here are some of the programs to look out for this weekend. .. >> literary critics and more to talk about politics, war, history, religion and culture. watch these programs and more all weekend long on booktv, and for a complete schedule, visit booktv.org. >> david graeber is next on booktv. he argues that america's political system is only responsive to the wealthy and has disenfranchised the

remainder of the population. it is a little over an hour. >> so how are you all doing tonight? i'm, i'm thomas frank, and i'm the author of, like, lots of stuff. it doesn't really matter. [laughter] and i'm here to introduce -- oh, yeah, they do have my book here tonight, so what do you know? i'll mention that one. it's called "pity the billionaire," it's a book about the financial crisis and the sort of bizarre political response to it that took place in this country. and i'm here with david graeber, who's also an author, and what i want to do, first of all, is welcome david to the richest city in america. i thought that would be appropriate. i want to welcome him to a city where the real estate market never really suffered, never really, you know, stopped for -- never really missed a beat. a city where until the recent

sequester there was really no slump to speak of at all. and the reason that washington, d.c. has done so incredibly well in recent years isn't because we're so openhanded with federal employees, but because of all the sort of highly visible reasons, david, that you no doubt noticed on your way in from the airport. when you see the buildings marked bechtel and general dynamics, and what i'm referring to is the massive contracting out of government services, of public functions that we do today as a political matter of course. plus all the soft money contributions which all, you know, gravitate to here, of course, plus all the lobbying, all the efforts to put government on what president bush used to call a market-based footing. all the things that david in his new book refers to simply as prescribe ri. and i think that -- bribery.

and i think that's very apt. we're going to talk about that at some point. but i think as we're gathered here today to mourn the passing of one of the great leaders of the conservative revolution -- i'm referring to margaret thatcher, of course -- i think it's worth noting the massive irony that the very city that the free marketeers and the conservative movement hate the most has historically been the greatest beneficiary of their political dominance. and i don't think that all of the stuff that i've been saying probably doesn't come as much of a surprise to david graeber here. his view of washington as the enforcer of the capitalist system rather than as its mortal enemy is the kind of cynicism that i can endorse whole heartedly. he describes if his new -- in his new book, "the democracy project," he describes the city of washington that we live in not as the servant of the takers, you know, as paul ryan

would have you believe, forever trying to steal from those who produce and turn their wealth over to the lazy, but instead as a city that runs on bribes, as a city where the banks have succeeded in enlisting the force of the state in their profit project. now, let me tell you something about what i know about david graeber which is mainly from reading his last book which had this fantastic title -- they've got copies of it over there -- "debt: the first 5,000 years." and i read this book, the book was a revelation to me. it's one of those sprawling anthropological romps through human history that i myself thought nobody wrote anymore. it was that kind of thing. i don't know if you all are familiar with a book from a hundred years ago called "the golden bow," but that's what struck me, it struck me as that kind of book written on that same sort of sweeping scale and

showing that same kind of, you know, grand historical originality. and it's the kind of book where you know as soon as you've read through a single chapter that it's going to overturn all sorts of things that the world insists to be true. and the kind of book that's going to remind you how little we really know about the human past, how much we simply project onto the past with our theories and our ideology. and what was especially striking to me was that a book that is largely concerned with bronze age societies could be so precisely relevant to our, in the exact moment that we're living through right now. and all i'm waiting for now, you know, now that the book has been out for a year or so is for the economists to acknowledge that graeber has singlehandedly shattered several of their most fundamental articles of faith. i'm waiting for that still. i'm waiting to see that op-ed.

david's new book is called "the democracy project." i've got it right here. and among other things, it's a firsthand account of how occupy wall street got started back in the summer of 2011. david was there, of course. and saw it all firsthand. now, i have myself been pretty critical of a number of, well, most of the occupy books that have come out prior to now. but i felt that this one was different from the others. for one thing, david is a, he's an original theorist about the world that we live in. and in this book he romps all over the world of contemporary politics smashing chivalrous and imposing interpretations of things, interpretations that i have never heard of before, that he's just completely invented but yet ring true. for example, among other things just out of thin air, he has a critique of the academic left which i found both original and

also unique in the literature of occupy wall street. i've never seen anything like it. and this book is also unique in that it's written in the first person. it's refreshing to read. it's filled with great anecdotes. and it's told in a way that seems absolutely familiar. you know, when you read it, the author's voice is one that you can just immediately, you know, that seems very close. but there's also a strange lacuna here. i'm going to reveal that i went to the same graduate school as david, i'm going to use words like la kind that. [laughter] lacuna is where i want to start, this is where i want to start the conversation. and in the book david finds all kinds of fascinating antecedents for the occupy movement, for people trying to build a democratic society. things like the abolitionist movement, the feminist movement and piracy -- [laughter]

we'll no doubt ask him about that one later on, you know, the pirates of the caribbean, you know, that ride at disney world? be what do you know, that's where democracy comes from. that never would have occurred from me before. but there's one that you didn't mention, and as i was reading the book, it kept hitting me this was the most of course, the -- the most obvious, the clearest antecedent for the occupy movement. it's made up of indebted people -- in that case farmers, in the case today of largely students -- it's a movement that hated and despised wall street and actually generated all sorts of conspiracy theories about wall street. and more importantly, a movement whose democratic vision arose directly out of the experience of democratic organizing, okay? out of its movement culture as the historians like to say. it also made much of its, you know, these public displays of numerical might, they would hold these enormous parades, you

know, go through small towns in huge numbers. and they would have these vast encampments. and one of the -- another theme in populism was middle class people, um, basically falling behind. they constantly talked about this. and so as i read the book, i was impressed by the examples the antisee dents for occupy that you did mention, but i was also wondering why this one wasn't there. start there, mr. graeber. >> well, one reason why is because i think occupy wall street was by a lot of outside observers criticized largely for not doing that. um, i mean there's a great tradition, and i think i do talk about some of the antecedents of the populist are movement in a way in the kind of movements that existed around the time of the revolutionary war, actually right after the revolutionary war which were also mobilelations of largely-in--

