“Griftopia” and “All the Devils Are Here” also never recognise that normal people abnegated all responsibility, both political and economic, to the financial superclass. The low voter turnout in American elections is ample testament to that problem. The book does not recognise the lack of financial literacy and the naïve belief in the ability of policymaker’s to control and engineer the economy. In this regard, neither title matches Joe Baegeant’s poignant portrait of American life and its problems in “Deer Hunting for Jesus“.

Both books are also silent on the role of the media which has fervently embraces a message that financialisation of economic life is an unqualified good. It is also silent on how the media itself fosters ignorance, through its treatment of issues in narrow and simplistic political terms. Laudatory biographies of business leaders helped create the all-knowing financial elite. The message of “stocks for the long run” and “increasing wealth” bears some responsibility for the global financial crisis.

Mr. Nocera and Ms. McLean draw the title of their book from the line in Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”: “Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.” The implication is that all would be well if the devils were rounded up and consigned back to the nether regions. Unfortunately, reality is more complex. Other observations from the Bard might be apposite. In “Julius Caesar”, Cassius tells Brutus: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings.” In “Othello”, the real “devil” Iago tells Roderigo: “Tis in ourselves that we are this and thus.”

We are not going to salvage either our environment or our country through electoral politics. I had lunch recently in NY with Fr. Daniel Berrigan and was asking him if he followed the elections, and he quoted his brother Phil and said "If voting was that effective, it would be illegal." I think that from now on, all resistance is local. Food will become, very soon, a major political weapon. We are already creating, in these post-industrial pockets, food deserts. I wrote a story for the Nation magazine on Camden NJ, which per capita is the poorest city in the country as well as the most dangerous, and there is no supermarket. The only outlets to eat [from] are Church's Fried Chicken and local donut shops. It's essentially fat, grease... This is true of West Virginia, in the places that have been culled[?] out. Banks have packed up and left. The communities themselves are falling into irreperable decay. And these post-industrial pockets are growing and expanding at a greater and greater rate. And the corporate state is not going to step in to do anything to ameliorate the suffering, the human misery that it causes. That's gonna be our job. We are going to have to begin to build locally. We are going to have to remember that the true correctives to American democracy have never come from the top down. That the question, as the great philosopher Karl Popper wrote, is not how do we get good people to rule. Most people, Popper wrote, correctly, who are attracted to power are at best mediocre (which is Obama) or venal (which is Bush.) The question is how do we make the powerful afraid of us. And all of the social movements that were built, starting with the liberty party, which fought slavery, the sufferagettes for women's right, the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement made the powerful frightened of them, which is why the last truly liberal president in the US was Richard Nixon, because he was actually scared of movements, and passed OSHA, and the clean water act, and the mine and safety act, all of which were written by Ralph Nader, who I voted for in the last election, and we have to recover that. We have to remember that it is not our job to take power. That's not our job. Our job is to remain fast around moral imperatives that we do not compromise on. It is our job to defend a dispossessed working class. It is our job to defend sick children. It is our job to defend those who are being tortured, abused and killed in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan because of our rapacious and out of control war economy. And we have to be willing to get up and make personal sacrifices on behalf of these moral imperatives even if at first we become pariahs. That is the only hope left. Anybody who's foolish enough to think that going to a ballot box at this point, and voting for a Democratic candidate is going to change anything, I think is living in a universe which is as non-reality-based as the Christian right. And if we can recover that ethic. If we can understand that rebellion or resistance is a way to safeguard our own integrity, our own individuality, if we can look down the long term and say "Maybe not in our lifetime, but we will carry this for the generations that come after," then I think we can speak about hope. If we refuse to do this, if we remain passive, and complacent, then I think both our nation and finally the ecosystem that sustains human life is doomed. Thank you.