thank you very much my last three books death of the liberal class which looked at the collapse of all of the traditional mechanism by which we made incremental and piecemeal reform possible how that happened decimation of the movements that opened up the space in american democracy illusion the end of literacy and the triumph of spectacle which examined the rise of the image based spectacle based society totalitarian states are always image based and spectacle driven severance from a print based culture the infusion of sophisticated forms of propaganda to make us confuse how we are made to feel with knowledge the porn of a cation of american society the commodification of human beings and the last book which i wrote with the cartoonist joe sacco days of destruction days of revolt which examine the sacrifice owns in america starting with pine ridge south dakota looking at camden new jersey per capita the poorest city in the united states the coal fields of southern west virginia are produce fields places where  unregulated capitalism have destroyed the environment communities families and finally lives their health their physical health and we wrote that book because we believed it was incumbent upon us to look closely at those sacrifice owns now that global capitalism has made us one vast sacrifice on this book is i no longer analyze or dissect the collapse of american democracy the corporate coup d'etat that has taken place the imposition of what our greatest living political philosopher sheldon wolin who is in a retirement community about an hour from here calls our system of inverted totalitarianism he lays this out in his book democracy incorporated arguing that it is not like classical talent tarion ism it doesn't find  expression through a demagogue or a charismatic leader but through the anonymity of the corporate state that in a classical totalitarian regime you overthrow a structure and the language of patriotism the constitution the free press and yet internally have seized all of the levers of power to render the citizen impotent and this book begins from that analysis that understanding that our democracy has been extinguished that the consent of the governed has become a cruel joke over and over what we as citizens demand or what we as citizens once assumed as part of our rights within a capitalist democracy have been taken from us in the two thousand and eight financial meltdown constituent calls were one hundred to one against the bailouts for the big banks and wall street across the political spectrum and yet that class of global speculators and speculation in europe in the seventeenth century was a capital crime and speculators were h past anyway the infusion of corporate money into our elections the rewriting of our constitution by judicial twisting our form of legalized bribery into a justification for corporate cash unlimited corporate cash as being allowed under the constitution as the right to petition the government the refusal by the court system to challenge the evisceration of our privacy we now are the most watched monitored photographed ease drop population in human history and i covered the sta in east germany during the revolution the use of the espionage act to shut down whistleblowers essentially extinguishing any serious investigations into the centers of power section ten twenty one of the national defense authorization act which overturns over one hundred fifty years of domestic law and permits the seize american citizens who quote unquote substantially support the taliban al qaeda or something called associated forces another nebulous term stripped them of due process and hold them in military facilities in the words of that section until the end of hostilities which in an age of permanent war is a lifetime when judge katherine b forrest wrote her opinion after the ruling she said that she struck down that law she issued that temporary injunction because it opened the way to criminalize an entire category of people and she brought up the internment of one hundred ten thousand japanese during world war two the response of  administration was chilling not just government attorneys but attorneys for the n s a visited her chambers the day of her ruling and in the name of national security a to revoke her decision to lift the temporary injunction and to her credit she refused that was a friday afternoon by nine am monday morning they were at the  court the second circuit demanding the same thing and unfortunately the second circuit agreed and why the lawyers and i wondered why we knew that appeal but why did they act out aggressively and i think the only thing we could determine was that they're already using the law most likely against u s pakistani dual nationals  graham and if that injunction was allowed to stand and if those u s citizens were able to escape captivity they could hold the government in contempt of court and how did the second circuit justify what is patently an unconstitutional misuse of the military as a domestic police force empowering soldiers to carry out acts of extraordinary rendition on the streets of american cities they did it the way the courts have been functioning especially after nine eleven i was a plaintiff as well and clapper versus amnesty international which before the snowden revelations a challenge t and the government attorneys reached the supreme court told the court that the charge made by myself and the other plaintiffs that we were under surveillance was speculation and then went on to say that if we were being watched by the government we would be told and believing the government attorneys the supreme court denied our standing our right to bring the case and the second circuit waiting for that ruling turned around and said if hedges does not have standing  as a plaintiff in clapper versus amnesty international