chris hedges, author, journalist, pulitzer prize winner is our guest this month. sonora california, good afternoon. >> caller: hi, mr. hedges. you mentioned earlier about going into i think the other car, i think he said iraq and we talked about iran. and i'm kind of wondering, what you think it would take for us to get into iran out and then what do you think would be the advantages and the consequences if we don't? >> guest: well, first of all, and i covered iran, i spent a lot of time there including some time in iranian jail cells. i was deported at one point in handcuffs. my best guess is that the arena regime is trying to build a nuclear weapon. but having coming out of the middle east, spent as long as i have in the middle east, that doesn't worry me. what worries me is the transference of that technology to nonstate groups. iran has an address, and states that have an address our i think very unlikely to use those weapons. i think that iran wants it as a defensive measure. i think they understand that if iraq, for instance, had had a nuclear weapon in a way

out acts of civil disobedience if we're going to protect those interests. >> host: next call for chris hedges comes from new milford connecticut. george, you are on booktv. >> caller: hi, mr. hedges. i would like to ask you about, you mentioned smedley butler a little bit ago. could you talk of a more butler and his role in the 1930s, plot to seize the white house? and also if you could speculate on why we know so little about that plot and about general butler himself? thank you. >> guest: butter, and i think served 33 years and for much of something in the u.s. marine corps, after the war began to reflect, i think we had a current figure, a colonel in the military, also he engage in that kind of reflection after he left service, begin to look at why interventions were carried out on whose behalf they were carried out, and butler writes that he commanded units that invaded, you know, the dominican republic to make it sure for -- make a safer sugar interests. cuba to make it safer banking interests. and wrote this pamphlet, which is a very long, calls wars abroad to which he lays out that it'

. >> up next, author and journalist chris hedges. the pulitzer prize-winning foreign correspondent called, e-mails and tweets on topics such as war, religion and politics. chris hedges told a master's in divinity and is the author of nine books including "war is a force that gives us meaning," "losing moses on the freeway: the 10 commandments in america" and his latest, "the world as it is: dispatches on the myth of human progress". >> host: in your most recent book "the world as it is: dispatches on the myth of human progress," you write brace yourself. the american empire is over and the dissent is going to be horrifying. how did you come to that conclusion? >> guest: well, first of all, i spent 20 years on the outer reaches of empire as a foreign >> first of all i spent years on the outer >>reporter: of empire. i have seen an aspect that most people have not unless you are in the military or foreign service. and i think all of the signs, the red warning signs are there. also the fact that i spent so long outside the united states

try and read every night for, you know, two, three, four hours. >> host: vermont, you're on with chris hedges. go ahead, jack. >> caller: hey, chris, your amazing to -- you're amazing to listen to. you and richard wolf, between the two of you, i take up a lot of my time listening. i'm going to -- i'm going toward the environment. i've got a list here of a million things, and i only have a short time. so we're running out of time. you know it, i know it, the people that know it really know it. we've been trying to tell 'em since the '70s, the environmental scientists first brought out the issue of it was the green originally. the progress is pretty grim when you look at what we just did down in durbin, it's almost criminal, the response of the united states in terms of not taking any leadership and putting this thing off. when you have a -- scientists around the world saying we only have a short period of time here to get going on this, and we're going to tip to the other side and not be able to bring it back, somehow and how are we going to do it? we need to take this corporate. and i bet you

yourself let alone them coming to your rescue because i want to turn to a little clip here from chris hedges a former war reporter who is now an independent journalist and commentator and here he is on democracy now being interviewed about the national defense authorization act he is suing the government to try to stop that and he notes that the intelligence community in front of congress testified that they don't actually need the authorization that was being granted to them so he asked why and i think we have to ask if the security establishment did not want this bill and the f.b.i. . director mueller actually goes to congress and says publicly they don't want it why did it pass what pushed it through and i think without question. the corporate elites understand that those things of certainly economically are about to get much worse i think they're worried about the occupy movement expanding and i think in the end and this is some position they don't they don't trust the police to protect them and they want to be able to call in the army and if this bill goes into law and slated to go into

more control on what we see here and what we could say and now chris hedges is one of these guys that i would imagine the government would love to marginalize even more than they've already marginalized by not having him on mainstream television he thinks that the n.d.a. is basically allowing for the indefinite military detention of american citizens as it relates to the upcoming financial collapse so they're kind of making some some moves here because they know that this u.s. economy is in the process of free falling do you see that absolutely no question there has been no and we've been tracking this the collapse not for well over a year now as as as this tightening down has taken place and we saw it with the occupy movement also in which i was deeply involved that that the government through whether through homeland security or any parts of the federal government and state governments are are doing everything they can to choke off and preemptively prepare for what they know is going to be civil unrest and i also think they're trying to stir it up themselves so that they can dig adv

that's chris hedges writing in "empire of illusion." he is the author of nine nonfiction books, and he has been our guest for the last three hours here on "in depth." very quickly, here are his books. war is the force that gives us meaning, what every person should know about war, losing moses on the freeway, american fascists, i don't believe in atheists -- which is now when atheism becomes religion -- collateral damage came out in '08, empire of illusion, a bestseller in '09. another bestseller, death of the liberal class in 2010, and the world as it is in 2011. mr. hedges, thank you for being on booktv's .. isaacson speaks at the computer history museum in california for about an hour and a half. >> welcome to the computer history museum in. i am john hollar. welcome on behalf of the trustees and our staff and members. everybody associated with the museum. we're delighted you are here. i want to thank our good friends at intel who sponsored the revolutionary ceres. season one as we are calling it provided support for this series. in

. >> chris hedges. today's economic and political climate. >> well, when norm jobs he has made that comparison. i think in some ways, yes, it is difficult to make those historical analogies because one has to be very cognizant of the major differences, including the massive well corporation, the fact that germany had no real tradition of liberal democracy under its market. but that heat that there are so frightening similarities, the most important being hit the american working class. the disenfranchisement of working men and women, you know, used to be in this country going back to the 50's and 60's that you could work in an auto plant or a steel mill had make a salary that would actually support a family and allow you to buy a small house and send your kids to college. you had medical benefits in the pension plan. the private sector economy. low-wage. households. but only the people tend to work more than one job, but almost everyone is working in order to keep afloat. that has been a devastating cha

they were raising children and never an undergraduate living with other kids and not even -- chris: high hedges. i love this idea, the suburbanite. let me ask you about his philosophy because his critics have said he doesn't have one. people who have worked with him, people who i've talked to worked with say he's data driven. he's almost like an investment banker. a young person. constantly trying to find out information. is he data driven or does he have some basic philosophical notion that he's trying to follow? >> i think what you see with romney, and you see this, his governing style most clearly in his first two years as governor of massachusetts, he was a best and brightest guy and brought in people irrespective of party and wanted to tackle big issues. health care, the biggest of them. he was interested in solutions. he's an input-output guy and not an ideology guy. chris: how would he deal with an issue? we talked about all the time on this program, everybody in america talks about, the threat from iran. how would he decide whether to bomb iran or let israel bomb iran? how would he do t