Flag In Distress Blog

Shattered peace: Israel-Palestine

Thu, 04 Dec 2014 01:35:53 GMT

Josh Ruebner
University of Colorado
Boulder, CO
5 November 2014

Outrage follows outrage in Israel and Palestine. Yesterday’s atrocity is quickly forgotten as a new one occurs. There is a dizzying vortex kidnappings, stabbings, killings of teenagers and rabbis, attacks on synagogues and mosques, rockets, invasions, bombings, curfews, collective punishment, and demolition of homes. Meanwhile, Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian land, contravening international law, continue unabated. Occasionally, Washington says they are “unhelpful.” But there are no consequences. U.S. policy, meek rhetoric aside, enables settlements. The so-called peace process is dead. The Palestinians feel hopeless and desperate. Their prospects for a viable state seem more remote than ever. The prescription for more violence is in place. Can these polarized and deeply divided communities live together or are they destined to be in perpetual conflict? What would constitute a just and lasting peace?

This lecture and interview are available as a CD or mp3 or transcript from Alternative Radio

Josh Ruebner is the National Advocacy Director of the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation. He founded and directed Jews for Peace in Palestine and Israel, which merged with Jewish Voice for Peace. He is the author of Shattered Hopes: Obama’s Failure to Broker Israeli-Palestinian Peace.

You can listen to Josh Ruebner speak for himself (an mp3 clip) here.
You can get a printable version of this talk (a PDF file) here.

Thank you for coming out to talk about what I think is an incredibly important foreign policy issue, which is the way that our country relates to Israel and the Palestinian people and how we may or, more accurately, may not help bring about a just and lasting peace between the two, given the configuration of our current politics.

Obama’s Failure to Broker Israeli-Palestinian Peace. I often get chided by people. Why am I picking on President Obama? Isn’t it true that all presidents, Democrats, Republicans alike, since Harry Truman, recognized the state of Israel in 1948, have tried their hand at brokering Israeli-Palestinian peace and all of them have failed? Yes, this is true. So this is not a singling out of the current president, but rather a case study in how the U.S. under Obama has continued our country’s policies of providing Israel with nearly unlimited and unconditional military, diplomatic, and political support for its ongoing oppression of the Palestinian people.

This policy of what I would argue to be U.S. complicity in Israel’s human rights abuses of the Palestinian people has only strengthened over the past six years, despite the fact that President Obama has been the most rhetorically sympathetic to the Palestinian people of any president, including Jimmy Carter, by the way. Jimmy Carter never got further than expressing support for a homeland for the Palestinian people and for self-determination for the Palestinian people. President Barack Obama has gone well beyond that. When he spoke in Cairo in the summer of 2009, just six months into his presidency, he talked about the daily indignities and humiliations the Palestinians face under Israeli military occupation, and he also talked about the fact that Palestinian refugees languish in refugee camps, denied their right to live in peace and security. No U.S. president has ever talked this forthrightly about the injustices done to the Palestinian people by the state of Israel over the past 67 years.

I think what occurred summer in the Gaza strip is a perfect example of exactly how the U.S. supports Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people no matter how egregious Israel’s behaviors and policies might be. Before I share with you some of the statistics which emerged from the Gaza Strip this summer, I think it’s important to share a few stories of actual human beings who were impacted by events that took place in the Gaza Strip, because as much as we discuss statistics when we talk about the Israeli-Palestinian issue, it’s always important to remember, to realize that behind all of these statistics there are real human beings with lives and hopes and aspirations and dreams and desires to live in dignity and in liberty.

Who can forget the images of the four young Bakr cousins blown to bits by an Israeli naval artillery shell on the beaches of Gaza City in full view of the international media? Or the story of Shayma al-Sheikh Qanan, aged 23, who was 8 months pregnant for the first time in her life when she was struck down by an Israeli artillery shell, which demolished her house, burying her under the rubble. Shayma was pulled from the rubble, brought to the hospital, where her unborn child was miraculously delivered by Caesarean section, despite the fact that she had already perished. This miracle child was named after her mother, Shyama, and symbolized to Palestinians, both in the Gaza Strip and further afield than that, the rebirth of Palestinian society, of Palestinian life, hopes, and dreams. But the miracle child, sadly, only lived for just five days, because the life sustaining her was in the form of an incubator, and the incubator lost power after Israel deliberately targeted for destruction Gaza’s only power plant, knocking it off line, cutting off electricity to the hospital where this child was being kept alive.

I just read yesterday a new update from the United Nations actually documenting that the destruction by Israel in the Gaza Strip this summer was more widespread than initially thought. The numbers are now that Israel in just 50 days of fighting killed more than 2,250 Palestinians, more than 70% of all Palestinians killed were definitively civilians, according to the United Nations. More than 11,000 people were wounded, many grievously, losing limbs. And 538 children were killed, or more than 10 children per day, in Israel’s attack.

We often hear from our mainstream media, from Israel’s supporters in this country that it is Israelis who face political violence from Palestinians. We even hear some people assert that this level of political violence by Palestinians against Israelis is tantamount to some form of an existential threat against the state of Israel. And from these dire analyses we might expect that, yes, indeed, Israelis are dying at far higher rates than Palestinians in political violence. But this flips reality on its head. This is not at all true. This summer, more children were killed by Israel in 50 days of fighting than the entire number of Israelis killed in Palestinian political violence, adults and children, civilians and all soldiers in more than 10 years. Five hundred thirty-eight children were killed by Israel this summer, 347 Israelis have died in the last decade. This is the reality. This is the magnitude, this is the scale of Israel’s oppression in maintaining its 47-year military occupation of the Gaza Strip, of the West Bank, and East Jerusalem. Because, of course, in order to strip a people of dignity and self-determination and to maintain them under these types of oppressive conditions, systematic violence is necessary to keep them pinned down under these circumstances. Because no people will ever agree voluntarily to give up their freedom and their dignity and their right to self-determination. It’s the violence inherent in the system which leads to these kinds of horrific statistics.

Originally the UN thought that 18,000 Palestinian homes were damaged, initially the estimates were that 6% of the entire population of the Gaza Strip were made homeless by Israel. But the revised figures indicate that actually 100,000 housing units were either damaged or destroyed by Israel, affecting one-third of the entire population of the Gaza Strip.

We saw Israel attack, damage, or destroy 140 Palestinian schools in the Gaza Strip. Can you imagine what the reaction would be from our members of Congress, our media, people who support Israel in this country if Palestinians damaged or destroyed one Israeli school? But Israel damaged or destroyed 140 Palestinian schools in the Gaza Strip, including attacking deliberately three UN schools which were serving as safe havens for internally displaced Palestinians.

We often hear that Israel is the “most moral army in the world” because the Israel military does things like call Palestinians on their cell phones and drop millions of fliers saying,

Get out. We’re going to bomb your neighborhood, we’re going to destroy it.

Sometimes Israel does what they call “roof knocking.” This is to deliver a so-called dud missile onto the roof of a home that’s going to be destroyed. And if you’re a Palestinian who resides in one of these houses, perhaps you will have 90 seconds, maybe 60 seconds, maybe 30 seconds to grab your stuff and go, to grab your loved ones and go, to try to get people in wheelchairs out of homes in 60 seconds.

Many Palestinians received this “roof knocking” by Israel, received these cell phone calls, received these fliers that were dropped in the air. And they indeed fled their homes, because Israel did indeed destroy these neighborhoods.

They fled to where they thought they would be safe, which were these UN schools which were serving as shelters for internally displaced Palestinians. On three separate occasions Israel bombed these UN schools, despite the fact that the UN had given Israel the exact GPS coordinates of these schools not once, not twice. This was no accident. The UN gave Israel the GPS coordinates of these UN shelters on a dozen occasions each. Israel still bombed them, knowing full well that innocent civilians by the thousands were taking shelter there.

We hear from Israel that this was a war against Hamas, an attack to destroy its arsenal of weapons, to destroy its network and infrastructure of tunnels, so on and so forth. And, of course, there were Israeli military attacks against Hamas targets. But this was certainly not the primary objective. The primary objective of this attack was, in Israeli political parlance, to “mow the lawn.” This extremely dehumanizing term refers to Israel’s regular efforts to slowly depopulate the Gaza Strip by killing people off.

Today, Amnesty International came out with a report showing that Israel showed “callous indifference” toward Palestinians. This was not an attack against Hamas. This was an attack against Palestinians and their ability to live normal lives in the Gaza Strip, which is, of course, impeded in the first place by the fact that you’ve had this illegal Israeli blockade on the Gaza Strip for now seven years, which has prevented the importation of essential foods and medicines and equipment for running infrastructure like water treatment, like sewage treatment. So this blockade has created a humanitarian catastrophe in the Gaza Strip.

The United Nations has estimated that it’s going to cost about $8 billion to rebuild the damage that Israel inflicted on the Gaza Strip this summer. Or to put it in other terms, a little bit less than three years in the amount of military aid, weapons that we as U.S. taxpayers provided to the state of Israel to demolish the Gaza Strip in the first place.

This is, of course, not the first time that Israel has completely demolished the Gaza strip. It did so in 2012, it did so in 2008-2009, it did so in 2006 as well. Every few years Israel demolishes billions of dollars’ worth of civilian infrastructure and homes in the Gaza Strip. And we keep paying Israel, giving Israel money and weapons to destroy it yet again. On top of that, then we go to international donors’ conferences in Cairo and pledge to rebuild it. And John Kerry says that this will never happen again: Gaza won’t be attacked again. Who is he kidding?

Because of Israel’s blockade on the Gaza Strip, the UN has actually estimated that it’s going to take 20 years to rebuild Gaza to the very precarious point that it was on July 6th. Twenty years. Can you imagine having a foreign army come in and destroy your home, destroy your children’s school, and the international community says, Oh, sorry, you’re not going to get any compensation, but you’re going to have to wait 20 years to have your house rebuilt? This is the situation today that faces Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. And even if somehow one thought that it was fair, just or right to have to wait 20 years to have your infrastructure rebuilt due to these massacres, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip don’t have 20 years. That’s the reality of the situation. Because the United Nations published a report a few years ago that documented that because of the environmental degradation foisted upon the Gaza Strip by Israel’s blockade, and due to the growing overpopulation of the Gaza Strip, it simply won’t be habitable for human beings by 2020. That’s just six years from now. So by the time the international community gets around to paying to rebuild what Israel demolished this summer in the Gaza Strip, it will be too late. It won’t be habitable anymore for human beings.

What was the response of our government? Was it to demand that Israel stop employing these U.S. weapons, in violation of U.S. law, to commit these human rights abuses? Was it to demand that Israel be held accountable for the war crimes that it had committed in the Gaza Strip? And, yes, when you deliberately target civilians and civilian infrastructure, it is a war crime. It is a war crime under international law. For those of you who know this issue, I think you know the answer. The answer is, of course, no. The U.S. didn’t say anything of the sort. In fact, John Kerry, Secretary of State, referred to Israel’s actions as being “appropriate and legitimate.”

We often hear that Israel acted in “self-defense” by “responding to Hamas rockets.” So a reporter at the State Department’s daily press briefing asked the State Department spokesperson, If the right of self-defense is a universal right that pertains to every human being, don’t Palestinians also have the right to defend themselves? Don’t Palestinians have the ability to defend their families and protect their homes and their schools and their businesses? The response of our government was to say that this was an “offensive notion.” It was an “offensive notion” to think that what Palestinians might be doing is simply defending their lives and their property.

The Obama administration, on behalf of the U.S., cast the only no vote in the UN Human Rights Council against the establishment of simply a fact-finding mission to examine the actions and the behaviors of both Israel and Palestinian groups. Do you know why the State Department claimed that the Obama administration voted against the establishment of this fact-finding mission? It was because it was “one-sided” and “unbalanced” and “biased” despite the fact that they hadn’t investigated anything, despite the fact that the composition of the investigation team hadn’t been decided upon, and despite the fact that the UN Human Rights Council passed a resolution to examine the conduct of all parties. This is the extent of bias that is inherent in our foreign policy when it comes to Israel and the Palestinian people.

You might be thinking,

Well, isn’t it true that the U.S. got really mad at Israel the third time that it bombed a UN school?

Yes, that’s true. Maybe you’re thinking,

Isn’t it true that President Obama expressed his remorse about Palestinian civilian casualties?

Yes, that’s true as well. But at the same time that President Obama was saying how sorry he was for all these Palestinian children dying, the U.S. was actually rearming Israel. President Obama gave special authorization to Israel during the attack to take stockpiles of U.S. weapons that are located in Israel and to draw from these stockpiles of U.S. weapons to replenish their arsenal. The very same tank artillery shells, the very same bazooka shells that had demolished entire neighborhoods like Shejaiya in the Gaza Strip, these weapons were given Israel to continue the attack. How can you say that you’re concerned about the death of Palestinian civilians when you’re arming Israel to continue the attack?

To understand what happened to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip one first has to understand the collective brutality inflicted upon Palestinian society in 1948, when Israel was established, what Palestinians refer to as the Naqba, or catastrophe, because indeed it was a catastrophe for the Palestinian people. It was a catastrophe for the Palestinian people because when Israel established its sovereignty on more than three-quarters, 78%, of historic Palestine, it engaged in a premeditated and very systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing to drive out as many Palestinians from their homes, from as much of historic Palestine as possible. This is all documented in books like Ilan Pappe’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, where he talks about how Israel wiped off the face of the map 531 Palestinian villages in 1948, how Israel emptied 11 Palestinian urban neighborhoods of their inhabitants. And what Israel would like you not to know is that between 80% and 90% of the indigenous population of Palestinians were driven, expelled from their homes by Israel in 1948 to create the so-called Jewish state.

The only reason why Israel today is a country which has a majority of its citizens who are Jewish is because of this is act of ethnic cleansing and the refusal to make it right. Under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, every human being has the right to leave their home at any time and for any reason and to return at any time and for any reason. And despite Israel’s agreeing, upon joining the UN in 1949, that Palestinian refugees who wished to return to their homes could do so, despite that fact, here we are 65 years after Israel joined the United Nations, and Palestinian refugees still don’t have their right of return to their homes and their properties.

Why? Because Israel does not view Palestinian refugees as human beings with human rights. They view them as a “demographic threat.” And Israel believes that it has a so-called “right” to maintain the bitter fruits of this ethnic-cleansing campaign and to deny these refugees their rights of return because they are not the “right nationality,” they’re not the “right religion.” You can scour the international law books for such a right to ethnically cleanse people and to deny them their right of return based on their ethnicity or their nationality, but I’ll tell you right now, you’re not going to find it. There is no such right under international law.

Not all Palestinians were ethnically cleansed by Israel in 1948. Some resisted this ethnic-cleansing campaign, stayed where they were, and eventually became citizens of the state of Israel. Israel claims to be a “democracy” because these Palestinians citizens of Israel have the right to vote, they have the right to run for office. There are, in fact, Palestinian members of Israel’s parliament today. All of this is undeniably true. But does having the right to vote equal democracy? I would say no. I would say voting is, of course, a prerequisite to having a democratic country, but voting is not the be-all and end-all. The cornerstone of living in a democratic state is that the state treats you with equality regardless of your race, regardless of your ethnicity, regardless of your religion. This is the notion on which democracy is founded.

Palestinian citizens of Israel—who, by the way, are 20% of Israel’s population, so one in five Israelis are Palestinian—are not at all treated equally. They’re not even really second-class citizens. That would be putting it kindly. They’re more like unwanted reminders to the state of Israel that the ethnic-cleansing campaign of 1948 did not fully succeed. So Palestinian citizens of Israel today face more than 50 discriminatory laws, which privilege Jewish citizens of the state and discriminate against them in housing, in land use, in governmental services, in health care delivery, in educational spending. The Israeli government spends $10 on education for its Jewish citizens for every $1 that’s spent on the education of its Palestinian citizens. And the two school systems are completely segregated except for one or two examples of private schools. Completely segregated. So that if you’re Palestinian, you must go to the inferior and underfunded Arabic-language school; but if you’re Jewish Israeli, you go to the well-funded Jewish only, Hebrew-speaking school. As we know from the tortured racial history of our country, separate always means unequal.

This was the situation in a nutshell up until 1967, when Israel conquered the remaining 22% of historic Palestine, what we today call the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. Since that time Israel has held those territories, in the words of the Israeli Supreme Court, by the way, under “belligerent military occupation.” Under this “belligerent military occupation,” Palestinians are stripped of all of their political rights whatsoever. Every single right that you and I take for granted in this country does not apply to Palestinians under military occupation.

The very first military order that Israel passed when it occupied these territories, military order No. 101, made it illegal for Palestinians to write an article in the Palestinian media, which is critical of Israel. It made it illegal for Palestinians to join a political party. All political parties are illegal under Israeli military occupation, including, technically, the parties that Israel sits at the negotiating table with. They’re all illegal. It’s illegal to wave a Palestinian flag under Israeli military occupation. And it’s illegal for Palestinians to gather in groups of 10 people or more for any political purpose whatsoever, including the right of nonviolent protest and nonviolent political expression. These rights are denied to Palestinians under Israeli military occupation. These are not denied, however, to Israeli Jews who have come to colonize expropriated Palestinian lands in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. In fact, of course, they come there at the behest of the Israeli government and are given tax breaks to come live on expropriated Palestinian lands.

The discrimination between these two populations in the occupied Palestinian territories is so blatant that there are actually—those of you who have been there know this—two different colored license plates, one for Palestinians under military occupation, the other for Israeli Jewish colonizers. Israel has actually built a whole road infrastructure in the West Bank that Palestinians are not even allowed to drive on. This is the degree and the blatant nature of the discrimination that exists between these two populations.

So when you look at the totality of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinian people, what we have is certainly no democracy. Israel is at best what I think political scientists call an ethnocracy, meaning democracy for a limited ethnic segment of the population. Calling Israel, either today or in 1948 or at any time in between, a democracy is like saying that the U.S. was a democracy upon our founding, when only white males who owned substantial amounts of property had the right to vote. We completely excluded from the body politic women, the indigenous population that we were busy exterminating, and the millions of Africans who were brought to this country as slaves to build the wealth and power of this nation. That’s no democracy. South Africa liked to claim that it was a democracy under apartheid. Who were they kidding that it’s a democracy if only white people can vote? Who are we kidding by saying that Israel is a democracy when even Palestinian citizens of Israel face 50 discriminatory laws? And when we factor in that Palestinian refugees have been driven from their homes and not allowed to return? And when we factor into the equation Palestinians who have lived under Israeli military occupation for now nearly half a century, denied all of their political rights whatsoever. This is not a democracy. This is an apartheid regime.

Yes, the word apartheid comes to us via the South African context, but, no, it’s not limited in its application to a discussion of South Africa. Because in the 1970s, the international community passed a treaty defining apartheid as a crime against humanity and giving it universal applicability. The UN defined apartheid as any governmental system that privileges one set of people and discriminates against another set of people based on factors such as their race, their religion, their ethnicity, table with. They’re all illegal. It’s illegal to wave a Palestinian flag under Israeli military occupation. And it’s illegal for Palestinians to gather in groups of 10 people or more for any political purpose whatsoever, including the right of nonviolent protest and nonviolent political expression. These rights are denied to Palestinians under Israeli military occupation. These are not denied, however, to Israeli Jews who have come to colonize expropriated Palestinian lands in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. In fact, of course, they come there at the behest of the Israeli government and are given tax breaks to come live on expropriated Palestinian lands.

So when you look at the totality of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinian people, what we have is certainly no democracy. Israel is at best what I think political scientists call an ethnocracy, meaning democracy for a limited ethnic segment of the population. Calling Israel, either today or in 1948 or at any time in between, a democracy is like saying that the U.S. was a democracy upon our founding, when only white males who owned substantial amounts of property had the right to vote. We completely excluded from the body politic women, the indigenous population that we were busy exterminating, and the millions of Africans who were brought to this country as slaves to build the wealth and power of this nation. That’s no democracy. South Africa liked to claim that it was a democracy under apartheid. Who were they kidding that it’s a democracy if only white people can vote? Who are we kidding by saying that Israel is a democracy when even Palestinian citizens of Israel face 50 discriminatory laws? And when we factor in that Palestinian refugees have been driven from their homes and not allowed to return? And when we factor into the equation Palestinians who have lived under Israeli military occupation for now nearly half a century, denied all of their political rights whatsoever. This is not a democracy. This is an apartheid regime.

Yes, the word apartheid comes to us via the South African context, but, no, it’s not limited in its application to a discussion of South Africa. Because in the 1970s, the international community passed a treaty defining apartheid as a crime against humanity and giving it universal applicability. The UN defined apartheid as any governmental system that privileges one set of people and discriminates against another set of people based on factors such as their race, their religion, their ethnicity, their national origin. This is exactly what Israel admits to doing when it demands to be recognized not as a state of all of its citizens, not as a country with equal rights for all of those over whom it rules, but as a “Jewish state”—a “Jewish state” that’s set up for the exclusive privilege and prerogative of Jewish people, whether they’re citizens of the state or not.

The problem with the U.S.-led so-called peace process has not been about ending Israel’s apartheid domination over the Palestinian people but the reverse. It is about making permanent and even reifying the notion that Israel should be an apartheid state. Some of you may be thinking, This doesn’t make any sense whatsoever, because I thought the goal of this peace process was the establishment of a Palestinian state on parts or all of land occupied by Israel in 1967: the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip. Isn’t it true, you might be thinking, that all of the parties to these negotiations agree that this should be the goal, this should be the outcome of these talks? So how can I say this is about strengthening Israeli apartheid when the goal is the establishment of an independent Palestinian state through which Palestinians can exercise self-determination?

The reason I say this is that just because all the parties say that they want the same thing, it doesn’t mean the same thing. So when the Palestinian negotiating team says that they want a state, what they mean is they want a state that has all the powers and sovereignties and prerogatives of 193 other nations in the world. But when Israel, backed by the U.S., says that it wants a “Palestinian state,” this means something completely different. This is a diametrically opposed vision, 180 degrees different.

The proposal put forward by John Kerry at the behest of Israel this spring of 2014 would not have created an independent and sovereign Palestinian state. It would have created a non-sovereign entity under the complete control and domination of the state of Israel from without. This is the main reason why Kerry’s so-called peace process failed. What Kerry was offering the Palestinians on behalf of Israel—and by the way, this is always how the negotiations work—was the U.S. proposing to Palestinians Israel’s ideas for how to maintain control over them. This is the rigged nature of the game.

So what Kerry put forward was that Palestinians would have no control over the borders of their so-called state. Those would be controlled by Israel. In fact, the West Bank would be cut off from its neighbor Jordan by a long-term Israeli-U.S. joint military presence there. Think of all the things that we do as a sovereign state: we control our borders, our airspace, our territorial waters, our natural resources, we have our own army, our own foreign policy, our own foreign economic policy. All these things we associate with sovereignty in the modern political system. Not a single one of these things would apply to the so-called state that John Kerry was proposing. In fact, Palestinians would not even have control over their electromagnetic sphere under John Kerry’s proposal. I have to confess, I don’t know anything about science, and I had no idea what an electromagnetic sphere meant until the Israeli prime minister started talking about it all the time. It refers to things like radio signals and cell phone networks and so forth. Palestinians won’t even be able to control their cell phones under the deal put forward by John Kerry. All of the military infrastructure that Israel has built in the West Bank and East Jerusalem over the last half century stays where it is. The apartheid wall that Israel has built stays where it is. The military bases Israel has built stay where they are.

Eighty to 90% the settlement population would get annexed to Israel, chopping the West Bank up into tiny little disconnected fragments of land cut off from one another by these Israeli settlements, by Israel’s apartheid road infrastructure network, by Israel’s apartheid wall. And what would be created in the West Bank would be a second version of what the Gaza Strip is today, a blockaded, non-sovereign entity completely under Israel’s control from without, with Israel able to attack it and demolish it at any time. Palestinians also would have no sovereignty in Jerusalem under John Kerry’s plan. Instead, John Kerry talked about “future aspirations” for Palestinians to have sovereignty in Jerusalem. What “future aspirations” are we talking about when John Kerry said this deal is a be all and end all, there are no more claims after this? What kind of “future aspirations” are we talking about? Palestinian refugees would not have the right of return, and Israel would maintain its more than 50 discriminatory laws against Palestinian citizens of Israel.

So as the contours of this deal became clear to the Palestinians and that they weren’t going to get a fair shake out of the U.S. yet again, the negotiating team was debriefing with the White House, and the lead Palestinian negotiator, Dr. Saeb Erekat, runs into Susan Rice, Obama’s national security adviser, in the corridors of the White House. Saeb Erekat said,

Susan, I see we’ve yet to succeed in making it clear to you that we Palestinians aren’t stupid.

To this Rice gets indignant, she gets livid. She can’t believe that the dispossessed, the colonized, the oppressed of the world would dare to challenge the superpower in this way, would dare not to accept the crumbs being thrown at their feet. And Susan Rice said,

You Palestinians can never see the fucking big picture.

This is how our government talks to the representative of a dispossessed, colonized, oppressed people denied self-determination.

So where are we today, now that Kerry’s so-called peace process has collapsed for good? We are at the end of what I believe is basically the second historical phase in how Zionism and the state of Israel relate to the indigenous population that it colonized and dispossessed. I say the end of the second phase. Let me give you the first one first.

The first phase lasted approximately from 1880 up until 1980, basically a century, and was summed up in the pithy expression of Zionism being a movement for

a land without a people for a people without a land.

If this were true about Zionism, that it really was a land without a people, then perhaps there would be no moral problems with Zionism and the state of Israel. But, of course, to colonize lands, there has to be an indigenous population who gets colonized, who gets dispossessed, who gets moved off of that land. That is, of course, the Palestinian people.

In the 1980s, when it became increasingly untenable for Israel to deny the existence of this Palestinian people, largely because of the first Intifada, , or uprising, against Israeli military occupation, we entered the second phase, which was basically to provide Palestinians under Israeli military occupation with limited autonomy, under the complete domination of the state of Israel. This notion of providing limited autonomy to the Palestinians has basically been the defining Israeli political project since the 1980s. It’s just changed names a little bit. It’s gone from autonomy to “state.” But this “state” is really no different from the powers envisioned for this limited autonomy way back in the 1980s.

So what we’re seeing as an end of this paradigm today, in 2014, is that this is not me, Josh Ruebner, little old nobody, who is standing up here and saying that this so-called two-state resolution paradigm is dead, this is John Kerry, our Secretary of State, who has admitted as much. He admitted as much in the spring of 2013, when he testified before Congress—mind you, this was about 18 months ago—that there is a one-to-one-and-a-half-to-two-year window of opportunity for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian issue on a two-state basis. So if even John Kerry has recognized that this window has now closed, what are we still doing pretending that it’s an option? How long is it going to take our politicians to recognize that the tired, hidebound platitudes simply don’t apply anymore to understanding how to resolve this issue fairly and justly? So the question is, How do we get from where we are today, which is stuck, to getting to a just and lasting peace?

The first thing I think we have to do is we have to pressure our politicians, because we as American citizens, no matter what our religious or ethnic backgrounds are, are complicit in Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people by virtue of both the weapons that we give to Israel and the diplomatic support which prevents Israel from being held accountable for its actions in the international community, no matter how egregious. So, one, we have to demand that our politicians change this morally bankrupt policy.

The second thing we need to do is to respond to what Palestinians are asking people of conscience around the world to do, which is to engage in campaigns of boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israel, against corporations which are literally profiting from their oppression of the Palestinian people. We’re seeing this BDS movement rise and grow stronger by the day. Macy’s has announced that it has pulled SodaStream from its line of products because SodaStream is a product made in an illegal Israeli colony in the West Bank. Actually, because of this pressure from the international BDS campaign, SodaStream last week announced that it is indeed shutting its factory in this illegal Israeli colony in the West Bank. These types of campaigns are working. We see the Presbyterian Church (USA) divest from Caterpillar, divest from Motorola, divest from Hewlett-Packard, corporations which all sell equipment to the Israeli military, used to commit human rights abuses of the Palestinian people. This movement is working, despite what Israel claims, despite what its supporters claim. By the way, they’re throwing millions of dollars into the campaign to try to defeat the BDS movement and they’re still failing. So they’re relying more and more on outright repression, because the debate has been lost.

Israel has lost the debate. The only question is, For how much longer can it continue the repression of dissent against this policy and prevent people from organizing and do the moral thing? I don’t think it’s much longer. Because structures of oppression can, I think, appear very solid from the outside but yet might be rotting from within, might be coming under so much pressure from without that they buckle and collapse. This is indeed what the BDS movement is doing: It is helping to pull out the pillars of support that sustain Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people. And when enough of these pillars are pulled out, I think the whole structure will become unstable and collapse very quickly. All of the people whom I have spoken to who were involved in the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa told me they never thought they would see the day when apartheid in South Africa ended. Then one day it did.

So this is our job: to continue this work, to not despair, and to continue until enough of these pillars of oppression are pulled out. And only when Israel’s superstructure of apartheid toward the Palestinian people has ended, can the parties then come and discuss a just and lasting peace.

Thank you.

*** *** **** Answers to audience questions

The first question was related to the recent provocations by extreme Israeli Jews who want to demolish the Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem and build a new Jewish temple on their ashes. Obviously, such types of plans and actions could be cataclysmic, could invoke the specter of religious war. What’s happening in al-Aqsa is extremely worrying. It’s obviously a very sensitive site. The new sort of Israeli Jewish extremist line is that, Oh, well, we just want equal rights. We just want the ability for Jews to pray at this site, too. This is not equal rights. This is about demolishing one religious site to build another religious site there. We’ve seen how that’s worked out in history. So it’s very worrying. And, yes, there are lots of tensions in Jerusalem right now. I think the probability of another uprising or Intifada against Israel’s military occupation is likely. Even Secretary of State John Kerry, even President Barack Obama say over and over again that the situation is unsustainable. Agreed, it’s not sustainable. It’s going to erupt. It’s always erupting, but it’s really going to erupt sometime soon.

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Hamas. What is Hamas’s culpability in terms of the violence inflicted on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip? Let me start off by backing up a step and saying that as an organization that supports human rights and international law, we believe that the deliberate targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure is a war crime, is wrong, is immoral. So we condemn that when Israel does it with U.S. weapons, and we’re against it as well when Hamas launches rockets against Israeli civilians. In terms of Hamas’s use of force, we have to distinguish between what is legitimate use of force and what’s not legitimate. So it’s not legitimate to fire rockets against civilian populations. Agreed. But does Hamas have the right to pick up weapons and defend itself and fight back against Israeli troops attacking Palestinians in the Gaza Strip? Yes, they do. You might not like the fact that Hamas is doing so. You might think that Palestinians might be better off pursuing a wholly nonviolent strategy. But under international law it’s the right of occupied people to resist occupation by military means. That means when Hamas strikes at Israeli military targets, it’s legitimate under international law.

We heard a lot in the recent attack this summer that Hamas was using Palestinians as “human shields.” Congress, in fact, passed a resolution, I believe by unanimous consent, condemning Hamas for using Palestinians as “human shields.” “Human shields” is a term that has a distinct meaning under international law, and it means forcing civilians to remain in harm’s way during fighting between militaries or paramilitaries. The New York Times, certainly no friend of Hamas, and certainly no friend of the Palestinian people, I would argue, actually said—I believe it was two days before Congress passed this resolution—that there was “no evidence whatsoever of Hamas using Palestinians as human shields.” There was no evidence and no one has put forward any evidence that Hamas forced Palestinians to stay in harm’s way, which is the definition of “human shields.”

On the contrary, Israel has a long record, which is well documented by international human rights organizations and Israeli human rights organizations, of using Palestinians as human shields. You can go on the Internet and do a Google image search—and, yes, I know Photoshop distorts images and so forth—and look at these credible human rights organizations’ reports on Israel’s practice of using Palestinians as human shields. And you will see how Israel ties Palestinian kids to their half-tracks, to their armored personnel carriers, to try to prevent stones from being thrown at them. In fact, in this latest attack in Gaza, Defense for Children International Palestine documented the case of Israel abducting, I believe it was, a 15-year-old boy in the Gaza Strip and forcing him to dig for Hamas tunnels for three days, putting him in harm’s way rather than the military. This is the definition of “human shields.” And the reality is Israel is the one that is engaged in this practice.

*** *** ***

What would a one-state solution look like? There are basically two models for how this would work. One would be a majoritarian system a la South Africa. In other words, one person, one vote, a unitary structure for the state. The other model would be some kind of bi-national setup, kind of like what you have in Belgium today, where you have two distinct national communities with separate identities and some separate institutions that come together at the federal level for joint decision making. These are basically the two options for what a one-state resolution might look like. They could all be configured lots of different ways, and political scientists have, I think, put out dozens of different studies about how this would work constitutionally and legally. But ultimately I think any just and fair resolution to this issue has to involve Palestinians attaining equal rights to Israeli Jews, no matter how you slice that, no matter how you set it up constitutionally.

*** *** ***

What to say to your pro-Israel friends who might be open to hearing what you have to say but would not necessarily agree with what I’ve said here tonight? The first principle of organizing is to start where people are at, not where you want them to go. So it’s with that organizing maxim in mind that I think we have to approach people, to recognize their fears, their concerns, their ignorance in many cases, and to, I think, engage people not on a debate on the issues right away but to engage them on what their values are. What do you value? Do you value life? Do you value dignity for human beings? Of course everyone is going to say yes. Then you can engage on the factual issues at hand to show how this is actually conflicting with what they say they’re in support of.

*** *** ***

What can you do physically on the ground? There are a number of Palestinian villages that hold weekly nonviolent protests that you can get involved with. They’re always open to Israeli, Jewish participation in solidarity with them. There are a number of good Israeli peace organizations that are doing on-the-ground work, like ICAHD, the Israeli Committee Against Home Demolitions, which engages in the rebuilding of destroyed Palestinian homes. There’s Rabbis for Human Rights, which helped to replant uprooted olive trees. There’s Anarchists Against the Wall, which go and protest every Friday, I believe, against Israel’s apartheid wall. So there’s lots of different ways that you can get involved and lots of good organizations doing good, hands-on type of work there.

*** *** ***

For information about obtaining CDs, MP3s, or transcripts of this or other programs, please contact:
David Barsamian
Alternative Radio
P.O. Box 551
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©2014

Capitalism versus the climate

Tue, 18 Nov 2014 21:41:36 GMT

Naomi Klein
Town Hall
Seattle, WA
28 September 2014

Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course. Human activities inflict harsh and often irreversible damage on the environment and on critical resources. If not checked, many of our current practices put at serious risk the future that we wish for human society and the plant and animal kingdoms, and may so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know. Fundamental changes are urgent if we are to avoid the collision our present course will bring about.

Those words of warning were written in 1992 by some 1,700 scientists including more than 100 Nobel laureates. Here we are, more than two decades later still talking, still drilling and doing very little to protect our precious planet from an economic system that prioritizes profits over the well being of Earth.

This lecture and interview are available as a CD or mp3 or transcript from Alternative Radio

Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, author and filmmaker. Her articles appear in major newspapers and magazines all over the world. She is the author of the bestsellers No Logo, The Shock Doctrine, and This Changes Everything.

You can listen to Naomi Klein speak for herself (an mp3 clip) here.
You can get a printable version of this talk (a PDF file) here.

This Changes Everything. The reason I chose this title is not because I think my book will change everything but because I think climate change changes everything. And I think that that’s a good place to start the discussion. When choosing a title, it’s good to choose a title that starts the discussion where you think it should start, because a lot of interviews begin with

Why is your book called that?

The reason it’s a good place to start the discussion is because it’s important for us to understand that we have procrastinated so long that there are now no nonradical solutions left on the table. If we stay on the road we’re on, we face radical changes to our physical world. This is what the vast majority of climate scientists tell us and now what some of our most conservative, staid institutions are telling us. The World Bank, the International Energy Agency, Price Waterhouse Coopers tell us that if we stay on the road we’re on, we are headed towards warming of between 4 and 6 degrees Centigrade. That’s 10.7 Fahrenheit on the high end. That is incompatible with anything that we might call organized, civilized society.

All the models break down, really, after 3 degrees. The scientists tell us they don’t know what this would look like beyond the fact that it would be radical change, it would be whole, huge cities under water, whole countries disappeared, it would be massive crop failure. And possibly much worse.

All we have to do to arrive at this scary place is nothing. All we have to do is not react as if this is an existential crisis. This is known as business as usual, being us, only more so. Because that’s what we do: We grow more and more and emit more and more every year. So that’s one radical scenario on the table.

Another radical scenario that I discuss in the book is what’s increasingly being taken seriously among the very serious people, and that is intervening in the climate system through radical technologies at a global scale, sometimes called geoengineering, to try to make those outcomes less disastrous, potentially making them more disastrous. We don’t know. You can’t find out before you do it, because you can’t build a model of the climate system to scale. Yes, I spent a fair bit of time hanging without with the would-be geoengineers, the smartest guys in the room, who are talking about fertilizing the oceans, pumping sulfur into the stratosphere, solving the problem of pollution with more pollution, dimming the sun. That’s pretty radical.

The good news is that it’s not too late to prevent these radical physical and engineering scenarios, but the way we do that at this point involves radical changes to our political and economic system. These are certainly considered radical, at least by current political standards. They involve questioning and really breaking, as I’ll argue, every rule in the free market playbook to which our leaders are still in thrall. I spend a lot of time in the book talking about the need to challenge this so-called free market ideology because I feel like we can spend a lot of time talking about various solutions, cap and trade versus cap and dividend, and we lose sight of the fact that actually none of it’s happening, certainly not at a national level, certainly not at a level that will get us anywhere near where we need to go. That has to do with the ideology that has swept our world. So the argument I make about why we have failed so miserably to rise to this challenge and the fact that we’ve failed is now beyond debate. Since our governments started meeting in 1990 to come up with a plan to reduce emissions, global emissions have gone up by 61%. That is not a good record.

There are all kind of theories that have been put forward to explain this inaction. We sometimes hear that it’s just human nature, that this crisis seems too far off and we’re hard-wired to respond only to immediate threats. This rationale doesn’t really ring true anymore because, of course, climate change is looking more and more like an immediate threat. It certainly looked like an immediate threat when Superstorm Sandy flooded Wall Street. Not that Wall Street has changed its behavior in any way. So
there is something else. And we know that we humans have responded to abstract threats before when our immediate safety was not threatened. We have this in our history. Then it must be something about us. I think a lot of us believe this, that it’s our generation that is too selfish. So this is one of the rationales.

The other rationale is just that it’s too complicated. You have to get all of these countries to come together and agree on a set of rules, and it’s just impossible. We hear this a lot. But, of course, our governments have come together and they have agreed on all kinds of things, whether it’s the Montreal Protocol on Ozone Depletion, whether it’s arms treaties. But what about the creation of the World Trade Organization? What about a global trade architecture with binding rules that our governments have managed to build in this very same period when they were failing to deal with the climate crisis? So clearly we can cooperate and come together if the interests are aligned with those in power.

There are little bits of truth in all of these rationales and some I haven’t mentioned. But I think that we haven’t paid enough attention to one of the biggest obstacles to change, which is just bad timing, bad historical timing. By this I mean that scientists have known about climate change for a long time, but the point where we lost all plausible deniability, we the public, was really 1988. That was the year that James Hansen testified on Capitol Hill that he now had a high degree of certainty that there was a connection between emissions and warming. By that year 87% of Americans knew about global warming. And that year, when the editors of Time magazine needed to choose their Man of the Year, they decided not to give it to a man—they were still only giving it to men—but to Planet Earth. “Planet in Peril.” It was a really interesting essay that accompanied that cover story, which talked about how climate change really called into question the whole Western civilizational paradigm of domination-based thinking, the idea of the Earth as a machine, which it traced back to Francis Bacon. It was a really interesting essay to read in Time magazine. You could never imagine it appearing today.

Speaking to people who were involved in the movement at that time, there was really a feeling that this moment was the dawn of a new consciousness. Then the Berlin Wall collapsed the next year, 1989. This was when Francis Fukuyama declared history over, when the ideology that in most parts of the world that is called neoliberalism declared victory over all other economic models. And it was then exported around the world. 1988, the same year that Hansen testified, was the year that Canada and the U.S. signed the historic free trade agreement that was then expanded into NAFTA, which
became the model for future bilateral and multilateral trade deals. A few years later the World Trade Organization was formed. So you had these two parallel processes.

This was a problem. It was a problem not just because the global economy, as it was being called, that was created was a particularly high-emissions one, but because the ideology of neoliberalism had as its pillars privatization, deregulation, cuts to taxes, paid for with cuts to social services, now called austerity, never-ending austerity, all locked in through this architecture of free trade or investor rights deals. What I do in the book is show how each one of these pillars of this ideological project that so successfully spread around the world has stood in the way of what we need to do to respond
decisively to the climate threat.

I’ll just give you a few quick examples. A lot of this is obvious. Take austerity. In my lifetime all I have known of the public sphere is its dismantling. My parents’ generation built things, but since I have been a conscious adult, it has only been about stopping the cuts, stopping the attacks. We don’t get to build things anymore. Of course, this has reached catastrophic levels in this country, and particularly in Europe in the wake of the financial crisis, which has been passed on to the public. And you
see the direct clashes, because, of course, if we’re going to respond to climate change, we need to invest seriously and on a large scale in not just protecting the public sphere but reinventing it along the lines that Casey was talking about.

We see the clash when disaster strikes. You see it in this country during Hurricane Katrina, that clash between heavy weather and weak, neglected infrastructure, a government that doesn’t seem to be home, can’t seem to find New Orleans. We saw it during Superstorm Sandy, where you had these widely divergent experiences of a natural disaster—or not a natural disaster. If you have resources, you’re kind of okay. But if you’re in public housing that has been allowed to decay, the lights are out for weeks and weeks, no one shows up. It was a bunch of 20-somethings from Occupy Sandy, as it was called, who were doing front-line work, which was amazing. We did some filming of this makeshift health clinic that was started in the Rockaways. It was incredible. It was just heroic work. But the people were going,

Wait a minute, where is the government? Why are we doing this?

There were historic floods in England this year. It was very interesting to see the logic of austerity clash with what the public wanted in that moment, which was a forceful public response. This was a problem for David Cameron, sort of Mr. Austerity himself, because he had slashed the agency responsible for flood response, knowing that increased flooding is clearly going to be one of the impacts of climate change in Britain. Nonetheless, he had laid off more than 1,000 people. He canceled hundreds of flood defense programs. Another thousand jobs were on the chopping block. And people connected
the dots. Cameron was so panicked in this moment that he had to publicly say,

Money is no object. We will spend whatever it takes.

That’s just a glimpse of how, if we take this crisis seriously, this logic of austerity cannot hold. Our governments have to find the money. And that means going to where the money is. Part of the response is going after the fossil fuel companies, polluter pays. We’ll come back to that.

This is happening all over Europe. In Greece the fire trucks don’t have spare tires going into forest fires. Greece is a tinderbox. This is how austerity is playing out in that country. At the same time, in the name of exiting austerity, Greece is being told that they need to drill for oil and gas in the Ionian and Aegean Seas. Which is madness, because this is a country whose two major sectors are tourism and fisheries.

When I call the book Capitalism vs. the Climate, people say that’s divisive. But the thing is, capitalism is already waging war on the climate. The point of this is, I think there are different levels of denial. We talk a lot about there’s a right-wing denial, where it’s really obvious and it’s easy to laugh at the people at Fox News. But I think we all engage in our own versions of climate denial. One of the reasons why we have to stop is that if we look and let ourselves feel the depth of this crisis, we have some of the most powerful arguments we’ve ever had to argue for a saner economic system.

I’ll give you another example—free trade. A lot of people in this room have been involved in these battles. How many of you were part of the Battle of Seattle 15 years ago? A couple? A few? One of the things we’re finding is that we knew when we were fighting the World Trade Organization that this was a system that sacrificed workers’ rights and environmental rights in the name of short-term profits. But we did not know how right we were. Because what’s been happening in recent years is that some of the best climate policies are being successfully challenged in trade court.

I’ll give you an example from close to home for me. Ontario had the most ambitious emission reduction program in North America. It was lauded by many people in this country, including Al Gore, for its extremely ambitious plans to get 100% off coal by 2015. The Green Energy Act was introduced in 2009 in the midst of the economic crisis. It was introduced because of concern about climate change, but it was primarily introduced because of concerns about unemployment, because Ontario is an economy that is extremely reliant on manufacturing and, in particular, car manufacturing. Our auto sector was getting decimated by the fact that the big three auto makers were on their knees at this point, and it was easier to close Canadian plants than to close American plants when you’re going to the American government for a massive bailout, which is what was happening at that time. So there were huge numbers of layoffs in the manufacturing sector in Ontario.

So, very smartly, the Ontario Liberal government introduced the Green Energy Plan, which had these ambitious emission-reduction targets but also had very ambitious job-creation targets and required that any player, any company, but there were also non-companies—co-ops, communities, and so on—that wanted to benefit from Ontario’s new Feed-in Tariff Program had to 40% to 60% of their equipment in Ontario. So it was a job creation plan. It was about rebuilding our moribund manufacturing sector. I profiled in the book a company called Silfab, which was sort of like the poster child for how this was supposed to work. It’s a solar plant on the outskirts of Ontario that opened up in a closed-down auto parts factory. So it was the perfect symbol: old economy dying, new economy opening. All these workers who had lost their jobs at Chrysler and Magna, which is a big auto parts manufacturer, got jobs on the assembly line making solar panels for this new program, and 31,000 manufacturing jobs were created. All was going well.

But then Japan and the European Union challenged Ontario’s Green Energy Plan at the World Trade Organization and argued that that requirement that a certain percentage of the jobs remain local was discrimination against their companies, against European companies and Japanese companies. The WTO ruled in their favor, and Ontario lost, and rolled, over very, very quickly, in fact, in part because the Canadian government wasn’t about to fight for renewable energy when this is an extension of the oil and gas industry, as you may have noticed. We’re seeing more and more of these cases.

This is not an isolated case. The U.S. has challenged China’s renewable energy subsidies, India’s renewable energy subsidies. And it’s tremendously ironic, because you listen in on a summit like the one that just happened in New York, and it’s all about governments sort of pointing the finger at each over: You’re not doing enough; no, you’re not doing enough; I won’t lead; no, you lead. But in fact what these governments are doing is running to the World Trade Organization and trying to knock down each other’s windmills at precisely the moment when we need all of our governments to be rolling out the most ambitious plans they can, and to do it in a way that will get political buy-in.

This was about a just transition. This was about supporting a sector that was getting hit hard and having a just transition to the new economy. And we were told that’s not allowed. In the book I quote Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, who talks about how absurd it is that we are leaving the fate of the planet in the hands of what he calls “silly lawyers, who didn’t even understand the issue when they wrote the rules.” Nonetheless, it is happening.

The good news is we’re facing a whole flurry of new trade deals. That’s not good news in and of itself. The good news is that I think we’re starting to pay attention to trade again, after tuning it out for a long time. A lot of us are very concerned about TPP and the European deal and, specifically, how it is undermining the actions that we need to take on climate. I think that this, once again, is the best argument we have ever had against these deals. We cannot allow trade to trump the planet. There is no stronger argument than that. But that is precisely what these deals are doing. We can’t be afraid to use that.

Another pillar of the neoliberal era, of course, is privatization. I want to talk a little bit about how so many of our cities, states, provinces have sold off key sectors that are central to the energy transition that we need to enact is standing in the way.

Many of you have heard a lot about Germany’s transition to renewable energy. It’s a complicated case; it’s not all perfect. Nonetheless, it is definitely worth appreciating that a highly industrialized economy like Germany, that does not have a lot of sun, has managed in a decade and a half to go from 6% of its electricity coming from renewable energy to 25% coming from renewable energy, mostly wind and solar, most of it decentralized. This is a real success story and one that shows that when we want to and the political will is there, we can move quickly. We need those success stories.

One of the things we don’t hear about the German transition is that one of the things that has allowed Germany to transition as quickly as it has is that in hundreds of cities and towns, big cities as well as small towns, citizens have voted and decided democratically to take back control over their electricity grids from the private players that privatized them in the 1990s. They’re doing this because they want to be part of this energy transition, they want their power to come from clean energy, and private players are not willing to move fast enough. So they are deciding to take their energy back.

But it’s not only that. It’s also that they want the money from the power generation to stay in the community. So it’s addressing both the austerity crisis and climate change at the same time. The problem is not just that it’s dirty energy; it’s also that the money is just hemorrhaging from communities into shareholders’ pockets. That’s not acceptable either. It’s become a pro-democracy movement, an anti-austerity movement, and it’s a climate movement.

These are the types of paradigms that we need, I think, to win. It’s also starting to spread. It’s happening in this country, too. Boulder, Colorado is a fantastic example. Boulder, this green city, is very much like some of the cities in this region. It had this problem, which is, despite the fact that everyone biked and wore fleece, all of their energy was coming from coal. So they wanted to switch. They went to their local private energy provider, Excel Energy, and talked about how they wanted to switch to renewable energy and were basically shut down. At that point they started exploring taking their power back, taking their energy back, not because they were ideologically opposed to privatization. It was because they wanted to be part of a green energy transition, in line with their values, and the profit-driven interests of this company were standing in their way. They took that step. I think it is interesting that these aren’t ideological movements. These aren’t movements that are starting by saying, “We’re anti-privatization.” They’re movements saying, “We want to do something about climate change,” and discovering that they need to take on the logic of privatization in order to make that happen.

There are other ways of bringing in green energy, and I think there are a lot of examples of that in this region. But there is clearly a tight correlation between very ambitious renewable energy targets and keeping energy in public hands. We see examples of that in this country, too. Austin and Sacramento are two of the cities with the most ambitious emission-reduction targets. And they never sold off their energy. There are lots of public utilities that are producing dirty coal. But I think the point is that it’s easier for us to change our public utilities than it is for us to change for-profit enterprises.

I said Germany is “complicated.” One of the reasons it’s complicated is that while Angela Merkel has been willing to put in place some great incentives to encourage renewable energy, what she has not been willing to do is to say no to the fossil fuel industry. Coal is continuing to expand. Even though demand is dropping in Germany, the coal companies are just exporting that energy. Sound familiar? So it’s not a simple success story. Sometimes we tell ourselves we can do this all with market mechanisms and having the right incentives in place, but it’s clear that it has to be a combination of finding creative ways to say yes to what we want and bold ways of saying no to what we don’t want. Part of what has us stuck right now is that we have a leadership class globally that has really lost the knack of saying no to big companies. When they’re dangling big investment projects, they automatically say yes. You look at Obama. It has taken him now more than three years to just say no to the Keystone XL pipeline. I’m starting to think he’s going to leave office punting this decision.

The exciting thing is that, with our leaders failing to lead, failing to do what they need to do, there is the emergence of what some have started to call Blockadia, this grass roots regulatory structure, let’s just say, of communities. It’s been so powerful in this part of the world. I really do think that the fossil fuel industry did not know what they were in for when they decided to build so many tentacles through the Pacific Northwest. This in many ways is the flip side of the carbon boom that we’re in the midst of. Of course, the fossil fuel companies are doubling down. They’re building all sorts of new infrastructure. They’re doubling down on some of the dirtiest carbon sources. They have to build all this infrastructure, and it takes them into territories that are distinctly hostile. I used to say that the World Trade Organization built our coalitions for us. In many ways the fossil fuel companies are building our coalitions for us by the sheer ambition of their coal trains and their oil trains and their pipelines and their LNG terminals and the rest of it. That was what was so exciting about the climate march this past week, is that you saw that network that is place- based really coming together in the streets in common purpose.

In Canada one of the most exciting parts of the emergence of this fossil fuel resistance, as our friend Bill McKibben calls it, is the way in which it is building really powerful ties between non-native and native communities. Whenever there is a big resource battle, we see these connections. But there’s something new happening. We saw this really clearly with the emergence of Idle No More and all these resistance movements, whether it’s to the Cherry Point coal export terminal or the Northern Gateway pipeline through B.C. I think what more and more of us are starting to understand is that indigenous First Nations’ treaty rights and aboriginal title are the most powerful legal barrier to the plans to just flay this continent.

Those rights become more powerful when there are mass movements defending them and when they are embraced by whole societies. This is really starting to change, I think actually changing, the way we think as well as the way we fight. I think it is and it has to be about more than the extractive relationship to those rights, that those rights are useful to us because they help us protect our water, so we want to use those rights. That’s exactly the wrong way of thinking about this. These are rights that come out of a vision of how to live well that were hard-won and hard-protected, and they point us towards a nonextractive, regeneration-based way of living on this planet. That is the most hopeful and exciting part of this new wave of activism.

This can sound overwhelming. Anything about climate change can sound overwhelming. And it’s certainly easier to talk about changing light bulbs than changing the economy. But here’s what we need to remember: It’s not like we’re talking about an economy that is working beautifully except for the small matter of rising sea levels. We’re talking about allowing sea levels to rise in the name of protecting an economic system that is failing the vast majority of the people on this planet, with or without climate change. By responding robustly to climate change in line with what scientists are telling us, we have a once-in-a-century opportunity to solve some of our biggest and most intractable social and economic problems. We can create countless good unionized jobs in the next economy. Every dollar invested in renewable energy, efficiency, public transit creates six to eight times as many jobs as that dollar would create if it went into oil and gas infrastructure. Those jobs can rebuild our ailing public infrastructure, and that infrastructure will give us more livable cities, stronger communities, healthier bodies. We all know this.

We can find the money by making polluters pay, whether it’s the fossil fuel companies or the bloated defense companies or the financial speculators. To do any of this, of course, we must dramatically reduce the power of corporate money in politics. Everybody who is trying to get anything done in this country that is in any way vaguely progressive, whether it’s fighting private prisons or for gun control or universal health care, knows that money in politics is the single greatest barrier. The question that I’m left with is whether climate change can provide the big tent that we need to build a new kind of coalition, put us on a science-based deadline and tell us that we cannot afford to lose.

I think it can, and I’ll tell you why. The atmosphere is already our big tent. We are already under this big tent, and we have to start acting like it. We’re coming up on the fifteenth anniversary of the Battle of Seattle, when the streets of this city were choked with tear gas and flooded with hope because a mass coalition, a movement of movements, put the system of short-term corporate greed behind the World Trade Organization on trial. It disrupted the negotiations and emboldened internal dissent, and the talks broke down.

They never quite recovered. But after September 11th that movement broke apart. Some were spooked by the new war on dissent. Others turned their attention, understandably, to stopping a war and increased criminalization. But we stopped talking about the system underneath it all. Then three years ago this month, the Occupy movement sprung up and put corporate capitalism on trial once again, to draw the connections between the logic of deregulation and austerity, the inequality crises ravaging our communities. The whole world listened. I firmly believe that movements like that never die, they just go quiet for a little while. They learn, they change, and reemerge.

Now another movement is taking the stage, the climate justice movement. It’s made up of all these past movements and many more older ones, deeper ones—the civil rights movement, the indigenous rights sovereignty movement—for the deep shift in world view that we know this crisis is really about. Because underneath all of this is the truth that we’ve been avoiding: Climate change isn’t an issue to add to the list of things to worry about, next to health care and taxes. It’s a civilizational wake-up call, a powerful message, spoken in the language of fires, floods, droughts, and extinction, telling us that we need an entirely new economic model and a new way of sharing this planet. Telling us that we need to evolve. Thank you.

Q&A

If we want the good life for all 7 billion people on this planet with sustainably grown food, sustainable use of precious raw materials, enough per capita wild spaces and rain forest, clean water, health care, and living space, what are your thoughts on the needs and benefits of voluntary population reduction? Do you think we can ignore that question?

I’m not sure what voluntary population reduction means. I wouldn’t say that population has nothing to do with the ecological crisis, but I think that we sometimes overplay it. Where population is growing fastest is in sub-Saharan Africa, and that is where emissions are lowest. If we want to deal with this crisis most effectively, we talk about consumption among the wealthiest people on the planet, not procreation among the poorest people on the planet.

Do you think climate change is the perfect topic to introduce a wider conversation about capitalism? I mean, in a sense we have the equivalent of right-wing climate denial on the left, capitalism denial, the desire to use euphemisms like “the free market” or “corporations” without asking the kind of wider questions that connect to things, like you say, about how elections are funded and those other things?

There is a larger constituency of liberals that really does not want to talk about capitalism than I anticipated. A lot of the criticism of the book has just been about the name. The subtitle I almost went with was “The Revolutionary Power of Climate Change.” As you heard from the talk, that’s the argument I’m making. But I do think that there is a core tension between our economic model and what our climate needs from us, that we have an economic model that is built on short-term expansion and we need to contract our use of resources. We don’t need to contract every part of our economy. We can grow other parts of our economy and we need to grow other parts of our economy that are low-carbon already, the parts of the economy that are going to make this transition possible. But at the same time, we do need to contract.

So we dance around. We really don’t like saying the word “capitalism,” particularly in this country. It’s easier to talk about growth than it is to talk about capitalism. I actually think focusing on growth is less helpful than talking about capitalism. Because in a lot of people’s minds, when you are talking about capitalism, you are talking about greed, you are talking about corporate greed, and you get closer to that; whereas if you talk about growth, then the first thing people think is that it’s all going to be contraction and it’s all going to be loss. That’s a very negative discussion to have. And isn’t true that it’s all about contraction. It’s really about how we manage our economy.

I’d just like to say I always enjoy these talks, but it sometimes feels like it’s kind of preaching to the choir. I just wanted to know what your thoughts are on disseminating all the information that you have, that you presented tonight, to people who mainly get their information from news outlets that it goes against their financial interest to report on all these topics. They might have corporate ties to fossil fuels, so they won’t want to report on the climate march, they won’t want to report on any of these issues, and we will continue to maintain the status quo. So just how you think that this movement is best going to be spread out beyond the people who already know about it.

I feel like that is starting to happen. And some of it is happening in a more old-fashioned way. The climate march in New York was an extraordinary exercise in popular education, really old-fashioned community organizing. It was an incredibly diverse march. It did not look like the choir. It mobilized all kinds of communities that are normally left out of the environmental movement. That was not done with the help of any corporate media. That was really legwork. And it was that hard, old- fashioned organizing work of building bridges across different constituencies, doing popular education. I think we need to return to some of that, just teach-ins, just basic popular education. A lot of people don’t participate in the climate discussion because it seems really, really wonky and they’re afraid of making a mistake. You’ve got the science side, the policy side, the UN. There’s a whole bunch of worlds that have their own language and their own jargon. So just unpacking it for people and creating context where they’re not afraid to make a mistake is really important.

But I don’t know that this is about going through corporate media at this stage. There is some of that. Like there was Years of Living Dangerously and that kind of work. But I’m not sure that that’s what builds a movement. I think the movement building is when people see the connections with their daily lives, and it comes from trusted sources. We spend a lot of time thinking about how we reach people who watch Fox News. We actually have a lot more work just building a broad, diverse, progressive movement and building bridges between the various constituencies in that world before we worry about reaching the climate deniers.

If you could send some advice to yourself back in time when you were first writing No Logo, what would you say?

I didn’t really know anything then. Coming back to the last question about sort of preaching to the choir, I think one of the things that I’ve learned is just how nourishing it is to be in a movement. I think we kind of belittle it when we talk about it as just preaching to the choir, as if this work doesn’t matter. But when you’re taking on really powerful forces, it can be pretty brutalizing. And if you’re going to do it, and if you’re going to immerse yourselves in some of the worst of what humans are capable of, which anybody who is involved in social justice work is doing, you also need to counterbalance that by being in community and valuing that community and supporting each other.

The antinuclear movement has not really been brought up that much in the talks about climate change. I just want to bring up nuclear power and nuclear weapons, which are one and the same. The question is this: We have mining with nuclear, we have uranium mining, we use coal for the spent fuel. I just wanted to say that I find it important to include all of these things within talks on climate change. And thank you for all the work that you do.

How do we sometimes get over the hypocrisy in fighting for a fossil fuel-free world when you can’t really get away from fossil fuel —when you go to the grocery store and you go home to your polyester sheets and the plastic in everything you buy, and even a lot of people who went to the climate protest flew there? How do we get over this kind of conflict within ourselves, when we use fossil fuel every day? We don’t want to, but you really can’t get away from it.

It’s a great question. In some ways I think that we—we, the environmental movement—overemphasized the individual actions at the expense of the big, systemic changes that we need. It was all about recycling and carbon offsetting and turning your personal life into a low- carbon piece of performance art. A lot of it was quite classist, too, because there are so many communities that have no good transit options, where people are so overworked as well that people are having to make convenience-based decisions that are about low cost but also about zero time. This is what our culture does to people. And this idea that it’s about being perfect and green and buying more green stuff was super alienating to a lot of people, and I think was part of why the climate movement was so homogenous, meaning white and middle-class.

But there’s something really key. I don’t think we should let ourselves off the hook; we should all try to bring our actions in line with our values. But I also think that we should all embrace our inner hypocrites and stop playing gotcha. Because if you need to be pure, if you need to be fossil-free in order to fight fossil fuels, that’s a great way of having a really small movement.

How can your organization lead in inspiring voter registration in all the places where we have too low of voter registration and to teach America a new story about finding the right candidates to run for office and to win for office? Because the stories that we’re told right now have to do with money. And here we have a situation where we have the right person running against somebody who needs to be out of office.

I would just add that it’s about getting involved in politics at every level, including at the local level, where maybe it’s a little bit easier to break through. I would be remiss if I left Seattle without just saying how will critically inspiring it was for everybody to watch the $15 minimum wage victory. That kind of ambition is really contagious and inspiring. All eyes were on you.

The Alberta tar sands are so destructive, but the cash flow is so overwhelming that there’s no control possible. Do you have any good news about the Alberta tar sands?

Yes, I do. I think the best piece of news we’ve had so far is that Stat Oil, which is the big Norwegian oil company, a huge player in the tar sands, announced the suspension of a multibillion-dollar tar sands investment because—one of the reasons cited was uncertainty about pipeline capacity. That is the strategy of cutting off the arteries that we’ve all been involved in.

As you’ve pointed out, the indigenous nations are making this region a choke point of fossil fuel shipping, but Swinomish and other tribes are also working with historically hostile local governments on climate change adaptation. Putting this book together with your last book, about disaster capitalism, Have you seen people preparing for these inevitable storms, disasters, power outages that are coming in a way to position community organizations in a place where we can instill disaster cooperativism and ways of bringing together communities and using that to also help build those bridges you’re talking about?

That is a great, great question. It’s certainly was a big part of the discussion post Sandy in New York, just that the communities that fared best were communities where people knew their neighbors, weren’t afraid, because there was a lot of fear, too, like all this fear of looting, and just this understanding that this social fabric that we’re able to build with one another is important. Yes, seawalls are important, but relationships are even more important. Checking in on one another when communication systems break down, as they inevitably do, that we still know each other’s names and where to find each other and knock on each other’s doors. This has to be understood as part of disaster response. So, yes, I think we need a really broad understanding that responding to climate change isn’t just about rebuilding the sort of public sphere in the sense of big state. It’s about reclaiming the whole idea of the commons, of the public, of the communal at every level against the attacks and the idea that we are nothing but atomized individuals and there’s no such thing as society. That’s another piece of the big war of ideas that we need to be fighting and also building. In that sense a farmers’ market is disaster response. Anything we do to strengthen our communities and get to know one another and build those relationships of trust is part of preparing for the storms ahead.

I realize that I didn’t respond at all on the nuclear question, and I do think it is an important point on this, because it’s important to remember that this vision of responding to climate change by building a more equal society is by no means the only way of responding to climate change. There is a shock doctrine scenario that is very clear. That is not just the profiteering from disaster, but it is also the positioning of these big engineering fixes that continue to put communities at risk. So more and more there is talk about replacing fossil fuels with nuclear, positioning GMO crops as climate-ready, climate-smart, and attacking small farming as unrealistic and some agrarian fantasy, which is one of the ways I’m getting attacked at the moment. A few years down the road it will be the geo-engineering fix being presented as more realistic than any of the stuff that we’re talking about.

That’s why I think it really is about identifying the values that we want to govern us as we move forward together. Even more important than identifying individual policies is identifying those values. One of the values that I think we need to put at the front of our movements is that the people who have been on the front lines of our toxic extractive economy need to be first in line to benefit directly from the next economy.

About the no-new-carbon infrastructure, drawing the line. This is the Keystone principle. I would say we need to extend that to the principle of there being no more sacrifice zones. We know that we can power ourselves without sacrificial people and sacrificial places. I think that that’s really important to the nuclear discussions. Who are we asking to eat the risk for these technologies? And if it’s not us, we have no right to ask it of anyone.

See and hear an interview with Naomi Klein at the following Democracy Now posts:

Capitalism vs. the Climate: Naomi Klein on Need for New Economic Model to Address Ecological Crisis

Naomi Klein on the People’s Climate March & the Global Grassroots Movement Fighting Fossil Fuels

Naomi Klein on Motherhood, Geoengineering, Climate Debt & the Fossil Fuel Divestment Movement

Here is an excerpt from her book:
Naomi Klein: “This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate” (Book Excerpt).

Other Alternative Radio Naomi Klein programs:
Economic Warfare: From Argentina to Iraq
No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies
Debacle in Iraq
The Shock Doctrine

For information about obtaining CDs, MP3s, or transcripts of this or other programs, please contact:
David Barsamian
Alternative Radio
P.O. Box 551
Boulder, CO 80306-0551
phone (800) 444-1977
info@alternativeradio.org
www.alternativeradio.org

Captain Ahab and U.S. empire

Tue, 12 Aug 2014 20:18:10 GMT

Chris Hedges
Missoula, MT
3 February 2014

The demonic Captain Ahab in Melville’s epic novel Moby Dick represents a quest for power and domination that is a death wish. Hubris will doom Ahab and his Pequod crew, all perish except for Ishmael. Is there a larger lesson to be learned? Is the United States much different? The U.S. with its obsessive drive for control of oil and other resources, its relentless hunger for profits, its garrisoning the globe with military bases, its arrogant disregard for the environment, is on the same suicidal path as Ahab. Washington’s policies, under both political parties, are always imbued with benevolence and noble intentions. It is innocent of imperialistic designs. Freedom and democracy are its goals. A well-disciplined media and intellectual class rarely challenge these embedded assumptions. We continue to ignore all warnings as to the destruction we are wreaking on the planet.

This lecture and interview are available as a CD or mp3 or transcript from Alternative Radio

Chris Hedges is an award-winning journalist who has covered wars in the Balkans, the Middle East, and Central America. He writes a weekly column for Truthdig.org and is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute. He is the author of War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, American Fascists, Empire of Illusion, Death of the Liberal Class, The World As It Is, and, with Joe Sacco, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt.

You can listen to Chris Hedges speak for himself (an mp3 clip) here.
You can get a printable version of this talk (a PDF file) here.

The most prescient portrait of the American character and our ultimate fate as a species is found in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Melville makes our murderous obsessions, our hubris, violent impulses, moral weakness, and inevitable self-destruction visible in his chronicle of a whaling voyage. He is our foremost oracle. He is to us what William Shakespeare was to Elizabethan England or Fyodor Dostoyevsky to czarist Russia.

Our country is given shape in the form of the ship, the Pequod, named after the Indian tribe exterminated in 1638 by the Puritans and their Native American allies. The ship’s 30-man crew—there were 30 states in the Union when Melville wrote the novel—is a mixture of races and creeds. The object of the hunt is a massive white whale, Moby Dick, which in a previous encounter maimed the ship’s captain, Ahab, by dismembering one of his legs. The self-destructive fury of the quest, much like that of the one we are on, assures the Pequod’s destruction. And those on the ship, on some level, know they are doomed— just as many of us know that a consumer culture based on corporate profit, limitless exploitation and the continued extraction of fossil fuels is doomed.

“If I had been downright honest with myself,” Ishmael admits,

I would have seen very plainly in my heart that I did but half fancy being committed this way to so long a voyage, without once laying my eyes on the man who was to be the absolute dictator of it, so soon as the ship sailed out upon the open sea. But when a man suspects any wrong, it sometimes happens that if he be already involved in the matter, he insensibly strives to cover up his suspicions even from himself. And much this way it was with me. I said nothing, and tried to think nothing.

Our financial system—like our participatory democracy—is a mirage. The Federal Reserve purchases $85 billion in U.S. Treasury bonds—much of it worthless subprime mortgages—each month. It has been artificially propping up the government and Wall Street like this for five years. It has loaned trillions of dollars at virtually no interest to banks and firms that make money—because wages are kept low—by lending it to us at staggering interest rates that can climb to as high as 30 percent. Or our corporate oligarchs hoard the money or gamble with it in an overinflated stock market. Estimates put the looting by banks and investment firms of the U.S. Treasury at between $15 trillion and $20 trillion. But none of us know. The figures are not public. And the reason this systematic looting will continue until collapse is that our economy would go into a tailspin without this giddy infusion of free cash.

The ecosystem is at the same time disintegrating. Scientists from the International Programme on the State of the Ocean, a few days ago, issued a new report that warned that the oceans are changing faster than anticipated and increasingly becoming inhospitable to life. The oceans, of course, have absorbed much of the excess CO2 and heat from the atmosphere. This absorption is rapidly warming and acidifying ocean waters. This is compounded, the report noted, by increased levels of de-oxygenation from nutrient runoffs from farming and climate change. The scientists called these effects a “deadly trio” that when combined is creating changes in the seas that are unprecedented in the planet’s history. This is their language, not mine. The scientists wrote that each of the earth’s five known mass extinctions was preceded by at least one part of the “deadly trio”— acidification, warming, and de-oxygenation. They warned that “the next mass extinction” of sea life is already under way, the first in some 55 million years. Or look at the recent research from the University of Hawaii that says global warming is now inevitable, it cannot be stopped but at best slowed, and that over the next 50 years the earth will heat up to levels that will make whole parts of the planet uninhabitable. Tens of millions of people will be displaced and millions of species will be threatened with extinction. The report casts doubt that cities on or near a coast such as New York or London will endure.

Yet we, like Ahab and his crew, rationalize our collective madness. All calls for prudence, for halting the march toward economic, political and environmental catastrophe, for sane limits on carbon emissions, are ignored or ridiculed. Even with the flashing red lights before us, the increased droughts, rapid melting of glaciers and Arctic ice, monster tornadoes, vast hurricanes, crop failures, floods, raging wildfires and soaring temperatures, we bow slavishly before hedonism and greed and the enticing illusion of limitless power, intelligence and prowess.

The corporate assault on culture, journalism, education, the arts, and critical thinking has left those who speak this truth marginalized and ignored, frantic Cassandras who are viewed as slightly unhinged and depressingly apocalyptic. We are consumed by a mania for hope, which our corporate masters lavishly provide, at the expense of truth.

Friedrich Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil holds that only a few people have the fortitude to look in times of distress into what he calls the molten pit of human reality. Most studiously ignore the pit. Artists and philosophers, for Nietzsche, are consumed, however, by an insatiable curiosity, a quest for truth and desire for meaning. They venture down into the bowels of the molten pit. They get as close as they can before the flames and heat drive them back. This intellectual and moral honesty, Nietzsche wrote, comes with a cost. Those singed by the fire of reality become “burnt children,” he wrote, eternal orphans in empires of illusion.

Decayed civilizations always make war on independent intellectual inquiry, art, and culture for this reason. They do not want the masses to look into the pit. They condemn and vilify the “burnt people”—Noam Chomsky, Ralph Nader, Cornel West. They feed the human addiction for illusion, happiness and hope. They peddle the fantasy of eternal material progress. They urge us to build images of ourselves to worship. They insist—and this is the argument of globalization—that our voyage is, after all, decreed by natural law. We have surrendered our lives to corporate forces that ultimately serve systems of death. We ignore and belittle the cries of the burnt people. And, if we do not swiftly and radically reconfigure our relationship to each other and the ecosystem, microbes look set to inherit the earth.

Clive Hamilton in his Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth about Climate Change describes a dark relief that comes from accepting that “catastrophic climate change is virtually certain.” This obliteration of “false hopes,” he says, requires an intellectual knowledge and an emotional knowledge. The first is attainable. The second, because it means that those we love, including our children, are almost certainly doomed to insecurity, misery, and suffering within a few decades, if not a few years, is much harder to acquire. To emotionally accept impending disaster, to attain the gut-level understanding that the power elite will not respond rationally to the devastation of the ecosystem, is as difficult to accept as our own mortality. The most daunting existential struggle of our time is to ingest this awful truth—intellectually and emotionally—and rise up to resist the forces that are destroying us.

The human species, led by white Europeans and Euro-Americans, has been on a 500-year-long planetwide rampage of conquering, plundering, looting, exploiting, and polluting the earth—as well as killing the indigenous communities that stood in the way. But the game is up. The technical and scientific forces that created a life of unparalleled luxury—as well as unrivaled military and economic power for a small, global elite—are the forces that now doom us. The mania for ceaseless economic expansion and exploitation has become a curse, a death sentence. But even as our economic and environmental systems unravel, after the hottest year (2012) in the contiguous 48 states since record keeping began 107 years ago, we lack the emotional and intellectual creativity to shut down the engine of global capitalism. We have bound ourselves to a doomsday machine that grinds forward.

Complex civilizations have a bad habit of ultimately destroying themselves. Anthropologists including Joseph Tainter in The Collapse of Complex Societies, Charles L. Redman in Human Impact on Ancient Environments, and Ronald Wright in A Short History of Progress have laid out the familiar patterns that lead to systems breakdown. The difference this time is that when we go down the whole planet will go with us. There will, with this final collapse, be no new lands left to exploit, no new civilizations to conquer, no new peoples to subjugate. The long struggle between the human species and the earth will conclude with the remnants of the human species learning a painful lesson about unrestrained greed, hubris, and idolatry.

Collapse comes throughout human history to complex societies not long after they reach their period of greatest magnificence and prosperity.

One of the most pathetic aspects of human history is that every civilization expresses itself most pretentiously, compounds its partial and universal values most convincingly, and claims immortality for its finite existence at the very moment when the decay which leads to death has already begun,

Reinhold Niebuhr wrote.

That pattern holds good for a lot of societies, among them the ancient Maya and the Sumerians of what is now southern Iraq. There are many other examples, including smaller-scale societies such as Easter Island. The very things that cause societies to prosper in the short run, especially new ways to exploit the environment such as the invention of irrigation, lead to disaster in the long run because of unforeseen complications. This is what Ronald Wright in A Short History of Progress calls the “progress trap.” We have set in motion an industrial machine of such complexity and such dependence on expansion, Wright notes, that we do not know how to make do with less or move to a steady state in terms of our demands on nature.

And as the collapse becomes palpable, if human history is any guide, we, like past societies in distress, will retreat into what anthropologists call “crisis cults.” The powerlessness we will feel in the face of ecological and economic chaos will unleash further collective delusions, such as fundamentalist beliefs in a god or gods who will come back to earth and save us. The Christian right provides a haven for this escapism. These cults perform absurd rituals to make it all go away, giving rise to a religiosity that peddles collective self-delusion and magical thinking. Crisis cults spread rapidly among Native American societies in the later part of the 19th century as the buffalo herds and the last remaining tribes were slaughtered. The Ghost Dance held out the hope that all the horrors of white civilization—the railroads, the murderous cavalry units, the timber merchants, the mine speculators, the hated tribal agencies, the barbed wire, the machine guns, even the white man himself—would disappear. And our psychological hard wiring is no different.

In our decline, hatred becomes our primary lust, our highest form of patriotism. We deploy vast resources to hunt down jihadists and terrorists, real and phantom. We destroy our civil society in the name of a war on terror. We persecute those, from Julian Assange to Chelsea Manning to Edward Snowden, who expose the dark machinations of power. We believe, because we have externalized evil, that we can purify the earth. And we are blind to the evil within us.

Melville’s description of Ahab is a description of the bankers, corporate boards, politicians, television personalities, and generals who through the power of propaganda fill our heads with seductive images of glory and lust for wealth and power. We are consumed with self-induced obsessions that spur us toward self-annihilation.

“All my means are sane,” Ahab says, “my motive and my object mad.”

Ahab, as the historian Richard Slotkin points out in his book Regeneration Through Violence, is

the true American hero, worthy to be captain of a ship whose “wood could only be American.”

Melville offers us a vision, one that D. H. Lawrence later understood, of the inevitable fatality of white civilization brought about by our ceaseless lust for material progress, imperial expansion, white supremacy, and exploitation of nature.

