for this week's conversations with great minds happy to welcome him into our studio pulitzer prize winning journalist and author was a foreign correspondent as for the public intimate knowledge of nearly every corner of the globe reporting from all over fifty countries his most recent book death of the liberal class was released this year and he is currently a senior fellow at the nation institute in new york it's my pleasure to welcome chris hedges based on thanks for coming in to have you here with us in your book death of the liberal class there's a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth on the liberal side of the spectrum as it were that you know chris hedges is picking on as he's taken as odd easy's he's calling us out. on. the people who represent the liberal class who oftentimes don't represent liberal values have walked away from the essence of liberalism and we're paying for we paid for it with the last

midterm elections where we saw the beginning of the empowerment of a lunatic fringe of the republican right. the fact is that traditional liberals were uncompromising in their defense of civil liberties in their defense of the working class in defense of social service programs that protected the weak the poor the mentally ill the indigent children especially children who were growing up in poverty they supported a robust system of public education including public universities city university in new york before nelson rockefeller could the budget was one of the great universities in the united states and produced an amazing. set of graduates mostly first generous sons and daughters of first generation immigrants who went on to enrich this country and all of these values have been abandoned with the rise of the corporate state and the. collaboration of liberal institutions the pillars of

the liberal establishment the press the democratic party liberal religious institutions labor unions culture. which have sold their souls and in our democracy has been severely weakened if not destroyed because of it let's talk about those traditional classical liberals that you're talking about my grandfather was a socialist in the twenty's and thirty's i think it's what my father became a republic of the but. he they were there was there was actually from my recollections of my conversations with my grandfather where he died there was a mixture of hope for things like the soviet union and some of those experiments and of very pragmatic very hard nosed. you know the great flood to strike you know that kind of stuff where they just said we're we're taking a prisoner right now we're going to sit here and you can bring out the dogs you can

shoot the guns were here and. where did those people go where they were destroyed and world war one was the rock on which they were broken the quote white macdonald with the rise of the creole commission committee for public information. the first system of modern mass propaganda which in cold hated fear. of both the internal in the external enemy so that to read people years like randolph born or chain adams who stood fast just spared how many of the progressives were seduced into supporting the war itself and then of course once the war was over neither did the alien sedition well the sedition the espionage act which were used to crush the remnants of these movements exactly and after the war was over the hated came the hated red and the liberal class which which stood between these militant and good including communist movements and of the ruling elite provided. kind of mechanism

are a safety valve by which incremental or piecemeal reform was made possible and the militant movements themselves were held at bay remember on the eve of world war one the capitalist class was terrified because the socialist movement was gaining tremendous ground a couple dozen socialist mayors appeal to reason a socialist journal had the fourth highest circulation in the country the masses eugene debs nine hundred twelve pulled a million votes and there was a conscious effort to break these movements and the liberal class was complicit in this the problem was that the liberal class in essence hollowed itself out especially with the witch hunts in the one nine hundred fifty s. is that where you had the universities the a.c.l.u. the press that's how i of stone arguably america's most important journalist of the twentieth century couldn't get a job you could even get a drop of the nation and he ends up printing i have still weekly in his basement and so the by the time the corporate state began to solidify with the reagan

administration furthered by of course the clinton administration we lacked the mechanisms by which to fight back liberal institutions had become so collaborationist with the corporate elite in the name of career as i'm there that they no longer stood for even the most basic who are elements of liberalism. those classic liberals that were talking about the from the activists from the air of arguably paternalism shari'a i mean you know teddy roosevelt even carrying forward some of their better oh certainly he was no liberal when he was the vice president under mckinley was a great follower of walter lippmann for me the sort of darth vader of american election was it a public opinion was a book teddy roosevelt you know what they were they you know ralph nader always says the last liberal president we had was richard nixon and was arguably right and he's arguably right because we still had movements that had frightened the power elite. and need them respond and that's very much why teddy roosevelt broke up

a lot of the truss and and why you get so many act passed and i you know seven i mean this was this was a direct assault on corporate power although there were some corporations some some of the corporate elite who were saying oh the tillman act great now we don't we're not getting shaken no at all iterations anymore in interest it's you it was really a complex time but the the the point question i have for you is that. liberal class of my grandfather and he was a first generation immigrant but had his father been here that they're that their generation came out of the out of the class struggles that came out of reconstruction and the rise of the railroad burns in the eighteenth seventies eighties eighteen ninety's charter modern era of the eighteen nineties the review of the rise of rockefeller and the change in charter was laws it was the push back i mean the grange movement was the it was the was the farmer saying we're

