this book was born out of the great work on suicide by the french sociologist a meal dark time was published in but i liked her climb for the same reason that i admire w e b dubois who and i think you could argue that the boys was probably our greatest intellectual because they married great scholarship and brilliant with this capacity to walk out into the communities that they were writing about and listen so when for instance  his classic the philadelphia negro by the time he's finished he's interviewed over twelve hundred families in philadelphia to profile what it's like at the turn of the century or the beginning of the twentieth century for african americans living in an urban setting so durkheim asks a question and the question is what is that drives individuals and societies to engage in acts of self annihilation freud would later ask the same question in civilization and its discontents and freud would frame it differently but i think also helpfully where he said that at any moment in time both within individuals and societies one of the primary forces annihilate every living system around you including yourself he writes this as europe is devolving into fascism and ultimately war  writes his book on suicide he found that those communities and individuals who were least likely to engage in acts of self destruction were those who had strong social bonds and provided space for individual self expression and self actualization that was the greatest protection against collective or individual suicide and those who carried out acts of self destruction had essentially come from communities where those social bonds the communal structure the capacity for self actualization had been destroyed and he used the word anime to describe that state that propels people to engage in activities of self and it's interesting how you translate anime literally means rule less ness meaning in essence the rules that govern or or the accepted rules of the social contract no longer function so you work hard you get a good education you obey the law you have the capacity  sustain your community and make it flourish and you have the capacity to fulfil yourself as an individual when those contracts are broken then you are thrust into a state of anime what sociologists call diseases of despair and that's what i wanted to look at the diseases of despair that afflict american society the pathologies that rise out of a decayed culture and when you examine disintegrating cultures and civilization these pathologies are always characteristic so i you saw at the latter part of those empires characteristics that are intimately familiar to all of us within the american empire so in essence what happens this is what plato  lamenting when he writes the republic because the remember plato writes the republic after the death of athenian democracy and he writes the republic of big that the greeks of course have a very different  notion of time as do most eastern cultures they don't see time as a lineal they don't believe in them the myth of human progress that we are just improving and improving rather it's it's time is cyclical both for individuals and societies so that you have a period of maturation of growth and then finally you complete the cycle in and it comes back to  y so that's why when plato is writing the republic it's all every mechanism that he proposes is about trying to freeze time because decay is an eval to stave off decay as much as possible so what kills the athenian democracy is the rise of the athenian empire are because you need a central bureaucratic structure to maintain empire which is  elected and undemocratic and the so that weakening of the polis of the city states and the that that construction of empire gives rise to an oligarchy class which finally takes control you have less and less say within your society through cities writes about this when he says that the tyranny that athens imposed on others it finally imposed on itself so what happens at the outer reaches of empire are we see it in our own empire our militarized police wholesale surveillance the suspension or  civil liberties militarized drones all of those mechanisms that are first carried out against those who are being subjugated within empire eventually come back to the homeland because your military as ours is i mean half of our discretionary spending is now spent on the military and our roads are crumbling and sixteen million children go to bed every night hungry and  you bring back those from the your forms of control to the homeland the other characteristic of course is that when that cobol sees us power you had two of the ruling  citibank to carry out massive acts of financial fraud and orchestrate tax boycotts which they've done that they're become too rules within the society as barbara ehrenreich pointed out in her great book nickel and dime nobody works harder than the poor in this country and she describes being poor in this country as one long emergency so the idea that working hard is somehow going to allow you to advance becomes a fiction the other aspect of declining empire are is that they they actually at the beginning of empire are use their military prowess judici fairly traditions slee but at the end of empire as you begin to k they engage historians call it micro militarism they carry out suicidal military fiasco as you saw the soviet union do  this in afghanistan the greeks when they invaded sicily their entire fleet was sunk most of their soldiers were killed the empire disintegrates you saw them the british empire in a slow decline after the end of world war one then invades egypt after nasser nationalizes the suez canal and has to retreat in humiliation and of course what kills the power of the empire are is the pound sterling is dropped as