Melville, who had been a sailor on clipper ships and whalers, was keenly aware that the wealth of industrialized societies was stolen by force from the wretched of the earth. All the authority figures on the ship are white men—Ahab, Starbuck, Flask, and Stubb. The hard, dirty work, from harpooning to gutting the carcasses of the whales, is the task of the poor, mostly men of color. Melville saw how European plundering of indigenous cultures from the 16th to the 19th centuries, coupled with the use of African slaves as a workforce to replace the natives, was the engine that enriched Europe and the United States. The Spaniards’ easy seizure of the Aztec and Inca gold following the massive die-off from smallpox and other diseases among native populations set in motion five centuries of unchecked economic and environmental plunder. Karl Marx and Adam Smith pointed to the huge influx of wealth from the Americas as having made possible the Industrial Revolution and modern capitalism. The Industrial Revolution also equipped the industrialized state with technologically advanced weapons systems, turning us into the most efficient killers on the planet.

Ahab, when he first appears on the quarterdeck after being in his cabin for the first few days of the voyage, holds up a doubloon, an extravagant gold coin, and promises it to the crew member who first spots the white whale. He knows that

the permanent constitutional condition of the manufactured man … is sordidness.

And he plays to this sordidness. The whale becomes like everything in the capitalist world a commodity, a source of personal profit. A murderous greed, one that Starbuck, Ahab’s first mate, denounces as “blasphemous,” grips the crew. Ahab’s obsession infects the ship.

“I see in Moby Dick outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it,” Ahab tells Starbuck.

That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.

Ahab conducts a dark Mass, a Eucharist of violence and blood, on the deck with the crew. He orders the men to circle around him. He makes them drink from a flagon that is passed from man to man, filled with draughts “hot as Satan’s hoof.” Ahab tells the harpooners to cross their lances before him. The captain grasps the harpoons and anoints the ships’ harpooners—Queequeg, Tashtego, and Daggoo—his “three pagan kinsmen.” He orders them to detach the iron sections of their harpoons and fills the sockets “with the fiery waters from the pewter.” “

Drink, ye harpooneers! Drink and swear, ye men that man the deathful whaleboat’s bow—Death to Moby Dick! God hunt us all, if we do not hunt Moby Dick to his death!

And with the crew bonded to him in his infernal quest he knows that Starbuck is helpless “amid the general hurricane.” “Starbuck now is mine,” Ahab says, “cannot oppose me now, without rebellion.” Melville writes,

The honest eye of Starbuck fell downright.

The ship, described as a hearse, was painted black. It was adorned with gruesome trophies of the hunt, festooned with the huge teeth and bones of sperm whales. It was, Melville writes,

a cannibal of a craft, tricking herself forth in the chased bones of her enemies.

The fires used to melt the whale blubber at night turned the Pequod into a “red hell.”

Our own raging fires, leaping up from our oil refineries and the explosions of our ordnance across the Middle East, bespeak our Stygian heart. And in our mad pursuit we ignore the suffering of others, just as Ahab does when he refuses to help the captain of a passing ship who is frantically searching for his son, who has fallen overboard.

Ahab has not only the heated rhetoric of persuasion; he is master of a terrifying internal security force on the ship, the five

dusky phantoms that seemed fresh formed out of air.

Ahab’s secret, private whaleboat crew, who emerge from the bowels of the ship well into the voyage, keeps the rest of the ship in abject submission. The art of propaganda and the use of brutal coercion, the mark of tyranny, define our lives just as they mark those on Melville’s ship. The novel is the chronicle of the last days of any civilization.

And yet Ahab is no simple tyrant. Melville toward the end of the novel gives us two glimpses into the internal battle between Ahab’s maniacal hubris and his humanity. Ahab, too, has a yearning for love. He harbors regrets over his deformed life. The black cabin boy Pip is the only crew member who evokes any tenderness in the captain. Ahab is aware of this tenderness. He fears its power. Pip functions as the Fool did in Shakespeare’s King Lear. Ahab warns Pip of Ahab. “Lad, lad,” says Ahab,

I tell thee thou must not follow Ahab now. The hour is coming when Ahab would not scare thee from him, yet would not have thee by him. There is that in thee, poor lad, which I feel too curing to my malady. Like cures like; and for this hunt, my malady becomes my most desired health. If thou speakest thus to me much more, Ahab’s purpose keels up in him. I tell thee no; it cannot be.

A few pages later,

untottering Ahab stood forth in the clearness of the morn; lifting his splintered helmet of a brow to the fair girl’s forehead of heaven. From beneath his slouched hat Ahab dropped a tear into the sea; nor did all the Pacific contain such wealth as that one wee drop.

Starbuck approaches him. Ahab, for the only time in the book, is vulnerable. He speaks to Starbuck of his

forty years on the pitiless sea! The desolation of solitude it has been. Why this strife of the chase? Why weary, and palsy the arm at the oar, and the iron, and the lance? How the richer or better is Ahab now?

He thinks of his young wife—“I widowed that poor girl when I married her, Starbuck”—and of his little boy:

About this time—yes, it is his noon nap now—the boy vivaciously wakes; sits up in bed; and his mother tells him of me, of cannibal old me; how I am abroad upon the deep, but will yet come back to dance him again.

Ahab’s thirst for dominance, vengeance, and destruction, however, overpowers these faint regrets of lost love and thwarted compassion. Hatred wins. “What is it,” Ahab finally asks,

what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time.

Melville knew that physical courage and moral courage are distinct. One can be brave on a whaling ship or a battlefield, yet a coward when called on to stand up to human evil. Starbuck elucidates this peculiar division. The first mate is tormented by his complicity in what he foresees as Ahab’s “impious end.” Starbuck,

while generally abiding firm in the conflict with seas, or winds, or whales, or any of the ordinary irrational horrors of the world, yet cannot withstand those more terrific, because spiritual terrors, which sometimes menace you from the concentrating brow of an enraged and mighty man.

And so we plunge forward in our doomed quest to master the forces that will finally smite us. Those who see where we are going too often lack the fortitude to actually rebel. Mutiny was the only salvation for the Pequod’s crew. It is our only salvation. But moral cowardice turns us into hostages.

I am reading and rereading the debates among some of the great radical thinkers of the 19th and 20th centuries about the mechanisms of social change. These debates were not academic. They were frantic searches for the triggers of revolt. Lenin placed his faith in a violent uprising, a professional, disciplined revolutionary vanguard freed from moral constraints and, like Marx, in the inevitable emergence of the worker’s state. Proudhon insisted that gradual change would be accomplished as enlightened workers took over production and educated and converted the rest of the proletariat. Bakunin predicted the catastrophic breakdown of the capitalist order, something we are likely to witness in our lifetimes, and new autonomous worker federations rising up out of the chaos. Kropotkin, like Proudhon, believed in an evolutionary process that would hammer out the new society. Emma Goldman, along with Kropotkin, came to be very wary of both the efficacy of violence and the revolutionary potential of the masses. “The mass,” Goldman wrote bitterly toward the end of her life in echoing Marx,

clings to its masters, loves the whip, and is the first to cry Crucify!

The revolutionists of history counted on a mobilized base of enlightened industrial workers. The building blocks of revolt, they believed, relied on the tool of the general strike, the ability of workers to cripple the mechanisms of production. Strikes could be sustained with the support of political parties, strike funds and union halls. Workers without these support mechanisms had to replicate the infrastructure of parties and unions if they wanted to put prolonged pressure on the bosses and the state. But now, with the decimation of the U.S. manufacturing base, along with the dismantling of our unions and opposition parties, we will have to search for different instruments of rebellion.

We must develop a revolutionary theory that is not reliant on the industrial or agrarian muscle of workers. Most manufacturing jobs have disappeared, and, of those that remain, few are unionized. Our family farms have been destroyed by agro-businesses. Monsanto and its Faustian counterparts on Wall Street rule. They are steadily poisoning our lives and rendering us powerless. The corporate leviathan, which is global, is freed from the constraints of a single nation-state or government. Corporations are beyond regulation or control. Politicians are too anemic, or more often too corrupt, to stand in the
way of the accelerating corporate destruction. This makes our struggle different from revolutionary struggles in industrial societies in the past. Our revolt will look more like what erupted in the less industrialized Slavic republics, Russia, Spain, and China and uprisings led by a disenfranchised rural and urban working class and peasantry in the liberation movements that swept through Africa and Latin America. The dispossessed working poor, along with unemployed college graduates and students, unemployed journalists, artists, lawyers and teachers, will form our movement. This is why the fight for a higher minimum wage is crucial to uniting service workers with the alienated college-educated sons and daughters of the old middle class. Bakunin, unlike Marx, considered déclassé intellectuals essential for successful revolt.

It is not the poor who make revolutions. It is those who conclude that they will not be able, as they once expected, to rise economically and socially. This consciousness is part of the self-knowledge of service workers and fast-food workers. It is grasped by the swelling population of college graduates caught in a vise of low-paying jobs and obscene amounts of debt. These two groups, once united, will be our primary engines of revolt. Much of the urban poor has been crippled and in many cases broken by a rewriting of laws, especially drug laws, that has permitted courts, probation officers, parole boards and police to randomly seize poor people of color, especially African-American men, without just cause and lock them in cages for years. In many of our most impoverished urban centers—our internal colonies, as Malcolm X called them—mobilization, at least at first, will be difficult. The urban poor are already in chains. These chains are being readied for the rest of us.

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets or steal bread,

Anatole France commented acidly.

Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan examined 100 years of violent and nonviolent resistance movements in their book Why Civil Resistance Works. They concluded that nonviolent movements succeed twice as often as violent uprisings. Violent movements work primarily in civil wars or in ending foreign occupations, they found. Nonviolent movements that succeed appeal to those within the power structure, especially the police and civil servants, who are cognizant of the corruption and decadence of the power elite and are willing to abandon them. And we only need 1 to 5 percent of the population actively working for the overthrow of a system, history has shown, to bring down even the most ruthless totalitarian structures. It always works on two tracks—building alternative structures such as public banks to free ourselves from control and finding mechanisms to halt the machine.

The most important dilemma facing us is not ideological. It is logistical. The security and surveillance state has made its highest priority the breaking of any infrastructure that might spark widespread revolt. The state knows the tinder is there. It knows that the continued unraveling of the economy and the effects of climate change make popular unrest inevitable. It knows that as underemployment and unemployment doom at least a quarter of the U.S. population, perhaps more, to perpetual poverty, and as unemployment benefits are scaled back, as schools close, as the middle class withers away, as pension funds are looted by hedge fund thieves, and as the government continues to let the fossil fuel industry ravage the planet, the future will increasingly be one of open conflict. This battle against the corporate state, right now, is primarily about infrastructure. We need an infrastructure to build revolt. The corporate state is determined to deny us one.

The state, in its internal projections, has a vision of the future that is as dystopian as mine. But the state, to protect itself, lies. Politicians, corporations, the public relations industry, the entertainment industry and our ridiculous television pundits speak as if we can continue to build a society based on limitless growth, profligate consumption and fossil fuel. They feed the collective mania for hope at the expense of truth. Their public vision is self-delusional, a form of collective psychosis. The corporate state, meanwhile, is preparing privately for the world it knows is actually coming. It is cementing into place a police state, one that includes the complete evisceration of our most basic civil liberties and the militarization of the internal security apparatus, as well as wholesale surveillance of the citizenry.

Moby Dick rams and sinks the Pequod. The waves swallow up Ahab.

As the planet begins to convulse with fury, as the senseless greed of limitless capitalist expansion implodes the global economy, as our civil liberties are eviscerated in the name of national security, shackling us to an interconnected security and surveillance state that stretches from Moscow to Istanbul to New York, how shall we endure and resist?

Our hope lies in the human imagination. It was the human imagination that permitted African-Americans during slavery and the Jim Crow era to transcend their physical condition. It was the human imagination that sustained Sitting Bull and Black Elk as their land was seized and their cultures were broken. And it was the human imagination that allowed the survivors in the Nazi death camps to retain the power of the sacred. It is the imagination that makes possible transcendence. Chants, work songs, spirituals, the blues, poetry, dance and art converged under slavery to nourish and sustain this imagination. These were the forces that, as Ralph Ellison wrote, “we had in place of freedom.” The oppressed would be the first—for they know their fate—to admit that on a rational level such a notion is absurd, but they also know that it is only through the imagination that they survive. Jewish inmates in Auschwitz reportedly put God on trial for the Holocaust and then condemned God to death. A rabbi stood after the verdict to lead the evening prayers.

African-Americans and Native Americans, for centuries, had little control over their destinies. Forces of bigotry and violence kept them subjugated by whites. Suffering, for the oppressed, was tangible. Death was a constant companion. And it was only their imagination, as William Faulkner noted at the end of The Sound and the Fury, that permitted them—unlike the novel’s white Compson family—to “endure.”

The theologian James H. Cone captures this in his book The Cross and the Lynching Tree. Cone says that for oppressed blacks the cross was a

paradoxical religious symbol because it inverts the world’s value system with the news that hope comes by way of defeat, that suffering and death do not have the last word, that the last shall be first and the first last.

Cone continues: That God could “make a way out of no way” in Jesus’ cross was truly absurd to the intellect, yet profoundly real in the souls of black folk. Enslaved blacks who first heard the gospel message seized on the power of the cross. Christ crucified manifested God’s loving and liberating presence in the contradictions of black life—that transcendent presence in the lives of black Christians that empowered them to believe that ultimately, in God’s eschatological future, they would not be defeated by the “troubles of this world,” no matter how great and painful their suffering. Believing this paradox, this absurd claim of faith, was only possible in humility and repentance. There was no place for the proud and the mighty, for people who think that God called them to rule over others. The cross was God’s critique of power—white power—with powerless love, snatching victory out of defeat.

Reinhold Niebuhr labeled this capacity to defy the forces of repression “a sublime madness in the soul.” Niebuhr wrote that

nothing but madness will do battle with malignant power and “spiritual wickedness in high places.”

This sublime madness, as Niebuhr understood, is dangerous, but it is vital. Without it, “truth is obscured.” And Niebuhr also knew that traditional liberalism was a useless force in moments of extremity. Liberalism, Niebuhr said,

lacks the spirit of enthusiasm, not to say fanaticism, which is so necessary to move the world out of its beaten tracks. It is too intellectual and too little emotional to be an efficient force in history.

The prophets in the Hebrew Bible had this sublime madness. The words of the Hebrew prophets, as Abraham Heschel wrote, were

a scream in the night. While the world is at ease and asleep, the prophet feels the blast from heaven.

The prophet, because he saw and faced an unpleasant reality, was, as Heschel wrote, “compelled to proclaim the very opposite of what his heart expected.”

The poet Leon Staff wrote from the Warsaw ghetto:

Even more than bread we now need poetry, in a time when it seems that it is not needed at all.

It is only those who harness their imagination, and through their imagination find the courage to peer into the molten pit, who can minister to the suffering of those around them. It is only they who can find the physical and psychological strength to resist. Resistance is carried out not for its success, but because by resisting in every way possible we affirm life. And those who resist in the years ahead will be those who are infected with this “sublime madness.” As Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism, the only morally reliable people are not those who say “this is wrong” or “this should not be done,” but those who say “I can’t.” They know that as Immanuel Kant wrote:

If justice perishes, human life on earth has lost its meaning.

And this means that, like Socrates, we must come to a place where it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong. We must at once see and act, and given what it means to see, this will require the surmounting of despair, not by reason, but by faith.

“One of the only coherent philosophical positions is revolt,” Camus wrote.

It is a constant confrontation between man and his obscurity. It is not aspiration, for it is devoid of hope. That revolt is the certainty of a crushing fate, without the resignation that ought to accompany it.

“The people noticed that Crazy Horse was queerer than ever,” Black Elk said in remembering the final days of the wars of Western expansion. He went on to say of the great Sioux warrior:

He hardly ever stayed in the camp. People would find him out alone in the cold, and they would ask him to come home with them. He would not come, but sometimes he would tell the people what to do. People wondered if he ate anything at all. Once my father found him out alone like that, and he said to my father: “Uncle, you have noticed me the way I act. But do not worry; there are caves and holes for me to live in, and out here the spirits may help me. I am making plans for the good of my people.”

Homer, Dante, Beethoven, Melville, Dostoevsky, Proust, Joyce, W.H. Auden, Emily Dickinson and James Baldwin, along with artists such as the sculptor David Smith, the photographer Diane Arbus and the blues musician Charley Patton, all had it. It is the sublime madness that lets one sing, as bluesman Ishman Bracey did in Hinds County, Miss., “I’ve been down so long, Lawd, down don’t worry me.” And yet in the mists of the imagination also lie the absurdity and certainty of divine justice:

I feel my hell a-risin’, a-risin’ every day;
I feel my hell a-risin’, a-risin’ every day;
Someday it’ll burst this levee and wash the whole wide world away.

Shakespeare’s greatest heroes and heroines— Prospero, Antony, Juliet, Viola, Rosalind, Hamlet, Cordelia and Lear—all have this sublime madness. King Lear, who through suffering and affliction, through human imagination, is finally able to see, warns us all that unbridled human passion and unchecked hubris mean the suicide of the species. “It will come,” Albany says in King Lear.

Humanity must perforce prey on itself, Like monsters of the deep.

It was the poems of Federico Garcia Lorca that sustained the republicans fighting the fascists in Spain. Music, dance, drama, art, song, painting have been the fire and drive of resistance movements. The rebel units in El Salvador when I covered the war there always traveled with musicians and theater troupes. Art, as Emma Goldman pointed out, has the power to make ideas felt. Goldman noted that when Andrew Undershaft, a character in George Bernard Shaw’s play Major Barbara, said poverty is “[t]he worst of crimes” and “All the other crimes are virtues beside it,” his impassioned declaration elucidated the cruelty of class warfare more effectively than Shaw’s socialist tracts. The degradation of education into vocational training for the corporate state, the ending of state subsidies for the arts and journalism, the hijacking of these disciplines by corporate sponsors, sever the population from understanding, self-actualization and transcendence. In aesthetic terms the corporate state seeks to crush beauty, truth and imagination. This is a war waged by all totalitarian systems.

Culture, real culture, is radical and transformative. It is capable of expressing what lies deep within us. It gives words to our reality. It makes us feel as well as see. It allows us to empathize with those who are different or oppressed. It reveals what is happening around us. It honors mystery. James Baldwin wrote,

The role of the artist, then, precisely, is to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through the vast forest, so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place.

Ultimately, the artist and the revolutionary function as they function, and pay whatever dues they must pay behind it because they are both possessed by a vision, and they do not so much follow this vision as find themselves driven by it. Otherwise, they could never endure, much less embrace, the lives they are compelled to lead.

I do not know if we can build a better society. I do not even know if we will survive as a species. But I know these corporate forces have us by the throat. And they have my children by the throat. I do not fight fascists because I will win. I fight fascists because they are fascists. And this is a fight, which, in the face of the overwhelming forces against us, requires us to embrace this sublime madness, to find in acts of rebellion the embers of life, an intrinsic meaning that lies outside of certain success. It is to at once grasp reality and then refuse to allow this reality to paralyze us. It is, and I say this to people of all creeds or no creeds, to make an absurd leap of faith, to believe, despite all empirical evidence around us, that good always draws to it the good, that the fight for life always goes somewhere—we do not know where; the Buddhists call it karma—and in these acts we sustain our belief in a better world, even if we cannot see one emerging around us.

Other AR Chris Hedges programs:
• Corporate Coup d’Etat
• Inverted Totalitarianism
• Empire Abroad, Tyranny at Home
• Death of the Liberal Class
• Empire of Illusion
• American Fascists: The Radical Christian Right
• War as an Addiction

For information about obtaining CDs, MP3s, or transcripts of this or other programs, please contact:
David Barsamian
Alternative Radio
P .O. Box 551
Boulder, CO 80306-0551
phone: (800) 444-1977
info@alternativeradio.org
www.alternativeradio.org
©2014

Unmasking the NSA

Fri, 18 Jul 2014 00:59:10 GMT

Glenn Greenwald
Town Hall
Seattle, WA
17 June 2014

Imagine a gigantic vacuum cleaner scooping up all electronic communications. That’s what the National Security Agency does. Think you are safe from NSA snooping? That you can hide behind clever passwords? Think again. The Agency has the capability to generate one billion password guesses per second. On top of that it can remotely activate your cell phone and computer and use them as eavesdropping and tracking devices. The NSA is at the center of a system of monitoring and control beyond the wildest dreams of the greatest tyrants in history. The so-called War on Terror has unleashed a war on civil liberties. White House claims of national security justify massive abuses. We have to give up freedoms in order to preserve them we are told. But hey, if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to worry about.

This lecture and interview are available as a CD or mp3 or transcript from Alternative Radio

Glenn Greenwald broke the story in The Guardian of Washington’s widespread electronic dragnet. His exclusive interview with NSA contractor turned whistleblower Edward Snowden was an international media sensation. He is the author of How Would a Patriot Act?, With Liberty and Justice for Some, and No Place to Hide. He is the recipient of the Izzy Award from the Park Center for Independent Media for his “path-breaking journalistic courage and persistence in confronting conventional wisdom, official deception, and controversial issues.” He also received an Online Journalism Award for Best Commentary for his coverage of Bradley [now Chelsea] Manning. He is co-founder of the watchdog media outlet The Intercept.

You can listen to Glenn Greenwald speak for himself (an mp3 clip) here.
You can get a printable version of this talk (a PDF file) here.

It has been just over a year now since I went to Hong Kong and met with one of the most significant sources in journalism in American history, Edward Snowden. It’s been an intense year for U.S. diplomatic relations with a whole variety of countries. It’s been an intense year for a lot of media outlets and journalists in the world whose conduct over the past decade has really been called into serious question by the disclosures. And it has been a truly intense year for numerous populations in multiple countries on many continents around the world, who discovered that the massive surveillance system that has been built, which we all vaguely knew had existed, was directed not at a handful of terrorists or people engaged in serious violence, but was, in fact, directed at them.

I think one of the remarkable aspects of the last year has been how sustained the intensity is surrounding these issues. It’s really not all that obvious that a year after the revelations began, I could go all over the world, which is what I’ve been doing in the last month in South America, in Europe, on the East Coast of the U.S. last month, and now on the West Coast of the U.S., and have rooms like this fill up with people interested in talking about these issues. It’s really an extraordinary event.

I think one of the reasons that it’s happened, maybe the main one, is one of the most underappreciated aspects of the last year, which is that the debate that has been triggered by the reporting that we were able to do is not just a debate about surveillance. In fact, I would say it’s not even primarily a debate about surveillance. There is a wide array of equally profound issues, if not more profound issues, that have been seriously examined by many countries around the world. This has been a global debate, not a domestic one.

It has involved an examination of the role of individual privacy in the digital age, probably the first time that as a planet, as we put more and more of our communications on the line electronically, we are considering what the value of individual privacy is. It has entailed a debate about the dangers of vesting power in government entities and allowing them to exercise that power in the dark. It has triggered a debate about the role that the U.S. plays in the world and the vast difference between the branding and marketing campaign that defined who President Obama was and his reality. It has triggered a truly, I think, profound debate about the role of journalism and the proper role of journalists vis-à-vis the state. So there have been all of these profound issues that have been debated over the last year, not just surveillance. I think that’s one of the reasons why the intensity has remained so high in this issue.

Part of what has been great for me about being able to go around to events like this and being able to talk to people in person is that when you’re doing this reporting and you have the obligation, which I’ve had for the last year, to work as hard as possible to get as many stories out as I possibly could in the seemingly endless archive of government secrets, you tend to focus us on story after individual story and focus really intensely on what the specific programs are that you’re reporting and what the capabilities are that you’re exposing, and the broader implications of the reporting can sometimes get obscured. One of the things I’m able to do by going around and having these kinds of discussions is it gives me a moment for the first time to take a step back and to think about how all of these issues really connect, why this will really be an enduring set of revelations.

One primary reason is that there has been so much said over the last year about all of these events, about what Edward Snowden did, about the reporting that we did, about the documents that he gave us, about what those documents revealed, so much said to the American media in particular, so much of which is just wrong, is just completely false. It’s funny, if you were somebody who loves to bash the American media and talk about how awful they are—and I am somebody who completely loves to do that; it’s one of my favorite things to do, I’ve been doing it for many years now—it doesn’t come as a surprise to learn that so much of what is conveyed and represented in the American media in this really authoritative, objective tone that they like to use is completely false. That probably doesn’t come as a surprise to anybody, certainly not to people who were of adult age in the run-up to the Iraq war. That lesson is a lesson that has been well learned by most of us. But when you’re in the middle of one of these stories that’s being talked about by the media to such an extent and you actually have firsthand knowledge of what’s happening, your appreciation for the U.S. media’s ability and willingness to spout absolute falsehoods escalates dramatically. I am somebody who has been incredibly cynical of the media, and yet I was shocked by the things I saw over the past year just in terms of pure falsity getting passed off as truth.

So one of the things I wanted to do is to be able to just set the record straight and to set forth the evidence that I have seen and that I know myself firsthand to create a historical account about what actually happened. The myths that got disseminated are sometimes so extreme, and yet they endure to this day in a way that’s quite remarkable.

One of the myths that has gotten repeated over and over by defenders of the U.S. government and by defenders of the NSA, is the idea that Edward Snowden has always been, or at least is now, a Russian spy. I know it is hilarious. And yet if you listen to CNN or MSNBC or certainly Fox or any of the major network news shows on Sunday, this is something that gets stated over and over with a great deal of seriousness. How people maintain a straight face when they say it is a mystery to me, and yet they do.

One of the things that is remarkable to me when I went back and I looked at the things that were being said in June of last year, when I was in Hong Kong. I was blissfully ignorant of the things the American media were saying about Edward Snowden and the reporting we were doing because I was focused on the articles. But I went back and I looked at a lot of this. And what’s most amazing is that the people who now say that Edward Snowden is a Russian spy, and they say it with such conviction and certainty, in June of 2013, when he was in Hong Kong before he had left for Moscow, those very same people were going on the very same shows and saying,

Oh, there’s no doubt that he is a Chinese spy. This is just obvious.

Then the minute he left Hong Kong and went to Moscow, seamlessly the whole narrative shifted, without any recognition of what they were saying just weeks earlier. I’m convinced that if he somehow managed tomorrow to travel from Moscow to, I don’t know, Lima, these same people would be saying,

Oh, obviously, he was a Peruvian spy the entire time.

They’ll just say anything.

My favorite instance of this occurred really recently. There was an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal by Edward J. Epstein, who frequently writes op-eds in places like The Wall Street Journal. I’m just going to read the quote, because it’s my favorite quote ever. This is what he said. He had spoken to a senior Obama cabinet minister who off the record assured him,

There are only three possibilities for the Snowden heist: one, it was a Russian espionage operation; two, it was a Chinese espionage operation; or, three, it was a joint Sino-Russian operation.

I love that so much. What that really means, of course, is, We have absolutely no idea what happened here, but we need to malign and demean him and demonize him as much as we can, so we will just say anything.

The whole time there was so much evidence, so much obvious evidence, that negated this, beginning with the fact that when he was in Hong Kong, he was forced to leave by the government in Hong Kong and in Beijing, not really the treatment typically extended to Chinese spies. And when he arrived in Moscow, he was forced to wait for five weeks in the international transit zone of the Moscow airport as the Putin government negotiated with the U.S. government about what the Russians could get in exchange for handing him over. Not exactly the treatment that the Russian government typically extends to valuable Russian spies.

But more important than that was the fact that he actually never chose to be in Russia in the first place. It was a pure accident that he ended up there. He was trying to transit through on his way to Havana, which had promised him safe passage, and then to Ecuador, where he intended to seek asylum. The reason he ended up in Moscow was that on the flight to Moscow, the U.S. government unilaterally, without any due process, revoked his passport, just declared his passport invalid. Did you know the government can do that? Just one day decide that they’re going to declare your passport invalid? That’s what they did. And then they bullied the Cubans into rescinding their offer of safe passage. The reason he was in Moscow was because he got trapped there by the U.S. government, which then turned around and used their apologists in the media to use the fact that he was forced to be in Moscow as proof that he was a Russian spy.

On top of which, if Edward Snowden were a Russian spy, or a spy of any kind, think about all the things that he could have done with the material that he had. He could have sold it for tens of millions of dollars to multiple intelligence agencies around the world and be extraordinary rich for the rest of his life. Or he could have passed it secretly to American adversaries if he had malignant intent. He did none of that. He came to journalists and asked journalists with well-regarded media institutions to carefully vet the material to inform his fellow citizens about the kind of debate that he thought we ought to be having. The very antithesis of what a spy does, let alone a spy for oppressive regimes.

You can look at media behavior and be shocked that they allowed this accusation to be aired over and over again, not just because there was so much evidence negating it but because there was no evidence ever supporting it. There has never been a shred of evidence that he has cooperated in any way with any government.

There has been a historical attack on whistleblowers. If you go back and look at what the Nixon administration was saying about Daniel Ellsberg in 1971 and 1972, John Ehrlichman was going before Congress and saying,

We think Daniel Ellsberg is a Russian spy.

So there are all these sorts of reasons we should have known on its face that the accusation was false, to the point where it was not even something that should be aired by responsible media outlets.

But the reason those kinds of accusations get aired I think is important and interesting, which is that it really says so much more about the people voicing the accusations and the people who give it credence than it does the target of the accusation, which is Edward Snowden. The reality is that Edward Snowden did what he did because as an act of conscience he was so disturbed by what he perceived to be this extremely dangerous and unjust system of surveillance that he had no choice but to come forward and do what he could to stop it, even if it meant sacrificing his liberty and everything else that he valued in his life. But in order to believe that that was really the reason, you have to believe that people are capable of acting out of conscience and out of conviction and in defense of political values. The people who insist that he’s Russian spy and the media elites who propagate these myths don’t believe that about him because they don’t believe that about themselves. Because they know that they never act out of conscience, that they don’t have any political convictions, that they never take steps to sacrifice their own interests in defense of political ideals. Therefore, they don’t believe that anybody else can do that either. So they search for other hidden motives that prove that the person is actually doing this for all sorts of corrupted ends. It’s a reflection of their own emptiness and corruption, not of the people whom they’re condemning.

Then there was this other thing that got said about him over and over, and still gets said about him, that I find even more interesting and more amazing, which is that Edward Snowden did what he did because he’s “fame- seeking narcissist.” The thing that really amazed me about this was that when I went back and looked at the discourse about this in the U.S. during those weeks after we began our reporting, though I wasn’t aware of this at the time, was that this phrase, fame-seeking narcissist got repeated over and over by so many different American pundits. People like Bob Schieffer, the host of Face the Nation, and David Brooks, the New York Times columnist, and Richard Cohen, the Washington Post columnist, and Jeffrey Toobin, the legal analyst for CNN, all somehow came up with this phrase instantaneously, literally within 48 hours of our unveiling Edward Snowden. We unveiled him on June 10th. That was when we posted the video and wrote about who our source was. Within 48 hours—I mean this literally; you can Google it—all of these American pundits had simultaneously decided that they were capable of psychologically assessing this person about whom they knew absolutely nothing and had never met in their entire life. And not only did they all decide that they were going to psychologically assess him, diagnose him from a distance as a “fame-seeking narcissist,” they all did it instantaneously.

I’m somebody who, if you had told me three or four years ago that media elites get together and coordinate their messaging, I would have said,

No, I don’t actually think that’s true. I think they just end up saying the same thing because they’re herd animals who just parrot what each other is saying, without any coordination.

But the degree to which they all latched on to the same phrase and the same psychological diagnosis in such a short period of time was really striking to me. Almost enough to make me believe that they were getting some kind of secret messages from some underground lair somewhere about the script from which they were supposed to be reading.

First of all, just as is true for the idea that he was a Russian spy, this idea that Edward Snowden is some sort of fame-seeking narcissist is literally the exact opposite of reality. The very first conversation I ever had with Edward Snowden, before I even met him, before I knew his name, before I knew what he looked like, was over the Internet, when I was in Brazil and he was in Hong Kong. He said to me,

I am determined to unveil myself to the world as the source of these documents, even though I know that doing so will likely send me to prison for the rest of my life. And the reason for that is that I believe I have the obligation to account to the world for what I did. And since I don’t think that what I’m doing is wrong, I’m not going to hide in shame. I’m going to come out and proudly identify myself as the source.

”But,” he said,

Once I do that, I am going to disappear from the sight of the media. I am going to disappear completely.

And the reason he said he was going to do that was because he knew that the goal of the media, the instinct would be to try and personalize the focus on him instead of where he wanted the focus to remain, which was on the substance of what these revelations showed. So he said,

I don’t want any attention for myself. I want to disappear from the media sight.

Literally for the next six months after we unveiled him, I had every single big TV star, all of those TV actors who play the role of journalists on television, calling me pleading to arrange for an interview with Snowden. He rejected every single one of those. He literally could have been the most famous person in the world, on prime time every single night, and yet he categorically refused to do any interviews. The one he just did with NBC in Moscow was the first-ever interview he did after that interview that we did back in Hong Kong a year later. The reason was because he wanted no attention on him. Really kind of weird behavior for a fame-seeking narcissist, I think.

But the complete lack of evidence for this claim and all the evidence that negates it is probably the least interesting part about this labeling of him in this way. I thought about this a lot. In every single instance, literally, when a whistleblower emerges, or not even a whistleblower, any actual dissident, they get attacked almost invariably as being mentally ill, as suffering from some kind of psychological affliction, as having personality attributes that make you want to run as far away from them as you possibly can.

Look at how whistleblowers have been treated or people who bring uncomfortable revelations are treated or people who meaningfully dissent. I don’t mean people who stand up and say, “I’m a Democrat and I don’t like the Republicans” or “I’m a Republican and I don’t like the Democrats.” That’s the kind of dissent that we’re allowed to do. I’m talking about real dissent, when you decide that you’re going to go so far as to break laws in protest of and in defiance of fundamental injustices. That kind of dissent. Anybody who does that is maligned as being mentally unstable.

One of the most fascinating examples to me is there was this instance in 2011 when WikiLeaks leaked, first, multiple documents about the war in Afghanistan, and then many more about the war in Iraq. The documents about the war in Iraq were much more significant than the ones in Afghanistan, because they documented extreme war crimes that the U.S. government and its partners in the Iraqi military were committing deliberately, and that there were huge numbers of civilian deaths that people didn’t know about, atrocities of the worst kind that these documents revealed.

The New York Times, which partnered with WikiLeaks to report on these materials, the day that those documents were released had a nice front-page headline that said, “Documents reveal U.S. atrocities in Iraq,” and then right next to it, almost as prominent, if not as prominent, was an article about Julian Assange written by the pro-war correspondent for The New York Times, John Burns. The article dissected all of Julian Assange’s personality traits and depicted him as this bizarre, paranoid freak who didn’t wash his clothes and slept on his friends’ couches and looked around the corner thinking, weirdly, that somebody might be after him, even though he was in the middle of the biggest national security leak in American history, so maybe that was a pretty rational fear. But the idea was to make him be viewed as so personally unappealing that you actually wanted to turn away from the very serious revelations of what those documents showed. It literally got equal billing.

The same thing happened with Chelsea Manning and her revelations. If you read what she actually was saying, it’s the model of rationality. She was saying that she joined the Army because she believed in the cause of the war in Iraq, and she slowly and gradually discovered the extreme levels of corruption and abuse that were taking place as part of this war and decided that she not only didn’t want to be part of it anymore but wanted the world to know about all of the secret, hidden atrocities that were taking place and therefore leaked these documents in order to trigger reform. Whatever else you think about what she did, that is a model of rational thinking. Yet instantly the U.S. media decided that the reason she did what she did was because of her struggles with her “gender disorder,” as they called it, or because of childhood conflicts with her father.

This is the tactic over and over that gets invoked. And it isn’t just about trying to distract attention away from the revelations or make you so uncomfortable with the disclosures that these whistleblowers and dissidents bring. That is an important part of it, but there’s something more pernicious going on, more subtle but more pernicious. That is this. If somebody steps out that extremely and breaks laws in order to dissent, the premise of these attacks—that Julian Assange is some paranoid freak, that Chelsea Manning only did it because she was struggling with her gender disorder, that Daniel Ellsberg is a swinger and in love with his sister, that Edward Snowden is a fame-seeking narcissist—is that if you dissent in that way, then it automatically means that there is some kind of disturbed psychological undercurrent that has caused you to do that, that it can only be explained by a psychological affliction.

The premise there is that the status quo is so fundamentally good, that the American political system is so at its core designed to give us freedom and choice, that only someone mentally disturbed would think that it was unjust enough to merit that level of protest and objection. It’s really a way of implicitly teaching and indoctrinating that the only mentally stable and healthy choice is to comply or submit or acquiesce to the prevailing order, and that anyone who doesn’t do that by definition is demonstrating some kind of psychological affliction. That’s a really subtle yet powerful message to convey.

The fallacy of it is that while, of course, it’s possible that people who dissent in a radical or meaningful way, namely, breaking laws to do it, are motivated in some cases by some kind of psychological drive as opposed to political beliefs, it’s also the case that oftentimes, in fact many times, people who don’t dissent, who instead choose to acquiesce, are doing so because of psychological afflictions as well. Perhaps it’s authoritarianism, perhaps it’s cowardice, perhaps it’s excessive groupthink. But this idea that the only people whose psychological motives we assess are those who dissent, but we never psychologically analyze those who refrain from dissent, is a really odious notion, because it inherently delegitimizes the idea of dissent.

I think it’s very reasonable question to ask, who is actually the psychologically disturbed person? Chelsea Manning, who comes forward and wants to reveal to the world the atrocities that the U.S. is committing in Iraq, or all of the people who decide that those atrocities aren’t enough to make them object in a meaningful way? Or who is it who is really psychologically disturbed? Julian Assange, who decides that this massive secrecy regime is dangerous and menacing, or the tens of thousands of people who work within it every day who do nothing about it? Or who is psychologically disturbed? Edward Snowden for deciding that all of us should know about the extreme invasions of our privacy to which we’re being subjected in secret on a daily basis or the tens of thousands of people who knew about it and did nothing and the officials who perpetrated it? That’s a really important debate to have. The idea that you are mentally ill if you dissent, that is the debate that that tactic is designed to suppress.

I just want to talk about one last myth. That is the idea that the only reason the surveillance state has been constructed is because our government officials have this really deep and abiding desire to keep us safe. This is really just about finding and monitoring the communications of people who are engaged in terrorism or other kinds of violent plots. It is genuinely shocking to me that anybody can stand up in public and say that after the last year without having their reputation instantly obliterated.

So much of the spying that we’ve revealed over the last year so plainly has nothing to do with any of that, whether it’s spying on democratic allies like the president of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff, or the chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, or spying on oil companies throughout Latin America or economic summits or on all sorts of populations around the world en masse who plainly have nothing to do with terrorism. There’s so much of that that has been revealed that just has no connection to that claim at all.

But even more compelling are the NSA’s own documents which really lay bare exactly what their institutional mandate and objective are in really clear language. These are the things they said when they thought nobody was listening and that you would never see. The motto of the NSA—the motto, their institutional phrase that governs what they are about—is “Collect it all.” Not “Collect communications of terrorists” or “Collect some of it” or “Collect a lot of it.” It’s “Collect it all.”

I think the NSA is actually owed a lot of thanks, they certainly have my gratitude for producing documents that are this clear and easy to understand—“Our new collection posture.” And then there is a little circle and it has six phrases that define what their collection posture is. At the top it says, “Collect it all.” And then it says, “Exploit it all,” “Process it all,” “Sniff it all,” “Partner it all,” and “Know it all.”

They are collecting every single day billions of emails and telephone calls. They have entire populations under surveillance on a daily basis, including our own. It is the largest system of suspicionless surveillance ever created in human history. The idea that they can still stand up in public and say this is about terrorism and have the U.S. media and all sorts of other people take that seriously is one of the most powerful indictments of just how rotted our political discourse really is.

One of the most important parts of the debate we’ve had over the last year is about the notion of privacy and what privacy means to the individual and to individual freedom. This is actually not an easy argument to have. It’s a hard case to make, why privacy matters so much. People have a really easy time understanding, for obvious reasons, and for good reasons, why feeding their children or having health care or having a job is this immediate question of survival. They have a harder time understanding why privacy deserves the same level of protection, because it tends to be a more abstract and ethereal and seemingly remote value.

So it’s not uncommon—I hear it all the time—for people, even people in good faith, reasonable people, to say,

You know, I just am not one of those people who is doing bad things, and therefore I don’t have anything to hide.

And

I don’t really mind if people read my emails, because I have nothing to hide.

The CEO of Google put this in the purest and most disgusting manner. He was asked in an interview about Google’s systematic invasions of privacy, and he said,

You know, if you want to hide something, if you’re so worried about somebody knowing what it is that you’re doing or saying, that’s probably a really good sign that you shouldn’t be doing it.

The premise being that the only people who have something to hide are people who are doing something evil, something wrong, something criminal.

One of the fascinating parts about this claim is that the people who say “I don’t really have anything to hide, because I’m not doing anything wrong” don’t actually mean it. The way that you know that they don’t actually mean it is that these same people put passwords on their email and social media accounts and they put locks on their bedroom and bathroom doors. And there are all sorts of things that they say and do and that they would only say and do when they think that nobody is watching or listening, that they would never in a million years say if they thought other people were knowing what it was that they were doing. There are all sorts of things that we have to hide as individuals that have nothing to do with violence or criminality. The fact is that people instinctively seek out privacy, to the point that every single time, literally, over the last year when somebody has said to me, “You know, I really don’t have anything to hide; I don’t actually care if people know what I’m doing, because I’m not one of those people who have done something wrong,” I’ve said the same thing every single time. Try this and you will see the same result. I’ve said,” Okay, here’s my email,” and I give them my email account.

What I’d like you to do is email me all of the passwords to your email and social media accounts so that I can just troll through everything that you’re doing and writing and publish at will whatever I feel like publishing under your name. You’re not doing anything wrong. You should have nothing to hide.

And not a single person, not one, has taken me up on this offer.

There was this remarkable op-ed early on, after we had published the article revealing that the NSA was collecting what they called the metadata for every single American. Metadata seems really technical when you call it that. What it is actually is the list of every single person with whom we’re communicating: who is calling us, who are we calling, how long are we speaking for, where are we when we speak, who is emailing us, and who are we emailing. And Dianne Feinstein, the cheerleader of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who is the NSA’s best friend in Congress by far, wrote an op-ed in USA Today saying,

I don’t even understand why people are so upset by this. In fact, I don’t even understand why they’re calling this spying. It’s not really spying on somebody if you’re not reading the content of their email, if you’re not listening to the content of your phone, all you’re doing is collecting the list of all the people with whom they’re communicating.

The reason why that is absurd to the point of being offensive I think is obvious. Think about how much somebody can learn about you, how intimate they can get in terms of their understanding of what you’re doing just by having what they call the metadata. If you’re a woman who calls an abortion clinic or you’re somebody who calls a physician who is an HIV specialist, or you call a drug or alcohol addiction hotline, or you call a suicide hotline, or you speak with somebody who isn’t your spouse late at night, collecting all that information will enable people to know some of the most intimate information about you, in fact, sometimes more probing and more invasive and more intimate than if they were listening to the content itself.

But one of the things about Dianne Feinstein’s claim was that there grew this sort of online movement instantly after her op-ed that called for Dianne Feinstein to be true to her words. If spying isn’t really collecting all this information, then every single day at the end of her workday she or one of her 8,000 assistants should post online a list of all the people with whom she emailed and telephoned that day and all the people she met in person and spoke to. Of course, she would never do that.

Because we all instinctively understand why privacy is so fundamental to human freedom. It’s something that we all seek out instinctively and as human beings always have. We are social animals. We do need other people to know what we’re saying and doing and to hear what it is we’re doing and saying. That’s why people voluntarily post things about themselves online and why they’ve always sought out human interaction. But just as essential to what it means to be human is having places we can go where we can think and read and be and choose and act without judgmental eyes being cast upon us.

There are all kinds of social science research, but I think our own personal experiences are even more compelling, that demonstrate that when we think or believe that other people are watching what we’re doing or monitoring us or judging us, our range of options shrinks considerably. When we think other people are watching, our behavior becomes more conformist and more compliant. We do the things that we think other people want us to do and will judge us well for, because as human beings we all try to avoid shame and being condemned and being denounced. It is only the realm that we can go to where nobody else is watching or judging us that is the realm where creativity and dissent and exploration about who we are as people exclusively resides.

A world in which there is no private realm is a world that becomes much less interesting, much less creative, much more submissive and compliant and obedient, which is why governments love surveillance—because it instills those behavioral values in people. You have not a physical prison that you get put into but a prison that enters your mind. That is what the true purpose and the true outcome of a surveillance state is. I think we all instinctively understand that, but I think the ability to sit back and think about why privacy is so important is a really crucial part of the debate that we’ve had over the last year.

I want to spend a little bit of time talking about the motive for this system, because that is a question that I get asked all the time. I think people by now are convinced that the NSA and its partner governments and other agencies in the U.S. security state are truly devoted to the elimination of privacy in the digital age. That is not hyperbole. I mean by that that they want to take and store and, when they want, analyze and monitor every single communication event that takes place by and between human beings on the planet electronically, on the Internet and by the telephone. You don’t need to take my word for that. Their own documents, as I said earlier, demonstrate that that’s their goal. But that then leads to the question of why the U.S. government would want to create a system that does that. What is the core motive that has driven this system to be created?

Motives can sometimes be really difficult to ascertain, so I think we have a hard time understanding our own motives, let alone other people’s. And when you’re talking about an institution this large, it becomes a very difficult question to ask. It’s like asking, Why did the U.S. invade Iraq? It’s almost impossible to answer that, because different factions responsible for that invasion had very different motives. Sometimes they had mixed motives and complex motives. It’s a hard question to answer. But one thing I can tell you for sure about the motive of the system is that it has nothing to do with the motive they claim. It has nothing to do with stopping terrorism or keeping the population safe.

This is one way that I know that. If you read what the 9/11 Commission said, which was designed to investigate why the U.S. government, with all of its surveillance capabilities, even back then, failed to detect a plot of this magnitude, what it concluded was that the problem was not that the U.S. government had failed to gather all of the information it needed to know this plot was coming. In fact, the opposite was true. They had in their possession all of the intelligence necessary to piece together to know that the 9/11 attack was coming. The reason that they failed to detect the plot was because they had collected so much information that they were incapable of understanding the significance and the meaning of what it was that they had. So the response to this diagnosis was for them to say, You know what, let’s go now and collect even more. Which is like being told that you have lung cancer and walking out of the office and saying, “I’m now going to smoke five packs of cigarettes more a day than I was before.” It makes no sense. It clearly is not the purpose.

When you are collecting every single communication event that takes place in the world and storing it, it becomes impossible to find the people who are talking about attacking the Boston Marathon or blowing up trains in Madrid or London or detonating a plane above Detroit or a bomb in the middle of Times Square. It is impossible to find what you claim you’re looking for in constructing the system. Which is why they don’t find those things.

If that isn’t the motive, the question then becomes, what is the motive? Why has the system expanded to the point it has?

I think one significant reason is that in the wake of 9/11 we just decided to drown the national security state with enormous amounts of money. When you drown bureaucracies with money, they will rapidly expand without limit. Every day they will wake up and think, How we can we expand our power and authority? But the more important part is that when you drown agencies with all that money, it creates an immense profit motive. Seventy-five percent of the intelligence budget of the NSA goes into the coffers of private corporations, which means every time the surveillance state expands, every time there’s a new capability, every time there’s a new target that is warranting a new system, the corporations that run the national security state make more and more money.

But the key reason, that I think should never be overlooked, is that surveillance vests governments that wield it with enormous amounts of power. If you can know everything that a citizenry is doing, especially at a time when you are creating higher and higher walls of secrecy behind which you’re operating, the power imbalance becomes immense. It becomes virtually impossible for that citizenry to challenge in any meaningful way the people who are wielding power. I think the surveillance state is part of a wildly underappreciated trend, which is that we have allowed all of these very radical powers and extremist policies to take root in the name of the War on Terror.

What has happened over the last four or five years, as the War on Terror has wound down, is that these policies began to be imported onto American soil, aimed at Americans instead of existing on foreign soil, aimed at foreigners. Which is why you see the use of drones now coming away from Iraq and Somalia and Pakistan and Yemen into the U.S. Or why you see the paramilitarized police forces that once patrolled the streets of Baghdad now visible in all American cities, used to crush, for example, the Occupy movement. Or you see the extreme levels of government secrecy that justify more secrecy being used domestically as well. Or you see the idea that the U.S. government can assassinate foreigners without due process now being aimed at Americans. This system of surveillance, which was pioneered in Iraq under the “Collect it all” banner by Keith Alexander, who was in Iraq at the time, before he became NSA chief, also has been now imported onto American soil.

There’s a real question about why that would happen. What explains this trend of importing these increasingly extreme policies that were once used to justify winning a war and are now used to aim at the American population? I think it’s really important not to underestimate the extent to which people who wield power in the U.S. fear political and social instability, largely as a result of huge amounts of economic inequality. In previously stable Western countries, like Spain or England or Greece or Italy, there have been sustained riots in the streets. Even if the U.S. there were two political movements, one from the right, one from the left, that got successfully co-opted and crushed—the Occupy movement and the Tea Party movement—that signaled that there was such severe discontent in the U.S. that genuine instability, even some kind of a rebellion outside of the ballot box, was possible. And there’s a real fear about this instability worsening, because the economic inequality that has come from the 2008 financial crisis is not going anywhere.

When you have a fear of instability, social instability and political instability, elites can respond in two ways: they can either think about how to placate the anger that causes the instability by reforming and by redressing those problems—and I don’t think our elites are even remotely interested in doing that—or you can say, How is it that we can empower ourselves and shield ourselves so that we can prevent that anger and instability from truly undermining our power? One way to do that is by consolidating the instruments and weapons used for population control. All of these weapons that were once used against foreign populations are now being imported onto American soil, with the surveillance state being one of the most potent means of control. It’s easy to think about that as some kind of conspiratorial thinking, but the reality is that states have always craved potent surveillance because of the way that it does breed compliance and submission in populations that know they’re being watched.

The last point I wanted to make is the one that I get asked about the most, which is,

Well, you’ve talked about all these interesting things that have happened in the last year and there have been all these fantastic debates, but what has really changed about anything? The NSA is still spying and the U.S. national security state is still as powerful as ever. So what kind of changes really have taken place?

One of the things that I think it’s important to think about is the way that change happens. It’s really easy to give in to this idea that change happens overnight, and there is a sort of instant gratification desire, that I want to see the building of the NSA collapsed. And if it’s not collapsed and if it’s still standing, I’m going to conclude that there have not really been any changes. The U.S. national security state is the most powerful part of the U.S. government, which is the most powerful government on earth. The NSA is not going to collapse because we published some of their documents and there’s a bunch of anger around the world. It’s really important not to look to the U.S. government as the source that’s going to impose real limits on the power of the U.S. government, because that’s just not how power gets exercised. People don’t walk around thinking about how to unilaterally limit their own power.

But there are some really promising signs. There are countries around the world—influential, significant countries—that are genuinely furious about what they’ve learned and that are working together to undermine American hegemony of the Internet. I think even more significant is the fact that U.S. technology companies, like Facebook and Google and Yahoo and Microsoft, are genuinely petrified, in a really pleasing way, about the impact that the surveillance system is going to have on their future business interests. They don’t care at all about your privacy or about the privacy of their users. And the proof of that is that when nobody knew it was happening, they very eagerly cooperated with the NSA, well beyond what the law required them to do, because of all the benefits they were getting and the lack of cost, because nobody knew that was happening. But now they’re extremely worried that all of you, aware of what they’re doing to your privacy—and especially what 14-year-olds and 12-year-olds and 10-year-olds will think—are no longer willing to use the companies that you know are turning your data over to the NSA and are collaborating with the NSA, that you will be vulnerable to appeals by Brazilian and German and Korean companies that “You should use our products and not theirs because we won’t violate your privacy.”

The U.S. government doesn’t care at all about public opinion polls or about public anger over surveillance, but they definitely care about what Silicon Valley billionaires think. These Silicon Valley tycoons are imposing genuine pressure now on the U.S. government to limit that surveillance and also creating ways to convince the public that their systems are safe.

But I think the cause of the greatest optimism for me about the changes that have taken place is that when people understand the extent to which their privacy is being compromised, they start taking matters into their own hands. There really are all sorts of technological programs of encryption and other means of rendering your online activities anonymous that are effective, that keep the NSA and other governments out of what you’re doing on the Internet. The problem is that right now there are maybe 10,000 people in the world who use encryption. And in the NSA’s warped mind, if you use encryption, which means that you’re trying to hide from them what you’re saying and doing, it probably means you’re somebody suspicious, because only bad people would want to hide what they’re doing and saying from the NSA. So they’re able to go target people now who use encryption. But if 10 million people used encryption instead of 10,000, they will no longer be able to do that. That will create meaningful walls around our communications that the NSA and other governments can’t invade. That’s one of the reasons why, even though there aren’t these genuine reform bills coming out of Congress, and won’t be, I’m very optimistic about the prospects for change.

I think it’s really easy, if you are a citizen who believes that there are serious injustices in your country, to give in to this kind of defeatism, this idea that these forces are so formidable and so powerful and so entrenched that there is just really nothing that I can do about them. I can vote for this party or that party, and nothing seems to change. The same factions continue to reign. So I really don’t feel like there is much that I can do. I just feel helpless. A lot of people turn away from political injustice because of that temptation of defeatism, which is very compelling and powerful for all of us. It’s one of the things the government wants to instill in us, this learned helplessness, this idea that there’s actually nothing that we can do.

One of the lessons, I think the most profound lesson, that I learned in the last year from working with Edward Snowden, something that will, I think, really shape how I view the world for the rest of my life, is the lesson that we can learn from what he did. He is someone who is 29 years old. He grew up in a house that was lower-middle class to poor. His father was in the Coast Guard for 30 years. He had no position or power or prestige of any kind. He was an obscure employee working for a large corporation. And through nothing more than an act of conscience, an act of fearlessness, a choice in defense of political convictions, acting more or less on his own, he really did change the world. He changed how hundreds of millions of people around the planet think about that wide array of topics I began by enumerating.

There are all sorts of lessons throughout history of powerless, obscure individuals through acts of conscience changing the world, whether it be Rosa Parks refusing to sit at the back of the bus or a street vendor in Tunisia lighting himself on fire and sparking a rebellion across a major region against the world’s most entrenched dictators. There are all kinds of lessons that should forever negate our succumbing to this temptation of defeatism.

But for me, watching this 29-year-old give up his entire life, out of the knowledge that he didn’t want to have on his conscience for the rest of his life the idea that he could have done something about an injustice but failed to do so, and sparked this massive ripple effect around the world, where all kinds of other people, including me, got infected with the courage he displayed. The huge numbers of journalists and media outlets that previously would never have touched material like this that were eager to prove that they were willing to publish aggressively, to all new sources that are now coming forward to copy the template that he created, the consciousness changes that he has engendered underscore that all of us as individuals always do have the power within us. If we summon the right will and unleash the right amount of passion, we all have that ability to find within ourselves how we can change the world. There are probably different ways that we can contribute, there are different skills and resources that we have. But the one thing that this should always teach us is that defeatism is always deceitful, it’s always unwarranted, and it’s always baseless.

With that, I thank you all very, very much for listening.

Related Programs from Alternative Radio
Glenn Greenwald – The Surveillance State
Glenn Greenwald – Shredding the Constitution
Pratap Chatterjee – Outsourcing the War on Terror
Jeremy Scahill – The National Security Beast
Rania Masri – Privatizing War
Robert Parry – The Art of Investigative Journalism
Phillip Agee – Inside the Company: CIA Diary
Kathy & Bill Christison – Terrorism & US Foreign Policy
Alfred McCoy – United States of Surveillance
John Stockwell – Inside the CIA
John Stockwell – The Dark Side of U.S. Foreign Policy (2 CDs)

For information about obtaining CDs, MP3s, or transcripts of this or other programs, please contact:
David Barsamian
Alternative Radio
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©2014

The National Security Beast

Sat, 24 May 2014 21:52:21 GMT

Jeremy Scahill
Lincoln Center
Fort Collins, CO
9 April 2014

The National Security Beast is a terrifying behemoth that extends its tentacles across the globe. Like a many-headed hydra it grows and grows. It has an insatiable appetite for weaponry. For example, in late 2013, the navy launched the Zumwalt, the largest destroyer ever built. It came in for a cool $3 billion. But that’s a bargain compared with the new Ford-class aircraft carrier. Price tag? $13 billion. The Beast has a life of its own. Presidents come and go but the war machine just chugs along. The “military-industrial complex” is always manufacturing new enemies to justify itself. The most urgent threat we face is climate change. Why not slash the Pentagon budget? For starters, cut the nuclear arsenal and mothball half the Trident submarines and use the money to protect the environment.

This lecture and interview are available as a CD or mp3 or transcript from Alternative Radio

Jeremy Scahill is the award-winning National Security Correspondent for the Nation magazine and author of the bestsellers Blackwater and Dirty Wars. He has reported from war zones around the world. His work has sparked several congressional investigations. He is a founding editor of The Intercept. He is also the subject of the film Dirty Wars, which was nominated for an Academy Award.

You can listen to Jeremy Scahill speak for himself (an mp3 clip) here.
You can get a printable version of this talk (a PDF file) here.

I’m not a Democrat, I’m not a Republican. I’m a journalist. I’m not one person in public and another person in private. I think that as journalists, it has to be who you are in your heart. Not a career that you think you have or a profession that you’ve chosen, but a way of being. That’s why great journalism contributes to strengthening democratic institutions or strengthening movements for change. Because you’re providing people with information that they can use to make informed decisions.

I covered the war in Yugoslavia during the 1999 NATO bombing. I repeatedly was in Iraq and Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Nigeria, where I covered the struggle of indigenous villagers against the multinational oil corporations, Chevron and Shell.

And when Hurricane Katrina happened, I had just gotten done doing extensive time in Iraq, and I went to New Orleans. I arrived there just a couple of days after the really bad flooding had begun. I didn’t see any FEMA the whole time that I was there. The National Guard was deployed in Iraq by Bush at the time.

The second day I was there, I was in the French Quarter just walking around, and I saw these two New York City police officers. I live in Brooklyn, New York, and I saw these New York City police officers, so I went up and started talking to them. I thought it was interesting. There’s no FEMA, there’s no National Guard, but why are there New York City police officers here? They had come down to volunteer, like a lot of people. Firefighters came from different parts of the country, police officers came from different parts of the country.

So I’m sort of shooting the shit with these officers when this compact car with no license plates on it pulls up in front of us. And out pop these massive, steroid-induced creatures, vaguely resembling men. They were like Incredible Hulk figures or something, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Huge men with wrap-around sunglasses and baseball hats with the logo of a bear paw in a sniper site on it. It was like a mercenary clown car. Ten of them somehow poured out of this little Yugo or whatever it was. They came up to us and they said to the officers,

Where are the rest of the Blackwater guys?

And without skipping a beat, the officers start to tell them. I had one of those moments where you kind of zone out. It was like

do- do-do-do do-do-do-do. Blackwater?

These guys get back into the mercenary clown car, and they speed off. And I said to the officers,

Blackwater? You mean like the guys in Iraq and Afghanistan?

They said,

Yes, they’re all over the place down here.

I said,

Wow. Where can I find them?

They said,

You can go either way on this street,

implying that they were sort of everywhere.

So I walked down Bourbon Street and watched as these Blackwater guys were emptying out someone’s apartment above a bar. They were throwing the mattress out, throwing the furniture out. And they draped an American flag and they draped a Blackwater flag over it. They had sort of taken up shop in the middle of the French Quarter as their headquarters.

I ended up talking to some of these guys. They had M4 assault rifles, they had Glock 9 pistols strapped to their legs. They were wearing full armor, those ridiculous wrap-around glasses. I was traveling at the time with a woman, and they were incredibly interested in her breasts. So we were able to talk with them because they primarily wanted to be around this woman. She and I were sort of playing good cop, bad cop, so these guys are all, like,

Hey, baby, what you doin’ tonight?

And I’m, like,

So where were you in Iraq?

We had sort of plotted this out, and it happens like that sometimes.

Anyway, we talked to them. Many of them had been in Iraq. One guy had just been in Iraq two weeks earlier. And they told us that they were in New Orleans to protect FEMA. There’s no FEMA there, but somehow the mercenaries were there. And one of them flashes a gold badge from underneath his armor and says,

We were deputized

—and he used that word, “deputized”

—by the governor of the state of Louisiana, and we can use lethal force.

And they said that why they were there was to “confront criminals and stop looters.” So I asked them,

Who hired you?

And they said,

Oh, that’s above our pay grade.

So I started to inquire with the U.S. Government about this. At first they denied the story. And then they were forced to admit, because after I did a story, then the Washington Post followed up on it, that the Department of Homeland Security had hired Blackwater on a megamillion-dollar, no-bid contract to be the official protective force of FEMA. I don’t know if FEMA has arrived yet in New Orleans, but the mercenaries on the no-bid contract were certainly there. It was like Baghdad on the Bayou down there: Halliburton, Bechtel, DynCorp, Triple Canopy, Blackwater, all of these companies just descended. They went from the Persian Gulf to the U.S. Gulf, and they went from war profiteering to disaster profiteering.

I became obsessed with this company and with this development as a kind of microcosm of what was happening in the world, what was happening in the so-called war on terror, what was happening with the cronyism of the Bush-Cheney government, what was happening with the use of private forces, which, of course, is increasingly happening throughout our cities across the country in urban areas, where there’s a move to privatize police forces. There is a paramilitarization of law enforcement in this country, where many, many entities that shouldn’t havethem have these huge SWAT-style teams.

I started digging into this company and learned that the founder and owner of Blackwater—it was not a publicly traded company—was a radical right-wing neocrusader whose family had been the major bankroller of the Republican revolution and had given the seed money to two organizations that would form the core of the radical religious right, one of which is based here in Colorado. James Dobson, of Focus on the Family, was able to start his organization because of the financial generosity of the family of Eric Prince, the owner of Blackwater. In fact, James Dobson gave the eulogy at Eric Prince’s father’s funeral. Gary Bauer, Family Research Council, started the Family Research Council with money given by Eric Prince’s family. This is in the 1990s.

At the time when Blackwater opened, the main source of income they thought that they were going to generate was by dealing with school shootings. Columbine, of course, had just happened. Blackwater responded to the Columbine shootings by creating a mock high school in the wilderness of North Carolina called RU Ready High. They invite the law enforcement from around the country to train in SWAT-style tactics to raid high schools to take down the violent youth of America. That was the whole point of the thing.

On 9/11, Blackwater’s entire game changed. Eric Prince, the owner of Blackwater, was on Fox News, of course, a few days after 9/11. And he said,

We were struggling to build this business and we were looking sort of domestically. After 9/11 our phone has been ringing off the hook.

Among the first calls that came in to Blackwater were from the CIA. The CIA ended up hiring Blackwater to reactivate a network of former Special Operations soldiers and CIA paramilitaries to serve as a kind of off-the-radar hit team for the U.S. Government in the early stages of the so-called war on terror. So Blackwater began this relationship where they became essentially like a privatized wing of the CIA, of the Pentagon Special Operations Forces, and as a sort of Praetorian Guard for the Bush and Cheney administration.

I tracked that story of Blackwater for years around the globe. Of course, many people here are aware of the mass killings of civilians that happened in both Iraq and Afghanistan and the fact that no one from Blackwater ever paid any price, really, for any of the criminality that that company was engaged in. Not to mention the waste, fraud, and abuse of money, but just the war crimes that they were involved with committing.

It was through my reporting on Blackwater that I ended up being exposed to this entire world of covert forces. All of us know that the CIA has covert agencies. We know that there have been dirty tricks all around the world. We know that the military has been involved with those things. But when you actually come face to face with modern iterations of it, when you understand that sort of hidden history, it is chilling, the implications it has for any semblance of democracy in our country.

We are living in a moment where we have a Democratic president who won the Nobel Peace Prize, is a constitutional lawyer by training, and is presiding over what is effectively a global assassination program. The most devastating aspect of the Obama presidency, when it comes to what is called “counterterrorism”—although I think our policy encourages terrorism—and “national security”—although I think it undermines our national security—is not just that he’s doing it but that he is asserting that he is right in doing it and that it is legitimate morally and legally to drone-bomb in countries anywhere where the U.S. pleases, to put people on kill lists who have not been charged with crimes and against whom we may not even have evidence that they are engaged in a terrorist plot against the U.S.

For all of the complaining about President Obama, that he’s a Kenyan, a socialist—and when you turn on Fox News, they say Barack Hussein—and then there is like a long pause—Obama. They want the Hussein to really resonate with you. They want you to stew on that for a moment. But for all the conservatives and the neocons complaining about how this Marxist Manchurian candidate who really is the second coming of Stokely Carmichael and wants to resurrect Chairman Mao and put him in charge of our economy, for all of that talk, I guarantee you that Dick Cheney is sitting not so far from here in Wyoming, fly-fishing or something, having a good chuckle about all of this. Because if Barack Obama had not been elected president, many of the core programs that Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld developed under the auspices of the so-called war and terror would not be expanding in the way that they are, would not be continued in some cases, and that they would not have the right to sort of say,

We’re going to continue the show the next time a Republican is in office.

Barack Obama has legitimized policies and programs that I think many liberals would have been outraged over if a Republican had won in 2008.

Barack Obama, when he was running for president and then when he won the first time, said,

I’m going to have the most transparent administration in history.

Obama the constitutional lawyer would rail against the Cheney and Bush use of the state secrets privilege, which Cheney and Bush used widely to try to quash any attempt to hold them accountable. If families of Guantánamo prisoners who died under mysterious circumstances wanted to get information about those deaths—state secrets privilege. If someone wanted to understand the extent of the CIA’s assassination program—state secrets privilege. They would use it all the time. Obama, to his credit, on the campaign trail, where it’s much easier to do these things than when you’re in office, was railing against that and saying he was going to severely limit the use of the state secrets privilege.

His administration has used it more than Bush and Cheney, and he still has well over a year left in his term. So President Obama talked a good game when he was candidate Obama on many of these issues, but at the end of the day, they have expanded and continued the most egregious aspects of the Bush-Cheney so-called counterterrorism apparatus. The life’s work of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney boiled down to one of the ideas in the Federalist Papers, and that was the idea of the unitary executive—the idea that when it came to foreign policy, when it came to security policy, there should essentially be a dictatorship of the executive branch, and that Congress’s only role in those programs for securing and defending the nation is funding. That Congress doesn’t actually have a say in overseeing the activities of the executive branch when national security is in question. They believed that Iran Contra not only wasn’t a scandal but was a model for how the United States should conduct its foreign policy militarily and use its CIA forces and other intelligence forces. In fact, Dick Cheney was a member of Congress when Iran Contra was being investigated, and he wrote the minority report defending Iran Contra.

These guys came up with the idea of the widespread use of executive orders and signing statements by the White House. You will hear sometimes that the president has issued an executive order or a signing statement. The idea behind that in the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld world was to undermine any ability of Congress to have a say in a variety of policies based on laws that were bills passed by Congress and then signed into law by presidents. So presidents could say, We don’t like this aspect of this bill that we signed into law, so we’re going to issue a signing statement that overrides it. Many of those are classified. Reagan loved doing that, George H.W. Bush loved doing that, Clinton did it, less than them but continued it.

Obama loves those signing statements. They’ve used them repeatedly to justify their drone program, to justify continuing the rendition program, to justify various assaults on civil liberties in this country, to justify giving aid to human-rights-abusing governments around the world who use child soldiers or who are involved in systematic human rights abuses. They use this secret process that is thoroughly and fundamentally antidemocratic to continue to support despots, dictators, what are effectively death squads, or policies that, if they were brought out into the light, most Americans would find deeply offensive and many lawyers would say are extralegal if not totally unconstitutional. So President Obama in doing this has actually helped to realize the life’s work of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.

Let’s be clear. Rumsfeld and Cheney were Murder Incorporated. They were a killing machine around the world. They empowered war corporations in an unprecedented manner. I don’t think it’s a helpful discussion to ask, Is Obama worse than Bush? On a level of pure killing, it would be really hard to match what Bush and Cheney did. But in terms of damage to the cause of justice, in terms of damage to the reputation of the U.S. around the world, it would be hard to quantify just how much has been done under this administration. Imagine the perception of the message being sent by the U.S. around the world when this figure Barack Obama becomes president, who is widely viewed as this transformative guy who says, I’m going to hit the reset button with the Muslim and Arab world, and then proceeds to continue the same kinds of policies.

Barack Obama has conducted more drone strikes in Pakistan than Bush and Cheney ever did. In fact, he did more drone strikes in his first term in office than Bush did in two full terms in the White House. Obama expanded the use of what are called signature strikes. There are two kinds of drone strikes. One is a personality strike, so you have an individual whose identity you know, you have evidence that they’re involved with terrorism plots or criminal activity, and you say,

We’re going to take this person out.

So you go and you find them and you kill them in a drone strike. I have all sorts of problems with that, but that’s one kind of drone strike. What Obama’s administration started doing very, very early on—and this had only been done a couple of times under President Bush—are signature strikes. They mapped out certain areas of Pakistan and ultimately then certain areas of Yemen, and they said,

If we do a drone strike in this area, and we kill people who are of military age and they’re male, we will posthumously declare them to be terrorists. We in fact don’t have to know the identities of the people we’re targeting. If the data on their phone indicates that they’re in contact with a certain number of dangerous people, if they live in a certain area, if they’re around these other people, we’re going to assume that they’re going to be up to no good someday, and it’s better to kill them before they kill us.

That’s essentially what this White House has embraced as its counterterrorism policy.

They’re engaged in preemptive war. But it’s not actually even a war, because it’s one side pummeling another on the vague idea that maybe one day these people are going to be engaged in a plot that may or may not succeed against the U.S. That’s what it boils down to.

It’s not that Barack Obama is immune to the reality that civilians are being killed; it’s that they’re starting to believe their own propaganda, because they’re posthumously just saying,

Those people were all terrorists.

So they’ve created a mathematical equation to figure out how many civilians are killed that almost always produces the number zero when civilians are in question.

I don’t think that Barack Obama set out to engage in this kind of policy around the world. What I think happened is that once he got the nomination for president, he got his first all-access briefing. This was when he was still running for president. He hadn’t beaten John McCain yet, but once you get the nomination of a major party, you’re entitled to an all-access intelligence briefing from the CIA. So General Michael Hayden, who was the director of the CIA at the time, flew to Chicago and briefed Obama in the federal building after he had gotten the Democratic nomination for president. After he got that briefing, you could see a dramatic change in Obama’s rhetoric. He started to become much more militaristic, much more fascinated by the idea of striking terrorists before they strike us, of violating the sovereignty of other nations, for instance, to go and track down Osama bin Laden, something that John McCain stupidly, in terms of conventional politics, attacked Barack Obama for saying.

Then Obama comes into office, and he is overwhelmed by the Beast—the Beast being the permanent national security apparatus in the U.S. This is a Beast that includes huge, powerful players in the military-industrial complex, it includes lifers at the CIA, lifers at the NSA, lifers at the Pentagon, lifers in the 16 intelligence agencies in the U.S. That Beast—it’s not like the Bilderberg Group or the Illuminati—does not have to be run by one person. It has a life of its own. Its primary objective is its own survival. You don’t need to have a conspiracy where one head on this Hydra knows what the other one is doing. They all work in unison, and they overwhelm every president who comes in with the threat matrix.

There are thousands of concurrent threats against the U.S. There are people, Mr. President, that are going to be blowing up our embassies around the world, that are going to be engaged in gas attacks against our subways, that are going to try to blow up major sporting events.

And they just inundate these guys right when they come into office with every possible threat that could happen. And they always say,

If we don’t do X, Y, and Z, we’re going to get hit, and we’re going to get hit hard.

Then you have people like Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod, the political hacks. They’re sitting and they’re listening to all of this, and they’re envisioning what a one-term presidency looks like if there’s an attack inside the U.S.

Obama had campaigned on a pledge not to deploy U.S. troops except in the surge in Afghanistan. So who comes in and offers him a solution on platter? These guys from something called the Joint Special Operations Command, headed for a long time by General Stanley McChrystal and at the time Obama became president headed by Admiral William McRaven. They basically say,

We have the capacity, Mr. President, to use Navy Seals, Delta Force commandos, the best pilots in the world. We can engage in covert activities on the ground and through the use of weaponized drones where we will be able to preemptively kill the terrorists before they can engage in plots against us.

President Obama not only embraced JSOC and the CIA’s paramilitary division as the implementers of this smarter counterterrorism policy, but he essentially made their perspective of kill/capture the entire counterterrorism policy of the U.S. Government, and in doing so, empowered these forces that had largely existed in the shadows and on the fringes of American foreign policy and put them at the center of everything.

Very early on in the Obama administration, they convince President Obama to start bombing Yemen. In December of 2009, President Obama authorizes the first strike in Yemen. JSOC and the CIA told him that he was hitting an al-Qaeda training camp. They didn’t have enough drones to use there at the time because they were being used in Pakistan at the time for his escalated drone-bombing campaign, so they used cruise missiles with cluster munitions. I don’t know if many of you know what a cluster bomb is, but it’s basically like a flying land mine. It drops from the sky in a little parachute, and then it explodes over a multi-football-field radius and sends shrapnel in all directions. I’ve seen the aftermath of it the first time in the 1990s in Yugoslavia, and then later I saw it in Iraq. It shreds humans into ground beef if it hits them. It’s horrifying. This was the weapon that they used. Most countries in the world have agreed to a ban on cluster bombs. The U.S. is one of the only countries in the world that continues to actively use cluster bombs.

So they cluster-bomb this place that they’ve told President Obama is an al-Qaeda training facility. But they didn’t say,

Hey, we bombed Yemen.

What happened is that the Yemeni government put out a press release saying that it had conducted air strikes against an al-Qaeda camp and they had killed 34 al-Qaeda members and it was very successful. The White House sent a cable of congratulations to the Yemeni dictator about his cooperation in fighting against terrorism. It turned out, though—and we know this because a Yemeni journalist went to the scene—that no other nation, certainly not Yemen, had the weapons that were used there that day. So the world then knew that the U.S. was starting to bomb Yemen. Munitions experts looked at all of the shrapnel, looked at the shell casings, looked at the control system that was on the Tomahawk cruise missiles, and determined beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was the U.S. and that they had started bombing Yemen.
Then they started doing drone strikes in Yemen.

And they started hunting people and they started creating these kill lists. Then they implemented these things called Terror Tuesday meetings. They sit around in secret and they actually use baseball-card-type graphics for statistics on potential people to kill. At times they have had baseball cards with teenage girls on them in certain Muslim countries. I don’t know that there has ever been an authorized strike against a teenage girl, but they have ended up on the board. They’re looking at these statistics, and through a secret process they’re determining every week who should live or die around the world at the hands of U.S. drone strikes. This has replaced any semblance of a legal process for dealing with the crime of terrorism—a bunch of people meeting in secret inside of the White House discussing who should live and who should die.

The stories that I’ve been covering have a connection here to Fort Collins, because the first American citizen that we know of that was directly targeted for assassination on orders from President Obama was a guy named Anwar al-Awlaki, who actually went to school here at CSU. He was an American citizen who was born in Las Cruces, New Mexico. His father was here as a visiting scholar from Yemen. He was born here and ended up coming here for university. During the Gulf War in the early 1990s, he became politicized here in Fort Collins and then ended up moving to Denver, where he became an imam. In 1995, his first child was born in Denver, named Abdulrahman Awlaki.

Awlaki himself, the older, Anwar Awlaki, was a very many prominent imam on 9/11. He was head of a big religious center called Dar Al-Hijrah Religious Center in Falls Church, Virginia. I remember seeing him on TV, because he was condemning the 9/11 attacks, was condemning al-Qaeda, was talking about the perversion of the religion of Islam by Osama bin Laden and others, was arguing that the U.S. had a right to go into Afghanistan, and was generally considered a part of the discourse and dialogue in Washington. He was profiled in the Washington Post, he was on the NewsHour on PBS, he was on Talk of the Nation on NPR.

