Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, who spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has written eleven books, including “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning,” which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. Mr. Hedges was part of a New York Times team of reporters awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for coverage of global terrorism. He also received the Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism in 2002. He writes a weekly column for the website Truthdig. And his latest book – coming out on August 21st – is entitled, “America: the Farewell Tour.”

“I don’t think the collapse of empire is necessarily a negative. At this point, empire has become a deeply destructive force not only for our own country but globally. We see with endless warfare – seventeen years of warfare now in he Middle East – the inability of the corporate state to deal in a rational way with climate change or restrict or control the financial institutions that have become completely predatory and have already reconfigured the United States into an oligarchy, where it becomes impossible to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs or Citibank or Raytheon or any of these other large corporations.” Chris Hedges, author of “America: The Farewell Tour”