mobilizations of largely-indebted farmers. most people don't know that one of the reasons that the constitutional convention itself was convened was because these kind of before-the-hour populist, people like herman husband, a radical quaker who was involved in a lot of the shay's rebel job -- the whiskey rebellion, not shay's -- he was a quaker, so he wasn't involve inside taking up of arms. but he would give speeches. he was elected to the legislature of pennsylvania which was at that time the most democratic state constitution and was making an issue specifically out of attempts to create a central banking system to monetize the revolutionary war debt. and saw this as it, in fact, was, as a kind of a conspiracy, a cabal of the very, very rich

to -- >> you know why washington, d.c. is situated right here? >> indeed, i do. please tell. [laughter] >> it was the deal between hamilton and jefferson so that hamilton could get his way on the national debt, and jefferson said, okay, well, here's what i demand as my part of the deal, is that you put the national capital in my state. >> one reason why it was protested. so far away from many towns. in pennsylvania they just had problems all the time with veterans marching in front of them demanding things. um, yeah. so, um, so at the time it was the same issue. and, in fact, i found, one of the last quotes i found when i was writing the book i just had to put it in, it was so great, was the opening remarks of the constitutional convention. it was the governor of virginia at the time saying, well, you know, we've got a real problem in america today. we have way too much democracy.

[laughter] and they were totally up front about this, you know? like the constitutions are rigged so they're not too democratic, but the democratic elements, once you get this thing out of the bottle, it's really hard to put it back. we need to control these democratic stirrings, what are we going to do? and, in fact, one of the things they were most concerned about was financial issues because the first thing these radicals in pennsylvania were doing was trying to create these land banks where they would issue paper money that was designed to appreciate at 20% a year to wipe out debt. and this is -- when that happened, they panicked and periodly called a constitutional convention -- immediately called a constitutional amendment. and the fist -- first thing they said was only the federal government was allowed to create money. >> very old. the populists with their version of of that was what they called free silver. we had a gold standard at the time. it was deflationary which is disastrous if you are a debtor like farmers traditionally were,

so they wanted a silver standard which would have been inflationary. and the response from the republicans and the eastern establishment was to call them repudiationists. i always loved that word, repudiationists. >> yeah. >> they wanted to get out of their debt, you know? there's always that wonderful moral language. now they call the greek debt sinners. [laughter] it's impossible not to moralize these things. >> yeah. >> so there's a huge strain of that. but i think the reason i didn't talk about the populists as much is simply because that attempt to mobilize through the electoral means, i mean, it got the pop lists only so far -- populists only so far. and i think we're actually, we're more ambitious than that. we wanted a real genuine cultural transformation. we want to build a democratic culture, sort of grassroots democratic culture that hasn't existed. it's forward looking.

so that's why i thought things like feminism, the abolitionists, those were people that were aiming a direct moral challenge at the very basis of the society in which they lived. and you can't do that by running candidates. >> [inaudible] >> by running candidates. or even pushing a specific legislative agenda. i mean, doing so helps others who are running candidates and pushing a legislative agenda. but you need people who start building, as they used to say, the shell of the new society. and, which is why in a way the funny thing about occupy wall street people say, well, it flickered up so fast, and it seemed to fade out. well, we were actually aiming for a long-term strategy. a transformation of what the very nature of what democracy is. that's not going to happen in a year. that's going to take decades to really completely transform our basic idea of what our political relations are like. and in a way we were all dazzled by how fast everything went. and probably it's hard to think of an example of a movement that

came out of nothing to do so much in such a short period of time. but those weren't our ultimate aims. outiims wer extremely ambitious. >> and that leads to the next question i was going to ask you which is about how you measure, how you measure success in these movements. and you situate occupy in this global continuum of movements; the arab spring, the protests in greece, the protests in spain. some of these movements have done momentous things -- egypt, libya. but libya, i mean, after terrible bloodshed. you know? and so it's possible to say this was a success. but what, i mean, how do we measure what occupy's done? what's the metric for this? >> i think we're not going to know for a few years. and it might sound strange, but, i mean, we know some things we've done. and, um, i think what we can claim credit for putting social

class on the agenda of american politics again. and that's something that nobody had managed to do for 50, 60 years -- >> wait a second, i've been working on that for a long time. maybe i should claim the credit for that. [laughter] >> okay. i'll shut up. >> i know, i know. people set the stage. but, like, that was the breakthrough for it, you know? and it really was true. that 99% thing really worked. >> that's right. i totally agree with you there. and i'll turn an -- i'll shut up, folks, i promise i'm going to shut up. but i wrote a book some years ago called "what's the matter with kansas," and it was the same idea, was to put class back in the center of the conversation. and it takes, steers politics away from what i thought the dead end of the culture wars. and this was sort of shocking or, i thought, was shocking and a new thing to be doing at the time. but i have to say, it was, this is a point that was impossible to make and very difficult to make until all of a sudden in the summer of 2011 -- and you do

have to give occupy credit for that -- all of a sudden the way that we talked about these things changed, and opinions that i had been, you know, that by friends and i had been pushing for years and years and years suddenly became acceptable. and that was a remarkable moment, when that would. >> yeah -- when that happened. >> yeah. it's hard to to understand why it happens when it does. and it's not just class. i think this is what's interesting, is that we were really trying to bring anticipation to the whole idea of the 1% and the 99% which was floating around, the 1%, at the time. it hadn't really quite taken off in the way that it did. it was not just to talk about class, but to talk about class power. that's what's interesting about it because, you know, the interesting thing about the 1% is that they're not only the group to which all of the benefits of economics, economic growth have accrued over the past 20 years or so, but they're also the people who give, basically, all campaign contributions.