In addition to talking about 9/11, he also as an imam was dealing with the hate crimes against so many Muslims around the country, where businesses were being attacked and taxi drivers were being attacked and students were being attacked, and people were starting to disappear, and there was this whole thing about secret INS detention centers, and then Guantánamo opened up. And you see this sort of radicalization or politicization in Awlaki, where he starts to cross this line and starts to get sharper and sharper. He ends up leaving the U.S. and, to make a long story short, goes back to Yemen. He has an increase in the popularity of his sermons around the world. A lot of young Muslims in the English-speaking diaspora were taken with his message, because he would include pop cultural references and was sort of living in modern times but telling older stories.

As he started to become more radical, the U.S. started to become concerned that he was going to inspire young people to potentially go to Afghanistan or elsewhere. So the U.S. tells Yemen to arrest Anwar Awlaki. They arrest him. This is the U.S. Government telling the human-rights-abusing government of Yemen to arrest one of their own citizens.

Arrest Anwar Awlaki. We want him kept in prison for four or five years so that people forget about him.

So they stick him in prison, and he ends up spending 18 months in prison, 17 in solitary confinement. He comes out of prison a totally changed person. His sermons become incredibly radical at that point. By the time Barack Obama comes into office, Anwar Awlaki had crossed the line from condemning U.S. wars around the world to actively calling on young people, young Muslims in the U.S., in Europe, and elsewhere, to engage in armed jihad in their own countries or to come to Afghanistan, Somalia, Pakistan, Yemen and join the mujahideen there in fighting against the dictators of those countries but also against the U.S.

I’ve listened to probably a thousand hours of Anwar Awlaki talking and am very familiar with his trajectory. Then I’ve seen all of the YouTube videos. Anwar Awlaki, in my mind, had very reprehensible ideas about the world. I think that the U.S. Government probably could have made a case against him in some form or another, especially when he called specifically for the assassination of individual cartoonists who had drawn demeaning pictures of the Prophet Muhammad in their cartoons. He actually listed their names in a publication and said people should go and kill them, shoot them. There was a young woman in Seattle, Washington, who actually had to go underground, change her name, be relocated as a result of that threat.

I don’t have all the intelligence or evidence that they have at the White House, and I am willing to believe that they had all sorts of evidence to indicate that Anwar Awlaki was involved in some sort of terrorism plot. They’ve never proven that, they’ve never shown that evidence, but I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt for purposes of this story.

Let’s say he’s involved in all sorts of act of terrorism plotting. Why not indict him? You know where he is. It’s not like he’s in Afghanistan murdering U.S. troops. You know where he is. He’s in a place where you could probably snatch him fairly easily.

They never indict him with a crime. Instead—and this is a U.S. citizen—they engage in this secret process where Mr. constitutional lawyer, Nobel Peace Prize winner serves as the prosecutor, the judge, the jury, and ultimately the executioner of a U.S. citizen they had never bothered to charge with a crime.

They killed him in a drone strike in September of 2011, when he was in a village that had 10 small dwellings in it in a rural part of Yemen. They made no actual attempt that we’re aware of to try to capture him. There are some things that we’ve learned about this. There may have been an attempt that got aborted. But the point of it is, they knew where he was, they had him under surveillance for an entire month before they killed him, maybe longer, and then they killed him.

In that same strike where they killed Anwar Awlaki, they killed another American citizen named Samir Khan, who was a Pakistani American from North Carolina whose parents had actually been told shortly before he was killed that there were no charges against him, there was no indictment against him, and they were trying to encourage his parents to get him to come home. They told them that there were no charges against their son. He gets killed in that action.

So the news reaches the U.S. President Obama doesn’t say,

We killed one of our own citizens.

He announces that Anwar Awlaki has been killed in Yemen and that it’s a great victory for the U.S. And for the first time he uses a label that al-Qaeda itself never used and Awlaki himself never claimed—President Obama called him “the head of external operations for al-Qaeda in the Arabian peninsula.” Al-Qaeda is actually a remarkably transparent organization. They are very adept at taking credit for what they do and promoting their leaders and celebrating them as martyrs. They never claimed that he was a member of al-Qaeda. They certainly had an affinity for him, because his message was very consistent with theirs. But Obama labels him as “the head of external operations.”

The reaction to the killing of these two American citizens in a drone strike, neither of whom had been charged with any kind of a crime, fell into two camps in Washington: silence or celebration. Hillary Clinton and John McCain sounded like twins separated at birth in praising the strike. The only actual objection came from Dennis Kucinich on the one hand and Ron Paul on the other. Almost no one else in Washington raised a peep about this. In fact, one member of Congress was so excited about the killing of Samir Khan, this other American, that he said, if he wasn’t a target, then it was “a bonus,” it was “a two-fer,” like a two-for-one. They all talk in this sort of sports lingo. We’re talking about killing people. We’re talking about actions that are going to cause blowback and collateral damage.

Two weeks after this killing, Anwar Awlaki’s 16- year-old son, Abdulrahman, who was born in Denver in August of 1995, was sitting at an outdoor restaurant with his teenage cousin. He had just turned 16 years old. He’s sitting in this café—his father has been killed two weeks earlier—when a drone appears above them and a missile is fired and blows up the kid, his cousin, and their friends. The Obama administration has never explained why they killed that kid. It’s hard to imagine it’s a coincidence that two weeks after you kill the father you kill the son. They haven’t been able to identify a member of al-Qaeda that they actually killed. When the press reports first came out saying that Abdulrahman Awlaki, a 16-year-old American citizen, had been killed, an anonymous U.S. official said that he was 21 years old. Then the family produced his birth certificate from the State of Colorado showing that he had just turned 16. They tried to say,

Well, he was at a meeting of al-Qaeda figures, and a guy named Ibrahim al-Banna was killed with him.

Ibrahim al-Banna is still alive to this day.

Why was that drone strike authorized? I don’t have the answer to it, but I know what it’s very difficult to believe, which is that it was just a coincidence. In fact, I know from my own reporting that John Brennan, who now is the director of the CIA, said at the time that he didn’t believe it could be a coincidence, and he ordered a review to figure out why the kid was killed. The White House will not release that review. In fact, they won’t ever discuss any specific strikes. But the only public statement we really have from any U.S. official about this, other than anonymous officials saying it was an accident or he was collateral damage or all these things, was Robert Gibbs, who was the former White House press secretary. At the time he said what I am about to tell you, he was the spokesperson for President Obama’s reelection campaign. He was asked by a young, independent reporter at one of those press gaggles after one of the debates about the killing of Abdulrahman Awlaki. What Robert Gibbs told him was,

He should have had a more responsible father.

There are few things in history that are more reprehensible than blaming the killing of children on who their parents are—sins of the father, or whatever the saying. Robert Gibbs should be ashamed of himself, first of all.

The last time that I was on Rachel Maddow’s show—and I’m not sure that I will ever be invited back—Robert Gibbs was on right before me. Because who is Robert Gibbs today? He is a paid pundit for MSNBC. So Robert Gibbs is on MSNBC right before me talking about the economy or something. I come on and I’m talking about what I’m telling you about, the Awlaki killings, with Rachel Maddow. At the beginning of the interview I said,

Well, Rachel, you just had on Robert Gibbs, who is on your payroll, and he should be ashamed of himself for what he said about this killing, because he said that Abdulrahman Awlaki should have had a more responsible father.

Rachel Maddow was livid with me. She would barely say goodbye to me when I left. I have never been invited back on that show. I called out Robert Gibbs, who had just been on right before me.

Again, I don’t know why that kid was killed. But the answer to why says a lot about who we are as a society. We don’t define our values based on how we treat law-abiding citizens. We don’t base our values on how we treat the people we like or how we view those in power, whether we voted for them or not. When your principles are tested is when it’s tough. Your principle on the death penalty is not tested on the exoneree or the person who DNA evidence is going to save the day for. It’s tested on someone who is dead guilty, who is a serial child murderer and rapist. That’s where your principle is tested on whether you support or oppose the death penalty on moral grounds. If you’re against it for those people, then that’s an actual principle. If you start to say,

Well, I’m against it in this case and that case,

that’s politics.

The same is true of the times in which we live. It’s easy—easy—to be against these things when cartoonish villains like Dick Cheney are in power. And I truly do imagine Dick Cheney sitting in a cave somewhere saying,

Let’s [beep] the world today.

I actually think that that guy—I don’t see Obama in that way at all. I certainly don’t want Republicans picking Supreme Court justices and having any control over the health care of women in our society. I definitely don’t want Rand Paul to be running our economy. But at the same time, I don’t want a guy who people think is such a great alternative to the Republicans’ militarism cleaning up the empire so that it can continue on and justifying things that, if a Republican did them, people would be in the streets about. It’s like many liberals have checked their consciences at the door of the Obama party. We’re going to look back years from now and realize that lines were crossed here that we’re never going to be able to go back and rethink those decisions. We have crossed some very, very serious lines.

I talked about the Beast before, the National Security Beast. That beast knows that it can wait out any president, for four years or for eight years. Some presidents try to tangle with the Beast or they maybe want to try to put it a little bit in the corner or cut some part of it off. But at the end of the day that Beast knows that this is a war economy in this country, that the only beneficiaries of American foreign policy are huge corporations. Those are the only entities in our society that have benefited from any of this: major corporations who make a killing off of the killing.

No matter what issue you organize around or you find important in your life, whether it is access to comprehensive health care for everyone, whether it’s the struggle for immigrants to gain their rights and preserve their rights in this country, or it’s police brutality or it’s prisons or it’s the environment or it’s issues about war or neoliberal economic policies, whatever issues you find important in your day-to-day life, nothing will ever change in this society until we get corporations out of our political process. Nothing.

In some countries you take a suitcase full of cash and you pay off the dictator, and that’s how it works. In this country we’re a little more sophisticated. We have a legalized form of corruption and bribery called campaign finance. That’s where corporations can purchase members of the U.S. Congress. And almost every single member of Congress is bought by some big corporate interest. Ordinary people cannot compete with the huge bundling of these megacorporations, of the drowning of the airwaves in ads. The war industry knows which way the wind is blowing. If you want to know who is going to win any given election, start to track who the war industry is giving money to.

They gave way more money to Barack Obama than they did to John McCain, because they knew from their own internal analysis that Barack Obama was going to win. What’s interesting is that active-duty troops gave more contributions to Ron Paul than to any of the other candidates, which gives you a sense that when we’re all told the military, hoo-ha, we’re doing this for the troops, actually a lot of the troops are fed up with all of this and want it to end. I think that was a statement for why he got so much money from them.

We are at an all-time low in the state of media in our country. Why is that? It’s because of an utter failure on the part of journalists and media organizations to present information to the American people that they can use to make informed decisions about what policies to support and what policies to oppose. Where I think we see an example of what really powerful media coverage is in the aftermath of these school shootings or incidents like the Boston Marathon bombing.

Remember, in the Boston Marathon bombing, three people were killed. One was an American citizen who was a woman who was a graduate student, another was a graduate student who was Chinese and she was from Taiwan, and then the third was this 8-year-old boy. How many of you remember the picture that that boy had drawn shortly before he was drawn up? It was a peace sign. It went viral all over Facebook and it was on the news. His parents, you watch them on TV, and their lips are quivering trying to explain how incredible their son was and not break down while they are doing it. Barack Obama spoke about those three people who died and he told stories about each of them, including this woman who was from Taiwan.

There was a blog post the next day that went viral around the Chinese-speaking world. The title of the blog post was “Where you die matters.” The story that was told in it was, Barack Obama, the most powerful person in the world would never have said the name of that woman if she had died in a factory making components for iPhones that were destined for use in Western markets. But because she died in that bombing, her life actually mattered enough to be recognized by the most powerful person in the world.

I’ve thought a lot about that, and I’ve thought about the aftermath of the Newtown shooting. When I was watching all that coverage, the endless O.J. Simpson-style coverage we have of everything, and it’s awful and sensationalized and horrible, I didn’t have any real emotional reaction to watching that other than just being horrified at all these little kids being killed. But then the next day the front page of The New York Times was—I’m sure people will remember this—was just the names and the ages of the people killed. This name, 6 years old; this name 7 years old; this name, 6 years old. I cried looking at that. I wondered, Why is that?

I’ve come to the realization that it’s because looking at that list of names and seeing those ages, you can imagine someone you know, whether it’s your child or your niece or your nephew or your cousin or your younger sibling. You see yourself in that story, you see your neighbor or your loved one in that story, so you have empathy. And it causes a reaction and it makes you ultimately, then, angry, and you say,

We have to do something about this in our society.

We don’t have enough of a debate in our society about guns, about legally purchased guns, not to mention guns that are being sold on the down low. But we had more of a discussion about it in this country than we had in a while. And why? It was because people were horrified and they empathized and they said,

This is enough. This can’t keep happening.

What if our coverage of war looked like that, too? What if when we covered drone strikes in Yemen, we never used “collateral damage” or “casualties,” but instead we actually understood the lives and deaths of those who live on the other side of the missiles. If we heard stories about a little girl in Yemen who was killed, a picture she had drawn a few days beforehand. Or if we learned about the heroic act of someone who, after a drone strike, ran and pulled someone out of a house that was burning? What if we knew those stories? I’m not saying that this would all end, but what I’m saying is that we would have totally different discussion in this country if we weren’t just inundated with that crap reality television but instead had some part of our day spent reflecting on the lives involved in all of these wars—the lives lost, the soldiers who were killed, the civilians who are forced to live in that way, and the officials, many of whom never have their children in danger in these war zones, who seem all too willing to vote to have other people’s children go to kill and be killed. If we had that, then we would have empathy. Then I think we would have a totally different debate in the country.

I really think that is part of our challenge in this society, is to get those corporations out of our lives and get empathy back into it. Thank you.

Q&A

Basic issues about corporate influence in the media. I think it’s an interesting discussion. One thought, as you were talking, that popped into my head was how incredible these major acts of whistleblowing have been lately. If you think of everything that Chelsea Manning did, it started with the collateral murder video. Then there were the Iraq war logs that were released, the Afghan war logs that were released. And then when all the State Department cables were released. We all, of course, followed that story. And what an incredible injustice that Chelsea Manning is in prison right now. An incredible injustice. But what happened was that these powerful corporate journalists who work for big publications, who are used to being the recipients of any leaked document, especially those coming officially from the White House, were knocked off their pedestal. And all of a sudden someone creates a system where we can all go online and look up, What did the U.S. do in Nigeria, what did the U.S. do in Libya, What did the U.S. do in Mexico, and we’re reading through these cables.

There was something that was so refreshingly democratic about that that I think it will be hard for them to go back on it. I think it really changed journalism. The Washington Post has done some interesting coverage with the NSA documents that they’ve gotten. I’ve been critical of it, but I do think that we’re in an era now where a lot of citizen journalists are calling out on famous journalists. And the forum where it happens most frequently is on Twitter, but you will see in real time especially young people who are really sharp and creative go after these iconic figures and take them down. I love searching what people say to Nicholas Kristof, because there are so many people that are just brilliant in their critiques of Nicholas Kristof. But also of all sorts of journalists. I get it, too. And sometimes errors are pointed out that you didn’t realize.

I think the power of social media, the future of good journalism is going to boil down to this: How to take the innovation and the creativity of so many young minds in our society and around the world, who are far more tech-savvy than I am and understand how to communicate in very rapid ways, and fuse it with the old-school, proven tactics of good muckraking journalism. We need a sort of modern version of I.F. Stone’s document digging, where we still have fact checkers and we have editors and we have some semblance of peer review and we get away from our computers and go out into the world and do actual reporting. If we fuse those two things together, then I have a lot of hope. I see a lot of young journalists and aspiring journalists talking about those kinds of alternative models.

The question is how to fund them. Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras and I started working with Pierre Omidyar from eBay in part because he said we could have autonomy. All of us are trying to figure out how to fund good adversarial journalism, and it’s tough. Community radio stations are struggling, community media outlets are struggling. But I absolutely have hope.

And I also think that media consolidation is a very serious crisis and is fundamentally antidemocratic. Those airwaves don’t belong to CNN and Fox and MSNBC. Let’s be honest. What’s the range of views there? MSNBC is like one huge Obama pep rally or an Obama for America meet-up. And then Fox is like a parody of itself. Saturday Night Live doesn’t have to make fun of Fox News, because you can just watch Fox News and pretend it’s Saturday Night Live and it’s much funnier. And then CNN is sort of like Xanax on TV.

The question was about education and how much of an emphasis should we place on current events or current policies in education. It depends. Obviously, I think that from a very young age kids should be taught that you should be paying attention to everything happening around you in your world, regardless of what you want to be in life. It used to be that your parents could say to you when you’re sort of hitting second, third, fourth grade,

You should read part of the paper in the morning,

or they’ll slide it over to you. Now kids all have these devices. And what are they actually looking at? They’re looking at Instagram, they’re looking at ask-fm, they’re sending Snapchat pictures to each other. I worry about that. And I do think that we have to make it a priority for them to pay attention, particularly to what’s happening locally around them.

Also, stories from throughout history can provide great inspiration for students. That’s why I still think to this day Howard Zinn’s work is like dropping a piece of magic into a kid’s lap at some point in their development. I think that’s part of how we fight for a better society. Teachers are so important, and they’re so disregarded in our society—underpaid, undervalued. There’s a war against teachers, there’s a war against particularly teachers’ unions. If we lose teachers who actually care about the world and care enough to try to make the world understandable to their students, that harms our society.

I wish more current events curriculum existed. My sister is a teacher and my sister-in-law also. Both of them talk about this. I was just at their schools last week in the Midwest, in the Chicago area and in Milwaukee. One of the schools that I went to was well funded and the kids asked great questions, and the other one is a very poor school with no funding, and they seemed totally clueless about what I was talking about. The same age groups; totally different universes. There’s a lot of disparity in the treatment of young people in this country in our educational system. But it’s great if people like you actually care enough about the world that we live in to make sure that it’s in the classroom, too.

I was counting the other day, because someone asked me this. I’ve known 13 journalists who have been killed since 9/11, people I knew personally. Thirteen. I think a lot of people who get involved with war reporting or conflict reporting, it all starts with an initial act of incredible stupidity and naïveté, where you say, “Oh, I’ll be fine.” And then you look back and you’ve been doing it for three years, and you realize that you took a lot of risks that were probably idiotic. So there is not like some glamorous path to how to be a war reporter and be safe.

Most of the people I know who spend a lot of time doing war journalism, didn’t study journalism. They either studied something else or they were working as a technician on like a satellite crew. Nick Robertson, who is actually one of the best reporters at CNN right now, was Wolf Blitzer’s satellite uplink technician during the Gulf War and didn’t really have journalistic training. He was the tech guy and then ended up becoming a reporter. Ivan Watson, another reporter, was the sound guy for CBS radio and ended up becoming a correspondent. I know people who rode their motorcycles from one part of Europe to Bosnia during the war in Yugoslavia and started shooting pictures and sending in story pitches. A lot of the journalists right now covering Egypt or Libya don’t necessarily have journalism degrees. Most journalists covering war are not Americans. Most journalists are local to whatever country they’re in. There’s no one path.

What happens in black communities every day in this country from the police? The Halliburton, Blackwater thing. Halliburton and Blackwater worked together for many, many years, starting very certainly on in the wars. Blackwater has gone through five different name changes and is not the company that it once was. There are hundreds of these companies now. It’s a huge, thriving industry—private security, private intelligence. We talk a lot about the NSA and its violation of the privacy of Americans and others around the world alike. That’s real. Believe me, I know, because I’ve seen the Snowden documents firsthand.

But in many ways the greatest violators of our privacy or our rights are local police forces, the FBI, the DEA. Various entities at local and state levels are far more into our communications than the NSA is in terms of actively monitoring them and pursuing them. There is a paramilitarization of law enforcement in this country. Police forces can get equipment from the military donated to them. After the military leaves Iraq or Afghanistan, they’re giving their military equipment to local police forces. That was part of what I was alluding to earlier. I’m not as concerned about the CIA or the FBI doing drone strikes in America as I am about all of this sort of permanent state of war bleeding down into the culture of what is called law enforcement in this country.

They are definitely going to start using drones, and they have in some cases. When the former L.A. police officer was engaged in that shooting last year, drones were used to try to track him down and hunt him. Eric Rudolph, whom they were hunting for many, many years in connection with the Olympic bombing, they used drones to try to locate him. They weren’t weaponized drones. Maybe someday they will use weaponized drones. I think it’s more likely that they will use it along the U.S.-Mexico border than they will in what we think of as conventional law enforcement activity in the U.S. But it’s the paramilitarization of law enforcement that I think is of really, really great concern in communities across this country.

Other Alternative Radio Jeremy Scahill programs:
License to Kill
Blackwater: Mercenary Army

For information about obtaining CDs, MP3s, or transcripts of this or other programs, please contact:
David Barsamian
Alternative Radio
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©2014

Whistleblowers

Wed, 11 Dec 2013 03:22:08 GMT

Ray McGovern
University Temple United Methodist Church
Seattle, WA
17 October 2013

What is one to do when confronted by blatant criminal actions and illegalities? Look the other way? Punch out at 5 and go home? That’s not what Edward Snowden did. His disclosures have informed and educated the people of the United States and the world about secret surveillance and massive data-gathering that the NSA and other government agencies are engaged in within the U.S. and abroad. And Snowden’s reward? Hounded. Threatened. Defamed. His passport has been revoked. Instead of encouraging whistleblowers the Obama administration has created an atmosphere of fear and intimidation. Open up your mouth to report wrongdoing and corruption and you’ll have the book thrown at you. Obama has the dubious distinction of prosecuting more whistleblowers than any administration in U.S. history. It has criminalized not only the truth tellers but also the journalists who report on their revelations.

This lecture and interview are available as a CD or mp3 or transcript from Alternative Radio

Ray McGovern is a 27-year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency. He helped form Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity and the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence. Sam Adams was McGovern’s colleague at the CIA. McGovern and several other former intelligence officials went to Russia in October to honor Edward Snowden with the Sam Adams Award. Ray McGovern also works for Tell the Word, a ministry of the inner-city Washington D.C. Church of the Saviour.

You can listen to Ray McGovern speak for himself here.

I was attracted to this very attractive offer being an analyst for the CIA, where you would be given in your little inbox—and most of you are probably old enough to remember that we used to have inboxes made of wood. Can you believe it? When I talk at colleges, they say,

What kind of inbox was this?

Into our inbox would come all manner of information: from press, from spies, from photography, from intercepted messages, from wherever. The FBI even shared information with us every now and then. We would be responsible—I’m far enough away from Washington to use the following word—we would be accountable. We would be accountable for looking at what information was available, and if it were important enough, we would serve it up to the president. Somebody might correct the syntax or the spellings, but there was no political thing on this. We told it like it is, and we had career protection for telling it like it was.

What you need is documents. My friend Dan Ellsberg always says,

Don’t just speak out. Bring the documents.

And Chelsea Manning did that fairly well, didn’t she? 700,000 documents.

And to his credit, Ed Snowden went through the documents that really needed to be released and figured a way to get them out.

What I’m saying here is that the Sam Adams award is made in recognition of Sam. He did the work but he didn’t go out of channels. Most of our whistleblowers had to. Ed Snowden is the par excellence example of that, because he saw what happened to Bradley Manning. He said,

I don’t want to be tortured by the Marines for eight months.

And he saw what happened to Tom Drake.

Tom Drake is the NSA senior executive who released information about billions and billions of dollars being wasted on a system that deprived us of our rights under the Fourth Amendment, where he and other experts in house had created a system that preserved those rights and was more efficient. He went to the Baltimore Sun and told them finally. First he went through all kinds of channels: Defense, Congress, everywhere else. He didn’t get anywhere. So what did they do when he told them? The Justice Department charged him with 10 felonies under the Espionage Act. He was going to be put away for years, he was told.

Long story short, Jesselyn Radack, who is a lawyer with the Government Accountability Project, but was a lawyer with the Justice Department, took up the cause. She did the PR of this. He used the public defender of the State of Maryland for his defense. He didn’t have any money. And at the end the federal judge said,

You so-called lawyers from the Department of Justice, you should be really ashamed of yourselves. This case had no basis from the beginning. You wasted all our time, and you put Tom Drake through four years of persecution. You should be ashamed of yourselves.

What did Tom do? I don’t know how this works legally, but he pled out to a misdemeanor for having exceeded the authorized use of a government computer, in other words, he wrote a letter to his wife or something on a government computer.

The point here is that Ed Snowden watched what happened to Tom Drake. So here we are in Moscow, and we’re ushered into this nice dining room. And there’s Ed Snowden. I let Tom go before me. Snowden looks at him, and you could just see it in his eyes:

This guy saved my life. I knew what I had to do. I never could have achieved my mission if I had gone through channels. So I figured out a way to do it.

And Tom Drake is looking at Ed Snowden, and he’s thinking,

My God, I never thought any good would come out of those four years of persecution, but this is a good.

I was looking at this and thinking,

This is wonderful, this is really wonderful.

We had a chance to ask Snowden,

Your major concern, of course, was that you could sacrifice all this, give up everything, maybe your life, you said you were willing to do that, and nothing is going to happen, right, nothing happens. Are you aware, Ed, that a lot of stuff is happening?

He said,

Yes, I am.

Coleen Rowley and Jesselyn Radack, both lawyers, really up on the legislation that’s being prepared now, some of it quite promising, were able to fill him in on some of those details that haven’t been on the Web. If it’s been on the Web, Snowden has seen it. He’s really engaged.

I’ll just say one more thing about Snowden. People say,

Why did he go to Moscow? Did the Chinese turn him down?

Dianne Feinstein,

He’s a traitor.

I’ll tell you who the traitor is. It ain’t Snowden. What he did was very artfully figured out, a way to get in touch in a confidential way with Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras. He arranged to meet them in Hong Kong and get all the stuff out. Because he knew he could get to Hong Kong from Honolulu without being intercepted and discovered, he couldn’t get to Latin America any other way.

So there he is in Hong Kong, meets with them, gives them the stuff. And, of course, they’re journalists, they’re not Good Samaritans or Red Cross people. So they go back and write their stories.

And there’s Ed Snowden. Hong Kong is sort of dithering. Who saved him? WikiLeaks. Julian Assange sent his right-hand person there, Sarah Harrison, and said,

Do what you can, see if you can get him—he’s got to go through Moscow if he wants to get to Havana. So talk to the Russians.

So she goes to the consulate there and arranges for him to get out of Dodge. And he just got out of Hong Kong before they were going to keep him there.

Was he headed to Russia? No, he wasn’t going to end up in Russia. I was comparing him in my mind to Columbus. I was thinking, I remember a history book that started out this way about the discovery of the New World. America was discovered by somebody who was looking for something else. The next two centuries were spent trying to figure a way through it or around it. It was named after somebody who had nothing to do with the discovery of America, and the people there were called people from the other side of the world. History is very chancy like that, very ironic. Here’s Ed Snowden. He wants safety, he wants security, he wants not to be killed. So he wants to get to Latin America. When he got to Moscow, he wanted to get around it or through it. He couldn’t.

And in the end, because of the U.S. imperiousness, John Kerry saying,

All right, Vladimir Putin, we know there’s no extradition agreement here, but you must give up Ed Snowden because we want him and we say you must.

That was a big mistake. Vladimir Putin doesn’t take kindly to that kind of thing. And besides, you can seek the high moral ground by obeying international law. There used to be some premium in obeying international law. There still is among some countries. So he said,

Yes, come on in here.

What’s the result? The height of irony. Ed Snowden is in the safest place on the globe. Why? General Michael Hayden, who was head of the CIA and the NSA, suggested openly,

I’ve got a list that I’d like to put Ed Snowden on, a different kind of list, not a list for an award.

And Mike Rogers, head of the House Intelligence Committee chimed in,

Yeah, yeah, I can help you out on that.

You know what list I’m referring to: The kill list for assassination—the one that President Obama on Tuesday mornings carefully reviews and decides who will live and who will die, including American citizens.

I hope none of you are shocked to hear that. There used to be a Fifth Amendment that would prevent that, but that’s gone by the boards, just like the First and the Fourth. So Michael Hayden and Michael Rogers have said he should be killed. I said to Snowden,

Are you aware that these guys have said that?

He just looked at me and kind of shook his head like,

Yes, I’m aware.

Like, what’s become of our country? This is not the Mafia. They’re not supposed to be the Mafia.

The thing with Snowden was just beautiful. We had a formal ceremony to give him the award. We each said something, Jesselyn Radack, Tom Drake, Colleen Rowley and myself. Jesselyn read something from Albert Camus.
She said,

Edward Snowden, you are in good company.

Snowden had talked about “the work of a generation.” He wrote a statement for the European Parliament Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice, and Home Affairs. And Jesselyn went to Geneva, I think it was, to read it. The title he gave it was “The Work of a Generation Starts Here.” She pointed out that “the wager of our generation” is how Albert Camus described what Ed had called “the work of a generation.” It was 1957, the year that Camus won the Nobel Prize for literature.

Radack said,

In 1957, Camus expressed hope in “the quality of a new generation and its increasing unwillingness to adopt slogans or ideologies and to return to more tangible values.” He wrote, “We have nothing to lose except everything. So let’s go ahead. This is the wager of our generation. If we are to fail, it is better, in any case, to have stood on the side of those who refuse to be dogs and are resolved to pay the price that must be paid so that man can be something more than a dog.”

Camus rejected what he called “the paltry privileges granted to those who adapt themselves to this world,” adding that “those individuals who refuse to give in will have to stand apart, and they must accept this. Personally, I have never wanted to stand apart. For this is a sort of solitude, which is certainly the harshest thing our era forces upon us. I feel its weight, believe me. But, nevertheless, I should not want to change eras, for I know and respect the greatness of this one. Moreover, I have always thought that the maximum danger implied the maximum hope.”

In December 1957, the month he won the Nobel Prize, Camus warned strongly against inaction: “Remaining aloof has always been possible in history. When people did not approve, they could always keep silent or talk of something else. Today everything is changed and even silence has dangerous implications.”

I think that has relevance to today.

Jesselyn Radack continued,

A key figure in the French Resistance, Camus in July 1943 published a “Letter to a German Friend,” an old friend that he had had for decades, which began as follows: “You said to me: ‘The greatness of my country [Germany] is beyond price. Anything is good that contributes to its greatness. Those who, like us young Germans, are lucky enough to find a meaning in the destiny of our nation must sacrifice everything else.’”

Camus, “No,” I told you, “I cannot believe that everything must be subordinate to a single end. There are means that cannot be excused. And I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice. I don’t want for my country a greatness born of blood and falsehood. I want to keep it alive by keeping justice alive.”

You retorted, “Well, then you don’t love your country.”

Jesselyn wrapped it up by saying,

Edward, that may have a familiar ring to you. But, of course, the truth is the very opposite. Let us take one more cue from Albert Camus, who emphasized that “Truth needs witnesses.” We are honored, Edward, to be here at this time and this place to be your witnesses. You have the full measure of our gratitude and support.

That was just one of the statements. Colleen Rowley read another and I read a little Russian poem. It was really interesting. We were hosted officially by Anatoly Kucherena, who is a civil rights lawyer and one of the lawyers who is supporting Edward Snowden. He’s a great big, wonderful, burly Russian guy. He gave us all gifts through a translator, inscribed books. The last one he gave out was Pushkin. And that gave me a chance to try to follow Cicero’s dictum of trying to render your audience “benevolent, attentive, and docile,” because I know a lot of Pushkin.

And I know one poem of Pushkin—does anybody here know Russian? Usually up in the Northwest we have some. I’ll translate it, anyway. It’s a poem Pushkin wrote when he was behind bars in Kishinev, now in Moldavia, I guess it is, because he spoke out, he wrote subversive things in his poems.

This one is titled “Usnik,” which means prisoner or somebody kept in captivity. He’s sitting in his little cell and he’s looking out the window. It goes like this:

I’m sitting behind the bars of this window in the dark, dank cell, cooped up like an eagle who can’t fly away. He looks out and he sees this crow waving his wings and picking up a piece of a dead animal and throwing it at the window. He’s clutching at this thing. And then he looks into the window and he looks at me as though he has the same thoughts that I have. He says to me, Let’s fly away. We are free birds. Let’s go. We need to fly away to that place beyond the snow-capped mountains, that I just saw flying in yesterday, beyond the blue seas that surround our country and beyond, where only the wind and I can fly.

Why did I take you through all that? Pushkin is their national hero. My feeble attempt to render him probably doesn’t do him justice, but that sort of gave us a real welcome with Kucherena. It was just fortuitous that the book he happened to give me was Pushkin short stories translated into English.

Pushkin lived in the first part of the 19th century, so he was part of that insurrection that really never got off the ground. He spoke out in favor of the Decembrists, which was really the first Russian revolution. These guys had chased Napoleon back into Western Europe, and they looked around and said,

Hey, this is a pretty nice place. How do they rule themselves?

They heard about constituzia, constitution. So without much preparation they drew themselves up before the square in St. Petersburg and shouted

Constanine y Constituzia! [Bring Constantine, Tsar Nicholas’s brother, into power and the constitution. ]

No other Russians except the ones that had chased Napoleon knew what constituzia was. They knew who Constantine was. But the tsar just brought his folks out and they shot some of them and imprisoned the rest. But that’s a measure of how people find out a different way of doing things and act on it.

I want to say a couple things about General Keith Alexander. Let’s have a moment of rejoicing that Keith Alexander is going. Good riddance. Keith Alexander is for the next few months still the head of the National Security Agency and the U.S. Cyber Command. Cyber Command? Yes. You’ve heard about how we very artfully with the Israelis set back the Iranian nuclear development program with the Stuxnet? We’re pretty smart. We can do that. How smart is that?

Just as an aside here, the battles of the future are not going to depend on battleships or aircraft carriers or B-52s or F-35s. It’s going to be cyber. So the great big advantage that the U.S. now has, to its detriment, of spending half of our tax money on defense, is not going to amount to a hill of beans. You know why? Because well-educated Iranians, well-educated Chinese and Japanese, that’s all it takes to do this cyber warfare. There are just as many of them, and some of them are better educated, as there are of us. Add to that the fact that NSA and our government, to the degree it wants to do this, cannot do it without people like Edward Snowden. They just can’t do it.

So this whole generation has grown up that is technically incredibly proficient, and they want to have good jobs. And a lot of them end up at the NSA and other places because there is good pay. But some of them, I don’t know, maybe 5%, have a conscience, and some of them remember the solemn oath that all of us who serve in the armed forces take to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic. That’s what Snowden remembers. He was a soldier for a while. That’s what I remember. We talked about that over dinner. Is this an oath that has an expiration date? No, it doesn’t. So what are we to do? Are we supposed to sit back and watch this happen?

When I’m doing interviews these days, people don’t seem to have any concept of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. I know you do, but I’m going to read it to you anyway, because you can see just by hearing it how much flouted it is by what’s been happening.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Put that up against the dragnet, collect-everything mentality. The natural conclusion is that there’s probable cause to believe that all of us are a bunch of terrorists. How many terrorists here? Because we’re all suspected terrorists. That’s a measure of what we’re up against.

I said that I’d do something about the empire here, so I’ll say something about the empire. I’ll say what I learned first about the empire when I was about 8 years old and my Irish grandfather said,

Raymond, you’ve heard about the British Empire. Do you know why they say that the sun never sets on the British Empire?

I said,

Yes, I think I know, grandfather.

No, no, you don’t know. Sit down there and I’ll tell you what it is. The sun never sets on the British Empire because the good Lord would never trust the British in the dark.

I was born a week before Hitler began the war with Poland. And even in the womb, I suppose, I sensed that people were really upset about what was happening. I grew up in that atmosphere and I remember a lot of it. After the war, 1948, when I was 9, here’s what the first policy paper of the newly created State Department’s Policy Planning Staff said. This was written by George Kennan, someone who used to be my hero. He was ambassador to the Soviet Union, Russian expert, author of the containment policy. He really wrote well about Moscow and so on. This is what he wrote in that paper. This was to set the policy for the U.S. after the war.

We have about 50% of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3% of the its population. Our real task in the coming period is to maintain this position of disparity. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day- dreaming. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford the luxury of altruism. We should cease to talk about vague and unreal objectives, such as human rights, the raising of living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts.

George Kennan, I later learned, was responsible for making the CIA a hybrid. President Truman knew what happened at Pearl Harbor. He was hell-bent and determined that wouldn’t happen again, there would be no surprises. There would be a central place, therefore, Central Intelligence Agency, where in that inbox would come all kinds of information. And somebody would be held accountable for looking at it and warning about these things. Most of you know that before Pearl Harbor there were all manner of little things floating around—from the FBI, from the code breakers, from the people in the embassy in Tokyo, from the FBI. Where was the Japanese ambassador? And there was a little submarine in Honolulu harbor. Where was the Japanese fleet?

Does anybody know?

Oh, we lost track of the Japanese fleet.

That was not going to happen again. So therefore the Central Intelligence Agency. This agency would report directly to the president, not to the Pentagon. Truman knew that the Pentagon will always say that the Soviets were 12 feet tall. He knew they weren’t 12 feet tall. The State Department would say they were only 5 feet tall. So he needed people who had no agenda except to tell the truth. I know. Even out here in the West people would wince and say,

Right, right. An agency with no agenda. Give me a break.

You say that in Washington, they just stare in disbelief. But it was true. When we were hired, Sam Adams and I, we were told we could tell it like it is. And almost always we were able to do that. There were exceptions, but almost always we could do that. That’s what Truman wanted.

What happened? After World War II these very imaginative, very courageous people came home from the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services. They had worked miracles in Europe and in the Far East. They came home to well-deserved applause. And they said,

Thanks a lot for the applause, but should we hang around here? Do you still need us, or should we go back to our law firms or corporations, back to academe?

1947 was when this all was happening. The Soviets had overrun Eastern Europe, they were threatening Greece and Turkey, and even Italy and France were in some danger. The KGB was all around the world trying to overthrow governments. So the question answered itself: Of course we need you.

Okay, all’s fair in love and war, but then some idiot—maybe that’s the best word I can find—said,

We’re creating this secret agency for analysis. They’re going to have their own clandestine collection capability, because they need some spies to get the stuff they can’t get from the media, so let’s put them in with the analysts.

The legislation was changed by one sentence about inserted. It said,

The Director of Central Intelligence shall perform such other duties and tasks from time to time as the President of the United States shall direct.

This gives the president of the United States the capability to have his own personal Gestapo. All he needs is the right guy in charge of the intelligence community. If you don’t believe me, just look at what George Tenet and George Bush did together. Enhanced interrogation techniques? That comes from a German phrase, verschärfte Vernehmung. What’s the translation? Enhanced interrogation techniques. Where was it found? In the Gestapo handbook. What were these techniques? The same ones. That’s the background of how the CIA has a structural fault from the very beginning.

Why do I mention that? Because these swashbuckling guys who were going to overthrow governments were encouraged to do so by my hero, George Kennan. He was largely responsible for this hybrid. That was the 1947 National Security Act. It created the Defense Department and the Air Force and the National Security Council as well as the CIA, so it was a big deal. Anyhow, that gave these operators the means and the profile to get all the money to do whatever they were told.

One of the first things they were told was,

Hey, there’s this upstart in Iran, the guy who was actually elected by the Iranians. Get this. He doesn’t realize that the oil underneath the sands of Iran belongs to British Petroleum. He thinks that the Iranians should share more of the proceeds from this oil. So he threatened to, actually, did start, nationalizing the oil.

So what happened? Well, the British had been at this for a long time. Remember what my grandfather told me. So they took the fledgling CIA under their wing. This is six years into after its creation. This is what you do when you have an upstart Third World dictator—well, he was actually elected, but it doesn’t matter. This is what you have to do. So, MI6 and the CIA overthrew Mossadegh, who was Time Man of the Year in 1951, the only freely elected person in Persian history. Who did they bring in? The Shah, with his hated secret police, SAVAK, who were just as bad as the Gestapo. But he was on our side. And he didn’t like the Russians. If you didn’t like the Russians, it’s just like being against terrorists: It doesn’t matter what else you do, you have our support. That was 1953.

In 1954 the same thing happened in Guatemala, because the Guatemalans thought maybe United Fruit shouldn’t own so much of their land, maybe the peasants should have some.

That was the history of all this. It’s a very sad history. I just want you to know that the operations directorate has always been separate from the analysis directorate. It depended on the head of the intelligence community as to whether it did the right thing or the wrong thing. And the president, of course. One fellow that I served under directly, Bill Colby, must have learned from past mistakes, but he was the most courageous. When it came out that there was a whole bunch of abuses in the 1950s and 1960s, he defied Kissinger’s admonition not to tell the truth to Congress. He told the truth to Congress. He said,

Look, I’m a lawyer, and I respect the law. This is the law. I’m going to tell Congress about the abuses.

Those abuses included, of course, his predecessor, Richard Helms having instigated the coup in Chile in 1973. Helms was brought up on charges. He was going to be convicted. He pled nolo contendere. I guess that’s what they let white-collar people plead to sometimes.

And you know what, folks? He went back to CIA headquarters. He was already out of the CIA. He went back to CIA headquarters. I’ve never seen such a crowd in our mammoth cafeteria welcoming him, passing around the hat. And the $2,000 or $10,000, whatever, he had to pay was collected within the first hour. A couple of us analysts were peeking in from the shadows there. I said,

This really is two different and distinct agencies.

I thought what Colby did was exactly right, courageous. Of course, he got canned by Kissinger right after that. And he met a very suspicious death. And that’s another story.

That’s just by way of saying that the CIA has kind of a hybrid thing and that there are the Tom Fingars but there are also the Richard Helmses and the George Tenets. And every time I go to an airport and have to do all that charade, I think disrespectfully of George Tenet, because he had the power to share more information with the terrorism guy in the White House, Richard Clarke, and he had the power to speak out when he saw that Condoleezza Rice was not taking this seriously. As you know, they didn’t talk about al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden until one week before 9/11.

I think that the good news is what I call the Noah principle. I think more of us—Chris Hedges and others—are beginning to realize that we should follow the Noah principle. And that is, no more awards for predicting rain; awards only for building arks. What arks are we going to build? The situation is pretty critical, in my view. The powers that be have rolled up the wagons in a circle, and the National Defense Authorization Act is, I think, probably the most revealing thing. This is the one that allows somebody from—what is it called now?—Lewis McCord to come in here and take McGovern to an undisclosed location without charge or anything. But not forever. Just until there are no more terrorists. That reversed history since the Civil War, when southern whites were using the U.S. Army to bring in slavery again after Reconstruction. And now they can use the U.S. Army to do this.

Why did they do that?

As I watched that, I couldn’t believe it. Here is the Senate. I saw John McCain and Lindsey Graham and all of those people, and I thought, Well, they’re behind it. But you know what? When it came back from the White House, Carl Levin, the chair of the Armed Services Committee, was asked by one of the Democratic senators,

We didn’t include arresting American citizens. How did that get in there?

And Levin said,

Well, the White House put that in there.

As if to say the White House put it in and we couldn’t take it out? Isn’t that a telling thing? The White House put it in there. And everybody says,

Oh, the White House put it in there.

So it was the executive and the Congress. Why do you think they wanted to make a law that stringent, to use the Army against us? Martial law. What were they afraid of? Bear in mind, this was two years ago. What was going on?

[Audience] Occupy.

You got it. I was interviewed about this right after it happened. I was sitting somewhere and thinking,

What’s changed over the last several months?

The only thing I could think of was Occupy. And I said,

They’re afraid of us.

Up until then we had thousands. But suppose there were tens of thousands. Suppose there were a hundred thousand surrounding the Congress and the White House and they couldn’t get home to their cocktails in Georgetown? Who were they going to call? They could call the park police. The park police were on our side. They let us camp out right in the middle of Washington. How about the capital police? The capital police, with all due respect, they’re good at operating those things that you have to walk through to make sure you don’t have a weapon on you, but not much else. The district police. Well, the district police are increasingly aware that they are part of the 99%. And small wonder that they realize that.

So suppose something really happens. Suppose the flag goes up. Suppose we are surrounded. Who can we call on? The U.S. Army. The generals, such as there are, are predominantly creatures of the system. They will do whatever advances their profile and career. I hate to say that, but it’s true.

And the people who populate the so-called volunteer Army. It’s a poverty draft, folks. And that is a shame on our country. These are mostly people from towns in this country of less than 50,000 people and from the inner city. They have no prospect of a job or of a good education. It’s a poverty draft. And it’s been ingrained in them to do what they’re told. Witness that terrible WikiLeaks collateral murder video. I showed that earlier today. Every time I see it it turns my stomach, because it’s not only the Iraqis who are being brutalized, it’s the fellows in those helicopters as well.

So what are we going to do? I’ve found in talking around the country that Americans have a peculiar hesitancy. It’s understandable. Who likes to be laughed at? We don’t like to start something that doesn’t have a reasonable prospect of success. Who wants to hear,

McGovern, what did you think you were doing standing up there and turning your back when Hillary Clinton was speaking? What was that all about? So you got beat up. What was that all about?

I don’t know why I did it, but I thought it was the right thing to do. We’re not supposed to worry about being successful. We’re supposed to be what? Faithful. The good is worth doing because it’s good. If we’re all worried about whether we’re going to achieve success, we ain’t gonna do nothing. It’s as Camus said:

You can always remain silent.

That’s, of course, what the Germans did in the 1930s.

The other thing, when I got up and beat up by the goons at Hillary Clinton’s speech—this was at George Washington University. For folks who don’t know. All I did was—maybe I’ll just explain in my own defense. I spent some time in the Soviet Union. And it used to be that when a Soviet leader made a speech, there would be stormy applause. And in Pravda the next day every third paragraph would say, “Stormy applause, everyone stands.” Well, Hillary Clinton walks into this big auditorium—I got somebody to get me an invitation—and stormy applause, everyone stands. I’m thinking “Stormy applause, everyone stands.” And then the president of GW University comes in. He made her out to be Mother Teresa. So I’m holding my nose and thinking,

McGovern, what are you going to do?

Luckily, I had my Veterans for Peace shirt on underneath. So there was plenty of time. So I took off my outer shirt, I turned my back, and I just stood there. And all she could see—and she was close—was “veteransforpeace.org.” But what the cameras could see was me standing there as she’s talking right behind me. And they could see “Veterans for Peace,” the whole logo. I had done that before in a church. I’m a Catholic, and I don’t like the fact that the women are subordinated and I couldn’t just sit where I used to sit, so I used to stand for the service. I did that for four and a half years in my parish. I finally had to leave. So I did what I did then at Holy Trinity. I looked right at the wall, picked a little place out on the wall. This is going to work, this will be good. The cameras were on me. And I hear Hillary Clinton talking about the necessity to have freedom of expression. It’s really important. In Iran. She doesn’t miss a syllable. She just keeps going on.

Then all of a sudden I see this guy come down with—he looked like a Redskins reject, about 300 pounds. He comes down. And I thought, I don’t know what’s going to happen now. Before I could figure anything out, some another guy grabs me from the back. They lift me up and carry me over three women between me and the aisle, take me out, bang my head against the door frame on the way out, and do other brutal things. Meanwhile, Hillary doesn’t miss a beat, not a syllable. And it’s all recorded. It’s kind of interesting. Some of the footage did get out.

Why do I say this? I say this because I see some people around here that have the same color hair I do. When that happened to me, the first report came out of Fox News, and it was pretty so-so. It said, “An elderly gentleman”—that hurt.

An elderly gentleman was thought to have a sign secreted beneath the seat, or it was felt that he might be willing to shout something out at the Secretary of State. So he was escorted out of the theater.

“Escorted out of the theatre.” Right.

But when the pictures came out of what happened to me, people care about old people getting beat up. That’s why I mentioned this. Young people, Ah, they have it coming. Young people, they can take it. But 71-year-old people—and I’m even older now, if you can believe it—we have an advantage. I say this not jocularly. I say this in real seriousness. We have an advantage. People care if we get beat up. I don’t think they’re going to kill us. But if you’re willing to take a stand on these things, you’re going to get a lot more reaction, a lot more resonance by virtue of your being an old guy like me.

And when one of my Veterans for Peace added that,

Yes, and he’s got cancer

—luckily I had just gone into remission—Hillary Clinton had over 500,000 emails and telephone calls just by virtue of what I did. The cancer brought it up to 800,000. I kid you not.

We can kind of have our principles and we can stand on our principles, but if there’s nothing for which you’re willing to suffer for those principles—and I don’t mean necessarily physically—if you’re not willing to put those principles into play where you could get hurt, where your compassion would mean actually suffering with or suffering because of—like what Ed Snowden did—then your principles, they’re really nice to have, aren’t they, but there’s something lacking there, it seems to me.

The prospect of success? I think we’ve dealt with that. Are there enough of us? Cesar Chávez always used to say, There are enough of us, but without action nothing is going to happen. Op-eds are really nice, speeches are really nice, but if you don’t get out there, nothing’s going to happen. And it’s getting kind of late. I think that probably the next year or two are going to be key. So I think we need to play a role. We have to recognize our responsibility. We have to be prophetic. We have to go back to the vision of the Founders.

I’ve learned a little bit about the prophets at this place where I work, at the ecumenical Church of the Saviour. I just want to see how Biblically literate this crowd is. Isaiah. Who knows that Isaiah walked around at least two years stark naked? Raise your hands. There are a couple people here. It’s right in the Bible. The question is, What was he doing? The smart exegetes, the people who study really hard, say it’s not clear—and they say this without any humor; usually exegetes don’t have a lot of humor—they say it’s not clear that he was always naked, just during liturgical services. That may be good exegesis, but it doesn’t get the man off the hook. So what was he saying? I think what he was saying was,

Look, I’m stripped of my garments here. You say, Oh, isn’t that awful. You are stripped of the vision with which Yahweh blessed you, a vision of justice and shalom, and that is far worse than being physically naked.

I don’t think we’re stripped of that vision, but I think it kind of needs repair and needs some courage. And it needs it quickly. Martin Luther King famously said,

There is such a thing as too late.

I’ll finish just by quoting a German you may not have heard of. He was a contemporary of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran minister who tried to wake up the church there and couldn’t. His name was Albrecht Haushofer. And he was a geologist, at the University of Berlin, and he had tenure. Some of you may not know what tenure means, but it means a lot. It meant a lot in Berlin and it means a lot here now. How did he get tenure? By keeping his mouth shut. He also had a conscience. And as he watched his Jewish friends and other friends being wrapped up, sent away, he gathered a following around himself and spoke out against what was going on. It was really quite significant that they saw this fellow finally speaking out. So he was wrapped up by the Gestapo and put in another prison, separate from Bonhoeffer, and was condemned to be shot. Bonhoeffer was hanged. Those were the two executions.

But the Germans, being very meticulous, insisted that you sign a confession before they would shoot you or hang you. Haushofer wasn’t about to do that. He refused to do it, and as the Allies approached, they shot him and he fell down. As they picked him up, out of his pocket fell a little Zettel, a little piece of paper. On it the title was Schuld, Guilt. It was his confession. And it was written in the form of a sonnet. It’s not very long, but what it said was,

Yes, I’m guilty, but it’s not what you’re thinking. I should have earlier recognized my duty. I should have more sharply called evil evil. I put off my judgment for too long. I did warn, but not enough. And today I recognize what I was guilty of.

So there is such a thing as too late. A lot of you recognize that and are out there doing your thing already. But we need all of us in this battle, and we need to be able to stick our necks out. And the last thing I’ll say is that I do not have anything against necks. I’ve been accused of having a lot against necks. But I think necks are very nice. They’re convenient connections between head and torso. I’d hate to be without a neck. But if there is nothing for which you will risk that neck, then it becomes your idol. And necks are not deserving of idol worship. I don’t have to tell most of you this, but I’ll say it anyway. Be willing to stick your necks out. Be willing to do whatever is necessary to demonstrate that we want to be loyal to our Founders’ vision. If we have to strip ourselves naked, that’s one thing. But we probably won’t have to do that. Whatever we need to do, we do it, without worrying whether it’s going to be successful or not. But let’s just try to do the good because it’s worth doing and leave the rest in the hands of the coming generation. I know that I can be with my nine grandchildren in a much more comfortable way if I know that I’m doing what I can to make their future a little better.

Thanks very much for listening.

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©2013

Democracy at work

Fri, 19 Jul 2013 21:31:17 GMT

Richard Wolff
Brecht Forum,
New York, NY
9 October 2012

Cascading economic problems and crises, coupled with dysfunctional political responses, have plunged many societies into deepening turmoil. Capitalism, the dominant economic system of our time, has once again become the subject of criticism and opposition. A global capitalist system that no longer meets most people’s needs has prompted social movements to arise and coalesce in the active search for fundamental and structural change. The establishment responds with what are called reforms. But they are superficial and quickly circumvented. Historically, the various forms of state socialism and communism do not offer a model or inspiration to those looking for viable alternatives. People are seeking new solutions to address capitalism’s injustices, waste, and massive breakdowns. One such proposal is workers’ self-directed enterprises. Production works optimally when performed by a community that collectively and democratically designs and carries out shared labor.

This lecture and interview are available as a CD or mp3 or transcript from Alternative Radio

Richard Wolff is Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and currently a visiting professor at the New School in New York. The New York Times called him “America’s most prominent Marxist economist.” He is the author of numerous books including Capitalism Hits the Fan, Democracy at Work, and Occupy the Economy: Challenging Capitalism with David Barsamian.

You can listen to Richard Wolff speak for himself here.

I’m going to begin by talking a little bit about the failures of the capitalist system we live in now. We can compare this crisis with the last time our capitalist system collapsed. That’s the 1930s. And that has to be brought back, because that’s the only standard, the only equivalent we really have to make sense of what we’re going through now. Like with everybody, you make sense of a crisis now if you can think of a similar crisis that you or your friends or your family went through at some other point. That’s what we do.

An interesting thing happened in the 1930s. Capitalism tanked. It fell apart. It lasted for years—12 years, 1929 to 1941. But there was a big difference. After 4 or 5 years of that crisis, something happened in America then that hasn’t happened yet again. The mass of people reacted and got involved. You had in the U.S. what you now see in Greece or Spain or Italy, and so on. People in the streets. There were demonstrations of tens of thousands, and sometimes hundreds of thousands, in Union Square, just a few blocks from here. Week after week.

There were three kinds of organizations that got involved. There was the union movement. In a short period of time tens of millions of Americans who had never been in a union before joined a union. The organization was called the CIO, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, which went to the masses of people and said, You’re being really shafted in this crisis. You’ve lost your job, you’ve lost your benefits, you have no money. The union is the only institution that’s going to help you, so you’d better join it and make it strong, because it’s your only chance. Millions of Americans agreed and joined.

The second kind of organization was a group of parties who used the name socialist, socialist parties of various kinds. They basically said capitalism is a system that’s no good. We need an organization to either force it to change or to go beyond it.

And the third organization was the Communist Party, which said more or less the same thing but pushed maybe a bit harder.

There was lots of overlap among the CIO and the socialists and the Communists. They worked together, and they represented tens of millions of people. They said to the president, Roosevelt,

You’d better do something for the mass of people. None of this crap about bailing out the big banks,

which he was doing, and helping the big corporations, which he was doing.

That’s not enough. You’ve got to do something for the people at the bottom, the millions unemployed, the millions losing their homes through foreclosure and so on. And if you don’t,

they wagged their fingers at him,

then we socialists and Communists, we’re going to overthrow this system.

And to make the point, they pointed over there to Russia, where this had happened a little while earlier, and said,

Don’t think it can’t happen here.

Mr. Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He heard these people. He knew they represented tens of millions. So what did he do? Very important. He went to the corporations and the rich and he said to them—they didn’t want to hear it, he knew that, but he came from that group, he knew them all personally—

You have to give me a lot of money right now. A lot. And not only do you have to give me a lot of your money, but I’m going to use it to help the mass of people.

Guaranteed to be a tense meeting.

And here was his argument.

You’d better do it, because if you don’t, down the road behind me are coming the socialists and the Communists, and they’re going to offer you a lot worse deal. So here’s what. You give me a lot of money. I’ll take care of them. I’ll help the mass of people the way they’ve never been helped before. But on one condition I’ll help them. Don’t mess with capitalism. Let the industries be the way they are, with the major shareholders having all the power to select the board of directors, which makes all the decisions. Leave that part of capitalism alone.

He split the rich people in the corporations. Half of them bought his argument. They were scared. They saw the same demonstrations in the streets. Half of them never bought the argument. They became the implacable enemies of Mr. Roosevelt, the people who now control the Republican Party, but who were doing that all the way back. But it was enough to get half of them. And Roosevelt went to the socialists, Communists, and CIO and said,

Okay, we’ve got a deal.

And they said

Yes, we’ll downplay the revolution.

Not all of them, but most of them did.

Roosevelt created the Social Security system. He said to Americans,

If you’re over 65 and you’ve spent a lifetime working, I’m going to take care of you for the rest of your life.

In the midst of a depression, when there was no money, like the people say today, the government said,

I’m going to give you all money, a monthly check, you old people, until you drop dead.

No one ever heard of that before. A public pension for everybody. Telling the old people,

You’re not going to have to live on cat food and your children are not going to be burdened by taking care of you. We’re going to take care of you.

No sooner was that done than he announced the development of an unemployment compensation system. That had never been done before either.

You lose your job, we’ll give you a check every week, for a long time. Have a nice day.

No sooner was that done than he said,

And now the icing on the cake. I’m going to create and fill 12 1/2 million jobs and give you all work.

Where did the money for this come from? He taxed the corporations and the rich. And what he didn’t get from them in taxes, he borrowed. And there was no discussion. They didn’t say,

Maybe I’ll lend it to you.

No, no, no, no, no. You’re giving it to us.

And that got us out of the Depression, with neither the revolution of the left, which they feared, or the fascism from the right, which they were also worried about, because that’s what had happened in Italy and in Germany.

But—and here comes the punch line—they never touched the corporation and how it’s organized. They left in place the major shareholders and the board of directors. And guess what happened? The board of directors and the shareholders didn’t like this deal that Roosevelt forced down their throat. They accepted it, but they weren’t happy. And by 1945, which is only a few years later, Roosevelt dead, World War II over, the corporations, shareholders, and boards of directors went to work to undo everything Roosevelt had done.

How did they do it? Number one, they went after the socialists and Communists. They knew who made Roosevelt do what he did, and they destroyed them. Which is why those political parties are as small and as weak today as they are in this country. And they went to work to destroy the labor movement, which is why it is as small and weak today, having had 50 years of decline. They knew that was the basis on which Roosevelt acted, so they had to destroy that basis. They had to destroy the organization of the working class from the left. We live in the results of that. While that was being done, they undid the New Deal. They passed the bills, the laws, they attacked, they took it away. The regulations were deregulated. The government activity was privatized. They took all the steps necessary.

There’s a lesson there, isn’t there? The lesson is, if you don’t change the organization of enterprises, then even when you’re lucky enough to get a better system, a capitalism that you might call capitalism with a human face, one that gives you a pension when you’re old, that gives you unemployment compensation when you lose your job through no fault of your own, one that provides jobs from the public sector if the private sector can’t do it, that kind of a capitalism that you can win if you fight hard, as they did in the 1930s, will then be taken away if you leave those people in power.

Why? Because they’re nasty people? No, no, no. If you’re the head of a corporation, your job is to make money. The regulations passed by Mr. Roosevelt were impediments for a business. They wanted to get around those regulations. They made it harder to make money. They didn’t want to pay those big taxes. That meant money they couldn’t use to build the enterprise. So they saw these things as obstacles, which they worked to overcome. So, of course, they did what the system makes them do: They undid it all.

The best metaphor for this comes out of American history. And it’s the fight against slavery. In the fight against slavery in the U.S. there was an antislavery movement, and it split into two parts. One part of the movement against slavery in the U.S. was horrified that slaves weren’t fed very well, they weren’t clothed very well, their families were split up, they were bought and sold, all those terrible things, and they wanted slaves to be better treated. The other people who were against slavery were horrified by that approach. They said,

Are you crazy? The problem isn’t that the slave doesn’t have the right diet. The problem is that he’s a slave. And if all you do is give him a better diet by forcing the slave owner to feed him better, then you’re leaving the slave owner in the position to reduce the diet next month, next year. You’ve left in place the institution that can undo whatever you achieve. That’s not smart.

That second group finally persuaded Mr. Lincoln. So he didn’t pass a law improving the condition of slaves, he abolished slavery.

If you want to deal with the crises of capitalism— with its injustice, its inequality, its fundamental instability, its waste of people and resources—then you can’t just pass a regulation or apply a tax. You’ve got to deal with the decision-making institutions. Because if you don’t, you cannot win this struggle. Therefore, my proposal is, we’ve got to do that. We’ve got to change the way enterprises are organized. No more shareholders, no more people who control a block of shares and can then pick the board of directors, who make all the decisions, that the rest of the workers, the vast majority, simply have to live with. That’s out. We can’t tolerate that. We’re not going to struggle another 10 years to reimpose the regulations and taxes that our forefathers and foremothers did in the 1930s only to have them undone again. This is absurd.

We have to learn from what they didn’t do and not make that mistake again. That means changing the way enterprises are organized. Don’t shy away from it. Don’t say,

Oh, it’s a big job.

Because the alternative is it won’t work. We’re living that result. We’re worse off now, because not only do we have a crisis of capitalism, but we have no organizations of the left comparable to the CIO, the socialists, and the Communists. So no one is helping us now. We’re just standing there looking at it all and shaking our heads. So capitalism needs now to be confronted. We have to change the way we organize enterprises.

The proposal here is very simple. Enterprises should be run with the decisions made by the workers in them—collectively and democratically. If 100 workers work there, then the 100 workers make those decisions. If 10,000 work there, they make the decisions. I’m going to come back to that, but that’s it. We call those worker self- directed enterprises. No more board of directors and shareholders. The workers become their own collective directors of activity. Every worker has two job descriptions: whatever tasks he or she does in the division of labor in the office, the store, or the factory, plus every worker’s participation, full and equal with every other worker, in the decisions of a director: what to produce, how to produce, where to produce, and what to do with the profits.

And before I go into it, which is what I’m going to do for the rest of my time today, I want to tell you that this is not only the solution to the inefficiency and instability of capitalism, the way I’ve stressed; it is also a solution to the problems of classical socialism.

Quickly let me review. The Soviet Union is a prime example. What did they do? They said,

We’re going to get rid of private property in the means of production, and we’re going to have it taken over by the country as a whole. We’re going to socialize the means of production. We take them away from the private owners and run by the state in the interests of everybody.

And the second thing they said is,

We’re not going to allow the market to determine who gets what. That’s going to be done by government planning instead of markets planning. Instead of private property, socialized property.

That was the plan. That’s what the Russian Revolution introduced, that’s what the Chinese Revolution introduced, that’s what the Cuban Revolution introduced, and so on.

What did it do? It did many things. I wish I had the time to go into it—and sometime I will. But here I want to make a central point. It had also profound flaws. First, it didn’t change the organization of the enterprise. The board of directors selected by the shareholders was gone. But in its place the government put in commissars; it sent people that were government officials. The enterprise now had a board of directors, but they weren’t elected by shareholders, they were selected by the government. That didn’t change. The workers still came to work five days a week, produced, and the decisions about what to produce, how to produce, where to produce, and what to do with the profits was made by the government officials.

Likewise, when you give such power to the government, the power to own the means of production and the power to distribute goods and services, you’re giving the government a stunning amount of power. And unless you’re awfully careful, they’re going to use that power in ways you’re going to come to regret, which we all know happened. So you’ve got to come up with a way to make sure that this problem doesn’t exist. And it’s all the more powerful because we know that in the end those systems have dissolved, not by external attack, but by the weight of their own contradictions. Russia imploded, China is going through a fundamental shift, Cuba likewise.

So what do you do? I have the same answer. You transform the enterprises. You make them run by the workers themselves. That creates the political power at the base of society that’s a counterweight to the government. The only way the government can survive is then to get taxes from the enterprises owned and operated by the workers in them. Then the government can’t do whatever it wants. It has to come to terms. It’s an institutional way to overcome the concentration of power at the top. And it’s an institutional way to transform the tensions of enterprises, which survive because government officials are just as odious as the people elected by shareholders in many cases. So you’ve overcome that. So this is a proposal that addresses not only the failures of capitalism but the failures of its major 20th century alternative, classical socialism, and maybe is the basis for a whole new idea of what socialism will represent in the 21st century, which is not centralized planning, but rather workers becoming finally the masters of their own lives.

What would that mean? Let me just tantalize you with some of the delicious possibilities. Let me begin with the easier ones. Do you think the workers, if they were sitting around in an office, a store, or a factory, would decide,

Hey, I’ve got an idea. We can make a bit more profit than we’re making now if we just shut down this workplace and reopen in China.

Unlikely. The self-destruction of people doesn’t usually go that far. They’re not going to do it. They’re just not going to do it. What an interesting idea. They’re not going to do it.

Here’s another thought. What if a new technology for whatever the company makes is introduced but it happens to have a side effect, it pollutes the air or it pollutes the water or it introduces a machine that is too loud are or a chemical that is toxic? Now, if you had a board of directors elected by shareholders sitting in New York or L.A., they might say,

Well, it will make more profit. We’ll tell the workers we have a fan. Don’t worry about it.

Yes, but the workers, if they made the decision themselves, since they have to breathe it, and their wives and husbands and children and neighbors, not so quick. If you want to do something about environmental degradation, here’s a way to do it. Just like if you want to do something about jobs leaving the country, there’s a way to do it.

But I’m just getting started. Here’s a bigger one. Do you think if the workers sat around together making the decision of how to divide the profits that they all produce, which is what we’re talking about, that they would give a few officials at the top, managers, tens of millions of dollars in wonderful pay packages—wages, salaries, stock options, bonuses—and everybody else struggles to get by? I don’t think so. If the decisions were made democratically, you know what? They would distribute the profits much more equally. Some would get more and some less, of course, but they wouldn’t be giving some people $25 million a year and everybody else nothing. They wouldn’t do that.

The single most powerful way I can think of to do something about the inequality of wealth and income in the U.S. that almost everybody complains about would be this idea. Because if you made the collective of workers in every enterprise distribute the wealth, they would never distribute it as unequally as is now done by the boards of directors, who give themselves the monstrous salaries. If you want to do something about inequality, do this. Do this. What an amazing thing.

Let’s talk about it some more. How might it work? Here are some questions that are raised that I want to answer.

Gee, it takes a special skill to be a director. You kind of have to know the bigger picture. You can’t go to East Tennessee State Community College. That’s good for working at the bottom. But if you want to be a director, you need to go to Princeton or Harvard or places like that.

Here’s the very old idea: The mass of workers isn’t competent to run a business. This should sound familiar to you. For those of you who remember the history of how we in Western society finally got over 1,000 years of kings and princes and emperors and czars and we got to this idea that everybody should have a vote, there were always those conservatives who said,

Are you crazy? Running a country is something you need to be a king to do. An average schmuck [or whatever the equivalent was] can’t do that. If we don’t have the king, who [as we all know and as they reminded us] talks to God almost as often as Republicans do, then our society will fall. We can’t leave power in the hands of the average person. They’re too stupid, they’re too undereducated.

The eventual answer of the mass of people was to separate those kinds of folks from their own heads, which ended the argument definitively. And we went on to have a voting system, which we call democracy. And guess what? Society didn’t fall apart, civilization didn’t come to an end. All of the dire predictions about the incapacity of the mass of people to participate in their own governance turned out to be, to use a technical term from political science, bullshit.

I’ve got a thought for you. The incompetence of workers to manage their own workplace is the same argument, it’s the same silly idea. You think the people who run America’s enterprises were born with the capacity to govern the enterprise? Stop. We have colleges for them. We have specialized programs/degrees for them called master of business administration. That’s where you learn to do these things. You have to learn it because nobody knows it. It’s something you learn. It doesn’t take very long. And most graduates tell you, We didn’t learn all that much, but it was good to go because I made good connections. Oh, I see, that’s what it’s about— connections. The learning part is very little.

Here’s a thought. You could organize enterprises so that not only did everybody participate in directing but that there were ongoing courses available to everybody, all the time during your work life where, if you felt deficient in any area, there would be people who would, in whatever way you like, teach you this, precisely so that everybody could participate. Your job and your education would be woven together. Going to work would also be going to school. What an interesting idea. You might go to a job to learn something; it might be exciting. The bar that you pass on the way home from your job would no longer advertise happy hour, because you knew what the hours were before you got there, because you would begin to be, I don’t know, happy at work. Can you imagine? Because you would be learning, you would be participating, you would be exploring your own capabilities.

Here’s another thought. The work is divided, but the people don’t have to be. We can rotate everybody. You can be for a while this job and then a while that job. You know why? Because it stultifies your brain to always do the same thing. You want variation. Not just from this technical work to that but from running the place to letting someone else run the place, maybe while you’re taking a course to become another kind of worker because you would like to try that, you would like to develop your skills. What an interesting idea.

Now let me address another dimension of this. And you see what I’m doing. I’m making the best case I can for this. And I have to, because it’s either ignored or dismissed when there’s no justification for either. Here’s another argument that is made.

These things might work, but it’s only on small enterprises. Five people could do it, maybe ten, but anything bigger than that, no. And if you look around, most co-ops that you see where people try to do it, they’re kind of small, you know.

I love this argument.

The answer to this argument is just the history of capitalism. Capitalism grew out of another system in Europe called feudalism. Most of Europe for, say, the period from 500 to 1000 A.D., was feudal. Big or not so big plantations—feudal manors they were called—big areas of land, lots of serfs. When capitalism grew, when capitalism emerged, depending on how you count, 16th, 17th, 18th century, guess how it started everywhere? Small. A capitalist with three workers or six workers or nine workers. And feudal lords all congratulated themselves. Yes, it’s scary, but it’s little. It only applies to little. Guess what? It starts little, but it gets big. It manages, it makes adjustments, but it manages.

Is that possible for co-ops? Sure it is. Why in the world would you assume otherwise? And in case you did, let me give you the example. It’s called the Mondragon Corporation in Spain. It’s a worker self-directed enterprise. And how many people work for the Mondragon Corporation? One hundred twenty thousand, thank you very much. Over 50 years. They started as six people in the north of Spain, a priest and six people. Not an auspicious beginning—a priest, six people. Not good. But here we are. They are now the largest corporation in the north of Spain and the seventh largest corporation in all of Spain. Did they manage the transition from small to big? Yes.

Here’s another topic.

Well, these things are very nice and people would love each other and it would be charming, but it could never compete with capitalist enterprises. They can’t. How are they going to compete with a tough capitalist enterprise?

And the answer is easy. Let me explain. I’m sure nobody in this room would qualify for what I’m about to say, but some of you know a little bit that if you work in a capitalist enterprise, it has been known to happen that at the end of the day when you go home, you take a stapler with you, don’t you? Some of you are smiling. You’ve heard of it. I’m sure you never did it. Or are a ream of paper or a pen or a chair, or a computer component, right? And you do that for all kinds of complicated reasons. But you rob the employer blind. Every employer knows it. In case you’re not aware, the biggest source of theft, most corporations of America believe, is their own employees, who are of course in the best position to do that. And they do.

Suppose you as an employee of a capitalist enterprise notice on your way out of the office that the lights are all on and you remember the employer giving you a memo or six telling you,

If you see the lights on before you go home, turn them off.

To which your response is,

Screw you. Why the hell should I turn off the lights? It’s not my problem, it’s your problem. The mice need to see where they’re going. And I like mice, and I don’t care that you don’t like mice. And I could spend a lot of time at night trying to figure out a better way to make something, but why should I do that? It would just help you and your profits. I’d rather watch the presidential debate.

So what would happen in a collective enterprise run by the workers? It’s their own enterprise. Of course they’re going to turn off the light. And what the hell would they steal for? They’d be stealing from themselves. And when they can figure out a better way to do something and it makes the business more profitable, it’s their business. We say that in America. We say it’s not good to rent a house, it’s better to own the house, because if you own the house, you care more about it. Oh. If that’s true, then it would make sense in the enterprise, too, wouldn’t it? How come it doesn’t apply there? Because it scares the people who own the enterprise. They don’t want you to think like that. It’s fine to think that about your house, just not where you work. It doesn’t work, friends. That’s illogical.

Here’s another difference. When a capitalist enterprise prices what they produce, a good or a service, they have to cover the costs of the materials that go into it, of course, and they have to cover the labor, the wages they pay their workers. But they have to cover something else: the profits they give to the shareholders. The price has to be high enough to generate the profits. But a worker-owned and -operated enterprise doesn’t have shareholders, doesn’t have to raise the price to cover the distribution of profits to the shareholders. So their price can be lower, which will enable them to outcompete the capitalist. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Look at that. It turns out that they can compete quite well.

And again, here’s the clue. Mondragon Corporation has an iron rule, which they explained to me when I visited there in May 2012. Every co-op enterprise within the large Mondragon corporation has to compete in the larger capitalist economy. No unit of the Mondragon Corporation will buy from another unit if they can get a better or a cheaper equivalent from a private capitalist enterprise. So everyone inside that corporation had to be competitive. And they were. That’s how they got to go from 6 to 120,000. They were successful capitalist competitors.

In San Francisco there’s a group of six bakeries called the Arizmendi Bakery. They’re all worker co-op, self-directed enterprises. Arizmendi, by the way, is the name they chose because it’s the name of the priest in northern Spain who started Mondragon, and it was in honor of him that they took that name. They’re very competitive. If you go to them, you get an espresso and a Danish or a croissant whatever it is you want, and you can do it at a competitive price. And they’ve been growing. They’ve made enough money with the bakeries—they started with one—and now they have six. So competition, not a problem.

The last couple of points. How do people feel who work in such a place? Not a minor matter. Here I’m going to give you some evidence from an American example that most people don’t know about and that even the people involved in don’t think about in the way I’m talking. The example comes from the Silicon Valley of California. Every year engineers, typically highly trained, well paid, working for big telecommunications and computer companies, quit their jobs. And together with 10 or 20 others they take their laptops and they gather in somebody’s garage, who has an extra garage, and they say,

We’re going to set up a new enterprise.

When you talk to them, here’s kind of the story you get.

We hate working for IBM or Cisco Systems or whatever, Oracle. We have to wear a tie and jacket. Ugh. We have to come at a certain time. We have some jerk sales manager telling us what we should invent in the way of software. We can’t bring our dog, we can’t bring our toddler, we can’t bring our Frisbee, and we’re not supposed to come high.

And if you know what an engineer in California is like, these are serious limits on what he or she would like to do.

But worst of all, we don’t like what we’re told to do. We have no freedom. We don’t do very good work. We hate this. All we get is a lot of money. But you know something, we don’t need that much.

They quit, and they set up a little enterprise.

It’s very interesting what they do. They set up an enterprise in which they say everyone here is equal—no boss, no supervisor, nobody tells anybody else what to do.

We get together on Fridays and we decide what we’re going to do and how we’re going to divide the labor. And we decide what to do with the profits from the software that we create. We can come to work the way we want. Loud Hawaiian shirt and louder Bermuda shorts. We are flying because we drank or ate or smoked something before we came to work, and we brought some with us. We have two toddlers. We’re not sure who they are, but we brought them. And we have six dogs. And we play Frisbee with the dogs and with the toddlers all day long and have a wonderful time.

Seriously, here’s what they say.

We are more creative than we have ever been. We’re free. We work out what we want to do together with engineers like ourselves who know what the issues are, what the problems are, what a reasonable solution might look like, what way to go. And we can work together. We make less money, but we love our work. We wouldn’t trade it for a million bucks. Wow. We’re more creative and we love our work.

Why are you more creative?

Well, we can invent, we can explore, we can do what we wanted to do when we went into this kind of work.

And then they point out something very powerful. I remember it blew me away when I first heard it.

We have made break-throughs in this little enterprise of 20 or 30 laptop users. We’ve made real break-throughs. And we’re angry, because the big businesses, the Oracles, the Cisco Systems, and all of them, claim they’re at the forefront of technological break-through. Crap. It’s not true. We’re the place where the break-throughs happen. In order to make a break-through, you need a different way of organizing.

Aha, listen to what they’re saying. These people have walked away from a capitalistically organized enterprise. And you know what they’ve created? A worker self-directed enterprise.