then he does not have a standing in hedges versus obama in the case was thrown out and it is law and yet there when they ran opinion polls on that section of the n d a it had a ninety seven percent disapproval rating and it is law anyway the t p p and cafe which no one wants the destruction of our tea period environmental regulations what are left of them the further disempowering of the american working class trade agreements being rammed down our throats by corporations and the specter of elected officials not being allowed to speak to us about what are in those agreements even if they take notes when they leave the room those notes are confiscated over and over example after example we see that we no longer count with the rise unfettered unregulated capitalism has no internal constraints and when you strip away the external constraints it commodifies everything human beings become commodities the natural world becomes a commodity that exploits until exhaustion or collapse and that is why the assault on working men and women is intimately twinned with  on the ecosystem that sustains life itself so this book asks something different it begins from the belief that the mechanisms including electoral politics that once made reform possible are irredeemably broken and it calls for revolution it calls for an overthrow of corporate power it calls for acts of mass civil disobedience that disrupt forces that if left unchecked will extinguish all of the systems of life including the natural world that we depend on for existence and what will that rebellion look like i've covered war i know violence i fear it i understand that poison and yet i'm not a pacifist i was in when it was being shelled by the serbs two thousand shells a day constant sniper fire four to five dead a day two dozen wounded a day the city was surrounded by a trench system for three and a half years and we knew that if the server forces broke through those trenches a third of the city would be murdered and the rest would be driven into displacement and refugee camps and that was not a supposition it was what we had seen in the dream the valley and invoke of our and at that point when you are faced with forces bent on your own annihilation you employ violence there was no discussion in those basements under that siege about pacifism and yet the tragedy is that once you use violence even for a purportedly just cause you become contaminated by it in wars that are about self preservation as that war in bosnia was for the muslim led government or in wars that are about overthrowing colonial occup ers the war of independence and i'll geria the war in vietnam the wars being waged in iraq and afghanistan violence has an eff that can work but revolution is different and we speak about the american revolution but that's a misnomer the american struggle was the overthrowing of a colonial occupier at the time the most potent imperial power on the world prussian mercenaries marching through new england one of the largest armada ever formed by the british to shell and then occupy new york but revolutions are internal affairs that pits citizen against citizen they have a different dynamic and in fact although violence can be part of a revolution successful revolutions are fundamentally nonviolent because as the great theorists of revolution crane brinton and davies and others have pointed out no revolution is successful until significant elements of internal security defect or refuse to protect a discredited regime we saw that in the russian revolution with the petrograd bred riots the cossacks arrived the enforcers of th and refused to fire on the crowd they rushed the tsar back from the front and he abdicated in a railway carriage when the show off fled iran in one nine hundred seventy nine one of the most well equipped well trained sophisticated military machines in the middle east would no longer defend his discredited regime this was true in cuba went out to flood was true in nicaragua when it was true in east germany when ira conacher sent down an elite paratroop division to leipzig to fire on the crowd and they refused honaker lasted as well another week in power the secret of successful revolution is embodied in vos law hobbles great one nine hundred seventy eight essay the power of the powerless the secret of successful revolution is living in truth and speaking that truth to power and pulling huge numbers of people into the streets nonviolently to discredit that power the stasi state was the most sophisticated security and surveillance state in the world intil our own and yet once the foot soldiers of the elite task with the role of protecting that elite would no longer use coersion even that regime was finished anyone who has read climate change reports understands that we have no time left march saw every single day of the month at four hundred forty parts per million terms of carbon admissions the first time that's happened since we recorded began recording weather patterns scientists have reported from the arctic that the measurement of the sea ice is completely off because the layers of old ice are gone and the rate will drive internally and exploit eternally until there is nothing left corporate capitalism as karl marx understood is a revolutionary force and it is our job to break it and if we do not break it my children and your children will not have a future the moment is grave and serious and we can rely on no one now rebellion is an act of faith it does not ask what is practical it does not ask finally even if it can succeed in moments of what a manual caught con called radical evil it requires an almost mystical belief that we are told to do the good or at least the good in so far as we can determine it and then let it go with the belief that the good  somewhere we do not know where the buddhists call it karma it