the world's reserve currency which will kill our empire so essentially that it's mismanagement you have elites that sever themselves from the rest of the country they retreat into their version of the forbid in city or versailles  there was a writer for the new yorker who said the rich in this country don't live in america they live in riches stan i think matt matt taibbi call them stateless archipelagos but that's right and when you have elite that is that divorced from the reality around them and yet have that concentration of power and wealth then you accelerate the destruction of the system itself on slow motion i don't always credit him but i was giving a talk and at the university of toronto and and suddenly notice that he was seated in the front row wealthiest individuals and corporations under the eisenhower administration was ninety one percent i mean people say well how are we going to pay for it how can a mess a tax and we're going to tax them at ninety one percent like we used to  and the other thing we're going to do is we must do is destroy the military machine in this country which is the greatest enemy of  there is no rational was a yesterday right was the seventeenth anniversary of the invasion of afghanistan i mean this is our micro militarism the taliban controls more territory in afghanistan than when we went in they do we've lost the war american troops they don't even want to go out with the afghan army because half of them are taliban i was with the p k k once in when i was covering the middle east this is the kurdish  separatist group and and i've been with a lot of rebel or insurgencies and i covered the war in el salvador for five years but i notice not only are they well equipped is because they were all running drugs out of lebanon so they had money but they were really good and so i was talking to the p k k commander and he said oh no we won't accept anyone into the rebel movement until they've done their two years military service in the turkish army  so what happened is that we lost control of we lost control of our government we lost control of our economy you know and this isn't unique to the united states neo liberalism as and idiology essentially created this absurd notion that societies could advance themselves by kneeling before the dictates of the marketplace this is popularized by figures like thomas friedman and others it's an absolutely ridiculous political theory it has no economic validity  know i don't know how many years of economic history no society has benefited by allowing their all agog acutely to become unregulated and uncontrolled and unfettered but it's peddled was paddled quite the political scientists samuel huntington called america's quote unquote excess of democracy you had the lewis powell memo of one thousand nine hundred seventy one which i'm sure you're aware of which was the kind of blueprint that corporations used to roll back these movements and seize control of all of the institutions and this goes back to the kavanaugh issue including the courts academia so you if you weren't especially in economics departments are our greatest political philosopher we lost a couple years ago sheldon wallen and read his book democracy incorporate a very important book for me in terms of giving me a language to describe the system he describes the american system now as he calls inverted totalitarianism it's an important distinction from let's say fascism because it's the primacy of economic profit over everything else which isn't necessarily true in a fascist state and that like the late roman republic as i said earlier you maintain the facade the electoral politics i mean this ridiculous hearing they had with kavanagh as if everything wasn't preordained in advance that everything becomes tribal truth no longer matters the rights of the citizenry no longer matter but the structures are there still you still pay fealty to the constitution and stuff and yet inside the mechanisms of power corporations control everything and and so you so why i remember speaking to wall and i did a three hour interview with him which is on you tube which is a of a year before he died he was ninety two or ninety three then and i had really read all his books you can see i went in with legal pads full of notes and there was it's remarkable i mean this guy there was nothing i could throw at him it had been interviewed for over ten years and that was the last interview he gave he was cornell west mentor cornell dedicated either his first or second book to sheldon and and wallen in the  was one of those who called out neoliberalism for the column that it is and he was immediately blacklisted he couldn't he is of quite a good writer and was quite a good writer he used to write for the new york review of books he was just purged and he said that even at the end within the political science department  princeton where he was teaching his own colleagues wouldn't speak to him so all of those figures who could have warned us ralph nader is another one we're shunted aside noam chomsky our greatest intellectual  hands down i a couple years ago i got a call from noam i course i read read noam since i don't know i was eighteen years old and he said i want you to write what i want to ask if you'll write the introduction to my new book  i mean every my whole understanding of the mechanisms of the liberal class i wrote a book called a liberal class come out of actually told no much should i put you down there you know that whole idea of the liberal class not being the political left that the liberal class functions as a kind of safety valve in moments of distress and the reason in a capitalist democracy you tolerate the liberal class is because they set the parameters of acceptable debate and as soon as critics