When you talk to them and you tell them,

You know, you have abandoned capitalism,

they get a sad, kind of hang-dog look, because it turns out that most of them are Republicans. They are. And they refer to what they have done as being—ready?—entrepreneurial innovators. And I always say when I talk to them,

I don’t care if you think what you did was invent a chartreuse banana. You can call it anything you want. You have done what was the dream

—and this gets them really upset—

of Karl Marx. And on behalf of Marx, who’s not around to tell you, I want to say to you thank you. Very good of you to do this, because it allows people like me to use you as an example,

just as I’m doing now.

So here we have this newborn kind of enterprise in our midst here in the U.S., proving that if you give American workers half a chance, choose you, American worker.

You want to go to work in a top-down, hierarchical capitalist enterprise? Be my guest. But if you would rather try to work in an environment of equals who make the decisions, where you can be a director as well as a drone, well, you could try this.

Of course, you could only try them if the U.S. gave you the freedom of choice, which it doesn’t. We believe in freedom of choice in the supermarket, where there should be 27 varieties of toothpaste that you can choose among.

But two different ways of organizing your work life? No, thank you. We don’t need it. Capitalism, as we all know, is the greatest system since sliced bread, and therefore no improvement or no alternative is needed.

That was a joke, friends. Sarcasm, okay?

So it turns out that if you give workers a chance, they will make these choices. They will surprise you. And when you think about it, it’s not so hard to understand why. Could it be done in the U.S.? Of course it could. Is this a feasible arrangement? No problem at all. So for those of you who think I’ve painted a lovely picture but it can’t be realized, I gotcha.

Here’s how we do it. We take some precedents from other places that have done it. First, let’s facilitate all the ways that working people who have a little money saved up could pool it to start the money they need to go into business as a collective, as a cooperative. Here’s another thought. Let’s borrow from an Italian law. It’s named after an Italian legislator, Marcora. It’s called the Marcora Law. Here’s how it works in Italy right now. It’s been on the books there since 1985. It works like a charm in Italy. They wouldn’t let it go. Here’s the deal. If you become unemployed in Italy, you have a choice. You can get a weekly unemployment check, just like we do in America. That’s choice one. But there’s choice two. Here in America there is no choice two. That’s because we believe in freedom of choice. Italy has a choice two. Here’s the choice. The Italian government will give you your entire two to three years of unemployment benefits, weekly check, in a lump sum right now at the beginning. You agree that you will make no more claims on the Italian government for unemployment; you’ve got your whole sum of money. And they will give it to you on one condition—that you find at least nine other unemployed people just like you who will agree, just like you, to take a lump sum, and then you agree to use the lump sum as capital with which to start a worker self-directed collective enterprise.

The argument for the law is, if workers start their own enterprise, they will work five times harder to make that successful than they would if they went to work as an employee for someone else. An interesting assumption, if you think about it. That’s the law in Italy. That’s how a lot of worker directed co-ops that exist in Italy today got started.

We could do that. We could do that. One more time. We could do that.

Here’s another thing we could do. We could take a page from the existing law in the U.S. We have in this country, as you know, the Small Business Administration. The idea is that big businesses have advantages over little ones in America and the little ones need to level the playing field. So there’s a special branch of the government to give the small businesses cheap loans, technical advice, to give them some help. We’ve been doing that for many decades in America.

Here’s another one: the Minority Business Administration, to help minority businesses get off the ground.

I’ve got a thought. A worker self-directed business administration, whose job it would be to give Americans a chance for a choice by creating and funding and giving technical help to workers’ cooperatives around the country, Americans could see what they look like, how they work, what it’s like to work there.

I have another thought. We could require labels on all our products. And the label would now say not just “Made in China” versus “Made in Brooklyn.” It would say “Made by a capitalist enterprise” or “Made by a worker collective enterprise.” And we as buyers could choose which kind of enterprise we wish to support. What a lovely opportunity to exercise our freedom of choice, which we don’t have, but which we talk a lot about. Which is a human characteristic. The more you miss it, the more you substitute bullshit about it, because you feel so sad that you don’t have it. We could do all those things. So is it possible to do? Yes. That would be the way to do it.

Finally—and I want to make sure that this point is as clear as I know how to make it—to bring worker self-directed enterprise organization to American enterprise is also a historic act that a generation like ours, yours, could and should and would be proud of, because what you’re doing is you’re completing the otherwise terribly incomplete democratic revolution of the last 300 years. Something terrible happened to democracy as we moved in that direction as a reaction to the absolute monarchies of Europe that we came out of. We said there would be democracy in the places where we lived, in our cities and towns, in our countries. We would have voting, we would give people power.

But we never brought it into our economic system. We allowed enterprises to develop in which a tiny group of people, the major shareholders and the board of directors, make decisions like kings. The rest of us all have to live. If they decide to close the factory, our jobs are gone. If they decide to use a toxic technology, our health is gone. If they decide to distribute most of the profits to a few people, our equilibrium with other people in the society is gone. We have to live with those decisions, and we participate in them not even a little.

Capitalism as a way of organizing an enterprise is fundamentally antidemocratic, and it’s always been like that. So if you have a commitment to democracy that’s more than verbal, you have a problem with capitalism, and you need to think about worker self-directed enterprise as the antidote, as the way finally to bring democracy to the workplace.

And isn’t it strange that it hasn’t always been there? Where do we all as adults spend most of our lives? Five out of seven days we go to work. For most of the hours of that day, we’re either getting ready for work or we’re at work or we’re recuperating from work. But work defines us. And if you have a commitment to democracy, that would have been the first place it ought to have been institutionalized. Not left out. To leave the workplace out of democracy is to undo your democracy. And you all know it. We all live in a country now that is stunning. The vast majority of people are polled by Gallup, by the CBS folks. We know what the majority of Americans think, and we know that our political leaders simply ignore it. The majority don’t want to be in Afghanistan. We’re there. The majority long ago stopped supporting the Iraq war. We’re there. The majority think the distribution of wealth and income in America is inappropriate. Who cares?

We know why. We know that if you have a political system that tries to be democratic superimposed on an economic system that isn’t, the economic system wins that struggle. It buys the political system. It makes sure that the political system cannot function democratically. Because if it did, then we would use our democratic power in politics to undo the effects of economics. If the economy made a few people superrich and the rest of us not, we would use our majority power in politics to undo that.

In a sense that’s what happened in the 1930s. The rich long ago figured that out. They use their money, their capitalist positions, to control the politics. To democratize the economy, you have to democratize the enterprise. And if you don’t do that, then your commitment to democracy is as shallow and as formal as our actual democracy is. The form is there, the content isn’t.

If you have found even some of these arguments in favor of an alternative way to organize enterprise, as a serious way to address many of the economic and social problems of our society that are now impacting every life in this room, then do me a favor, think about this. And talk to people about it, which is the best way to spread this. But for those of you that have wondered: There’s no alternative to this system that is so painful, that is so inadequate, there is. And if people begin to understand that and push for it, there’s no end to what we can do.

One personal note. As I hope you can see from the way I present these ideas, I am having the time of my life. And there’s a simple reason. My message isn’t different than it was 5 and 10 years ago. So that’s not the reason. The reason is that audiences across this country keep expanding with their numbers, their enthusiasm, and their openness. Something is shifting in the United States on a scale I have never seen in my lifetime and I was born here. Way better than anything that happened in the 1960s. So don’t feel down, this is an opportunity the likes of which do not come but once in a long while. This is a country that is changing.

Thank you.

For information about obtaining CDs, MP3s, or transcripts of this or other programs, please contact:
David Barsamian
Alternative Radio
P.O. Box 551
Boulder, CO 80306-0551
T: (800) 444-1977
info@alternativeradio.org

Magna Carta: Then and now

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 01:02:20 GMT

Noam Chomsky
Denver, Colorado
7 May 2013

The Magna Carta is the foundational document of the legal system. It crucially asserted that law is sovereign, not the king. Today, the term rule of law is invoked by whoever is in the White House. But you have to wonder what do they mean? There is one set of rules for official enemies and another for Washington and its minions. Take the Non-Proliferation Treaty, the NPT. Iran is a signatory and is being subjected to collective punishment, i.e., a stringent sanctions regime as well as the threat of military attack. Both are illegal. But hey why bother with technicalities. Meanwhile, U.S. allies such as Israel, India and Pakistan are not signatories to the NPT, have nuclear weapons and Washington says nothing. Principles to have any validity must be applied uniformly. What does it mean when a president is above the law?

This lecture and interview are available as a CD or mp3 or transcript from Alternative Radio

Noam Chomsky, legendary MIT professor, practically invented modern linguistics. In addition to his pioneering work in that field he has been a leading voice for peace and social justice for many decades. Edward Said said of him, “Noam Chomsky is one of the most significant challengers of unjust power and delusions; he goes against every assumption about American altruism and humanitarianism.” The New Statesman describes him as “the conscience of the American people.” He is the author of scores of books, including Hopes & Prospects, Occupy, How The World Works, and Power Systems with David Barsamian.

You can listen to Noam Chomsky speak for himself here.

Two years from now we’ll be reaching the 800th anniversary of a document of quite remarkable significance, the Magna Carta, extracted from King John by the barons in 1215. Unfortunately, we’re probably not going to be celebrating its achievements; we will more likely be mourning its demise. The Magna Carta has two parts. One part is or should be well known. It’s the Charter of Liberties, widely and justly recognized as the foundations of our highest principles of freedom and justice. The other part has long been forgotten, and it may be of even greater importance. I’ll come back to it later.

The Charter of Liberties provides the origins of the concept of presumption of innocence, of due process. Its most famous part is Article 39.

No free man shall be punished in any way, nor will we proceed against or prosecute him except by lawful judgment of his peers and by the law of the land.

That’s 1215. It has a long history that enters in slightly different form into the U.S. Constitution, which says that “no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law and a speedy and public trial by peers”—the core of our concept of justice. It has restrictions.

The term person in the Constitution, of course, doesn’t mean persons. It does not include slaves, of course does not include Native Americans, it did not include women. Under the prevailing British common law of the day, women were not persons, they were property. A woman was the property of her father, handed over to her husband. In fact, it’s worth recalling that it was not until the 1970s that the Supreme Court granted women the right of actual persons, peers entitled to serve federal juries. Post-Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution repeats that guarantee but extends it beyond the limited concept of persons in the Constitution. Personhood was granted to freed slaves. In later years, and up till the present, the term person has been both extended and narrowed by the courts. It has been extended to include collectivist legal fictions that are established and maintained by state power and taxpayer subsidy, called corporations; and it’s been narrowed to explicitly exclude undocumented aliens. That goes right up to very recent court cases. So “person” still doesn’t mean person, unfortunately.

There has been progress over eight centuries—habeas corpus, other extensions, additions—but there has also been regression, particularly in very recent years. Regression is quite sharp under the Bush and Obama administrations. Under Bush, the state claimed and was granted the right to capture and torture suspects. Obama changed that. Now he claims and is granted the right to murder them. That’s a crucial change from Bush to Obama. The means for carrying this out are the secret executive army, JSOC, the Joint Special Operations Command, which is under much less supervision than the CIA and more lethal, but particularly the terror weapons that are now being used quite extensively in what is by far the leading, most prominent and widespread terrorist campaign in the world, the drone campaigns of assassination.

We should bear in mind that drones are not just guns that kill somebody; they’re weapons designed to terrorize. That’s kind of obvious. If you’re in Denver, let’s say, and never know when you’re walking down the streets whether suddenly a person standing in front of you will be blasted away by some device you can’t see up in the sky, along with whoever may be standing next to him and other people who happen to be in the way, that’s a weapon of terror. It’s designed and used to terrorize communities, regions, and in fact by now quite large regions. By now there are large regions of the world where anybody, at any moment can expect a sudden blow from the Grim Reaper in Washington, who, incidentally, is acclaimed here in his terrorist activities for administering justice to those who are suspected of maybe someday thinking about harming us, so therefore they have to be blown away. Or who happen to be standing by, as often happens. Or who are misidentified by poor intelligence. Or who happen to have made a bad choice of a father, should have chosen a responsible father.

That was explained by Obama’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs, when he was asked why the Grim Reapers had murdered 16-year-old Abdul Rahman Awlaki at a barbecue with his cousins. They went too. Why were they killed? When Abdul Rahman’s irresponsible father had been killed, murdered, in fact, two weeks earlier, along with the man sitting next to him, of course that was reported. The New York Times had a headline saying, “The West Celebrates a Cleric’s Death.” Actually, not death, but the murder of a cleric. There were a few eyebrows raised in that case, unlike others, because Awlaki and the man next to him and his 16-year-old son were American citizens, and they are supposed to fall under the category of persons, unlike non-citizens, who are what George Orwell called “unpersons” and therefore all fair game for assassination under our current moral code.

We know how this is carried out. For example, there was a long story in The New York Times by two military correspondents, probably a White House leak. It seems the White House is proud of it. What happens—I’m sure you’ve read that story—is that President Obama sits down every Tuesday morning with his counterterrorism advisor, John Brennan, now head of the CIA, a former priest, so the two of them can read a chapter of St. Augustine together about just war, and then they run through the list, the “disposition matrix,” as it’s now called, and decide who we’re going to blow away today.

This is all celebrated. The reactions from the government are instructive. The Attorney General, Eric Holder, was asked whether he didn’t think that had violated due process in the case of American citizens. He said, No, they have due process, because we discuss it in the executive branch. King John in 1215 would have been delighted with that answer—one sign of how we’re progressing. Presumably they didn’t read another chapter of St. Augustine’s work, one that should be famous. St. Augustine relates a parable of how in the reign of Alexander the Great a pirate is captured. The pirate is brought to the emperor and Alexander angrily asks the pirate, “How dare you molest the seas?” And pirate responds, “How dare you molest the whole world? I have a small ship, so I am a pirate. You have a great navy, so you are an emperor.” Augustine says he found the pirate’s answer elegant and excellent. I doubt if that was read.

The elite reactions tell us a lot about what’s happening to this country, to us. Take Joe Klein, a liberal columnist. He was asked on MSNBC, which is supposedly the liberal channel, what his reaction was to the drone killings of four little girls in Yemen. He also gave an answer that was excellent and elegant. He said,

The bottom line in the end is whose 4-year-old gets killed. And what we’re doing is limiting the possibility that 4-year-olds here are going to get killed by indiscriminate acts of terror.

So it’s a good idea to kill 4-year-old kids somewhere in Yemen because maybe those who see that will realize that they’d better not think of harming us. Although chances are quite high that what they will actually think of is revenge and try to find a way, if they can, to harm us as much as they’re able to.

This, incidentally, is well understood by high officials, by experts on the topic, for example, Gregory Johnson. He’s a Princeton University specialist on Yemen. I’ll read his words.

The most enduring policy legacy of the past four years may well turn out to be an approach to counterterrorism that American officials call “the Yemen model.” It’s a mixture of drone strikes and special forces raids targeting people thought to be al-Qaeda leaders. Testimonies from al-Qaeda fighters and interviews that I and local journalists have conducted across Yemen attest to the centrality of civilian casualties in explaining al-Qaeda’s rapid growth here.

The United States is killing women, children, and members of key tribes. Each time they kill a tribesman, they create more fighters for al-Qaeda,

a Yemeni explained to him over tea. Another, he says, told CNN after a strike,

I would not be surprised if a hundred tribesman joined al-Qaeda as a result of the latest drone mistake.

That’s an interesting illustration of the willful blindness about this.

In yesterday’s New York Times there is a lead story on the threat of what’s called “solo terrorism,” individuals who might decide to carry out acts of terror, like the Marathon bombings. They might emanate from Yemen. There are a lot of citations and learned commentary on what might be the various psychological disorders of the perpetrators of these acts. But there’s not a single word on why the Yemenis or Pakistanis or Somalis might want to harm the United States, though the answer is hardly obscure.

Also interesting is the attitude towards terror of the leading intellectual lights of the liberal establishment, for example, the highly regarded liberal commentator of The New York Times, Thomas Friedman, also a Middle East specialist. He was interviewed in May 2003 by Charlie Rose. That’s the highbrow discussion program on PBS. We’re supposed to be impressed. He was asked by Rose what his recommendations were for the U.S. occupying Army in Iraq—this is the early months of the occupation—and he gave an answer that was also simple and elegant. I have to read it; I can’t paraphrase. Friedman says,

We needed to go over there basically, take out a very big stick right in the heart of that world. What Muslims needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house from Basra to Baghdad and basically saying, “Which part of this sentence don’t you understand? You don’t think we care about our open society? You think this bubble of terrorism fantasy, we’re just going to let it grow? Well, suck on this.”

In short, a severe dose of humiliation administered by American boys and girls will teach the terrified women and children whose houses they break into that they’d better stop terrorizing us. I’m keeping to the liberal extreme. You go to right, it gets a lot worse.

The same is true of policy. Take, for example, the Marathon bombings a couple weeks ago. Plenty of people in Boston were touched, even personally, by that tragic event. So, for example, in my case, a young police officer was murdered right outside my office, friends were at the finish line where bombs went off, others were under the militarization of neighborhoods where the second suspect was finally caught. That’s rare. It’s rare for privileged people like us to get a little sense of what others live with constantly. That’s not usual. So, for example, Yemen again. Two days after the Marathon bombing there was a drone strike in Yemen on a remote village. It killed the target. We know about it because there happened to be— usually we don’t know, but in this case there happened to be testimony in the Senate a couple of days later by a young Yemeni man who comes from the village.

His testimony is interesting. He said that for years the jihadis in Yemen have been trying to turn the village against the Americans to make them hate America, but they failed, because the only thing the villagers know about America is what I tell them from here. I’m a village boy who is lucky enough to be here, and I tell them good things about America. But, he said, the one drone strike accomplished what the jihadis had failed to do for years. So we generate some more “solo terrorists.” He also pointed out that the suspect in this case was well known in the village, could easily have been apprehended. But it’s kind of easier just to blow him away, whatever the consequences.

There are other cases like that, even more serious ones, like the murder of Osama bin Laden. And the term “murder” is correct. Bin Laden was a suspect. Eight centuries ago there used to be an understanding that there’s a concept of presumption of innocence. Suspects are supposed to be brought to a fair and speedy trial. In this case it wouldn’t have been very difficult. He was apprehended, defenseless, alone with his wife, by 79 highly trained members of the Joint Special Forces Command, Navy SEALS. They blew him away on orders and dumped his body into the ocean without autopsy. That’s also easily taken care of. In fact, there was some protest about it, some question, very little, but a little, and there was a response to it by another respected left liberal commentator, Matthew Yglesias. He patiently explained that

one of the main functions of the international institutional order is precisely to legitimate the use of deadly military force by western powers.

That means by us. So, he says, it’s “amazingly naïve” to suggest that the United States should obey international law or other conditions that we impose on the powerless. Incidentally, he’s referring specifically to me, and I happily accept the guilt.

But let’s look a little bit beyond. How did they locate bin Laden? The technique that was used, this time by the CIA, was to start a fake vaccination campaign in a town where they thought he might be located. The campaign started in a poor area, but along the way they realized that bin Laden was probably somewhere else, so they cut off the campaign. This alone violates principles of medical ethics or elementary ethics that go back to classical times, to the Hippocratic Oath. But anything is okay if you’re the Godfather. So no comment on that.

It gets worse. Throughout a lot of the poor countries is that there is fear, and quite justified fear, of what these white guys are doing. Justified. They’ve got a history. We may not like to think about it. What are they doing when they come in, these rich white guys, and start poking our arms? What are they up to? There’s plenty of fear. Okay, Obama gave them a lesson in what they’re up to. They’re involved in a campaign to murder somebody they don’t like. That had an effect, a big effect, in Pakistan, but also beyond, as far as Nigeria. It aroused fear of the polio vaccination program that’s underway. Polio is practically eradicated. It could go the way of smallpox in no time if it weren’t for our fun and games. Pakistan is one of the last places where it’s endemic. Polio workers soon began to be abducted and killed, and the UN had to withdraw its whole polio vaccination team. A specialist on this matter at Columbia University, Les Roberts, estimated that this will probably cause 100,000 cases of polio in Pakistan. He pointed out that one of these days people in Pakistan are going to point to that kid sitting in a wheelchair and say, “You did this to him,” and there’s going to be a reaction, as you would expect. The same happened in Nigeria, maybe elsewhere.

There’s more. When Obama sent the Joint Special Forces Command into Pakistan—which is, of course, aggression, a violation of international law, but we’re above that—they were under orders, to fight their way out if they were apprehended. And if they had had to fight their way out, the U.S. forces would not have let them be. They would have used the full force of American military power to extricate them. And it came very close. The Pakistani chief of staff, Kayani, was informed of the invasion, and he ordered his staff, in his words, to “confront any unidentified aircraft.” He assumed there it was probably an attack from India, the main enemy. At the same time, in Kabul, not far away, the commanding general, David Petraeus, ordered U.S. warplanes to respond if Pakistanis scrambled their fighter jets. We were on the verge of war with a well trained, disciplined army dedicated to the defense of the sovereignty of Pakistan and with plenty of nuclear weapons and, incidentally, laced with radical Islamists. So Obama was saying, Okay, we’ll take a chance on a nuclear war, which will destroy most of the world, because we have to carry out this assassination. That’s worth thinking about.

It brings up another basic human right, which wasn’t discussed in the Magna Carta, the right to security, even the right to survival. If you look at scholarship and you go to school and you believe what you hear, then the security of citizens is supposed to be the prime commitment of state authorities. In fact, that’s the foundation of international relations theory. But it’s very far from true. Actually, the Yemen assassinations are an example. The U.S. is creating future terrorists more quickly than it’s killing people who might possibly be a danger someday.

It’s worth remembering that these are self-generating processes. When you build up institutions like JSOC, the drone system, they keep expanding. In fact, they are generating targets which require them to expand. So we can expect it to go on, and we can also expect it to come back home. That’s traditional. You work out ways of terrorizing and controlling people abroad, and not long after, similar methods are used at home. There are already dangerous beginnings of that. And I’ll put that off.

However, there is a much more serious threat than terror. Instant destruction by nuclear weapons. Actually, the bin Laden assassination is an example. But it’s worth remembering that this has never been a high priority for state officials. The idea of protecting the U.S. from what would, in fact, be total destruction from nuclear weapons has just not been a high priority. There’s plenty of evidence for that. We can ignore it if we like, but it’s there.

So, for example, you go back to 1950. The U.S. had tremendous security, overwhelming power, but there was a potential threat. The potential threat didn’t exist then, but it was potential. It was the threat of ICBMs with hydrogen-bomb warheads. There would have been a way to deal with that threat. In fact, the Russians, who were the potential enemy, knew that they were way behind the U.S. in military technology, and they proposed to sign a treaty with the U.S. to ban the development of these systems. If that had been done, it would have eliminated the one and only serious, indeed massive, threat to the security of people of the U.S. There’s a detailed history of nuclear strategy by McGeorge Bundy, who was Kennedy’s and Johnson’s national security adviser. He had access to internal documents. It’s interesting to read it. He mentions, more or less in passing, that he was unable to find a single internal paper in the government that even considered this possibility when they were offered the treaty by Russia. It just doesn’t matter.

It goes on. Two years later, in 1952, Stalin made a remarkable offer. It was known, it wasn’t secret. The offer was to permit Germany to be unified and have free, internationally supervised elections, which, of course, the West would win, but on the condition that it be militarily neutralized. For the Russians that’s not a small thing. Germany alone had practically destroyed Russia several times during the past half century and, as part of a Western military alliance, it’s very frightening. That was the offer. It was kind of ridiculed. There was one well- known policy analyst, James Warburg, quite influential, who did write about it, but that was dismissed, basically with ridicule. Now, years later, with the Russian archives opened, it’s being taken seriously by conservative scholarship, that says it could have been that there was something to it. If the U.S. had followed up with it, it would have greatly reduced the threat of war. It would have also ended the official reason for NATO. That was all pretty serious. But it was ignored.

A couple of years later, Nikita Khrushchev came in. He recognized as did the Russian military that they were way behind the U.S. in military power, and Khrushchev made an offer to the U.S. to sharply reduce offensive weapons mutually so as to cut back the threat of war in Europe. The Kennedy administration was aware of the offer, they considered it, and they rejected it. They rejected it even when Khrushchev went ahead unilaterally to cut back offensive weapons. In fact, the Kennedy administration reaction was to sharply increase military spending and military force. That had consequences, too. That was one of the reasons why in 1962 Khrushchev sent missiles to Cuba to try to right the enormous military imbalance somehow. That led to what Arthur Schlesinger, historian, Kennedy adviser, called “the most dangerous moment in world history,” the Cuban missile crisis.

There was another reason for it. The Kennedy administration, after the Bay of Pigs, had launched a major terrorist war against Cuba, economic warfare but also a straight terrorist war. Schlesinger again, in his biography of Robert Kennedy, says that the goal of the war was to “bring the terrors of the earth to Cuba.” Robert Kennedy was in charge, it was his prime responsibility. It was pretty serious. We don’t read about it, but it matters to people at the other end of the guns. That operation, Operation Mongoose, was set up to lead to a U.S. invasion in October 1962. Cubans doubtless knew, the Russians knew. That was another reason for putting the missiles into Cuba. Then we get to “the most dangerous moment in world history.”

It’s worth paying attention to what actually happened. It tells you a lot about how our government, and states generally, consider, how they rank the threat of survival for their own citizens. A lot is known about this. We have a horde of internal documents that have been declassified. They’re very clear. There’s no ambiguity about what they say. On October 26th the U.S. B52 fleet was armed with nuclear weapons and ready to attack Moscow. Furthermore, the option of bombing was actually down to individual pilots. Some pilot might have decided, Okay, let’s blow up the world. Kennedy himself was leaning towards military action to remove the missiles from Cuba. His own subjective estimate of the probability of nuclear war was between a third and a half.

That evening, October 26th, Kennedy received a private letter from Khrushchev with an offer to end the crisis. How? The Russians would withdraw the missiles from Cuba and the U.S. would withdraw the missiles from Turkey. Now, Kennedy didn’t actually know that there were missiles in Turkey. In fact, when they were talking in the internal meetings and was he talking about how dangerous the missiles were in Cuba, he said, Look, if we had put missiles in Turkey, it would really be very dangerous. And McGeorge Bundy, his national security adviser, leaned over him and told him quietly, We have missiles in Turkey. But, in fact, those missiles were being withdrawn. The reason? They were being replaced with much more lethal, invulnerable Polaris submarines. So Khrushchev’s offer actually was to withdraw the missiles from Cuba if the U.S. would withdraw obsolete missiles from Turkey for which a withdrawal order had already been given. Kennedy rejected it, with the estimate of a threat of a third to a half of nuclear war.

In my view, that’s maybe the most horrendous decision in human history. We take a huge risk of destroying the world in order to establish the principle that we have a right to have missiles on anybody’s border threatening them, anywhere in the world, and no one else has a right to threaten us. This is a unilateral right. They can’t do it even to deter a planned invasion. That’s not the worst of it. The worst is that in our kind of intellectual system, Kennedy is praised for his cool courage at this moment. In my view, that’s shocking.

It continues. Ten years later, 1973, there was a Middle East war, Israel, Egypt, and Syria. In the middle of that war, Henry Kissinger, who was then in charge, ordered a high-level nuclear alert. The goal of the alert, we know from declassified documents, was to warn the Russians not to interfere when Israel violated the ceasefire that the Russians and the Americans had agreed on. Kissinger had informed Israel they could violate the ceasefire, if they want, and keep going. There was some concern the Russians might react, and the nuclear alert was set up to warn them away. Fortunately, it worked.
Ten years later, Ronald Reagan comes in. As soon as his administration opened, they began to probe Russian defenses with simulating air and naval attacks into Russia. The Russians weren’t sure what’s going on. They also installed Pershing missiles in Germany that had a 5- minute flight time to Russian targets, that provided what the CIA called “super sudden first strike capability.” Naturally, this caused plenty of alarm in Russia. Unlike us, they’re quite vulnerable and had been invaded, almost destroyed numerous times. And it led to a major war scare in 1983. I won’t go on. But this continues. The most recent case is the bin Laden assassination. Unfortunately, none of this is discussed. Try to find some discussion of it.

And there are other cases waiting. In fact, three cases are on the front pages right now, so let’s take a look at them. These are North Korea, Iran, and China.

As you know, in the last couple of weeks North Korea has been issuing wild and dangerous threats. They’re an unpredictable place. All of this is attributed here to the lunacy of North Korean leaders. Arguably, this is the worst country in the world, with the most grotesque leadership in the world. But there are some questions that we shouldn’t ignore. For example, we could ask how we would react if a superpower that had virtually leveled the U.S. in the most intense bombing in history were right now carrying out simulated nuclear attacks on our border by the most advanced bombers in the world, stealth B2 and B52 bombers. That’s part of an escalating crisis that began with U.S. South Korean war games. They’re regular, but these included for the first time

a simulation of a preemptive attack in an all-out war scenario against North Korea.

Their lunatic leaders know all this.

And they can presumably also read official U.S. military publications, which we choose not to read, though it’s not a good choice. We should read them. They’re public. So, for example, the official Air Force History and Air Force Strategic Studies Quarterly. Take a look back at the enthusiastic description of the exciting military operations that were carried out a month before the 1953 armistice. At that time there was nothing left to bomb anymore in North Korea. Everything above ground had been almost destroyed. I’ll just read what you can read there, if you turn to it.

They turned to bombing the dams.

That’s, incidentally, a war crime for which people were hanged at Nuremberg, but put that aside.

This object lesson in air power to all the Communist world [the attack on the major irrigation dam] is highly successful, caused a flash flood that scooped clear 27 miles of valley below. Along with other attacks on dams, this devastated 75% of the controlled water supply for North Korea’s rice production. It sent the commissars scurrying to the press and radio centers to blare to the world the most severe, hate-filled harangues to come from the Communist propaganda mill in the three years of warfare. To the Communists, the smashing of the dams meant primarily the destruction of their chief sustenance, rice. Westerners can little conceive the awesome meaning which the loss of this staple food commodity has for Asians—starvation and slow death. Hence the show of rage, the flare of violent tempers, and the threats of reprisals when bombs fell on the five irrigation dams.

In other words, these stupid gooks just can’t perceive the elegance of our technological achievements. They can read that, even if we choose not to because we don’t want to know anything about ourselves.

There is also a more recent history that they no doubt know very well, as does the leading U.S. scholarship on the topic. I’ll review some high points. I’m quoting top American scholarship, a study by Leon Sigal in this case. Here’s a couple of recent high points. In 1993, North Korea was about to strike a deal with Israel. The deal would be that North Korea would end missile and other weapons exports to the Middle East, which is an enormous value for Israeli security, and in return Israel would recognize North Korea. Clinton intervened. He pressured Israel to reject it. They do what they’re told. Consider the relations of power. It’s obvious. North Korea reacted. They retaliated by carrying out their first test of a medium-range missile.

A year later, there was a so-called framework agreement between North Korea and the United States as to nuclear issues. Actually, neither side observed the agreement completely, but they mostly kept to it. Things kept stable until President Bush took office. At the time when he took office—I’m now quoting U.S. scholarly studies—

the North Koreans had stopped testing long-range missiles. They had one or two bombs’ worth of plutonium and were verifiably not making more.

That’s when Bush came in. Bush’s aggressive militarism and threats and “axis of evil” and all the rest quickly led to a revival of North Korea’s missile and nuclear programs. By 2006 North Korea had developed eight to ten nuclear weapons and had resumed long-range missile tests. One of the many successes of the neocons.

A year earlier, 2005, an agreement had been reached under which

North Korea agreed to abandon all nuclear weapons and existing weapons programs and allow international inspections in return for international aid and a non-aggression pledge with the United States along with commitments from the two sides to respect each other’s sovereignty, exist peacefully together, and take steps to normalize relations.

That didn’t work. The Bush administration immediately undermined that agreement. Immediately. They disbanded the international consortium that had been set up to provide North Korea with light water reactors, they renewed the threat of force, they pressured international banks to freeze North Korea’s hard currency accounts that included proceeds from ordinary foreign trade. And then North Korea reacted, predictably, in their strange and incomprehensible ways.

There have been other interactions since. I won’t run through them. Sigal concludes that

North Korea has been playing tit for tat, reciprocating whenever Washington cooperates, retaliating whenever Washington reneges.

It’s doubtless a horrible place, but the record does suggest directions that could be taken to reduce the threat of war, if that were a concern, not military maneuvers and simulated nuclear bombing on the borders. You can think that one through.

Let’s turn to what’s called “the gravest threat to world peace”—I’m now quoting both presidential candidates Obama and Romney in the last foreign policy debate, duly repeated the next day in the nation’s press— Iran’s nuclear program. That raises a couple questions. Who thinks it’s the greatest threat to world peace and what is the threat? We have answers to that. It’s a Western obsession, primarily a U.S. obsession. The nonaligned countries—that’s most of the world—have vigorously supported repeatedly, quite recently again, Iran’s right to enrich uranium. As signers of the Nonproliferation Treaty, they have that the right.

What about the Arab world right next to them? What we hear and what we read is that the Arabs support the U.S. on Iran, which is not totally false, because in the U.S., when we talk about a country, we talk about the dictators, not the people. And it’s true that the dictators tend to support U.S. policy. But we know something about the irrelevant people. There are regular polls taken by U.S. polling agencies in the Arab world. The results are quite interesting. The Arabs don’t like Iran. There are hostilities that go back forever. But they don’t regard it as much of a threat. They don’t like it, but they don’t regard it as a threat. They do see threats—the United States and Israel. Those they regard as major threats. In fact a poll right before the Tahrir Square uprising in Egypt found that though Egyptians don’t like Iran, a pretty large majority of them, thought the region might be more secure if Iran had nuclear weapons to fend off the authentic threats, U.S. and Israel.

This, incidentally, is one of the reasons why the U.S. and its allies are so strongly opposed to any democratization in the Arab world. That’s not the rhetoric; I’m talking about the actions. The rhetoric is that we always love democracy, just as Stalin did and everyone did. But you don’t pay attention to soaring rhetoric. If you want to be serious, you look at actions. It’s obvious why the U.S. and England and France don’t want democracy in the Arab world. Democracy, if it means anything, means that public opinion is supposed to have some influence over policy. And what I’ve just mentioned are hardly the policies that the U.S. and its allies want.

What about the next question? What’s the threat supposed to be? Let’s say we take the U.S. point of view, that this is “the gravest threat to world peace.” What is it? Actually, there’s an authoritative answer to that. You can read it, you can find it on the Internet. It comes from the highest sources. The Pentagon and U.S. intelligence provide a review of the global security situation to Congress every year, and, of course, they talk about Iran. And they do regard it as a very grave threat. But it’s very interesting to read why. These are not secret documents, perfectly public. They say that Iran is not a military threat: it has very limited capacity to deploy force. Its military spending is low, even by the standards of the region, minuscule as compared to Israel or, of course, the U.S. They have a strategic doctrine. Their doctrine is defensive. It’s to try to deter an invasion long enough for diplomacy to set in. They, of course, talk about nuclear weapons. U.S. sources say they don’t know if Iran has a nuclear weapons program, but if it does, it would be part of their deterrent strategy. If any country needs a deterrent, it’s Iran. It’s surrounded on all sides by major nuclear powers. It’s under direct, constant threat by the global superpower, which is, incidentally, in violation of the UN Charter, if anybody cares about that. That’s what it means when Obama says all options are open. That means, I disregard the UN Charter, which bans the threat or use of force in international affairs. But by the Yglesias principle, we can put that aside. So they’re under constant, serious threat. Conceivably, they’re developing a deterrent.

Why is that a threat to us? Think it through. If you’re a rogue state and you’re the Godfather, and you have to control everything, and you have to have a right to use force wherever you like, then a deterrent is intolerable. So that’s a major threat to us. That’s what the threat is.

I might mention that there is another rogue state that follows the same principle—our Israeli client. And it can act with impunity, thanks to the protection from the Godfather. We saw an interesting case a couple of days ago. As you know, Israel bombed military installations in Syria. Why? If you read the generally approving accounts in the press, they did give a reason. It was to prevent the threat that Syria might give Hezbollah weapons. Why is that a threat to Israel? Because they could be used to deter an invasion of Lebanon. Israel has already invaded Lebanon five times. They might do it again. If Hezbollah has missiles, that’s a deterrent. And if you want to be the regional sub-Godfather, you can’t admit such a deterrent.

There’s a third question besides who thinks it’s a threat and what is the threat? And that is, how can you deal with the threat, whatever it is? There are some ways. For example, a way was found in May 2010, when Turkey and Brazil reached an agreement with Iran that Iran would send its low enriched uranium out of the country for storage to Turkey, and in return the West would provide Iran with isotopes that it needs for its medical reactors. As soon as that agreement was announced, the U.S. government and the media immediately launched into an attack on Brazil and Turkey for daring to end “the gravest threat to world peace.” Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, commented that

the U.S. refuses to take yes for an answer.

The foreign minister of Brazil was kind of annoyed, and he released a letter that had been sent from Obama to the president of Brazil, Lula da Silva, in which Obama had proposed exactly what they did, probably assuming that Iran wouldn’t accept and he could get some propaganda points. Well, Iran accepted. So therefore Obama raced new sanctions through the UN, Washington and the press denounced Brazil and Turkey for their effrontery, and that option was gone.

There’s a more far-reaching proposal. It happens to have been raised recently by the nonaligned countries, most of the world, but it’s an old proposal. It’s been pressed particularly by the Arab states for many years, Egypt in the forefront. That’s to move towards establishing a nuclear-weapons-free zone in the region. There are such zones around the world. And it’s one of the ways to take steps towards what in fact is our legal obligation to move to get rid of nuclear weapons. These are steps. In the Middle East it would be extremely important, because, after all, that’s where “the gravest threat to world peace” is.

Can you do anything about that? Yes, you can. For example, there was a possibility last December. There was supposed to be an international conference in Finland last December to take steps towards advancing this proposal to develop a nuclear-weapons-free zone. Israel said they wouldn’t attend the conference. In November, Iran said they would attend the conference. Within days, Obama called the conference off. The Arab states said they would press it anyway, but they can’t do anything. The European parliament passed a resolution appealing for quick renewal of the proposal, but they can’t do anything. In fact, the only people who could do anything are people like you, if citizens of the U.S. could do something about that. But there’s a precondition. They have to know about it. You can’t do anything if you’ve never heard of it. And you can’t hear of it, because the press, with astonishing uniformity, did not report a single word about this, any of it. Try to find it. It’s not orders from the government, it’s not collusion. It’s just kind of an internal understanding that you just don’t report things like that. So there won’t be any protest, and we may march on to what looks like a war.

Let’s finally have a couple of words about China. That’s a potential confrontation, maybe a serious one. Actually, China also has memories, just like North Korea. For example, the Chinese no doubt remember that in 1962, six months before the missile crisis, Kennedy sent offensive missiles with nuclear warheads to Okinawa aimed at China at a moment of extreme tension in the region. In 1962 there was kind of a war going on between India and China. You know, the weird Chinese, not happy about this. They remember it. It doesn’t get discussed here, because it’s our right. We’re the emperor, after all. We can molest the world. So it’s barely mentioned here.

China also can look around and see what’s happening. China is surrounded by U.S. military forces, all around it. Japan, which China has some memories of, is a major base for U.S. power. Okinawa, right to the south, is a huge base. The Okinawans have been trying to get rid of the American installations for years, protesting against them, but nothing doing. The U.S. is now, with Obama’s pivot to Asia, establishing new bases in northwestern Australia, in the Philippines, in Vietnam, in South Korea. There’s an island in South Korea called an “Island of Peace,” incidentally, the scene of huge massacres in 1948, when South Korea was under U.S. control. The U.S. and South Korea are now building a major naval base there, which is aimed at China. And Guam, of course. They can only see this as a threatening arc of military power that surrounds them, and also surrounds the waters that are crucial for their trade with the Middle East and elsewhere.

It’s kind of interesting to see how this is all formulated here. A couple of days ago The New York Times had an article very upset about China’s military buildup, incidentally, to a small fraction of ours. This is depicted as “a serious challenge to the United States in the waters around China.” “A serious challenge…in the waters around China.” This is not a challenge in the Caribbean or off the coast of California. Everybody would be blown away if there were any such challenge. But in the waters around China it’s a challenge. If you look at the U.S. strategic journals, analysts describe this confrontation as what they call “a classic security dilemma,” in which each side sees fundamental interests at stake over control of the waters around China. So the U.S. regards its policies of controlling those waters as defensive. China regards them as threatening, obviously. Similarly, the Chinese, oddly, are not happy when the U.S. sends the advanced nuclear aircraft carrier, George Washington, into waters near China that place Beijing within the range of its nuclear missiles. They don’t like that. Of course, the U.S. would never tolerate anything remotely like that. This “classic security dilemma” again makes sense on the assumption that the U.S. has the right to control most of the world by force, do what it wants, and that U.S. security, unlike everyone else’s, requires something approaching absolute global control, otherwise we’re not secure. An interesting notion, which goes back deep into American history.

Let me put that aside and turn to another threat to survival, not immediate but imminent. You’re all aware of it. It’s environmental catastrophe. The facts are familiar to anyone who bothers to read scientific journals. And each one is more alarming than the last one. To take a couple of very recent reports, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a government administration, gave its latest report on ocean surface temperatures off the northeast U.S. coast. They’re the highest in 150 years, with drastic effects on ecosystems. They keep going up. A couple weeks before that Science magazine, the main scientific weekly, reported a study that showed that

even slightly warmer temperatures, which are less than what’s anticipated in the coming years, could start melting permafrost [mainly in Siberia], which in turn will trigger the release of huge amounts of greenhouse gases, methane—[much worse than carbon dioxide]—that are trapped in the ice and that will set off escalating nonlinear processes of destruction.

Geologists and archeologists are now considering establishment of a new geological era. History is broken up into geological eras. The new era they are discussing is what they’re calling the Anthropocene, starting with the Industrial Revolution, which is having huge effects on the Earth. The preceding era, the Holocene, begins around 11,000 years ago, about the time of the rise of agriculture. And the age before that, the Pleistocene, lasted 2 1/2 million years. You take a look at the acceleration and that gives an indication of the fate towards which we’re careening. Meanwhile, research papers in the Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, super-respectable, report,

One hundred nine countries have enacted some form of policy regarding renewable power and 118 countries have set targets for renewable energy. In contrast, one country, the United States, has not adopted any consistent and stable set of policies at the national level to foster the use of renewable energy.

That’s not because of public opinion. Public opinion strongly supports measures to deal with the looming crisis. U.S. public opinion is not very far from that in other parts of the world.

That’s kind of interesting, because, as I’m sure you know, there has been a massive corporate offensive here for years to convince the public that either there’s no global warming at all or, if there is, we don’t have anything to do with it, no human contribution. That offensive is escalating, accelerating right now in interesting ways because of fears in the corporate sector that the public is just too infected by scientific rationality. That’s as big a threat as a deterrent. An interesting program is being initiated by a group you may know of, ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council. It sounds innocuous. It’s a corporate-funded group that proposes legislation for state legislatures. You can imagine what they propose. And they’ve got plenty of clout, given the wealth and power behind them, so a lot of these get accepted. There’s a new one that’s just being started that’s for K-to-12, kindergarten to 12th grade, education programs. They’re trying to convince state legislatures that they should introduce what they call “balanced teaching to develop critical thinking.” That sounds good. What’s “balanced teaching”? That means along with teaching what’s called “climate science,” you should teach climate change denial to kindergarteners and all the way up. Then they will have critical thinking and we’ll be better off. There are a couple of states that have already adopted it. We can expect a lot more like this.

Let’s put this aside and imagine what a future historian, assuming that there is one, and it’s not obvious that there will be—looks back at what’s happening right before our eyes, looks back at the early 21st century. For the first time in history humans are facing quite significant prospects of severe calamity, maybe destruction of the possibilities of decent survival, as a result of actions of theirs. It’s not secret. The facts are before our eyes. Despite the efforts of the corporate sector to conceal them, most people see them.

There’s a range of reactions around the world. At one extreme there are some who are trying to act decisively to prevent possible catastrophe. At the other extreme, policies are designed to enhance the threat, while the most powerful domestic actors are undertaking major efforts to deny what’s happening and to dumb down the population so they won’t interfere with short-term profits.

Leading the effort to intensify the likely disaster is the richest and most powerful country in world history, with incomparable advantages, along with Canada, which is in many ways even worse. We’re leading the effort. Leading the effort to preserve conditions in which our immediate descendants might have a decent life are the so-called primitive societies, the First Nations, tribal societies, indigenous societies, aboriginal societies. That’s going on all over the world. In the Western Hemisphere, for example, the countries with large indigenous populations, Bolivia and Ecuador, are pursuing efforts to introduce what they call “rights of nature.” We’ve got to protect “rights of nature.” Ecuador has a big indigenous population, it’s a majority in Bolivia. Ecuador is an oil producer, but they’re seeking financial aid from the rich countries so that they can keep the oil underground, where it’s supposed to be. That’s the backward, primitive societies. Meanwhile, here we’re racing with total enthusiasm towards quick disaster. Every time Obama or anyone else talks about 100 years of energy independence, as if it meant anything, what they’re saying is, Let’s destroy the world as fast as we can. So suppose we get every drop of hydrocarbons out by fracking and tar sands and anything else you can think of. What’s the world going to look like? Not our concern. That’s the concern of primitive, backward people, who have these sentimental ideas about the rights of nature. That’s what a future historian will see, if there is one.

Let me just make a last comment about this. All of this traces back to Magna Carta, 800 years ago. The Magna Carta had two components. One is the Charter of Liberties, the famous one, which I discussed, the foundation of Anglo-American law, now being torn to shreds before our eyes. The other part is what was called the Charter of Forests. That was dedicated to protection of the commons from the ravages of the power centers of the day. That record is preserved for us in things like the Robin Hood myths. That’s what they’re about.

What are the commons? The commons weren’t just the forests. They were the source of sustenance for the general population: food, fuel, welfare. There’s the classic image that goes back to the Bible of widows gleaning things from the commons for fuel and food. That’s what the commons were. They were very carefully nurtured and protected for centuries by people like these primitive, backward people today who are trying to save the planet.
In capitalist ethics, there’s a different concept. It’s called the tragedy of the commons. That’s familiar. The thesis is that if the common possessions are left to the population, they will be destroyed, so you have to privatize them and put them into the hands of the Koch brothers and so on. Then they’ll be protected. That’s capitalist ethics. Unless common possessions are privatized, they will be destroyed. There’s a principle behind it. It’s the principle that Adam Smith described as what he called “the vile maxim of the masters of mankind”: everything for ourselves and nothing for anyone else. That’s the concept that has to be drilled into people’s heads to make them total sociopaths. The reality is, of course, quite the opposite. Privatization leads to the destruction of the commons in pursuit of “the vile maxim.”

What happened to the Charter of the Forests that was an equal part of Magna Carta? It was dismantled with the rise of capitalism in England centuries ago by enclosures and other measures to privatize the commons. It was followed centuries later in the United States. This central part of Magna Carta has long been forgotten, apart from the traditional societies that are trying to fend off the disaster that’s approaching as we, in our brilliance, lead the way off the cliff like the proverbial lemmings.

(Due to time constraints some portions of the lecture were not included in the national broadcast. Those portions are included in this transcript.)

For information about obtaining CDs, MP3s, or transcripts of this or other programs, please contact:
David Barsamian
Alternative Radio
P .O. Box 551
Boulder, CO 80306-0551
phone (800) 444-1977
info@alternativeradio.org
www.alternativeradio.org ©2013

Corporations, communities, and the environment

Wed, 22 May 2013 13:01:47 GMT

Thomas Linzey
Eugene, Oregon
2 March 2013

Communities across the country, trying to stop a wide range of threats and unwanted projects such as gas drilling and fracking, mining, pipelines, factory farming, sewage sludging, landfills, coal shipments and GMOs, all run into the same problem: they don’t have the legal authority to say “no” to them. With their high priced lawyers and huge political influence corporadoes shape the law. That may be changing. A recent court ruling in Pennsylvania says that corporations are not “persons.” They cannot elevate their “private rights” above the rights of people. Others can’t wait for the legal system to catch up. Sandra Steingraber, noted biologist and scholar, shortly after appearing on Bill Moyers and on Alternative Radio, has gone to jail. In an act of civil disobedience, Steingraber and others blocked the entrance to a natural gas storage facility in the pristine Seneca Lakes region of upstate New York.

This lecture and interview are available as a CD or mp3 or transcript from Alternative Radio

Thomas Linzey is an attorney and co-founder and executive director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund and serves as its chief legal counsel. He is the author of Be the Change: How to Get What You Want in Your Community. His work has been featured in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Mother Jones, and The Nation.

You can listen to Thomas Linzey speak for himself here.

So let’s get down to business. This is being recorded for about 175 radio stations across the U.S. and Canada, thanks to David Barsamian on Alternative Radio. That basically means I can’t swear, which is what I usually do during these presentations. So let’s get down to it. We’re fucked. Generally, when I say that at smaller events—and they’re going to have gone to bleep that out, I understand—I’m sorry, David—there’s three things that people say to me.

They say,

Well, you can’t say that, because if you say that, then people lose hope. And when people lose hope, they won’t do anything. They won’t appeal regulatory permits, they won’t get active in doing regulatory work, they won’t try to ask corporations to do X, Y, and Z for them.

The second thing people say is that,

If we say it’s fucked, which is it is, then we will lose funding, because there’s no funder, there’s no foundation, program officer that wants to hear, “Hey we’re fucked,” because then there’s nothing we can do.

And the third group of people that come up to me after the talk—and some are really offended—say,

You can’t say that because it’s just not true. Things aren’t worse now than they were 40 years ago when we passed the major environmental laws.

You people snicker and laugh, but I get it all the time. In fact, I got it talking to a foundation program officer a couple weeks ago for a major foundation. He said,

Well, of course things aren’t worse today than they were 40 years ago. Rivers don’t catch on fire.

And I said,

Well, if that’s our standard now, we’ve got some really serious problems.

So on the first point that, when you say we’re screwed and that things are hopeless and that our work isn’t working—because I don’t think it is—and the things we’re doing aren’t working, on the first one, that hopeless piece, Derrick Jensen probably says it best. I think he’s one of the best writers of our generation. Here’s what Derrick has to say about hope, in a piece called “Beyond Hope,” which everybody should read. It’s the best piece I’ve read in a long, long time. He says giving up hope is a good thing. And this is a quote from Derrick’s piece. He says,

Hope is a longing for a future condition over which you have no agency.

He writes,

I’m not going to say “I hope I eat something tomorrow.” I just will. I don’t hope I take another breath right now, nor that I write this sentence. I just do them. On the other hand, I do hope that the next time I get on a plane it doesn’t crash. To hope for some result means you have given up any agency or control concerning it.

He writes further in the piece,

Having hope is about having hope that someone else is going to save you—a regulatory agency, a corporation, the Sierra Club, Alpha Centauri, beings from another world— that someone else has control over our destiny and our job is to influence them or attempt to put pressure on them because we don’t have it.

The second thing that people come up to talk to me about is you can’t say you’re screwed because the funders don’t want to hear it, money won’t come in. Well, that one is between your foundation program officer and you, if you have one.

The last one I’m going to talk about now, which is people coming up and saying,

Well, it’s just not true things are worse now than they were 40 years ago before the major environmental laws were passed.

So I have some numbers now. I used to go without these, but now I have them. And they’re very, very depressing and dismal, so we’ll get through them as quickly as possible. Here are a couple. Each year in the U.S. alone 570 billion pounds of municipal waste is produced, with 60% of that waste ending up in landfills or incinerators. Four billion pounds of toxic chemicals, including 72 million pounds of known carcinogens, are released into the atmosphere from 20,000 industrial polluters. Two trillion pounds of livestock waste laced with antibiotics, hormones, and chemicals are dumped into waterways and applied to land. Eleven million people live within 1 mile of a federal Superfund site. Eighty thousand industrial chemicals currently are in use in the U.S., with more than 700 now found within every human body. Eighteen hundred new chemicals are introduced annually. Forty percent of our waterways fail to meet even the minimal requirements of federal and state clean water laws. More than 90% of America’s original forests have now been logged. Over 70% of all biodiversity on the planet has now been lost, according to a major conservation organization. And in July of 2011 the United Nations declared our situation “a major planetary catastrophe.”

In the 1990s, when we got our start, things weren’t rosy. It’s not like these things have come into being overnight. In the 1990s, we got our start with the Legal Defense Fund. Note to law students: If you decide to start your own law firm without funding in place or some place to go for that, generally not a good idea. We raised about $3,000 the first year. I think it was the right decision to make, but there are tough times ahead for folks who form their own law firms right out of law school. What did we do when we came out of law school? We formed the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund. The point of the Legal Defense Fund was to say to ourselves when we were in law school that if the U.S. has the best environmental laws in the world—and in fact, our laws are so good, apparently, that we export them to other countries on a routine basis—that if our environmental laws in the U.S. are so good, that the reason why things are so fucked in the U.S. must be because we don’t have enough lawyers enforcing those laws. There’s several hundred full-time public-interest environmental lawyers in the U.S. doing this kind of work. We decided to add one more, which was me.

We began to do work for free. We opened our doors up to community organizations that were being inflicted upon by a toxic waste landfill or sewage sludge being dumped or toxic emissions or a pipeline coming in or all those types of things. We would represent those community groups, primarily in Pennsylvania, to go through the regulatory process.

I don’t know if anybody has ever seen the film Groundhog Day with Bill Murray from the 1990s? Groundhog Day for us would always start the same, which was a phone call from the community organization that would say,

We need your help. We can’t afford a lawyer to fight this toxic-waste incinerator that’s coming in. We need help to fight it because we don’t want it. Our community doesn’t want it here. Our definition of sustainability for our community means that we don’t have a toxic-waste incinerator in the middle of it or a 25,000-head hog factory farm in the middle of our community.

We would say to them,

Well, we’re sorry

—this was the traditional spiel, and still is today by most traditional environmental lawyers—

We’re sorry, but we can’t help you stop it because the law does not recognize your community’s authority to actually say no to the thing coming in. The entire nub of what our Democracy Schools are built around is that the law does not recognize that your municipality, your community has the ability or authority to say no to a federal or a state permitted project. Once a state has permitted it, the municipality can’t say no to it. In fact, the law is generally that if something is a legal use, l-e-g-a-l, that the community has no power to actually say no to it.

So what do we do as environmental lawyers? Well, we become experts on the regulations. We become experts on Section 25(c)(d)(I)(2)(c)(d)(i)(2)(e)(f), and we end up arguing in front of regulatory agencies or administrative law judges that something is missing from the permit application that has been put in by the corporations trying to put the project into the municipality. Most times, just by showing up, in some ways in rural communities, because 90% of these communities never hire an attorney, they never have input into the regulatory process, never show up, we would generally win. Which meant that we would find the signature that was left out or the macro invertebrate study or the hydro study that was outdated that the corporation had submitted with the permit application. And we would argue to the judge that something was missing from what was required by the environmental regulations or the permit application and we would win in front of the judge.

What would happen next was the community group that we were assisting would have a victory party. So they would call us back to the house, and we would have some wine and beer and snacks, and people would pat themselves on the back and they would say,

The system works. We came together around our kitchen table. We found a problem that we were having in the community, we found the right lawyer to represent us, the judge listened to us, he actually ruled in our favor. And now we’re not going to get the toxic waste incinerator in our community. The system worked.

What would happen three months from then or six months from then or a year later is that the corporation would come back. In fact, at those regulatory hearings I had lawyers from Waste Management Corporation and other major corporations come up to me and thank me, because we had found a deficiency or an omission or something that had been left out of their permit application. So three, six months, a year later the corporation would come back, and this time they would have a new and improved permit application for the process. They would have filled in the signature, they would have had the new hydro study or macro invertebrate study done or whatever else had to be put into the regulations and the permit application. I’m shortening this down, but we would go through this process with them for 8 or 10 or 12 cycles. Some groups are still at it, trying to stop Wal-Marts in central Pennsylvania for 8 or 9 or 10 years. Because we’re in a system that doesn’t recognize our authority to actually say no to those things coming in, we fight with what we have; we fight with what we have been given.

The nasty little secret about that time period, of our lives, at least, was that as soon as that permit application came back, that new and improved permit application from the corporation came back, that the community group would come back to us and say,

Mr. Linzey, we need you to do that jujitsu again that you did the first time around to keep the toxic-waste incinerator from being built in the community.

And we would look back at them and we would say,

We’re sorry. Unfortunately, there’s nothing we can do for you anymore, because the corporation has now dotted all the i’s and crossed all the t’s in the permit application.

So we had a win-loss record at the Legal Defense Fund of about 130 and 4. We were on fire. The problem was, if you actually set foot in the communities that we were representing, you would see absolutely no resemblance between the community that was getting the toxic-waste incinerator and our win-loss record as a law firm. But that didn’t stop the progressive community from giving us awards, from giving us money. We got invited to the White House one year by Al Gore to celebrate the best environmental law firms in the U.S. that year. It didn’t seem to matter that environmental law seemed to not be working in these situations. So we had a crisis in our office. We decided that we had not created the Legal Defense Fund just to build better permit applications for the corporations.

It was about at that time that we started talking to some other folks that were having experiences with the regulatory system and how environmental law is practiced. One of those people was a woman named Jane Anne Morris. She bills herself as a corporate anthropologist. Jane Anne Morris said a couple things which still resonate with me today. She said,

The only thing that environmental regulations regulate are environmentalists, because they make us predictable in how we oppose projects that are coming into our community. Because the regulations are written by the very corporations that ostensibly the regulatory structure is supposed to regulate. Do we really believe that regulatory structures written by the very corporations that those structures are supposed to regulate are going to recognize any rights for the communities in which they do business, especially rights to say no, which we don’t have under the law?

In addition to that, Jane Anne Morris said another thing to me which blew my mind. She said,

You know all the monies that get spent by the corporations to fight off the permit appeals that you file

—because at least I thought we were costing the corporate boys some money when we walked into the administrative law courts—

the monies that the corporations spend fighting the permit appeals are tax-deductible as reasonable and necessary business expenses under the law. They can write them off.

Jane Anne has this great piece that she wrote which we use in the Democracy School. The title of it is,

Help. I’ve been colonized and I can’t get up.

The subtitle is

Take a lawyer and an expert to a hearing and call me in a decade.

This is what she has to say:

At regulatory agencies corporate persons have constitutional rights to due process and equal protection that human persons, affected citizens, don’t have. For noncorporate human citizens

—that’s us—

there’s a democracy theme park where we can pull levers on voting machines and talk into microphones at hearings. But don’t worry, they’re not connected to anything and nobody is listening except for us. What regulatory law regulates is citizen input, not corporate behavior.

That’s what Jane Anne has to say.

So what did we do? We had a crisis in our office. We said,

We were constructed, we were built to protect the natural environment, to protect communities and do all that mom-and-apple-pie kind of stuff. And instead we found ourselves building better permit applications for the corporate boys that wanted to come in and put in projects.

So we decided to shut down the office, we decided to close, because we decided we could do other things and other things would be more effective than trying to enforce environmental law in this context.

In addition to that I should mention, we weren’t just doing permit appeals and regulatory stuff. We were challenging environmental impact statements under the National Environmental Policy Act, we were doing Clean Water Act litigation, attempting to enforce clean water dictates. We were across the board dealing with environmental laws that seemed to us to be not about protecting the natural environment but instead about easing certain projects in by carving off some of the harms that were caused by some of those projects coming in. It wasn’t about actually stopping the projects, no matter how harmful they are to the natural environment.

The National Environmental Policy Act is a perfect example. You have environmental impact statements that have to be prepared if federal monies are used for a project, but nowhere in the law does it say that the entity, the agency, has to select the most environmentally sound alternative. So we were challenging road projects in Virginia. What the agency would say is, Yes, this is going to extinguish this ecosystem, this is going to kill this stuff off, but we still think it’s a great idea, and we complied with the federal environmental laws by simply disclosing the harms. That’s how NEPA is built, that’s how the EIS stuff is built.

As we were closing down our office in Pennsylvania, something interested happened, which was a spate of phone calls from a constituency that we were not established to assist. The constituency that started to come in our door was local elected officials from rural south- central Pennsylvania. What was their problem and why were they turning to us? They were turning to us because agribusiness corporations were driving their way up from North Carolina and South Carolina to site a bunch of mega factory hog farms in south-central Pennsylvania. These are the biggest agribusiness corporations on the planet.

Just to give you an idea of how agriculture has been corporatized over the years, six corporations currently control 80% of the pork processing market in the U.S., four corporations control 60% of chicken processing, one corporation, Kraft, controls about 80% of cheese processing in the U.S. today. Suicide among farmers is now the number one cause of non-natural death for farmers in the U.S. It’s a statistic that began in 2004. So when we’re talking about corporatization of agriculture, we’re talking about more than just changing methods of production. We’re talking about extinguishing generations-old farms and ways of life and implement dealers and open livestock auctions and all those kinds of things that keep rural communities alive.

In the late 1990s, as we were closing down our office and these calls started coming in, the calls were coming in because there was slated and proposed a span of factory farms to run through about eight counties in the south- central Pennsylvania. The municipalities and the elected officials didn’t want the factory farms coming in, for a bunch of reasons: number one, impact on farmers; number two, impact on property values; number three, the environmental pollution, water pollution, stuff that flows when you jam these animals into these intensive livestock operations.

For the last 10 years municipal governments in Pennsylvania in that area had passed very stringent manure disposal laws. We’re not going to get into the details here, but suffice it to say that those laws, in the best environmental regulatory tradition, tried to make it too expensive for liquid manure from the factory farms to be applied to land in those municipalities. So for a number of years factory farms couldn’t set up shop because of those environmental regulations. What happened when the big agribusiness corporations came into town, the town being the state of Pennsylvania, is they went to the legislature and they drafted something called the Nutrient Management Act. The Nutrient Management Act promptly removed control over any factory farm regulation from the local municipalities and centralized it at the state level, making putting in a factory farm merely a planning process that you had to file a plan with the state agency for rather than go through any kind of local ordinances that might interfere with those operations coming in.

So imagine yourself being a municipal official in south-central Pennsylvania. Your residents are screaming at you. They’re saying,

We don’t want to lose 60% of our property value if we live within three-quarters of a mile of one of these mega hog factory farms. We don’t want the smell and the water pollution and everything else that comes with us.

And there was some inkling of a conversation about, Why should agribusiness corporations decide what farming looks like in our community rather than us, rather than the farmers that actually live in that community? So the calls in to the office took on a different tenor at that point, where we still had our phones hooked up for those calls to come in.

The calls got much more complex. It might have been something in the water or the air, I don’t know. Something was changing about that time in the way people think about environmental law, I think, at least at the community level. These folks would get me on the phone, and we would say

What could we do?

and they would say,

Well, we have this corporate factory farm coming in.

And they would say,

We don’t want it. Our farmers here don’t want a 25,000-head hog factory farm in the middle of our community.

And they said,

We want to say no to it, we want to stop it.

We tried to give them the old song and dance, which is embedded in our heads, in my head since law school, which was,

I’m sorry, you can’t stop it because it’s going to have a state permit and it’s a permit operation. You can’t say no to it within the municipality.

And these folks—and keep in mind this is rural south-central Pennsylvania, an NRA membership area, local control, folks that had been in office for 30-40 years at the local level, very small municipalities—asked me one question, which threw me off for the next 15 years. They asked,

Why? Why can’t we say no?

So I was on the other end, and I said,

Well, you can’t say no because if you do try to prohibit a factory farm from coming into your municipality, you’re going to get sued, and you’re going to get sued by the agribusiness corporation that contends that you’re violating the corporation’s constitutional rights under the law. Because when you pass an ordinance that bans a legal use, the corporation comes in and uses the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to say to the court, You’ve taken our property, because you’re not allowing us to do what we want in your community. This ordinance is stopping it. Therefore, we’re going to sue you. Not only are we going to sue you for breaching or violating our constitutional rights, we’re going to sue you under 42 U.S.C. Section 1983, which is a civil rights law, for damages incurred as a result of the passage of the ordinance to things like future lost profits of the corporation. That’s how the system operates. That’s not the exception, that’s the default.

So again the folks on the other end of the line would ask me another question, which I didn’t know how to answer. He said,

Why?

Being the lawyer, you give the lawyerly story, which is,

Corporations got constitutional rights way back in the early 1800s. Corporations became persons in the 1800s through the Supreme Court, through other federal courts, in which corporations now have the same rights as you or I. And by virtue of their wealth, they can exercise those rights more fully than you or I. It was those places, those Supreme Court cases and going back to 1800 and to the other jurisprudence, that corporations gained this control. That in essence the corporate board of directors has more decision making in your community than you do, because it creates that special layer of law.

To which the folks at the other end of the line said again,

Why? Why were corporations given those rights?

So, a typical lawyer, you say,

Well, it actually goes back to the U.S. Constitution.

In some ways the U.S. Constitution is a property document. It’s no secret. The U.S. Constitution protects property and commerce above other rights.

You can look at the U.S. Constitution and thumb through it all you want, but you won’t find a couple words mentioned. One is “nature.” Forget about it. Another one is “labor.” Forget about that one, too, unless you’re looking at a provision that uses the phrase “bonded labor,” which is about returning slaves to their owners as property, which is also in the Constitution. That stuff isn’t there. So when the environmental laws were passed, the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, all of the good stuff that we have, the civil rights laws, the Violence Against Women Act, all that good stuff that’s been passed has all been passed under the authority of the commerce clause of the Constitution.

It’s kind of wacky. People say,

What does that matter? At least it’s there. At least we have a place to plant our feet.

And the answer is, essentially, the Constitution sees everything in terms of property protection. That’s how it works, that’s how it’s structured. And because of that, when we actually make arguments about things like protecting the environment or nature in contexts that are outside of commerce, like protecting nature for its own sake or protecting a community’s right to say no when that interferes with commerce, the system looks back at you with glazed-over eyes and doesn’t understand what you’re trying to say. It’s like speaking Greek to a French person: it just doesn’t fit, because the system runs a different way.

So these supervisors, these folks in rural Pennsylvania, said back to me on the phone, calling in, and said,

Why is that? Why is the Constitution written in such a way? The Constitutional structure seems to screw us automatically. So in our communities if we oppose a factory farm or a toxic-waste incinerator, we don’t run up against the corporation first. We run up against our own Constitution first. We run into a constitutional structure first that doesn’t recognize our authority to be self- governing within our own community, let alone talking about things like the rights of nature.

So these folks would say,

Why is that?

And we would say,

Well, it’s because of something called the English Common Law. The folks who wrote the U.S. Constitution were basted in this thing called English Common Law, which was a system of law that essentially legalized colonialism. And England was the top bill, they were the folks developing the most. So you have Hamilton and you have Dickinson and you have Madison talking about English Common Law as the best thing in the world, and that the U.S. constitutional structure was about replicating that system of law. There’s no place in that for us if we’re a community that’s being hit with X, Y, and Z or for ecosystems themselves to be treated differently as property.

Then they would say,

Why is that?

I would say,

Because God said so. I don’t know. Because we’re at the end of this conversation and we’ve got other things to do.

So that why question has actually plagued us since the Democracy Schools. We actually use 15-hour trainings to take community folks through a series of historical stuff to show them why they’re in the position that they’re in. Because when community groups get hit with something, the first thing they do is call up the DEP or whatever it’s called in your state, the environmental agency. In Pennsylvania it’s called the Department of Environmental Protection, or for many communities there it’s known as the Department of Everything Permitted. So you have the DEP. And other folks pick up the phone and call their local government. The DEP says,

Well, we’re so glad you called. Hire a lawyer and get involved in the regulatory process. It won’t allow you to stop it, but you can, of course, publicly comment and be part of that process.

The others call is to the municipal government. The municipal government sometimes says,

Our hands are tied. We can’t do anything. It’s a state issue. Go talk to your legislator and change the law.

Fat chance of that.

So through the years we started getting these questions, and we decided that we weren’t going to close down. The municipal governments and elected officials said to us,

What can we do?

And we said,

We have no idea what you can do.

And they said,

Why don’t you help us figure out what we can do?

And we said

Fine.

So we started looking at the laws that have been passed in different places on agribusiness issues. It turns out that in 1902—I had no idea till 12:30 at night, falling over some old law text trying to find it—the people of Oklahoma, mostly family farmers and communities, came together and banned corporations from farming. 1902, right? Nine states followed the lead, including, in the late 1990s South Dakota and Nebraska, through Initiative 300 and Amendment E, actually took the anti-corporate farming laws and drove them into their state constitutions.

So folks in those Midwestern states began to frame the problem a lot differently. It wasn’t about water pollution or air pollution or parts per million or paper versus plastic or all the bullshit that we argue about when we get into the regulatory stuff. That if the problem was the corporatization of agriculture, then the solution is to get corporations out of agriculture. So they moved to do that. The frame was different. Rather than dealing with the manifestations of the environmental harms that flow from those projects, instead attempting to preempt them by taking control and writing the rules themselves.

So that without pride of authorship, we borrowed Amendment E, we reworked it into a local ordinance, and we actually sent it in to these Pennsylvania municipalities to begin adopting. And they did. The first one, in 2001, was a small community of 550 people, called Wells Township, a little place called Fulton County, right above the border with Maryland. Eventually the ordinances spread to eastern Pennsylvania, western Pennsylvania, north-central Pennsylvania, as communities began having a new conversation—not one about how many tons or gallons of liquid hog manure can be legally applied to an acre of land, but instead towards something based on the right of the community to decide what farming would look like there rather than a corporate board of directors located 3,000 miles away.

That conversation that started in 2001 has accelerated, expanded to today. In addition to the factory farm issues, in Pennsylvania we have a sludge problem. Typical of the environmental laws, which essentially are good at one thing—which is transferring pollution from one medium to another, so from water to land or from land to air—with the sewage sludge situation, all the sludge coming out of the centralized sewage treatment plants to clean up the waterways, we actually took the toxins and pollutants and put it into the sludge cake, which is the solid stuff, which goes to say that you can’t put “cake” after everything and make it sound that much better. The sludge cake itself we used to dump off the coast of New Jersey. And then the major environmental groups did us a real favor and worked for a program that was approved by the EPA to dump it on land where we grow our crops. So all of those 60,000 different pollutants that are in that sewage-sludge stream that we now try to keep it of the waterways, we now dump on farm land. And four corporations control 90% of the market for hauling the sludge from the treatment plants to the farmland. In Pennsylvania we’ve had two kids die from exposure to sewage sludge. We named the Democracy School after one of those kids.

The municipalities that were faced with getting sludge dumped from Philadelphia—because, guess what, Philadelphia’s municipal treatment plant doesn’t dump sludge near the multimillion-dollar houses in suburban Philly, they actually send it out into the hinterlands, into the rural T of Pennsylvania to be dumped in these rural communities—a lot of these communities said,

We don’t want it anymore. We don’t want your shit coming from your place and being dumped in our home.

So they began to work with us to take the anti-corporate-farming laws and make them into anti-corporate-sludging laws, which actually prohibited the corporations from bringing sludge into those municipalities. Those began to multiply quite quickly: we went from five to 10 to 15 to 20. We’re up to 86. And on the factory farm laws, we’re up to about two dozen in the state of Pennsylvania.

As you can imagine—and the question is probably burgeoning in your head—you say,

Mr. Linzey, you said we can’t do that. We can’t ban X, Y, and Z.

It turns out, when you attempt to actually begin to synthesize new law, and new law which is based on community self- governance, that there’s a reaction. And the reaction is not equal but an unequal one. So in the years following this stuff moving, keeping in mind that 10% of all rural municipalities in the Pennsylvania had passed our ordinances, which really began to pull the teeth from some of these corporate boys who were attempting to use those municipalities for their own projects, two things happened: one was a lawsuit was filed by one of the major factory-farm agribusiness corporations against one of our municipalities, and the other one was that state legislature started to take action.

So on the lawsuit first, there were several filed. What was fascinating to me, watching them come in, was that they could have been written on the same computer, with the same boilerplate, with the same paragraphs, with the same everything. Because in the system and structure of laws set up in this country to actually make municipalities and communities where you live subordinate to the corporations that are coming in, in addition to corporate personhood, this concept that corporations are persons and they have certain rights they can exercise against the community, corporations also have something called commerce clause rights, that corporations can use the interstate commerce clause to knock down law making that interferes with the commerce interests of those corporations. As much as we talk about corporate personhood, corporate commerce clause rights are actually used more than that to overturn laws. In addition to those two, we have things called Dillon’s Rule, which says your community can’t pass any law that’s not specifically been authorized to be passed by the state legislature—it’s written by an ex-railroad lawyer who was an Iowa Supreme Court justice—and you have preemption. Preemption is the theory that the state and federal government can preempt completely what’s passed at the municipal level. We all as lawyers, those of us who are lawyers, pretty much buy into these doctrines in many ways. They’re referred to as well settled legal doctrines by the legal industry.

So these lawsuits that came in, you could literally read the complaints that came in from these corporations that were filing suit against the municipalities, and those four doctrines were laced throughout the complaint. So on page 1 it said, We are corporations, we are persons, you have violated our Fifth Amendment rights under the law, and you now owe us damages. Paragraph two was, You were not authorized to pass this because the state legislature hasn’t authorized you to do this law making. Point number three, You can’t do this law making because the Nutrient Management Act preempts you at the local level from being able to pass these things. And, of course, the corporate personhood stuff was meshed into that fourth claim.

So our communities, who had stepped outside the box—as Jane Anne Morris says,

Take a deep breath. We’re going over the wall,

that’s what she says—these communities, because they went over the wall, because they did something outside of the box, were saying,

Hey, the problem isn’t factory farms, really. The problem isn’t the environmental impacts from those facilities or sludge or whatever else, and the problem really isn’t the corporation itself. The problem is in many ways the structure of law itself.

It’s actually those doctrines which have been in some ways so IV’d into us since birth, not just the preemption and Dillon’s Rule stuff but the constitutional stuff, that the Founding Fathers were the greatest people that ever trod the planet, that our system of government is the bastion of democracy, and that if we don’t win regulatory fights, if we don’t win these fights that we’re involved in when the corporations come in to do X, Y, and Z, it’s our fault because we have the democratic system to use. We just didn’t get enough people to the demonstration, or we just didn’t get people to the church, or we didn’t have the right podium for the pads that we write on, or we didn’t bring the right microphone, the video camera, or whatever. We blame ourselves for failing within the system.

Meanwhile, the system is fixed. We’ve been snookered for a long, long time. No offense to the folks in this audience, but the fact is, the only people who see it are the folks who have to see it. Because they’re in places like Port Arthur, they’re in places where you run up directly against those legal doctrines. A lot of us try to go around them by doing things like, well, we need to negotiate an agreement with the corporation, or we need to buy the right stuff, or we need to invest in better stock, or we need to do all these voluntary fixes, self-help kind of stuff, like changing light bulbs, because we feel so disempowered by how the structure of law works.

It’s our proposition to you that the structure of law has to be dismantled. It has to come apart, because otherwise we’re cooked. Literally, we are cooked if we do not actually take that battle on. In the communities in Pennsylvania who started this conversation to change— when you’re talking about parts per million, particulate matter, and bringing experts in, doing all that kind of stuff, it limits the number of people who actually get involved in those campaigns, because they say,

I’m not an expert. Therefore, I don’t have a legitimate place here at the table or to speak about X, Y, and Z.

But when you start talking about rights—community and local self-governance and corporations having more rights than the communities into which the corporations are coming in to build or construct or whatever, you start getting something that approximates the foundations for the beginnings of a movement, a movement that says that the state government is not going to help us, the federal government is not going to help us, and the only way that we’re going to make change to those layers of law is to force it to happen by disobeying the law itself.

And it’s not so foreign. We’ve been at that place before in our history. The abolitionists didn’t advocate for establishing a slavery protection agency, right? They weren’t interested in an agency that regulated the numbers of lashes you could give daily to a slave. The suffragists, they didn’t just write letters to the White House. They voted. Virginia Minor and Susan B. Anthony, they went into ballot places and they cast ballots and they were arrested and they were thrown into jail and then they had trials. They understood that is when you don’t directly challenge the law, you are validating it automatically.