requires what the filo jhon reinhold niebuhr calls sublime madness and neighbor said that in moments of extremity liberalism is too weak and intellectual and ineffectual force to counter radical evil these corporate forces in theological terms  forces of death and we are called to affirm the forces of life one of them is our system of mass incarceration we hold twenty five percent of the world's prison population we are five percent of the world's population and most of those in our prisons are poor people of color half of whom never committed violent offenses as you heard in the introduction i teach in a maximum security prison and what's heartbreaking and the reason i don't go back to do visiting professor ships in universities is that in every class i teach i fin students who have more brilliance more passion for learning more curiosity more honesty and finally more integrity than in any classroom i have taught in including places like princeton and yet they never had a chance many of them will die in prison reading augustine or plato or james baldwin is not about a career or networking it is about the life of the mind and they have taught me what it means to resist under forms of draco nian repression under forms of horrific poverty and abuse for what we have created in our marginal communities is a system of control that as hannah arendt pointed out in the origins of totalitarianism lurks like a virus in the body politic when she writes and she herself stripped of her german citizenship rendered stateless in france without rights when you create a segment of your population a demonize segment that has no rights and ninety four percent of those in our prisons never go to trial they have stacks of charges and then they bargain some away for their sentences when you create physical mechanisms of militarized police what she calls omni potent policing then the moment a society erupts with the flick of a switch those mechanisms can be used against the entire population i taught a class in the prison on drama we read august wilson dutchman by leroy jones later  baldwin's go tell it on the mountain and as an experiment that first week i told my students that they should write scenes dramatic scenes from their life i took the papers home the first week with that kind of musty smell that is the prism i read two three and suddenly hit one that was brilliant i had another a few scenes later it was brilliant i had attracted probably the best writers in the institution after a couple weeks i added another night to the class you can only do that by telling the prison authorities that certain members of your class need remedial help so i went in and told my twenty eight students that i was coming in now on fridays night friday nights and they asked who would be there and i said all of you and i dropped this book which i was supposed to be writing and for the next four months i helped them put together a play which was written out of and at the end of the semester we couldn't read it in front of the prison authorities i invited cornell west and the great theologian james cone to come be our audience and when they got to the lobby the warden was there and the major the highest uniformed official in the prison was there and they said you're not going to your classroom you're going to the chapel and they escorted us to the chapel and they brought my students in and they had twelve corrections officers in the back of the room and of course they could never read this play now as it was because of the retribution that would be carried out against them and so they picked they huddled and picked which scenes they would read in which scenes they would not and one of the scenes that was re came from an assignment where i asked them to write about a conversation with their mother something they remembered from before they were incarcerated a moment and one of my students said well what if we're a product of rape and i said well then that's what you have to right and so he wrote this moment in his life when he was in a car with his half brother in paterson new jersey and there was a gun in the car and it was his half brothers and the police stopped the car and searched the car and found the weapon and he told the police that it was his because if no one claimed the weapon everybody would have been charged with weapons possession and then he describes the phone call he made to his mother from the jail and he says it doesn't matter ma i was never supposed to be here anyway and you have the son you love that's why he's in prison or the student my only a plus last semester arrested at the age of fourteen in camden for a knife and he did not commit holden to a police station a terrified boy none of his family was allowed to see him was two three in the morning he was weeping he wanted to go home and the police said you must sign sign and you can go home he spent two years in the county jail after that until he was sixteen and brought to trial and on the basis of that signed statement he was sentenced and he is not eligible to go before a parole board until he is seventy over and over i hear stories like this in my last class everyone left and he remained behind for a moment and he said i know i'm going to die in this prison but i work as hard as i do so that one day i can be a teacher like you when you see what is being done to the underclass when you recognize their dignity their power of resistance their affirmation of their own dignity in the face of horrific oppression tens of thousands of our citizens held in solitary confinement and solitary confinement isn't just being locked in your cell twenty three hours a day it is sensory extreme sensory deprivation harsh light total darkness sweltering cells freezing cells dogs with guards that come in in the middle of the night randomly wake you up make you gather your