i just spent two years with a great graphic illustrator joe sacco who i had met in bosnia in one thousand nine hundred five when i was covering the war there for the new york times and he was doing his book a safe area garage though i was not of the time particularly literate with the form of graphic novels but i certainly recognized a first rate journalist when i saw one  subsequently collaborated on a long story for harper's magazine where we went and lived in a refugee camp in gaza on the eunice and then did a piece for the nation magazine out of camden this book had its genesis in the last two books that i wrote empire of illusion the end of literacy in the triumph of spectacle that reality is never an impediment to what we want which is fed to us across the political and cultural spectrum whether that's oprah or the christian right or positive psychology or self help gurus or hollywood and of course that's a form not only of magical thinking but infinite teil ism essential he creates a population that never grows up and as that gap opens up between the illusion of who we think we are and where we think we're headed and the reality when that gap widens to such an extent that reality is no longer deniable when it's our home that is foreclosed when we finally grasp that that job that we lost is not coming back and will never appear for our children there is a tendency in such societies to react as children which is to call for a demagogue a savior moral renewal and vengeance and i think we see on the outer fringes of american society embodied in groups like the tea party and militias an lunatic fringe of the republican party and just about anybody who speaks on fox news that that this frightening form of proto fascism is very real the next book that i wrote was death of a liberal class which looked at the pillars of the liberal establishment what happened how did we reach a point where we had become disempowered and that book led me back to world war one which i think was a seminal moment in american history because on the eve of the war you had numerous radical populist progressive movements that were threatening the control of the power elite we had over seventy socialist mayors in this country appeal to reason had the fourth highest circulation of socialist journal eugene debs in one nine hundred twelve pulled six percent nine hundred thousand votes and as dwight mcdonald a writer i admire very much pointed out the war was the rock on which these movements broke because what was instituted was the system the first system of modern mass propaganda the committee for public information or the creel commission because it was led by a former muckraking journalist named george  which employed for the first time the understanding of crowd psychology pioneered by lowball trotter and sigmund freud and edward bernays the father of modern public relations comes out of the creel commission  nephew through marriage twice over his book after the war propaganda becomes a seminal text that goebbels use uses when building the nazi propaganda machine and it was this understanding that people were not moved by facto reason but by the manipulation of emotion what walter lippmann in his book public opinion calls the manufacturing of consent that is where chomsky and herman get the title for their book on the media a few decades later when you read randolph borne or jane adams who held out against this propaganda  commission had of course the resources of the state public speakers fanned out across the country it had its own news division which pumped out daily press pro war press stories it had its own film division which made movies like the kaiser the butcher of berlin and stuff like this and the debate it's interesting the debate at the beginning when they were first going into the war between wilson lippman and that argument over whether they would have to use the coercive measures of the espionage act or the sedition act to control the population the war had very little popular support and of course we were pushed into the war because of the wall street  france or excuse me britain and france were defeated then those tremendous loans that wall street had given britain and france would never be repaid and this was really a banker's war sort of nothing new in that  and when born in adams right they talk about in fact how easily the intellectual and even the radical class is seduced into the war effort that's a constant theme in their writings that kind of despair so in fact the hearts are harsher measures of control were really reserved for those recalcitrant few who were not seduced by the propaganda absolutely you know a crucial turning point in american history those movements it's only been movements that have and xine does a very good job of pointing this out in the people's history of the united states which  i teach at a correctional facility and there is some benefit to having an illiterate ruling class i submitted my form to teach the end mates american history and the prison fishel sought this was just wonderful and then i i went out and bought every inmate a copy of the people's history of the united  states i never met zen a huge admirer of him but after teaching him to african american inmates i realized what a magnificent moral and intellectual voice he was  i would give ninety minute talks built around whatever chapter we were studying and i would hear inmates go damn damn we've been lied to since very cognizant that you know the founding fathers which are sort of deified often by the mobile class along