for this week's conversations with great minds of happy to welcome him into our studio pulitzer prize winning journalist and author who is a foreign correspondent as for the public intimate knowledge of nearly every corner of the globe reporting from 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 taste 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 us he's taken as audience he's he's calling us out. on. well 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 the lunatic fringe of the republican right. the fact is that projection 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 gutted 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 this talk about those traditional classical liberals that you're talking about are my grandfather was a socialist in the twenty's and thirty's i think it's what my father became a republican. he they were there was there was actually from my recollections of my conversations with my grandfather died there was a mixture of hope for things like the soviet union and some of those experiments and. a very pragmatic very hard nosed. you know the great flip to strike you know that kind of stuff where they just said we're we're taken

a president right now we're going to sit here and you can bring out the dogs you can shoot the guns were here and. word of those people go well they were destroyed and world war one was the rock on which they were broken to quote white mcdonald with the rise of the creole commission committee for public information. the first system of modern male mass propaganda which in cold hated fear. of both the internal in the external enemy so the red pete figures like randolph born or jane adams who stood fast despair how many of the progressives were seduced into supporting the war itself and then of course once the war was over and the lady of 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 hundred came the hated red and the liberal class which which stood between these militant and progress including communist movements and the ruling elite provide. it is

a kind of mechanism or 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 one hundred twelve polled 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 have stone arguably america's most important journalist of the twentieth century couldn't get a job you could even get a job in 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 a thread that they no longer stood for even the most basic core elements of liberalism. those classic liberals that were talking about the from the activists from the era of arguably the turn of the century i mean you know teddy roosevelt them carrying forward some of their banner of certainly he was no liberal when he was vice president under mckinley was a great follower of walter lippmann for me the the sort of darth vader of american electorate was 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 is arguably right and he's arguably right because we still had movements that frighten the power. elite

and made them respond and that's very much why teddy roosevelt broke up a lot of the truss oh yeah and and he got some one 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 this woman act great now we don't we're not getting shaken no a politician anymore that interest is it's where it was really complex time but. the point question i have for you is that. liberal class of my grandfather and he was a person or an 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 seventy's eighty's eighty ninety's the charter modern era of the eighteen nineties there were the rise of you know rockefeller and the changing charter was laws it was the push back i mean the grangemouth was the it was the was the farmers saying we're going

to push back so and they were pushing back against naked corporate power that is actually consolidated a grip on this country after the civil war because lincoln a given in today's dollars hundreds of billions maybe trillions of dollars to five railroad barons be rightly so are we there or are we there again i mean is it was 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 eight hundred seven though they were split they were certainly there by the early one thousand nine hundred eight and the eight hundred seventy s. was an extremely pernicious time because of the robber barons but i think that 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 head idiots would 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 this slave labor that's new this destruction of trade barriers has allowed these corporations to pull all 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 was over thirty percent we're going to yes well at the end of 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 role and and used to be a manufacturer it's the sub hoster top exactly it was a management so even probably tell krit we're talking with chris hedges his new book death of the liberal class you can probably tell i'm. groping for some cyclical 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 brain 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 five villainy 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 destroyed 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 enjoy someplace to go now there's no place those orders were trashing were replicating and there's that great to just who wrote that book of 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 a 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 now the heads of the industrialized nations along with their corporate backers go to copenhagen

and what do they do they shred kyoto do nothing at a moment of crisis even if we stop emitting fossil fuels right now we 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 her to be fifty percent i suppose that's right why continue as we as we know it. is not a good time. we are. out of this pardon me as i gather my thoughts you know you think about the sweep and scope of this and it and it and it can be overwhelming where do we go from here though 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 have entirely yes the corporate state has so corrupted. the levers of power as to render of the citizen

ri disempower today it was reported on the american they're having this meeting or anticipating this meeting of the g. twenty i forget which i. scanned the article this morning the financial times basically she was saying protectionism no global was a yes no germany is actually a country where it is by protection. and still practices protectionism. and. south korea china highly protectionist states united states we've protections away right it's shredding us. was she is 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 german situation is 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 have to have half of the board of directors made up of representatives of labor as well another thing sorry are you suggesting then that the death of the little class or the title of your book chris hedges is unique to the united states or the us in the u.k. no liberal the death of a i think when societies break down and market society cease to function and one of the first victims is the liberal class you know it's an obsession with garces notes from underground demons that's where our underground man that's what it is that the man who went all the obama rallies and chanted yes we can and now feels betrayed and retreats to sipping his latte to steal you know a stereotype from fox news and say and says only fools and idiots achieve power and