so, you know, essentially what you have is a small group of people who through this system of institutionalized bribery that we now call democracy are, essentially, paying off the politicians, and the politicians write the laws in such a way that they're going to essentially accrue all the profits from financial expansion. it's a completely circular thing. and what it means is that government authority, one could make the argument that in the final analysis the state really is the protecter of private property on the basis of the economic system. but now it's become the state is the direct enforcer of the economic claims of the class which is now the dominant class of capitalism. and that's what we were getting at. not only social class, but there's a new con fig be ration of social -- configuration of social class in this country whereby, i mean, it's almost like mafia capitalism. you know, mafia are people who are famous for sort of running casinos, bribing politicians, extorting protection money.

and engaging in various forms of extongs. that's, basically, the basis of the financial class. >> okay. so the question of tactics is always, for me, it's always what gets in the way of my, you know, appreciation of occupy. and i always come back to this, the idea of building a community. why was that so important? and occupying public space. i mean, the physical act of protesting in a public space, why is that for you so freighted with meaning at a time when, i mean, if you open up any magazine -- well, we can all tell anecdotes. everybody thinks that, you know, the world has moved online, you know? [laughter] one thing you don't need to do is go out in the city streets and do these things. we trade most stocks in these virtual exchanges anyway. does the new york stock exchange still even exist? >> it does, actually. [laughter] but -- >> so that's what, that's what

i'm wondering. why is there this emphasis on physical space, building the community there? >> it's a really interesting question, and i've actually given a lot of thought to it. because, you know, in a way what we have in the occupy movement is simply kind of revival of what was happening in the global justice movement in 1999, 2000, 2001. and then it was very similar in that the idea was we have this giant system which claims to be democratic, but it isn't. and most people don't even know it exists or how it works. in this case it was sort of imf, the world bank, the sort of global trade bureaucracies that nobody elected and that could overrule the decisions of elected governments. and what we were trying to do is not only expose the workings of the system, but at the same time counterpose to it an idea what real democracy would be like. so at least the people engaged in it, absolutely central to what we were doing. at the same time, what we ended

up doing, essentially, was organizing these giant carnivals and festivals. i actually referred to it as a kind of revolution in reverse. you know, the classic model of what's supposed to happen in a revolution is, first, you have the battle of, you know, the police or the army and battles in the streets. you win, and there's a gigantic popular festival and celebration. then you gradually form be sort of -- form sort of the sections, you form your directly democratic institutions. then gradually you're going to transform everyday life and our basic social relations. instead we start with a bunch of subcultures, hippies, punks, all these people who are trying to recreate social revolutions. they get together to form gigantic festivals which end with battles with the police. that was the old model. now all of a sudden we have this new thing. instead of creating these great carnivals against capitalism, festivals of resistance, we have a community, we have a camp.

the very activist mutual caring, dedication, mutual service itself becomes a gesture of defiance in the face of capitalism. and the most effective one, because it really took hold as an image. i think the reason why can only be understood if you think of changes in the nature of labor and exploitation and social class itself in america today. i was really impressed by looking at the we are the 99% tumbler page. some people involved in occupy put up this page where people could show their signs saying i am the 99%, here's my story. and we got huge response. thousands of people did it. and what i was -- and almost all of them were about people in debt, people out of work, people trying to take care of their families, these sort of desperate medical situations that were very heart-wrenching stories, a lot of them. the thing they had in common, first of all, the overwhelming majority were women. and even the guys were almost all involved in so kin ring lab.

they were either providing social services, or they were teachers, or they were involved in the medical profession one way or another. they were doing things to help people, doing things for people. and the kind of common complaint was like i want to have a life where i am nice to people, where i do something that's actually good for others. but if you wallet to have that kind of job -- if you want to have that kind of job, you can't even take care of your own family. this is ridiculous. and i think that crisis, that crisis of life-sustaining, caring labor and the utter devaluation of labor that actually does good for anybody else is at the core of, like, it's kind of moral perversion of that situation. was at the core of the crisis that sort of brought about the movement and brought so many people to the street. having a camp where we sort of defiantly take care of each other in the face of capital is the ultimate gesture against it. >> now i'm going to shift gears

here very slightly. you all think that david is this, like, you know, out there leftist. but he has some things to say in his new book that might prove a little bit astonishing to you. and what you're leading up to here, or what i'm going to try to get you to lead up to here is something that i've always found very interesting which is, um, your take on the conservative label liberal elite. >> yes. >> a phrase that they love to throw around. and you were edging towards it there, and i want you to complete the thought. >> okay. well, you know, this is a little bit inspired by my own reaction to "what's the matter with kansas," you know, what is the reason that so many working class people are attracted to right-wing populism more than left-wing populism? i thought this a lot. it's a key strategic question for anyone on the left, what are the other guys doing right? and, um, i was really impressed by two slogans. and how they didn't seem to have anything to do with each other, but, in fact, they seemed in

practice to have everything to do with each other. and those two slogans, one was support the troops. and the other one was this idea of hatred for the liberal elite. constant invocations of the liberal elite. and they don't seem to be any obvious reason they should be related, but they're the two ideas that seem to catch the most resonance in right-wing populism and really appeal to a lot of working class people. so i thought ability it, and i realize -- thought about it, and i realize in a way there is. imagine it this way. imagine everything we think about americans is not true, that we're not actually a nation of cynics all trying to get ahead, but we're a nation of frustrated altruists where people don't actually want to be thinking about money and material things. we want to be nice. we want to do something noble, do something good for people. well, how do you do that? well, in fact, the jobs where you get to be good to people are