on the left start attacking the structures or the motives of the ruling elites the liberal class discredits them and pushes them aside the liberal class can critique the excesses but they never critique the system and you see the classic example of how liberal class is supposed to function in a capitalist democracy with the collapse of capitalism hundred thirty s and roosevelt and roosevelts he has after after his death they published his correspondence and his brother was the editor which i've read and it's fascinating because roosevelt is keenly aware of the powerful movements the progressive party the labor unions like the c e o the but also the communist party we've kind of a race from our history but it played an important role in american radicalism and he says if we don't respond we'll get revolution and we'll lose everything and so that's it was that pressure that led roosevelt who came from the oligarchy elite to say well if the private sector can't create jobs then the government will create jobs and he creates twelve million jobs social security be with the unions in the wake of world war one had been decimated destroyed and and you know the old united mine workers could even exist legally until roosevelt reversed it that's how liberal class functions and roosevelt says his greatest achievement is that he saved democracy i mean capitalism not democracy you save capitalism but what happened after the war and it is there was an assault not only on those radical progressive movements that as howard zinn has pointed out opened up the space in our democracy i mean i always find it and of course what isn't today columbus day right but we should all all be wearing armbands yeah you know i was reading eugene o'neill's biography who was quite a radical and he said the only day that the only day in american history that he really cared about celebrating was the day the sioux and the other tribes in the little big horn wiped out the seventh cavalry that was really the only day  so as in understood the system was created as a closed system and you go back and read the federalist papers and they were terrified of direct democracy of and they created all sorts of mechanisms including the electoral college which has given us the gift of george w bush and donald trump they created all sorts of mechanisms to thwart the ability of the populace which they can often conflated with the mob so all of the spaces in american society were paid for with the blood of working men and women african americans women in the suffragist movement throughout miserables last semester and i put in a proposal to teach gulag archipelago next list i taught a class once called conquest and we read open veins of latin america bury my heart james's black jacobins which is a classic work on the haitian revolution the only successful slave revolt in human history and haiti has been paying for it ever since and i was in montana i've given them the syllabus so i won't be as weeks i have to speak in montana and i was in my hotel room in montana and i got a phone call and it said this is a special investigations division of the department of corrections of the state of new jersey are you aware that your students just let us sit down strike in the prison and it was very moving i mean i really was quite emotional when the phone call ended because they knew even better than i did what would happen their cells would be strip searched as they were they would all be interrogated until they found the leaders of the strike which they did and those leaders would be shipped to another prison and put in indefinite solitary confinement where they remain and yet they rose up anyway and we just of course saw heroic struggle on the part of incarcerated men and women which ended on september ninth the anniversary of the forty seventh anniversary of the attica prison uprising if you haven't read heather thompson's blood on the water read it it is a really amazing work of the history of the attica uprising but importantly how after that uprising the power elites affectively a demonized african americans i mean because they were so frightened  when that action that just finished on september ninth was concluded you had seen throughout the country thousands of men and women who had carried out work stoppages it didn't get the kind of press coverage should commissary boycotts and hunger strikes because they grasped and i think it's an important lesson for all of us that our system is so calcified that reform will not come from within it will only come from without and as the free alabama i don't know if you know about the free alabama movement they did a work stoppage two thousand and ten and then they put the leaders again in indefinite definite solitary confinement but alabama being alabama where the guards make minimum wage it means you can get anything so i'm what they call me on their cell phones all the time which  but they said you know the only way to end slavery which is what neo slavery which it is in our prisons is to stop being a slave that we the only mechanism we have now is to break them economically if you paid  prisoners the minimum wage our entire prison system would collapse it's not it can't be sustained prisoners and louisiana make four cents an hour i guess if you're really at the high end you can fight fires in california for a dollar an hour new jersey they make twenty two cents an hour that's twenty eight dollars a month i've got students who you know spend twenty thirty forty years in prison work forty hour weeks get out and not only do they not have social security they're in is now you you get indebted prison so i think that on you know the people who come out of marginal communities i certainly find my students in the prison have a kind of hyper awareness