with the ruling class never wanted a popular democracy popular do were terrified of popular democracy of course they disenfranchise the majority of people in this country african americans native americans women people without property indentured servants and then created mechanisms within the system like the electoral college in the senate to where the senators used to be appointed so that popular rule would never be achieved and and ns in the magnificence of zinn's work as this study of how that opening up of american society was obtained with the sweat toil sacrifice and blood of the disenfranchised in the american working class and and so these after of that moment after the war of a transition in american society from into what he calls the psychosis a permanent war and he says none of the political theorists of the hundred century including mccall marx anticipated this psychosis of permanent war were in mcdonald's words you can get the masses to call for their own enslavement so after the war the dreaded hun becomes the dreaded red everybody from the committee for public information goes straight to madison avenue and starts working on behalf of corporations and they up and traditional american values of self effacement thrift community to instill this cult of the self hedonism and consumption as a kind of inner compulsion they affective i think when i think when we talk about american values or american culture at this point what we're really talking about is corporate culture and they used the espionage in the sedition act to essentially wipe out those radical movements that were left behind including the wobblies of big bill haywood has to flee the country spends the last decade of his life in moscow joe hill of courses on trumped up murder charges  hung in utah map the masses to shut down appeal to reason a shutdown even though there was a policy during the war that you can only publish if you had a pro war editorial stance which is why the masses wouldn't publish appeal to reason did and even then they were shut down that's how you have emma goldman alexander berkman deported so the breaking of those radical movements was a high school teachers social workers that used to be that social workers would the unions would advocate on behalf of their clients artists writers directors journalists like i have stone who becomes a pariah he can't even get a job at the nation magazine and he ends up starting i have stones weekly in his basement and so the the progressive forces are pushed out the liberal forces are hollowed out figures like sidney hook who had flirted with trotskyism becomes he names names and and the liberal class itself ceases to function function of the liberal class of course is not to serve as the political left in a capitalist democracy the function of the liberal class is to serve as a safety valve so when then grievances and injustices become extensive within the underclass there is it makes possible incremental or piecemeal reform and that's why when conrad black writes his biography of roosevelt he says that roosevelt's greatest achievement was that he saved capitalism the breakdown of the liberal class means that that incremental reform is no longer possible and it's interesting that this is a constant theme in do work at the end of the one nine hundred century in russia that's what is novel demon's is about that's what notes from underground is i'm out it's it's mouse man it's the defeated dreamer who went to all the obama rallies and chanted yes we can and now it's just cynical and in despair and dostoevsky says when that liberal center doesn't work when essentially you have a government that is gripped by paralysis which is something that i saw in the former yugoslavia then you enter an age of moral neil ism so without the populist movements and without in the end a functioning liberal class that was able to safeguard some of the interests of the vulnerable within the society and of course the working class you give rise to these monstrosities such as bill clinton clinton speaks in that traditional feel your pain like obama feel your pain language of liberalism and yet serves corporate interests so under clinton we get the destruction of welfare we get the deregulation of the c which is not a small act because it essentially has allowed a half dozen corporations viacom general electric rupert murdoch's news corp disney clear channel to buy up the airwaves and we've been reduced in this political theater to investing our emotional energy in what is nothing more than court gossip and that's what m s n b c does and that's what fox does they spin it in a different direction but it's the same and additives whether it's newt's moon colonies or ann romney's horse the real issues that confront the american citizens as they are rapidly stripped of power and never addressed over the commercial airwaves and of course it's clinton who destroys the banking system which triggers the economic meltdown got more and so the obvious question is with all of the restraints and impediments lifted against corporate capitalism with nothing to check that predatory nature of corporate capitalism what happens and what joe and i did was go to the sacrifice owns of the country those places that had been offered up to the marketplace first and of course it all began with westward expansion and the seizure of the land the violation of the treaties and the acts of genocide carried out against native americans propelled by gold speculators timber speculators freighters the railroad barons  and what you