almost doled out as a reward. that's what you do if you're really rich, you go out and spend your life doing charity. that's your reward. and, in fact, suddenly everything started to click. i realized that, okay, say i'm a truck driver from louisiana or i'm a air conditioner repairman in nebraska, and i have a smart kid. well, i can imagine the scenario where my smart kid might become a ceo. it's not likely, and i don't like ceos very much, but i can imagine they're braking into the economic -- breaking into the economic elite. but i can't imagine a situation where my kid is ever going to be drama create aric for the -- drama critic for "the new york times." why is it not going to happen? there's a million barriers. what it comes down to is if you want to get a job that isn't just for the money, a job that relates to any other type of value -- truth, beauty, you want

to go into the arguments, politics, you want to do something where you actually get paid to be nice to people or so follow something higher than money, something noble -- well, they won't pay you for the first two years. there's all these unpaid internships. first of all, you have to go to an elite college. even if you get in there, you have to live in new york or san francisco, some really expensive city for years. basically, it's impossible for anyone with that kind of background to break in. so, naturally, you hate those guys who grabbed all the jobs who get paid to do something noble, right? on the other hand, if you are from a working class background and you want to get paid to do something that you think is pursuing something higher and noble, what can you do? you can join the army. that's pretty much it. and one of the things that gave this away to me was, um, talking to an anthropologist named kathy lutz who's done a whole study at military bases. and one thing she finds is they always have these programs where they get the soldiers to sort of

go out -- this is in foreign bases in the philippines or latin america -- to go out and give free dent l check-ups or do cultural things. outreach. and today started all this stuff because they thought it would make people more accepts of the presence of military -- accepting of the presence of military bases. they found out soldiers who get to do this stuff are three times more likely to reenlist. so these guys, you know, they want to be in the peace corps. they don't want to be killing anybody. they want to do something nice. the only way you can get paid to do anything valuable like that. in fact, they're more likely to, you know, sign up to a job where, you know, you have the possibility of getting your head blown off, of getting crippled or killed if they're allowed to give free dental check-ups. i think that ooh tells you -- that tells you something. >> and the only way they're able to do that by conventional means is going to fancy college, doing the two years of unpaid

internship, things like that. >> right. >> just not available to most people. >> exactly. >> fascinating. all right, now i'm going to send you going the other direction of you've got a section in your last chapter called "reclaiming communism." [laughter] explain. on the occasion of margaret thatcher's passing, explain communism here. >> well, i think we are all communists most of the time, we just don't realize it. yeah. what do i mean by that? part of my argument is that we immediate to just totally transform -- we need to just totally transform common sense. this is how you know a revolution has happened, is that common sense is different. manuel wallerstein gives this great example, he's talking about the french revolution. he say, you know, in 1750 if you were to say social change is good, a simple one, most people would think you're aback coe. -- a whacko. the kind of people who thought social change was probably a good tho ngin kround in cafés,

wingnuts, rabble-rousers. you know, by 1850 pretty much anybody has to, like, claim social change is good what have they actually think. similarly, the idea of the state is important to guide social change. the state gets its legitimacy from the people. all these were considered crazy. so what a revolution does is transforms common sense, and it does it on a global level, not just where the revolution took place. like in 1848 it has these kind of effects. so what kind of common sense could be transforming now, and at the end i sort of prosocktily -- provocatively throw out examples. maybe the idea of work. i thought, all right, let's go totally crazy. communism. we have this idea that communism means state control, collective property. but the original sort of motto doesn't even come from marx, it's louis blank, and he probably got it from the workers' movement before that.

from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs. anybody trying to solve a problem to cooperate actually acts like a communist in that sense. if you're working for bechtel and someone's fixing a pipe and someone says hand me the wrench, you don't say, yeah, what do i get for that? you actually give the guy what he needs if you're able to because you're trying to solve the same problem. when there's a natural disaster, everybody reverts to communism -- >> by the way, that's a big problem for management theorists. years ago when i was reading a lot of management theory, there's a fact that there's a firm inside the firm, you suspend the operations of the market is disturbing to them. so one of the big sort of ideas of management theory in the '90s was to markettize every transaction. so, yeah, the guy would say, yeah, how much are you going to give me for that wrench? i mean, that's the ideal in the management theories of the '90s. okay, enough interruption. >> when they try to do that, it falls apart. i actually have another essay

saying that's why we don't have any scientific breakthroughs. so, yeah, much though they hate to admit it, much though they might sometimes try to mitigate against it. so in a sense capitalism is simply a bad way of organizing communism. we're already communists half the time. so expanding communism -- we're never going to expand it to anything. exchange will always have a place, always be some kind of competition, hierarchy, you know? but it's more like what would be a good way of managing these things, what would be a good way of managing commune um. and the same thing as i say about anarchism. anytime you work out a problem without calling the police, you're being an around keys. ananarchism, communism, they all already exist. all we differ is how large that zone can be expanded to. >> all right. so to get back to occupy and its, one of its connections with

washington, d.c., one of the moments that made occupy possible in your account was the debt ceiling debate in the summer of 2011, one of the real high points in this city's history. [laughter] okay, i'm being sarcastic there. it was a disastrous, stupid moment. i remember it very well. everybody was terrified, what were these people going to do. the price of gold was going like that, it was vertical. and since this is the city where that glorious contribution to human understanding took place, i want you to tell us what you mean by that. that that was this enabling moment. >> well, i think it was a moment where pretty much everyone in america realized that politicians didn't even have any interest in arguing about things that actually did affect their lives. that was, that was, essentially, the line that we were putting out when we were first organizing occupy. it's that, you know, politicians have made themselves irrelevant. they've cooked up these make belief issues that they can all