possessions and move swiftly to another cell dry cells where you have no water at all you have to beg the guards to turn it on and they've taught me what it means to resist that finally resistance is not about what we achieve but what it allows us to become i gave them the syllabus and there was a wednesday in march when i was not going to be in class because i was speaking in montana and my phone rang in the hotel room in montana and it was the special investigations division from the department of corrections of the state of new jersey and the investigator said do you know that your students have just let a sit down strike in our prison and we think you're behind it i don't know why they were for me that was such a deeply moving moment on many levels because of they had heard what i had taught them not that i had called on them to organize a sit down strike but by having them read richard wright most moving was that they were totally cognizant of what would be done to them and what was done to them not only were they interrogated for hours not only were their cells strip searched and most of their possessions confiscated and not only finally were the leaders removed from the prison and shipped to another prison and placed in solitary confinement but they themselves had become marked with inside or inside the prison complex and yet they rose up anyway and we must look to those who deal under these naked forms of repression within our midst for those forms of oppression are soon to be visited upon us why did they pass section ten twenty one of the national defense authorization act empowering the military to arrest american citizens it was a two year lawsuit we contacted the democratic leadership in the house and we told them if you will insert into this section that us citizens are exempt we will drop our lawsuit but they did not they did not because they have run scenario after scenario on the effects of climate change on the looming financial meltdown that will inevitably strike us again as global capitalism return to their games of speculation and they are ready legally physically we see on the streets of american cities this discontent over the lethal indiscriminate lethal force used by police against poor people of color march after march black lives matter and yet they keep shooting and killing i'm sure most everyone in this room has watched the video of police training goal and an armed citizen to death and yet those police walk free and the longer the state refuses to react the more they fuel the inevitable discontent that will lead to revolt it is always the state that determines the configurations of rebellion if the state had the capacity to respond rationally to forgive student at to build a public health care system for all as a right to create jobs especially target those under the age of twenty five to declare a moratorium on foreclosures and bank repossessions this would begin to ameliorate the suffering that is rippling across the landscape of our country but the state responds only with force utterly tone deaf all of the mechanisms of power are now in the hands of those who do not even live in essence within our country itself they live in what a writer for the new yorker a rich a stand they don't fly on commercial airlines they don't speak to the working men and women of this country unless they're doing their lawns or cleaning their houses elite like that encased in the equivalent of the forbidden city or versailles unplugged from the reality around them then they wreak horrific damage civilizations decay in much the same pattern chose of tain or in the collapse of complex societies redmon in the collapse of ancient societies jared diamond and his book collapse ronald right have all pointed this out but the difference is this time there are no new peoples to subjugate no new resources to plunder this time when we go down the whole planet will go with us in the book i interview those who are endowed with these qualities of sublime madness songe trapped in the embassy in ecuador jeremy hammond the hacker who leaked five million e mails from strat for a private security company which provided crucial evidence in my own trial in the n d a case when there was an e mail exchange between the f b i and for attempting to tie a group a dissident group called us day of rage to al qaeda so the terrorism laws could be used against them lynn stuart the great civil rights attorney imprisoned herself released because she has terminal cancer lumia abu jamal all of these figures become vital in a moment of unrest hannah arendt in an essay says the only reliable people in moments of extremity are not those who say this shouldn't be done or we oughtn't to do this but those who say i can't and baldwin when he writes his great essay on the similarities between artists and rebels says that it is not so much that they are driven towards a vision as possessed by these figures that have the capacity to stand up and endure the repercussions of the state become the tinder that allows us to go forward rebellion in this moment in history is a moral act it is about affirming what we must  it is about fighting for life it is about understanding configurations of power and not being mesmerized or fooled by the massive systems of propaganda that seek to induce a kind of collective high hype hypnosis that blinds us to our own reality and what will it look it will call upon us to physically stand up together and assert an undeniable truth that many of those within the power structure understand i was in boston a few days ago meeting with anti  who are in great despair as spectrum and kinda morgan prepare to run pipelines from the tar sands down through the suburbs of their city and they have done what many of us have done petitions letters to no avail and they said what do we do and i said it's over