So these communities, the least likely of activists in some ways, the least likely of activists—folks that are first-time activists, coming into the stuff for the very first time, not long-term progressive activists or people who worked in the regulatory arena—didn’t have this stuff clouding their heads, all this past that said we have to do it this way or have to do it that way. They just said, This is the right thing, is actually to seize that ability, the authority for us to make decisions about what our community is going to look like in 20 or 40 or 60 years.

So they began coming to a conclusion. And that conclusion was, they had to take these doctrines on frontally, that the local ordinance making had to be more about just the imminent harm coming in when that imminent harm could be overridden. The ordinances could be overridden by those doctrines that were being brought against them. So they decided to begin writing these ordinances to directly challenge those legal doctrines which keep our communities subordinate to these corporations, because they understood that sustainability is impossible unless those people who are directly affected by the unsustainable practices are the ones who are deciding whether those practices occur. State legislatures, folks 500 miles away, they don’t care. The community is a dumping ground, it’s a toilet. They’re going to use it for as long as they can until people stand up and say

We’re not going to take it anymore.

The kids that sat in at the lunch counter at Woolworth’s. They didn’t write letters to Woolworth’s. I suppose they did at the beginning. They said, Hey, please desegregate your lunch counters. But eventually, at some point, they said, No more. Things are so bad that we need to go in and actually break the law. We need to disobey the law. In a very structured way, but we need to do it. And so they did. In fact, this country is built on people not following the law. The Declaration of Independence, people breaking free, self-governance, all that stuff that’s built into us that we seem to have lost.

We think it’s time to return to that place. I think communities in Pennsylvania and other places certainly are beginning to lead the way, which is to say, the cost of doing nothing is more now than the cost of doing something, putting our municipalities on the line to take on these four legal doctrines. So they started to do that. Over 100 communities in Pennsylvania have passed those laws. In addition, the laws have spread. We have communities in New Hampshire and Maine who are taking on Nestlé corporation, saying, No corporate water withdrawals in our communities. There are folks in New Mexico and in Pennsylvania and elsewhere who have passed anti-fracking laws, saying, We’re not going to allow corporations to frac here. We have the first county in New Mexico which is going to ban all hydrocarbon extraction within their municipality. What are we waiting for? Seriously, how bad does shit have to get before we actually begin to be less obedient to how the structure operates?

There are real consequences to all this stuff. When we get called as counsel for municipalities, we give them the worst-case scenario. You could get sued, you could go bankrupt. This is very serious work that these municipalities are taking on, that these elected officials and other people are taking on. In places where their elected officials aren’t willing to do it, citizen groups are coming together to go override them through initiative processes and home rule charter stuff.

People ask, Where is all this headed? In other words, what’s the point, if a court is just going to come in and overturn the law as being against the doctrines? Well, we hope that courts won’t. We’ve actually found judges who have ruled in our favor in other cases before. But it’s very important that people understand, these ordinances are not the end point. Just because a judge rules that it’s in violation of these other legal doctrines, that’s not the end of the story. That’s the first step. Because these communities now in Pennsylvania and New Mexico and New Hampshire and Washington state are now stitching themselves together to talk about what state constitutional change looks like. And eventually, 10 years, 20 years down the road, these states are going to come together through their municipalities to make federal constitutional change. It all comes down to what our theory of social change is. Can we be obedient folks petitioning our legislatures to do the right thing for us, or is it time to take that shit into our own control and do it ourselves, no matter what the cost?

One hundred fifty communities across the U.S. have passed those ordinances now. In addition to that, we’ve been working on something called “the rights of nature.” One of the components of those ordinances, they contain rights of nature clauses which recognize the rights of ecosystem and natural communities to exist, flourish, and naturally evolve. Two dozen communities in Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Maine, New Mexico, other places have adopted these ordinances, which refuse to recognize that nature is property under the law. The controversial statement that we sometimes make is that there’s never been an environmental movement in the U.S. And we say that there’s never been an environmental movement in the U.S. because movements transform things that were treated as things under the law into being rights-bearing persons. The abolitionists were about a movement to her transform slaves and African Americans from being property into being persons. The suffragists were about transforming women from being property of their husband or their brother into being persons. That’s what movements do.

We’ve had an environmental movement that’s been focused on treating nature as property to be regulated. Under our system of law, if you have a 10-acre deed to a parcel of land, it carries with it the right to destroy the ecosystems on that parcel of land. That’s the system of law that we have. These communities are beginning to adopt laws that refuse to recognize that nature and ecosystems are property under the law, and that actually allow residents to step into the shoes of a river or a mountain to bring an action as a plaintiff to protect those rights of ecosystems within those communities.

The work in the U.S. in 2001 to 2006 was carried down to Ecuador, which was beginning to work on a new national constitution in the country. They found out about the work of Wells Township and they found out about the work of Tamaqua Borough and they found out about the work of these small communities that were actually passing these laws, and they asked us to come down to help them write a new national constitution. The committee of delegates working on a fundamental rights section of that constitution, brought us in to help them fashion the law, because they wanted to become the first country in the world to transform from a regulatory, property-based system of environmental protection to a rights-based system of environmental protection. They took the rights from the U.S. communities, and they actually wrote it into their national constitution, which was ratified overwhelmingly in 2008, making Ecuador the first country to do that. We’ve been training judges in the Galapagos to deal with “rights of nature” cases that are coming in the door. The group that we work with in Ecuador has set up a 1-800 number for people to call to ask an ombudsman to begin representing “rights of nature” cases. All of that stuff has been happening.

We just got the first enforcement decisions. I just want to share them with you before we wrap up here. One was brought by a group of residents using the constitutional provisions on behalf of the Vilcabamba River, located in the province of Loja in Ecuador. The local government there was actually building a road project that was altering the course of the river by dumping that road refuse into the river. The residents there brought a case in which the plaintiff was the Vilcabamba River. They brought it in to the local court, and the local court agreed with them, in the first ruling ever in the globe on behalf of an ecosystem as a plaintiff, and then awarding injunctive relief and damages to repair and restore the ecosystem itself.

We believe that the “rights of nature” stuff is the next horizon for environmental law. It’s actually about building a real environmental movement that makes it a rights- based movement rather than just something that raises consciousness or something that attempts to regulate around the edges. We think that’s the next step. We’ve been in touch with Nepal. We just made a visit there. They’re talking about putting the rights of nature into their national constitution. The Maldive Islands, where we had a conversation last year about building in a right to climate. In other words, a right to climate that was shared by ecosystems as well as people within the Maldives that could then be used to sue polluters around the globe, including countries, to actually begin to confront the damage that’s being caused to the Maldives and other low-lying island nations on global warming. But it’s all pinned to that rights stuff, because we think it’s a rights- based movement that’s beginning to arise.

I just wanted to say, with no offense to anyone that it’s really time to take our collective heads out of our collective asses. And people all the time say, Surely you’re not saying to us we need to stop doing the front- line work that we’re doing. Surely you’re not saying to us that we’ve got to stop appealing permits and doing all that kind of stuff. I have a mixed response to that now. I used to have something different. But the first one is that there are a limited amount of monetary resources circulating out to nonprofit organizations and other groups doing environmental work. Those resources have to shift, because to build this new system of law, to give birth to this new collective consciousness, it takes money. And the funders have to stop giving money to the regulatory stuff. I think that’s about as blunt as I’ve ever said it. They have to stop. Those are sponges that are taking up money. And we have to have the elbow space to actually build new room for this stuff to happen.

As for the front-line activists, the fact is, things would be even worse now without the courageous work of people that have gone before us to fight those front-line battles. But there has to be a time when we re-examine whether those battles have been successful. We have to regird into a different position, and we need to begin to frame the different fight which is now upon us, which is the collapse of our entire planetary ecosystems.

So here’s Derrick Jensen again. I’d like to return to this hope thing. When I say things are hopeless and we’re fucked and all those things, this is what Derrick Jensen has to say in his book, and I think the words are right on target. They asked Derrick,

If things are hopeless, why do you do anything at all?

And he said,

Because I’m in love—with salmon, with trees outside my window, with baby lampreys living in sandy stream bottoms, with slender salamanders crawling through the duff. And if you love, you act to defend your beloved. Of course results matter to you, but they don’t determine whether or not you make the effort. You don’t simply hope your beloved survives and thrives. You do whatever it takes. If my love doesn’t cause me to protect those I love, it’s not love.

And he goes on, last paragraph,

A wonderful thing happens when you give up on hope, which is that you realize you never needed it in the first place. You realize that giving up on hope didn’t kill you. It didn’t even make you less effective. In fact, it made you more effective because you ceased relying on someone or something to solve your problems. You ceased hoping your problems would somehow get solved through the magical assistance of God, the Great Mother, the Sierra Club, Valiant Tree Sitters, Brave Salmon, or even the Earth itself, and you just began doing whatever it takes to solve those problems yourself. I think there’s that new world waiting to be born.

A final quote from Jensen, because I think it hits home.

If we wish to stop the atrocities, we need merely to step away from the isolation. There is a whole world waiting for us, ready to welcome us home.

Thank you.

For information about obtaining CDs, MP3s, or transcripts of this or other programs, please contact:
David Barsamian
Alternative Radio
P.O. Box 551
Boulder, CO 80306-0551
phone (800) 444-1977
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©2013

Kicking people when they’re down

Wed, 22 May 2013 00:07:26 GMT

Barbara Ehrenreich
Lecture, then interview by David Barsamian
(This event was presented by the Lannan Foundation.)
Santa Fe, New Mexico
13 March 2013

The rise in New York’s poverty rate as a result of the ongoing recession has pushed nearly half of the city’s population into the ranks of the poor or near-poor. Ironically, the nation’s largest city is run by a multi-billionaire. Almost on the same day, another report came out saying “Hedge Fund Titans Get Lavish Paydays Stretching to Ten Figures.” People are immiserated and dumped into the streets because of decisions made downtown in the suites. Do we lend a helping hand to the poor? Barely. Let them eat op-eds about values and the virtues of hard work. There’s billions to fund the latest F-whatever fighter jet but scant little for people in distress. The pounding the needy are taking is particulary severe because much of the social safety net has been shredded. Can anyone say compassion and caring?

This lecture and interview are available as a CD or mp3 or transcript from Alternative Radio

Barbara Ehrenreich is a social critic, journalist, and activist. She received a PhD in cell biology from Rockefeller University. By the 1970s, she was involved with the nascent women’s health movement and teaching at the State University of New York, Old Westbury. After publishing an article in Ms. magazine, she became a regular columnist there and with Mother Jones. Numerous books followed including such bestsellers as Nickel and Dimed, Bait and Switch, This Land is Their Land, and Bright-Sided. In 2012 she founded the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, a website designed to place the crisis of poverty and economic insecurity at the center of the national political conversation.

You can listen to Barbara Ehrenreich speak for herself here.

I am so glad to be in Santa Fe. For me Santa Fe is something like Mecca, it’s like a very special, holy place. Because of your minimum wage. That’s what brought me here in 2007, six years ago, the minimum wage campaign. And I know there are people here from it who are here tonight.

But I was looking so much forward to coming here because last week I gave a talk at George Mason University in Virginia and, as usual in these situations, a student in the audience stood up in a Q&A and said that she had learned in her economics class that raising the minimum wage would cause widespread unemployment and economic ruin. I hear this every time I speak on a campus. I think that academic economics departments are dedicated to one proposition only, and that is teaching that the economic status quo is exactly fine, and it’s perfect even for the poor. So I said to this young woman,

Will you come with me to Santa Fe next week? Come and see for yourself.

This is the highest minimum wage city of— I think you’re only outdone by San Francisco. I’m not sure. But I think it’s San Francisco, Santa Fe. That’s it. By comparison with my trip here six years ago for that campaign, I am not seeing boarded-up businesses, I am not seeing a city brought to its knees by the raised minimum wage.

Last time I came here—and right to this theatre, in fact—I spoke entirely about my book Nickel and Dimed. I’m going to talk about that a little bit, look back at that, and also talk about things that I have been learning from much more recent research since the economic downturn.

My starting point for a lot of this, I will tell you, sort of the source of a lot of my motivation, is I get really, really upset whenever I hear someone speak disrespectfully about people in poverty, and maybe especially women in poverty. And I have personal reasons for that reaction. But in the 1990s I was hearing a lot of that kind of disrespect, especially from politicians and pundits. There is something wrong with poor people. That was the theory. And in many quarters it still is. Poor people have low IQs. We’ve had Charles Murray to point that out, as well as people of color having lower IQs, he pointed out. They have character defects. They make bad lifestyle decisions. Poor women are promiscuous, they are lazy, they have too many children, they don’t bother to get married, they eat too many Doritos and drink too much Mountain Dew. That has pretty much been the official theory of poverty in America, which is, if people are poor, they have nobody to blame but themselves.

This works its way into policy all the time. For example, the original welfare reform bill, which was in 1996, the bill that ended welfare as we knew it, ended any kind of entitlement of poor single parents to government aid. This bill provided in it originally $100 million for chastity training for low-income women. That’s the theory. So imagine the scene. Bill Clinton signing into law this provision for chastity training—not, unfortunately, for himself.

And that amount went up. The most recent amount, it was up to $400 million for training poor women to make them more marriageable. Some of us ladies aren’t married. It’s because we haven’t tried. We really need the education. Actually, I’ve tried it a number of times.

It seemed me that the problem had nothing to do with lifestyles or personal choices, or overwhelmingly it has nothing to do with those things. I started my own personal crusade for the living wage just by reading my local newspaper, seeing what wages were being offered in the help- wanted ads—and they very cleverly don’t mention them usually—then turn to the apartment rentals section see what the rents are. The math did not look good to me. That was my starting point.

I agonized and complained about it so much that I finally got a magazine editor to say,

Barbara, what you have to do is go out there and try living on these wages yourself.

I had meant somebody should do it. I did not mean myself as a journalist. But journalists need what jobs they can get and what assignments they can get. So I had to leave home, I had to find the cheapest accommodations possible. And I was not trying to find the lowest-wage jobs I could; I was not trying to find minimum-wage jobs. My rule for myself was I had to find the best-paying jobs I could, consistent with not using my actual résumé or educational experience or anything. I could have cheated very easily, though, because I never did see a help-wanted ad for a political essayist. In particular, I never saw a help- wanted ad for a sarcastic feminist political essayist.

The jobs I ended up getting, like waitress and hotel housekeeper. That’s where I fit in in the labor market. That’s what I found. It had been a while since I had worked in any of these kinds of jobs, since I was a teenager. And one of the first things that struck me about being in the low-wage work force—and this has not changed, not at all, since 2000—is the constant suspicion that if you’re willing to work for those wages, you probably have some sort of criminal tendencies. There’s something wrong with you.

First, the drug test. Anybody here ever take a drug test to get a job? Oh. How did you do? We’ll talk about that later. Then there’s the personality test. Most of the questions I thought, being kind of a smart aleck, were pretty easy. Here’s an example. And I wrote this one down, so it’s word for word. You get this in your application process,

In the last year I have stolen [check dollar amount below] worth of goods from my employers.

You see that and you really want to be a smart aleck and say,

Do you have a calculator I could use?

Then there was this question, which pops up on many companies’ tests for their low-wage workers,

Agree or disagree: It is easier to work when you’re a little bit high.

You don’t want to overthink that one. It would be so easy to get philosophical there, but don’t do it. That’s the preparation.

Then you enter into a job paying—at the time I was doing this, I averaged $7 an hour. These were hard jobs, all the jobs I had. They were physically hard jobs. And I would have to say that’s one argument for doing this sort of journalism, which is called immersion journalism, where you actually put your body into it. That is that if you ask people, “Is your job physically hard?” they will say “Yeah,” but most people don’t complain a lot. It was another thing to do it myself. I’m strong, I’m fit, but there were many jobs where after a shift my legs would feel like rubber. I had to find that out.

A more important thing I picked up about how hard these jobs were is something that was completely surprising to me. I’m educated, I’ve written a lot of books. These jobs were mentally challenging. Every one of them I had a hard time learning. It’s a humbling kind of discovery.

I’ll just mention one example of that, which was at Wal-Mart. I was assigned to ladies’ wear. I thought, Oh, great, I’ll be giving fashion advice to the women of Minnesota. No. The main thing was picking up garments from the floor or things that had been hidden— for some mysterious reason that I don’t know what consumers are thinking—in the wrong department. Somebody has to find everything and put it in its exact right place. In other words, I had to memorize the exact location of hundreds of different items, which would then be rotated every few days for no other purpose than to convince me I have Alzheimer’s disease. Why Wal-Mart wanted to do that I don’t know, but that was the plan. A very important lesson for me here. I never used the word unskilled to describe anybody’s job. Every person’s job takes intelligence and skill and concentration and deserves our complete respect.

Some of these jobs were also a lot harder than they needed to be because of absurd management rules, like no talking to your fellow employees. You can guess why that is. No drinking water, even in a sweaty job. And then there’s a whole bathroom break situation. In some of those jobs the bathroom breaks were so rare I looked back on the drug test with nostalgia. They don’t tell you that could be the last time. There is an academic book that’s been written about bathroom breaks in the U.S. work force. The title tells it all. It’s called Void Where Prohibited.

Another interesting thing. In all these jobs they suspect you of stealing. Your purse could be searched at any point, because you might be stealing, I don’t know, ketchup packets from the restaurant or something. However, in most of these jobs it’s management that’s stealing. Wage theft is a huge problem in America. I could see it going on, but I didn’t even have a term for it when I was doing these jobs. One form it can take is, Wal-Mart just changes the computers so it doesn’t look like you’ve worked so many hours. Another thing is that they can tell you to come in a half an hour before the clock starts ticking for your pay and you start working. And they’re not paying you for that. To me this is really something, the amount of this. I pressed the experts on this to come up with an estimate of the amount that is stolen from low- wage workers in America in the form of wage theft. The number they came up with for me was $106 billion a year. One hundred six billion is on the order of magnitude of some of our larger social programs—bigger, I think, than Unemployment Insurance.

I had a lot of trouble making ends meet. I had no idea how out of whack wages and rents were going to be. Obviously, I was looking at the cheapest places to stay, which included trailer parks and, very often, these places called residential motels, which you can get into without one month’s rent deposit. You pay by the week. I learned a very important thing in these living situations: It’s expensive to be poor. If you don’t have that one month’s rent and security deposit up front, which could be more than $1,000, a lot of capital, then you’re stuck with outrageous weekly payments. In this one residential motel I ended up at it was $250 a week to stay in an absolute dump that smelled like rodent droppings. And it had no fridge or microwave, meaning that everything I bought to eat had to come from a convenience store, and occasionally, as a treat, fast food. I’m not complaining about the cuisine. It’s just right away that’s a lot more expensive than being able to go to a grocery store.

With the rent, the expenses, I ultimately realized, this is not possible. I would have to, I don’t know, find a lot of roommates or something. And I had advantages, like not having children with me. I tried to get my children to come with me, but… How will you do this sort of thing? Suppose I was a single parent with one child trying to do the same thing. You can do the math here. In New Mexico the minimum wage for the state is $7.50 an hour, which is ahead of the federal amount. But a living wage calculated by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for this state for one adult and one child is $17.78 an hour. Way off. In Santa Fe, due to a heroic, exemplary struggle, you have a minimum wage that begins to somewhat more closely approach what people might need to live on, $10.50 an hour. But sad news here. A living wage for Santa Fe, according to MIT, would be $19.82 an hour. That’s for a bare-bones existence. There’s no Internet in there, there’s no movies, there’s no vacations.

Sometimes affluent people say to me,

Why don’t these people just learn how to manage their finances a little bit better?

There’s a growing movement to provide financial literacy training for poor people. What bothers me so much about this is that if you’re trying to live on his $7, $8, $9 an hour, there’s only one financial plan for you, and it’s called Just Say No. Don’t buy it, don’t eat it, don’t drink it, don’t smoke it, don’t fix it if it breaks, don’t go to a doctor in the first place. I just found out recently, due to some recent research who is funding financial literacy education in our public schools. The banks. Wells Fargo, Capital One. The same banks that brought us the mortgage crisis in the middle of the ‘00s. The banks that have depended on the gullibility and ignorance and trust of consumers all along.

We have a lot of full-time workers in this country who don’t make enough to live on, if you’re talking about living indoors, that is, homeless people who are full-time workers. I met them. I’m sure you know some of them. Even more disturbing to me in some way, hungry workers. That’s sort of an image of one in the early ‘00s before the economic downturn. What I described in the book Nickel and Dimed, in case any of you have been forced to read it in school or something, is out of date, because those were the good old days. Everything you read in there you have to correct and say, Ah, what would this be like today, when it’s so much harder to find these jobs and when in many ways wages and conditions have deteriorated?

What happened in the last four years or so of downturn? The number of people in poverty grew to 15.5% of Americans. A large part of this increase—I can’t tell you how much, I wish I knew—is not people who are poor necessarily in the long term or people whose parents were also poor, but people who have higher educations, who have degrees, people who were lawyers, IT experts, college graduates of all kinds. These are not the kinds of people that that stereotype I talked about at the beginning can apply to. These are not the people who have the bad lifestyles, so-called. They got poor because they didn’t have money. In fact, that’s become a sort of a major kind of theoretical breakthrough of mine: The cause of poverty may not be character failings, may not even be lack of education, may not be bad habits. The real, real core of poverty is a shortage of money. That’s it. It’s a theoretical breakthrough. I’m trying to push it.

Generally when we talk about doing something about poverty, we talk about things that need to be done: affordable housing, subsidized child care, all those sorts of things. We talk about budget programs. This afternoon I went to a fascinating meeting put together by Homewise, the housing organization in Santa Fe, to talk about just these kinds of things. How do we build programs and make them work effectively to help people move up? The sad truth in this country now, though, is instead of helping the down and out, we have a society that seems to persecute the poor, so that if you start sliding downhill, you’re likely to accelerate all the way into destitution, or even further. There’s another step, and that’s incarceration. This is something that has accelerated and increased since the middle of the ‘00s. I’ll tell you why I think that is, this sort of persecution of the poor.

Both government and corporations play a role in this. First of all, a number of employers openly discriminate against hiring unemployed people. It’s funny to say that. They don’t want to hire unemployed people. They want to hire people who already have jobs. Why is that? Because the same stereotypes that apply to the poor apply to the unemployed. They must be losers, so don’t hire them. In fact, there are states now that have been trying to pass laws so that you can’t have help-wanted ads that say, for example,

No unemployed candidates will be considered at all.

More and more employers—and I’ve seen numbers that go up to 70%—now do a credit check on people who apply for a job. It’s nothing to do with your ability to perform the job. Right there the people who most desperately need employment are weeded out. And if you’ve been relying on credit cards to get through these things, the poor face higher interest rates. They don’t get regular credit cards, they get subprime credit cards. I won’t even talk about payday lenders, because they’re such astronomical amounts of interest. And if you think you can get rid of any of these bills by filing for bankruptcy, I was shocked to find that the average cost of filing for bankruptcy in America is $2,000. Where are you going to get the $2,000 just to become bankrupt? Do we need a special program for that? Bankruptcy assistance?

Here’s the most sinister thing to me, though. This is research I’ve done and reporting I’ve done, but also because I work now with a group called the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, which I am proud to say I launched. We get starving journalists, who are pretty easy to find, to do really good research on these sorts of issues. The most sinister thing, it seems to me, is the ways in which government contributes its own harassment of the poor.

Ten million people are charged each year in this country with misdemeanors. Many of these are very minor misdemeanors—I’ll mention some of them—but they still lead to fines and even jail time. Seventy-five percent of the people charged with misdemeanors—this is kind of interesting—are indigent, and the average fine for a misdemeanor is in the range of $200 to $500. Let me give you some examples of what the things are that you can do. You’re already poor, right, you’ve got a low-wage job. In New York it is illegal to put your feet up on a subway seat that is empty. The whole subway car can be empty, it can be 3:00 in the morning. You’re returning from your dishwashing job. You put your feet up, and a cop comes in. You are not warned, you are not reprimanded, you do not receive a citation. You are arrested. You’re right then taken off the subway train into a police station. Next thing is you’re going to be charged, you’re going to have court costs. Because now the defendant is charged with all the court costs, or increasingly with the court costs.

In Washington, D.C., you can be arrested, not just warned or given a citation, for driving with an expired license. So you can see how this grows. The example I like to give is, if you’re driving with a broken headlight, it costs $150, maybe, to get a new one put in. You don’t have $150. You’ve got to get to work or from work or whatever. You get stopped for that. You get fined $200. If you had that money, you would have fixed the headlight, right? So you can’t pay that. Then the court is going to issue a summons at some point, because you haven’t paid that kind of cost. The summons is going to be turned over to a collection agent, which may not bother even getting your correct address. Most people who are issued summonses don’t show up and say they never got the summons. That’s now called “failure to appear.” Now you’re in real trouble. There’s a warrant out for your arrest, and the likelihood is you have no idea about that.

Another thing that is in the public-sector realm is that a growing number of cities have taken to ticketing and sometimes handcuffing children found on the streets during school hours. In Los Angeles the fine for truancy is $250. In Dallas it can be as high as $500. Crushing amounts for people who don’t have much money. In New Mexico, when there is a second conviction for a child’s truancy, a parent may face a fine of not more than $500 or imprisonment for up to six months. We want children to go to school, right? But in L.A. some community groups studied the situation because actually people were getting afraid to send their children to school in case they were a little bit late and got caught in the street and these fines started piling up on the family. So the community organizations found out that 80% of the so-called truants were simply late for school because a city bus was too full and whizzed right by their school-bus stop so they couldn’t get to school on time. I know sometimes it sounds good, Let’s really get those kids in school, let’s make the parents responsible. This has become an additional way of criminalizing the poor. It is not the kids in Beverly Hills whose families are getting tickets for this.

This sort of police harassment has increased since the recession started, as far as anybody can tell me, because it looks like it’s a way for municipalities and counties to raise their revenues. They’re really pressed for revenues, so they said, Let’s have more infractions, let’s have higher fines, let’s charge our court costs. What happens if you don’t pay a fine? Well, you may go to jail. There’s a case I found pretty fascinating about a South Carolina woman who was trying to make a living post losing her business in the recession by selling plasma, her own blood, and also scrap metal. She was charged in January 2012 with having a “messy” yard. Who knew that was a crime? Fined $480. Of course she didn’t have $480. So she was jailed for six days, until there was a community protest to get her out.

At least in this case she was not charged room and board for her jail time. I really want to know more about this. I have no national numbers. I just know it’s increasingly frequent to be charged room and board for your jail time just as like for your court costs. I want the money to do the kind of investigative work—not me, I’ll get other people, smarter people to do it—to find out, just how frequent is that now? Why are people in jail in the first place, usually? You might say they’ve done something wrong. But also because they are too poor to have private representation in court or anything else. They’re poor. So you jail them. And they come out and you say,

That will be $60 a day for your stay here.

It’s very easy to get in deep trouble. The story that I find most amazing comes from Michigan in ‘09. It’s of a woman—I should mention, this is actually a white woman, if it sounds like this is all racial profiling. It is not always. A homeless woman, a full-time worker, was arrested as a homeless person. When they got her, they found she had an even worse thing on her record than being homeless, and that is, her 16-year-old son was in jail and she was not keeping up with his room-and-board charges. So she was jailed because of that. So you have two family members caught in this situation. Fortunately, the ACLU intervened in her case.

One of the things that’s proliferated since the economic downturn is laws that forbid, outlaw essentially, homelessness. A good example, a particularly evil one, would be from Sarasota, Florida, which passed an ordinance that it is illegal there to be asleep outdoors and

when awakened, state that he or she has no other place to live.

In other words, if you’re sleeping in the park and a police officer comes over and shakes you awake and you say,

Oh, you know, I just didn’t feel like staying in my penthouse condo tonight, I really needed a change,

fine, that’s legal. But if you’re awakened and you say,

I’ve got nowhere to go,

that is a crime. Think about that. There are no laws, of course, that require cities to provide food, shelter, or restrooms for their indigent citizens. Restrooms, a big issue. Public urination is a crime almost everywhere. But is anyone going to help you to do it unpublicly if you don’t have the money or the skin color or whatever it takes to walk into a restaurant and just use the facilities?

I think the worst part of this is that in some cities, such as Orlando, it is even illegal to help the poor. There are laws forbidding the sharing of food with indigent people in public places. There’s a great group, Food Not Bombs—you might have heard of them—that like to get in those parks and serve vegan food to homeless people. And I don’t hold the vegan part against them. That’s great. Very sweet, nice, middle-class people have spent time in jail for that crime. As far as I’m concerned, that is like outlawing Christianity or outlawing ethics or something.

And how do they define indigent? I don’t know the definition exactly in Orlando, but Las Vegas had a great definition of indigent. And that was that “an indigent person is someone whom a reasonable person would consider to be eligible for public assistance or able to apply for public assistance.” That could have been me in my everyday work outfit at home as a free-lance writer. But the depth of prejudice there is incomprehensible.

So we have a pattern in this country. We have been defunding services that might help the poor while ramping up various forms of harassment of the poor, including law enforcement. So you starve school budgets, for example, you cut all the fun things, like art and drama and everything, then make truancy illegal. You cut public transportation budgets, then make lateness to school illegal. You shut down public housing and then make it a crime to be homeless. And at a time of high unemployment in most parts of this country, you make it more and more difficult for people who are unemployed who need jobs to find them.

It’s clear, the kinds of things we need to do in this country. We need affordable housing, we need to raise the minimum wage everywhere. In Santa Fe you have to go out there and be the missionaries around the country—that they can raise the minimum wage and have a better, stronger community. You can cut executive compensation at the top of the corporate hierarchy, if you just want to keep things in line. It’s amazing how some of the same economic conservatives who will say,

No, we cannot raise the minimum wage,

when you say,

How about controlling executive compensation?

No, don’t do that either.

Why not? Why not bring that down?

We’ve got health reform, or we should shortly have it, in New Mexico. The question will be whether it is actually implemented so the people can sign up for expanded Medicaid. What about some sick days for this country? Nearly half of America’s private-sector workers have no guaranteed sick days and can face firing for staying home with a sick child.

I could go on and on and on with the things that need to be done. I’ll mention this since there are college students in the audience. This isn’t working, our higher education business. It isn’t working anymore. You have no guarantee of a job when you get out. What you have is a guarantee of a huge debt. An awful lot of poor students are trying to get through college now while working full- time, which is not possible. No one should have to go through this. No one should graduate with tens of thousands of dollars in debt. In fact, I’m for an immediate debt jubilee for all those student loans.

I’m not pushing a positive agenda here. We all know what it is. My sort of short-term demand is much more modest. Could we just stop the meanness? Could we stop the relentless persecution of people who are already having hard time? Could we stop the wage theft by employers? Could we stop treating low-wage workers as criminals? Give them some rights in the workplace so they can even organize into unions, if they want to. Stop penalizing people for their credit scores. Since when is a credit score a measure of a person’s worth, which is how we act about that today? Could we stop harassing the homeless and the indigent. In a sense, to be homeless, to be indigent in America, you have entered the ranks of a population very little different from undocumented workers. It’s like you’re not a citizen anymore. It’s like you have no rights at all here. In other words, could we stop kicking people when they’re down? That’s my program. Not my whole one, but…

I don’t think this is about whether you’re a liberal or a conservative or what your religious orientation is or anything. I think these are moral issues. How we treat the people who are in need is a moral issue. I want to quote someone who is here tonight. She is one of the people who was one of the original activists behind raising the minimum wage in Santa Fe. I remember reading her quoted in The New York Times in 2006. This really meant a lot to me. She said,

What really got the other side

— and she’s talking about the opponents of raising the minimum wage—

was when we said, “It’s just immoral to pay people $5.15 on hour. They can’t live on that.”

She said,

When we said that, it made some of these business people furious. So we kept saying it over and over again.

Forget the so-called economic argument. This is a moral argument. When I speak to religious audiences, and I sometimes do, if you’re looking for some kind of biblical backup, you’re not going to find a lot on abortion in the Bible, you’re not going to find anything on gay marriage in the Bible, you’re not going to find a word about stem cell research in the Bible. But you will find 3,000 references to the moral claim that people who are hurting, chiefly because of poverty, have on the rest of us. I think it is time to start acting on that moral imperative and maybe even get to the point where we move on from stop kicking people when they’re down to the point where we’re actually constantly reaching out a hand.

Thank you.

Interview

It’s hard to be funny and discuss these issues in the same breath, but you remind me of Howard Zinn, who combined a great sense of humor while talking about very serious matters. I’d like you to talk about what’s happened to the Democratic Party over the decades in relation to issues of class and poverty. And I’m reminded of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his 1944 State of the Union address on economic justice, he had a whole list of things that he said that America must do and guarantee; for example, “the right to a useful and remunerative job; the right to earn enough to provide adequate food clothing, and recreation; the right of every family to a decent home; the right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and to enjoy good health; the right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment; the right to a good education.” He said all of these rights spell security.

I really cannot comment a lot on our elected officials or our Democratic Party. I would just point out that it was good to hear Obama talking recently about raising the federal minimum wage to $9 an hour until you realize that when he was running for reelection he was saying $9.50. If he keeps going down at that the rate we’ll be—the national is, what, 7.25 an hour?

But still, let’s say Congress passes it. At $9 or 9.50, if you are working full-time, you are in poverty.

No question about that.

You have a background with democratic socialists, and you kind of didn’t answer my question on the Democratic Party, where the plight of the poor was once a concern.

I don’t look at it so much politically. It’s in the early 1960s this culture of poverty idea took hold, which is what I was talking about, is terrible stereotypes about the poor, that there’s something wrong with them that has to be fixed, not that there’s something wrong with wages, that there’s a lack of housing, and so on. That’s what I think has to be turned around. There are obvious things everybody is probably thinking of right now, like campaign finance, the obvious dependence of elected officials on great wealth, which I don’t know the solution to unless we prevent all advertising for candidates, which might not be a bad idea.

How has the decline in the union movement affected wages and poverty?

It’s a disaster. The unions have been pushing for raising the minimum wage. That’s a good thing. I fault them for spending the last five or so years without making a huge effort to organize the unemployed. So many people have lost their jobs in this country, in waves. I’ve met with mill workers in Maine and foundry workers in Indiana. When you lose your job, you lose your union membership. No. That’s exactly where the union should be in fighting for you harder than ever. I am quite critical of our major unions.

And I’ll say something which may get me in a lot of trouble back in D.C., but I think they have to sell off their real estate. Anyone who has visited Washington, D.C., and has seen the beautiful buildings that the Teamsters, the AFL-CIO, etc., even the SEIU occupy, I think all that has to go. It’s probably worth hundreds of millions, billions of dollars. All that has to be turned into grass-roots organizing. That’s the only thing to do with that.

Union membership is now at an almost 100-year low. And there have been concerted attacks, well documented in Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, to take away collective bargaining. Talk about their endorsement of Keystone XL, the pipeline project that would bring tar-sands oil to the Guld Coast.

They didn’t come right out and endorse the Keystone pipeline. They just said, There’s a lot of good stuff about pipelines, right? I found very shocking about that in the statement from the AFL-CIO that at the same time they’re saying we the unions have to be sort of a nexus of democratic forces in this country—and they included civil rights, women, etc.—they suddenly dropped the environmental movement? What was with that? I have to say, I spent a lot of time back in union organizing drives, walking picket lines. And right now I always try to remind workers, they have the option of forming their own associations. You do not have to be part of any sort of national or international labor union to be organized. Like the American Airlines flight attendants. They’re not part of the AFL-CIO. They have their own association. The clerical workers at the University of California, at least in Berkeley, have their own association. That’s another way we have to think of that people can go.

The economist Richard Wolff on this stage talked about the systemic and structural problems of capitalism that need to be addressed rather than this or that particular problem. What do you think about that?

I tend to think smaller in my actual work. I agree with Richard Wolff, obviously. But we have to break things down into a size we can deal with. In Santa Fe six, seven years ago, when the living wage movement started, they could have said, “We have to smash capitalism. That’s what’s wrong here, some people getting rich off of other people.” That would be true at some level. But they also carved out an attack. If you want to call that reformism, then we have a fight, David. And I was hoping we would have a fight.

New Mexico is a state with a large number of people in poverty. Many of them are Native Americans. Four of the five poorest counties in the U.S. are on Indian land where there’s a tremendous amount of poverty, unemployment, domestic violence, crime.

Did I mention the Economic Hardship Reporting Project?

You did.

This is my project. We’re trying to get starving journalists to write about economic hardship. We had a very good piece a few months ago, which we got out in a variety of media about what’s happening on Native American reservations in North Dakota. That’s the big oil-boom state. The frackers come in and everybody gets a job. However, at the same time, the place they’re in becomes unlivable because of giant trucks going around, there’s actually no housing. Our reporter lived in a rental car in the Wal-Mart parking lot. Everything just went to hell. That sort of shows another side. You can have economic development, so-called, that is also social collapse.

I was reminded of a Yeats couplet when you were talking about meanness and kind of the hardening of the emotional arteries in the body politic. He said, “We had fed the heart on fantasies, The heart’s grown brutal from the fare.” How do we stop that meanness?

It’s not meanness in us each individually. I think very few of us have an impulse, when we see a panhandler, to hit the person or call the police. But it becomes systematic. When your municipality is so starved for finances that they think that’s actually a good way to make money, by laying fines and fees on top of the poorest people, then it becomes organized. And then we can do something. A lot of that is within reach of city ordinances, of people. You want children handcuffed on the streets for being late to school? You’ve got a choice. You can vote on that, you can go to city council on that. But it means looking at all those places where the gears are turning in that kind of direction and intervening.

I’m sure glad that that truancy thing wasn’t in force when I was going to junior high school and high school, because I was playing hooky most of the time, and my immigrant parents would have probably landed in debtor’s prison, if it had existed at that time.

Debtor’s prison does now exist.

De facto.

Or de jure, whatever. I tried to sketch out the way that can happen. If you miss a court summons, you have debt. And it could be a private-sector debt. It could be that you didn’t pay your rent and your landlord decides to take you to court over that. You don’t show up because you don’t get the summons or you had to work at that time or you have no vehicle or whatever, then you are a criminal.

In recent weeks the stock market has hit record highs, but people aren’t doing as well as Wall Street. One of the characteristics of the ongoing great recession is long- term, chronic unemployment. That’s defined by the Labor Department as 27 weeks or more of people being out of work. It turns out that many of them are older. And it’s hard for them to find a job.

I’m thinking now of the white-collar, professional, managerial job market. When I investigated for my book Bait and Switch—that was really hard. You think Nickel and Dimed was hard? This was really hard. Because all the advice is, on your résumé include no experience that goes back more than 10 years, because that will give your age away. There are no jobs after a certain age. I think one of the scariest times of life for people, no matter how educated or successful they might have been at some point, is when you become too old to be employable again. Say you’re 52 and you want to go back into practicing your white-collar profession, but you’re too young to qualify for Social Security or Medicare. That’s a very scary little period in there, when you become unemployable and you don’t qualify for those limited benefits.

What does it say about the economic system when there’s obviously so much work to be done, so much infrastructure that needs to be built and repaired and restored on one side, and on the other side you have all of these people out of work that are looking for work but the system can’t bring them together?

You’re indicting capitalism again. Is there any shortage of things to do in this country? And it’s not just physical infrastructure. It’s also what you could call human or social infrastructure. The baby boomers more and more are going to need home health care aides, just to give you one example. We’re not all going to be in nursing homes. We’re going to need that kind of service. Right now home health care aides are treated terribly: they’re paid near the minimum wage everywhere. They have no more rights than the average domestic worker. We’re not putting the need together with the ability to do something about that. We have so many children who need tutoring, they need help with school, they need smaller classrooms, and then we have all these unemployed teachers. An economy like that has to be changed.

You write that there was no decision to become a writer; “that was something I just started doing.” You have a background in science, a Ph.D. in cell biology. How did you become a writer?

I never thought about it as a profession. When I decided to become “socially relevant”—that was the old term—and went to work with a little group of young activists around 1970 on improving health care for low-income people in New York City, I actually had no thought of any kind of career. I got my Ph.D. in cell biology. I threw that over, or just got tired of the bench. And then in my first little movement job, I found myself doing a lot of writing. And I liked it, and I liked doing investigations, too, because that seemed to come straight from science.

And in Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch you foreground the first-person narrative. You’re the actor there interacting in these different situations. Very different from rather distant political analysis and essays.

It was strange, very strange.

You’ve said that something that prepared you for writing was the amount of reading that you used to do.

Sometimes students ask me, “How can I become a writer?” And not just students. Writing seems very glamorous. It is glamorous. It’s wonderful. There’s just no pay. I’ll say back to a young person, “What do you read?” “I don’t really read very much.” I’m sorry, that’s the ticket. The first step is to learn the language, how the language is used. Learn the beauty in the language, learn the language as a tool. For me that was not an effort. I love to read. You can’t stop me. I’ve actually had people tell me that Nickel and Dimed was the first book they’ve finished. I don’t know how to feel about that. On the one hand, I’m really proud; on the other hand, terrible, just terrible.

A friend told me Nickel and Dimed was the most depressing book she could never put down.

It’s not depressing.

One thing that characterizes your writing is fluency and terseness. There’s much in little. There’s not this endless verbosity and run-on sentences that begin in Tampa and end in Tucson. Did your science background give you that sense of precision?

I wouldn’t be surprised. A great way to learn to write: Write some science. Anybody ever done that kind of writing? All passive voice. But as a discipline, it’s good, because you just absolutely have to focus on what you’re trying to say. What I’ve said when I’ve taught essay writing classes is, Don’t worry about saying things in lovely ways, what adjectives and adverbs you’re going to use. The first thing is to have something to say. That’s where the struggle is. I don’t find writing sentences down too difficult, probably from those years and years of reading. But the struggle, the agony, the waking up in the middle of the night, thinking, What exactly do I have to say, what needs to be said that hasn’t been said, and how can I make that clear?

And you invest it with passion and energy.

Can’t help that. It’s just infects everything.

It may be growing up in Butte, Montana, which you say was still a “bustling, brawling, blue-collar mining town.” Your father was a miner, other men in your family were either miners or railroad workers. And today, Butte, you note, is, sadly,” an underpopulated, woefully polluted EPA Superfund site thanks to the mining companies.”

It’s a story like so many others. The mining companies come in or the lumber companies or whatever it is, and they make their money and they go off. When the Anaconda company left Butte, Montana, to go get their copper from Chile, they didn’t bother pumping out the mines. They let the mines flood. They let all the toxic chemical wastes flood the city. Neighborhoods are buried under water that is so toxic that birds have been seen accidentally going into it and disappearing.

What was your take on the Occupy movement?

I loved it. Anybody here from Occupy Santa Fe? Congratulations. Thank you. I think actually that was a turning point in which we began to understand, a lot of us, that criminalization of poverty, that it is illegal to be homeless, that it is illegal to do things outdoors in public that biologically you have to do and there is no provision for. It was a turning point for me. I remember going to Zuccotti Park in New York City to visit. I’m too old to stay overnight. That’s my excuse, anyway. Zuccotti Park is pretty small. So I go there and I’m enjoying it and so much is going on. And then I started thinking, Where do you pee? There was one Starbucks about three blocks away which would let people use their bathrooms, and there was like a block-long line outside for that. There are no public facilities. A lot of things I think were brought home to a lot of us who are not homeless through the Occupy encampments. And I think in that way it was sort of a brilliant tactic, although it’s not a tactic that was easy to continue.

Occupy to some extent did inject the 1% versus 99%, and income inequality and wealth inequality into the political discourse. But except for a recent revival after the superstorm Sandy hit the New York-New Jersey area, where Occupy people helped people in distress, get them out of their homes and feed them, the movement pretty much seems to have dissipated.

I don’t think it’s as visible. But one of the things that Occupy people are working on, maybe also here in Santa Fe, but I think nationally—which I mentioned in my talk is abolishing debt. And I’m not talking about for the big banks. We have to look at this trillion dollars now in student loan debt. I don’t know what the number is on medical debt, but medical debt, as Elizabeth Warren pointed out before she became a senator, is the number one cause of bankruptcy in the U.S. I think that the Occupy demand is worth pushing for: Abolish these debts and let people live.

There was the Occupy slogan, “We got sold out, they got bailed out.” It kind of encapsulated the politics of the era. You’ve said that we’ve got to move the discussion from what can we do for the poor to what do we have to stop doing to the poor? Can you talk more about that?

Well, I think the liberal idea is a good one, how do we put these things together—housing and good jobs and education—and make all that work for people. I’m completely down with that. But at the same time, we have to not look away from the huge levels of incarceration in this country, the insanity, for example, of the war on drugs, which has resulted in the incarceration of so many African American men, and these other forms of the criminalization of poverty that are going on.

Michelle Alexander, again, from this stage spoke eloquently about that.

Her book, The New Jim Crow, is great.

What’s coming up for the Economic Hardship Reporting Project?

We have some very hot things in the works. Right now, today, go to cnn.com and you will see something we got Susan Faludi, the well-known feminist, to write about Sheryl Sandberg’s intervention in feminism. Sheryl Sandberg, the Yahoo executive who has written a book called Lean In about how women can get ahead in the corporate hierarchy. Unfortunately, that book came out at the same time as the female CEO of Yahoo stopped the possibility of working from home—very, very important for parents of both sexes, but particularly women—while she built her own nursery next to her office at the Yahoo building. I’m not really interested in women making it up the corporate ladder if they don’t have concern for their women employees.

Your views on women in combat?

Fine. I’ve been saying this for a long time. My favorite of my own books is called Blood Rites.

It’s a terrific book.

Nobody ever mentions it because it’s scholarly, my own form of scholarly. The point is that ever since the introduction of action-at-a-distance weapons, like bows and arrows, upper-body strength has not been the determining thing in ability to the fight. That’s nonsense. The other thing is, when you’re using action-at-a-distance weapons—and our most common one for the past few hundred years has been guns—you don’t want to be in some kind of testosterone rage when you’re taking aim. Rage and the total sort of testosterone story of war—silly. Unless you’re fighting hand to hand in wrestling or something.

And any guy here who questions that and thinks that women aren’t capable of being really aggressive, I’ll meet you outside.

I’m not going to top that. So that’s a perfect place to stop. Thank you Barbara.

(Due to time constraints some portions of the interview were not included in the national broadcast. Those portions are included in this transcript.)

For information about obtaining CDs, MP3s, or transcripts of this or other programs, please contact:
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Alternative Radio
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©2013

What’s going on in Canada?

Wed, 08 May 2013 19:32:13 GMT

Yves Engler
Interviewed by David Barsamian
Toronto, Ontario
25 March 2013

What’s going on in Canada? Justin Bieber? Snow? Hockey? Since 2006, the vast country of 35 million people has been led by Stephen Harper. He is prime minister and head of the Conservative Party. Earlier in his political career he was a Member of Parliament representing Calgary in Alberta province. To say Harper has close ties with Canada’s powerful oil and mining interests would be an understatement. He is a fervent advocate of the tar sands project in Alberta and has aggressively backed its expansion. Scientists such as James Hansen call the extraction of this particularly dirty oil a “monster” and “game over” for stabilizing the climate. Harper is strongly backing the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline from Alberta to the U.S. Gulf Coast. That project, opposed by many in the U.S., is on Obama’s desk right now

This lecture is available as a CD or mp3 or transcript from Alternative Radio

Yves Engler has been called “one of the most important voices on the Canadian Left today” and “in the mould of I.F. Stone.” He is the author of many books, including Lester Pearson’s Peacekeeping: The Truth May Hurt, The Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy, Canada Israel: Building Apartheid, and The Ugly Canadian: Stephen Harper’s Foreign Policy.

You can listen to Yves Engler speak for himself here.

I’d like you to read the opening paragraph from The Ugly Canadian.

“While millions disagree with Stephen Harper and his Conservative Party’s domestic agenda, fewer Canadians are aware of his government’s destructive foreign policy. Many of us only pay close attention to matters that directly affect us, or our families. So when the Conservatives make it harder to collect unemployment insurance or raise the Old Age Pension, people notice because it affects them or someone they know. When a Conservative MP introduces a private member’s bill to restrict a woman’s right to choose an abortion, media outlets across the country report on it and pundits produce reams of analysis, much of it critical. But when our government encourages a coup in Honduras or mining legislation to benefit Canadian companies over indigenous communities in Peru, there is little critical reporting in the dominant media. This is because the only direct Canadian self-interest tends to be that of the companies trying to profit from the situation. Investors put pressure on the government to promote their self-interests while few, if any, Canadians have a direct stake in defending Honduran democracy or the rights of poor villagers in a remote corner of Peru.”

Who is the ugly Canadian? Who is Stephen Harper? What are his political origins?

Stephen Harper’s foreign policy is not something that’s completely distinct from previous Canadian governments’ foreign policies. But it’s a particularly ideological bunch that are in power today, very close to the tar sands oil interests and a couple decades of right-wing ideology that comes with the oil sector in Alberta. Also, it’s a foreign policy that is very close with the rise of Canadian mining companies globally. Those companies have risen in influence around the world at incredible rates, going from about $250 million in investment in Africa in 1989 to $30 billion today. They dominate throughout Latin America with hundreds of billions of dollars of mining investments there.

So Stephen Harper comes out of a particularly right-wing regional movement from Alberta, where the bulk of Canadian oil is. And at the foreign policy level he has very much extended this sort of right-wing ideology. The rise of the tar sands and the rise of Canadian mining investment are some of the economic forces that are driving this particularly ugly Canadian.

Andrew Nikiforuk, the journalist, who has been a guest on this program, told me when I interviewed him in Calgary that Alberta was “Texas on steroids” and it was Canada’s “petrostate.”

There’s a lot of truth to that. Harper’s ties to the oil sector in Alberta are extensive familial ties. In large part the political party he represents comes out of a backlash to a national energy program in the 1980s. Basically, that was not liked by the oil companies in Alberta, and they funded an alternative Reform Party for a while. Then it morphed into the Conservative Party and a whole host of right-wing think tanks. For Alberta regionally, every position in the House of Commons from Alberta, minus one, was won by the Conservative Party. So the province is the bastion of support for this government and all those particularly regressive elements that tend to come with the oil sector.

If Alberta were an independent country, it would have the third largest oil reserves in the world after Saudi Arabia and Venezuela.

And the plan is to keep extracting that no matter what the ecological toll is. That’s where you see, with the Keystone pipeline protests, why the federal government and the Alberta government have both been so active in their lobbying in the U.S. to get that pipeline built. Because this is not just about something that’s going to play out for the next couple years. They have plans to extract billions of barrels of oil and keep expanding the extraction process. And, obviously, Alberta is cut off from a seaport. There’s opposition to building pipelines to the West Coast through British Columbia.

They want to get that oil to market and the most profitable of the options is down to the Gulf Coast. So you have a federal government that has literally spent millions, probably into the tens of millions of dollars, lobbying in the U.S. on behalf of TransCanada and the Keystone pipeline. The Alberta government also, all the ministers repeatedly in Washington speaking to governors throughout the U.S., sending letters to Congress people or senators that come out in opposition to the pipeline, going to county meetings and writing letters to The New York Times. And on and on and on, just an incredible lobbying battle. Because the Keystone pipeline is not just about the short term. The plan is to continue to expand the tar sands. And there are a number of companies that are making and will be making lots of profit from that process. From an ecological standpoint it’s a catastrophe, but from the standpoint of economic growth and profit, there’s a lot of money to be made in the Alberta tar sands.

James Hansen, the well-known U.S. scientist says that if this project continues, that it would be “game over.” You hear a lot of these kinds of apocalyptic terms around the tar sands—tipping point, game changer—but there is a solid consensus that this would significantly exacerbate climate change.

There’s no doubt about it. The first thing that people have to understand is that they have started with the easiest oil. It gets dirtier as the extraction process goes along. And increasingly, while there are efficiency improvements in the extraction of the current dominant form of extraction of tar sands oil, they’re increasingly going to in situ extraction, which is pumping moisture down to pull out the oil. And that’s even more energy-intensive. From the oil sector crowd, they say they’re getting better, more efficient, it’s less harmful to the environment. But in fact they’re moving toward a model of even more difficult oil to get out, which is more energy-intensive, plus the impact on the indigenous communities that live there, and the destruction of forest at incredible levels.

Are there not problems with coal extraction? Are there not problems with traditional oil extraction? Of course there are. There need to be radical changes in how we structure our cities and how we structure our economies. There is no doubt. The tar sands are not the only problem out there. But with the plans of expansion they have going, I think this should be seen as a line in the sand for the environmental movement. So far the mobilizations against the pipeline, certainly in B.C., have been very impressive in terms of galvanizing environmental activism; and, clearly, in the U.S., with the Keystone protests, they’ve been very good at galvanizing environmental activism and putting the question of climate justice and climate disturbance on to the political agenda, which is an incredibly important development.

More than 1200 people were arrested at the White House in the largest civil disobedience action in recent memory. And the Sierra Club, a conservative environmental organization in the U.S., has now endorsed civil disobedience as a technique to try and stop this project from going forward.

That’s a very positive development. I saw that more recently, if Obama okays the Keystone XL, up to 5,000 people are planning to use their bodies to disrupt the building process. It is just one element in a bigger fight. I’ve written a previous book called Stop Signs: Cars and Capitalism on the Road to Economic, Social and Ecological Decay. I think we need to move completely away from the private automobile, for instance, among many other changes in terms of the environment and economy. So we need to be moving towards a model of walking, biking, and mass transit for people to get around. We need to be changing the ways in which food is grown to be less energy-intensive. There are lots of changes that need to be done.

Interestingly, the Keystone protests in the U.S. have really put the Conservative Harper government on the defensive on the climate issue. They, of course, pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol. They’ve criticized the opposition NDP for its supposed job-killing climate change program. So they’ve been really aggressive in doing their best to do nothing on that issue. But the protests in the U.S. have forced them on to the back foot. Now they’re starting to talk about bringing in stricter measures around greenhouse gas emissions on a number of fronts. It’s probably mostly rhetorical at this point, but it’s interesting to see how the social movement in the U.S. has really impacted the official political discussion in this country around greenhouse gases. What’s needed is bigger and more militant protests. And pushing groups like the Sierra Club and other more conservative organizations to drop this desire to always be respectable and moving towards activism and taking the science seriously.

Explain NDP.

The New Democratic Party, in this last federal election, 2011, for the first time in their history became the official opposition. They’re traditionally the labor-supported party. They’re sort of the social democrats, clearly to the left of the Democrats, though increasingly less to the left of the Democrats and clearly moving to the right. But they have a history of being tied into social movements. They were the party in Saskatchewan that brought in Medicare, the national single-payer health insurance. They’re the main opposition at this point.

The premier of Saskatchewan, at the time, was the father-in-law of the actor Donald Sutherland.

Tommy Douglas was the premier when they started the process of bringing in Medicare in Saskatchewan 50 years ago.

How have the protests in the U.S. against Keystone affected Canadian activists? Have there been sit-downs and blockades?

In British Columbia there have been. There are two different main pipelines planned to take oil from Alberta to the coast through B.C. The Northern Gateway has received the most amount of protest, which looks like it’s dead in the water because of a combination of indigenous opposition, First Nations. B.C.’s unceded territory. So the First Nations have legal rights that are quite significant. That combined with the environmental movement have really put that on the back burner. And there is another pipeline planned to go into a port in the Vancouver area. There’s lot of opposition from the municipalities. At this point there hasn’t been that significant of a direct action. There have been wide-scale pledges of, If they start this process, we’re going to block it physically. At this point it looks unlikely that they will be able to get the pipeline through, because even the right-wing provincial government of B.C. has come out in opposition to the main pipeline.

There has been some direct action, sort of symbolic direct action or symbolic getting arrested, against the Keystone XL in Ottawa. But the battle to some extent in Canada has been lost, because the National Energy Board has okayed the project and the opposition has really been coalesced more on the pipelines out to B.C., because that’s where groups have much more capacity to actually block the pipelines, whereas the one down south is much more difficult to oppose.

And that Northern Gateway pipeline is an Enbridge project. And then the U.S. pipeline is being projected to be built by TransCanada.

Both of them are Calgary-based. Enbridge is a major pipeline company that wants to take that oil out to the West Coast and then export it to Asia, possibly export it down to Southern California. TransCanada is the one building the Keystone XL, has already built portions of that longer pipeline, and is now calling on the Obama government to okay the cross-border component, which he has authority to say yes or no to. I think they’re the two most important pipeline companies in Canada.

But it’s not just the companies themselves. It’s the whole Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers that’s behind this, and at the end of the day all of the companies that are invested in the Alberta tar sands that have direct interest in the building of these pipelines. So the companies themselves are big multinational corporations, but they have numerous bigger multinational corporations, from Total to Exxon to many others, kind of behind them in supporting the building of these pipelines.

And China is proposing to invest quite significantly in the tar sands.

A Chinese oil company, CNOOC, recently purchased for $15 billion, Nexen, a Canadian company heavily operating in the tar sands. The purchase by the Chinese company is in part because they obviously want access to the tar sands oil, but it’s also the expertise. The Canadian companies producing in Alberta are at the kind of forefront of the extraction technologies of this really dirty and difficult to get to oil. So for the Chinese, there are other parts of the world where similar forms of oil exist, so there’s a desire to build up that expertise for use globally.

A Canadian organization called someofus.org has called FIPA, the Foreign Investment Protection Agreement, between China and Canada, “the most secretive and sweeping trade deal of a generation.”

It’s been postponed. The Harper government signed FIPA. But it has not been passed in the House of Commons because about six months ago, when it became public, there was a groundswell of opposition. Because the accord really extends the investor rights of Chapter 11 in NAFTA, which allows foreign companies to sue the government if they feel they’ve had their profits impacted. And it has a really long shelf life. Once it’s signed, it’s in effect for 30 years. Whereas NAFTA, whatever country—I think it’s six months they have to give notice to pull out of the agreement.

There’s speculation that FIPA is a way of locking in Chinese investment into the tar sands. Some even speculated that the Conservative government wants this accord with China to strengthen the push to get that oil from Alberta out through B.C. and actually be able to hang it over the heads of the provincial government in B.C. and the communities that oppose it. That by the rules of FIPA the Chinese company would be able to sue Canada. That would then put further pressure to build the Northern Gateway pipeline to get the oil out to Asia. Whether that’s true or not, I’m not sure.

But what is clear is this is a further intense extension of investor rights and that whole process of corporate capitalist globalization that’s been going on for a couple of decades of putting the rights of investors above those of indigenous communities, above those of governments to regulate, above environmental accords, etc.

How did the sale of Nexen to CNOOC go over?

Harper okayed the purchase but it was controversial, even fairly controversial within the government itself.

Someofus.org says that this takeover of Nexen will open the floodgates to a wave of foreign buyouts of Canada’s resources.

That’s not the criticism I would make. First of all, there’s lots of foreign investment in the tar sands already, companies from Exxon to the French company Total to Norway’s Statoil to state-owned oil company from Qatar. I think one of the reasons why the Nexen purchase received so much opposition, even from establishment voices, is that China is seen as sort of a geopolitical rival of the West, of the U.S., Canada. So when a state-owned company from Qatar invests in the tar sands the reaction is different. Qatar is an ally of the West. It’s equally as repressive as China, it’s a state-owned company like the Chinese company, but that gets very little criticism.

I oppose foreign investment in general into natural resources. In fact, I oppose Canadian corporate investment. I think natural resources should be in the hands of local communities, in conjunction with provincial and national governments. And that should be everywhere in the world. That doesn’t just go for Chinese investment into Canada, but that also goes for Canadian mining investment in the Congo. You read in the business pages of The Globe and Mail or the National Post, the two dominant business papers, about how one Canadian company has paid $3 billion to another Canadian company to buy a mine or two in the Congo. The question of the Congolese is just completely off the agenda. But foreign investment, particularly in natural resources, whether it’s an American company or a Chinese company, I’m not a big supporter of either of these options.

Talk about the First Nations in Alberta and how they are adversely affected by the tar sands project, the Athabasca Nation. There has been a huge increase in rare cancers, there’s been contamination of water, wildlife has been imperiled.

In Fort Chipewyan, which is probably the worst hit significant sized community—multiple thousands of people live there, predominantly indigenous people—the cancer rates have risen significantly. There has been just incredible pressure on the doctors—this is going back several years—when it started to become clear that the toxins being released in the tar sands extraction were increasing cancer rates. There were some attempts by a doctor working there to document the issue. He got incredible pressure, basically got run out by the provincial government. The question has been proven beyond a reasonable scientific doubt at this point, that there have been increased cancer rates, but that’s put aside for the profits that the oil companies are extracting. There is a long history in this country, obviously, of natural resource extraction being at the expense of the first peoples, that had their land taken from them and continue to have their land taken from them across what is currently called Canada.

Not unlike the U.S.

For sure.

One of the chapters in The Ugly Canadian is “Mining the World.” You quote Harper saying, “Canadians are justly proud of our mining industry for its elevated sense of corporate social responsibility.” Then you quote a Foreign Affairs spokesperson from Ottawa, “Canada’s mining sector leads the world in responsible mining practices.”

That’s just Orwellian. The way to hide a problem is by boasting in the complete opposite direction. Even the Mining Association of Canada, there was a report of theirs leaked in 2011 which showed that Canadian mining companies were engaged in the biggest number of what they call “corporate social responsibility problems” around the world. The evidence, the documentation, is just absolutely overwhelming. At this point, and unbelievable as it might sound, you can pretty much pick any country in the global south and you will find an example of a Canadian-run company that’s involved in a conflict with the local community that has spurred violence, that has spurred ecological problems, from Ghana to Papua New Guinea, Chile to Guatemala. There is an example of a Canadian mining company that hired security forces who were then involved in raping people from the local community. Oftentimes because there’s resistance to the mine, people are killed because the community opposes the mine and the company is adamant that it’s going to move forward. So the examples are just absolutely overwhelming. Mostly ignored, of course, by the dominant media in this country. But groups like Mining Watch Canada and a whole series of different independent media outlets have just documented story after story after story. Increasingly, they have trickled out into the dominant media.

But the Harper government has blocked all attempts to bring in minimal regulations for mining companies. One of the reasons there are so many mining companies based in Canada, on Canadian stock exchanges, particularly the Toronto Stock Exchange and the Vancouver Stock Exchange, is that communities don’t have the right to pursue legally a company in this country that is responsible for abuses abroad. The U.S. something like 100 countries in the world have laws that allow people from other countries to pursue a company from the U.S. or elsewhere in a home court for what they did abroad. That doesn’t exist in Canada.

It’s precisely because the whole regulatory environment is incredibly permissive to what companies based in Canada do abroad, a big part of the reason, that so many of the mining companies are based here. Sixty percent of the world’s mining companies are based in Canada, on Canadian stock exchanges. I think it’s something like 40% of all mining capital from the world is on Canadian stock exchanges. So Canada is far and away the biggest player in the global mining sector, particularly in the juniors; a big player among the big companies, but particularly among the junior mining companies. The Harper government is just an ardent defender of the mining sector, no matter what the companies are involved in abroad. If there are examples where the company’s security forces have killed people, they still defend the Canadian mining company.

What you described as the lack of legal redress and criminal prosecution, is that connected with what you call, “Canadian mining investment is dependent on extreme free-market capitalism”? Is this extreme free-market capitalism?

It’s not free-market capitalism when you have the Canadian government lobbying on your behalf in Ecuador to introduce Canadian miners to local authorities. That’s not extreme free-market capitalism. That’s a clear example of government supporting the mining sector. But that’s ignored in the discussion. But what the Canadian mining sector has benefited from is a whole series of pro-capitalist reforms, often pushed by the International Monetary Fund through its structural adjustment programs, things like the reforms that came alongside NAFTA in Mexico. In the lead-up to NAFTA there were changes to the ejido system. Corporations in Mexico benefited from the elimination of the ejido system, where local communities had control over the rights of the subsoil and mining. This placated Canadian and other foreign investors. They did not have to worry about having “their” property taken over by local communities. At the time of NAFTA, in the mid-1990s, there was no foreign mining company operating in Mexico. By 2010 there were 375 Canadian mining companies operating in that country. Almost the entire mining sector is Canadian-dominated.

As I mentioned before, in 1989 there was $250 million in Canadian mining investment in Africa. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, there was a whole series of structural adjustment programs pushed by the IMF, which often opened up those African countries’ natural resource sectors to foreign ownership and exploitation. Canadian companies are a dominant player throughout Africa; they’ve been the primary beneficiary.

When we talk about the ugly Canadian in terms of Harper’s foreign policy, structurally an important component of that is that these Canadian mining companies that are all across the globe understand that resource nationalism and socialistic reforms are a big threat to their profits. That’s part of why you see that Peter Munk, who is the head of Barrick Gold, the biggest Canadian mining company, came out viciously against Hugo Chavez. Even though his company has had no investments in Venezuela, he denounced Chavez as a dictator and has been very aggressively opposed to him because he understands that the sort of socialistic reforms that were being pursued there are a real threat to his interests elsewhere, if other countries start pursuing those reforms.

One of the first reforms that movements against neoliberalism pursue is they call for higher royalty rates on foreign investment, in the natural resource sector they call for nationalizing of natural resources. So the rise of the mining sector has had a major impact on creating a more generally right-wing Canadian foreign policy.

Chavez, of course, passed away in March of 2013.

And the Canadian government was the only government that used the opportunity to criticize Chavez, which prompted a very hostile letter from the Venezuelan government to the Harper government. Which is just another example of this over-the-top behavior—even Obama had the good sense to write a sort of don’t-say-anything type of statement about Chavez’s death, but Harper used it as an opportunity to again show that he’s the most right-wing government in the hemisphere.

Harper’s hostility to nationalist governments in Latin America doesn’t extend to Cuba.

It is a very interesting development. First of all, there are lots of Canadian corporate interests in Cuba that have to some extent benefited from the U.S. embargo. Now, ideologically, they are, of course, incredibly hostile to Cuba, but they have kept that pretty minimal. Here and there there’s an odd criticism that’s ideologically driven, but they’ve mostly avoided an open fight with the Cuban government. But also, there are about a million Canadian tourists who go to Cuba every year. So there’s a sense of—you could almost call it solidarity among Canadians, an understanding that the American embargo is unfair and it’s a punishment of Cuba that’s not warranted. So the combination of quite a bit of sympathy among the public and significant corporate interests have led to a situation where the Harper government has just decided to try to avoid the question and has quieted down the most ideological bunch in their attacks against Cuba.

Canada is militarily involved in the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan. Are mining companies also involved because Afghanistan is known to have huge deposits of precious metals and minerals?

There has been a whole series of articles in the business pages of the Canadian papers going back five, six, seven years about the natural resources in Afghanistan and precisely the position that Canadian companies would be in to benefit because of the heavy military involvement of Canada in Afghanistan. Some are saying as many as a trillion dollars’ worth of natural resources, of different minerals, in Afghanistan. Because of the security situation, it’s been slow in terms of developing. One Canadian company did get a quarter stake in I think it’s an Indian-led project, a fairly significant project in Afghanistan. But there is no doubt that that was one of the issues sort of hovering in the background of Canada’s military involvement in Afghanistan, which continues with about 1,000 Canadian troops that are no longer supposed to be militarily involved, they’re just supposed to be training Afghans, but are clearly still part of the U.S.-led occupation of that country.

And in the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the tenth anniversary of which was recently observed, Canada to some extent did not directly get itself involved militarily but it profited enormously from the U.S. invasion.

It wouldn’t be correct to say that Canada didn’t get involved militarily. Canada didn’t join, the Chrétien government, because of massive protests, particularly in Quebec. There were huge protests in Montreal. And with a provincial election coming up in Quebec, a fear in the Chrétien government of the time, since like 80% of Quebec were against the war, that supporting the war would benefit the sovereignist Parti Québécois, that wants an independent Quebec. They didn’t join the “coalition of the willing.” They didn’t formally endorse the war but they did a whole bunch of things that supported it. For instance, there were Canadian troops integrated in U.S. units that were part of the invasion; there were Canadian generals, one general who then became the head of the Canadian military, who was actually in charge of 35,000 foreign troops in Baghdad, and a couple of other Canadian generals in similar positions at different points; there were Canadian naval vessels off the coast of Iraq.

Actually, the government had a legal opinion that because of Canada’s role in charge of this NATO force off the coast of Iraq, that we were actually legally at war with Iraq because it was about stopping Iraqi ships. There were Canadian training missions of jets in Iraq. A whole series of different forms of Canadian support to the war in Iraq, but not the main form, what Bush wanted above all else, which was that public endorsement of the invasion.

So Iraq, on one hand, is an example of the success of the antiwar movement in this country, but on the other hand, it’s an example of how deeply integrated the Canadian military establishment is with the U.S. military establishment. There are something like 150 different military accords between Canada and the U.S., most prominently through NORAD. So this country has a deep history of being tied into U.S. militarism, going back certainly to the post-World War II period.

In North Africa and the Middle East you write that the reasons for Harper’s foreign policy may be more complex than the straightforward promotion of wealthy people’s financial interests. What are some of those reasons?

It depends on the country. In the case of Saudi Arabia, the Harper government, is deeply tied to the monarchy. Part of that has an economic component. Part of it is that Saudi Arabia is a long-standing U.S. ally in the region and I guess was threatened in the context of the Arab Spring pro-democracy protests.

In the case of Israel, the Harper government has made Canada the most pro-Israel, diplomatically at least, country in the world—very aggressively in support of whatever the right-wing government in Israel does, says nothing about the expansion of settlements. But I think Harper, like George Bush Jr., is tied in to a sort of evangelical Christian Zionist movement. Obviously, Israel is seen as a geopolitical ally.

I wrote a book called Canada and Israel: Building Apartheid, which goes into the long history of Canada’s support for Israel, which predates the creation of Israel in 1948. There are long-standing Christian Zionist views in this country, and also a long-standing view of Israel and Zionism before the creation of Israel in 1948, of Israel being a tool of Western imperialism in the region. There were people going back to the late 1800s in this country calling for a dominion of Israel as part of the British Empire, just like Canada.

So Israel is an example where there’s a mix of motivations for this strong pro-Israel support. But two of those are a combination of a Christian Zionist movement that Harper represents and also, part of what the Conservative government wants to do. They want to replicate the sort of social model of the Republican Party, where it’s completely pro-business party. But how do you develop a base of activists and how do you have people vote for you? Part of that in the U.S. is focusing on social issues and trying to build a base of support among a certain subsector of the population through Christian Zionism, and other sorts of social issues that they’ve pursued.

Quoting Andrew Nikiforuk, “Republican religious tribalism is now Ottawa’s worldview.”

Exactly. I think Harper pretty consciously looks to the Republican Party as what to try to replicate—fortunately, in lots of ways unsuccessfully on a number of the social issues. The public has become so accepting of things like gay marriage that it’s difficult for them to go where they want to go, abortion being obviously the biggest issue. But still a big chunk of the Conservative Party MPs are people who are antagonistic to abortion, who are antagonistic to gay marriage. That’s a big part of the base of their party.

Ten percent of Canadians identify themselves as evangelical. So that’s about 3 to 3 1/2 million people, including the prime minister and some of his cabinet ministers as well. In the U.S., Christian fundamentalists see the extraction of resources as a bounty that God has given and used that as justification.

The church that Harper goes to—it’s unclear if he really believes in this stuff or he sees this as politically useful to belong to this church—has said similar kind of stuff like that about climate change and God’s role and the denial of climate change, that it’s our duty to extract these resources and the like. To me, it’s obviously a self-serving ideology from the standpoint of oil and mining companies. Nonetheless it convinces many people who aren’t necessarily directly benefiting from the process in significant ways.

Years ago I remember listening to a Noam Chomsky lecture which was recorded here in Toronto. He began with, “I landed today at an airport named after a war criminal,” the Lester Pearson International Airport at Toronto, the very one that I landed at today. Why would Chomsky describe Pearson, a former prime minister of Canada, as a war criminal?

Actually, that story that Chomsky tells in the book Understanding Power I included in the forward that he wrote for my book Lester Pearson’s Peacekeeping: The Truth May Hurt. In Canada it’s important to note that there is this strong idea of Canada being a benevolent international actor. A lot of people, even on the left, believe that it’s Harper that has wrecked Canadian foreign policy, that prior to that it was morally directed. That’s untrue, and it’s an important part of what I’ve tried to challenge in my previous books.

Lester Pearson is the preeminent symbol of that supposedly benevolent Canadian foreign policy. He was the most important post-World War II Canadian foreign policy decision maker. He was head of External Affairs from 1949 to 1956, he was then prime minister from 1963 to 1968, and had a number of different roles in the External Affairs bureaucracy.

Chomsky’s focus for referring to Pearson as a war criminal—I agree, correctly so—is Pearson’s role in the Vietnam War, and specifically in terms of delivering American bombing threats to the North Vietnamese. That came out in the Pentagon Papers, that Pearson, in a meeting with Lyndon Johnson, had okayed having Canadian officials who were on the International Control Commission, which was supposed to be bringing peace to the region, go to the North Vietnamese and say, If you don’t do this, we, meaning, of course, the U.S., will bomb you. And the U.S. bombing of North Vietnam was quite clearly a war crime. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed. There was Canadian complicity in that process, among many other elements of the war in IndoChina.

But Pearson’s record, actually, is the reason that the second part of the title of my book is called The Truth May Hurt. I think for lots of left nationalists, it hurts them to hear this stuff. But Pearson played a big role in the founding of NATO. He played a terrible role in the Korean War. He was the external minister. He actually threatened to resign if Canada didn’t send ground troops to Korea. That’s a war that left 3 to 4 million people killed. At one point the U.S. stopped bombing North Korea because all buildings of more than two stories were thought to have been destroyed. This was a war of incredible brutality, something that makes the war in Afghanistan or the bombing and the war in Libya look tame comparatively. But Pearson was a big player in that. And he was the person most responsible for moving Canada from support for British imperialism towards support for American imperialism in that post-World War II period.

Why did Canada get militarily involved in Libya?

One, it’s a strong proponent of NATO, going back to the creation of NATO. There are also significant Canadian corporate interests in Libya that were put in jeopardy with the uprising and some of the Western response to that. Another internal Canadian government document that just came out a couple days ago showed that immediately before the war was over the priority was securing Canadian investments and benefiting from the reconstruction process in Libya.

There were some specific elements. The Canadian government in the process was trying to purchase 65 F35 fighter jets from Lockheed Martin, which has been a very controversial issue in Canada.

Why?

Because of the cost, primarily. That’s what the dominant media focus has been on, because the cost is just escalating to $35 billion or $40 billion, and the government has sort of tried to suppress the cost. They initially said it was going to be $9 billion, and then they came out, It’s going to be twice that, and then they just tried to lie about it. That’s most of what the media talks about.

Obviously, from my standpoint, we shouldn’t be buying F35 fighter jets because the point of F35 fighter jets is to kill people. And I think there’s lots of progressive opinion in this country that opposes the F35 for that reason. That’s been a controversial issue. The bombing of Libya was just before the Canadian election and right at a time when the F35 was particularly controversial. So from the government’s standpoint, the bombing of Libya sort of justified spending more on fighter jets. The corporate media basically said, We need these F35s because this wonderful moral crusade we’re doing in Libya is an example of why we need a top-of-the line fighter jet.

But a big part of the reason why the government wants the F35 is because the military is so into it, and the military is so into it because that’s the top-of-the-line fighter jet. And to be well integrated into the U.S. military, that’s your best bet, to be that away, alongside many Canadian companies that are involved in the production of the fighter jets.

But when it came to neighboring countries of Libya, to wit, Tunisia and Egypt, Ottawa, the Harper government, supported the Ben Ali and Mubarak dictatorships right till the end.

Egypt was a particularly embarrassing situation for Harper. Three hours before Mubarak publicly announced his resignation, Harper was making a speech essentially endorsing Mubarak’s transition plan, which was something that was opposed overwhelmingly by the pro- democracy movement. In the case of Tunisia, it was a bit lower-profile, but likewise they supported Ben Ali to the bitter end. So the idea that they supported the bombing of Libya or the opposition in Libya just because they believe in democracy is absurd and is obviously shown in the case of Egypt or Tunisia. But it’s also shown in the case of Saudi Arabia, where they’ve strengthened Canadian military, diplomatic, and business ties. Saudi Arabia, of course, being a monarchy that is one of the most repressive places in the world.

The Harper government is also engaged in a major navy ship building expansion and is setting up military bases around the world. How has the post-9/11 War on Terror environment intersected with the growth of Canadian militarism?