of  the fact that we live in a failed democracy that our democracy is not a functioning democracy and that by appealing to those institutions and this was my both mine and sharma's problem with sanders we we did an event with bernie and bill mckibben and iommi kline the night before the climate march in new york and schama kept pushing bernie not to run as a democrat and i found bernie's answer quite illuminating because he said well if i do that i'll end up like ralph nader and he's not wrong what he was saying is that if i defy the democratic party establishment they will destroy me and the tragedy for me of the sanders campaign is one as to which turned out to be true i never believed that the democratic party was going to ever permit bernie to get the nomination and i think we now have enough cumulative evidence to say that it was stolen from him and secondly we're never going to build a resistance movement within the span of an election cycle and we're going to have to walk out into the wilderness for a long time which governs greece and yes i know about caving into the banks but cerezo was polling in four percent ten years ago we're going to have to go back and do that hard kind of work i i managed i was going to tell that is in stores so i one of my great coups in the prison saw it when i when i write the description of the course it's purposes it's the opposite opposite from writing for a college audience where you know class on the long lots of films you've got to make it sound absolutely as boring and turgid as possible so i submitted a proposal to teach american history and the three branches of government and constitution which  because it goes through records then it goes through the prison administration and then i brought in the people's history of the united states for all of my students was quite moving i mean they were most all of them are block and incentives quite cognizant throughout that whole book of that the story of african americans and these guys were their minds were blown away but i would be giving my ninety minute talk on whatever chapter we were on reconstruction or something and i would hear students go  so we saw that period in the seventy's where corporations organized a frontal assault against every institution that made democratic space possible that made the mechanisms of reform possible they gave voice to the citizen rhee and critics of imperialism critics of capitalism and it closed and closed and closed at the same time that the economy was reconfigured and we shifted in the words of the harvard historian charles mayer from what he called an empire of production to an empire of consumption meaning that we were borrowing to maintain both an empire and a lifestyle we could no longer afford i don't know if you saw the new york times story a few days ago on  explosion of government debt of the us debt i was quite it was quite chilling the front page story and it was of course with the tax cuts over a ten year period we will diminish an estimated one point five trillion dollars from government revenue next year we're on track to pay about three hundred seventy billion dollars of interest and in ten years we will be paying nine hundred billion dollars a year in interest is not a sustainable system but of course there is a handful of people on wall street and criminal organizations like goldman sachs who are doing extremely well i i taught three times at princeton and i were member when they had a small occupy gathering at princeton they asked me to come speak to them and i did what i didn't know was that there was a reporter from the daily princetonian in the crowd and the next day the school paper said ferris professor announces correctly ferrous professor announces that the president of princeton and other elite universities are just overcompensated fundraisers princeton students are far too deferential to authority prison i wasn't invited back next year i still got an email that day i think they they wanted to clear that they had read the story but of course it's true in princeton it's just a corporation like most of these universities  you know harvard the same they produce systems managers the largest major at both harvard princeton is computer science the humanities are withering away all of those mechanisms that teach us not what to think but how to think i mean they're not wrong that an education is subversive it's designed to make you ask questions but the system only wants people who will perpetuate it so you get the two thousand and eight financial crash and the systems managers loot the u s treasury to reinflate a failed financial system the university of missouri just recently did from you know it went and looked and tried to estimate the eggs act amount of money the fed had fabricated and they came up with twenty six trillion dollars trillion dollars i mean imagine now china's response to two thousand it was very different from our own it was about kind of like the new deal they had infrastructure projects put people to work twenty six trillion dollars were handed to people who should be in prison unlike my students and  and what do they do with it well they as they've done with the step the tax cuts they've bought back their own stock and you know this idea that an overheated stock market is good for the economy i just want to give everybody copies of john kenne crash it's insane it's not tied to value of course they're over buying back their own stock apple bought back one hundred i think i have the right one hundred million of their own stock from doing that because the all the c e o s compensation packages are tied to it  so they're you know they're they're even cheating their own stockholders ultimately and so what do they do the money they hoard it i mean it's borrowed