agree are worth arguing about. it has almost nothing to do with people's real problems. the only way to create a solution is to create a space where people can get together and start thinking about solving their problems for themselves. i've always said this, that the world does not lack anything. if there's anything that there's no shortage of whatsoever, it's smart people with creative ideas who could come up with solutions to all these problems. that's not the problem. the problem is most people on earth go around all day with all sorts of solutions in their head but are afraid to say that, because people will either laugh at them or hit them. and so how do we have the space where people can actually talk to each other about these problems? and that worked. ultimately, i think one of the powers of occupy was the delegitimization effort. and it seems our strongest suit. if you entered into the

political field itself, that's where they got the big guns, the money, the pr machines, they could overwhelm us. but the big leg we have is that most people think the politicians are crooks. they don't think they recognize the fact that they are. and how can we push that further, you know? a lot of successful revolutions, in effect, have worked that way. i always think of argentina. most people don't know how the third world debt crisis ended. essentially, it was the fault of argentina. but the hand of the government was forced. basically -- [inaudible] they can all go to hell. forget the entire political class, they'rer relevant, they're talking about stupid things, we don't need any of them. we're going to set up our own popular assemblies, we're going to occupy our factories and run them ourselves. we're going to create our own economic system. forget those guys. and in order to relegitimate themselves, the political -- kirschner realized he had to do something radical to

relegitimate the very idea that politicians could be relevant. and there's actually a sign, you know when that strategy has succeeded -- can when politicians can no longer go to restaurants. [laughter] this is it. without wearing disguises. politicians had to put on phony moustaches and things like that because otherwise people would start throwing food at them. i hear it's turning like that in greece now. when you get to that point that politicians are terrified, you know, to even face the people they're supposed to be governing, they've got to do something. be you know, there's all sorts of different radical plans they could adopt. we don't have to come up with one-quarter of them, but what he came up with was, all right, i will default on the argentine debt which then set off the ripple effect which, essentially, destroyed the iimf for the time being and ended the third world debt crisis. that's how it happened. and that's what we were trying to do. this was the perfect point where politicians essentially e do

legit mad -- delegitimated themselves 85% of the way. >> are there republicans doing your wishes? they're at it again, right? [laughter] >> wait for a bounceback very soon. [laughter] >> now, the -- another big actor in the book, you know, someone on the other side is, of course, the new york police department. >> oh, yeah. >> and they are on the one hand the open nemesis, right? the people who wreck occupy. but they're also, on the other hand, the way their hostility is one of the things that you turn to to sort of prove that occupy has the right answers. because otherwise why would they be so hostile if you weren't a real threat to the system? why would they do things like this? and i wonder if that isn't having it both ways with these guys. >> well, i mean, when you talk about the new york city police department, i mean, i'm not talking about individual police officers who are very much broken up, a lot of them, and very, very different opinions. a lot of them made a big point

of how they personally supported us. sometimes, you i mean, in bizare circumstances -- i have a friend who, you know, at one point they were doing intentional attacks on women. they would, like, ostentatiously groping women's breasts and things like that both to freak out the women and try to provoke the men to do something violet. one women screamed and called them perverts, i think they broke her thumbs. when she was in the hospital, she was talking to the cops after about six hours of pleading to go to the hospital, um, she was -- talked to the police, and they were saying, well, you know, personally we support you. keep on protesting. [laughter] you know, this gives you a sense of, like, how confusing it is to deal with cops a lot of the time. but i think that the thing you have to understand about the new york police is that a lot of these people, especially in precinct one which is like, you know, the wall street precinct, they get paid directly by wall street. i mean,secity work in

their uniforms with their guns for wall street firms. most of them for considerable hours a week. the head of the nypd used to be the chief of global security for bear stearns. and his boss, of course, mayor bloomberg, is a wall street executive. so, i mean, again, that point that there's really no distinction now between the power of the state and ten wall street. >> describing various members of the bush administration. you know, formerly from goldman sachs and formerly from bear stearns, formerly from -- yeah. >> yeah. and we now know what happens, like, the decisions to evict the camps was made by -- well, the fbi was in on it, homeland security, there were all these people, these fusion centers they set up to deal with domestic terrorist threats. but the interesting thing we now found out is that, like, representatives of the big banks sat in on these meetings. so the bankers and the police coordinated the suppression. they came up with a pop began da line, use -- propaganda line,

using the theme of dirt and pollution. that was always the excuse for kicking us out. it was all coordinated. again, that fusion of financial power and police power is, therefore, all the same. >> why not do it somewhere where they can't get at you, you know? think of -- >> [inaudible] >> canada. [laughter] >> no, look, there's, of course, private property, in cyberspace, in a town where you've, you know, a small town where for whatever reason the city fathers don't have a problem with you. i think of the hutterites in canada or any other -- lots of examples of, you know, communal farm aers who are building -- farmers who are building who have, in fact, built their -- >> we have farms as well. we have farms. actually, there's seven or is it eight occupy farms in new york alone. i mean, there's a lot of stuff like that that's happened and is a little bit off the radar, and

that's why we've been able to keep it. but the problem is you need a central place where beam can show up. this is our real crisis, right? in order for a movement to you, in any movement there's burnout. most of the people are still there, and we do have new people, but we don't have the same flow of new people as we used to because nobody knows where to go. back when we had a central park, it's a central place, it's in a city. anybody who wants to say, oh, i want to be part of that occupy wall street thing, they know exactly where to go. people will say, oh, you want to talk to that guy. oh, you're into banking, go there. and, you know, yeah, we have that online, but somehow it's not the same. i mean, you really need a physical place where people can just show up, meet people, start having considerations, hook up with other people's similar interests. and that's what they were determined we do not have. we tried to reestablish everything we could possibly think of in new york because this is a story most people don't know. after the eviction of the park we thought maybe we can meet during the day.