saw in the final stages of the crushing of native culture was not simply the seizure of land and the decimation of a peoples but the destruction of a competing ethic of how to exist on the planet within native societies anybody who hoarded goods for themselves was despised a great book called the great transformation about unfettered capitalism which like marx he calls a revolutionary force that has built within it its own quality of self destruction writes when you come modify everything when human beings become a commodity when the natural world becomes a commodity you exploit those forces in till exhaustion or collapse which is why the environmental crisis is intimate only twinned with the economic crisis these sacrifice omes we were in pine ridge south dakota  forms of violence and the violence visited by the forces of oppression on those who live within these sacrifice owns destroys their capacity to sustain themselves both economically and morally the average life expectancy of a male on pine ridge is forty eight that is the lowest in the western hemisphere outside of haiti there is an estimated eighty percent alcoholism rate and at any one time sixty percent of the developers have neither electricity or water and of course these people like all the people in our sacrifice omes are invisible and that's why for me it was so important to work with joe over fifty pages of the book are our graphic panels he can give a kind of filmic quality to lives and illustrations to make these of those who live within the in the zones visible to the reader in a way that in simple prose is often difficult we then went to camden new jersey which per capita is the poorest city in the united states and also not surprisingly one of the most dangerous most urban centers have fallen into decay but some parts of those urban centers remain functional in camden it is a completely dead city and this was one of the industrial hubs of the northeast at its height the shipyards and camden rip employed thirty six thousand people r c a victor was there campbell soup was there and in camden everything went their whole blocks that are just deserted with literally trees growing out of the roofs the only business the only two businesses that function are the roughly one hundred open air drug markets and the these huge scrap metal business on the river because you have armies of foragers who go into the abandoned buildings and rip out all the piping and the screen doors anything bring it down to the port boards crushed up and ships from china turkey india come and literally take the guts of this american city overseas to smelt it down  we went from there to west virginia the coal fields in southern west virginia where coal companies who own everyone all politicians i mean they even write the school  textbooks so that big coal is painted in classrooms as sort of the savior of of west virginia because they don't want to dig down for coal anymore they just blow the top four hundred feet off of the mountains to get to the coal seams they are doing this with some of the largest land equipment on earth twenty five foot story drag lines giant bulldozers and they will literally push all of the trees and topsoil over the edge and l and we flew over this wasteland and these are the lungs of the eastern seaboard much of the headwaters of the eastern seaboard come out of the appalachian mountains and it's it's just a  lit fires it's it is it's an act of collective suicide for quarterly profit and of course the consequences are that the air is poisoned the water is poisoned we went into villages in southern west virginia where everybody has had their gallbladder removed because the water so toxic you walk into the nurse's office in an elementary school and there's there are rows of little inhalers for the children a cancer is an epidemic and and and self medication to cope with that despair hillbilly heroin is widespread oxy cotton we are people we interviewed in the book who young men who a it was either that or clinging to religious belief and not necessarily christian in pine ridge of course it was lakota tradition sweat lodges went to a sundance deeply moving for days of fasting dancing around  cottonwood tree young men often with their prison tattoos struggling to pull their lives back together and all of those pockets there were figures of heroic figures  resisted and yet could our did within the book articulate how power worked and it wasn't that they necessarily had hope that they could overcome the forces  against them but as hannah arendt understood she said that finally when one embraces the moral life it is not those it's not done by those who say i shouldn't or i oughtn't but it's done by those who say i can't we the fourth chapter was out of a mochel the floor of the produce fields because it is bernie sanders says said after a visit at a mock ali in the race to the bottom that has become america is the bottom there you have the perfect worker in the corporate state utterly disempowered no legal rights no benefits no protection  they when they don't work if they can't they have to they there's three families in a mockery the control the trailer parks these are trailers that should have been condemned years ago holes in the floorboards rats cockroaches they'll put twenty mattresses down on the floor and you pay fifty dollars a week that's two thousand dollars a month these people are making to live in that trailer and then you have to go to the collection points at four in the morning and hope that crew leaders pick you put them on the