money there but it's part of virtually zero percent interest and central banks in europe were lending money out of negative interest rates which meant they actually gave you if you borrowed money they give you money so what did they do with the money they they bought back their own stock which swell their compensation packages they hoarded it or they gambled for instance and there was another article in the times i read other papers besides the times but there was an article the times in the week in review about two or three weeks ago where they talked about the fracking industry being the next dot com bubble because the fracking industry is a lose lose money it's it's it's valued on projected profit just like the dot com industry not actual profit they've already swallowed about two hundred eighty billion dollars so what you've done is there's no use of that money which of course i mean the tragedy is that you know every student this country could go to college for free we would have a rational health care system where we weren't preyed upon by pharmaceutical and insurance companies eighteen percent of p the least efficient health care service in the industrialized world and even if you have insurance your costs and co pays and the you know everything is imploding because they can a million people a year go bankrupt because corporations have the ability to hold their sick children hostage while they try and while they bankrupt themselves trying to save their sons or daughter means unutterably insane system all of this could have been fixed but it wasn't and of course the problem is that it has to be paid back and so what they are doing is extract ing from us that's student debt one point five trillion dollars and it's estimated that within two decades or so forty percent of those who have student debt will go into default  personal debt is thirteen billion dollars i mean american production since one thousand seventy three has gone up by seventy seven percent and and if wages a kept pace with production the minimum wage will be well over twenty dollars an hour  forty one million workers in this country a third of the workforce earn less than twelve dollars an hour and almost none of them have employee sponsored health insurance but that's by design because they need to suppress wages in order to extract debt and i opened the book in scranton pennsylvania the moment the city faces is facing insolvency so everyone in the city has been put on minimum wage including the mayor what happened their pension funds were decimated in two thousand and eight lost forty percent of their value because of financial fraud and they're selling off their city assets they're selling off their sewer system their parking authority  all of their utilities in a desperate effort to regain financial solvency and of course these corporations come in and then jack up the prices double triple the price and the per capita income  scrims forty five thousand dollars here but the question is what happens when they don't have any assets to sell off and this is described quite effectively by mar capitalism corporate capitalism that it is it has the capacity to commodify everything human beings become commodities the natural world becomes a commodity that it then exploited until exhaustion or collapse and that's of course what we're seen in this insane inability to respond to the eco side you've all seen the report that came out yesterday which says basically we have ten years to save ourselves as a species that's it and the reason that climate scientists are so terrified they're talking about one point five celsius the reason they're so terrified of going beyond two degrees celsius is because of feedback loops which means that essentially you lose the ability to so your temperatures rise your ice cap the polar ice caps melt and once they're gone they're not coming back for thousands of years the acidification in the oceans i mean that you can't control of that one plays off of the other and we know what feedback loops do because they've studied it on planets like venus which used to have water and is now eight hundred degrees that's where we're headed but we've retreated into what anthropologists would call crisis call magical thinking so the seizure of power by these elites the primacy of profit the destruction of democratic institutions including the courts really and you are what going to watch now with kavanagh some very the what they do what they bend doing but it will be accelerated is they are staking from us our constitutional rights by judicial fiat i e reinterpretin the right of unlimited corporate power through a distorted interpretation of the constitution how do they justify citizens united it's the right to petition the government i'm not making this up it's the right for free speech what do they do when they when edward snowden provides concrete proof that our right to privacy has been taken from us nothing i mean i love it when they all talk about how they're strict constitutionalists you know i wrote when i wrote that book on the christian right it was fascinating because i always always very upfront about who i was where i came from my father was a minister my mother was a seminary graduate she was a professor i graduated from seminary and as soon as the history was there they never wanted to speak about the bible with me ever because they don't know the bible their selective literalists just like our strict constitutionalists they select a certain passage biblical passages that affirm the and they have a culture aided the worst aspects of american imperialism and american capitalism into the christian religion sacral ised and i blame the liberal church that we didn't call these people out for who they are which is christian heretics you