going to push that so and they were pushing back against naked corporate power that essentially consolidated a grip on this country after the civil war because lincoln had given it in today's dollars hundreds of billions maybe trillions of dollars to five railroad barons the right way so are we there or are we there and yet i mean is it it's actually worse . because we don't have those institutions and movements that were around at the turn of the so they weren't there in the eight hundred seven though they were split they were certainly there by the early one thousand nine hundred right and the eight hundred seventy s. was an extremely pernicious time because the robber barons but i think that there is a fundamental difference between the robber barrons and and corporate globalism because the robber barons however sort of feudal they were within national boundaries nevertheless ran their enterprises within the nation state itself now we have corporate habits which seek. the lowest possible wages around the globe in essence

the prison labor of china and is forcing the rest of. the planet's workforce has to compete with the slave labor that's new this destruction of trade barriers has allowed these corporations to pull their money offshore i mean even halliburton most of its subsidiaries are in dubai they don't pay taxes so what we're seeing is it similar to the age of the robber barons but in fact worse big. because there is no loyalty to the nation state the corporations are actually hollowing the country out from the inside they've destroyed our manufacturing base only nine percent of the american workforce is in manufacturing and what we've been is over thirty percent of revenue yes well a day in a world war two it was forty plus percent and what we're creating is a kind of neo feudalism and we're already seeing it with the leeching out of these huge post-industrial pockets of utter despair i did a story that's in the nation magazine this week on camden new jersey which per

capita is the poorest city in the country and not coincidentally the most dangerous law and and used to be a manufacturer it's of such poster child exactly it was how many hundreds so even probably tell krit we're talking with chris hedges his new book death of the liberal while you can probably tell i'm i'm. groping for some cyclical all hope here in you know maybe we've been here before maybe there's a lesson we can pull out of that to get out of this mess am i doing this in vain or do you see. i don't think we have been here before and here's why number one there's a supranational quality to corporate capitalism which actually works to destroy the capacity of national governments and the viability of nation states number one number two the assault on the ecosystem is unprecedented we had moments in human civilization when various groupings whether it's sooner or whether it's the myers

or the aztecs or destroy easter island they destroyed the environment in which they lived but we were able to see the rise of new civilizations or people were able to rise or someplace to go now there's no there's no giotto to what we're trashing we're replicating there's that great to biologist who wrote the book on the aborigines called the human species the future eaters. but here we have no other place to go there and that is. that is fundamentally different so we have powerful corporate interests that have commodified everything but human labor which human beings no longer in the ethics of corporations have any intrinsic value they are commodities to exploit until exhaustion or collapse and that is also true for the natural world we exploited natural world until exhaustion or collapse in the name of profit so we face an environmental crisis the heads of the industrialized nations along with their corporate backers go to copenhagen and what do they do

they shred kill good enough at a moment of crisis even if we stop emitting fossil fuels right now we'd still rise to the estimate is five fifty parts per million and. and we're all pretending it doesn't exist two hundred parts per million higher than what james hansen exactly does leave would be fifty percent i suppose that's right allowed to continue as we as we know it. is not a good time. we are. out of this pardon me as i gather my thought you know you think about the sweep and scope of this and at it and it can be overwhelming where we go from here but i think we have to concede the very unhappy fact that we have undergone a coup d'etat in slow motion and we have lost and they've won entire yes the corporate state has so corrupted. the levers of power as to render of the citizenry

disempower today it was reported on the merkel they're having this meeting or anticipating this meeting of the g. twenty it forget which i. scanned the article this morning financial times but basically she was saying protectionism no globalism yes no germany is actually a country that got where it is by protection. and still practices protectionism japan. south korea china highly protectionist states the united states we've protections away right it's shredding us. was she saying that because that's the best thing to say for germany or is she you know just part of this kind of transnational couple of internationalists who don't you know they don't sit around and conspire but everybody gets it well the germans is relational it's a little different than ours you know savings. are much higher per capita

they don't have the kinds of deficits that we do they're not trying to monetize their debt the way we are. so i think we are unfortunately in a rather unique and precarious situation so and in germany corporations are to have half of the board of directors made up of representatives of labor as well another thing sort you are you suggesting then that the death of the liberal class or the title of your book chris hedges is unique to the united states or the us in the u.k. you know liberal the death of i think when societies break down and market societies cease to function and one of the first victims is the liberal class you know it was an obsession with offsets notes from underground demons that's where the underground man that's what it is the man who went all the obama rallies and chanted yes we can and now feels betrayed and retreats the subpoena has latte to steal you know stereotype from fox news and say and says only fools and idiots achieve power and does nothing and dostoevsky's understood that when