It’s been a fundamental sort of justifying of the ramping up of militarism, the war in Afghanistan being the most obvious example, that that was sort of justified in the post-9/11 context. And then that justified a really ramping up of military budgets, which began a little bit before Harper took office but then just exploded in the first five years of the Harper government, with the Canadian military budget going from about $15 billion to about $23 billion over about five years of significant increases every year.

They’re in the midst of a massive $35 billion warship building project, which is about projecting force abroad, which is also what the setting up of seven military bases around the world is about. One is already set with Jamaica, Kuwait, Germany, and plans—this came out about a year and a half ago—the government didn’t want this to come out but it came out through a leak—for bases in Kenya, in South Korea, in Senegal. It’s a little bit unclear which countries will ultimately accept the Canadian bases and which countries the Canadian government will choose. But it’s about being able to respond to conflicts or events all around the world. And the history is that, contrary to the mythology, what the decision makers say, is that usually they send Canadian troops places because there is an economic or a geostrategic reason to send them, not because it’s about helping the poor of Haiti, for instance, which is one of the justifications they gave for the bases.

But there has been a real extension of Canadian militarism. Which has really surprised, taken a lot of Canadians aback, just how aggressive that increase in militarism has been.

So that image of the blue-helmeted Canadian peacekeeper is largely a myth.

It’s always largely been a myth. For a lot of people the Harper government has just exploded that in their faces. It’s never been true, as I’ve tried to point out in previous books. And, in fact, even the creation of peacekeeping in 1956 with the Suez crisis, Lester Pearson’s motivation, who was then the External Affairs minister, was to support the U.S., which opposed the British-French-Israeli invasion. The U.S. didn’t oppose that invasion because they had a moral disagreement. It was because they wanted to tell the former colonial powers, France and England, that there was a new boss in the region, Washington. And they were also worried that the British- French-Israeli invasion would add to Moscow’s prestige among the recently decolonized Arab countries. The motivation for creating the peacekeeping mission was to advance Washington’s geostrategic interests. But it got morphed in the history books written by the establishment to be this idea of a benevolent Canadian foreign policy, which has close to zero basis in reality.

And what’s happening further north, that is to say, the Arctic? What with global warming increasing the melting of the ice there, the sea lanes are going to be opening and Canada is going to be defending the north, presumably.

They justify the spending on the military partly on those grounds. In fact, what I understand from the F35 fighter jet, for instance, it’s actually not the right fighter jet if you really wanted to protect the north, because the distances are so large and it’s not ideal for flying in those contexts. But there’s no doubt that there’s increasing corporate interest in the north. One of those sad ironies of climate change is that they see this as an opportunity: the oil companies, that are largely responsible for the climate change, see the climate change as an opportunity to extract more oil that they previously were not able to get after. And also, of course, there are questions of significantly cutting the travel time for shipping of goods across the north. There are questions about territorial rights. The Canadian government has very wide demands or believes its rights to control over the seaways are quite strong, and there’s disagreement among a handful of countries in the north over those issues.

In post-9/11 U.S. there has been an evisceration of many guaranteed rights under the Constitution. Have similar things occurred in Canada, under the rubric of protecting the citizenry from the terrorist threat?

Defintely. There was a big increase in the security certificates, which are basically used against a handful of Muslim Canadians who were targeted by CSIS, which is the internal and external intelligence agency, sort of a cross between the FBI and CIA. There has, fortunately, on that issue been quite an impressive push-back from activist groups, which has forced a number of individuals to be released—long, multi-year protest movements that combine street activism with legal battles. But there has been expansion. Things like the G20, G8 protests in Toronto, just an incredible number of arrests and temporary legislation that was brought in that comes out of the post-9/11 rise of a security state. I don’t think it has been quite as intense as in the U.S., but nevertheless a significant rise of sort of Islamophobia and different laws that justify state control or stopping of dissent or creating fear among different immigrant and particularly Muslim communities.

At the Pearson airport today I was pulled over and questioned, basically because I have Pakistani, Syrian, Egyptian, and Iranian visas in my passport.

Certainly an Iranian visa would attract the attention of the authorities because the Harper government has gone out of its way to be incredibly hostile to Iran and talk up preparing for an attack on that country. Recently they shut down the Iranian embassy in Canada. There are about 200-300,000 Iranian Canadians. There are thousands, tens of thousands, I think, of Iranian students who have come to study here who overnight have no access to visas. Their ability to travel, to go home, to stay have just been thrown into jeopardy. So there’s no doubt that CSIS has been particularly interested in those questions. And that might have contributed to your being asked questions.

I should say, the official was pleasant and wanted to know where I was going, where I was staying, things like that, and she said, “Have a nice time.” But what prompted Harper to sever diplomatic relations with Tehran and to oust all Iranian diplomats in Canada?

They alluded to a threat of an Iranian government- sponsored terrorist attack against Canada. That’s how they justified it, or partly justified it. But I think what actually prompted it was they’ve taken increasingly a bellicose position on Iran and have been repeatedly condemning Iran in a whole series of different international forums.

But part of what prompted it was actually Iran had just hosted the nonaligned summit, which was a big rebuke to Washington’s, Ottawa’s, Tel Aviv’s position on trying to isolate Iran. It was a couple weeks after that that Ottawa severed relations, kicked out the Iranian embassy. It was partly a way to try to draw negative attention towards Iran. Iran is again being further isolated, was sort of what they were trying to portray.

I think one of the reasons that enabled the cutting off of diplomatic relations is because for so many years previous to that they’ve been dissuading business relations with Iran. The main objective of a Canadian embassy anywhere in the world is to advance Canadian corporate interests. But once the government has tried to stop those corporate interests in the country, to some extent what’s the point of having an embassy anymore?

There are Canadian naval vessels as part of the U.S. armada running provocative maneuvers off the coast of Iran. Canadian government officials a number of times have referred to how the Canadian military is planning for an action against Iran; repeated diplomatic criticisms, a long list of hostile comments and actions towards Iran over the past three, four, five years.

Al Jazeera had a story on Canada’s war on science. They’re saying, “Canadian campaigners are calling it a war on science, a slow and systematic unraveling of the environmental and climate research budgets under the Conservative government of Stephen Harper. Hundreds of researchers have lost their jobs, with those remaining reportedly forbidden from talking to the media without a government minder. The government, on the other hand, says the cuts are part of a wider deficit-reducing austerity program.”

As they cut funding for Environment Canada, they increase carbon-capture programs, that are basically a big subsidy to the oil sands companies. The Harper government, as part of this pulling out of the Kyoto Protocol, part of their support for the tar sands industry, has cut a slew of different programs that deal with climate change or climate disturbance, the research element. And it’s actually prompted fairly significant protests from scientists.

About eight months ago there were a couple thousand scientists in their white coats who marched on Parliament Hill denouncing the war on them, as they see it. And there has been a muzzling of Environment Canada researchers. Where previously reporters were able to call different government researchers to ask them what research they were working on, what it means, to get an understanding of it, the Harper government has brought in this whole process of completely controlling what is said. So here you have a situation where these are public servants, researchers who are doing all kinds of important work, and they are not allowed to talk to the media. As I said, it fits within their overarching sort of hostility towards climate science. I think it also kind of fits into a little bit of their social kind of conservatism, just a general sort of anti-science position.

Talk about the corporate media and its influence in Canada in terms of shaping public opinion.

On the foreign policy level, the space for serious criticism of Canadian foreign policy is almost nonexistent. As a personal anecdote, I’ve written numerous op-eds on different Canadian foreign policy topics for different corporate dailies. Basically none of them ever get published. For the last 10 months I have been working for a union, and I’ve had about 15 different op-eds on domestic issues published, albeit from the institution, from the president of the union, so there is an institutional weight that comes with that. That’s part of it. But most of it is that there is just incredibly limited space on foreign policy. On domestic issues there is a little bit more space to have critical voices.

There is a more significant union movement in this country than there is in the U.S., and that does have some impact on media dynamics. Obviously, there’s the CBC, the public broadcaster, that is perceived to have been a bit more of an open voice. I think that’s mostly exaggerated, certainly on foreign policy. The CBC is absolutely unwilling to cover something like The Ugly Canadian book. Generally, it’s pretty similar. The media here in this country get most of their money from advertising, which comes from big companies. The Globe and Mail, the most important paper in the country, is owned by the richest person in the country. It’s actually more concentrated than U.S. media, because in the U.S. there are controls, as I understand it, on owning the main paper and main TV station in a single market, whereas in Canada Global Television and Post Media, which are the biggest chain of newspapers and one of the biggest TV stations, was owned by the same company.

Is that Thompson?

That was Asper. They went into bankruptcy about a year and a half ago, so it’s been busted up a little bit. For instance, in Vancouver, they owned the two daily newspapers, the Global Television TV station, which would have been the second or third biggest, one of three stations that you would have when you’re not on cable, as well as a whole slew of the weekly papers. So the concentration of the media in this country is worse than that in the U.S. And the underlying structure: owned by big companies dependent on advertising, responsive to criticism that comes from corporations, other rich people, institutions of power. So it’s pretty important in terms of shaping opinion, especially on foreign policy. As it gets further away from people’s day-to-day lives, the power the media has in terms of shaping people’s understanding is quite extensive.

Who is the richest person in Canada?

Thompson.

Your book The Ugly Canadian is published by Fernwood, a small, independent publisher. How many copies of books like this are printed?

The standard for Fernwood is they print between 500 and 1,000 copies. And Fernwood at this point is probably the biggest of radical left-wing publishers. There are only a couple of them. And this book, I think there were 3,000 copies printed, and hopefully most of them will be sold.

And what about political alternatives? What do you see challenging the hegemony of the Harper government in Ottawa?

First of all, the Harper government won with 39% of the vote, with about 60% of the public voting, only 60% of registered voters, not counting younger people. So only about 25% of the population or so actually voted for the Conservatives, and they got a majority government with that percentage. So it’s a pretty tenuous situation. They are somewhere between maybe 30% and 40% of support. So about half of the voting public that’s quite antagonistic.

In the electoral arena, I think there’s a high likelihood that in 2015, which is the next election, they won’t win, especially if the housing market crashes and if things like the Keystone pipeline don’t get built, because so much of their whole economic model is based upon the extraction of oil, particularly tar sands oil. There are lots of challenge in the official arena, with the NDP and the Liberals. And the Liberals have the son of Pierre Trudeau. Justin Trudeau is going to almost certainly be the next head of the party. So they’re in this whole process of reviving the Liberal Party, which has been in power for 70% of Canadian history. The NDP also challenges them in the official arena.

More interesting for me are the movements of contestation from below. There are significant social movements on foreign policy issues. There’s a growing pro-Palestinian movement. There’s, unfortunately, a fairly quiet antiwar movement at the moment. There’s a significant anti-mining or opposition to Canadian mining companies abroad. That’s a growing movement in the country. There’s the environmental movement, particularly in places like B.C. There’s a plan for a pipeline across Canada. Line 9 it’s called. So here in Ontario there’s lots of opposition to that. So there are significant social movements. The labor movement is more politicized than in the U.S., a bit more class-conscious, a bit more antagonistic to bosses’ control. So that exists. That’s generally on the defensive and it’s unfortunately too much of a bureaucratized kind of movement. But there are oppositions.

There are some interesting things. The Harper government hasn’t gone after Medicare in any significant way, understanding that even among Conservative voters it’s the top issue. Overwhelmingly Conservative voters support Medicare.

This is the single-payer health system.

And the more you hear about problems with the U.S. medical system, the more support there is for the single-payer system in Canada, because the stories do trickle up about just how bad the model of private health insurance is in the U.S.

So while they’re a majority government, and they’re incredibly ideological on a whole bunch of issues—they’ve done terrible things, particularly with regard to the environment, their foreign policy is horrible, their undermining of First Nations’ rights—at the end of the day they are still constrained by the political reality.

And the political reality is that there is almost 30% of the public that’s in unions, almost three times as much as in the U.S., there is a Medicare system, there’s a sense of the correctness of the government being the main player in health care, there is a tradition, as much as they’re trying to change that, of sort of openness with regards to immigration. So there are constraints, there are social movements. But like in the U.S., there are also the institutions, the dominant media and the 1%, that at the end of the day have overwhelming control over public policy.

How did you become an activist?

I actually went from playing junior hockey. When I was 19, I stopped playing junior hockey. I have a left-wing background with my parents, but for most of my teenage years I was focused on trying to make the NHL. That didn’t work out. And I had some opportunities to travel in Latin America and had the good fortune to go to Montreal, to Concordia University, which at the time was the most politically active university in the country. I didn’t go there for that purpose, but that’s what I was exposed to, and then got involved in student political affairs and became a vice president for the Concordia Student Union. It happened that Benjamin Netanyahu, who was then the former prime minister of Israel, was going to speak at Concordia. And in the aftermath of Netanyahu not being able to speak, I was expelled from the university.

What happened?

There were huge protests that led to cops actually releasing pepper spray or tear gas inside the university building, to the point where thousands of students that were in their classes were subjugated to the pepper spray or tear gas. It’s not exactly clear. They deny the tear gas element. Windows were broken. It was quite a raucous demonstration that the police a combination of both lost control of and really exaggerated their response. But there was a really significant pro-Palestinian movement at Concordia University and a really significant radical left that for about five years running was probably the most active, very heavily involved in the protests against the Free Trade Area of the Americas, pro-Palestinian, different feminist struggles. So I had the good fortune to be exposed to those movements. And that sort of contributed to my activism today.

Who are some of your intellectual influences?

Many of the books that you’ve done with Noam Chomsky. I’ve read I don’t know how many of them. I can remember being on a bench in Guanajuato, Mexico, having gotten one of the small ones, The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many that you did with him, in the little English library there for travelers. So people like Chomsky have been important in helping me to figure out the world. Writers in Canada like Rick Salutin, many others. Places like ZNet and CounterPunch or rabble.ca are important outlets of different left-wing voices.

(Due to time constraints some portions of the interview were not included in the national broadcast. Those portions are included in this transcript.)

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Alternative Radio
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War and peace

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 13:44:41 GMT

Dennis Kucinich
Santa Barbara, CA
February 8, 2013

The U.S. has the world’s most powerful military machine. Its navy controls the seas, its air force the skies. Almost 70 years after the end of World War Two, its armies occupy bases from Germany and Italy to South Korea and Japan. Its CIA-operated drones attack Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Afghanistan. Its multiple intelligence agencies have black sites and black budgets and carry out black operations. The financial costs of maintaining an empire are enormous. The moral costs are incalculable. And some would suggest the external violence connects to the murderous rampages and shootings here in the homeland. The signs of structural decay are all too apparent. Nation building begins at home. Can we imagine a culture of peace? Can we create a political and economic system that serve the needs of people and protects and honors the Earth?

This lecture is available as a CD or mp3 or transcript from Alternative Radio

Dennis Kucinich served as a member of Congress from 1997 to 2013, representing Ohio’s 10th district. He brought articles of impeachment against George Bush and Dick Cheney. He was a candidate for the Democratic nomination for president in 2004 and 2008. He was an advocate for the creation of a cabinet-level Department of Peace. Upon leaving the House, his colleague Rep. Keith Ellison of Minnesota said of him, “We’re really going to miss Dennis. He is a transformative leader. He stood up and spoke eloquently and passionately about Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran. He was a consistent voice for peace.” He is the author of A Prayer for America and The Courage to Survive.

You can listen to Dennis Kucinich speak for himself here.

I’ve given some thought to the broader concepts that deal with the human condition, violence in our society and violence which is initiated and authorized by our government. I take you back to what I think is one of the greatest films ever made, and that is Stanley Kubrick’s classic film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Just after the majestic opening of Richard Strauss’s “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” a soaring sun splits the darkness, seemingly heralding the new genesis and next a man-ape uses a femur bone to dispatch the leader of another group in order to gain control over a water hole. It is a simple act of one mammal clubbing another to death. It is what Friedrich Nietzsche, in his novel Thus Spake Zarathustra, may have countenanced as

the eternal recurrence of the same.

Yet, Kubrick does not leave us stranded upon the darkling plain of brute violence, for emotion is admitted, and so exultant is the conqueror at the demise of his extant competitor that he flings the femur skyward in triumph and, through the match-cut magic of movie making, the femur tumbles end over end, high up into the heavens, where it is transformed—into a space station!

We surf on Kubrick’s monolith into an evolutionary spiral across space and millions of years, now equipped with high technology, but burdened with the signal responses of our lower limbic system and its embedded fight/flight conflicts, ever ready to take up the electronic cudgel to drive contestants out of water holes or oil holes. Violence is. Its expression neither regressive nor progressive, it exists as a disconnection from our own divinity, a fall from the heavens, a departure from grace, a descent into the lower circles of that philosophical hell of dichotomous thinking, of us versus them, whoever they are. The invention of “the other,” the evocation of the out-group, the conjuring of the enemy are precedents of violence. We hear the siren call.

But what makes us answer the tocsin of rage clanging in our heads, in our homes, in our cities and in the world? Could it be the ripping of the moorings of our reality, the anxiety of separation shaking our core, the earthquake beneath our ground of meaning, dissecting through our bedrock beliefs when we learn that that what we thought was true was indeed false? Peter Berger once wrote that reality is socially constructed and culturally affirmed.

But what happens when the sociopathic trumps the authentic?

We cannot justify violence, but we must determine its roots. Before Kubrick, before Strauss, there was Zarathustra, or Zoroaster himself. He confronted us with this moral proposition: The central struggle of our existence is the determination of what is true and what is false. Is it our inability to strive for, to discern, and to receive and know truth which binds us to violence? Is what we see what we get? Are we bound to truth-shattering illusions? How do we know what we are told is true? Has the misuse of power in our society so distorted meaning that truth and lies are indistinguishable, or worse, morally relative?

These are questions of import in our interpersonal relations, and the consequences of untruth grow geometrically when a major progenitor of perceptions in our society—the government—stumbles or seeks and practices to mislead.

To ponder that question, let us first look at another production called 2001: September 11, 2001, the catastrophe of nearly 3,000 innocent souls perishing in waves of hate. That date is burned into our memories as one of the worst days we have ever known. We know the choices which our government made, acting with the tacit consent of we the people, to respond to the 9/11 crimes committed against our nation. But we seldom reflect on our government’s response, as though to do so publicly is either impolite or un-American. Is it rude to mention that, acting upon the choler of crime and tragedy on September 11, 2001, we began a descent to officially sanctioned mass murder called war, into the lower circles of the infernos of torture, rendition, and drone assassination? That we established an antidemocratic state of emergency, which exists to this day, with its Orwellian PATRIOT Act, its massive spying networks, its illegal detention, its extreme punishment of whistleblowers, and its neo-police state, in violation of posse comitatus, which put MPs on the streets of Washington, D.C., during the recent inaugural?

We have cut and pasted the Constitution in the manner of a disambiguated Word document, through sheer casuistry, excising those sections which guarantee protection from unreasonable search and seizure, which protect individual rights of habeas corpus, due process, which prohibit any one person from simultaneously being policeman, prosecutor, judge, jury, executioner, and coroner. Violence has enabled the government to grow and the republic to shrink.

Ten years ago the United States, despite a massive peace movement that put millions in the streets protesting the upcoming invasion, launched a full-scale attack on the nation of Iraq. “Shock and Awe” it was called. Hellfire was brought to the cradle of civilization, to its people, its culture, its antiquities in our name—for a war based on lies. In awe of our weapons, we shocked ourselves vicariously with their effect, never experiencing the horror visited upon the people of Iraq.

When I say “we,” I mean all morally conscious Americans. Over 1 million Iraqis were killed in our name. I want to say that again. Over 1 million Iraqis were killed in our name—for a war based on lies. In awe of our destructive power and its toll on innocent human life, we shocked ourselves and then returned to our normal lives. Trillions of dollars damage was done to that country, in our name—for a war based on lies. Trillions more spent by U.S. taxpayers—for a war based on lies. In awe of the monetary cost of war, we shocked ourselves with massive deficits. Thousands of U.S. troops were killed, tens of thousands wounded. In awe of the long-term human cost of war, we shocked ourselves with broken lives, broken families, suicides, PTSD.

Shock and awe indeed. We attacked a nation which did not attack us and which had neither the intention nor the capability of doing so. We attacked a nation which did not have the yellowcake to be processed into a substance fit for a nuclear warhead. We attacked a nation which did not have weapons of mass destruction. We visited upon the people of Iraq the equivalent of one 9/11 a day for an entire year, and with it the irretrievable rending of families, of places to live, places to work, places to worship, ripping apart Iraqi society in a war which soon became so remote that it was finished off by unmanned vehicles. The mission that was “accomplished” was wanton destruction, ecocide, alienation, statecraft puppetry.

And for what? What was it all about? It did not make us any safer. It weakened our military. It killed and injured our soldiers. It seriously weakened our nation financially. The long-term cost of the post-9/11 wars of choice will run over $6 trillion. Is anybody asking one reason why we have a $16 trillion debt? We borrowed money from China, Japan, and South Korea to pursue wars while these countries built their economies and their infrastructures. We blew up bridges in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan at such expense that we are now preaching austerity here at home, unwilling to face the fact that we have over $2 trillion in infrastructure needs in America which have not been met. Unwilling to invest in America, all too willing to invest in wars, we became the policeman of the world, and ended up being resented worldwide. We have fueled the fires of reactionary nationalism abroad, which are easily stoked by foreign occupation or invasion. We have helped further fundamentalism and made decisions which placed in positions of power those whose very existence supposedly drove us to the conflict in the first place.

What passes for our recent history is an acculturated, sleep-inducing lie from which we must wake up. We must awake from the stupor of our self-imposed amnesia or shock. We must shake off the awe which comes from the misuse of power on a global basis. We must always question governments whose legitimacy rests not upon accountability and truth, but upon force and deception. A government which assumes that we are neither intelligent enough nor loyal enough to know the truth about its actions a dozen years ago or, for that matter, a dozen days ago, is not worthy of a free people. We must bend the fear-forged bars which imprison the truth. We must seek the truth. And we must know the truth. For it is the truth that will truly set us free and lead to the wisdom that can rescue us from destruction, the wisdom that can reclaim America.

America. The mere utterance of the word should set the pulse pounding with the excitement of discovery, of possibility, of love—not fear.

The time has come for us to demand that our nation, America, establish and empower a commission on truth and reconciliation so that those who are responsible for misleading us into the annihilation of the innocent people in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere can brought forward to public accountability in a formal process of fact finding, of inquiry, of public testimony, of admission, of confession. This is a process that has worked in other countries, notably South Africa. Frankly, there is no way out of this moral cul-de-sac in which reside the monstrous crimes of massed murder, torture, kidnapping, rendition other than to have an atonement—an at-one-ment. It is in at-one-ment, atonement, that we will achieve what Blake called “the unity of opposites.” It is in reconciliation that the Blakean idea of the contrary nature of God, containing multitudes of humanity, causes us to understand the fragility of our social compact and the possibility that any one of us could be a murderer or a victim. Lacking public expiation over the unbridled use of force, the wanton violence we have writ large across the world will replicate, it will perpetuate, and it will be our ruin. This is the importance of a formal process of truth and reconciliation.

We had and we have a right to defend ourselves as a nation. But we went on the offensive. And the violence that we have visited abroad will inevitably blow back home. The violence that we create in the world in turn licenses and desensitizes us to the display of wanton violence which is exercised in our streets and, unfortunately, in our homes. We must understand the causal links. What is outermost presses down upon what is innermost, and what is innermost becomes outermost.

Once a full process of truth and reconciliation has helped us to discern the truth of our experience of the past decade, equipped with the truth of our errant descent into errant wars, we must be prepared to forgive those who would be forgiven, and forgive ourselves for having participated, with either our assent or our silence. Then we may move forward, with truth as the standard under which we organize a stronger and better America.

We must think often of our nation, reimagine it, reestablish it as the exemplification of our highest ideals. Think of those lofty sentiments present at the founding of our nation, its spiritual origins: One motto, the Latin words Annuit coeptis, “He has favored our undertaking,” an allusion to the guidance of providence. Think of the transcendent purpose in the founding of America, united states, presaging human unity. Our first motto: E pluribus unum, Latin, “out of many, one.” the paradox of multiplicity in singularity. What extraordinary faith, courage, and spirit were present at the founding of this country.

Let us renew our faith in our nation. Let us unite so that the power of unity will lift up this nation we love. Let us declare our faith again in each other, as it occurred so many years ago with that clarion call for the rights of we the people. Let us find that place within ourselves where our own capacity to evolve catalyzes the evolving character of America; where, through the highest expression of informed citizenship, we quicken the highest expression of informed nationhood.

America. America for Americans. America for the world. Let the truth be our empire, the plowshare our sword, nature our textbook, and let us once again celebrate the deeper meaning of what it means to be an American.

Then, reimagining the town hall model—that model where people get together and they talk about things that concern them—let us consider what America represented to each of us on the day before 9/11, on September 10, 2001. Let millions of people, in tens of thousands of places across our nation, meet, rediscover, and celebrate our nation and its purpose and recapture the spirit of America, which we know already resides in countless places. The spirit of America is always ready to be called forward, with a sense of wonder and joy, which our children will in time come to understand as our capacity to rise from the ashes of our own suffering and disillusionment, a quality which becomes their civic inheritance.

We were not a perfect nation by any means before 9/11. But I remember a greater sense of optimism, a greater sense of freedom, of security, of control of our destiny. We need to come together now in town halls across America to appreciate our common experiences, to share our narratives about what is best in our nation, about what we love about this country, about our own journeys to share with each other those things in our lives that directly connect us to what we call the American dream. And when we come together in that way, when we so share, we will know each other better and love our country even more.

The violence of today has cast us into a psychological wilderness. There is a path out of the wilderness of violence in which so many of our fellow countrymen and countrywomen are lost. If we are to help them find that path, it would be helpful for us to look again to the origins of our nation and find the map.

On July 4, 1776, the Second Continental Congress unanimously declared the independence of 13 colonies, and the achievement of peace was recognized as one of the highest duties of the new organization of free and independent states. Peace at the founding. Yes, there was the paradox of revolutionary war, but the destination was peace, articulated and enshrined. The drafters of the Declaration of Independence appealed to the supreme judge of the world and derived the creative cause of nationhood from the “Laws of Nature” and the entitlements of “Nature’s God,” celebrating the unity of human thought, natural law, and spiritual causation in declaring,

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men [and women] are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with her certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

The architects of independence, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence, spoke to the activity of a higher power which moves to guide the nation’s fortunes and lends its divine spark to infuse principle into the structure of democratic governance.

The Constitution of the United States in its Preamble further sets forth the insurance of the cause of peace in stating,

We the people of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity….

We must remember where we have been so that we can chart to where we will proceed. It is the sacred duty of the people of the United States to receive the living truths of our founding documents and to think anew to develop institutions that permit the unfolding of the highest moral principles in this nation and around the world.

Some of these words that I just shared with you are from the preamble to legislation that I wrote in 2001. They form the basis of my understanding of the conceptive power of freedom. The founders of this country gave America a vision for the ages and provided people with a document that gave this nation the ability to adapt to an undreamed of future. What can we give back?

When I first came to Congress, I saw how easily we slipped into conflict. I saw how normally placid representatives could get swept up in war fever. It led me to study war. I learned that during the course of the 20th century more than 100 million people perished in war, most of them innocent noncombatants. And here today, violence is the overarching theme of our time, encompassing personal, group, national, and international conflict, extending to the production of nuclear, biological, chemical weapons of mass destruction, which have been developed for use on land, air, sea, and space. Such conflict is taken as a reflection of the human condition, without questioning whether the structures of thought, word, and deed which we have inherited are any longer sufficient for the maintenance, growth, and survival of our nation and the world.

But we are still relatively at the beginning of a new millennium, and the time has come to review to review age-old challenges with new thinking wherein we can conceive of peace as not simply being the absence of violence but the active presence of the capacity for a higher evolution of human awareness, of respect, trust, and integrity, where we all may tap the infinite capabilities of humanity to transform consciousness and conditions which impel or compel violence at a personal, group, or national level. We do this towards developing a new understanding of and commitment to compassion and love in order to create “a shining city on a hill,” the light of which is the light of nations.

It was this thinking, this articulation which I was privileged to bring forth on July 11, 2001, fully two months before 9/11, to introduce a bill, H.R. 808, to create a cabinet-level Department of Peace, soon to be reintroduced by Congresswoman Barbara Lee as the Department of Peace Building.

Imagine, coming from a position of love for our country and for each other, if we move forward, without judgment, to meet the promise of a more perfect union by meeting the challenge of violence in our homes, our streets, our schools, our places of work and worship, to meet the challenge of violence in our society through the creation of a new structure in our society, which can directly address domestic violence, spousal abuse, child abuse, violence in the schools, gang violence, gun violence, racial violence, violence against gays. This goes much deeper than legislation which forbids certain conduct, it goes much deeper than creating systems to deal with and to help victims. Those are necessary, but they are not sufficient. We need to deeper go if we are at last to shed the yoke of violence which we carry through our daily lives. We speak of creating a structure where all across this country we tap the creative energies of those who have committed themselves—the sociologists, the psychologists, the counselors, who commit themselves to help people through their daily lives. Across the country we begin to transform our educational system to teach children peace giving, peace sharing, mutuality, to look at the other person as an aspect of oneself.

We know violence is a learned response. So is nonviolence. We must replace a culture of violence with a culture of peace. Not through the antithetical use of force, not through endless “thou shalt nots” and not through mere punishment, but through tapping our higher potential to teach principles of peace building and peace sharing, and to teach them at the earliest ages as part of a civic education in a democratic society. Carl Rogers, the humanist psychologist, has written,

The behavior of the human organism may be determined by the external influences to which it has been exposed, but it may also be determined by the creative and integrative insight of the organism itself.

We are not victims of the world we see. We become victims of the way we see the world.

If we are prepared to confidently call forth a new America, if we have the courage to not simply redescribe America but to reclaim it, we will once again fall in love with the light which so many years ago shined through the darkness of human existence to announce the birth of a new nation. Out in the void I can see a soaring sun splitting the darkness. Behold the dawn of a new nation, our beloved America. Thank you.

Q&A

Two words: positive vision. It’s been a whole generation at least since people got out in the streets, not just against war and so on but a positive vision. We have tens of millions of people out of work while we need to build a future for sustainable energy and sustainable transportation. Why are we not calling for people to get out in the streets for a positive vision?

The potential of being able to move a new agenda in this country for economic justice is unlimited if we regain the civic capacity for action, if we are willing to be visible. This is really one of the great preconditions for being able to create change in Washington. It’s to become visible. And when you do it en masse, it has impact. There’s just no question about it.

But lacking visibility, it’s very hard to have to rely on the built-in inertia which tends to characterize activities within the Beltway.

So specifically, I introduced legislation in the Congress, H.R. 2990, called the National Employment Emergency Defense Act. The whole idea is to create millions of jobs rebuilding our infrastructure. People will say, Where is the money coming from? Keep in mind, we borrowed hundreds of millions of dollars from China, South Korea, Japan to finance wars. We pay interest on that debt. We have a trade deficit with China that is about $200 billion. China, Japan are reinvesting in their country. We’re not doing that. We have the power under the Constitution, Article I, Section 8, to coin or create money. It’s an inherent power of the government that was written into the Constitution specifically so we wouldn’t be in hock to the banks. A series of presidents have warned against that.

In 1913 the Federal Reserve Act was written, and what happened was that it took over the money power, so the government then was at the threshold. You pass an income tax, you fund the government. But actually what happened is it imposed on the people a greater responsibility for coming up with the resources for governance instead of recognizing that the innate power to put money into circulation rested with the government.

Instead, what do we have? Money is debt. The whole system is upside down. So you start thinking about money and how a different concept of money could start to change things. We have the power right now to get our way out of these doldrums, to put America back to work, to reject austerity as a way of life, and to stop the raid on Social Security and any of the other programs. You’re right. Social justice and economics are twins in the same march here. Thank you for your question.

I have seen a lot of people in this country do absolutely nothing compared to what we’ve needed to move the kind of consciousness that you’re talking about moving tonight.

I mentioned in my prepared remarks that there’s a sense in which we have to forgive ourselves. This is about all of us, not just one of us. We can look back over 10 years, and it’s pretty shocking. If you were to go home tonight and Google

Kucinich October 2002 analysis of the Iraq war resolution,

you will see that, look, I’m not a swami, but I picked up right away what was going on. And anybody who really spent the time would understand what was going on. But we were pushed into this war. There’s a lot of dead people as a result. I can’t get that out of my head. To me, our nation needs to—how do we get beyond it? I really am concerned that if we just bury this whole discussion about what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan—and there’s a few other places—we’re never going to recover the country. We’ll be dragged into more wars. We’ve got to stop the beat.

I have two questions for you. How best can we support your vision, which is our vision, in both the micro of our own lives and the macro of government and the world? And how best can we support the Department of Peace?

Let me take the second part first. Before I left Congress, Barbara Lee and I had many long talks, and she agreed to take that baton and keep running with it. We made some changes to the legislation that will emphasize peace building in an active capacity, which is really good. I think that it would be helpful, for whatever Congressional district you’re from, to ask a member to sign on to the bill. But it also would be helpful, given what an extraordinary community this is, to create a forum where you could talk about some of the practical applications of this.

Keep in mind, there is a legitimate concern that, “Yes, what this country needs is a bigger government, right?” But what we’re talking about here is actually a transformative purpose. We need to get in the discussion.

This is the problem. When you create a department, it legitimizes the discussion about justice, about labor, about the environment, about health. And peace is seen back here. It’s almost like it’s an airy-fairy notion instead of central to our existence and our continuation as a species. Remember, I introduced this in 2001 in July, and I saw people’s eyes were rolling. “Yeah, right. Another department, bigger government.” Hey, wait a minute. If we’re spending half of our budget on the implements of war and preparing for war, what if we spent just a couple percentage points on trying to create peace? There are financial issues here as well, not just moral issues.

And you can come at it from the practicalities. With all the shootings that are happening around the country, and a lot more attention is paid to it, we need to get underneath that and talk about what’s happening. Why is our society becoming so unhinged? Guns are one thing that people use, an implement of violence. But even if they pass an assault-weapons ban, which I of course would vote for, we’re still stuck with the fact that there are 100 million, according to many different reports, gun owners in the country. That’s something we’ve got to be aware of, we can’t ignore it. And there’s 300 million guns. So the urgent question deals with the issues of violence in the society.

I was glad to hear you use the term ecocide. Could you comment on the burgeoning student divestment-from-fossil-fuel movement and the renormalization of civil disobedience evidenced by the tar-sands blockade, 350.org, and the Sierra Club’s commitment to nonviolent direct action for the first time in its 120-year history.

You see the response here. The public is ready for a more active approach in confronting the destruction of our planet, the destruction of the natural world. It was Thomas Berry, the late philosopher, who said that the major work of our life should be a reconciliation with the natural world. And we’ve seen this natural world being cartelized, being auctioned off. So the work that 350.org., the Sierra Club, and others are doing is absolutely important. It’s about a type of civic action that is our responsibility of citizenship.

As far as the money aspect, look, after Buckley v. Valeo, which basically said that money equals free speech, and Citizens United, which gave corporations the ability to contribute corporate dollars into federal campaigns, what’s happened is the whole thing is an auction. And the candidates that are often brought forward are the candidates who went to the highest bidder.

Does that mean they’re all crooks? Absolutely not. It means that the system is a rotten system. And if we’re going to free our country from this stigma of “pay to play,” the only way we can do it is a constitutional amendment that would stop all private funding of elections once and for all, private funding, private ownership of the process, and have only public funding, the chance that we might actually have our government back.

I just wanted to reiterate the question that was asked earlier about party politics. Bush’s crimes have become Obama’s crimes. And at this point the only person who is faced with prison for torture was a whistleblower.

Right.

At what point do we give up on Democratic politics and seek a third option?

I think that’s part of the discussion that’s going to happen in the next few years, depending on the direction that we go in. If people see whistleblowers punished and people see those who perpetuated crimes against others go free, then they’re going to ask questions. That’s why what I advocate is to look at South Africa’s experience, look at other nations that have had a process of truth and reconciliation. We need to bring the whole range of the top decision makers in to explain what happened. We’re a democracy. Just because you held a high office doesn’t mean all of a sudden you’re unaccountable. We need to do that to save our country.

And it’s not about putting anybody in jail. It’s about the truth, which has a much greater value than imprisonment. We need to know the truth. So, yes, I would like to see President Bush and Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld and all of them brought in. And it’s about loving our country. That’s what it’s about—how much do we love America.

I too am more or less a recovering Democrat. I love your analogy to the femur bone. I feel that drones are the next manifestation of that femur bone. I’m so glad you mentioned drones. I know that’s one of your issues. Do you think we finally have a chance, if we get ahead of the game, to make a difference?

Mechanized warfare, war by robots, robot planes, whatever, what it does is it removes us from our humanity, it separates us from actually having to make decisions. And it sets us on an inconscient path, going deeper into the darkness of hate and a loss of humanity. I saw this when I first heard about it back in 2005, when a wedding party was blown up in Pakistan with a drone strike. We have to watch this. And I will tell you this, that the administration’s description—people, if you get a chance, look at the 16-page legal memo which came out of the Department of Justice.

I didn’t go to law school. I play a lawyer on TV occasionally. But I will tell you this. I don’t know if they have a class in pretzel making at Harvard Law, where they twist the Constitution into a pretzel so you’re supposed to understand it, but that whole memo is an exercise in casuistry and sophistry, having no connection to any solid, bedrock constitutional principles. The use of these drones shreds the Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure, Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments with respect to due process.

Look, I’m all over this. We could spend the rest of the evening talking about it. But we need to fight back on it and push back. And that cannot be who we are as Americans. We cannot permit our country to wage war without any accountability, assassinate people, whoever we want. Baloney.

Thank you for your inspirational speech. You’ve been my hero in politics ever since I started following politics. I’m an inventor and entrepreneur who is trying to start jobs in clean energy. How can people like me get the $500 billion that’s put into war and put that to where it needs to be put to rebuilding our energy infrastructure and providing jobs?

This is the whole question about resources. When you think about it, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz wrote a book the title of which is The Three Trillion Dollar War, he and Linda Bilmes, his associate. They updated it to say $5 trillion war. Imagine for a moment that instead of investing in war, that we had invested in carbon-free energy technology. We would have been energy independent. We have the ability to able to use our resources right now to invest in the creation of alternative energies.

And we should be doing that instead of our reliance on coal, on nuclear, on oil. We can no longer do that. It’s apart from our natural world. Mother Nature doesn’t make deals with politicians. Mother Nature just responds in a very powerful way to the assaults on her planet. So we need to invest in that. And it’s part of the cycle of job creation. So thank you and stay with that, because that time is coming.

For information about obtaining CDs, MP3s, or transcripts of this or other programs, please contact:
David Barsamian
Alternative Radio
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©2013

Ending corporate rule

Wed, 09 Jan 2013 01:34:23 GMT

Paul Cienfuegos
Missoula, MT
March 1, 2012

Modern corporations trace their origins to the trading companies of imperial Europe more than three centuries ago. Their rise in power and influence has been a steady trajectory to the point where today they are the dominant institution in society. Governments have freed corporations from legal constraints through deregulation, and granted them even greater power through privatization. The Supreme Court has declared corporations are people and money is free speech. The latter has turned Congress into, as one commentator put it, “a forum for legalized bribery.” Many citizens feel that pleading to corporations is insufficient and that it is time to examine the nature of this artificial institution. Endless single-issue crisis-based activism, one grievance at a time does not address the core problem, which is the corporation itself. Is ending corporate rule an obtainable goal? How would it happen?

This lecture is available as a CD or mp3 or transcript from Alternative Radio

Paul Cienfuegos lectures and leads workshops on dismantling corporate rule. He co-founded Democracy Unlimited of Humboldt County in Northern California. He’s based in Portland, Oregon, where he is a regional leader in the Community Rights movement, which works to dismantle corporate constitutional so-called “rights” and enshrine We The People‘s right to self-governance. He leads workshops on this topic.

You can listen to Paul Cienfuegos speak for himself here.

I’d like to begin by asking you some questions. When was the last time that you remember being asked by the people who run your local chain supermarket how you felt about them filling most of their shelves with highly processed foods that were shipped an average of thousands of miles to get to you? When was the last time that you remember being asked how you felt about your supermarket selling thousands of items containing genetically modified ingredients that had never been properly tested for their health effects? Or being asked how you felt about them paying the farm workers who harvested the fruits and vegetables that were sold there, a wage that very few U.S. citizens would ever be willing to work for?

And what if it wasn’t just you who felt that way? What if it turned out that the vast majority of shoppers at that store didn’t want it selling GMO foods or mostly highly processed foods from far away either, and would much rather have products filling the shelves that were grown or produced locally or regionally, and really did want the farm workers to be paid a living wage? Would that matter? Would the majority’s desires have any impact?

When was the last time you remember being asked by the people who run your local electric power utility how you would like them to spend the money you pay every month for your electricity bill? Year after year, their directors make one decision after another on how to spend your money. They get to choose between year-end bonuses for their CEO and directors, or offering discounted solar panels to their customers, or deciding to build a new coal-fired or nuclear power plant, or lowering everyone’s rates. The decision is left totally up to them, and rarely does a single customer ask themselves why the directors get to make these decisions, rather than it being democratically decided by those who pay their bills.

When was the last time you remember being asked by the people who run your local corporate chain daily newspaper how you feel about them printing very few of the letters to the editor that they receive? Or how you feel about the owners of your local newspaper prioritizing shareholder returns rather than hiring enough reporters to ensure that local residents get the news and analysis they need every day to fully participate in their role as citizens?

And what if the vast majority of the people who read that daily newspaper wanted to see major changes in the direction of more accountability to the community, the hiring of more reporters, opening up the editorial board so that it began to include not just Republicans and Democrats, but also Greens, Libertarians, and independent voters of all stripes? Would it matter what the majority of readers wanted?

When was the last time that the folks who own and manage the company you work for asked you whether you were satisfied with your job? Whether your work was sufficiently meaningful, or whether you were getting bored, and wanted to switch to another job within the company? Or asked you if you wanted to participate in the decision-making process about how the company profits were going to be spent next year?

What if the vast majority of the employees at your company wanted the same things you wanted? Would that matter?

When was the last time the folks who own your health insurance company asked you what services you wanted to have covered under your health insurance policy? Or asked you whether you preferred to continue being part of a for-profit health care system, or whether you would prefer to be part of a not-for-profit health care system that provides affordable health care for all who need it, similar to what already exists in Europe, Cuba, and Canada? What if the vast majority of the people insured by that same company wanted the same thing that you wanted? Would that make any difference? Does it matter what the vast majority of us want?

My guess is that pretty much every last one of us is so used to not being consulted in the endless and critical decisions that corporate boards of directors make day in and day out decisions that affect all of us in big ways. That it doesn’t even occur to most of us to even think these questions, let alone to actually complain about it.

Most of us have internalized the assumption that having no say is normal, even when it affects the vast majority of us in a nation that is based on majority rule.

Now I’ve only given examples, so far, of corporate decision-making. Let’s take a look also at government decision-making. Surely, the way in which our government responds to the majority’s desires must be different. Right?

During the entire period that candidate Barack Obama was campaigning to become president, and after he had been elected, the polls showed overwhelming support for some kind of universal and affordable public health care system that left no one out, what some refer to as Medicare For All. Those same polling numbers continue to this day. How did that public opinion translate in Washington D.C.? It’s quite striking, really. Doctors, nurses, and others who supported it were not invited to testify at the Congressional hearings that were held after he launched his health care proposals. Obama’s list of possible options never included a serious health care for all option. It was never debated. It was never on the table, even though it had overwhelming public support.

This is what minority rule looks like. This is what corporate rule looks like.

Let’s look at another example. In Vermont, the state legislature voted in 2010 to close the state’s only nuclear power plant when its 40-year license expired on March 12, 2012. The vote was 26 to 4. The Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant had originally been built to be safe for just 40 years, if you can even call nuclear power “safe.” And during that 40 years had experienced very serious safety problems, so it was a no-brainer for the state legislature to make this decision. Vermont’s voters were very much in agreement with how their legislature voted. Vermont is the only state in the nation with authority over its nuclear facilities, so its legislature thought it was totally within
their proper jurisdiction to refuse the 20-year extension that the nuclear operator, Entergy Corporation, was requesting. Over the course of the next year, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission went ahead anyway, and approved the 20-year extension. And Entergy Corporation sued the state of Vermont, claiming that the legislature really did not have jurisdiction to make this decision because it violated the corporations constitutional socalled “rights” under the Commerce Clause because it interfered with the interstate electricity market, and further claiming that since the state legislature wanted to close it based on safety issues, that violated the federal government’s exclusive jurisdiction on nuclear safety questions. The federal court sided with Entergy Corporation, stating,

The safety of nuclear power is a
federal issue, not a state issue

and is requiring the state to relicense the plant for another 20 years.

So much for the right of a state legislature to try to protect its citizens from the very real threat of a nuclear power accident. On February 18, 2012, Vermont’s Attorney General appealed the federal judge’s ruling, escalating a two-year battle over state’s rights and atomic energy. And by the way, the Vermont Yankee plant is the same vintage and design of the Number 1 reactor at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan.

You can’t make this stuff up. This is what minority rule looks like. This is what corporate rule looks like.

Let’s look at one final example. The people of thirty New Hampshire communities have been adamantly opposed for some time to the building of a massive new transmission line for electricity to be sent from Quebec, Canada into New England. It’s called the Northern Pass Project. In March 2011, in their annual town meetings, voters passed resolutions in all thirty towns demanding that the transmission lines not pass through their local pristine forestlands and farmlands. How big was the majority that voted against the project? Was it a barebones majority or a significant majority? Actually, neither. In almost every one of those thirty towns, regardless of whether there were 300 voters or thousands of voters, the vote was unanimous. The people of rural New Hampshire said, No. Almost every single one of them said, No.

Did the governor of New Hampshire stop the project? Of course not. Once again, majority rule turned out to be irrelevant.

I could offer one example after another after another. You already know these stories. You hear them every day in your own communities. We participate in the ways we’ve been taught to participate. We vote, we sign petitions, we write letters to our elected representatives, we march. The list of what we do is long. But no matter how hard most of us work, it doesn’t seem to add up. We mostly lose.

What the majority of people wants usually doesn’t seem to matter to those who ultimately make the decisions that affect all of us.

It’s no wonder so few of us engage in the political process. We’re run down, we’re exhausted. We feel hopeless and helpless. Many of us get angry, many feel despair. Many of us just go numb and stop paying attention to the news altogether, because we no longer believe that anything we could do would make any difference at all. I would argue that that’s not apathy. Instead, I would argue that it’s a perfectly rational response to a system that clearly isn’t interested in what we want, in what the majority wants.

Did you, the good people of Missoula, want your local water utility to be owned by a California corporation? And this California corporation just sold your local water to the Carlyle Group, the world’s largest private investment firm, which has never owned a water utility until now. Imagine that, the Carlyle Group now owns Missoula, Montana’s local water utility. They can toss your local water, your local aquifer, from corporation to corporation, and there’s very little you can do about it.

No one asked the people of Missoula what you want. They didn’t have to ask. The law is on their side. This is what minority rule looks like. This is what corporate rule looks like.

It reminds me of what it feels like when bullies stole my cap when I was a kid, and tossed it back and forth between them. I couldn’t get it back. They had all the power. And it made me really angry because that was my cap. But it had become their plaything. I couldn’t do anything to get it back, other than to beg them for it. Now the law allows giant corporations to do that with your water, like it’s just a corporate toy, while the people of Missoula run back and forth begging the corporation to sell it back.

That’s how the system works. The law is on their side. It doesn’t really matter what the good people of Missoula want.

And yet there’s something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear. But I can feel it, and I’ll bet you can too. People who have never been politically active before are rising up in hundreds of communities across this country.

Regardless of what you think about the Occupy Movement, it has had dramatic impact on what is being discussed in the cafes and on the front pages of daily newspapers. “We are the 99%” has become a slogan, a soundbite, crisscrossing the entire country, in just a matter of a few months. For the first time in decades, our politicians are being forced to discuss the obscene disparity between the richest and the poorest Americans.

There is a great political awakening taking place. Huge numbers of us are standing up for the first time and telling others,

What’s going on here is unacceptable. We cannot continue down this path. We have to do something.

But it’s not just income disparity that has people so angry. Massive numbers of us are also standing up and asking,

Who’s in charge here? Giant corporations or We The People?

What a teachable moment this is. I have been doing grassroots community organizing my entire adult life, and, wow, I have never witnessed anything like this before. So much energy. So many people mobilizing who have never been politically active before. It’s tremendously exciting.

When we were children, we all learned in school that we live in a society that is democratic, where the majority rules, where we vote for our representatives in government and they do our bidding. What I think is going on right now across this enormous country is really profound. I think that the average citizen is starting to finally wake up in large enough numbers to the reality on the ground that tells them that this story from our childhood was a great myth, a great illusion.

We The People are starting to stir again. And the big question is this: Will enough of us understand the importance, or perhaps more accurately the urgency, of reaching outside of our comfort zones, across the boundaries we rarely cross, and doing what is perhaps the scariest thing that most of us will ever do, starting conversations with starting to build mutually respectful relationships with those who are not like us?

What I’m talking about here is the essential first step in organizing our communities. Most of us these days think that all we have to do is activate our social networks, and we’ll succeed at reaching everyone who needs to be reached. Sadly, that is not how it works. Our society is incredibly fractured. And networking is not at all the same thing as organizing. Once you’ve stretched yourself a bit, and built relationships with new groups of people who you wouldn’t normally have gotten to know, then social networking is an ideal way to stay connected and get mobilized. But first you have to build that trust.

Years ago, author Carolyn Chute, who lives in Maine, was working hard to build what she called “The Second Maine Militia.” She imagined it would be some sort of pro-people, pro-democracy local army that would try to reach out to everyone. They would carry guns, just like the Maine Militia already does. But their work would be about defending grassroots democracy. She referred to them as “Your Wicked Good Militia.”

Here’s something she said at the time:

We The People must unite if we are to be a power strong enough to get our sovereign rights back. we must not squabble amongst ourselves over stuff like abortions, drugs, guns, welfare, unemployment benefits, men who whistle at women, cultural differences, race, and all that. a united people must include all of us: the homos, the heters, the yuppy, the hippie, the red necks, hairy, shaved, kinky, spiffy, the work boots, the sneakers, the black shiny pumps, the nose rings, the knit shirts, flannel shirts, pink shirts, the fat, the thin, the tall and the short and the beauteous, and the ugly. We need millions. We can’t fight the corporate scheme if we are all hissing and fluffing and puffing and snorting in little isolated groups which blame other little groups for the country’s ills.

She’s talking about the 99%. And believe it or not, on the issue of corporate power vs We The People, we’re mostly all on the same side already. We just don’t believe it yet.

When the Supreme Court ruled in January 2010 that corporations should be allowed to steal our elections even more easily than they could already, how did citizens react? 85% of Democrats, 81% of Independents, and 76% of Republicans opposed the court’s decision.

I’ll repeat those statistics because they’re so startling to most of us. 85% of Democrats, 81% of Independents, and 76% of Republicans opposed the court’s decision giving even more power to corporations to steal our elections.

The only reason that I can figure out how to explain why Democrats, Independents, Republicans, Libertarians, and Greens are not already working actively together to challenge corporate rule, is that our minds have been so completely colonized that we don’t realize we already are the majority.

Divide and conquer works. That’s why a lot of you in this room really need to be leaving this hall tonight and asking yourselves what you can do to reach outside of your comfort zone and start building sustained relationships with people who may not think the way you do on many topics, but on the topic of citizens vs corporate rule, you see eye to eye. You just don’t know it yet.

We The People of these United States of America have a lot of work to do. And we’re going to have to figure out how to mobilize ourselves at a rate that most of us can scarcely imagine if we are to effectively tackle the social crises and the economic crises and the ecological crises that are staring us in the face.

Step one is for us to get real and stop lying to ourselves about what’s going on in Washington D.C. and in our state capitols. Our so-called “representatives” are doing exactly what they have always done, since the founding of our nation representing the captains of industry. It has always been this way. James Madison, the main author of the Constitution, was quite honest about this at the time:

The primary goal of government is to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.

I’ll say that again. James Madison said,

The primary goal of government is to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.

And if you actually read the Constitution–not the Amendments to it, but the original Constitution–you’ll see how true this is. Our nation’s history isn’t pretty to look at. Most of us prefer to avert our eyes, but that doesn’t make it go away.

The Founding Fathers were mostly very wealthy men who owned slaves. When the founders finished writing the Constitution, and sent copies of it to each state to be reviewed, the general response was outrage. In state after state, it was rejected. The general public had expected that it would be filled with specific rights and protections for people. But instead, it mostly protected commerce and property; it was an economic document.

So the men who had written the Constitution were forced to draft a number of amendments to it, which took many years to get finalized, and which became known as the Bill of Rights. Finally, there were rights for people in the Constitution, but it took citizen outrage to get us there.

For the next 100 years, only 10 or 15% of those human beings who lived in the U.S. had any Constitutional rights at all. You had to be a white male and own property to be considered a person under law. The other 85 to 90% of us had no rights. It wasn’t until the final years of the 1800’s that enough non-persons had mobilized through massive social movement, and had become legal persons with rights. Ultimately, as abolitionists organized to end slavery and turn property into people with rights; as suffragists organized for a woman’s right to vote; and as white men without property organized to win the rights of persons; it became necessary for the small minority who ruled the country to find another way to maintain their control.

What did they do? They worked diligently for decades, primarily via the Supreme Court, to transform the corporation from something that had been merely a tool, controlled and defined by state legislatures, to something that was to ultimately become the dominant institution of our entire society. Mostly through a supportive Supreme Court, the corporation was granted one new Constitutional so-called “right” after another.

And from that point forward to this very day, the original 10% of the people who ruled the rest of us found a new resting spot, inside of, and firmly in control of, the corporation. So we have always lived in a minority rule society. And the sooner we come to terms with this fact, the sooner we will succeed in effectively changing this situation.

You can argue that we still get to choose our elected officials, but did you know that the candidate who has the most money to spend almost always wins? And did you know that the vast majority of campaign contributions comes from corporations, not from people?

So until we figure out how to build a movement from the bottom up, starting locally, to drive change upward to the state and federal level, we can’t honestly claim that we live in a functioning democratic republic. If we’re prepared to acknowledge this very painful truth, enormous energy can be released in some very exciting ways. Because once you stop trying to convince your so-called “representatives” to do the right thing, and once you stop putting your energy into trying to fight one corporate outrage at a time, it frees you up to see everything from a fresh angle.

That’s exactly what has been happening for the past ten years, in a growing number of communities across six East Coast states–with very little attention paid to it by the corporate media, which is not surprising–but also with very little attention paid to it by the independent media, which is surprising. With one exception, YES magazine.

In 140 communities, some very conservative, some very progressive, local residents are pulling the wool out of their eyes and concluding that if they want to protect the local places where they live and that they love, they have to step outside of conventional law to do so–because municipal governments are not allowed to pass laws that respond directly to the grandest aspirations of their residents. It’s against the law. Local city councils are not allowed to ban harmful corporate activities if those activities are already considered normal and legal by state governments. It’s called “state pre-emption.” And you’ll come up against it quite quickly if you try to stop a factory farm from moving into your area, or a clearcut in your local woods.

Local governments also run into another barrier called “Dillon’s Rule,” which is the flip side of state pre-emption. Dillon’s Rule states that local governments may only make laws in the areas that state governments explicitly allow them to.

And then there’s corporate constitutional so-called “rights.” You can’t stop a Wal-Mart from being built over there, because that violates the corporation’s constitutionally protected property “rights.” You can’t stop that local factory that’s been providing living wage jobs to a thousand residents for decades from closing its doors and moving production to China, because that violates the corporation’s decision-making authority, which is constitutionally protected as an intangible property “right.” You can’t ask your City Council to hold a public hearing on the human health impact of cell phone towers, because just holding the hearing would violate the corporation’s constitutionally-protected “rights” under 1950’s-era civil rights law. And the Vermont state legislature learned the hard way that if you try to shut down a nuclear power plant, even after its operating license has expired, and even though state law explicitly allows them to do this, you’ll quickly discover that doing so would violate the corporation’s protected “rights” under the Commerce Clause of the Constitution.

You can’t stop corporations from throwing millions of dollars at manipulating one of our elections because that would violate the corporations’ constitutionally protected First Amendment “rights” of free speech.

What I’m talking about here isn’t just what’s taken place in the distant past. No, this is current. Corporations just keep winning Supreme Court decision after Supreme Court decision. This is living history that is still unfolding.

And until We The People decide that corporate constitutional “rights” are a real problem in this country, nothing much is going to change for the better.

Just a few years ago, Nike Corporation’s lawyers tried to get the courts to agree that corporations should have the legally protected right to lie, as a subset of their First Amendment “right” to speak. The Supreme Court chose not to make a ruling on that request, so this one is still up for grabs.

Let me be very clear here. I am not challenging or criticizing rights for people. What I am doing is drawing the line between people and corporations.

What is a corporation? It’s property. We’re supposed to not fall over laughing when we’re told that it’s essential that we not interfere when the courts grant property rights to property, free speech rights to property, civil rights to property? That’s like giving constitutional “rights” to my toaster. It’s absolutely nuts. And it amazes me that We The People aren’t already up in arms about this.

But that’s what happens when we put our attentions elsewhere, fighting one single issue after another, decade after decade, not ever connecting the dots to discover that at the root of most of our single-issue battles is corporate constitutional “rights.”

Once again, there’s state pre-emption, there’s Dillon’s Rule, and there’s corporate so-called “rights.” These three rules are what makes it literally impossible for local governments to pass laws that protect your community.

And that’s why local governments in 150 towns and climbing have said, “Enough is Enough.” And they are choosing to step outside of conventional law to do what elected officials have given an oath to do, to represent their communities the best way they know how.

What do you do when you’re elected to serve on a city or town council, and what the majority of the town wants is not legal for you to pass into law? You do what the good people of dozens of rural Pennsylvania communities did over the past ten years. They passed the “Anti-Corporate Farming Ordinance” which banned nonfamily owned corporations from engaging in farming or owning farmland. The law they passed violated corporate “rights.” It violated state pre-emption, and it violated Dillon’s Rule. These township supervisors had to step outside of the legal structures they were told they had to operate within. There was no other way to protect their towns.

They had tried pleading with agricultural regulatory agencies, but as you may already know, regulatory agencies aren’t about saying no to harmful corporate activities. They’re about regulating harmful activities, which by definition means that they’re about permitting harmful activities. The farm communities didn’t want the hog farms regulated, they wanted them stopped. But there was no one else to ask. There was no there there. So they stepped outside of the law. They had to in order to protect their rural way of life. The laws they passed succeeded in keeping the corporate factory farms out of their towns. These conservative farmers were the spark that started this grassroots movement that is now spreading so quickly.

This really is nothing new. What did the abolitionists do in the late 1800’s when they were trying to end slavery? They couldn’t turn to the law. The law enshrined slavery. The Constitution defended slavery as a normal activity. So in their rallies they burned copies of the Constitution, because there was no way to get justice for slaves within existing structures of law. The law was the problem.

What did the suffragists do when they were trying to win the right for women to vote? They couldn’t turn to the law. The law only talked about “persons”, and women weren’t persons. There was no way to get justice for women within existing structures of law. The law was the problem. So women entered polling places year after year by the thousands, and tried to vote, and they were arrested and imprisoned and treated in surprisingly brutal ways.

The people of this country have understood from the very beginning, starting with the American Revolution, that sometimes you have to break the law in order to win new rights. Quite frankly, it’s as American as apple pie.

Since the Pennsylvania farmers banned corporate agriculture in dozens of communities, this Community Rights movement has really taken off. Towns in Maine have banned corporations from pumping water out of the ground to sell in little plastic bottles. Other towns have banned corporate mining, the corporate dumping of urban sewage sludge on farmland, the corporate use of the right of eminent domain to take private property away from private land and home owners against their will and many other examples.

In 2010, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania’s city council, by a unanimous vote of nine to zero, banned corporate fracking for natural gas–a practice that commonly results in turning your tap water into something that you can light with a match. Imagine that. It’s not a pretty picture.

The latest community to be added to this map is Bellingham, Washington, which in January 2012, launched a ballot initiative campaign that would ban coal trains from passing through Bellingham. As was reported in the Bellingham Herald newspaper on December 30, 2011, and I quote,

In conventional legal terms, that doesn’t seem to make much sense. The federal government regulates the interstate rail system, and BNSF Railway Company has a legal right of way through the city.

But the Bellingham organizers don’t seem too concerned about that. They say that they are setting out to establish some new legal groundwork that would put the rights of communities and ecosystems above the “rights” of railroad corporations.

Every last one of these local ordinances is doing something as revolutionary as what the Abolitionists and the Suffragists did. They are refusing to abide by an unjust law. They’re saying in town after town, if we can’t get our state and federal governments to protect us from these harmful corporate activities, we’ll do it ourselves. No matter what it takes. Because we live here. Because we won’t let our homes get destroyed. Because we’re drawing a line in the sand. any town can do this. It just takes backbone.

I travel extensively leading workshops and giving talks about these issues. I’ve been doing this since 1996. And I have to tell you, people are fed up with the status quo in this country. They’re fed up with feeling powerless. They’re fed up with being ignored by their so-called leaders. I’ve never witnessed so much readiness to stand up collectively and say,

We will not let this harmful corporate activity happen here.

And what’s even more exciting to me is that people are taking it one step further and also starting to think about what they want for their towns. Not just what they don’t want. Not just what they’re trying to stop. But what they want.

A few communities, like the rural New Hampshire towns I mentioned earlier, are getting ready to pass ordinances that would enshrine, under law, the “right to a sustainable energy future.” Imagine that. Six communities are voting on this. These residents are no longer begging state and federal politicians to pay more attention to the fossil fuel energy crisis we’re in. They’re not waiting anymore for someone higher up to save them. There is no legal force more powerful than We The People. And they know it.

Let me read you Section One of this ordinance being discussed in the town of Lancaster, and as you listen to this, think to yourself how exciting it might be to do this sort of thing in your town:

The residents of the Town of Lancaster recognize that the current energy policies of the state of New Hampshire and the United States have long been directed by a small handful of energy corporations and the directors of those corporations, and that centralized control over energy policies forces reliance upon unsustainable industrial-scale energy production, and denies the rights of residents to a sustainable energy future.

The residents of the Town of Lancaster recognize that environmental and economic sustainability cannot be achieved if the rights of community majorities are routinely overridden by corporate minorities claiming certain legal powers that bar meaningful regulatory limitations and prohibitions concerning the generation, distribution, and transmission of unsustainable energy.

The residents of the Town also recognize that sustainability cannot be achieved within a system of preemption which enables those corporations to use state governments to override local self-government, and which restricts municipalities to that lawmaking specifically authorized by state government.

The residents of the Town of Lancaster believe that the protection of their health, safety, and welfare is mandated by the doctrine of the consent of the governed and their inherent right to local self-government.

Thus, the Town of Lancaster hereby adopts this rights-based Ordinance, which establishes a Bill of Rights for the residents and communities of the Town. This Bill of Rights includes the Right to a Sustainable Energy Future, prohibits corporations from acquiring land necessary for the construction of unsustainable energy systems, or engaging in the construction or siting of any structure to be used in the operation of unsustainable energy systems, removes certain legal powers from energy corporations operating within the Town of Lancaster that would violate the Right to a Sustainable Energy Future, and nullifies state laws, permits and other authorizations which interfere with the rights secured by this Ordinance.

What do you think of that?

What we are witnessing, I believe, are the opening shots of the Second American Revolution. The central question that each one of these towns is asking themselves is this: Who’s in charge here? We The People or large absentee corporations?

They know who should be in charge here. So they’re standing up for their communities and exercising their inherent right to govern themselves. And they’re not going to allow higher levels of
government to stop them from passing stronger protection of their farm and ranch lands, stronger protection of their creeks and rivers, stronger protection for working people, stronger protection for neighborhoods. Because that’s what a majority of them wants.

Let me read to you the first few sentences of the Montana State Constitution, which by the way is the highest law of the land in Montana.

ARTICLE II
DECLARATION OF RIGHTS

Section 1. POPULAR SOVEREIGNTY.
All political power is vested in and derived from the people. All government of right originates with the people, is founded upon their will only, and is instituted solely for the good of the whole.

Section 2. SELF-GOVERNMENT.
The people have the exclusive right of governing themselves as a free, sovereign, and independent state. They may alter or abolish the Constitution and form of government whenever they deem it necessary.

Section 3. INALIENABLE RIGHTS.
All persons are born free and have certain inalienable rights. They include the right to a clean and healthful environment and the rights of pursuing life’s basic necessities, enjoying and defending their lives and liberties, acquiring, possessing and protecting property, and seeking their safety, health and happiness in all lawful ways. In enjoying these rights, all persons recognize corresponding responsibilities.

These are your constitutional rights in the state of Montana. Are you already familiar with this document? Every state constitution contains reasonably similar language.

Earlier, I mentioned that Bellingham, Washington is organizing to ban coal trains from passing through their town. If you don’t already know about this, there’s a corporate plan to run up to 20 coal trains per day, each train up to a mile and a half long, and containing 100 to 150 coal cars each. That’s 3000 coal cars per day, stretching up to 30 miles long per day. They’ll run from Wyoming and Montana to a number of deepwater ports in Oregon and Washington. Many of these trains are destined to go through Missoula, as well as through Spokane, Everett, Seattle, Tacoma, Yakima, Longview, Vancouver, Hood River, Portland, Salem, Eugene, and many other towns and cities on numerous routes. Ports are already being dredged to handle these massively heavy ships in Cherry Point north of Bellingham, in Grays Harbor west of Olympia, in Longview and Saint Helens on the Columbia River, and in Coos Bay, on the Oregon coast.

I am helping to establish a network of communities that are considering passing the same ordinance that Bellingham has written, with the goal of stopping this entire operation before it ever starts. So please contact folks you know along these routes, and let them know that there’s something very powerful that they can do, beyond just pleading with elected officials. The time for pleading is over. It’s time for us to stand up collectively and exercise our right to say “No” to what we find unacceptable and to say “Yes” to what we actually want.

Coal is the worst of the fossil fuels for releasing carbon into the atmosphere that creates catastrophic climate destabilization. So if we care about our climate, this project has to be stopped. Each coal car is expected to release upwards of 500 pounds of coal dust as it rumbles along. Up to 500 pounds of coal dust release per train car.Imagine the health impacts of that much coal dust in the air, in the creeks, in our lungs. More than 170 Bellingham doctors have already mobilized to warn their community about this new health menace. In their own words,

There are irrefutable links between these pollutants and cardiovascular and respiratory disease, reproductive health issues and malignancy, with no threshold value for impacts on human health. Much like cigarettes, a little exposure is bad and more is worse.

Let me be clear. It’s not enough to simply stop the coal trains, although stopping them is essential, and these rights-based local ordinances can help. It’s not enough to simply stop the tar sands project in Canada, and the related pipeline to the Texas coast, although stopping them is essential, and these rights-based local ordinances can help. It’s not enough to simply stop the drilling for oil in deeper and deeper waters, although stopping this is essential. What we really need is a fundamentally new energy policy in this country, and there is no way we can get there if our entire strategy is begging and pleading with our elected politicians in Washington D.C. and in our state capitals.

Fossil fuel analysts say that Peak Oil happened just a few years ago, and it’ll be a slow decline from here on out. Peak Coal is right around the corner, at least domestically. Peak natural gas is closer than you might think. We are simply running out of most of the raw materials that are required for economic growth to continue. The reason I’m focusing for a moment on peak fossil fuels is that a vast number of us already know that we need to change direction in our energy policies, and fast.

What Lancaster and other New Hampshire communities are doing is an example of how we can get there. Or at least how we can begin the long journey from heading off the cliff, towards acknowledging that this beautiful planet that we live on has limits. And that we’ve reached those limits. And that we have to drive major political change upwards, from local communities to state and then federal government, if we are to have any chance of fundamentally shifting our energy policies in this country.

The same goes for transportation policy, agricultural policy, forestry policy, health policy, environmental policy, etc. I am absolutely convinced that we have to begin by envisioning what we want here at home first, and turning that vision into local rights-based lawmaking. In New Hampshire, it’s people exercising their right to a sustainable energy future. In Maine, it’s people exercising their right to a sustainable food system. And in Montana, what will it be? That’s where it starts. What does a majority of Montana voters want? What does a majority of Missoula voters want? That’s where it starts.

When you hear a news story on the radio tomorrow, talking about the policymakers who decided this, and the policymakers who decided that, ask yourself who these policy makers are. Ask yourself why is it that you hear that phrase day after day, but it doesn’t ever occur to most of us that We The People hold the ultimate responsibility and authority to be those policymakers.

Montana is one of the more than 30 states in this country that allows the voters to pass laws directly through the ballot box. You won that right because an enormous number of people calling themselves Populists organized here in the 1880’s and 1890’s and won that right for all of you.

The GMO issue is yet another emergency that needs immediate attention. We The People can’t keep battling these totally legal but awful corporate activities, one at a time, endlessly, into the future. We don’t have the time. We don’t have the resources. And frankly, it’s a waste of our energies, when instead we could be exercising our right of local self-governance. Instead, we could be standing up together and saying,

No, you can’t harm us here anymore. We have the right to say No. We’re drawing a line in the sand. And we’re organizing for our right to sustainable agriculture.

None of what I’ve been describing to you is easy to accomplish. Of course it isn’t. But neither is all of our endless single-issue crisis-based activism, which rarely accomplishes its goals.

For me, the central question that I keep asking in each community that I visit is this,

What do you want? What do you need?

You are the real experts in this place. No one knows this place better than you do. You have unique issues here that need to be resolved. You’re trying to figure out how to get your water utility back in public hands. You’re trying to figure out how to stop coal trains from passing through. You’re trying to stop prime agricultural lands from being turned into subdivisions. In each one of these cases, a small minority of people, organized as a corporation claiming constitutional “rights” is making all of the critical decisions. In most of these cases, they’re not even the people who live here who are making these decisions.

That’s the central issue that needs to be addressed. Who’s in charge in this place? The people who live here and vote here, or large corporations?

Every town needs to identify the primary issues that are so contentious here. Every town needs to create authentically democratic public space so that We The People can meet and talk and listen and think creatively together. So that we can find our power again as The People. So that we can learn again how to govern ourselves. So that we can think about what we want to leave for our children and grandchildren and great
grandchildren here in this place.

We can do this. We are The People. Right?

Thank you very much.

For information about obtaining CDs, MP3s, or transcripts of this or other programs, please contact:

David Barsamian
Alternative Radio
P.O. Box 551
Boulder, CO 80306-0551
(800) 444-1977
info@alternativeradio.org
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©2012

The grand betrayal?

Mon, 10 Dec 2012 15:46:11 GMT

by Robert L. Borosage

Washington’s obsession with deficits is illogical for two reasons: first, there is no sign of accelerating inflation; interest rates are near record lows, as global investors seek shelter in US securities from economic turmoil abroad. We will never have a better opportunity to rebuild our decrepit infrastructure, so there’s no reason for Washington to focus on belt tightening now.

Second, austerity is, paradoxically, likely to undermine the stated goal of deficit reduction. Cutting spending and raising taxes in a weak economy destroys jobs and slows growth. The increased unemployment leads to declining tax revenue as well as increased demands on government services, all of which adds to the deficit. This is the famous “debt trap” recently experienced in much of Europe, where premature and harsh austerity drove many EU countries into recession. Spain, Portugal and Greece have piled up worse debt burdens as their economies collapsed.

With the election behind us, President Obama and the lame-duck Congress return to Washington to face a fiscal showdown, occasioned by automatic tax hikes and spending cuts scheduled to kick in after the first of the year. Most economists, including the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, agree that if nothing is done, this arbitrary, Washington-created “fiscal cliff,” as Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke dubbed it, will likely drive the economy back into recession.

It is probably already contributing to slower growth. The New York Times reports that manufacturers are delaying capital improvements and postponing hiring for fear that no deal will be made. More than a third of the nation’s school districts have reduced programs and hiring in anticipation. If there’s no deal, domestic agencies face an 8 percent cut across the board in fiscal year 2013. Middle-class families will see an income tax hike of about $1,500, a cut in child tax credits by about $500 per kid, a cut in tuition tax credits by $700 a year, and a hike in the payroll tax of $1,000 a year. Lower-income families will suffer cuts in the earned-income tax credit. The result is renewed discussion of a “grand bargain” to avoid that self-destructive course.

But the “cliff,” with its misleading metaphor of an imminent, irreversible fall, has been misconstrued by the media. These changes are not irrevocable; it’s not as if they can’t be fixed after January 1 (more on this later). But in true shock doctrine fashion, the ersatz crisis is being used to demand changes that would otherwise be politically impossible: cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, along with deep cuts in basic government services, combined with tax increases. Wall Street billionaire Pete Peterson has enlisted bankers and CEOs in a multimillion-dollar campaign spearheaded by the hysterical Cassandras of debt, Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, former co-chairs of President Obama’s deficit commission, to demand action now. Editorial opinion and much of the punditry, along with a claque of supposedly bipartisan or nonpartisan lobbying groups, have dutifully echoed the call. Gaggles of senatorial aides have been meeting to explore what a deal might look like.

In an initially off-the-record campaign interview in late October with The Des Moines Register, Obama indicated that he intended to offer Republicans a deal similar to the one he offered House Speaker John Boehner in the summer of 2011: meeting the Simpson-Bowles target of $4 trillion in deficit reductions over ten years, with a ratio of $2.50 in spending cuts for every $1 in new revenue as well as “working to reduce the costs of our health care programs.” Since the election, Boehner and Senate Republicans have indicated they would support an agreement that reduces deficits by cutting Medicare and Social Security in exchange for tax reform that lowers rates but raises more revenue through closing loopholes.

Virtually every aspect of this hysteria is wrong. The United States does not have a short-term deficit problem, and the fundamental long-term problem isn’t one of soaring debt; rather, it is the lack of a foundation for sustainable growth that includes working people. Without a political movement to achieve the latter, very little progress will be made on the former.

The grand bargain being discussed in Washington reflects an elite consensus far removed from what voters want. Americans want action on jobs, and most support the president’s call to raise taxes on the rich. Overwhelmingly, they want basic family security programs protected. Any deal that cuts Medicare and Social Security, slows growth and increases unemployment will look a lot more like a grand betrayal than a grand bargain. And virtually the entire organized base of the Democratic Party, from unions to civil rights and women’s groups, is mobilizing in opposition.

Austerity Bites

There are still more than 20 million people in need of full-time work. Mass unemployment guarantees stagnant or falling wages and sputtering growth. Long-term unemployment—40 percent of those out of work have been jobless for more than twenty-seven weeks—erodes skills, confidence and lives. The Federal Reserve, understanding the danger, has used monetary policy to keep interest rates low and pump money into the economy. Yet Americans are still strapped, given declining real wages, the collapse of the value of their homes and the rising cost of necessities, from gas to college education to healthcare. Companies are sitting on trillions in profits, waiting for demand to pick up for their products. The Fed can’t generate the growth we need through monetary policy alone. In this situation, the federal government should be acting to boost the economy.

Washington’s obsession with deficits is illogical for two reasons: first, there is no sign of accelerating inflation; interest rates are near record lows, as global investors seek shelter in US securities from economic turmoil abroad. We will never have a better opportunity to rebuild our decrepit infrastructure, so there’s no reason for Washington to focus on belt tightening now.

Second, austerity is, paradoxically, likely to undermine the stated goal of deficit reduction. Cutting spending and raising taxes in a weak economy destroys jobs and slows growth. The increased unemployment leads to declining tax revenue as well as increased demands on government services, all of which adds to the deficit. This is the famous “debt trap” recently experienced in much of Europe, where premature and harsh austerity drove many EU countries into recession. Spain, Portugal and Greece have piled up worse debt burdens as their economies collapsed.