don't have to spend three years at harvard divinity school as i did to understand that jesus didn't come to make us rich and the christian right played an important part in this destruction with d industrialization slashing of social service programs all of it much of it pinned on clinton  nafta of course but the destruction of the old welfare system and seventy percent of the original recipients in our welfare system were children the deregulation of the f c c which has allowed five or six corporations to seize control of the airwaves what about ninety percent of most americans watch and listen to ripping down the far walls between investment in commercial banks which precipitated the global crisis  was all clinton and clinton did corporate bidding by the ninety's the democratic party had fund raising parity with the republicans and barack obama ran in two thousand and eight he got more but that created the fole liberal class a fake liberal class there used to be a liberal wing of the democratic party but is long gone and so you have people continue to speak in that feel your pain language but arce have sold out working men and women and that's where a lot of this white rage comes from in the white working class  baldwin james baldwin who i love and i don't really think you can understand america ferrera read baldwin but he writes about why is it that white working men have are susceptible to a midlife crisis in a way black men are not and he says it's because when you're black you realize that the game is fixed whereas if you're white you're more susceptible believe the myth of a meritocracy and you get ahead and then you wake up and realize it's fixed and that's what's happened and so it is that sense of in tight white entitlement colliding with economic and political reality that they don't matter and  of course fed upon that whole idea that trump was elected because of coal me or the pedestrian emails or russian bots is frightening because it is a way of refusing to address the massive social inequality that has distorted our system you can't maintain a democracy in an oligarchy aristotle knew it i mean aristotle said once you have an oligarchy your choice is between tyranny or revolution and the longer the democratic party i mean they're playing a very dangerous game now because they are they are following the same tactic hillary clinton followed which is trump is and we know for the best e mails that they wanted trump as the nominee and so the tactic is trump is so repugnant trump will implode but now you've watched with kavanagh hearings i mean look i certainly hope the democrats retake the house just as any kind of a bloc obviously but they're playing a very dangerous game by refusing to address the fundamental issues that have distorted our society and of course they're creations of the corporate state schumer in particular their job is to funnel wall street and corporate money to anointed democratic candidates they have certainly purge the burnie people from the party and nobody is going to run again it is as samuel johnson said the triumph of hope over experience these people if we had real electoral reform and remove corporate money from the democratic party they would have power and i think how i thirst certainly cognizant of how fragile things are but they're just not about to give up their first class accommodations no matter what but we could all go down because of that and i really look at the democratic party is like any failed liberal elite as deeply complicit in the rising totalitarianism that is emerging around us so these corporate forces in the name of the primacy of profit destroyed our democracy distorted our economic system into an oligarchy rewrote our laws and regulations so that they can carry out an eco side for short created political paralysis and created the inability of the government to respond in a rational way to the rights to sires needs of the majority of the citizenry and at that moment of political pro s something i watched in yugoslavia plus severe economic mismanagement it's a very frightening recipe because it's fertile ground for demagogues and trunk came out of this and he has no i classic you know he's the classic con artist that rises up out of decayed state i saw it in yugoslavia utusan and of course what he without any logical void is now being rapidly filled by the christian fascist ideology noam chomsky says probably correctly we may get rid is worse and the drive to put kavanah on the supreme court came from the christian right i mean susan collins sitting around pretending she doesn't know that this guy's going to reverse roe v wade is really hypocritical i mean they put millions of the christian right made it very clear to the republican party this guy had to get on for that reason  so what happens well trump has catapulted us into a whole nother phase of decay won by engaging in the crude and vulgar trash talk which degrades political discourse look you saw it replicated in the kavanaugh hearings both by grassley and so there's a decay of civil discourse which is classic to totalitarian it's reduced to insults hyper masculinity massage any all this kind of stuff but there's also the embrace of what hannah arendt call the permanent lie so all as i have stones that all governments lie all politicians lie bill clinton lied when he says he conned us and nafta saying it would create a lot millions of good middle class  jobs george w bush lied when he said iraq had weapons of mass destruction but they don't still george bush still doesn't tell us their weapon the clinton doesn't now say that it created lots of millions of good middle class jobs the permanent lie is impervious to reality and that's what trump that comes out of the christian right and that's trump so you can