those mechanisms that make incremental or piecemeal reform within the system no longer work which is what liberal institutions do. then you enter an age of moral meals then you enter an age where there is no way to address the grievances of citizens repression becomes more pronounced we are creating a kind of permanent underclass we're about to see unemployment benefits run out and with the new configuration of the house of representatives we may very well see them not extending. which means courtesy of bill clinton's so-called health care hell of a welfare reform people are going to have to try and survive one hundred forty three dollars a month so that rage which is a legitimate rage is being expressed through these very frightening proto fascist fringe movements and yet the liberal class or let's say be the public face of those people who present themselves as liberals because they no longer represent liberal values still speak in the bloodless language of policy and issues without

recognizing that that rage is legitimate and look i watched this in yugoslavia the one yugoslav which i covered for the new york times the war in yugoslavia was caused by the economic meltdown of yugoslavia not by ancient mr cater it's we can because our stars happened over and over and over and over again open the door for lenin the bolsheviks i mean the road republic the river there you go there it's it's it's a grim analysis we're going to continue our conversation with chris hedges here still ahead of the big picture. what drives the world the fear mongering used by politicians who makes decision to move it that it made who can you trust no one who is human view with a global missionary zeal where we had a state controlled capitalism and score that he's when nobody dares to ask we do you r t question more.

think. through. with us chris hedges is new book pulitzer prize winning author and reporter. renaissance man his new book death of the liberal class an extraordinary work chris we've been talking about the descent into no ism the descent into a permanent underclass neo feudalism. are we seeing and i keep looking for

historical allegories and maybe there aren't any it's seems almost like we could wander into a long stagnant period like europe did in the dark ages the so-called dark ages or we could see the rise of something like the weimar republic so is is your analysis so along those arrows on i think we live in what the political philosopher sheldon will and calls a system of inferred totalitarianism and that's different from classical totalitarianism and that it doesn't find its expression in a demagogue or a charismatic leader but in the anonymity of the corporate state that in inverted totalitarianism you have powerful core forces corporate forces that purport to pay fealty to electoral politics of the constitution the iconography and language of american patriotism and yet have so disrupted the mechanisms of power that the

citizenry the with the needs and and concerns of the citizenry are no long. are addressed in the wall in argues that in inverted totalitarianism un like classical totalitarianism economics trumps politics whereas in classical totalitarian regimes economics politics always took precedent over economic cause and politics of. a tool to facilitate policy politics and a hold it ruled by virtue of multi-generational but all as it was and for instance if you take the decision to destroy european jewry it from an economic standpoint it was an irrational decision where is in inverted totalitarianism of the primacy of the market everything is placed before the altar of the market all human behavior has to conform to the needs of the market now there's nothing in three thousand years of economic history to justify this utopian vision that the market always iran snubs and had read their god well greenspan favorite book. said that we

should all sacrifice human behavior to the it's an absurdity and it's utopianism you know which francis fukuyama and larry summers and thomas friedman feed us and say all this human suffering is worth worth it because we're going to get to paradise that's what isms do that's what and you and you and so it's a religion it's a religion it's a utopian belief system and remember utopia comes from a word cloying by thomas more in fifteen sixteen from the greek roots meaning no place doesn't exist it's actually just hope. it's not so i think that. i think that that that system that wall and describes is probably a correct characterization of where we are with this interesting twist. wolen argues in his book democracy incorporated that. you maintain a system of inverted totalitarianism even as wages decrease which real wages for

most american reporters have to climb for three or four years exact. through credit and through cheap mass produced goods now we're seeing the credit dry up there is no credit and we're seeing a permanent underclass which is so crippled by mortgage payments credit card debt medical bills that they can't even afford the mass produced goods and i spoke with wall and not long ago and asked him given that given that those are the control mechanisms could we see this system of inverted patella tarion as a flip into a more classical form of totalitarianism and he conceded that without those control mechanisms that may very well be possible and i think that the utter failure on the part of the democratic party and the liberal elite to respond to the to the financial meltdown in a rational manner and you see it in almost every column of the new york times columnist paul krugman writes which is we have to we have to get more money to

create jobs to rebuild the infrastructure to put people back to work to keep people in their homes two point four million two point eight million people tossed out of their arms last year another three million people this year. over fifty percent of americans are either underwater or they can't make their mortgage payments and yet we pass a jobs bill which gives fifteen billion dollars in tax credits to the corporations but the problem is right but the problem is we're not going to get any more money at all and krugman i've debated this with him that we did on a cruise ship that's. still holds to his colleague tom friedman's notion that free trade is a good brain well you know it's a supported nafta i don't want to pick on proven but his support and yeah i know it and this is and i in the end i think this is the liberal class that you're talking about the liberal plus is people who who you know it's very easy and in fact there's a certain kind of snobbery associated i think with the with the with the with the