bus and take you out to the fields and if you can't work enough that week in turn in your fifty dollars you sleep under a mango tree or out in a sort of in the outskirts of the town in a in a wooded area in places that we visited and it's not surprising that there are just constant discoveries of slavery where workers are held against their will their families are threatened in mexico or wonderous or guatemala if they were port to authorities and we interviewed some of them sometimes those slave encampments can run into a few hundred workers who are often held behind barbed wire  and as corporations you know have been able to reconfigure american society into a form of neo feudalism which of course they're doing with the global economy you're finding the horrific conditions that workers undocumented workers endure in our produce fields being replicated in all sorts of other industries from the hotel industry to meat packing everything else  and that's because we've lost the capacity to fight back through the formal mechanisms of power the liberal establishment has essentially sold its soul and here i would disagree with thomas franks in his book what's the matter with kansas where he argues that you know he asks why is it that that these people vote against their own interests i don't think they vote against their own interests course most people in this country just don't vote i think they fully understand that the democratic party especially after nafta walked out on the working class of this country turned their back on the working class in this country and the just sort of destruction and the internal destruction i think it's what five or seven percent of jobs in this country are now manufacturing jobs and the new york times did a story a couple weeks ago where they looked at those middle class families that had lost their jobs in two thousand and eight and found that in most cases those who had found new jobs were working  for salaries that were forty or fifty percent less than what they were making before without benefits and that's of course where we're headed we've shifted  we shifted in the one nine hundred seventy s i suppose from what the harvard historian charles mayer calls an empire of production into an empire of consumption and so the obama administrat which has been nothing if not obsequious to corporate interests and if any of you have followed obamacare you know fully what i'm speaking about this health bill was hatched  within the heritage foundation which should be huge tipoff to you that it's no good it was first implemented in two thousand and six by then governor romney it then made its way to washington where its two thousand pages were tweaked and written by corporate lobbyists who inserted of course four hundred forty seven billion dollars in subsidies that's why this is the equivalent of the bank bailout bill for the pharmaceutical and insurance industries and why of course stocks today  pharmaceutical insurance industries are shop for the roof they can still jack up co payments and premiums if you get a serious illness you're still not protected and of course a million bankruptcies a year in this country are caused by people who can't pay their medical bills and eighty percent of them had insurance and the tragedy for me is that it's going to make it even harder for us to get the public option  medicare for all which is the only rational policy that should be implemented one of the things that has frightened me most about the obama administration is its agree just assault against civil liberties which are actually worse than the bush administration and that's because the corporate state i think our you know if we have to date the the final act of the corporate coup d'etat it's probably two thousand and ten with citizens united the corporate state is fully aware of what is happening and they are rapidly criminalizing descent as rahm emanuel did in chicago because they know that as they harvest the country it's a business term where you take over a business you know it's not going to last and to squeeze it for short term profit that eventually there will be a backlash  that's why obama has not restored habeas corpus that's why he supported the amendment act which retroactively makes legal what under our constitution has traditionally been illegal the warrantless wiretapping and monitoring and eavesdropping of tens of millions of americans and now we all know where your information is stored in supercomputers in utah that has permitted him to radically i think misinterpret the two thousand and one authorization to use military force act to call for the assassination or carry out the assassination of american citizens and then two weeks later their sixteen year old son and that's what has caused obama to use the espionage act six times against whistleblowers including sterling who purportedly gave information about war crimes to the new york  times the espionage act was never designed to silence whistleblowers in between one thousand nine hundred seventeen when it was passed and the obama administration was only used three times against whistleblowers the first being daniel ellsberg  and i have many friends who are investigative journalists and they all will tell you that essentially no one within the structures of power will speak to them anymore because obama has a essential delivered the message that if you talk you're probably going to go to prison and this also of course is what led obama to pass or sign into law on new years eve the national defen which included section