we found all these loopholes. union square was always open, so for the first time in 100 years they closed it at night and started sending in hordes of riot cops. we found a legal decision that said you can sleep on the sidewalk as long as you only block half the sidewalk, we started doing that in wall street, and they developed a special security zone where that law doesn't apply. we went to the federal steps, and we went to the place where they actually signed the bill of rights, you know, try kicking us out there. it's going to look bad. it took them about three days, and before long we were surrounded by s.w.a.t. teams and they terrorized people, so we finally left. we just weren't able to establish a foothold. they were just going to drive us out. they didn't care what the law said. >> i have to say -- are we going to take questions from the audience, is that the next -- i have one more thing that i wanted to ask david here. what was it? you know, i wrote all this stuff down.

you know, oh, you know what it was, i was reading this book by john steinbeck the other day, "indune yous battle," have my of you read it? classic strike novel from the 930s. i think it might have been one of the things that ayn rand used to write atlas shrugged. but in it the strikers, they're migrant farm workers, and they do camp, okay? they set up an encampment, and they run into the same problems you did. obviously, sanitation is -- >> we had sanitation pretty well handled. >> with right. as a pretext. and then, of course, there's the violence and, ultimately, everything falls apart. but when you're talking about a sort of traditional strike like that, there's always a sense that if they last long enough, they will win something tangible. and i always get the feeling with occupy that there was nothing like that on the horizon, that it was just like we're here, and here we are.

[laughter] >> well, we set up a network that's, um, nationwide. i mean, the tact that they're not -- the fact that they're not reporting it, something a lot of us notice is very interesting. right around the time of this mass eviction of the camps which we now know was coordinated around the country, all of a sudden the media coverage -- which had been intense, i mean, like nothing we'd ever experienced before -- stopped. to the extent that, like, i had like three different interviews on different tv shows that had been lined up where we were discussing, all of them immediately stopped talking to us as soon as that happened. so something happened in that regard. so i think that the story when we look at it in retrospect is going to be different. but anyway, there's a blackout. so most people don't know that, in fact, what we accomplished was to create an institutional structure which is still running. i mean, that's why when sandy happened, you know, hurricane sandy, we were the first guys in the field.

there was like 40,000 people registered in just a number of days doing relief work under our rubric, directly democratic direct action group. they're still out there. we have a huge infrastructure doing that. we have a strike debt campaign. we have a whole series of different things. we have most be cities, um, which are having mortgage crises now have, um, anti-eviction t'll come in ando occupations. so there's occupy foreclosed homes all over the country. endless varieties of things. there's just been a blackout. i think we also -- i want to end with this, because this is going to be on c-span. >> you have to take all their questions. >> yeah, i know. i'm going to end my part with this because i want to say this. that i think that what this shows us, um, is something really profound about american politics where, again, the right wing seems to understand something that the left wing, such as it is, does not. because the reason in this happened is because the liberal

organizations which had been supporting us, basically the left wing of the democratic party, you know, once the repression began, today decided, all right, enough is enough. i think they kind of expected us to turn into some kind of left-wing version of the tea party. maybe not support candidates, but get involved in legislative campaigns. when they found we were really serious about the direct democracy stuff, they became much more tepid, looked the other way. there was three broken windows in oakland which they got all excited about that had happened two months before. i only make the point that everybody in america seems to know there were three broken windows in oakland back in october. we only had one major incident of window breaking in new york on the six month anniversary of the occupation. there was a window broken by the nypd using a protester's head. that one seems to get no news coverage. it was a storefront window, too, and, you know, if they didn't care about the guy's head, they

should have cared about the window. anyway, this gives you a sense of just how much there was this dead air about this stuff. but i think and the reason why is because there was no human cry about the evictions. there -- somebody be, i don't know who, probably a lot of people -- decided it wasn't strategic to pick an issue out of this. and this is, i think, what the right knows that the left doesn't seem to have figured out, which is i guess if i wanted to make it into a formula, i would say, you know, you can't sell out your radicals on policy issues if you first sell out your radicals on existential issues. that is to say, you know, your average republican probably thinks militia guys are a bunch of nuts, but if anybody threatens the second amendment, they go crazy. they know you need to have radicals to your right so that you seem reasonable. and then you sell them out. >> right. >> but you don't sell them out on the existential issues. on the other hand, democratic left doesn't seem to have figured this out, you know? if the democratic left got as

excited about first amendment issues like direct attack on the very principle of the freedom of assembly, for example, as the right gets upset about any attack on the second amendment, we'd still be out there, and they'd still be relevant, and we wouldn't be arguing about cutting social security. we'd be arguing about prosecuting wall street. >> welcome to washington, david. it's, we call -- we have a name for that here. it's called triangulation, and only one of the two parties bothers with it. all right. we're going to take questions from the audience. [applause] >> thank you. thank you to david and to thomas. mic's going to come around. if you have a question, just raise your hand. >> i'd like to invite you to speculate a little bit about possible be -- possible solutions and next steps. and in particular, the idea of a basic income. >> coordinating committee of the

u.s. basic income guarantee network, and this idea of a guaranteed basic income is gaining a lot of attention in many be other countries. >> italy especially -- >> brazil especially, south africa, ireland. africa, parts of africa. >> yeah. >> and most people don't know about it and especially don't know that in the 1960s it was a moderate, mainstream idea that there should be some type of guaranteed income supported even by milton friedman -- >> i was going to say. yeah. >> so i'd just like you to comment on if you see any way that that might get some traction with occupy and with other groups. >> yeah, it's interesting. um, a lot of people -- there's a lot of people who have been talking about this, and that was actually, um, an idea that was percolating around during the global justice movement as well. a lot of people especially coming out of italy were talking about it. and then is there a possibility of having a global basic income idea as opposed to a national