thomas frank perspective i'm not picking on thomas frank is a brilliant guy. but put the perspective of what's the matter with kansas or that there's something wrong with these tea partiers and it's these people who are as they don't know what's going on but in fact there's something wrong within the liberal but that's exactly right you know that we are frank and it is a good book what's the matter with kansas but the final premise is that he asks how can these people vote against their own interest rates on a pittance they're not fighting against their own interests they fully understand that the liberal class betrayed them and those liberals who continued to speak in a way which by which they. expressed concern for the issues of working men and women supported a democratic power structure that simply since the clinton administration has made war i mean larry summers larry summers who destroyed the banking system deregulate in the f.c.c. destroying welfare nafta all these things came out of a democratic administration and barack obama i mean the tragedy for me of the obama administration is that in the last two years what they have done is codified the

destruction of international and domestic law put in place by the bush administration including the failure to restore basic civil liberties including his corpus it's staggering or poor posse come into our yes it's now legal for the u.s. army to turn its guns on america that's right something that i mean it eight hundred seventy we right we. the. the the way back you talk at the very end of your book you talk about how acts of defiance it's i thought of it as i was gandhi and it basically you know we're going to go to if we're going to get out we're going to go kicking the habit and that's nice but i'm not going down or if we go down might be like robbi potter is suggesting the s. and you economist was you know calling for a change or trade laws or that we hit bottom and we all go oh a war wake up and that pops us back out of there is some sort of

a revolt against the ruling elite world. why. they sponsor well having as it happened at the g. twenty in pittsburgh and having just come from toronto where they just finished the g twenty. the they're not radical just in the streets and it will be out that track tony and controls the security state put in place for instance in the g twenty was totally disproportionate to the protests were there and most of the people in pittsburgh were retired quakers and sandals and yet they literally militarized the whole center of the city bringing back a national guard battalion from iraq in full combat gear and i think that we should not underestimate the ability of these corporate entities to use very fearsome and frightening forms of control to keep any kind of. you know is it insecure you're what you're describing chris and we've got about three minutes here what you're describing is the turner diaries i mean this is what animated to

mcveigh it was the the there would be some horrific event in the church diaries it's blowing up a federal building because the the corporate state to plant its foot down and take away the guns from the good god fearing christians and they rise up in rebellion and now they're organized it's called the tea party right will you know i quote from joe stack's manifesto not in any way to the flu is plain if you are. you know the guys that are living across an apartment with an elderly woman it's very rash and yes she's eating dog food because her husband her she's a widow her husband worked for the steel factories his entire life their pension went up in smoke these are these are very severe and and and. and disturbing dislocation that are fueling. an irrational political response at the end of the book i talk about the difference between rebellion and revolution revolution is the belief that you can recreate

a state structure and it exposes the enter because to me i pray. rebellion in a constant kind of battle against power sources of any kind the julian benda vision of the world i can name is not of this world and actually close now if you and i think that given the power of the corporate state we have to recognize that it's probably rebellion that will save our souls that will create at least within local communities the possibility i mean the food structure the distribution of food because of agribusiness in the united states is so fragile all my fruits and vegetables come from california live in new jersey that's not a sustainable system with the rise of fossil realize you're starting to sound like glenn beck and the mormons yes you know there's they're not always wrong in their critique of this destructive force like ours right but it's what they propose as an alternative that it's so terrifying and though that was the problem with marx so.

so rebellion. as opposed to really you know the french revolution went badly wrong you know you go it was so gung ho it was going to go over there to help them out didn't work out so well but. one of the forms of rebellion but they you know he we are taking your your courage and i'm so of course deeply would it to nonviolence because i know what violence does to human beings as a war correspondent even a supposedly just cause that once you embrace it you you replicate the paranoia of the internal security the purges you become the monster the weather underground essentially became the very most stores try to fight you saw it so. i think that. we are seen at a grassroots level. important forms of resistance sustainable agriculture sustainable entropy energy the more we can sever ourselves from the tentacles of the corporate state the more we can be self-sufficient the more freedom we have because if things begin to go bad you can be damn sure these people are not going

to take care of us they're going to take care of them they're. to do what my only klein said in disaster capitalism which is to retreat into their little gated compounds where they have access to security goods and services that are denied to the rest of us so it's incumbent upon us not to trust into a system which and theological terms you know it is core is a system of death brilliantly said chris hedges thanks for coming out like some great talking with the death of the liberal thoughts by chris hedges. and that's the big picture for more information on the stories we've covered because their website said tom foreman dot com speech an oregon r.t.r. can also take it or to you tube channels there are links said tom hartman dot com and this entire show is also available as a free video podcast on i tunes we have a free tom hartman i phone and i pad out at the app store you can send us feedback at twitter at tom underscore hartmann on facebook underscore and on our blog just

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