. that is fox news, cable news channels that are not rooted in verifiable fact. this frightens me very much. whatever the limitations of the new york times and they have

them, i have been very critical of them including my book "the death of the liberal class". discussions are based on verifiable facts. with the rise of so-called media outlets that discard fact, where opinion becomes interchangeable with fact, then you enter a 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. not so much ideological. i don't think the new york times can be classified as a liberal newspaper but i think it is more pernicious. what they are attacking is reality based media. essentially trying to destroy it. before they dropped that source of iron curtain of propaganda around all of us. >> host: mr hedges, your first book was a finalist at the critics circle award for

nonfiction. work -- "war is a force that gives us meaning," the enduring attraction of war is 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. the communal march against an enemy generate a warm and familiar bond with our neighbors, community, our nation, what got unsettling undercurrents of alienation and dislocation. war in times of malaise and desperation is a potent distraction. and finally, 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. >> and i say that with a great deal of pain because i know what violence does. i know poison that it is. and yet i was as i said in sarajevo when it was being hit