one. i think the only state that has one is alaska? yes. yeah, they have a permanent one. interestingly enough, sarah palin presided over a basic income program. [laughter] basically a socialist state. she didn't want to admit that. but, um, yeah. it's an interesting idea. um, i'm, i'm not a policy guy, right? i'm interested in creating democratic forums and allowing people to debate these things and come up with ideas for themselves. so, you know, what sort of economic system should there be in a free society, i always say i'm less interested in coming up with a blueprint, and i am interested in creating institutional structures where people can decide for themselves what kind of economic system they want to have. but basic income is important, and it's good to put on the agenda. by own suggestion has been in a slightly different direction but not an irreconcilable one. i have always thought that,

well, that we could kill two birds with one stone, because at the moment we have two terrible crisis. we have a debt crisis and, you know, we have a global warming/climate change problem. the only thing that even did a little dent in climate change was after 2008 when they had a massive recession, and a lot of people were out of work. now everybody thinks the solution to problems, everybody should be working more. of course not, we're going to destroy the planet. and, in fact, what the debt crisis really is is, ultimately, people promising to work even more next year than they did last. it's basically a promise of future product it. so why not combine both? why not have as broad a jubilee as possible and follow that with a four-hour day? you know, massively reduce working hours. but basic income is another way of approaching the same problem. more radical in a way because it's a way of detaching labor from recompense. rather than a wage system,

what's to say everybody's guaranteed something, and it's not like people don't want to work. most people want to do something with their lives, except they want to do something that's actually meaningful. that's why they can get away with paying all those people who do work which helps people less than the people who are doing horrible stuff. >> so you talked earlier about the sort of commonality of altruism between the upper class and the lower class, and, i i mean, it's a very idealistic vision, and i thought i was an idealist, but then i became an economist. [laughter] my version of it is that there's also a commonality of selfishness between the 1% and the 99% because sort of those same instincts that cause, you know, mortgage bankers to blind themselves to the risk they were creating are the same as things we have of why people are flipping their homes, destroying the planet and doing things that they know are harming others. and in addition, i think that

there's also this sense in the upper class among undergraduates at harvard or mit who would like to do something that helps the world but also feel trapped in the same way that you described sort of a working class person. is that an illusion? is it untrue that the elites, you really have a choice, but we just would like the higher paying salary? is that an illusion, or, you know, what are we doing about it? >> well, i should clarify. a very simplified version of the argument. they exist in relationship to one another. one of the interesting things, one of my favorite thinkers is a french anthropologist. one of the most interesting things he argues in his book on the gift is that the very distinction between self-interest and altruism simply would have been inconceivable in most periods of human history. it never occurred to anybody that any act is either purely

selfless or purely selfish. real human beings are more comply dated. usually -- complicated. usually you're doing something for somebody else, or you're doing it because you hate somebody. if you go to a small village, i lived in a village in mad gas car for -- madagascar for a while, they thought the biggest social and economic problem was spite, that people would do things just because there's somebody they can't stand, and they'd do anything to hurt them. economists don't usually work that factor into their calculations. but you have to create very specific institutions to get both types of behavior. in fact, if you look at it historically, the idea of self-interest and the idea of charity and selflessness both show up at exactly the same time. starting around 600 b.c., you've got the rise of impersonal markets. and exactly at the same time and places they invent cash, people

invent all the world religions. it's uncanny. you say, well, here we have a space where we teach people just to get as much stuff as possible and not think about anyone else, and as soon as you do that somebody be else says, okay, here we'll have a space where we'll learn to give is better than to receive. [laughter] you know, they kind of follow one another. and whenever you have one, you will have the other. but rather than saying, oh, we can just get rid of egoism and just haval truism, you know, i'm saying we need to move to a much richer idea of what people are basically about which is, you know, much more subtle and complex than most of these models would possibly allow. >> okay, we have time for go more questions. we'll -- for two more questions. we'll take one over here. >> hi. so you were talking about the ability of the, the differences in the ability of the left, i

guess, to -- the left seems very able to mollify people, to sort of take an issue like, say, gay marriage and make a tiny, incremental change and really satisfy people and sort of push off its far left. and that, i think, is a big reason that, a big way that it is so different from the way that the right is able to, um, that the right still pays attention to its radicals, that the right takes its radicals really seriously. so i wonder what you think about the fact that so many people still are in really serious economic dire straits, complete hopelessness without really a way forward in this economy, but it doesn't ubt seem to translate into any desire for direct action. it seems like it's very easy that we have this feeling that we're in the midst of a recovery, and that's enough. and that really has allowed something like occupy to sort of, i mean, also with a lot of other factors like repression,

but allowed it to sort of lose strength and not turn into a more mass movement. >> well, i think one thing we have to think about is how we think of a movement. i'm involved in the strike debt campaign with occupy, and we wanted to make an issue out of debt because we found be when we have popular assemblies, we spent a lot of the summer having, okay, what issue is really going to take hold, what do people really respond to. it was all strategizing. so we started off with this series of popular assemblies in parks during the day before they could kick us out, about -- we had one on climate change, we had one on police brutality, stop and frisk, things like that we had one on debt, and that was by far the biggest. lots of people got very excited because everybody's in the same situation. they can't talk about it, they're ashamed, and it was incredibly cathartic for people to compare notes with one another. and they wanted to do it again. and it turned into a debt

campaign. one of the first problem problems we had was, well, how do you mobilize people around that? i mean, capitalism has shifted. most of the profits of wall street are from direct ex-traction largely -- extraction largely through debt. it's not from exploiting wages. but, you know, when you're exploiting wage, everybody's in something like the same place. they can talk to each other, they can form unions. what would be the equivalent in these new economic foreign rums? and we've been thinking about that -- forums? we've been thinking about that a lot. in some ways it provides amazing opportunities because suddenly workers and students are in the same economic circumstance. they have a lot more in common. that's why, you know, we found this incredible alliance between indebted students and, um, unionized workers in zucotti park and elsewhere which was an alliance which nebraska would have had -- which never would have had occurred in previous decades. in fact, antipathy from workers to such movements in earlier