American CEOs, fearful of the recession that would ensue from the fiscal cliff, have been clamoring for a deal to avoid it. But given the faltering recovery, the same logic applies to the less harsh grand bargain now under discussion. Job creation is barely able to keep up with new people coming into the workforce. Federal government purchases were down last year, as spending from Obama’s 2009 stimulus bill declined, and they are declining again this year. State and local expenditures continue to fall off. The results are felt all over the country as teachers are laid off, aging sewers collapse and Head Start programs close. Streets grow unsafe as police forces are reduced. Adding to the drag on the economy are the budget caps passed by Congress—as part of the 2011 debt ceiling deal—that will reduce discretionary spending by $1.5 trillion over the next ten years. Any new deal would only add to the drag on the economy in a world where Europe is in recession and emerging nations like China, India and Brazil are struggling.

The hysteria about deficits ignores both their source and their solution. Publicly held debt was only about 36 percent of GDP in 2007, before the crash. When the housing bubble exploded, the economic collapse meant falling revenue and rising spending (particularly on unemployment insurance, food stamps and other programs for the jobless). The result just about doubled the debt burden, to 73 percent of GDP. Spending from the president’s recovery act temporarily contributed to the deficits, but that has already petered out. As a result, deficits are coming down; they are currently three-quarters of what they were in 2009, relative to the size of the economy.

Putting people back to work does more to reduce deficits than any other factor. That requires more federal spending now, preferably in areas vital to the economy, like modernizing our infrastructure and keeping teachers on the job. Once the economy is growing and people are working, the deficit will come down. Additional steps can be taken, if necessary, to reduce remaining imbalances and address our long-term debt problem.

It is the long-term, seventy-five-year debt projections—illustrated in the lavish charts that Pete Peterson’s various front groups have plastered across the country—that have terrified so many people. But those long-term deficits come almost entirely from one source: our broken healthcare system. The projected increase in healthcare costs—through Medicare, Medicaid, children’s and veterans’ healthcare—drive long-term deficits. The costs of Medicare and other public healthcare programs are rising more slowly than private healthcare, but even so, in the long term they are unaffordable. As economist Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research has pointed out, if per capita US healthcare spending were comparable to what other industrialized countries spend (with better results), we would be projecting budget surpluses as far as the eye could see. The solution requires challenging the predatory oligopolies—the insurance companies, drug companies and hospital complexes—that profit from high costs. Obamacare began that process; Medicare costs have begun to rise more slowly. The sensible solution to our long-term debt problem is continued healthcare reform, not cuts in basic security for Americans.

Other than our broken healthcare system, our structural problem is not so much deficits and debt as that the United States does not have a stable foundation for growth. In 2007, before the recession hit, annual deficits were down to less than 3 percent of GDP, a level that could easily be sustained indefinitely. This was despite the Bush administration’s two unfunded wars, tax cuts and a prescription drug benefit that wasn’t paid for (indeed, the Bush excesses and the Bush economic crash have contributed far more to the current national debt than anything Obama has done). But the low deficits reflected the growth, employment and consumption generated by the housing bubble. We can’t reinflate that bubble, and we shouldn’t want to. As discussed below, we need a different basis for growth.

The most damaging implication behind the call to balance our books now rather than get the economy moving is that it assumes the current recovery is adequate and that mass unemployment is the new normal. We will probably see a flood of articles by economists explaining that high unemployment is structural, and that workers don’t have the skills needed for the twenty-first-century economy. As New York Times columnist and economist Paul Krugman has written, this callous assumption is not only wrong; it condemns millions of people to joblessness and despair.

This election was fought over which candidate and which party would do better at producing jobs and growth. To turn to deficit reduction now would be a great betrayal. But it would not be the only one.

Chump Change

The grand bargain not only offers the wrong answer; it poses the wrong question. In Washington, the bargainers intone the same mantra: It is a time for shared sacrifice. Everything must be on the table, from Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security to tax hikes. We must all do our part.

The call for shared sacrifice makes no sense given that in recent decades, the rewards have not been shared. The middle class lost ground even before the Great Recession, while the wealthiest 1 percent pocketed about two-thirds of the rewards of growth. In the first year after the recession, the top 1 percent pocketed a staggering 93 percent of income growth, as the stock market roared back but housing values and wages did not. The pious summons to shared sacrifice violates both fairness and common sense. Worse, the focus is on programs for ordinary Americans and the vulnerable, not on the people who have made out like bandits. For example: our debt burden nearly doubled because Wall Street’s excesses blew up the economy and drove us into the deepest recession in seventy-five years. So you would think any discussion of how to reduce the deficit would start by demanding that Wall Street pay for the damage it caused. You would be wrong.

We are witnessing the worst inequality since the Gilded Age. The top 1 percent of taxpayers pocket more income each year than the bottom 40 percent, and they own more wealth than 90 percent of Americans. Yet their tax rates are near the lowest in post–World War II history. As billionaire investor Warren Buffett has noted—and as Mitt Romney has demonstrated with his 13.9 percent tax rate on $20 million in income—the richest Americans are often paying lower tax rates than their secretaries. You would think that any discussion of reducing deficits would begin with the assumption that there must be higher tax rates on millionaires and billionaires. You would be wrong.

Multinational corporations based in the United States pay among the lowest effective tax rates in the industrialized world. Many, like General Electric, earn billions in profits and pay nothing. Lower rates, corporate loopholes, offshore tax havens and transfer pricing have reduced the corporate share of federal tax revenues consistently since the 1950s. You would think that any discussion of reducing deficits would begin with a call for higher taxes on corporations and a clampdown on overseas tax havens. You would be wrong.

The military budget has doubled over the past decade, now exceeding what it was, in comparable dollars, at the height of the cold war. The United States and its NATO allies spend more on their militaries than the rest of the world combined. At the same time, domestic spending—with the temporary exception of Obama’s 2009 stimulus bill—has declined as a portion of the economy, despite a growing population and spreading poverty. The president brags that nonsecurity discretionary spending—everything outside the military and guaranteed programs like Social Security and Medicare—is projected to decline to levels not seen since the Eisenhower era. The result is a continued decline in public provision: decrepit sewers, airports and bridges; an outmoded electric grid; inadequate research and development; national parks in decline; infants without adequate nutrition; families without affordable shelter; glaringly inadequate investment in public education from pre-K to college. You would think the focus of any spending cuts would be on the military, not on domestic spending. You would be wrong.

Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, the pillars on which family security rests, are not generous. The average annual Social Security benefit is $14,800, sufficient only to put a minimal floor under seniors. The average 65-year-old couple on Medicare will spend an average of $230,000 out of pocket on healthcare over the course of their retirement years. Without Social Security, 14 million more elderly Americans would live in poverty; without Medicare, few would be able to afford medical expenses.

Americans want these programs protected. They are so popular that politicians in both parties vied during the election to show who would protect them the most. Republicans strafed Obama and the Democrats by falsely claiming that they cut $716 billion from Medicare to pay for Obamacare. Joe Biden guaranteed absolutely that an Obama presidency would not allow cuts in Social Security. In an election night poll by the Campaign for America’s Future with Democracy Corps, fully 79 percent of Americans—from across the political spectrum—stated that they would find unacceptable any deal that cut Medicare benefits; 62 percent opposed an agreement that would cut Social Security over time. You would think those programs would be off the table in any discussion. You would be wrong.

The Sting

The general frame for the grand bargain violates almost all these common-sense priorities. In Obama’s 2011 talks with Boehner, the president offered to trade cuts in Medicare and Social Security for a tax reform that lowered rates on the rich and corporations while closing loopholes and exemptions to generate more revenue. Any tax proposal to raise revenue that begins with cutting top rates deserves only scorn. As Romney demonstrated with his mathematically impossible tax proposal during the campaign, raising significant revenue by cutting rates and then closing loopholes isn’t easy. To gain enough revenue, popular middle-class deductions—for home mortgages or employer-provided healthcare—are likely to get hit. And of course, as we saw with the Reagan-era tax law, such reforms eliminate loopholes but not lobbies. Pretty soon, new loopholes are slipped in, while rates remain at the lower level. The overall result: a more regressive, unjust tax system.

How did politicians arrive at this bad bargain? The essential dynamic is that Democrats reward Republican intransigence with concessions. Republicans refuse to hike taxes, so to entice them, Democrats offer the crown jewels: Medicare and Social Security. Republicans still resist tax hikes, so the austerity crowd suggests “reform” that will in theory bring in more revenue while lowering tax rates. Behind this are the big money lobbies that rig the rules: the Wall Street bankers, CEOs and private equity vultures who want to protect the scandalously low tax rates they now enjoy. The result is the outline of a deal that betrays promises made on the campaign trail and compromises the historic legacies of the New Deal and the Great Society. And it does all this while addressing the wrong problem.

No Home to Go Back To

Last fall, as part of his comeback from the disastrous negotiations over the debt ceiling, President Obama put forth the American Jobs Act, calling for a $447 billion program that included $65 billion to rebuild schools and keep teachers on the job, $50 billion in infrastructure spending, an extension of the payroll tax cut and other measures. Senate majority leader Harry Reid offered to pay for it with a surtax on millionaires. This was a no-brainer, estimated to create another 1.9 million jobs by 2013. Republicans blocked all but a few minor parts. Mysteriously, Obama walked away from his own plan, choosing not to make an issue of it during the campaign.

Many assume that the White House will seek to add some money for jobs in the coming grand bargain, as a sweetener for Democrats. But this economy needs far more than a short-term spending jolt. Although austerity and stimulus head in opposite directions, they share one assumption: that there will be a healthy economy to return to one day. Austerians would cut deficits and regulations. Stimularians would spend money and put people back to work. But the economy was not working for most Americans even before the Great Recession. The Bush years witnessed the first “recovery” in which most American households lost ground. Most real incomes went down, not up. The wealthiest few captured most of the rewards of growth. The middle class took on greater and greater debt simply to stay afloat.

The Excluded Alternative

The debate we should be having is about how to make the economy work for working people again, how to revive a broad middle class and make the American Dream more than a nostalgic fantasy. That would require both investments now in areas vital to our future and a fundamental change of course. It would include a strategy to revive domestic manufacturing and thus reduce the destabilizing trade deficits that have contributed to the global crisis. It would include an industrial policy designed to help the United States lead the new global green revolution. A serious long-term commitment to rebuild America would renovate our infrastructure to withstand the extreme weather that is already upon us. It would break up the big banks and shackle finance so that it serves, rather than threatens, the real economy. Measures to transform corporate governance, curb excessive executive compensation, and empower workers to organize and bargain collectively would help counter extreme inequality.

The new foundation would also require doing at least the basics in public education: universal preschool, small classes in the early years, greater rewards and respect for teachers, after-school programs, affordable college and advanced training. And of course it would feature progressive tax reform, compelling the wealthy and corporations to pay their fair share. It would continue healthcare reform and guarantee affordable care as a right for every citizen, not a privilege allowed only to those who can afford it. This requires taking on the most powerful and entrenched interests: multinationals that drive trade policy, Big Oil’s hold on energy policy, Wall Street’s grip on financial regulation, the military-industrial complex, the medical-industrial complex and more.

In the salad days of his presidency, Obama called for rebuilding the economy on a new foundation, not on the shifting sands of debt and bubbles. His recovery act, healthcare reform, Wall Street reforms and energy bill were first steps in that effort. But just as his premature turn to deficit reduction sabotaged the need to expand the initial recovery act, his turn now to a grand bargain will squelch any serious discussion of fundamental reforms.

Will Democratic legislators join Republicans in a danse macabre of austerity, accepting mass unemployment as the new normal? Will Democrats support a deal that cuts Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security while lowering tax rates on the rich and corporations? Will they embrace an austerity that makes vital public investments impossible? We’ve just completed a money-drenched election, and many Democratic officeholders will be tempted to curry favor with the deep pockets once more. But no one should be misled. Obama doesn’t have to run for re-election—legislators do. Voters want Medicare and Social Security protected, not cut. They want jobs and growth, not deficit reduction at the price of higher unemployment. Politicians who embrace such a deal may reap the whirlwind.

The battle lines are being drawn. The AFL-CIO, SEIU and AFSCME have announced labor’s opposition to cuts in entitlement programs and to continued tax cuts for the rich. Groups representing the base of the Democratic Party—from African-Americans to Latinos, women and the young—are lining up around a four-point program calling for jobs first; protecting Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security; letting the top-end Bush tax cuts expire; and protecting programs for the vulnerable.

Reaching no deal is preferable to a bad one that cuts entitlements. Going over the so-called fiscal cliff is perilous, but probably preferable to a bargain under the terms currently in play. With no agreement, the Bush tax cuts would expire. In January the Senate would immediately push to revive the lower rates for everyone but the top 2 percent. Republicans could vote for tax cuts, but rates at the top would rise. The automatic spending cuts would not kick in immediately (although the stock market might feel the hit quickly). But the thing to remember about failure to reach a deal before January is that Medicare, Social Security and many programs for the most vulnerable are shielded from the cuts. And the new Congress would likely act rapidly to reverse the cuts to military and domestic spending. The already faltering recovery would surely weaken, threatening the loss of more jobs. But that might force Congress to address the real crisis—jobs and growth—rather than court a ruinous austerity.

Whatever the outcome, the battle is likely to be only the first skirmish of a defining struggle over the future of the Democratic Party and the progressive movement. We’ve just had what might be called the first of a new era of class-warfare elections. The plutocracy ran one of their own, on their agenda and with their money. The American people’s rejection of Mitt Romney, despite the lousy economy, demonstrated the declining appeal of the conservative, trickle-down agenda. The budget debate will draw battle lines within the Democratic Party, between the Wall Street–dominated New Democratic wing and the progressive wing fighting for the change this country desperately needs.

We are headed into a new era of upheaval. Our money-soaked politics may suffocate growing demands for change. But if Democratic legislators join the president in a grand betrayal, they may witness a powerful Tea Party movement from the left, as Republican legislators have from the right.

Robert L. Borosage is president of the Institute for America’s Future and co-director of its sister organization, the Campaign for America’s Future.
This article is available from The Nation.

Incarceration nation

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 20:39:21 GMT

Michelle Alexander
Santa Fe, NM
September 12, 2012

available from Alternative Radio

You can listen to Michelle Alexander speak for herself here.

Michelle Alexander is an associate professor of law at Ohio State University and holds a joint appointment at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity. Formerly the director of the ACLU’s Racial Justice Project in Northern California, she served as a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun. She is the author of the bestseller The New Jim Crow.

The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. once said,

A time comes when silence is betrayal.

The silence surrounding mass incarceration is one that I am desperate to break. I have to say that really this work that I have been engaged in over the last several years has become the passion of my life—trying to find ways to break silences in communities all across this country. And I’ve come to wonder whether we’ve been silent or simply asleep. Dr. King once said there is

nothing more tragic than to sleep through a revolution.

And he was talking at that time about a profound moral revolution that was underway, a struggle for the recognition of the value and dignity of all humankind, a struggle to end what was then America’s latest caste system, known as Jim Crow.

He told his audience the story of Rip Van Winkle, who fell asleep for 20 years. When he began his extended nap, there was a sign posted on a nearby inn that had a picture of King George III on it. When Rip Van Winkle awoke a couple decades later, the sign had a picture of George Washington on it. Dr. King told the audience that the most striking fact about Rip was not that he had slept for 20 years but that he had slept through a revolution. He said,

There are all too many people who, in some great period of social change, fail to achieve the new mental outlooks that the new situation demands.

I think his words are as relevant today as they were back then. Many of us, myself included, have slept through a revolution, actually, a counterrevolution. While many of us have been asleep, a vast new system of racial and social control has emerged, one that would certainly have Dr. King turning in his grave. I think one day we may look back and wonder how we could have possibly slept for so long.

I argue that today in the so-called era of colorblindness and, yes, even in the age of Obama, something akin to a caste system is alive and well in America. The mass incarceration of poor people, especially poor folks of color, is tantamount to a new caste system, one specifically designed to address the social, political, and economic challenges of our time. It’s the moral equivalent of Jim Crow.

I’m always eager to acknowledge, to admit that there was a time when I rejected this kind of talk. There was a time when I rejected comparisons between mass incarceration and slavery or mass incarceration and Jim Crow, believing those kinds of claims and comparisons were exaggerations, distortions, or hyperbole. In fact, there was a time when I thought that people who were making those kinds of claims and those kinds of comparisons were actually doing more harm than good to efforts to reform our criminal justice system and achieve greater racial equality in the U.S.

But what a difference a decade makes. After years of representing victims of racial profiling and police brutality and investigating patterns of drug law enforcement in poor communities of color, and attempting to assist people who had been released from prison reenter into a society that had never shown much use for them in the first place, I had a series of experiences that began what I now call my awakening. I began to awaken to a racial reality that is so obvious to me now that what seems odd in retrospect is that I managed to be blind to it for so long.

What has changed since the collapse of Jim Crow has less to do with the basic structure of our society than the language we use to justify it. In the era of color blindness it is no longer socially permissible to use race explicitly as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. So we don’t. Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color criminals and then engage in all the practices that we supposedly left behind. Today, it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways in which it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once you’re labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination—employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, exclusion from jury service—are suddenly legal. As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America, we have merely redesigned it.

Like I said, though, I reached this conclusion reluctantly. I resisted it. But there are a number of experiences that finally began to open my eyes. One in particular I’ll never forget. It involved a young African American man who was about 19 years old who walked into my office one day and forever changed the way I viewed not only our criminal justice system but how I viewed myself as a civil rights lawyer and advocate. At the time, I was the director of the Racial Justice Project for the ACLU in California, and we had launched a major campaign against racial profiling by the police. We called it the DWB campaign, or the “driving-while-black-or-brown” campaign.

We had created a hotline number for people to call who believed they had been stopped or targeted by the police on the basis of race. We put this hotline number up on billboards and communities around California—in Oakland, San Jose and elsewhere—urging people to call this number if they believed they had been stopped or targeted by the police on the basis of race. In fact, within the first few minutes of us announcing this hotline number on the evening news, we received thousands of calls and our system crashed temporarily. We had to expand the capacity. So I was spending my day interviewing one young black/brown man after another who had been targeted, stopped, frisked, their cars had been pulled over, sometimes brutalized for no apparent reason other than the color of their skin.

It was late in the afternoon and I was getting tired when this young man walks in with a thick stack of papers. He had taken detailed notes of his encounters with the police over about a nine-month period of time in his neighborhood. He had an extraordinary amount of detail. He had dates of each encounter, descriptions of each incident, names of witnesses, in some cases badge numbers of police officers. Just an unbelievable amount of documentation and detail about this pattern of police stops he had experienced in his neighborhoods. And the stories of what he was describing going on in his neighborhood were corroborated by other stories we had heard coming out of his neighborhood.

I started to think, Well, maybe he’s the one. Maybe he’s going to be our lead plaintiff in the suit we were planning to file against the Oakland Police Department, a class action suit challenging their profiling practices. So I started asking him more questions. He was well-spoken and composed, and he was a good-looking young man. And I thought, He’s the one. We can put him on the television and the media will love him. This is it.

Then he said something that made me pause. And I said to him,

Did you just say you’re a drug felon? Did you just say you’re a drug felon?

We had been screening people with prior criminal convictions. When people would call our hotline number, we would send a form to them to fill out asking them a bunch of questions about their experiences with the police. And one of them was, “Have you ever been convicted of a felony?” We believed we couldn’t represent someone in a class action lawsuit challenging racial profiling if they had a criminal record, because we knew that if they did, the media and law enforcement would be all over us, saying, “Well, of course the police should be keeping their eye on him. He’s a felon.” And we knew we wouldn’t be able to put him on the stand in front of a jury without him being cross- examined for an hour about his prior criminal record, taking the focus off the police conduct and putting it on the prior criminal history of the man. So we had been screening people with prior criminal records, and he had not checked the metaphorical box.

So I said to him,

Tell me, have you been convicted of a felony?

And he gets quiet and he stares down at the table for a few minutes. And then finally he just looks up, looks me right in the eye, and he says,

Yeah, yeah. I’m a felon. But let me tell you what happened to me. Let me tell you. The police framed me. They planted drugs on me and they beat up me and my friend.

He starts telling me this big, long story about how he had been set up by the police and the police had planted drugs on him and beat him up. And I said,

I am sorry. I cannot represent you if you have a criminal record.

I tried to explain to him why that was the case and why we just couldn’t possibly take that kind of risk in our litigation, and it was wrong, “but I’m sorry, there’s nothing I can do.” I keep trying to explain, and he keeps trying to give me more information, more detail. He says,

I just took that plea. I took the plea because I was scared of doing time. They told me I could go to prison for years, maybe even decades, if I didn’t take the plea. I pled out. They said I would just get felony probation. I could walk out of there. But just take the plea.

I said,

I’m sorry, I’m sorry. There is nothing that I can do.

Then he becomes enraged, and he says to me,

You’re no better than the police. The minute I tell you I’m a felon, you just stop listening. You can’t even hear what I have to say.

He said,

What’s to become of me? I can’t get a job anywhere because of my felony record. I can’t get a job anywhere.

He said,

I can’t even get access to public housing. I can’t even get into public housing. I have to sleep in any grandma’s basement at night because nowhere else will take me in.

He said,

I can’t even qualify for food stamps to feed myself because of my felony record. What’s to become of me?

He says,

Good luck finding one young black man in my neighborhood they haven’t gotten to yet. They’ve gotten to us all already.

And he snatches all those papers and notes off the table and just starts ripping them up into tiny little pieces, throwing them in the air, snowing white paper in my house. He walks out yelling,

You’re no better than the police. I can’t believe I trusted you.

He takes off.

Several months after that, I’m doing a public-access television show that was broadcasting live out of his neighborhood. I was doing public-access TV because we were trying to organize thousands of people to attend a major protest against the then governor’s refusals to sign racial profiling legislation in California. So we were doing public-access TV, urging people to get on the bus and go to the demonstration at the capital. And it was broadcasting live. The minute the show goes off the air, he comes bursting into the studio carrying a dirty potted plant. He comes rushing up to me and he’s emotional, practically on the verge of tears. He rushes up to me, thrusts this dirty potted plant into my arms, and he says,

I’m just here to tell you I’m sorry. I’m sorry for how I treated you.

He said,

I’ve been seeing you on the news. I see you out there trying to the fight for our eople, trying to do the right thing. And I shouldn’t have treated you that way

.
He said,

I would have bought you some flowers, but I still don’t have any money. I snatched this plant off my grandma’s front porch. Here.

He pushes my arm. And then he turns around and takes off, runs out of the building. I chase after him. He jumps into a broke-down car and takes off.

Several months after that, I’m in my office. I open up the newspaper. What’s on the front page? Well, the Oakland “Riders” police scandal has broken. It turns out that a gang of police officers, otherwise known as a “drug task force,” had been planting drugs on suspects, beating folks up in his neighborhood. And who is identified as one of the main officers charged with planting drugs on suspects and beating folks up? The officer he had identified to me as having planted drugs on him and having beat up him and his friends. It was only then that the light bulb finally started to go on for me. I thought to myself, He’s right about me. I’m no better than the police. The minute he told me he was a felon, I just stopped listening. I couldn’t even hear what he had to say.

That was the beginning of my asking myself some hard questions, of myself as a civil rights lawyer and advocate. How am I actually replicating the very forms of discrimination, exclusion, and marginalization I’m supposedly fighting against? And I started asking some bigger questions about the system as a whole. I started asking myself, Why is it that we haven’t been able to find one young black man in his neighborhood they haven’t gotten to yet? What is really going on there?

So I began to do an enormous amount of research, and I started asking myself and others a lot of hard questions. And I began listening more carefully to the stories of those cycling in and out of prison. What I learned in that process truly blew my mind. But of all the things that I learned, what has stayed with me most is that my real crime was not in refusing to represent an innocent man.

My real crime was in imagining that there was some path to racial justice that did not include those whom we view as guilty.

Here are some of the facts that I learned in the course of my work and research. More African American adults are under correctional control today, in prison or jail, on probation or parole, than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began. As of 2004, more black men were disenfranchised than in 1870, the year the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified prohibiting laws that explicitly deny the right to vote on the basis of race. Of course, during the Jim Crow era, the era of legalized discrimination and segregation in this country, black folks were kept from the voting booth, from the polls through poll taxes and literacy tests. Well, today felon disenfranchisement laws have accomplished in many states what poll taxes and literacy tests ultimately could not.

A black child born today has less than a chance of being raised by both parents than a black child born during slavery. This is due in large part to the mass incarceration of black men. There was an interesting article published about this phenomenon in The Economist magazine, of all places, entitled “How the Mass Incarceration of Black Men Harms Black Women.” The article explained that the majority of black women in the U.S. are unmarried, including 70% of black professional women, and that is due largely to the mass incarceration of black men, which takes them out of the dating pool at the years they would be most likely to commit to a partner, to a family.

But what’s worse is that by branding them criminals and felons at very young ages, often before they’re even old enough to vote, they are rendered permanently unemployable in the legal job market for the most part, virtually guaranteeing that most will cycle in and out of prison, sometimes for the rest of their lives. Eighty percent of all African American children can now expect to spend at least a significant part of their childhood years living apart from their fathers. And contrary to the image presented in the media of black men being a bunch of deadbeat dads that don’t care enough about their children to be involved or to support them, the research actually shows that black men who are separated from their children due to divorce, incarceration, or any other factor are actually more likely to make an effort to maintain meaningful contact and relationships with their children following separation than men of any other racial or ethnic group. But no other racial or ethnic group faces as much separation, and forced separation, as African Americans.

That doesn’t mean that black men couldn’t do a better job of being fathers that they couldn’t try harder. But so could white men, so could Asian men, so could Latino men, so could mothers. And I speak from experience. We could all do a better job of parenting. But no group faces such extraordinary challenges to playing the role of a traditional father in our society today than black men.

This phenomenon does not affect some small segment of the African American community. To the contrary, in some major urban areas more than half of working-age African American men have criminal records and are thus subject to legalized discrimination for the rest of their lives. In fact, in some cities, like Baltimore, Chicago, Philadelphia—take Chicago for example. In Chicago, if you take into account prisoners, if you actually count them as people—and, of course, prisoners are excluded from poverty statistics and unemployment data, thus masking the severity of racial inequality in the U.S.— but if you actually count prisoners as people, in the Chicago area nearly 80% of working-age African American men have criminal records and are thus subject to legalized discrimination for the rest of their lives. These men are part of a growing undercaste—not class, caste—a group of people defined largely by race relegated to a permanent second-class status by law.

I find that when I tell people that I now believe that mass incarceration is like a new Jim Crow, a new caste system, people react with shocked disbelief. They say,

What are you talking about? Our criminal justice system isn’t a system of racial control, it’s a system of crime control. And if black folks would just stop running around committing so many crimes, they wouldn’t have to worry about being locked up and then stripped of their basic civil and human rights.

But therein lies the greatest myth about mass incarceration, namely, that it’s been driven by crime and crime rates. It’s not true. It’s just not true.

During a 30-year period of time our prison population quintupled, not doubled or tripled but quintupled. Our nation now has the highest rate of incarceration in the world, dwarfing the rates of even highly oppressive regimes like Russia or China or Iran. But this is not due to crime rates.

During that 30-year period of time crime rates fluctuated—went up, went down, went back up again, went back down again. Today, as bad as crime rates are in many parts of the country, crime rates are nationally at historical lows. But incarceration rates have consistently soared. Most criminologists and sociologists today will acknowledge that crime rates and incarceration rates in the U.S. have moved independently of one another. Incarceration rates, especially black incarceration rates, have soared, regardless of whether crime is going up or down in any given community or the nation as a whole.

So what explains this sudden explosion in incarceration, black incarceration, if not crime or crime rates? There was a drastic shift in attitudes. There was a wave of punitiveness that washed over the United States. We declared a war on drugs, and a get-tough movement was born on the heels of the civil rights movement. The war on drugs and the get-tough movement are responsible for the quintupling of our prison population in a few short decades. What has changed dramatically is not crime but what counts as crime and how we respond to it. And nothing has contributed more to the emergence of this new caste system than the war on drugs.

Drug convictions alone, just drug convictions, accounted for about two-thirds of the increase in the federal prison system and more than half of the increase in the state system between 1985 and 2000, the period of our prison system’s most dramatic expansion. Drug convictions have increased more than 1000% since the drug war began.

To get a sense of how large a contribution the drug war has made to mass incarceration, consider this. There are more people in prisons and jails today just for drug offenses than were incarcerated for all reasons in 1980. Most Americans violate drug laws in their lifetime. Most do. That’s a fact. But the drug war, not by accident, has been waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color, even though studies have consistently shown now for decades that, contrary to popular belief, people of color are not any more likely to use or sell illegal drugs than whites.

That defies our basic racial stereotypes about who a drug dealer is. Most Americans, if they’re honest with themselves, when asked to picture a drug dealer, will picture some black kid standing on a street corner with his pants hanging down. Plenty of drug dealing happens in the ‘hood, but it happens everywhere else in America as well. A white kid living in rural South Dakota does not drive to the ‘hood to get his marijuana or his meth or his cocaine. No, he gets it, most likely, from someone of his own race down the road. Drug markets, much like American society generally, are fairly segregated by race: black folks tend to sell to black folks, whites to whites. Even segregated by class. University students sell to each other. Drug dealing happens in all communities, of all colors, but those who do time for drug crimes are overwhelmingly black and brown. In some states 80% to 90 % of all drug offenders sent to prison have been one race—African American.

I find that many people when they actually see the data say,

Oh, that’s a shame. That’s a shame. That’s too bad. But you know what, we need a drug war in those communities because that’s where the violent offenders are, that’s where the drug kingpins can be found. We need to get tough in those communities because that’s where the violent offenders can be found.

In fact, in my experience, most people seem to imagine that the war on drugs was declared in response to the emergence of crack cocaine in inner-city communities and the related violence. And for quite a while I believed that as well.

But that is not true. President Ronald Reagan declared the current drug war in 1982, at a time when drug crime was actually on the decline, not on the rise. President Richard Nixon was the first to coin the term a “war on drugs,” but it was President Ronald Reagan who turned that rhetorical war into a literal one. And at the time he declared his drug war, drug crime was actually on the decline, not on the rise, and less than 3% of the American population identified drugs as among the nation’s most pressing concerns.

So why declare a national drug war at a time when drug crime is declining, not rising, and the American population doesn’t seem much concerned about it? From the outset the war on drugs had little to do with genuine concern about drug addiction or drug abuse and nearly everything to do with politics, racial politics.

Numerous historians and political scientists have now documented that the war on drugs was part of a grand Republican Party strategy, known as the Southern strategy, of using racially coded get-tough appeals on issues of crime and welfare to appeal to poor and working-class whites, particularly in the South, who were anxious about, fearful of, resentful of many of the gains of African Americans in the civil rights movement.

To be fair, I think we have to acknowledge that poor and working-class whites really had their world rocked by the civil rights movement. Wealthy whites could send their kids to private schools and give their kids all of the advantages that wealth has to offer. But poor and working- class whites, who themselves were struggling for survival, faced a social demotion in the civil rights movement. It was their kids who might be bused across town to a school they believed was inferior. It was their kids and themselves who were suddenly forced to compete on equal terms with a whole new group of people that they’ve been taught their whole lives to believe was inferior to them for limited jobs and limited opportunities. And to make matters worse, from their perspective, affirmative action programs created this impression that black folks were now leap-frogging over them on their way to Harvard, Yale, Stanford, or fancy jobs in corporate America.

This state of affairs created an enormous amount of anger, fear, resentment, anxiety, but it also created an enormous political opportunity. Pollsters and political strategists found that thinly veiled promises to get tough on “them,” a group not so subtly defined by race, could be enormously successful in persuading poor and working-class whites to defect from the Democratic New Deal coalition and join the Republican Party in droves. H. R. Haldeman, President Richard Nixon’s former chief of staff, explained the strategy this way:

The whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to divide the system that recognizes this while not appearing to.

Well, they did.

[For more on this Republican strategy, elaborated on by Lee Atwater in 1981, see this recent New York Times story.]

A couple years after the drug war was announced, crack cocaine hit the streets of inner-city communities. The Reagan administration seized on this development with some glee, actually hiring staff whose job it was to publicize inner-city crack babies, crack dealers, the so- called crack whores, and crack-related violence. The wave of media coverage that ensued when crack hit the streets was not the product of just good investigative journalism. It was the result of a media campaign launched by the Reagan administration to bolster public support for a drug war they had already been declared and to persuade Congress to devote millions more dollars to waging it.

The plan worked like a charm. Almost overnight millions more dollars were devoted to the drug war. And once the enemy in this war was racially defined, a wave of punitiveness swept the United States. Congress and state legislatures nationwide began to compete with one other to pass ever harsher drug laws, harsh mandatory minimum sentences. You would have small-time drug offenders receiving sentences harsher than murderers received in other Western democracies.

Almost immediately Democrats began competing with Republicans to prove they could be even tougher on “them” than their Republican counterparts. So it was President Bill Clinton who escalated the drug war far beyond what his Republican predecessors even dreamed possible. It was the Clinton administration that championed the laws denying drug offenders even federal financial aid for schooling upon release. It was the Clinton administration that championed laws banning drug offenders from public housing. And it was the Clinton administration that championed the federal law banning drug offenders even from food stamps for the rest of their lives. Many of the laws that now constitute the basic architecture of this new caste system were championed by a Democratic administration desperate to win back those so-called white swing voters, the Reagan Democrats, the folks who had defected from the Democratic Party in the wake of the civil rights movement.

In my experience, even many people who are familiar with this history will defend the drug war nonetheless. They will say,

We need a drug war because what about all those violent offenders and drug kingpins in the ‘hood?

But what many people don’t realize is that this drug war has never been focused on rooting out the violent offenders or the drug kingpins. Federal funding has flowed to those state and local law enforcement agencies that boost the sheer numbers of drug arrests. It’s been a numbers game. What has been rewarded in this war is the sheer volume of drug arrests. Millions of dollars in federal grant money is provided to state and local law enforcement agencies based on the number of people swept into the system for drug offenses, virtually guaranteeing that law enforcement will go out looking for the so-called low-hanging fruit, stopping, frisking, searching as many people as possible in an effort to boost their numbers and continue to qualify for that financial aid. And to make matters worse, federal drug forfeiture laws allow state and local law enforcement agencies to keep for their own use up to 80% of the cars, cash, homes seized from suspected drug offenders. You don’t have to be convicted. If you are just suspected of a drug offence, law enforcement can take your car, your cash, seize your property.

The results are predictable. People of color have been rounded up en masse for relatively minor, nonviolent drug offences. In 2005, for example, four out of five drug arrests were for simple possession, only one out of five for sales. Most people in state prison for drug offenses have no history of violence or even significant selling activity. In fact, in the 1990s, the Clinton years, the period of the most dramatic expansion of the drug war, nearly 80% of the increase in drug arrests was for marijuana possession, a drug that has now been shown to be less harmful, less addictive than alcohol or tobacco and at least, if not more, prevalent in middle-class white communities and on college campuses as it is in the ‘hood. But by waging this drug war almost exclusively in the ‘hood, we’ve managed to create this vast new racial undercaste in an astonishingly short period of time.

But, of course, being swept into the system is only the beginning. Because once you’ve been swept in and branded a criminal felon, even if you get just felony probation, like the young man in my office, for the rest of your life you will be punished. You will have to check the box on employment applications for the rest of your life. It doesn’t matter if the crime you committed happened four weeks ago, four years ago, or forty-five years ago. For the rest of your life you’ve got to check that box asking the dreaded question, “Have you ever been convicted of a felony?” Hundreds of professional licenses are off limits to people convicted of felonies. In fact, in my state, Ohio, you can’t even get a license to be a barber if you’ve been convicted of a felony.

People often say to me,

Oh, come on. They could get a job if they try. If they really try, if they really apply themselves. So many of those people don’t even want to work. They could get a job if they try.

I say,

Really? Try getting a job at McDonald’s with a felony record.

Employment discrimination is legal. Housing discrimination is perfectly legal. Public housing projects, private landlords are free to discriminate against you for the rest of your life. You could be denied access to public housing for a crime you committed 30 years ago, in your youth. Where are you supposed to sleep? Food stamps, public benefits can be off limits to you. Financial aid for schooling. If you want to improve yourself, get an education. Off limits.

What are folks expected to do? Imagine you’re just released from prison. You can’t get a job, you’re barred from housing, even food stamps are off limits to you. What are you expected to do? Apparently, what we expect them to do is to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars in fees, fines, court costs, accumulated back child support, which continues to accrue while you’re in prison. And in a growing number of states, you’re actually expected to pay back the costs of your imprisonment. All of this can be a condition of your probation or parole. And then get this. If you’re one of the lucky few who actually manages to get a job out of prison, you actually get that job, up to 100% of your wages can be garnished—up to 100%—to pay back all those fees, fines, court costs accumulated back child support. What are folks expected to do? What does this system seem designed to do?

It seems designed to send folks right back to prison. Which in fact is what happens the vast majority of the time. About 75% of people released from prison return within three years, and the majority of those who return in some states do so in a matter of months, because the challenges associated with mere survival on the outside are so immense.

But as bad as all the formal barriers to political and economic inclusion are, many people who have been labeled criminals have told me that that’s not even the worst of it. It’s the stigma that follows you for the rest of your life. That’s the hardest to bear. It’s not just the denial of the job but the look that crosses an employer’s face when he sees, oh, that box has been checked. It’s not just the denial of housing but the shame of having to beg your grandma to sleep in her basement at night because nowhere else will take you in. It’s the shame associated with being branded that causes so many people who have been branded criminals or felons to try to pass. During the Jim Crow era, light-skinned blacks would try to pass as white to avoid the shame and stigma associated with race. Well, today people labeled criminals try to pass not just by lying to employers, by failing to check the box on employment applications or housing forms, but by lying, denying, avoiding friends, family members, loved ones.

There was an excellent ethnographic study conducting in Washington, D.C. by an ethnographer who is now a Georgetown law professor. It was a study conducted in neighborhoods hardest hit by mass incarceration in Washington, D.C. These are neighborhoods where literally every young black man expects to serve time in prison. It is difficult to find anyone who has never gone to jail. You would think in these communities that imprisonment would be so normal that everyone would just be talking about it all the time, who’s in, who’s out. To a certain extent that was true. But what they found in this study was they were unable to find even one person—one person—who had fully come out to their friends, neighbors, loved ones about their own criminal history or that of their loved ones. Children, when asked by a relative,

Honey, where is your daddy? I haven’t seen your daddy in a long time. Where is your daddy at? What’s he up to?

My daddy? I don’t know where my daddy is.

Knowing full well their father is in prison. People released from prison bumping into friends on the street they haven’t seen in a while.

Hey, I haven’t seen you. It must have been years. Where have you been? How are you doing? What have you been up to?

Oh, I’ve been out of town. I’ll talk to you later.

The shame creates an eerie silence even in the communities hardest hit by mass incarceration. And this silence makes collective political action nearly impossible.

So what do we do? Where do we go from here? I think one thing that has become clear is that those of us in the civil rights community have allowed a human rights nightmare to occur on our watch. We’ve been sleeping through a revolution. While many of us have been fighting to hold on to affirmative action or the perceived gains of the civil rights movement, millions of people—millions of people—have been rounded up, locked in cages, and then released into a parallel social universe in which they’re denied the very rights that some of our parents or even grandparents fought for and some died for. As a nation we have now spent $1 trillion waging this drug war since it began—funds that could have been used for schools, for economic investment in the poorest communities. A trillion dollars could have been used to promote our collective well being. Instead, those dollars paved the way for the destruction of countless lives, families, and dreams.

So what do we do? Where do we go from here? My own view is that nothing short of a major social movement has any hope of ending mass incarceration in America. And if you imagine that something less, surely something less, will do, consider this. If we were to return to the rates of incarceration we had in the 1970s, before the war on drugs and the get-tough movement gained steam, we would have to release four out of five people who are in prison today. Four out of five. More than a million people employed by the criminal justice system would lose their jobs. Most new prison construction has occurred in predominantly white rural communities, and many of these communities have been led to believe that prisons are the answer to their economic woes. Those prisons across America would have to close. Private prison companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange would be forced to watch their profits vanish. This system is now so deeply rooted in our social, political, and economic structure that it’s not going to just fade away, it’s not going to just downsize out of sight without a major upheaval, a fairly radical shift in our public consciousness.

I know that there’s many people who say there is really no hope of ending mass incarceration in America. Just as many people were resigned to Jim Crow in the South and would shake their heads and say,

Yes, it’s a shame, but that’s just the way that it is.

Today many people view the millions cycling in and out of your nation’s prisons and jails as just an unfortunate but inalterable fact of American life. Well, I am confident that Dr. King, Ella Baker, Sojourner Truth, and the many other freedom fighters who came before us would not be so easily deterred. It’s time for us to take the baton. We have got to be willing to continue the work. We have got to be willing to go back where they left off and do the hard work of movement building on behalf of poor people of all colors.

In 1968 Dr. King told advocates that the time had come to shift from a civil rights movement to a human rights movement. Meaningful equality, he said, could not be achieved through civil rights alone. Without basic human rights – the right to work, the right to housing, the right to quality education – he said, civil rights are an empty promise. So in honor of Dr. King and all those people of all colors who labored to end the old Jim Crow, I hope we will build a human rights movement to end mass incarceration: a movement for education, not incarceration; a movement for jobs, not jails; a movement to end all these forms of legal discrimination that deny people their basic human rights to work, to shelter, and to food.

What must we do to build this movement? First, we’ve got to start telling the truth, the whole truth. We’ve got to be willing to admit out loud that we as a nation have managed to recreate a caste-like system in this country. We’ve got to be willing to tell this truth in our schools, in our community centers, in our places of worship. We have got to be willing to tell this truth so that a great awakening can begin.

But, of course, a lot of talk isn’t going to be enough. We also have to be willing to build an underground railroad for the people returning home from prison. We have got to be willing to extend much needed help, support, jobs, housing, food, open arms, love to people returning home from prison and support for their families, who are dealing and struggling, coping with the grief of having a loved one behind bars. We have got to support with open arms all those who are willing to make a genuine break for freedom. We’ve got to be willing to create safe spaces for people, create safe places for people to admit their criminality out loud, places where people don’t feel ashamed.

How do we create those safe places? I think one thing we’ve got to do is to begin to admit our own criminality out loud, our own criminality.

Many people say to me,

What are you talking about? I’m not a criminal.

I say,

Okay. Maybe you never drank under age, maybe you never experimented with drugs. If the worst thing you’ve ever done in your unadventurous life is speed 10 miles over the speed limit on the freeway, you’ve put yourself and others at more risk of harm than someone smoking marijuana in the privacy of their living room.

But there are people doing life sentences for first-time drug offenses in the U.S. Life sentences. The Supreme Court upheld life sentences for first-time drug offenses against an Eighth Amendment challenge that such a sentence was cruel and unusual punishment. The Supreme Court said, No, it’s not cruel and unusual to send a young man on a first-time drug offense to life imprisonment, even though virtually no other country in the world does such a thing.

So rather than imagining that the criminals are them, not us, I think we’ve got to be willing to say,

There but for the grace of God go I.

After all, President Barack Obama himself has admitted to using more than a little bit of drugs in his lifetime. In his youth he used marijuana, he used cocaine. And if he had not been raised by a white mother in Kansas or white grandparents in Hawaii, if he had been raised in the ‘hood, the odds are great that he would have been stopped, he would have been searched, he would have been frisked, he would have been caught. And far from being president of the United States today, he might not even have the right to vote.

So this is about all of us. It’s about recognizing and honoring the dignity of all of us.

But just helping a few and creating safe places for a few and telling the truth, even that is not enough, because just as during the days of slavery it wasn’t enough to build the underground railroad, you had to be willing to work for abolition, today we have got to be willing to work for the abolition of this system of mass incarceration, abolish it entirely. That means ending the drug war once and for all. It means ending all these forms of legal discrimination against people released from prison that keeps them locked in a permanent second-class status for life. And it means shifting from a purely punitive approach in dealing with violence and violent crime to a more restorative and rehabilitative approach, one that takes seriously the interests of the victim, the offender, and the community as a whole. So we’ve got a lot of work to do.

If you think it sounds like too much, if you think we can’t possibly rise to the challenge that’s before us, keep in mind that all of the rules, laws, policies, and practices that comprise this system of mass incarceration rest upon one core belief, and it is the same core belief that sustained Jim Crow. It’s the belief that some of us—some of us—are not worthy of genuine care, compassion, and concern. And when we effectively challenge that core belief, this whole system begins to fall like dominoes.

A multiracial, multiethnic human rights movement must be born, one that takes seriously the dignity and humanity of all people. And, yes, it has got to be multiracial and multiethnic. This drug war may be born with black folks in mind, but it is a war that has destroyed the lives of people and communities of all colors. A young white kid who is getting a prison sentence rather than the drug treatment he desperately needs but could afford is suffering because of a drug war declared with black folks in mind.

We now see that another war has been declared, a war on illegal immigrants that is leading to another prison- building boom. So we have got to be willing to connect the dots and build a multiracial, multiethnic movement on behalf of all of us. But before this movement can truly get under way, a great awakening is required. We have got to awaken from this color-blind slumber that we’ve been in to the realities of race in America. We’ve got to be willing to embrace those labeled criminals—not necessarily all their behavior, but them, their humanness. For it has been the refusal and failure to recognize the dignity and humanity of all people that has been a sturdy foundation for every caste system that has ever existed in the U.S. or anywhere else in the world. It’s our task, I firmly believe, to end not just mass incarceration, not just the war on drugs, but to end this history and cycle of caste in America.

Thank you.

For information about obtaining CDs, MP3s, or transcripts of this or other programs, please contact:
David Barsamian
Alternative Radio
P .O. Box 551
Boulder, CO 80306-0551
phone (800) 444-1977
info@alternativeradio.org

Plenitude: The emerging new economy

Tue, 06 Nov 2012 19:55:01 GMT

Juliet Schor
Northampton, MA
July 28, 2008

available from Alternative Radio

You can listen to Juliet Schor speak for herself here.

Juliet Schor is Professor of Sociology at Boston College. Before joining Boston College, she taught at Harvard in the Department of Economics. She is author of many books including The Overworked American, Do Americans Shop Too Much?, and Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth.

This evening I will offer a vision that addresses both our economic and ecological predicaments. It lays out the logic of a small-scale, low-impact, time-affluent, high-satisfaction alternative to what I call the business-as-usual economy, or what I’ll refer to as I go on as the BAU economy or the BAU market.

It begins from the premise that standard solutions, such as the attempts to maximize indiscriminate growth, have become problems. And that without a more thorough-going reorganization of our economic lives, we will fail on many fronts, from solving unemployment and poverty to improving the distributions of income and wealth and saving the planetary home. Surveys I have done support the view that the average American understands that our way of life is not sustainable. But the elite discourse has not yet absorbed that point.

Like most of the sustainability visions that have been offered in recent years, mine requires that we adopt cutting-edge green technologies. Most importantly, we must get off fossil fuels as rapidly as we can. That’s key to averting climate catastrophe. It will involve capping carbon use. It will require the pollution sector to be made to pay for the havoc they’ve wreaked, through taxes, fees, and a commitment to leave the dirty fuels in the ground. But that won’t be enough.

Getting off fossil fuels will take some time, and in the meanwhile we also have to address the demand for energy. If we continue with business as usual with respect to demand for energy, we won’t succeed either in achieving a true energy transition, maintaining the climate at the 2-degree-warming increase or less, or with preserving the endangered ecosystems around the world that we depend on.

What the requirement to address energy demand really implies is that we need to do more than just change our technology, the terrain on which the conversation is currently stuck. We must also introduce a different rhythm of work, consumption, and daily life. We don’t just need an alternative energy system; we also need an alternative economy.

That may sound utopian. After all, the economy and the government remain firmly ensconced in the hands of a small number of powerful corporations and individuals who have made it clear they have no interest in curing what ails the U.S. or in averting climate catastrophe. The criminal enterprises that go by the name of energy companies—Exxon, BP, Koch Industries, or the coal companies—the big financial institutions that finance this dirty energy, the industrial agriculture system, and a variety of other powerful blocs and individuals have taken us backwards, reneging on earlier promises. The energy companies especially understand climate change. They see that trillions of their assets are in jeopardy of being made worthless and are spending desperately to stop other people from realizing that.

To rein them in, we need campaign finance reform, we need an awakened populace, and a powerful social movement to take back the government. But that movement hasn’t developed yet. Meanwhile, the climate clocks are ticking. What I’m suggesting is a way forward that allows us to do what we can now, at a scale where change is possible, while we push for something larger. One of the premises of my argument is that individuals, communities, cities, even some states can get started on creating the new economy today. Taking the first steps does not depend on already having achieved total systemic change or undoing the gridlock in Congress. Those are essential. But while we engage in those efforts, households and communities can also begin to take their economic futures into their own hands, and millions are already doing that. There are four principles to my vision.

The first is a new allocation of time. We’ve got to reverse the decade-long move toward longer hours of work, a trend that has propelled what I’ve called the work- and-spend cycle.

Work-and-spend has not only yielded exhausted, indebted households but more employment, as hours are concentrated in fewer and fewer people, and higher carbon emissions. As I will explain shortly, my research shows that carbon use and hours of work are closely linked, a fact that has not yet been recognized. Moving forward by funding hours reductions through productivity growth is at the core of this model.

The second principle is DIY, or do it yourself, or self-provisioning. People can use the new-found free time that they get from following step 1 to reduce what they have to buy on the market and provide for themselves in low-impact ways. Millions are already doing this. Self- provisioning not only gives people more freedom from a destructive and increasingly unreliable market, but it can help propel a more local, human, smaller-scale, greener, and fairer economy.

The third principle is an environmentally aware approach to consumption, which emphasizes the
recirculation and reuse of goods, sharing, and the creation of a new consumer culture.

And finally, we need to build new investments that are held widely and publicly. One casualty of rising inequality and an intense market orientation is that community has gotten thinner and human ties weaker. By recovering hours, individuals are freed up to fortify social networks and build common property.

I use the term plenitude to describe this economy in order to call attention to the inherent bounty of nature that we need to recover. It directs us to the chance to be rich in the things that matter to us most and the wealth that is available in our relations with each other. Plenitude involves very different ways of living than the maxims that have dominated the economic discourse for the last 30 years. It starts from our grim ecological and economic situation, but it is not a paradigm of sacrifice, despair, or desperation. To the contrary, it involves a way of life that will yield more well-being than sticking to business as usual, which has led both the natural and the economic environments into decline. It is hopeful, upbeat, and solutions-oriented. I believe that’s essential to success today.

But before getting into the specifics of the plenitude model, it may be worth revisiting the debates about ecology and economics that have been ongoing for many years. The history of this conversation is actually quite long. It began back in the 19th century with political economists like Thomas Malthus. But I will pick up the story in the 1960s and 1970s, because that debate has now again resurfaced in the 21st century. At that time the problem of the Earth’s so-called carrying capacity was famously put forward by a number of biologists. Paul Erlich wrote The Population Bomb, which argued that humans were risking collapse by overbreeding. Similarly, Garrett Hardin’s classic article “The Tragedy of the Commons” argued that humans couldn’t avoid degrading the biosphere because it is in our nature to overconsume common resources.

As it happens, both of these accounts were deeply flawed. Erlich’s racist alarm was later shown to have been sounded at the peak population growth rate, and rates of population growth have declined dramatically since then. Hardin’s grim biological determinism has been powerfully challenged by the work of Elinor Ostrom, who received the Nobel Prize in economics in 2009 for analyzing the conditions under which humans can manage common resources sustainably.

The third major intervention from this period, however, has been of more lasting value. In the early 1970s, a group of researchers at MIT, led by Donella, or “Dana,” Meadows, Dennis Meadows, and their collaborators, developed a model of a self-contained world system in which they included not only population but industrial production, pollution–they talked about climate change that early–and, very importantly, they included the powerful feedback loops that climate scientists are now looking at as key to what’s happening and going to happen in the climate system. The limits to growth analysis indicated that if we continued along the trajectory we were then following, what’s called now in the climate discourse the business as usual, or BAU, scenario, by the first decade of the 21st century there would be the beginnings of a significant collapse.

Their model was simplistic and you could say wrong in a number of ways, as economists rather arrogantly pointed out, but one has to give them credit for being fairly prescient on the big story. Because by the early 21st century, we did have evidence of rampant ecosystem degradation, particularly climate destabilization, as well as an economic meltdown.

The limits to growth and subsequent collapse narratives were based on two major ideas. One is the exhaustion of what are called nonrenewable resources. Peak oil was the most important, but other minerals were also part of the story. This is where the limits perspective was most vulnerable, because commodities prices, including the price of energy as well as many other commodities, fell in the 1980s, partly as a result of a worldwide downturn, such as the one we’ve experienced recently, as well as incentives for more exploration.

Their second idea has proved more enduring, which is that renewable resources, ecosystems such as forests, oceans, and the climate system itself, were in jeopardy. Their argument began from a simple and an increasingly commonly held trope, that you can’t have infinite growth on a finite planet. Eventually ecosystems would be overwhelmed with pollution and degradation.

As I said, limits to growth was mainly discredited by economists and other conservative forces, who argued that infinite growth is possible, even on a finite planet. Although many scientists signed on to the limits-to-growth perspective, the discourse was dominated by the pro-growth, pro-market, neoliberal forces for the next three decades. These people argued that GDP could “dematerialize”; that is, every dollar of growth could be associated with less and less in the way of materials flows, or carbon in the case of energy. Natural resource productivity would grow, perhaps dramatically. In the design world this perspective was known as Factor 4, then Factor Ten, Cradle to Cradle, Zero Waste, biomimicry—a whole range of perspectives that says we can dematerialize our production, and therefore our total output in value terms can grow indefinitely.

Indeed, this camp argues that capitalism is already in the process of greening itself and that this technological transformation will be sufficient to achieve sustainability. Changing the system itself is not necessary. Indeed, the profit motive, the market, highly concentrated ownership of property and investment decisions, and growth itself are all seen as beneficial for the sustainability transformation. That’s the so-called green growth perspective.

But can this be right? Are there no limits to growth? Do we not need a new economy? So far capitalism’s green potential has proven to be rather limited. Dematerialization has not happened. We can measure this by the growth of carbon use, which is soaring, as well as by total material flows, a new measurement that social scientists have just started to collect on a regular basis. It is true that there has been some of what we call relative decarbonization, or dematerialization, by which I mean that the amount of carbon or material flows per dollar of GDP has declined. Since 1980 it’s gone down by a little bit over 1% annually, 1.1-1.2%, for both of those measures, materials and carbon. But the expansion of the world economy has been much larger than that 1.1% or 1.2%, so that both carbon use and material flows have increased by more than 50% since 1980.

One could argue that dematerialization and decarbonization just haven’t been given a chance, and that without a high price for carbon, there’s not too much that will happen. But, of course, there are powerful forces preventing those punitive prices for carbon and materials. Based on the track record to date, one would have to say that the economists and the ecomodernizationists—that’s what they’re called in sociology—have been far too optimistic. Ecological overshoot continues apace.

Conversely, other approaches have been too pessimistic, including the so-called treadmill of production paradigm, which comes out of Marxism. They argue there are inherent dynamics within a market system which make ecological protection almost impossible. There’s also an emerging school of thought based in behavioral economics and psychology which says that humans are hard-wired to avoid climate risks. This perspective has trouble accounting for nations like Germany, Portugal, and the U.K., which have made serious commitments to reducing their emissions or to getting off fossil fuels.

I think the truth lies closer to a third paradigm, which believes that both the optimists and the pessimists have overstated their cases. The new economy movement believes that the system won’t green itself but that we can build a different one that can. In recent years this view has gained adherents not only for ecological reasons but also because forecasts about the economic road ahead are rocky.

One of the core principles of plenitude is diversifying out of what I call that BAU economy, the business-as-usual economy, and it is predicated on the view that for most people BAU will increasingly offer fewer options, lower returns, and higher costs. It’s a bad deal getting worse. This helps explain why people will increasingly want to work less in the mainstream market. That’s because its ability to yield lucrative returns is on the wane. The days of sky-high market returns are over. We know that many of the pre-2008 gains were illusory, bubbles which popped in that year, for example, the billions in fictitious profits that disappeared from the financial sector and housing markets. The BAU economy itself may be in for a long slide.

This view of long-term stagnation in returns to labor, to finance, and other assets comes in part from looking at historical data. Consider profits, the pool of value from which higher living standards are funded. Profits tend to have long swings in addition to short-term ups and downs. From 1948 until 1982, the long-term trend was down. Profits were so low during the stagflation of the 1970s that business revolted and induced government to undertake a major restructuring, which began in the early 1980s with, originally, Jimmy Carter, and then more in earnest with Ronald Reagan, with Margaret Thatcher in the U.K. As a result of this restructuring, profits began to rise, and continued rising until the 2008 downturn. It’s likely we’re on track for another decade of down, particularly for U.S. operations. That means there will be less income available for individuals and households. We’ve already been in 3 years of what the business press calls “the new normal,” lower growth and reduced earnings.

The dominance of the U.S. is also on the wane. For decades the country has benefited from its special position. Americans could live beyond their means with a whopping trade deficit because others have been willing to accumulate the dollars that flow outside the nation’s borders. But the economic collapse made foreign investors and central bankers nervous about all currencies, including the dollar. American workers have long enjoyed a wage gap relative to those in poorer countries. However, companies have used the downturn to reduce compensation and locate even more jobs offshore.

As we move forward, the fatal flaw of the current growth regime, climate change and other ecological limits, will increasingly rear its ugly head. These problems have already started to affect the bottom line, with weather and other climate-related losses reducing profits and incomes. There are trillions in assets that will ultimately be uneconomic on the books of American and global companies. These are not just toxic financial assets, the ones we’ve heard about, but also an estimated $27 trillion of assets in proven oil, gas, and coal reserves, which cannot be used if we are to keep the planet safe. When we own up to that, there will be another giant write-down on top of the financial balance-sheet losses of 2008 and 2009.

We’re also up against some of the factors that triggered global problems in 2007 and 2008. The prices of food and energy appear to be on a long upward climb, as would be expected in a world reaching ecological limits. Energy and food, which, after all, is eaten by workers, are inputs into virtually everything that is produced. The index of primary commodities, which includes wood, metals, minerals, fuels, food, and other inputs, rose 23% a year between 2003 and 2007. At no time in the last 60 years have commodity prices risen so rapidly. After dipping during the downturn, they have now resumed what looks like an inexorable rise. For the average American, European, or inhabitant of another country, selling one’s labor to an employer or investing in financial assets will yield less, while buying food at a supermarket or traveling on an airplane will become more expensive. The bottom line is that room to maneuver in the BAU economy is narrowing. We’re faced with a choice between stagnation and the softer prices of commodities or growth, with high prices and mounting damages.

The plenitude path transcends this dilemma and offers us a way out. It’s parsimonious in the use of scarce natural resources and a heavy user of what is comparatively in surplus: human creativity, knowledge, technology, and, as we reconstruct it, community.

The first principle of plenitude, then, is a new relationship to this declining market. For decades Americans have devoted an increasing fraction of their time and money to the market—working longer hours, at least until the downturn, filling leisure time with activities that require more income for unit of time, and buying rather than making more and more of what they consume. But we can reverse this trend and diversify out of that BAU market. Relying less on the market spreads risk and creates multiple sources of income and support, as well as new ways of procuring consumption goods. That means a moderation of hours of work in the BAU sector.

There are undoubtedly complexities for managing this shift, such as changing the incentives faced by employers and ensuring career tracks in professional jobs where people are working less. However, work-time reduction is absolutely at the core of an economic policy that will both solve our unemployment problems and reduce carbon emissions.

The importance of work-time reduction becomes clear as we consider our economic history. Between 1870, the peak of the industrial production of the 19th century, and 1970 the U.S. was on a trajectory of declining hours. Annual work time went from about 3,000 hours a year in 1870 to about 1800 hours a year 100 years later. That is almost a halving of the annual working hours. This was made possible through productivity growth. And it was not just the U.S. that was on this path. All of the other industrialized countries did the same thing.

But beginning in 1970, the U.S. diverged from those other nations and from its own historical path. Annual hours began to rise. And before the downturn in 2008, the average American worker was putting in an extra 200 hours per year of paid employment in comparison to where he or she was in 1973. The reasons were partly due to employers’ incentives. Because they were funding ever more expensive health insurance, they prefer longer hours and fewer employees. But there were other reasons, too—weakened trade unions and growing inequality.

By 2001 the average U.S. employee was on the job almost 300 more hours than many Western Europeans. In that year the gap with Germany was 296, with France 264, with the Netherlands 320 hours, with lower differentials for Sweden, about 70, and the U.K, 62. What those differences mean is that a U.S. employer needs to generate anywhere from 4% to 24% more revenue to hire an additional worker than his or her European counterparts. For the countries with the biggest hours gap, the U.S. economy is producing four new jobs for every five created in those short-hour countries, where, by the way, the collapse of 2008 generated almost no unemployment. Whether we look at our own historical experience or to other nations, the anomalous trend of rising hours in the U.S. has hobbled us with respect to both preserving jobs and creating them. High hours unfairly concentrate hours in too few people. This has become a key driver of poverty, because the poor have too little work. High hours also create stress, reduce the quality of life, and undermine community and democracy.

In the 1980s, the Dutch addressed their high unemployment by offering new government employees a four-day work week at 80% pay. It was a savvy policy, which allowed 20% more young people to get jobs than the business-as-usual policy would have. It’s a good way to begin, because youth are bearing the brunt of the unemployment crisis. Today the Dutch have not only the lowest hours in Europe, super high labor productivity, and a successful economy, but they also have a carbon footprint that is 63% of the U.S. footprint. It’s important to note that this 80% solution, as they call it, does not take away income from people that they are already attached to. That’s a bad way to design work-time reduction. Instead, it starts new hires at lower salaries than they would get if they started at 100% time. That’s a psychologically and practically much easier way to manage the transition to shorter hours.

But we can do more than the 80% solution. If we build in the principle of using productivity growth to fund reductions in work time for people who already have jobs rather than using productivity increases for higher profits or wages, people can experience steady incomes with growing leisure time. The U.S. has had a productivity resurgence over the past decade, with especially high rates of productivity growth since 2000. That may be a surprise to you, and that’s because all of it has gone to profits and not to wages. But what if we gave it to people in the form of shorter hours of work? That’s a bounty that can be used to fund a shift out of business as usual. We can get a given level of production with fewer and fewer hours. Why not take that opportunity? There’s good evidence from behavioral economics and from studies of happiness that people are far less attached to income they don’t already have than income they’ve got. In addition, once people are out of poverty, incremental income does less to improve well-being than people imagine and much less than economists typically have assumed.

And there are other ways to reduce hours. According to the surveys I’ve conducted, as well as those of others, many higher-income employees would welcome the opportunity to trade a day’s pay each week in exchange for a 3-day weekend, especially if they’re parents. The desire to trade money for time is strongest when people won’t be punished in terms of their career trajectories or future opportunities. Again, the Netherlands has been a leader in this regard, legislating the right of workers to reduce their hours without career penalties: job sharing, upgrading part-time work, and long vacations are other ways to reduce hours, increase employment, and make people better off.

Work time is also key to cutting carbon emissions. In a study I conducted recently with sociologists Kyle Knight and Eugene Rosa of Washington State University, using data from 29 high-income countries over the years 1970 to 2007, we found that when employees worked fewer hours per year, the carbon footprints and carbon emissions of their nations are lower. The reverse also holds: the high- hours countries have high carbon footprints.

We believe there are two reasons for this relationship. The first pertains to the scale of the economy. High-hours countries are growing closer to their maximums, taking less of their economic dividend in free time. By contrast, countries like Germany, France, the Netherlands, while still extremely rich by international standards, aren’t expanding the size or scale of their economies as rapidly as they would be if their workers spent more time in factories and offices.

The second reason is that having more free time changes what people do in their daily lives. Households that are time-stressed live in more carbon-intensive ways. Travel mode is the most obvious choice here. Getting places faster requires more carbon. Think of the differences between walking, cycling, public transport, driving, and flying. The faster you go, the more fuel you use. But even controlling for their higher incomes, households that work long hours also do other things, like buy more purchased foods, live in bigger houses. It turns out that the impacts of working hours on carbon emissions are quite substantial. For example, if we were to reduce work time by 10%, we would get about a 22% reduction in the nation’s carbon footprint, with about two-thirds of that from the scale effect and one-third from the changes at the household level. Bigger work time reductions yield even bigger impacts.

So it’s a kind of a triple dividend policy: shorter hours of work reduce unemployment, reduce carbon emissions, and improve people’s well-being.

How can we make this transition in such a difficult time, when it seems like the pressure is on to work longer and harder? While we build support for the kinds of labor market changes I’ve suggested—new hires at 80%, income trade-offs, productivity into shorter hours—we can also take advantage of some of the work-time developments that are already happening. There are more than an estimated 8 million people who are on part-time schedules because they can’t find more work. The more we can do to make it economically and socially feasible to live well while only working part-time, the easier it will be to transition more people into shorter-hours schedules.

That’s where the next two principles of plenitude come. They facilitate access to goods and services without having to lay out much money.

Plenitude’s second principle is what has been called high-tech self-provisioning. Self-provisioning means to make, grow, or do things for oneself. If people are working fewer hours in the BAU economy, they can use the time that is freed up to meet their needs through self- provisioning. This allows to them increase their consumption, reduce dependence on cash income, become more self-reliant, build skills, and exercise creativity. Following the philosopher Frithjof Bergmann, I use the term high-tech self-providing for this activity, and I’ll explain why in a minute.

In the U.S. these kinds of activities have become newly popular, especially since the economic collapse, and especially newly popular among more highly educated people. They are typically very green activities, with low carbon and low eco footprints. Examples include growing food, raising poultry, beekeeping, and the whole phenomenon of urban and suburban homesteading. They include small-scale generation of power through solar and wind, eco-friendly home construction, arts and crafts, clothing, and the manufacture of small household items at a household or community scale.

Part of why this is happening is that the downturn has shifted the balance between time and money, giving people more time and reducing their access to cash. That’s the difference between a boom time and a stagnation time. That leads naturally to more DIY and more self-providing. This trend is also related to the growth of what’s called peer production on the Internet, where people have gotten used to doing things for themselves or in groups, whether it’s writing open-source software, making or posting videos, or collaborating on collective projects. Today’s DIY movement is different from those of the past because it incorporates a high-tech dimension. A lot of the activity is Web-enabled and speaks to the need to self-provision in efficient, high-productivity ways. New agricultural knowledge and the invention of affordable smart machines, many of them at small scale, so-called fab lab machines, make it possible to turn small-scale provisioning into a high-productivity and economically viable use of time.

Mainstream economists have typically argued that people should specialize in one activity in the market, earn money from that, and purchase everything that’s they want and need. As I argued earlier, I believe we have reached a point at which further specialization does not make sense, and that a diversification of activities and income streams is a smarter way to go.

Why?

One reason is that market returns will be lower in the future. Another is uncertainty and future catastrophic events, stemming from both financial instability and ecological instability. Both climate and economic fragility mean that reliance on the market is more risky. Being able
to meet one’s needs, even in the event of market collapse or climate catastrophes, increasingly becomes a smart strategy. Doing that on the community level is even smarter than as an individual. This is what about initiatives such as the Transition Town movement are directed to, that kind of local self-reliance.

But even aside from this insurance function, as we might call it, there are other good reasons to think that a rebalancing between market and the so-called informal sector or the non-market sector makes sense. One is that the productivity potential of hours outside the market is rising. If self-providing meant going back to the technologies and ways of doing things of the 19th century, the mainstream economists would be right, it’s a net loss. But now there are newly available technologies, knowledges, and Web-based innovations that enhance the productivity of labor at a household and community level. We are all aware of these in the realm of information, software, and culture. There’s a vibrant peer-production model that has developed high-value products like Linux and Wikipedia, Firefox. Self-production in music, video, ads, writing has exploded, and people are sharing and learning new skills, enjoying the opportunity to be creative, and producing real value to be used by others. The self-providing model takes this activity and extends it to the material world, to the offline world—to food, shelter, power, clothing, small manufacture. It’s been dubbed the “open-source hardware movement.” The point is that the model that began in information and culture should not be ghettoized in those sectors. It’s relevant across the board.

What’s key about the new form of self-providing is that it is high productivity, because it is knowledge- intensive. It employs high-tech knowledge in both computers and ecology to raise the productivity of labor. Examples include the use of permaculture principles in food provisioning—and that’s the ecological knowledge applied to agriculture—living wall gardens, small-scale energy generation, and fab labs.

The model of retrieving labor time from the market and putting it to work at the household and community level under different economic principles also makes sense because the economics of scale have changed. What computerization and the development of the Web have done is to make small-scale production much more efficient. After all, think about the change in scale from the first computers, which took up entire rooms like this, to the computing power that is available literally in our laps, or now in our palms. I think this point is of vital importance. The rise of information technology has transformed micro-enterprise from a romantic throwback to a smart 21st century strategy. Indeed, the massive command-and-control institutions that we call corporations no longer possess the advantages they once did. Small companies are where the dynamism and the employment growth is coming.

Extend this insight farther and we see that there are new possibilities at the household and community level for creating a high-productivity local green economy. What becomes possible is a synthesis of the pre-modern household form and modern technology. By the former I refer to peasant households that did not work for others, had diverse skills, activities, and income streams, and actively managed risk through that diversity.

A key aspect of these self-providing activities is that they are low-footprint and therefore a central contributor to solving the climate problem. Furthermore, as people learn how to make things, they develop skills and affinities for particular activities and then turn these into businesses and careers. Self-providing becomes one mechanism for expanding a sector of small green businesses, and those become the basis of a new sustainable economy. High-tech self-providing is a transitional strategy to get out of BAU.

But there’s an even more important reason that the current conversation is failing, and that has to do with what’s happening to the planet. During the same time that the global economy went into free fall and in the years since then, the news on climate has gone from bad to worse to catastrophic. A growing number of scientists have warned that carbon dioxide levels beyond 350 parts per million in the atmosphere are incompatible with preserving a planet “similar to that on which civilization developed.” But we are already at 396 and rising. And the speed of climate change is well beyond anything envisioned by the last round of published models by the IPCC.

I’ll end with briefer discussions of the last two principles. They’re a little more self-evident. The third principle is the building of a new consumer culture that I call true materialism, which respects the materiality of goods and the fact that their production involves the destruction of nature’s bounty and beauty. The key here, in addition to avoiding high-impact lifestyles, is to reduce the purchase of new items and promote economies of reuse and exchange.

A silver lining of the recession is that it has dealt a sharp blow to what I have called the fast fashion model. The average American before the bust was purchasing 67 new pieces of apparel every year, one every 5.3 days. That’s changed since the downturn. Instead, there’s a growing range of new consumer innovations, swapping and selling of a wide range of goods, such as apparel, which is where a lot of the new swapping economy began, but also books, toys, DVDs. People are car- and ride-sharing, they’re couch-surfing, they’re using Airbnb, which is a peer-to-peer bed and breakfast service. There are neighborhoods that are doing tool sharing, there are soup collectives and food-swap organizations, community gardens, CSAs.

Social innovations around concepts of sharing, commons, barter, informal exchange, neighborhood exchange, reuse, resale are changing huge swaths of the consumer economy. Many of these practices have come out of the hacker culture that developed on the Internet and they’re made possible by the Web. The Internet reduces the time requirements for organizing these kinds of schemes, and equally important, helps to solve the issues of trust and reputation which arise when strangers interact directly, such as in couch-surfing or ride-sharing or any other person-to-person or so-called peer-to-peer interchange. The downturn has mainstreamed many of these practices by shifting people toward more cash scarcity and more time abundance. Together they are transforming the way many people, particularly young people, are living and are procuring goods and services. They merge the production and consumption side and they’re much lower footprint.

The final plenitude principle is to built economic interdependence among people or wealth in our relations with each other. These activities overlap with some of those I just mentioned and include not only sharing schemes on the consumer side but also time exchange or time banks, local currencies, skills transmission. These activities flourish when the first two principles of plenitude are followed. That’s because they rely on time, which is a key resource into all production, whether it’s private production or social, and they rely on skills.

But the building of economic interdependence is also occurring in the emergence of a range of new enterprises founded not on traditional private ownership but on various forms of collective holdings. These include models such as the Evergreen worker cooperatives in Cleveland, a set of worker-owned green businesses that are supported by major anchor institutions in the city—the medical complexes, the educational institutions, the foundations.

This model has generated tremendous interest around the country, and versions of it are in the planning stages in a number of cities. But it’s not only worker co-ops that are thriving. We’re also seeing consumer co-ops, land trusts, other kinds of property held in common, co-housing, community development corporations, municipal utilities, and public enterprises. These forms of property are rooted in communities and social networks. As Gar Alperovitz has persuasively argued, they already represent and command large sums of money. If they are channeled to common purposes, such as carbon reduction, employment generation, and wealth distribution, these public forms of wealth holding could be a strong foundation for the emergence of a new pluralistic, small-scale, low-carbon, high-welfare economy.

I will close with an observation. I have described the outlines of a new economy that is rich in time, that is low- impact, and that I argue will yield high satisfaction. But the plenitude idea that I’ve been discussing is not just one scholar’s vision of a good direction to move in. It is already a living, breathing entity that is growing in size, scope, and sophistication every day. It is made up of sustainability activists, conscious consumers, low-income city residents whom the formal economy has abandoned, casualties of the 2008 downturn, young people increasingly committed to a sharing and commons philosophy, and advocates of the peer-production, open- source movement in the tech world. I also include here the degrowth movement, which is gaining momentum across Europe and consists of academics and activists explicitly challenging the growth imperative within western capitalism. The plenitude movement includes groups such as Bioneers, so-called biological pioneers, the Transition Town, BALLE, the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, much of the alternative food movement, the local currency movement, and the DIY and so-called “maker” movements. What most of these groups share is a commitment to local, small-scale, low-impact production and consumption, expanded motivations for economic activity than just profit, belief in fairness, democracy, and community, and a rejection of the dominant consumer culture.

Only through a social movement that counters the current destructive paradigm can we hope to return to a safe way of life on the planet. I believe this new, emerging economy represents that hope. We’ve got to take it seriously, we’ve got to believe in it, we’ve got to get going on it.But if we do, we have away out of both the economic and the ecological challenges that we face today.

Thank you.

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Obama’s attack on Social Security and Medicare

Tue, 25 Sep 2012 21:47:20 GMT

by Dave Lindorff
Summer 2011

(appearing in Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, edited by Jeffrey St. Clair and Joshua Frank)

When Barack Obama was running for president, back in 2008, he was pretty definite about his seemingly progressive position on Social Security. While he conceded the arguable point that Social Security faced a crisis several decades hence, he also claimed, both on the stump and in debate with Hillary Clinton, that he was opposed to benefit cuts and to privatization. He also insisted at that time that the answer was to raise the cap on income subject to Social Security taxation, and he declared himself opposed to the idea of putting some “commission” in charge of coming up with a “solution.”

What a difference getting elected makes, especially when you get elected with the help of truckloads of money from Wall Street financial interests.

No sooner had Obama moved into the White House, than he changed his tune and began suggesting, in what has proved over the next two and a half years of his presidency to be his “negotiation” style, which is to give away 90% of the ground before you start to negotiate, that he was open to discussing benefit cuts. He also did a 180-degree turn and announced that he would appoint a deficit-reduction commission to come up with recommendations. When he appointed that commission, he announced in advance that he would be “agnostic” toward any recommended changes, including cuts to Social Security, thus telegraphing in advance, in case the commission members needed encouragement, that he was ready to undermine this key New Deal legacy.

Medicare was tossed into the same hopper. In fact, in the case of Medicare, it got worse. Obama had campaigned for office claiming that he would fix the nation’s disastrous health care system, which for decades now has featured the highest cost and the highest rate of cost inflation, as well as some of the poorest health statistics (life expectancy, infant mortality, etc.) in the developed world, all the while leaving some 40% of the population uninsured and without access to basic care. There was an easy fix to all these problems right in front of him–one which the majority of Americans, and the overwhelming percentage of those who had voted for Obama in November 2008, have consistently told pollsters they favored: extending Medicare to cover everyone, instead of just those 65 and older.