ten twenty one which until i sued him and we won in federal court was  but read it it's terrifying it it authorizes or gives the government the power to use the military to seize american citizens on american soil hold them in military facilities including our offshore penal colonies strip them of due process and it's not just terrorists it's citizens who have relationships with what they call quote unquote associated forces whatever that is to hold them in these military facilities and until in the language of that section of the bill the end of hostilities which of course is indefinite it's forever and dianne feinstein to her credit when she read it attempted to exhaust insert language into that section to exempt american citizens and both the obama white house and the democratic party rejected it and fortunately we had a courageous judge in the southern district court of new york catherine forrest who threw it out and issued a temporary injunction which essentially invalidates that section of the act and we're waiting now to see whether the government will challenge it and and it will move to an appellate court in the last chapter of this book we the book was always called days of destruction days of revolt but when we began it the revolt was conjecture we certainly understood that with all restraints lifted on corporations there would eventually be a response but we didn't know what the response would look like we didn't know when it would come we didn't know where it would come from and then september show and so we we went i've spent a lot of times of cutty we went to zuccotti and and in the last chapter of the book is the occupy movement the only hope that we have now of challenging these corporate forces is by rebuilding mass movements it is not going to become  me that's why occupy was so important it articulated the fundamental problem which is that corporate power has seized control of our economy control of our political system and control of our systems of information not to mention our systems of education and it's only by by building a mass movement that we have any hope of bringing them down it appears quixotic and yet i covered the revolutions in eastern europe including east germany which was the most efficient police state certainly in eastern europe perhaps in the world the stasi state for every sixty three east germans there was a police informant and what happened and it's one of the reasons that i've been so critical of black bloc anarchists what happened is that you saw these courageous and lonely dissidents in leipzig mostly coming out of lutheran churches carrying out candle zx against the regime of vera conacher who'd been in power for one thousand years and then suddenly a few hundred people join them and then a few thousand and then  saw that there were seventy thousand people marching through the streets of lovesick and they sent down an elite paratroop division to shoot the crowd and when the officers went into the barracks to get the paratroopers many of them were weeping because they had family and friends on the streets honaker sent that paratroop division down to leipzig and it never shot the demonstrators at that point he did not last another week in power when you can pull those kinds of numbers into the streets including half a million people in  alexander plots and east berlin who are nonviolent who speak a fundamental truth about the corruption of power what you do is you paralyze the forces that the ruling elite relies on for control you draw those forces to you and this is true in most revolutions i mean the russian revolution was in fact  nonviolent revolution the violence came afterwards when western powers backed the white army that led to the civil war in lebanon the bolsheviks carried out a push to overthrow the constitutional assembly  he had to resign in a train carriage before he before he could make it back into the country before he could make it back from the from the front i covered the revolution or the velvet revolution i spent every night in the magic lantern theater with a hobble and clausen dins bear all the people who would inherit the government  and hobble was for me an extremely important figure started charter seventy seven of virtually unknown i mean it was a kind of non person within his country his plays were never performed in an out of prison he has a wonderful one nine hundred seventy eight essay called the power of the power les and his argument is that our greatest strength when we articulate a truth what he calls living in truth is there's a kind of in congruity to it is our powerless ness and of course our transparency and during that revolution it was driven home to me the importance of all of the acts of resistance that at the time were written off as impractical or futile on every street in prague there were posters of a young charles university student named beyond pottage who after the soviet tanks had invaded prague to overthrow dubcek and restore the pro regime had gone to events a lot square lit him self on fire four days later he died of his burns thousands of students marched with his body to the cemetery they were broken up by the police his act was never mentioned on state media when his grave became a shrine the communist authority exuma his body cremated it and gave the ashes to his mother and forbade her from reburying them and yet his picture was everywhere two weeks after the communist government fell ten thousand people gathered in red army square in the center of prague and renamed it yon ponit square i was with