times. but how do you actualize it? and we tried various things. for example, one thing we tried was to do a debt pledge. this was about student debt which is up to over a trillion now. it's a major form of debt, and we can't get out of it. we can't ask people to default, but why not do a pledge? let's get a million people to sign a document saying once we get to a million people, we'll all default at the same time and use that as a wedge. we found that it was really hard to get people to sign. and one reason for that, i mean, we have to analyze it. we got about 5,000, really not very much. and one of the reasons for that when we analyzed it, we realized a lot of these people are already defaulting. 20% of student loans are in default, and of the ones who aren't, they're thinking about it, you know? so the last thing you want to do if you think you're going to be defaulting is put your name on a document. [laughter] how better to screw yourself over? so then the question is, well, how do you organize people who almost by definition can't admit

to what they're doing? when we thought about it, we suddenly realized, well, wait a minute. these guys are practicing civil disobedience already. because what is civil disobedience to finance capital? not paying your debts, right? that's what they're doing. one out of every six americans or seven, i can't remember, definitely one out of every seven americans is now being pursued by a debt collector, and that doesn't include the 20% who are defaulted on their student loan and not to mention all those mortgages. if you add it up, probably a quarter of americans are actually practicing civil disobedience in one way or another. how much is political? you know, it probably varies from case to case. right now we're trying to put together a defalter's manual. we have, actually. debt resistors operations manual. you can look that up and download it. ..

>> these guys are thinking about how to offset the possibility. again, in a way, our potential of thought. and that did not quite articulate the default, for a ball. they are so terrified. it stems from the one quarter of all labor done in america today. what they call garden labor, which is exactly managerial and keeping people in line anything to prevent mass movement themselves encrypting the capitalism. we have this paradox supposed

situation and the cost of duty is part of the system before us. we can imagine anything else. >> are more quick question, then we will have a finding here. >> okay, this is off-topic. your dad wrote a little thing about the hispanic revolution, the currency, am i remembering that right? >> yes, my father did not aerated he wrote about this. that is why i am in anarchist are you later in his life, he

bought all of these coins when they were cheap and so forth and gone into this. put together this kind collection of emergency money. he actually wrote the book after would be a book on emergency paper money and federal articles these experiments. how we use it and how it is. >> okay. have i found a copy of that? to i have a few in my closet it is never actually bound.

if anyone is office society or whatever it is, listening to c-span, i would love it to be re-release. >> fantastic. thank you to thomas and david. thank you for coming and giving us what you can. [applause] >> is there a nonfiction author or book that you like to see featured on booktv? send us an e-mail at c-span.org or tweak us a booktv. >> what happened in minneapolis of 1999? >> start the book without meeting because of so informative. it 1999 the obesity epidemic is just beginning to emerge. it began to raise concern.

and among people inside the process of the processed food industry. ceos are some of the top manufacturers in north america. they got together to talk about this crisis and up in front of them, got none other than one of their own. he was armed and he was a response to elevate for not only the obesity crisis, but the rising cases of diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, he'd been linked foods with several cancers.

he pleaded with them to collectively start doing something on behalf of consumers. behind-the-scenes, food industry is intensely competitive. putting them towards a healthier profile of the product. it is to get them to do something. from his vantage point from the meeting was a failure. ceo reacted defensively. we have that has a deep reliance

on salt and sugar and fat? >> even a baby carrot and it doesn't grow that way. but typically, from my and common sense, the formula is something i'm writing about in the look. it is incredibly dependent on salt and sugar and fat. you can pick up the label and you can see, thanks to government regulation that we have, you can see the amounts of sugar and fat in these items and it is regularly extraordinary.

not just for flavor, but for convenience. also for low low cost. they can help us with using fresh ingredients. >> this month we are discussing how the food giant can help us. michael maas sat down to discuss his book and answer questions. you can watch the entire program online at booktv.org heard it he read the book this month, right on our facebook page, this book.com,/booktv. and join our discussion on both social media site. send your suggestions for next month and which books you think you should include on our online

programming. e-mail us at booktv@c-span.org. >> now joining us is a familiar face in a more earlier this. victor davis. he came out of his new book, to what you mean when you talk about this. >> their situations and consensual societies where people collectively are the leadership and it was a bad idea. or didn't turn out like we thought it would be. they are the military version of shame, or the liberty genre of saviors.

and they say, it is not lost. they have a hard line convincing people. they are eccentric personalities and they tend to alienate people. whether it's domestically or david petraeus. >> those are three of the generals that depict. >> matthew ridgway, who was going back to japan. >> did you have to narrow the list? >> i have people as diverse and

there are all sorts of figures. and rather than trying to be chronological, just be impressionistic which i thought were the most interesting and controversial and use them as a template to say they are applicable to other people. >> you write that most students come in even scholars have garnered little notice and use their time in obscurity to systematically review this strategy of an ongoing losing roar. >> they called him this and he didn't realize that he had been studying late at night.

he was a magnification of history. he had really thought it out in advance. they tend to be part of publicity. but they are serious students. david petraeus was part of our popular culture from 2007 to 2000 and but for 50 years, he was a student of talking strategy and political science. they adopted these personas and they sometimes pull us into thinking that they shot the place of the month, but they did not.

>> after saving him from the persians, they ended up as a bigger streets of constantinople. he had a really bad time and people were calling him a terrorist. then all of a sudden, i don't recall it, the incident started to appear. and that sort of fit the profile. >> victor davis hanson, was general macarthur on the list? >> no, one of the reasons is

that everyone knows of macarthur and i have written about this. people don't know who you're talking about aaron this individual died and no one knew who he was. no one had really known what happened to him. he faded a faded away. so try to get that in my book. >> his newest book is trickier. if you go to can see many videos with victor davis hanson talking about is love, as well as a longer version of him in fresno ta