i said the only thing left to do is to buy junk cars and drive them into the streets to block the construction equipment and take the batteries out of the cars and walk away and do it day after day after day you saw in denton texas a community seeking to protect the he especially of its children ban fracking and then be overruled by the texas senate banning bands that's the world we the whole game of environmental regulation is fixed because the lobbyists for b p and exxon mobil and trans canada write the rules not us and the legislators who are on the payroll put it into law and the longer we trust in a stint in a system that is essentially be against our interests and against the ecosystem on which our children will depend for life the more precarious the future of the human race becomes we must find within us this sublime madness this act of faith and i say that to people of creeds or people of no creeds we must make an astute analysis of power for if we do not understand corporate power and how it works then we will not effectively fight it we must do what all of the great movements have done throughout american history all of those movements that have opened up the space in our democracy when you write a course proposal in a prison it's very different from writing a course proposal that seeks to entice undergraduates at princeton into your seminar because you have to get it by prison authorities i turned in a proposal to teach american history our constitution the three branches of government and it was approved and then i gave all of my students howard zinn's the people history of the united states the brilliance of that book is that zinn explained that our system was designed as a closed system one that was meant to protect the property rights of white men and especially slave holders women african americans native americans even men without property were excluded and then they threw in the electoral college and that's how al gore can win five hundred thousand more votes than george w bush and george w bush becomes president had nothing to do with ralph nader by the way chronicles that a long bloody struggle on the part of working men in this country to create the forty hour work week to end child labor to provide safe working conditions in factories and mines and they paid for it with their blood hundreds of american workers died or murder in the labor wars in this country which were the bloodiest in the industr thousands were wounded tens of thousands were blacklisted all of those movements that created our democracy the suffragists the liberty party that fo slavery the civil rights movement and all of them understood something we've forgotten it is not our job to take power it is our job to stand fast around a moral imperative and make power frightened of us the last liberal president we had was richard nixon not because he was a liberal or had a conscience but because he was frightened of movements the mining safety act the clean water act ocean all written by nader were passed by nixon there's a moment in kissinger's memoirs do not buy the book where it's nine hundred seventy one and there are thousands of antiwar demonstrators around the white house and nixon has put empty city buses end to end as barricades around the white house and he looks out the window and he says to kissinger henry they're going to break through the barricades and get us and that's just where people in power have to be of course history's rewritten this ridiculous film about lincoln and emancipation that manages to a race frederick douglas roosevelt who came out of the oligarchy class was confronted by the old c i a o the communist party the progressive party all of these radical movements that said if you do not react to the suffering of the american people then you will get revolution and roosevelt went to his fellow oligarchy and he said you better give up some of your money or you're not going to have any of your money and that's how we got a government program that created fifteen million jobs and social security and public works and it was not because of the tender hearted notice of the capitalist class it was because they were frightened they were frightened and that's our job was julian bend and the treason of the intellectual says we have a choice in life between serving privilege and power or justice and truth and the more we compromise with those who serve privilege in power the more we diminish the capacity for justice and tru the state is fearful it knows how corrupt it is those on wall street understand cynically what's happening they are stealing and looting as fast as they can on the way down believing they can retreat into their little gated compounds and somehow survive the very idea that you build a society based on the dictates of the marketplace is insanity and yet these forces have total control over our lives and over our future i'm not naive enough to stand here and tell you we can win even if we stopped all carbon admissions today we would struggle with catastrophic effects of climate change but i am here to tell you that we have a moral responsibility for those who come after us that even if we fail we must stand up so that they can look back at us and say they tried kahn said if justice parish is human life on earth has lost its meaning and that's finally what i'm calling for a life of meaning no longer accepting these forces of death that will doom us and doom the future of our children rebellion doing anything we can to disrupt the mechanisms that seek to destroy the world around us and that requires us to be in the street and requires us to go to jail i don't like going to jail it's more time than i care to donate to my government and yet it is that moral imperative i don't finally fight fascists because i will when i fight fascists because they are fascists thank you