0:05 it's difficult to live in the last Decades of an Empire will take the American Empire probably another half century or so to completely undergo the the fundamental implosion and transformation but it's clear that the uh that that that the dying process is very much in place you are uh an incredibly uh learned intellectual public intellectual also in the you know I consider you in the the tradition of grami but as someone who studied Empire and has such a vast encyclopedic uh breath of knowledge what what makes you think that this is going to happen that this this shift in Empire is going to happen and what kind of is it going to be a collapse a death yeah
0:52 it's hard to say you know either the bang is it a whimper it's very hard to say how Empires themselves undergo their own form of Decay and deterioration and death uh the United States is is the 68th Empire and the history of the species it's been roughly 70 uh uh this is from the world atlas this is from the AL Ferguson's book and other Scholars who have made this point over and over again so I'm not the first to put this forward uh but what is distinctive about the American Empire is one it claims the innocen is to his obsession with dreams there's been no other Empire in the history of the world to move from received innocence to corruption without a mediating stage of maturity because the United States began with a big lie it said that somehow it
1:39 was born modern born capitalist born bgea no talk about the genocide of indigenous peoples no talk about slavery denying class struggle denying patriarchy in that way all every Empire we know have been shot through with forms of barbarism don't get me wrong the whole species is human species we're wretched in that sense we don't know a moment has been structures of domination there has been forms of organized hatred and weaponized greed of of organized greed I should say and weaponized hatred and routinized indifference but but the United States has this city on the hill mentality so that when James B says the Innocence itself is the crime if you view yourself as innocent why you're
2:26 committing violence and your major myth is the Frontier which is a line between the innocent civilized and the guilty Savages or precious indigenous brothers and sisters and you get more regeneration through violence then that's the worst of the country and that leads directly to Trump that leads directly to to the worst in the nation now the best in the nation is Martin King Edward Z Rabbi hesel Dorothy da Steven sonheim Louis Armstrong John C train harri tell I can go on and on no chsky Chris HED hedes I can go on and on with the best of the nation and and what we were trying to do of course in the campaign was just to reintroduce America through the best of itself and we did
3:13 win many hearts at minds and souls it was just it was hard to gain access the corporate media itself shot through with its own forms of corruption and accommodation to the unjust status quo made it very very difficult for them to focus that regard I don't think I had one speech that that the American public even heard I mean they heard more cardi B God bless us so than they heard of me in in 17 17 months why because it's just so difficult to gain access to uh exposure and visibility I was blessed to be on one number of wonderful shows including your own and and some of the corporate media had an openness to interviews with me but it was no sustained Focus on the issues of poverty
4:01 and mass incarceration and big money in politics and the ecological catastrophe and the escalating nuclear catastrophes with three sites of Wars be it with Russia or with China or in the Middle East and so on uh no serious engagement with those issues and as you know Sister Katie I uh I me I'm a crack vessel that comes out of the black Freedom Movement you see so look at the world through the lens of those friend fenon call The Wretched of the earth and begins on the chocolate side with me and so I always look at the 40% of black children who live in poverty I'm concerned about mass incarceration no serious discussion of it what soever I'm concerned about the
4:47 forms of spiritual Decay that is shot through the hearts and minds and Souls of black people as well as fellow citizens as well as fellow human beings and you can see the ways in which when you live in a society in which everybody's for sale uh and commodification is ubiquitous and it's all about you know life is Gold Rush worshiping the golden calf and transforming the Golden Rule into he who she who has the gold will rule then you're GNA get black folk themselves seduced by corruption seduced by bigotry seduced by greed because these are human beings we are human beings like everybody else and the challenge is to try to be that cloud of witnesses to
5:32 hold up that blood stain B it was the Abolitionist in the 19th century everybody laughed at it was the freedom fighters in the 1960s everybody laughed e either laughed at them or they shot him down assassinated him incarcerated him that's why mumi Buu Jamal is still in jail right brother ad Brown brother ammani men Abdullah alham still in jail Leonard peler still in jail I mean these are folk who were very much a part of efforts to try to bring light on the forms of barbarism that was shot through the American Empire in the 1960s and it's gotten so much worse now in terms of the corruption now the irony is that we've made some some some
6:17 progress in terms of inclusion I don't want to deny that at all we've made progress as a result of social movements but what has happened of course is that the Imperial uh hierarchy and the class hierarchy has just invited all these different peoples of color and gender and sexual orientation to come in and be included without getting at the structures of the Empire the structures of the predatory capitalist mode of production or the structures in terms of the ways in which professional classes so tied to careerism and opportunism simply make room for the newcomers without fundamentally transforming the structures as the newcomers are on their way in and so you get these black faces
7:03 and high places and women faces and high places gay and lesbian faces and a now a precious trans you know I do want to stop and say a word about this because I'm deeply concerned about the way which they have been so viciously demonized and viciously vilified and so they're human means like anybody else so they can be they can make choices of right and wrong but anytime you have a group that's being viciously vilified like that and we've seen it in the history of the species with Jews for 2500 years terrorized traumatized but when they get in positions of power they can be human like everybody else because they are human and they have the capacity to terrorize and traumatize too
7:48 and if we can't be flexible enough to be concerned about our Jewish brothers and sisters when they're being terrorized and traumatized but also concerned about our Palestinian brothers and sisters when they're being ter and traumatized by Israelis then something's wrong with our Humanity right something's wrong with our solidarity you see