does nothing and dostoyevsky's understood that when those mechanisms that make incremental or piecemeal reform within the system no longer work which is what liberal institutions to. then you enter an age of more meals then you enter an age where there is no way to redress the grievances of citizens repression becomes more pronounced we are creating a kind of permanent underclass who are 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 and 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 the 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 war in yugoslavia to cover for the new york times the war in yugoslavia was caused by the economic meltdown of yugoslavia not by ancient history kate that we can because i was happy for the world over and over and over it open the door for lenin in the bolsheviks i mean in the roman republic the really out 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. made who can you trust no one who is human view who would have noble mission where we had a state controlled capitalism in school that he's when nobody dares to ask

we do you are t. last gen more. for. with us chris hedges his 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 descends into now was a descent into a permanent underclass neo feudalism. are we seeing and i keep looking for

historical allegories and maybe there aren't any good 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 long goes as law i think we live in with the political philosopher sheldon will and calls a system of inverted 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 and the constitution the iconography and language of american patriotism and yet have so disrupted the mechanisms of power but the

citizenry the with the needs and and concerns of the citizenry are no long. are addressed in a wall in argues that in inverted totalitarianism unlike classical totalitarianism economics trance politics whereas in classical totalitarian regimes economics politics always took precedent over economic horse and politics of. a tool to facilitate holiday politics i mean it was old rule by virtue of multi-generational but it wasn't it wasn't for instance if you take the decision to destroy european jewry it from an economic standpoint it was an irrational decision whereas 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 is an area where there are good well greenspan's favorite book. that that we should all sacrifice human behavior to that

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 it worth it because we're going to get to paradise that's what isms do that's what and you can you answer it's a religion it's a religion it's a utopian belief system and remember utopia comes from a word coined by thomas moore in fifteen sixteen from the greek roots meaning no place doesn't exist it's actually just so you know it's it's so i think that. i think that that that system that will in describes is probably a correct characterization of where we are with this interesting twist wolen argues in his book the martyrs incorporated that. that you maintain a system of inverted totalitarianism even as wages decrease which real wages for

most america are satisfied for three years exactly. through credit there and through cheap mass produced goods now we're seeing the credit dry up there is no credit and we're seen 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 roland not long ago and asked him given that given that those are the control mechanisms could we see this system of inverted totalitarianism 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 work of the financial meltdown in a rational manner and you see it in almost every column 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 comput eight million people tossed out of there as 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 crew is right but the problem is we're not going to get it in our budget well and krugman i've debated this with him in fact we get 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 i support and yeah i know i and this is and i and i think this is the liberal class that you're talking about death of liberal causes people who are 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 the perspective of what's the matter with kansas or the 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 the the i frank and it is a good book or what's not real kansas but the final premise is that he asks how can these people vote against their own interest it's a pittance they're nothing against their own interests they fully understand that the liberal class betrayed them and those liberals who continued to speak in a language 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 you regulate 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 starting or more posse comes out yes it's now illegal for the u.s. army to turn its guns on america that's right something that i mean if eight hundred seventy we. rolled out. the. the way back you talk and at the very end of your book you talk about how acts of defiance . i thought it was always gandhi and that basically you know we're going to go if we're going to get out we're going to go out kicking the habit and that's nice but how about not going down or if we go down like robbi potter as suggested in the us a new economist was you know calling for a change or a trade laws or that we hit bottom and we all go through a war wake up and that pops us back out of there is some sort of

a revolt against the ruling elite world. why it is possible 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 of the track only in 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 a very fearsome and frightening forms of control to keep any kind of. you know if you're in syria 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 tim mcveigh it was the the there would be some horrific event in the turner diaries it's blowing up a federal building because the the corporate state to clamp its foot down and take away the guns from the good god fearing christians and they rise up in her belly and and now they're organized it's called the tea party right well you know i quote from joe stack's manifesto and i'm not in any way that the flu is playing if you are reading this bill you know the guys the live in across an apartment with the elderly woman it's very rational 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 a belief that you can recreate

a state structure and it exposes the enter kissed and made. 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 but actually close matthew 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 in the mormons yes you know there's they're not always wrong in their critique of this destructive force a sort of ours right but it's what they propose as an alternative that so terrified and i know that was the problem with marx so it was so rebellion. as

opposed to really you know the french revolution went badly wrong and so are you going it was so gung ho he was going to go over there and help them out you know the more go so well but. one of the forms of rebellion on the t.v. or taking or i would courage and i'm towards deeply wooded 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 of the purges you know you become the monster the weather underground essentially became the very maestros trying to fight so. i think that. we are seen at a grassroots level. important forms of resistance sustainable agriculture sustainable and energy the more we can sever ourselves from the tentacles of the corporate state the more we can be self-sufficient the word 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 so chris hedges thanks for coming up next some great talking with you just a liberal class by chris hedges. and that's the big picture for more information on these stories we covered this their web site that's all marman dot com speech at oregon r.t.r. problem also triggered 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 thom hartmann i phone and i pad out at the app store you can send us feedback at twitter underscore hartmann on facebook underscore and on our

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