those crowds half a million people on that december night when one of czechoslovakia's most famous singers marta coolish i walked out on a balcony before the crowd she had s the anthem of defiance that was broadcast over the airwaves to inspire resistance when the pro soviet communists regained control her entire recording stock was destroyed she was never allowed to appear on the airwaves and she says she existed by working as assembly line in a toy factory and yet when she walked out that night and began to sing that anthem everyone in that crowd knew every word the occupy movement has been knocked off balance consciously but finally it was always the ruling elite that determines the nature of resistance when there was that central decision to destroy those occupying kamins for me it was an extremely telling moment because it showed that the only thing the centers of power corporate centers of power had to offer was repression force and  many of you i'm sure read krugman who keeps calling for a rational economic policy and he and i were both on democracy now a few weeks ago i spoke and then paul was on and afterwards i said paul everything you write is true but it's it's only possible if you have systems of power that are rational one systems of power a century retreat as our elites have done into their version of versailles or the forbidden city i think a writer from new york the new yorker called and richest man once they are totally out of touch once they start cannibalizing themselves i mean there's a really great book which i just read read by crane brinton called the anatomy of revolution in which he lists he studies several revolutions including the american revolution the french revolution and he lists sort of the fundamental prerequisites for revolution all of which we have fulfilled a corrupt elite you know disempowered working class that keeps getting pushed further and further into misery but at the end of that list he says the most important thing about revolutionary movements is that their fundamental demand can never be met by the ruling class because it would mean they're disillusioned and one of the critiques of the occupy movement from you know all the courtiers on the airwaves was what are their demands they don't have any demands well they had a very clear demand and that is we want to reverse the corporate coup d'etat and take back for the citizen re the power that has been arrested from our hands by corporations but that was of course a message that wall street and its minions could never hear the decision by the state to respond with force for me instead of responding rationally which would have been a national effort a national jobs program massive jobs program especially targeted at people under the age of twenty five a mor foreclosures and bank repossessions a forgiveness of all student debt the public option for all that would have broken the movement in the way that the new deal legislation broke the radical sm with the breakdown of capitalism and as conrad black pointed out saved capitalism and so we've entered a new era and there will be a reaction i don't know what it will look like even the purported leaders of those closest to the movement don't know what it will look like on november ninth one nine hundred eighty nine i was with all of the leaders of the east german opposition leipzig and they said maybe within a year there will be free passage back and forth across the berlin wall within a few hours the berlin wall at least as an impediment to human traffic did not exist we have a moral imperative especially for those of us in this room who have children because we betrayed them to stand up and fight for a life in theological terms and anyone who reads climate science reports i think cannot dispute this corporate forces  systems of death they are willing to sacrifice us all it's not a particularly new phenomenon in civilizations it happened on easter island it happened in the mayans but this time we're called to do the good or at least the good in so far as we can determine it and then we have to let it go faith is the belief that it goes somewhere that the good draws the good even if all of the empirical evidence around to show otherwise the buddhists call it karma but i think that we've got to stop asking the question is it practical and start asking the question is it right and i believe th inner workings of corporate power are so corrupt and so fragile that with the kinds of mass movements that i saw in eastern europe what do you think is the one unifying principle that we can all unite behind to create a mass movement here in america all of the tenders there for the mass movement i mean you know i cover two palestinian uprising uprising or intifada as the revolutions in eastern europe the street demonstrations that brought down milosevic that they all have a kind of a unifying quality which is that you know the tender is there but you never know what it is that will ignite it none of us can know but it is there and we've just seen the last few weeks the government deny hundreds of thousands of americans the extension of their unemployment benefits the supreme court decision that was an assault against public sector unions i mean it is just the refusal to fund adequately food stamps and six million people in this country their sole source of income is now food stamps one in every three children in this country because of food stamps when clinton destroyed welfare you know sort of wasn't gotten out was that seventy percent of the recipients of welfare support were