have photographs of barack obama's inauguration crowd and and trump's inauguration crowd and it doesn't matter his is bigger and hannah arendt in the origin writes that that the embrace of the permanent light which is always a feature of totalitarian states creates a kind of collective schizophrenia because you see reality or verifiable so what i fear is the our economic system is not sustainable and i have lived through economic meltdowns i covered in the twenty years i was a foreign correspondent disintegrating societies i know what the warning signs look like and once that stability is a radical and i don't know what's going to trigger it whether it will be another financial collapse or as alfred mccoy points out in the shadows of american century the day the dollar is dropped as the world's reserve currency you know if you read the new york times stories closely because they say but the dollar's of the world's reserve currency bung going to stay that way mccoy said by two thousand and thirty it's finished and at that moment everything implodes you can't maintain your empire imports become expensive chronic under employment unemployment the elites have no plan b because they can't lower interest rates any more than they've lowered them and at that point you have created fertile ground for the kind of scapegoating demonizing and violence and we already have a president who speaks in all incites violence rhetorically you've created fertile ground for the rise of an american fascis and our only response now is sustained mass acts of civil disobedience and the state will be vicious i was at standing rock and but standing rocks the model it's got to have a spiritual dimension in the way standing rock  it's got to understand that what we're fighting for is the systems of life is the sacred is the understanding that there are people and things around us that have an intrinsic value beyond a monetary value and when we are affected when we are affective as we saw with standing rock they will throw everything out of member standing rock was under obama seven hundred arrests on nonviolent protests attack dogs unleashed on the crowds water cannons laced with pepper spray unleashed fired hosing down the protesters in subzero temperatures constant infiltration constant drones when i drove in in november i can i had to come all the way around because the roads were blocked but when i was stopped these weren't law enforcement we have no time left just from climate change we have no time left and in that sense resistance becomes a moral imperative we have to stop being constrained by the tyranny of the practical we have to understand as daniel berrigan once told me i asked him how do you define faith and he said the belief that the good draws to it the good even if empirically everything around you says otherwise i have kids we may fail but at least i want my kids to say he tried i'm not going to be complicit i'm not going to be passive and i can tell you that the good does draw to it the good those ironic points of light that flash out wherever the just exchange their messages may i composed like them of arrow son of dust beleaguered by the same negation and despair show an affirming flame i covered the revolutions in eastern and the revolution is what i'm calling for and all spelled out for the homeland security not playing games anymore we don't have time i'm calling for the overthrow of the corporate st and we will overthrow it just as the regimes in eastern europe were overthrown through nonviolence and through a centrally carrying out sustained acts of massive oil disobedience acts of conscience because no revolution succeeds as the writers of revolutionary theory crane britain davies and others have noted and last a certain segment of the ruling apparatus to facts then they're finished so it's one nine hundred eighty nine i was there honaker the communist dictator in east germany sends down only paratroop division to leipzig to crush the demonstrations they get there the local communist authorities refused to deploy the monitors out of power in a week the good draws to it the good and nobody knows how rotten corrupt and decayed this system is better than the people manager i was in prague it was every evening in the magic lantern theater with during the velvet revolution you had posters all throughout the city of yon polic a charles university student to protest the soviet invasion in  of square lit him self on fire four days later he died of his burns his funeral which was not reported by state media was broken up by police when his grave became a shrine his body was e d his remains were cremated and his mother was not allowed to rebury them a week after the communist government fell ten thousand checks marched a red army square and renamed it yon  i was invents a la square with half a million checks in december of eighty nine it was snowing so the great czech singer martha cooper shava comes out on the balcony now she had sung in one thousand nine hundred sixty eight a prayer for mart to protest the soviet invasion the overthrow of dubcek and the installation of a pro soviet regime once the soviets took power they destroyed a recording stock she was banned from the airwaves and in the intervening years she worked on an assembly line in a toy factory and when she walked out on that balcony and began to sing a prayer for marta every check in the crowd knew every word that is the good to it the good but if we don't stand up it can't be seen and we can't use the word hope i don't know if we will win i don't even know if we will survive as a species but these corporate forces have us by the throat and they have my children by the throat and in the end i don't fight fascists because i will when i fight fascists because they are fascist