children so you know corporations know only one word and that's more and they will push and push and push until there is a backlash it can go the wrong way as it did in the one nine hundred thirty s and we have powerful essentially pro fascist movements that speak in the language of violence that celebrate the gun culture that direct a legitimate rage and betrayal towards the vulnerable muslims undocumented workers homosexuals intellectuals feminists they've got a very long list and they are backed by the most retrograde forces in our society including the koch brothers and others and that's why it's extremely vital that those of us who care about nonviolence care about an open society begin to make sacrifices which are not comfortable wendell berry seventy seven years old occupies the governor's office in kentucky to fight mountaintop removal and before he goes in he goes to be honest going to jail is more time than i care to donate to the wrench in the machine and we've got to do with our bodies do you believe that the recent ruling by the supreme court regarding corporations being human beings further and trenches and yeah i think that that two thousand and ten ruling was it and you can see it because they now have the capacity to essentially destroy anyone who stands in the way of corporate power i think the recall  wisconsin is a lot of you know the tragic mistake that we don't want to make you know we allowed that energy could have gone either way could have gone towards general strikes which is where they should gone but if they funneled it back they funneled it back into the dead political system what benjamin demat calls junk politics the democrats took control organized labor which has not been very good took control they coughed up you know a retread democratic candidate and then of course you know the koch brothers and everybody came in and and and crushed it and it's going to be very hard for them to rebuild what they had it's not our job to take power all of the correctives to american democracy came through movements that never achieved formal power it's an end  you know if you if you look at the political decline that we have undergone it would be would have to sort of except that the last liberal president that we had was richard nixon because because he was still scared of movements so we got osho the mining safety act there's a wonderful scene in kissinger memoirs don't go by the book where there is a huge any war demonstration i think it's one hundred seventy one nixon's roam the white house end to end with busses to keep out the demonstrators  standing at the window with kissinger wringing his hands going henry henry they're going to break through the barricades and get us and that's just where we want people in power to  be what's your thinking on like a coup d'etat within the next year in our country with like the european union collapsing in a six hundred trillion dollar bottle it seems like there's so much dysfunction in the centers of power that it almost looks like we 're like well no it gets any any seismic change or revolutionary change requires a crisis now unfortunately because movements popul movements have been destroyed what is actually the ascendant and backed is right wing populism which is very frightening it resembles the nazi party in the sense that you have a right wing populism that is backed in the case of the nazis by german business interests in the case of the tea party and others by corporations so the lynchpin tends to be currency a currency collapse i've lived through three of them and then the world order is turned upside down this is what happened in yugoslavia and the war in yugoslavia was not caused by ancient ethnic hatreds it was caused by the economic collapse of yugoslavia and when the currency collapses the moral order is instantly inverted because all of the people who are on fixed income who put money aside every month who were living on pensions who had fixed wages were destroyed because their currency wasn't worth anything and it was all the gangsters and the speculators and the war criminals who were filthy rich and the anger in yugoslavia was manifested by supporting figures like radovan carrot it to everyone knew was insane just out of discussed and we're not immune from that at all i don't take the the lunatic fringe of the republican party and these you know frightening deformed figures on the far right i don't take them lightly because i watched the same those kinds of figures become ascendant in yugoslavia and it worries me i mean so there's no guarantee rate novelist like and rand it's insane i mean the idea the idea that making an entire human society sacrifice itself before the dictates of the marketplace there's nothing in three thousand years of economic history to justify this absurdity and yet you know go to any economics department in this university and it's just a big vat of laced kool aid it's it's crazy and you can't even you can't even get into the debate unless you buy this essentially utopian belief and what we're watching of course is the breakdown of globalization and yet all of those figures including the popularizers of it like thomas friedman continue to speak in a language that is that is increasingly divorced from what's happening  of the promises of globalization have turned out to be a lie and and i think part of the problem unlike europe is that with the with the destruction of the left of populist movements we've been rob the language by which we can describe what's happening to us and it's called class warfare