Medicare, while it is hardly perfect, and has been weakened by Congressional restrictions on its ability to negotiate volume discounts for drugs and pharmaceutical products, and by privatization schemes that give huge subsidies to private insurers like Aetna and Humana that compete with Medicare, has nonetheless demonstrated for years that it can deliver quality care fare more cheaply to everyone eligible for it than can private insurers. It has an administrative overhead of just 4%, compared with over 20% for private insurers, and doesn’t operate by trying to deny care, as private insurers do.

It is undeniable that if Medicare were simply expanded to cover all Americans, the result would be immediate and massive savings to both the general public and employers, and even for taxpayers, since it would eliminate the need for hundreds of billions of dollars currently spent annually on veterans’ medical care, on Medicaid care for the poor, on subsidies and reimbursements to hospitals for the so-called “charity care,” and most importantly, on the hidden subsidies for such charity care. These are hidden in the inflated fees charged by hospitals and doctors to insured patients and in the inflated premiums that their insurers charge to cover those inflated fees.

Yet when President Obama assembled a session with health care industry representatives at the White House to help him develop a health care reform plan, he deliberately excluded advocates of the idea of Medicare for all, or what has been called “single-payer,” or alternately the Canadian-style health system, even barring representatives from the doctors’ organization Physicians for a National Health Plan (PNHP).

The fix was in, Obamacare was to be a plan constructed around the needs and interests of the health insurance industry, not around the needs of the people of the country.

Worse yet, Medicare, which is tasked with financing care of the sickest and most costly portion of the population–the disabled and the elderly–was left holding that bag, and even suffered cuts to help finance the additional costs embedded in Obamacare. Not surprisingly, having left Medicare out in the cold, the White House now is talking about cutting what is clearly one of the country’s most successful programs–one that even had Tea Party activists defending it during the health care debates, with their oxymoronic signs saying: “Keep your government hands off my Medicare!”

For four decades Canada has been successfully operating a health care system (called Medicare!), which, exactly like the U.S. Medicare program, is based upon private physicians, free doctor and hospital choice for patients, and which like Medicare in the U.S. remains hugely popular among Canadians and among Canadian businesses, and which covers everyone, at a cost of just over half, in terms of percent of GDP, of what the U.S. spends on health care.

How can it be that the White House, when it was developing its health reform plan, never even invited any of the Canadian system’s administrators and advocates down to Washington to explain how they do it north of the border?

Obama even lied about its relevance, at one point back in 2009, during an address to a joint session of Congress. He conceded that a single-payer system like Canada’s might work well in some countries, but then said,

Since health care represents one-sixth of our economy, I believe it makes more sense to build on what works and fix what doesn’t, rather than try to build an entirely new system from scratch.

Of course, he was dissembling. It wouldn’t be “from scratch,” since we already have a “Canadian-style” system in place for our elderly. It’s called Medicare, and people love it.

The obvious and unavoidable answer is that this president has no interest in finding, or even in hearing about, the obvious solution to the nation’s crisis in health care, which is now costing over 17% of GDP, when it costs just 10% of GDP in Canada, 12% of GDP in France, 11% of GDP in Germany, 8% of GDP in Japan and the UK, and 9% of GDP in Italy. He is interested in finding a solution that will ingratiate him with the insurance industry, the pharmaceutical industry, and the AMA–the most retrograde, greedy, and self-aggrandizing group of doctors you could find–all big contributors to his 2008 campaign.

And so we had the Deficit Reduction Commission, which was headed by two known enemies of Social Security and Medicare, Erskine Bowles and former Wyoming Senator Alan Simpson (who famously said, while serving as co-chair of the commission, that Social Security was “a milk cow with 310 million tits”).

This commission, quite predictably, came out with “rescue” proposals that featured raising the retirement age for Social Security, reducing the benefits for future retirees, and “adjusting” the methodology for accounting for inflation in setting benefit payments for current and future retirees (a downward adjustment, of course)–a sneaky and invisible way of slowly diminishing the benefits paid over time.

And on Medicare, we had the wacky and thoroughly inhumane proposal to raise the age of eligibility from the current 65 to 67. After all, if employers continue to lay people off at 65, as they certainly will, and as people leave their jobs, often not because they want to but because they are no longer physically capable of doing them (think truck and bus drivers whose vision is failing, or manual laborers whose backs, legs or hearts are giving out), what are these retirees to do when they lose their employer-provided health insurance and their incomes, and yet still have to wait 2 years to get access to medical care through Medicare?

(The idea is not even good for business, since the likelihood is that workers, knowing they would be on their own after retiring, would push forward any needed major medical procedures, such as a disk repair or a hip replacement, getting it done on the company plan before they lose it.)

Actually, it is at the other end, among the so called “old old,” where all the costs are to be found. The oldest 10% of Medicare recipients are responsible for about 90% of the entire Medicare budget. People in their late 60s tend not to need all that much care, relatively speaking. In fact, lowering the age of Medicare eligibility would add incrementally less to the program’s cost on a per-person basis as you move down in age from 60 to 50 to 40 to 30. It is only when you get to young children, and to women of child-bearing age, that per-person care costs start to rise again.

If Obama really wanted to cut Medicare’s costs significantly, then instead of making people aged 65 to 67 ineligible, he should make those over 90 ineligible. Obviously this would be viewed by the public as heartless, so he can’t do it, and is hoping that raising the entry age to the program will somehow prove more acceptable. Yet the rationale of axing one age group from access to the program is the same.

Unmentioned, of course, is the harsh reality that raising the age of eligibility for Medicare, besides meaning some people will just go untreated for medical conditions like heart problems, cancer, and diabetes, simply shifts most of the costs of care of those people onto the states’ struggling Medicaid programs, and onto the children of those who have been forced to wait for their Medicare.

But logic, economics, and humane public policy are clearly not considerations in this White House, any more than they were in the Bush/Cheney White House that preceded it. The political calculus is all about pleasing the business interest groups that have the money to give to a reelection campaign. And that would be primarily the insurance industry in the case of Medicare, and the Wall Street gang in the case of Social Security.

The saga of the wholly artificial debt-ceiling “crisis” and of the alleged “crisis” of the nation’s ballooning national deficit, were both just part of a Washington Kabuki theater set-piece in the long campaign by corporate interests to undermine and ultimately destroy Social Security and Medicare.

In truth, the debt ceiling has always been a contrivance for cutting popular social program spending. No other nation even has a debt ceiling. Their legislative bodies just pass budgets and their treasuries just make their principal and interest payments on any debt, as required to maintain a sovereign debt rating. Meanwhile, while it is true that this nation’s overall debt has risen dramatically since 2000, the reason has nothing to do with either Medicare or Social Security, which have, all through the past decade, been taking in more money than they pay out. The debt has risen for several key reasons, none of which is being addressed by either President Obama or the two political parties in Congress.

The first of these is military spending, which annually consumes more than half of all tax revenues collected by the Treasury. The wars that the nation is currently engaged in are being fought on borrowed funds, because the government warmongers, knowing the unpopularity fo these bloody adventures, has been afraid to ask the taxpayers to pay for them directly. One way they have borrowed to cover these enormous expenses is by quietly borrowing from Social Security and Medicare trust funds–the monthly tax which workers pay out of each paycheck, matched by their employers, and which now total $2 trillion, but which are required by law to be invested fully in Treasury bonds, meaning they are lent to the federal government.

Get it? The White House and Congress, for decades, have been collecting our FICA and Medicare taxes, and then taking that money to fund their wars, giving the two trust funds Treasury bills in exchange for which they have promised to pay interest. But now they are turning around and complaining that the interest money is a “burden” on the taxpayer, and that it has to be reduced.

That’s why the Congressional Budget Office in its 2011 report on the Social Security trust fund claimed that it was running a $45 billion “deficit” this year for the first time. It was a point that allowed Obama and the gang in Congress that is gunning for Social Security and Medicare to declare a crisis and to call for cuts in benefits. But the truth is, between the FICA taxes paid into Social Security by current workers and the interest payments paid by the government, the fund was actually running a surplus of $2.6 trillion.

Actually, the deception on the part of the CBO staff was even greater. In 2010, the White House got Congress to agree to “grant” workers a temporary 1-year reprieve of 2% of the 7% normally paid out of every check into the Social Security trust fund. The idea was supposed to be that this would work like a 2% tax cut, which would then put more money in the hands of consumers, who would then go out and buy stuff and stimulate the economy. But in the act of staggering betrayal, these same politicians turned around and are now claiming that the $85 billon that the government paid into the trust fund to cover the missing employee tax payments meant the system was in deficit, and thus benefits needed to be cut. That is, the extra money they said they were “giving” workers as a tax “cut” would actually be coming out of their retirement benefits later, and would also be used as a justification for attacking the Social Security system.

It really doesn’t get more obscene than this.

The other reason for the nation’s huge deficit increase over the decade is the ongoing Bush tax cuts for the wealthy and for corporations, which could have been killed easily by an Obama veto, since they expired in 2010. But Obama has chosen to allow them to continue. Oh, he complains about them, but he had all the power he needed to end them. With only a narrow majority in the House and with Democrats in charge of the Senate, Republicans could never have managed to override, even with the votes of some conservative Democrats.

There is no question but that the Social Security System, which has been piling up surpluses since 1981 to cover the coming tsunami of the Baby Boomers into retirement, is going to come up short without some additional revenue–reportedly by 2037. People are living longer than anticipated, which should be seen as a good thing, not a crisis. But President Obama knows this is not a crisis. As he used to say, back when he was a candidate, it’s a problem that can be easily solved if addressed now, by simply eliminating the cap on income subject to Social Security taxation–a cap that currently exempts all income above $106,000!

In fact, the U.S. is at the low end of developed nations in terms of the percent of retirement income provided by public pension, with the average American having Social Security cover only 40% of their retirement expenses. That percentage could be easily raised, and more of our low-income elders who have no other resources, could be lifted out of abject poverty, if Congress and the President agreed to a stock transfer tax dedicated to Social Security, and if Social Security taxation, currently applied only to wages and the Schedule C profits of small businesses, were applied to investment income, or what the IRS calls, with no sense of irony, “unearned” income.

There are easy solutions for the financial problems facing both Medicare and Social Security. But both are political problems, not actuarial ones, as Obama and the lobbyist-owned members of the two parties in Congress are trying to have us believe.

Despite a current barrage of misleading news reports on both issues, polls show that a majority of Americans instinctually get it and know that the solutions are

an expansion of Medicare to cover all Americans, and
an increase in taxes on the rich to fully fund Social Security.

It is an indictment of the American political system that despite this clear public preference, President Obama and the elected Representatives and Senators in the Congress, are not even discussing either approach.

Dave Lindorff is the author of Killing Time and The Case for the Impeachment of George W. Bush. He edits the blog This Can’t Be Happening.

Drone warfare: Killing by remote control

Tue, 25 Sep 2012 19:38:51 GMT

Medea Benjamin
Eugene, OR
July 1, 2012

available from Alternative Radio

You can listen to Medea Benjamin speak for herself here.

Medea Benjamin is a renowned peace activist and social justice advocate. She travels around the world and documents human rights violations. She’s co-founder of Global Exchange and CODEPINK. She is the recipient of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Peace Prize from the Fellowship of Reconciliation. She is the author of many books including Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control.

When 9/11 happened, there were maybe 50 drones in the Pentagon’s arsenal. Today there are over 7,000 drones in the Pentagon’s arsenal.

The Pentagon, the government, the CIA have realized that since the American people are sick and tired of war, they’re really sick and tired of Americans dying overseas, and they’re sick and tired of our spending so much of our money on these wars. So the drones came in as an alternative, a way to keep the fighting going but do it on the cheap and do it without American lives at risk.

I was in a State Department meeting when somebody from the State Department Democracy Program said that the drones were a “miracle weapon.” The State Department. That’s the diplomatic arm of our government. A “miracle weapon,” because they allowed us to wage war in a much more humane way.

What are drones? Let’s just take a look for a minute at the concept of drones. Drones means it is something that is flying in the air, doesn’t have a pilot in it, and is conveying information back to a base, and sometimes it is also unleashing missiles. Some of these drones are tiny, tiny, tiny things. They can be the size of insects, they can be the size of hummingbirds, they can look just like a dragonfly. In fact, there is a huge industry, with a lot of our taxpayer dollars, going to something called biomimicry, taking the beauty and the miracle of nature and figuring out how we can convert this into drone technology. Then there are drones that soldiers can put in their backpacks and launch by themselves. Lots of those are being used in Afghanistan today. And then there are the bigger drones, the Predator and the Reaper drones, which are the ones being used for killing. Those are made by a company in southern California called General Atomics. And then there also really big drones, that are the size of a commercial aircraft, like the Global Hawk, a huge surveillance drone.

What about the pilots? Who are piloting these drones? Well, in the case of the Predator and Reaper drones, most of them are being piloted here in the United States. So it’s a very surreal kind of sci-fi situation, where you have people in the military or in the CIA who are sitting in air-conditioned rooms in ergonomic chairs and they are looking at screens that have been purposely designed to mimic a PlayStation, because a lot of the pilots have been recruited from young guys who have spent much of their teen years playing these kinds of video games. In fact, the UN has said that the U.S. has created a PlayStation mentality towards war. So the pilots are sitting in a place like Creech Air Force Base outside of Las Vegas, Nevada. They can be killers by day and go play the slot machines by night, or they can be killers by day and go home and supposed to be good fathers and husbands and members of their community.

It’s a little hard for some of those pilots, because we find the same level of PTSD among remote-control pilots as we find with soldiers in the battlefields. But some of these remote-control pilots would rather be in the battlefield. I have talked to some of them who say, “I joined the military to be on the ground with my buddies and to be a part of the action, not to be sitting 8,000 miles away in an air-conditioned room.” In fact, one of the things they really complain about is boredom. They say they’re sitting in front of a screen for hours and hours and hours on end just waiting to get a piece of the action, waiting to hit the kill button.

Who are they allowed to kill? Until very recently we didn’t know where the kill list was coming from. But there are two types of drone kills. One is when you know who you’re trying to kill, you have a name of somebody and you’re going after this individual. That is called a personality strike. And the other is when you are merely looking for suspicious behavior. That is called a signature strike.

The first kind of strike, when you have a name, we didn’t know how the kill list was being developed. In fact, I did a lot of research when I was writing the book to try to understand what the role of the White House was, and particularly President Obama, and it was very hard to get this information. Let’s remember, this is a secret program in the hands of secret organizations like the CIA or like the Joint Special Operations Command, also known as JSOC, of the military. But there was a remarkable article that came out on May 29 that talked about the intimate role that President Obama plays in deciding who will be on the kill list. It was to me a jaw-dropping revelation, because the article was quoting people who were still in the administration or had recently left the administration, and they talked about the gatherings that would happen on something called Terror Tuesdays. On Terror Tuesdays the President would invite the old boys into the White House, and they would be flipping through the profiles with pictures of people—they said it resembled baseball cards—and they would be deciding who would live and who would die. They would be playing the prosecutor, the judge, the jury, and the executioner all at once.

There was another remarkable thing that was revealed in this article, and that was that the administration admitted that any male of military age in the areas where we are using these drones are considered militants. So just think about that for a minute. Persons who are old enough to have a little facial hair and live in the areas where we are using these drones are militants. And if they are militants, then they are fair game. Just an astonishing revelation that we don’t know who we are killing, and that we are obviously killing lots and lots of innocent people.

Let’s look for a minute at some of the places where we are doing this killing. The drones were used quite prominently in Iraq. In fact, the Iraqis thought that when the U.S. military left, they were taking the drones with them. Little did they know that the drones were transferred from the U.S. military into the hands of the U.S. State Department, that now is running a fleet of drones in Iraq. And little did they know that the U.S. was also transferring some of those drones across the border into Turkey, where they are used to provide information to the Turkish government in its war with the Kurds. So the U.S. is now smack in the middle of another conflict that it shouldn’t be in.

The drones were also used in the intervention in Libya. Whether somebody in the U.S. thinks that it was a good thing or a bad thing for the U.S. Government to have intervened to overthrow Qaddafi in Libya, they should be aware of just how awful the process was. The process went like this. The administration said,

We can make unilaterally a decision about intervention in Libya, and we don’t have to go to Congress.

Congresspeople on both the left and the right were saying,

We think we should have a chance to talk about this.

And the administration said,

No. When we use drones, there is no American life at risk. And when there’s no American life at risk, the War Powers Act has nothing to do with this, so this is something outside the purview of the legislative branch.

Imagine this kind of usurpation of power by the executive, with the precedent already being set, and what this will mean for the next presidents in the White House, who have this power now.

We’ve also used these drones in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and the Philippines. And we should be very concerned that we are opening new drone bases in many places around the world. This is a time when so many budgets are being cut in all government agencies and when there is some pressure on the Pentagon to cut its budget, some pressure to close some of the 800-plus U.S. bases that we have around the world. And here we have new bases being opened for the drones in places like Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Djibouti, the Seychelles, Ethiopia, Uganda, Burundi, and the newest has been on islands off the coast of Australia.

Let’s focus a minute on Pakistan, because that’s where most of the drone strikes have been used. There were about 40 drone strikes under the Bush administration. But the Bush administration had another way of dealing with what it called terrorists, and that was to capture them and throw them into Guantánamo or to use extraordinary rendition to send them somewhere to be tortured. The Obama administration realized it was a tough thing for them to close down Guantánamo, it was very messy to capture people and put them in indefinite detention, and where were they going to have trials, would they be civilian trials, would they be military trials. It was just a messy process.

So they prefer the drone strikes. Just kill people. It is

a cleaner way of doing things.

So over 85% of the drone strikes have been under the Obama administration. In Pakistan alone there have been about 325 drone strikes. Some reports have said that 175 of the victims have been children. Raise your hand if you have ever seen a drone victim on the TV screen. One person says they did. I can guarantee you it wasn’t on a U.S. mainstream TV station. And raise your hand if you have seen a photo of a drone victim in a mainstream U.S. newspaper. Nobody.

Just think about that a little bit. Think about how perhaps this is why so many Americans think it’s okay to use these drone strikes, because they don’t see pictures of the people being killed, they don’t see the mutilated bodies of children who have been killed, they don’t see the charred remains from these lethal weapons. They don’t have a chance to develop the kind of compassion one feels when one sees real people who have been so mutilated by these weapons.

In fact, the very first drone strike under the Obama administration in Pakistan came just three days after the President came into office. And it was a mistake. The drone hit an elder in the family who was a member of the pro-peace committee, killed his family members as well as a neighboring shopkeeper and two of the other neighbors. There was only one young man who survived that attack, and he too was severely wounded.

I go into great detail in the book about another incident. That’s the killing of a family of a man named Karim Khan. This was also in northern Pakistan. I want to read you just a short piece from the book.

On December 31, 2009, the drone didn’t just hover overhead watching the movement of the villagers below, as it had done on so many other occasions. No, this time it let loose a missile into the very heart of Karim’s family compound. When the chaos of the explosion dissipated, Khan’s brother and son had been blown to bits. News reports allege that the target of the drone had been Haji Omar, a Taliban commander, but the villagers insisted that Haji Omar had been nowhere near the village that night.

The tragedy that forever scarred the lives of Karim Khan’s family was the product of a mistake, a mistake made by a far-away aggressor who would face no punishment for pressing the fire button without looking long enough, without checking, without double-checking.

Karim’s son had just graduated from high school and had returned to the small village to be a teacher. Karim’s brother was not a militant, or even a militant sympathizer, but a schoolteacher with a master’s degree in English literature. For eight years he had been teaching children in the small village school with whatever meager resources he could muster. He left behind a young wife, now a widow so distraught she could not speak for weeks after the attack, and a 2-year-old boy who would never remember his father. He also left behind hundreds of students with scant chance of resuming their education, young people now mired in hatred for the drone that killed their teacher, aching for revenge.

There are also examples of drone strikes that have killed large numbers of the most respected members of the community. This is a case of a drone strike that happened on March 17, 2011, when there was a community meeting going on called a jirga. A jirga is a gathering of community leaders that happens on a regular basis. But perhaps in the eyes of somebody 8,000 miles away, one of the drone pilots, this looked like a bunch of Taliban people planning an attack. Indeed, there were people with beards, with turbans, with guns, but that characterizes just about every man in northern Pakistan. So some drone pilot unleashed the Hellfire missile and killed over 50 members of the community, the most respected leaders in the community. You can imagine the kind of hatred that spread after that attack.

I want to talk about the case of a 16-year-old boy. His name was Tariq Aziz. He was very upset about the drone strikes because his cousin had been killed by a drone strike. But instead of taking up a gun and joining the Taliban, he was given the opportunity to do something else, and that was to travel to the capital of Pakistan, to Islamabad, with about 80 other drone-strike victims and their families to meet with lawyers from Pakistan and from England who wanted to hear their stories. What was decided at the meeting was that because journalists are not allowed into that area of Pakistan, they would train some of these young people to be citizen journalists. They equipped them with video cameras and they gave them lessons about how to use the cameras.

Tariq Aziz was very excited about the chance to go back into his community and document the drone strikes. He told the lawyers that the drones in his community were not just something that happened on an occasional basis, coming in and out, but they were constantly in the community, buzzing overhead, terrifying the children. They called it “the sound of death,” and they would never know if there would be a missile unleashed and who it would kill. So he returned from that gathering eager to document the drones.

Little did he know that the first documentation after that gathering would be his own death, that happened two days afterwards. There was nothing left of his body when the drone strike hit him and his cousin. Many of the lawyers who were at that meeting were outraged about this, and they went to the U.S. government and they went to the Pakistani government and they said,

Why did you kill this young man?

First, the U.S. said,

Well, he wasn’t 16 years old, he was 21 years old,

as if 21 years old then justified it. And then they said,

He was a militant.

And the lawyers said,

Well, if indeed you had any proof that he was a militant, why didn’t you send somebody into the hotel where he was staying for four days in the capital? Or why didn’t you send somebody into the public meeting we were having for four days to capture him and give him a chance for a trial?

There was no answer to that question. What has been the response of the Pakistani people and the Pakistani government? We know from the WikiLeaks cables that at first the Pakistani government said to the U.S.,

Okay, we’ll let you do the drone strikes, but we’ll pretend that we know nothing about it or we’ll complain about it publicly.

That went on for a while, until the government realized that this was just not working, that the drone strikes were counterproductive, that it was radicalizing the local population, turning them into Taliban sympathizers, and making them anti-Pakistani government and anti-American. So they went to the U.S. government and said,

These drone strikes really ought to stop.

And the U.S. government said,

Sorry, we don’t agree.

So it went to the legislature in Pakistan, and they voted once, they voted twice, they voted three times unanimously—something almost unheard of in Pakistan—to demand that the U.S. Government stop the drone strikes. But the U.S. Government said sorry. It seems that while the U.S. says it promotes democracy around the world, when a democratically elected government tells the U.S. to stop killing its people, the U.S. Government doesn’t listen.

Not only that, they take the same program that has been so counterproductive in the case of Afghanistan and transfer it to another country. And that is Yemen. The first drone strike under the Obama administration in Yemen was also a mistake. In this case it was a drone strike in 2009 that left 14 women and 21 children dead. Only one of the dozens of those who were killed were identified as having connections with al-Qaeda. There was another drone strike in May of 2010 that killed one of the most prominent sheikhs and a deputy governor in Yemen. The entire tribe was so outraged they started to attack government infrastructure, including a pipeline, that led to a billion dollars’ worth of damages.

If you want to understand how unproductive this program is in the case of Yemen, in 2009 there were perhaps 200 people who identified as members of al-Qaeda in the Arabian peninsula, and they held no territory. Today, there are over 1,000 people with al-Qaeda in the Arabian peninsula, and they hold significant territory.

There was an op-ed that came out in The New York Times on June 13 written by a young Yemeni activist. It was called “How Drones Help al-Qaeda.” He was pleading with the U.S., saying how the drone strikes were causing more people to join the radical militants, driven not by
ideology but by revenge and despair. He said,

The shortterm gains from killing military leaders is minuscule compared to the long-term damage the drone program is causing.

The U.S. Government is not only killing people from Yemen, but it is also killing people in Yemen who are American citizens. Raise your hands if you’ve heard of the case of Anwar al-Awlaki. This is an unusual audience because a lot of you have heard of that. Most people in the U.S. have probably never heard of him. This is a cleric born in the U.S. who moved to Yemen, known for his fiery sermons. He was put on the kill list by the President, and he was killed with a drone strike along with another American called Samir Khan. The ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights sued the American government on behalf of Anwar al-Awlaki’s family saying,

We need to see the evidence that you used to put him on the kill list. All that is public is that he had fiery sermons, but we want to know what evidence you have that he was actually involved in activities designed to kill Americans.

The U.S. Government has refused to make that information public, and the U.S. courts have gone along with the U.S. Government in saying that that information does not have to be made public, on the basis of national security grounds.

But worse than that is that just two weeks later another American was killed with a U.S. drone in Yemen, and that was the 16-year-old son of Anwar al-Awlaki, a Denver-born teenager named Abdulrahman. This is a case that particularly pains me, because I find it hard to comprehend that my government is able to kill an American teenager with absolutely no proof of any wrongdoing and absolutely no attempt to capture or provide any kind of judicial process. In the case of Abdulrahman, you can see his Facebook page that shows the pictures of a smiling young boy. It said on his Facebook page that he liked rap and hip-hop and swimming. His friends said he was a typical American boy and that he had absolutely no interest and no involvement with any militant activities. It seems he was killed simply because he was the son of somebody that the U.S. had put on a kill list.

While there hasn’t been a huge outcry in the U.S. about all of these killings, there have been some demands by some of the legal community to ask the administration to tell on what legal basis is this killing spree happening. It wasn’t until March of this year, 2012, that the Attorney General, Eric Holder, talked to a group of law students at Northwestern University and started to give some kind of justification for the program: The U.S. Government says that it has the right to self-defense.

Well, the right to self-defense, according to international law, is a very narrowly defined right. It means that if you are in danger of an imminent attack, if somebody is just about to bomb you, or if they are amassing troops right at your border getting ready to attack, you have the right to self-defense. But you have to give your enemy a chance to surrender, and you have to make sure that this is the only way that you can do this, and the lives that you will be saving are disproportionately greater than the lives that you will be taking. It does mean that you can kill somebody because they have suspicious behavior, that someday, sometime they might want to kill you.

The U.S. Government also says they are justified by U.S. law. Remember, post 9/11 there was a terrible piece of legislation that was passed that gave the green light to the government to use military force. It was the authorization for the use of force. And there was only one Congressperson in the entire Congress who voted against that. Does anybody remember who that was? Congresswoman Barbara Lee.

So that continues to be one of the grounds the U.S. Government is using for the justification under U.S. law to use violence anywhere it wants. But there’s a problem with that, because the law specifically said that violence was authorized to kill people associated with the attack on 9/11. A lot of the people that we are killing today were maybe about 10 or 11 years old at the time of 9/11, and the groups like the group in Yemen didn’t even exist at the time of 9/11.

The U.S. Government is also saying they have the right to kill U.S. citizens overseas. Many lawyers questioned how that could be possible. Well, Eric Holder said that it seems many people are under the misunderstanding that somehow the Constitution gives them the right to due process.

Raise your hand if you thought maybe you had the right to due process. A lot of you were under some kind of misunderstanding, it seems. Said Eric Holder:

You don’t, by the Constitution, have the right to any kind of judicial process.

That’s the trick. You only have the right to something strangely called due process. And that can mean that folks get together in the White House and decide to put you on the kill list.

The best answer to Eric Holder I found did not come from Harvard legal scholars but came from a late-night comedian called Stephen Colbert. Stephen Colbert said,

Yes, the Founders weren’t picky. Trial by jury, trial by fire, rock-paper-scissors. Who cares? Do process just means there is a process that you do. In the current process, the President meets with his advisers, decides who to kill, and then kills them.

If we are going to win our never-ending war against terror, there are bound to be casualties, and one of them just happens to be the U.S. Constitution.

Let’s give a hand to Colbert for being the truth teller of our times.

This all might work for the U.S. if the U.S. were the only country that has drones. But that is not the case. In fact, there are many countries that have drones. The U.S. is the number-1 producer and user of drones. In fact, we don’t produce many things in this country at all, but we still produce a lot of weapons. And then there is a number-2 producer of drones, and that is Israel. And then there is another country that is really getting into the drone business, understands the growth market, and that is China. China is developing dozens of different kinds of drones and selling them overseas.

So you have to think, what are other countries thinking? What is China thinking? Maybe it is thinking,

We should go get some of those Tibetans or those Uighurs who we are fighting with, and they are living in the U.S. Why don’t we kill them with a Hellfire missile here?

Or maybe the Russians are thinking,

Why don’t we go get some of those Chechens who are living overseas? We think they’re extremists and militants.

Or the Cubans are probably thinking,

Why don’t we find some of those terrorists who are living in Miami and send a Hellfire missile into their Miami condominium. Maybe a couple of neighbors will get killed in the process, but, hey, that’s what the U.S. does.

Or the Iranians. You might remember when the Iranians just a few months ago downed a spy drone that they said they hacked into the system and brought it down without a scratch and put it in front of the TV cameras and said,

Thank you very much, President Obama, for this very sophisticated gift that you have given us.

They made little toy drones and they sent one to Obama, but they also reverse-engineered the big drone, and they are now producing them. They are also working with the Venezuelans to build a drone factory in Venezuela.

So these drones are in the hands of all kinds of governments as well as non-government entities. We should think that what goes around, comes around.

We don’t have to wait, though, for a drone to come at us from the hands of an enemy in a foreign land, because we already have drones here at home. Raise your hand if you think there are lots of drones, like thousands of drones, already being used here in the U.S. [many hands] And raise your hands if you don’t think there are so many drones here in the U.S. [two hands]

You two people have the right answer. That is because we don’t have thousands of drones flying in the airspace. Yet.

Let’s look at why. The airspace is controlled by the Federal Aviation Administration, FAA. One of their mandates is to keep our airspace safe, and they take that mandate very seriously. So they have been giving out permits to different entities in small numbers.

Unfortunately, they haven’t wanted to reveal to us, the public, how many permits they’ve given out, who they’ve been given out to. It took a lawsuit and a Freedom of Information Act request by the Electronic Frontier Foundation to start getting some of this information. So we now know that there have been over 700 permits given out, but only 300 of them are active right now. That some of the entities that have those permits are government agencies, like the FBI, Homeland Security, the Border Patrol. The Border Patrol is already using them on the southern and the northern borders.

We also know that some of the companies that are making the drones have gotten permits to test them here. Some of the universities—and many of them are state universities that work with the military on the drone research—have permits. And about a dozen police stations have gotten
permits for the experimental use of drones.

There is something called the drone lobby, and they are very unhappy with the FAA. They say,

Come on, guys. We’re losing a market already in Iraq, and who knows how long we’ll have this market in Afghanistan. We need to sell more of these drones. And, yes, we’re trying to sell more overseas, but we need a domestic market.

So the lobby does what lobbies do, which is, they lobby Congress. And they were so successful at lobbying Congress that there is now, believe it or not, a Drone Caucus in the Congress. A Drone Caucus in Congress, think about that. This is a group of 58 people, mostly Republicans, but also Democrats—and it includes some liberal Democrats—who feel, as in their mission statement, that there is an

urgent need to rapidly develop and deploy more unmanned systems in support of ongoing civil, military, and law enforcement operations.

So the drone lobby wrote the legislation, they gave it to their buddies in the Drone Caucus, the Drone Caucus pushed it through Congress, and President Obama signed it on Valentine’s Day, 2012. A big gift to the drone industry. This legislation says that the FAA must open up the airspace to drones by September 2015 at the latest for commercial drones, and for law enforcement it must be before that. Already, right now, the FAA is speeding up this process.

The drone industry is looking at all the different places that it can sell these drones. There are all kinds of ideas for the commercial use of drones. FedEx would love its own fleet of drones. There are restaurants that say they would like to deliver your lunch by a drone, although nobody can figure out how to keep it hot or how to keep you from stealing the drone once you got your sandwich.

But the drone manufacturers are really drooling at the idea of police stations, because there are 18,000 police stations across this country, and they would love to have every police station have their own fleet of drones.

Of the police stations that are already experimenting with drones, one is outside of Houston, Texas. It’s the Montgomery County police station. They have a cute little drone that’s worth a couple of hundred thousand dollars. You might say,

How can a little police station have a couple of hundred thousand dollars to buy a little drone?

Anybody have an idea? Very good. Homeland Security. Homeland Security is taking your tax dollars, my tax dollars, our tax dollars and giving grants to police stations so they can buy these drones. This is like a drug pusher saying,

Hey, little girl, wouldn’t you like to try a little bit of this?

get you hooked on the drones, and then get the other police stations in the area to say,

Hey, we want some drones, too.

What would these drones be used for? The Montgomery County folks were very excited about their new drone, and they held a press conference to show it off. The CEO of the company, called Vanguard Defense, was also very proud of selling the drone. He said,

It’s supposed to be used for things like search-and-rescue missions, but it could also be weaponized with what we call “less lethal systems.”

So let me tell you what some of these “less lethal systems” could be. Tasers that electrocute suspects on the ground, beanbag firing guns called stun batons, grenade launchers, tear gas, rubber bullets, or even a 12-gauge shotgun. Of course, they can also be equipped with very fancy surveillance kind of equipment: they can be equipped with thermal imaging, facial recognition techniques, Wi-Fi networking, cracking capabilities, and systems to intercept text messages and phone calls.

The sheriff was there at the press conference and he said,

You know, no matter what we do in law enforcement, somebody’s going to question it. But we’re going to do the right thing, and I can assure you of that.

Are you feeling reassured? Neither am I. I think with these drones everything is in place for a 24/7 surveillance society that would profoundly change the nature of life in this country.

So what are we going to do about it? My organization, CODEPINK, decided that one of the first things we could do was bring together folks in Washington to look at the drones that were being used overseas and the drones that are being used at home and might well in the future be used in the many, many thousands. In fact, there are predictions that in the next 15 years there would be 20,000 or 30,000 drones in our airspace.

We came up with some ideas for some campaigns. I’ll just talk about some of them now. These include ramping up the visibility of the protests against the drones. For the last couple of years there have been some organizations, like my group, CODEPINK, like Catholic Workers, Veterans for Peace, and some of the other folks in the peace movement who have been going to the Air Force bases, protesting outside the bases, trying to talk to the drone pilots, getting media attention, and raising awareness in the communities. Because, you know, by international law the places where the drones are being piloted and also manufactured would be considered legitimate targets for our enemies.

So they have not been only protesting outside the bases; they have been walking onto the bases, they have been risking arrest, they have been arrested, they have been using their trials as a way to publicize the horrendous use of these weapons, to bring in experts in international law, and to try to create a venue to talk about the violations of international law and the grotesque drone program. So we need to step up the protests, the visibility, the media attention.

We had a number of international law experts who were at the conference, and they said,

You might want to take lethal drones out of the hands of the military and the CIA. But we recommend that you start with the issue of the CIA, because, according to all international law, the CIA is a nonmilitary organization, and there is no justification for the CIA to have these kinds of lethal drones.

In fact, the law experts tell us that the CIA personnel and the private contractors who work directly with the CIA by international law are considered unlawful combatants. You’ve heard that term before with reference to the Taliban. Now you know the CIA are unlawful combatants.

You might also be asking,

What is the UN doing? Why isn’t the UN trying to stop the U.S.?

For the years the UN did come out and condemn this program. The person in the UN who is the special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings has been saying over and over that This is just wrong.

But nobody in the U.S. government has paid much attention to the UN. But just in June of this year it came up at the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva. The head of the UN Human Rights Commission for the first time spoke out against the U.S. drone program, and they commissioned a 28-page report extremely damning of the U.S. That report says that the Obama administration must justify why they are assassinating people rather than capturing them, and it calls for accountability, justice, and reparations for the victims and their families.

Then there is also the issue in Geneva of arms control and how do you get weapons like these banned at the United Nations. There is a group of scientists that is horrified by this use of drones.

And they’re also horrified by what they see coming down the pike, because they say this drone technology is just in its beginning stages, and that this is the stage of the Wright brothers in terms of the airplane. They tell us that what is being researched and produced in research facilities are drones that do not even need a pilot in the remote cockpit. They wouldn’t need a pilot at all. These would be autonomous drones without, as they say, a human in the loop. They would be preprogrammed and they would go off and kill on their own. And they would have the ability to call in other drones—big ones, small ones—in what they call a swarm.

So these scientists are trying to bring this to the United Nations. They’re looking at the models that were done successfully in the case of banning landmines and cluster bombs, and they are trying to stop the use of autonomous lethal drones and to get some regulations for the use of all kinds of lethal drones. So we are supporting them in their activities.

Then there’s the issue of drones at home. In this I think there is a lot we can do, because it’s not just folks who might call themselves progressive, it’s not just folks who care about the lives of people in places like Pakistan and Yemen. It’s folks who care about privacy here at home. And that, fortunately or unfortunately, is a much broader community. It includes libertarians, it includes Republicans, it includes Ron Paul supporters. So it is quite a large universe. In fact, some of you might have heard the statements of some folks like Charles Krauthammer, a neocon, who wrote a piece called “Rifles in the Air, America.” He said,

The first American who shoots down a drone that’s hovering over his house will be a folk hero.

I don’t know if those in the peace community want to clap for shooting down anything, but we do understand the sentiment. And there are hackers who can in other ways bring down drones and are already very excited about that chance. In fact, there is a professor and his students from the University of Austin who just hacked down a drone that the university was producing. And they showed how easily it can be done, with just a thousand dollars’ worth of equipment.

My organization, CODEPINK, has been working with a very conservative organization called The Cato Institute. You might know about The Cato Institute because they took lot of money from the Koch brothers. We certainly do not agree with them on a lot of other issues, but in this issue we are on the same page. In fact, we co-authored an op-ed piece that said that we want the government to pass legislation that says that no government agency, including Homeland Security, would be allowed to give grants to any police department for the use of drones. And Rand Paul has introduced legislation saying that law enforcement agencies cannot use drones to invade our privacy. So we have some unlikely, some strange bedfellows that we can work with on this.

We are also telling people around the country to call their police departments and ask if they have drones, if they have any plans to use drones, and tell them you do not want them to use drones. And we are also asking people in their communities to introduce legislation into their city councils to make their cities drone-free zones.

I just want to end by saying that some of you might have seen me get dragged out of a place in Washington, D.C., recently where the counterterrorism chief, John Brennan, was giving his justification for this drone policy. This is a man who called our drone policy “just, wise, surgically precise and ethical.” Well, I couldn’t sit in that audience and hear that, and I had to get up and say something. Because I don’t know how anybody could call this policy ethical. It just reflects such a huge problem that we have, whether it’s a Democrat or a Republican in office, that we are an economy, we are a country that is run by a military-industrial complex, and that we have a war economy.

I was just in Hood River [Oregon]. I was speaking, and an engineer came up to me afterwards and said, “Can we talk?” He worked in a drone factory. He said that he hates it, that the other engineers hate it. “But,” he said,

there’s no other work for people like me. And there’s no way to use this technology in a positive way that is economically viable, because it’s only viable with the millions and millions of dollars we get from the Pentagon.

So the task before us is much, much greater than grounding the lethal drones or stopping drones from invading our privacy at home. It’s the much, much bigger question of how do we turn from a foreign policy and economy that is based on war and militarism into a foreign policy and an economy that is based on peace, that is based on life-affirming activities, that is based on regenerating this planet that we have so destroyed, that is based on showing love and kindness and generosity to each other and to people around the world. So let’s build that kind of life-affirming economy and that life-affirming foreign policy that we so desperately need in this country and we so desperately need to show people around the world.

Thank you so much.

For information about obtaining CDs, MP3s, or transcripts of this or other programs, please contact:

David Barsamian
Alternative Radio
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Not a drop to drink

Wed, 12 Sep 2012 01:16:15 GMT

Maude Barlow
Denver, CO
January 27, 2012

available from Alternative Radio

You can listen to Maude Barlow speak for herself here.

Maude Barlow is the National Chairperson of The Council of Canadians, Canada’s largest public advocacy organization, and the co-founder of the Blue Planet Project, working internationally for the right to water. She is the recipient of the Right Livelihood Award, the alternative Nobel Prize and the Citation for Lifetime Achievement, Canada’s highest environmental award. She served as the first Senior Advisor on water issues for the United Nations. She’s the author of many books, including Blue Gold and Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis.

I’m going to talk a little about the global situation and then come back here to the U.S. and to Colorado. And then I’m going to talk about what I think we need to do about the water crisis. If I’m a little negative at first, forgive me. I’ll get positive later. But I think it’s really important, particularly for young people.

Forgive me, because I hate people my age who say to young people, “Oh, my, it’s the end of everything.” Well, it isn’t, of course. We’ve got lots we can do. But I do think it’s important to have the courage to say the truth about the situation that we’re in, so I will spend a little bit of time doing that.

And that is to say this: That back in Grade 6 pretty well everyone in the world learned a lesson that was wrong. Our teachers weren’t lying, but it was wrong. That lesson was that you can’t run out of water; that we have a hydrologic cycle with a limited but finite specific amount of water, and it goes around and around in the cycle, and it can’t go anywhere and you can’t—maybe we started to realize you can pollute it, but that’s really as far as far as we got.

What we know now is that that’s not true. We are a planet running out of water, running out of accessible, clean water. I have a PowerPoint that shows the Earth maybe about this big stripped of its water, and beside it is a little around ball, and that shows all the water in the world to scale. But beside that is a tiny dot you can hardly see, and that’s the available fresh water in our world. What are we doing with it? Where is it going? We’re polluting it, of course. That’s one of the big things. We are putting the equivalent of sewage and toxins into our water systems every year equivalent to all the weight of all 7 billion of us on the planet, every single year. And we are also using water far faster as we become so-called more sophisticated, more urban, more so-called developed. The population is growing, but the use of water is doubling at the rate of population. So it’s not that we don’t have enough water for all. It’s that we don’t have enough water for the uses to which we are putting it.

We are also displacing water massively. We’re extracting our rivers to death to grow inappropriate crops and commodities in deserts and so on. We have a global trade system, and I want to tell you about something called virtual water trade. Virtual water is the water that is used to produce a commodity or to produce computers or cars or whatever. There’s water used in mining and energy, particularly like fracking or the more-difficult-to- get-at energy. All this water, if it’s then either destroyed or is exported out of the watershed with the export, it’s gone permanently from the watershed. One of the reasons that I have opposed these global trade agreements and the whole notion of unlimited growth and exponential free trade, more stuff, more growth, is that we are destroying our water system, because we grow things with it and then ship it away.

Then we’re pumping our groundwater faster than we can replenish it, with technology we did not have 50 years ago. A brand-new study on groundwater taking says that we’re doubling our exponential use and abuse of groundwater every 20 years. Several examples come to mind. The Ogallala Aquifer that runs down the spine of the western U.S. that produces most of the food here is only producing half the food it was producing in the 1970s. And the Ogallala center of the Department of Agriculture here in the U.S. says that it will be in this lifetime that it will actually run out. They say there’s no question about if it will. It absolutely will. It’s a question of when. There’s another study on groundwater takings that said that if the Great Lakes water, for instance, is being pumped as quickly as groundwater around the world, the Great Lakes could be bone dry in 80 years. I think that’s an absolutely stunning statistic.

One of the things that’s happening, then, of course, is that we’re pumping water out of aquifers, out of rivers, out of lakes, and we are sending them to big cities. When we say cities, 5, 10, 20, 30 million people. And if those cities are anywhere near the ocean, we’re dumping that water into the ocean, we’re not returning it to the land. So we are depleting the land of water sources and we are creating desertification in over 100 countries in the world. This same study on groundwater takings said that probably at least a quarter of the cause of rising oceans is not climate change as we have understood it. Rather, it is the shifting of land-based water into the ocean. It’s the dumping of freshwater, which then becomes salinated water. And if you think that desalination is an easy answer, just take it back. It is not. It’s expensive, it’s energy-intensive, and it puts a terrible polluting brine back into the ocean.

So what we’re hearing from scientists is that we’re not just experiencing drought—you will hear the word “drought”—but in fact we’re running out of water in many parts of the world. China has used so much of its water to produce its so-called industrial miracle, to send running shoes and toys all over the world. There are 4,000 cities in China in danger of having to be deserted because of the encroachment of desert. Twenty-two countries in Africa are in crisis. Every single country in the Middle East is slated for the end of water. We’re not talking water shortages. The end of water. Australia, the Murray-Darling, the major river system, no longer reaches the ocean. They had a little bit of a reprieve last year with the floods. But this is a perfect example of this virtual water. Huge industrial farms, great big agribusinesses have built up all along the Murray-Darling, and they suck the water up, they grow cotton, they grow rice, they produce wine, and they ship it all over the world, and it is shipped out of the water system. This very sophisticated, so-called, First World country is absolutely running out of water very quickly. India, Mumbai, is hitting the bottom of its water table.

The image that I want you to have is of a bathtub. There’s lots of water in the bathtub, and there are people around the bathtub and they have blindfolds on and they’ve got straws and they’re sucking the water out of the bathtub. If you could see this coming, one and one and two and two, that would be one thing. But when you have exponential overuse or exponential environmental destruction, you don’t see it coming fast enough. These people around the bathtub are getting lots of water. There’s lots of water for everybody until there’s no water for anybody. This is the image that we need to have in our mind, that we are not replacing this water in the ground.

Mexico City is sinking. They took all the water from underneath the city—it’s called subsidence—and now literally—churches are kind of half falling into the ground. And the U.S. The U.S. Midwest, the U.S. Southwest, you know the story here in Colorado. It’s very important that we understand. The RDC, our Resource Defense Council, says that there are now at least 40 states that face in either the immediate or in the not too distant future a reality of water crisis in this country. I find it astounding, in all of our countries, my country and yours, we still have federal elections in which the word “water” is never mentioned. The discussion of water just doesn’t take place. I think, Why are we talking energy only? Why aren’t we talking about our dwindling water supplies?

What we’re finding, of course, is that with this crisis coming—and, of course, it’s affecting in them different ways around the world—we have a number of conflicts growing. The first, of course, is between those who can afford lots of water for whatever they want and those who cannot. There’s a new study from the World Health Organization that says that in the Global South every three and a half seconds a child dies of waterborne disease. It is simply the biggest killer of children, far more than accidents, HIV-AIDS, and war put together. The lack of clean water, the lack of access to accessible water is the number one killer of children in the world. This is growing as the gap between rich and poor grows.

You might want to know, and I think we need to say, however, that it’s not just in the Global South. Or should I say, the Global South is not just in other countries. It’s right here in North America. A few years ago the City of Detroit cut off the water to 42,000 families in inner-city Detroit. We think the numbers are probably closer to 90,000 families now. They are eking out a water living the way people in villages in the Global South eke out water, having to go and try to find it, buy it, whatever. And social services have come in and taken a number of their children away. So this issue is growing here. As we see a growing gap between rich and poor, growing in Europe, growing in Canada, growing in the U.S., and as we see water getting more and more expensive, which is happening, we are going to see water haves and have-nots in the so-called First World as well.

Then we have nation states looking outside their borders for new supplies of water, just the way they look outside their borders for secure energy supplies. That’s what the whole debate around the Keystone pipeline to the U.S. from Canada is about. I love it when American politicians say, “We need a domestic secure source of energy.” And we say, “Wait a minute. That’s Canadian. Okay, all right, you can have it.” Actually, we give it away in NAFTA, so it’s not really Canadian anymore. Which is funny. We all kind of smile when we hear that this is domestic energy. But it’s all owned by the big energy companies; it has nothing to do with nation states anymore anyway. So countries are looking outside of their own borders.

And one of the things we’re seeing are land and water grabs. There has been land twice the size of the United Kingdom bought up by either investment companies, hedge fund companies, or countries, even countries like China and India, but certainly wealthier countries like Saudi Arabia and so on, buying up land and water for a future time when they don’t have the ability to grow food for their own people and don’t have the water they need for their own needs.

We also have conflict growing between the needs and demands of big cities and rural communities, indigenous communities, and nature. So we’re plundering our wilderness and our rural communities for water to pull into large cities. Mexico City has put pipelines into indigenous lands and just confiscated the water. You’ve got to start thinking of water as gold. That’s why I called my first book on water Blue Gold, because you will see, actually, armed fortresses, armed guards and dogs and guns around these water sources, because they are becoming contested the way gold mines or energy sources are.

But I think the biggest debate that we’re having and the one I’ve been most deeply involved in, is the issue as to whether water is a commodity to be put on the open market, like oil and gas or electricity or running shoes or whatever, and sold to the highest bidder, or is water a commons, a human right, a public trust, is it something that is a shared heritage of humanity and of the Earth, because I don’t think we can separate them. Is water a resource for our convenience and profit, or is water the essential element in the living ecosystem that gives us life? This is a very intense struggle that we’re having.

It takes a number of forms. One of them is around utilities, water services. We’ve had intense fights. Colleagues in Bolivia have got rid of not one but two big transnational water companies. I remember being in a place called Orange Farm in South Africa, poverty as far as you can see, rats in the gutters, kids with no shoes, no water anywhere, and burning garbage. But suddenly the miracle that to every block of these tarpaper shacks is a state-of-the-art pipe bringing beautiful clean water. But between the pipe and the tap is a state-of-the-art water meter. The only way you can get at the water is to get an electronic key charged up, and you have to pay for it. With unemployment at around 80% in that community, nobody can afford it. I can remember standing with one of the activists there, who said, “It gives new meaning to the old saying, ‘Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink.’” So the women take the vases or the containers on their heads and walk the 5 miles to the polluted water source, which is why we see the diseases like cholera coming back.

Then there’s bottled water. We’ve got bottled water fights all over the world. I noticed here in the theatre that only bottled water is allowed in here. So I just want you to know I broke the rule. I have tap water. If you were to take just the single bottles that people drank in the world last year, the little individual ones, the little plastic ones, and put them end to end, they would reach to the moon and back 65 times. It is absolutely insane to be paying for and taking care of source water and have clean, safe water coming out of our taps and have to turn to bottled water. That’s not to say there aren’t parts of the world where you cannot get clean water out of at your tap. I understand that. But that’s not the case here. The bottled water industry and the bottled water struggle is a huge one.

Then we have what are called water markets, or sometimes called water rights. We have the beginning of that here in Colorado. But it can be taken to extremes. In Australia what they did was—they thought this would make everything more efficient—they converted the licenses to these big companies to water rights, and then they said, “You will trade them, but we think, because you’re going to be able to sell them and make money, you will use less water and you will sell the excess and everybody will be happy.” That’s not what happened. The big companies bought out the little companies’ water rights and the small farmers’ water rights. Then the big investors started coming in, and then big foreign investors started coming in. Now the Labour government tried to buy back some of these rights because the Murray-Darling river system was desperate, but they couldn’t afford it. The price of water had risen so high that the government could not afford to bring this water back.

Chile has gone further than any country in the world in privatizing water. This is a direct legacy of the Pinochet regime, because he started this. But you can actually have public water auctions. They have water auctions where mining companies—and I hate to tell you, it’s Canadian, they’re the worst in the world—the Canadian mining companies are there outbidding local first nations or tribal people or communities or farmers or whatever and just buying up that water. So it can go to an extreme and is moving into areas of real private accumulation. T. Boone Pickens, the gazillionaire energy guy in Texas, is buying up huge amounts of the Ogallala Aquifer and holding on to it. I’m not sure what for. I think he’s in his late eighties, so I’m not sure what he’s going to do.

So we have a huge corporate grab. If you look at the chart for the demand—and this is my last stat I’m going to give you—this is a study that was just done by all the major water guzzlers, Coca Cola and Pepsi and Nestlé and the big food companies. They coordinated their research and they said by 2030—that’s not a very long time away—the demand in our world for water will outstrip supply by 40%. It’s an absolutely terrifying statistic. If you look at the chart, the demand goes straight up and the supply is going straight down. The private sector knows that there’s money to be made in water and there’s also power to be held. As one investment banker told a big conference in London, England, last year, “The water crisis provides an opportunity to make buckets and buckets of money.”

Now Colorado. I don’t have to tell you that you have a problem, we have a problem here in this area. The reprieve last year with the snowpacks was just that. It was just a reprieve. And I don’t think it’s going to be matched this year. I sure didn’t see much snow, coming in here today. Lake Meade is perilously near the level at which the Secretary of the Interior may have to declare a water shortage and impose severe water restrictions. There’s a study by the Scripps Institute of Oceanography that says with climate-change models they can say absolutely that the runoff in this area will decline by between 10% and 30% over the next two decades. As I say, the NRDC has come out with a new study. If you go to their website, they actually have a map of the U.S. showing all the areas of drought and coming drought and over that they overlay where the population is growing. It tells a story that is something we need to know.

Here’s something I want to say really strongly to you. We need to think about what we’re doing with our water. One of the things here in the U.S. is that you’re growing a great deal of food in places that don’t have water to grow this food and you’re shipping it away. A third—most Americans don’t know this—a third of your daily water withdrawals, a third, leave not only the watershed but leave the country altogether. You’re a net water exporter through commodity trade. This is things like biofuel, ethanol, and that kind of thing. These are the questions that we’re going to have to grapple with that people don’t particularly want to.

I also want to raise the concern of fracking. And then I’m going to stop telling you about problems and start telling you about what I think we need to do. The worst thing you could do, it seems to me—well, second worst, okay. The first is to build a pipeline over the owing Ogallala Aquifer, that is already dramatically distressed, and send the dirtiest oil in the world through it, this corrosive oil that absolutely, I promise you, will spill and would spill into the Ogallala. Except that the President has made that one very good decision to not allow it. But I guess the second dumbest thing is to allow fracking in a state where the water crisis is as perilous as this one is. There are now 48,000 fracked wells already in Colorado and each well uses between 1 and 5 million gallons. Just try to do the math here, the amount of water.

We’re not just talking here about water that’s used and then put back into the system in a healthy state. As you know, fracking requires the use of chemicals. In one study in New York the EPA there couldn’t get the answer, as you know, from the manufacturers about what chemicals are in the fracking fluid. So they did their own study by fracking sites, and they listed 257 toxins and carcinogens that are in the water in the fracking areas. It takes 10 pages to list what they found in this one study. I am Canadian, but I also chair the board of Food and Water Watch here in the U.S. We’re calling for a full moratorium on fracking. We think that it’s absolutely the most dangerous development.

So what do we do with this very bleak reality? I’m actually hopeful. My husband always says, “Do people willingly come to hear you speak? Why do they do that on a Friday night?” You could go to a movie or out to dinner. But if you take a hard look at it—we have a wonderful writer, Margaret Atwood—you may know her writing—in Canada, and she says, “The world seen clearly is seen through tears,” which I think is gorgeous. Whenever anybody gets weepy over something that they feel passionate about, I always pull that quote out, because I think it’s true.

The world right now—we are in trouble ecologically, from the fish in the sea—90% of the big fish are gone— the hunt for minerals, and it is mineral hunting, as water mining is water hunting. I see this bottled water. In a movie that just came out in Europe—I think I’m probably going to get sued—I called Nestlé “water hunters.” But they are. They’re aggressive, seeking out the last remaining non-fossil, clean fuels and forests and minerals and fish in the sea.

We really have to ask ourselves some hard questions about the whole notion of growth. It’s why I continue to talk about the issue of trade. We continue to get deeply involved in these trade agreements. The U.S. under Obama was going to question trade, he was going to take a revisit to NAFTA. None of that has happened. He’s now aggressively promoting a number of trade agreements, as is my government. We have a very, very right-wing government in Canada right now. They’re actively, aggressively promoting globalization, open markets, deregulation. So I think of Grover Norquist, who was the tax adviser to George Bush, who used to say the appropriate size of government is small enough to put it in a bathtub so that any time you need to pull the plug, you can just do that and down it goes.

So big picture, I think we have to really question this mantra of growth and we’re going to have to come back to more sustainable economies. That doesn’t we’re all going to live like our great grandparents. Nobody is saying that. But something has to change. We need to start asking ourselves some very hard questions. Here in Colorado there are going to be big questions around big corporate farms that export your water away versus more sustainable local farms. There are going to be hard questions around snowmaking and that whole industry. I’ve seen it up front. I was at the Sundance—I know, a different state but same thing—a couple of years ago for a film done on my work. And just the condos they were putting up. Every condo had a dishwasher and a washer and a dryer and shower heads that really poured the water down. This is in a state that doesn’t have water. We need to think really carefully about what we’re doing and about the notion that we continue to grow.

But what to do immediately around this? I think we need to come to some practical guidelines based on some principles. I would offer you these three, and then I’d like to talk with you, not at you. We in our movement have really struggled through a lot of work to try to come to a consensus on these, because we feel it’s very important to take the time to have the principles; otherwise your policies and your laws and your solutions are all over the place and they’re not going to work.

The first principle is that water is a sacred commons and a public trust. We go back to the notion of the commons. The commons is a very well old and yet a very new term again, and I think you’re going to be hearing a lot more about it. The enclosure of the commons in England was during a time when the peasants were allowed to hunt and fish and grow their small crops on nobility land. But it was understood that they had a right to live. Then the laws came in in the 1600s that enclosed the commons, and many people died.

So many of us talk about the modern enclosure of the commons as being this move to privatize absolutely everything. What are carbon markets if it isn’t a way of trading pollution and privatizing the air? What are water markets, if not that? So the modern commons, the language we’re trying to bring back now, is based on the notion that certain national resources, air and water and oceans, are central to our very existence, and therefore the governments have the responsibility to exercise their fiduciary role to make sure that they’re governing in the interests of all of their people, not just a privileged few, and they don’t allow a privileged few to have particular and special access to these waters or these commons.

And the public trust doctrine is basically the legal basis, it’s the legal framework that you use to articulate and to accept and to adopt the notion of the commons. For instance, the notion of a public trust is that shoreline must be open to all. Even though there might be private homes along there, nobody can stop you from walking up and down a shoreline or enjoying the water of a shoreline. So this notion that we have the right to claim certain commons for all of us because if we don’t, many will die while others have privileged access. This is going to be very difficult to move to in Colorado, because you have moved some direction in the area of water rights, and it’s very entrenched in the American West. It’s far less entrenched in the American East, and particularly in New England. But I believe that eventually every state in the U.S. is going to have to come up with a long-term plan, a statewide plan, a watershed-wide plan, that clarifies that the people here are the keepers of the watershed and the sacred water commons and set out priorities for access.

I’ll give you an example. I worked with a government in Vermont. Four years ago they realized that there was a lot of free-for-all taking of their groundwater, particularly bottled-water companies coming in and just helping themselves. So the government, with myself and a few others, drafted legislation, and then it was unanimously adopted, that said that their groundwater is a public trust, belongs to all Vermonters, belongs to the ecosystem and belongs to future generations. Those are the owners of the water. They actually set priorities in time of shortage. One of those priorities is water for local food production rather than for food production for commercial export. As I say, this is tough to do, and they don’t have the big, big agribusiness interests that exist here or in California. But I think it’s a model really worth looking at.

So that’s the first, that water is a sacred commons and a public trust. That doesn’t mean there isn’t an economic use for water or an economic purpose for water. Of course there is. But anyone who uses water—and in Vermont they say if you’re going to access it, you have to have a license and you have to ensure for the owners, the people of Vermont, that you’re not hurting that water. They’ve already used it to challenge a nuclear waste plant. So it’s a law with teeth and it’s a law that’s moving.

The second is that water is a fundamental human right. You might say that’s a motherhood and I would say, I would have agreed with you, but I’ve been involved in the fight too long to know that actually not a motherhood. We have had a very, very intense struggle over this issue. Up against us were big corporations, the bottled-water companies, the big utilities like Suez and Veolia, the World Bank, wealthy countries. My country has consistently opposed the right to water. Part of it is that the U.S., Canada, Great Britain, Australia have this notion that they don’t want to extend the concept of rights to second and third generations, so more community-based and so on, so they just resist any new human right. But it’s been a terrible uphill battle.

We thought it was going to be another 20 years at the UN. A couple of years ago I had the honor of serving as the senior adviser on water to the 63rd president of the General Assembly, Father Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann from Nicaragua. He and I and the ambassador from Bolivia, Pablo Solon, came together to promote the right to water at the UN. Ambassador Solon, had the courage in the summer of 2010 to put a resolution to the General Assembly, which was adopted. I was there the day it got adopted. They had to vote on it because many countries were opposed. When you’re at the UN and they’re voting, they do it from their chairs. It’s all electronic, up on a big board. I was convinced we were going to lose. I was holding hands with my staff and saying, “Don’t worry. We’ll come back another time. We’ll win another time,” blah, blah, blah. Anyway, we won. And it was joyous and wonderful. And no country, even the U.S., not even my country, voted against. Forty-one abstained but 122 voted for it and it was adopted. And then only months later the Human Rights Council also adopted a similar resolution but spelled out the obligations on governments.

We had a test case within a couple of months. The Kalahari Bushmen of Botswana have been treated horribly by their government, which considers them an embarrassing anachronism because they still live the way their ancestors did. The government wants turn the Kalahari into an eco-theme park, and they found diamonds and De Beers wants in. So they started removing the people and making them live off the desert. The Bushmen kept coming back, so they smashed their water bore wells. In a series of court cases they won the right to go back to the desert but not to their water. But what was so lovely is when these two resolutions were adopted, the Kalahari Bushmen went back to the Supreme Court of Botswana and said, “We are armed with these two resolutions. We want the right to our water recognized.” The Supreme Court unanimously said, yes, you do, and forced government to allow them to go back to provide water, to reopen that bore well, and to pay them for never, ever all of the suffering that they’ve incurred but some of it. So it’s just a tremendous victory for us.

So that’s the second, that water is a human right. By the way, I’ve written a guide for the Great Lakes called “Our Great Lakes Commons: A People’s Guide for Saving Great Lakes.” What we want to do is have the Great Lakes named a common, as a human right, a public trust and a protected bioregion. So if you want to go to our website, canadians.org. and get a model of what this might look like, I think this could work for any watershed.

The third, then, that the sacred water commons has rights, too. The water itself and watersheds themselves and other species have rights beyond their use to us. Most human—and I would exempt indigenous peoples or first people’s in many places—but most “modern” humans, in the West particularly, have seen nature, and in this case water, as a resource for us, for our use, for our convenience, for our profit. It’s time to put that behind us. When you see nature that way, then you’re going to take the hard path, to high technology, desalinizanation, big dams, and so on. If you take the soft path, you’re going to go water restoration, you’re going to take the path of conservation, of protection of source water. Martin Luther King said, “Legislation may not change the heart, but it will restrain the heartless.” Infrastructure investment, cutting our virtual export imprint, local, sustainable food production, and so on. There are ways and there are plans that we can build to conserve water and share. There’s another water for all if we treat it very differently. If we protect it and then we share it more equitably among us, we can save the world’s water. Many of us are challenging the whole notion of the marketization of nature, the commodification of nature.

When the UN gathers in Rio in June—this is the Rio+20—you’re going to hear a lot about something called “the green economy.” At first blush you’re going to think that must be good, it’s good for the economy and it’s green. But the image that the powers that be are bringing to this green-economy discussion is basically continued free trade, continued deregulation, continued unlimited growth, continued marketization and commodification of nature, but with friendly technology. “Oh, let’s trade that technology and let’s make lots of money on it.” I’m sorry to say this, but I think we’re going to have to build a fight against this notion, as it’s being promoted by the World Bank and others, of this green technology.

So we need instead a body of law that regulates human behavior in order to protect the integrity of the Earth and other species. Our human rights must be balanced against those of ecosystems and the Earth itself. What would it look like if the Gulf could sue BP? Think of it. At the moment, you know who can sue BP? Only those individual families and businesses that can prove that they lost property in the spill. Nobody can sue on behalf of the ecosystem or the aquatic life there or the future, the inability of people to live there in the future or just the general damage done to the local population.

We came together after the failure of the climate summit in Copenhagen two years ago in Bolivia and we came out of it with something called the Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth. We are deeply hoping that one day it will take its place alongside the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as the manifesto for our time. I do believe every now and then humans take an evolutionary step forward, and this is one in which I think this is happening.

So I’m just going to finish the formal part of this with two quotes, and then I would like to talk with you. The first is from a man named Cormac Cullinan. Cormac is the person who wrote the first draft of the Universal Declaration. He’s a lawyer from South Africa, an environmental and human rights lawyer. And he says this about the rights of nature:

The day will come when the failure of our laws to recognize the right of a river to flow, to prohibit acts that destabilize the Earth’s climate, or to impose a duty to respect the intrinsic value and right to exist of all life will be as reprehensible as allowing people to be bought and sold. We will only flourish by challenging these systems and claiming our identity as well as assuming our responsibilities as members of the Earth community.

The other quote I want to leave you with is from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. I loved it before the films, but I did love the films. It’s Gandalf, and he’s facing that night when all evil may triumph over all good. He’s talking about being a steward. I’m speaking to all of you who have come here tonight because you wouldn’t be here if you weren’t stewards. I want to share this with you. I’ve kind of got Tolkien on the brain because not long ago we took a group of journalists and people up to the tar sands in northern Alberta. We took a bus and we toured and we took them up in a helicopter. I came back to Edmonton and we held a press conference. And I called the tar sands Canada’s Mordor from the Lord of the Rings. So the next day in the Edmonton Journal, front page, it had my quote, and then it had a photo of Mordor from the film and a photo of the Syncrude site in the tar sands. So help me, you wouldn’t know which was which. There were just no Hobbits in the Syncrude site. Anyway, one of the energy poobahs said—he should have said, “There’s no such thing, and that’s a terrible thing to say.” What he said was, “It’s not as bad as Mordor,” which I thought was not the smartest thing to say. Anyway, here is Gandalf speaking as a steward that night, because much, of course, of The Lord of the Rings is about an assault on nature.

He says,

The rule of no realm is mine…. But all worthy things that are in peril as the world now stands, those are my care. And for my part, I shall not wholly fail of my task…if anything passes through this night that can still grow fair or bear fruit and flower again in days to come. For I also am a steward. Did you not know?

Thank you.

Q&A

The a question is about information. It’s easier to let water flow than get the information out. It’s been hard with the mainstream media. There are exceptions. I would say The New York Times has done a good job of telling the water crisis story. And I’ve seen some good reports here in Colorado as well. The questions that don’t get asked, though, are the deeper ones, the ones that get to the heart of what the problem is. So we have drought, so too many people chasing too little water, and leave it at that. Instead of saying, Why do some get access to so much? Why is it that the computer companies get to have—and this is in certain states—access to cheaper water than what residents pay? This is very common. If a state wants to lure industry, it will do it by lowering standards or lowering taxes for that industry or whatever, and in this case by saying, “We’ll give you water at a cheaper rate if you come and locate here.” Because they’re desperate to bring jobs. Those are the deeper questions about where is the water going.

I go back to this again and again. As we have built a global food trade so that food that could be grown a half a mile down the road and you could be using is shipped away and you’re buying stuff from halfway around the world, it’s insane. There’s nothing wrong with trade as long as it’s based on some common sense. There was a study done a couple years ago, and they compared the number of livestock from England that were shipped to Europe for slaughter for food and then the number of livestock from Europe to Great Britain. And it was about the same. So what’s the point? It’s terrible for the environment, it’s terrible for the animals. It doesn’t make any sense except if you’re trying to get the prices down, if you’re trying to make the farmers in Europe competitive against the farmers in Great Britain. Those are the kinds of questions we haven’t heard asked.

When you read about the Horn of Africa and you read about the terrible drought there and you hear about the suffering and the death, everybody just about has the same analysis: Too many people, drought, too few resources, and corruption. That’s what you’re going to hear over and over again. What you don’t hear is that the North American and European hedge funds and investment funds and wealthy countries have come in and bought up the best land and have access to the best water. And they help themselves to water, which is used to grow food for export, and the people there get left with none. That’s the stuff you’re not going to read, maybe, in The New York Times. I shouldn’t say. I don’t read it enough that I can say for sure. But I can sure speak about the Canadian media. You’re not going to read that in our mainstream newspapers.

That’s why we have to support ways of getting this information out. I would urge you to go to the website of Food and Water Watch, foodandwaterwatch.org, here in the U.S., because it has tremendous information on fracking, on the situation here, on food, who’s growing what food, who’s got privileged access.

We live in a world of haves and have-nots. And we have to look at the depletion in our resources in connection with the growing inequality in our world. We cannot separate them. That’s why in our movement we are trying to pull together environmentalists and scientists and those who are warning about the crisis over here, because they’ve been working in isolation, with those working on the human rights development issue over here. We’ve got to put it together. If the answer is, let’s find more money to dig more wells, but you’re running out of groundwater, that’s not the answer. If the answer is, we’ll ask those people to take care of their water, but they don’t have any sanitation and they’re desperately poor and they have to use the rivers to defecate in, that’s not the answer. You can’t have one without the other. So it’s not that you’re not reading that there is a water crisis. If you want to read it, it’s around there, it really is.

It’s the deeper political set of questions. And I find in all of our countries—I’m not just saying this for the U.S.—I’m finding the level of debate at the political level inane. I don’t have another word for it. It’s inane. I don’t mean there aren’t smart people running for office. It’s just that we’re not going to the deeper level of these questions. It’s as if people are afraid to tackle the underlying questions.

I know it’s a long answer, but I deeply agree with you. I think the information flow is very important, and that’s why this event is so important. And you go home and you talk to people and you share information. That’s how we build a movement.

The question is about here you have first in time, first in right. We have it in Alberta as well. You have it in most Western states in the U.S., whereas in the Eastern states they have more of a public trust kind of law. It’s going to be very controversial here, but I don’t think you’re going to be able to do anything else. I think it’s only going to be a matter of time before California and Colorado and Arizona and every single state is going to have to take a different approach to water. If they continue to allow water to be privatized, water rights to be entrenched to those who got there first, water to be traded and sold as a property, what you’re going to go find with time is that water is cut off to people, people who can’t afford it. The way it is in communities and villages in the Global South. It is not impossible to think of in North America or in Europe poor people not having access to basic water. Look, in Greece, where they’ve plummeted in their standard of living with these austerity measures and so on, there are people going hungry, there are people begging on the streets. It’s not impossible in the so-called First World to think of this.

We never had poor people in Canada. We had a very strong set of social safety nets. We still have public Medicare for all, health care for all, but we’ve lost a lot of others. We used to look like a big egg, with a large middle class and a fairly small population of poor, well served by a social security net and a fairly small group of wealthy. We’ve totally changed shape. We bought all the neoliberal, market-based ideals. And now we have a really entrenched wealthy group at the top and we look like a pear, with more and more of us falling out at the bottom. That’s the demographic shift that’s happening in our countries, and it’s happening dramatically. We’re either going to allow the continuation of this privatization and we’re going to see all the small farms go down and we’re going to see people without water access or we’re going to come to a fair way to allocate water. This first in time, first in right made sense when they did it, and it doesn’t make any sense anymore.

I read a bunch of stuff coming here, just to bring my mind up to date on Colorado. And I saw statements from a lot of officials who said some things fairly similar to what I’ve said tonight, that we’ve got to stop living the way we’ve been living, that we have to start living more fairly and justly, that we’ve got to bring a more just economic system to the water allocation here. I saw some statements that made me happy to see, because I thought it was the beginning of real soul searching. If you’re left, right, or center, if the people who are voting for you don’t have access to water, you’re going to be held responsible. So I do think there’s a sea change.

What I would like, and this is what I would hope would come out of this gathering here, is the nugget, the beginning of a movement to start to say, Let’s put out the alternative. Let’s not just say, These are the problems, and you, government, go fix it. No, no. We’re going to articulate the principles that would work here. We’ve done this, as I say, for the Great Lakes. A man named Jim Olson—some of you may know his name—is a lawyer in Traverse City, Michigan, who fought the case against a big bottled-water company in their community, Ice Mountain, but it’s owned by Nestlé. He’s a wonderful man and he’s done huge work on public trust. He and I presented to the International Joint Commission just before Christmas—this is the Canada-U.S. commission that oversees joint waters, all the binational waters, particularly the Great Lakes.

We said to them, Okay, there’s this agreement and there’s that agreement and, yes, there have been improvements in Lake Erie, although they’re going back now, and, yes, the eagles came back because you took away DDT. But, but, but, but. We’ve got fracking, we’ve got this tar-sands oil, we’ve got mining, we’ve got multipoint pollution, we’ve got more invasive species, we’ve got over-extraction. We’re losing the battle. We’re losing the battle because we don’t have a common language. We want the common language to be that these lakes belong to the people who live on them and love them. We want the common language that nobody has the right to hurt them in any way, no one has prior or preferential access, anybody using them for a commercial purpose has to answer to those who own the lakes, the people who live around them and on them. That aquatic life and other species have a right to live and thrive, that the lakes themselves have rights. We put this message.

And let me tell you, there were some left-wingers and some right-wingers in this group, and they loved it. Because it gave them a handle on a concept that they could start to put together to move forward with in terms of what would be an alternative. If we don’t put alternatives out, if we’re not articulating what could be different and why our vision is different, then I don’t think that we’re going to succeed fast enough. Because I am very worried about catching this crisis. I think it’s catchable, and I believe that hope is a moral imperative. But I also think that we’re up against time. I think it would be wonderful if out of this gathering came that desire to start to articulate this kind of language here. It will be met with skepticism. But to hell with it. They’re wrong.

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The surveillance state

Tue, 11 Sep 2012 22:54:30 GMT

Glenn Greenwald
Socialism 2012
Rosemont, IL
June 28, 2012

available from Alternative Radio

You can listen to Glenn Greenwald speak for himself here.

Glenn Greenwald is an attorney and the author of How Would a Patriot Act?, Great American Hypocrites, and Liberty and Justice for Some. He is the recipient of the Izzy Award from the Park Center for Independent Media for his “pathbreaking journalistic courage and persistence in confronting conventional wisdom, official deception, and controversial issues.” He also received an Online Journalism Award for Best Commentary for his coverage of U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning. Greenwald is a columnist and blogger at Salon.com and his articles appear in various newspapers and magazines.

The surveillance state hovers over any attempts to meaningfully challenge state or corporate power. It doesn’t just hover over it. It impedes it and deters it and chills it. That’s its intent; it does that by design. So understanding what the surveillance state is, how it operates and, most importantly, figuring out how to challenge it and undermine it and subvert it really is an absolute prerequisite to any sort of meaningful activism, to developing strategies and tactics for how to challenge state and corporate power.

To start this discussion, I want to begin with a little story that I think is illustrative and significant in lots of ways. The story begins in the mid-1970s, when there were scandals that were arising out of the Watergate investigation and the Nixon administration, and there were scandals surrounding the fact that, as it turned out, the Nixon administration and various law enforcement officials in the federal government were misusing their eavesdropping power. They were listening in on people who were political opponents, and they were doing so purely out of political self-interest, having nothing to do with legal factors or the business of the nation. This created a scandal.

Unlike today, the scandal 40 years ago, in the mid-1970s, resulted in at least some relatively significant reactions. In particular, a committee was formed in the Senate, and it was headed by Frank Church. He was a Democrat from Idaho and had been in the Senate as of this time for 20 years or so, was one of the most widely regarded senators, and was chosen because of that. He led the investigation into these eavesdropping abuses and to try to get to the bottom of the scandal.

One of the things he discovered was that these eavesdropping abuses were radically more pervasive and egregious than anything that had been known at the start of the investigation. It was by no means confined to the Nixon administration. In fact, it went all the way back to the 1920s, when the government first began developing the technological capability to eavesdrop on American citizens and heightened as the power heightened, through the 1940s, when World War II justified it, into the 1950s, when the Cold War did, and into the 1960s, when the social unrest justified surveillance. What Senator Church found was that literally every single administration, under both Democratic and Republican presidents, had seriously abused this power, not in isolated ways but systematically. This committee documented all the ways in which that was true. And the realization quickly emerged that allowing government officials to eavesdrop on citizens, without constraints or oversight, to do so in the dark, is a power that vests so much authority and leverage in those in power that it is virtually impossible for human beings to resist abusing that power. That’s how potent of a power it is.

But the second thing that he realized beyond just the general realization that this power has been systematically abused was that there was an agency that was at the heart of this abuse, and it was the National Security Agency. What was really amazing about the National Security Agency was that it had been formed 25 years before, back in 1949, by President Truman, and it was formed as part of the Defense Department, and was so covert that literally for two decades almost nobody in the government even knew that it existed, let alone knew what it did, including key senators like Frank Church. Part of his investigation—and it was actually a fairly radical investigation, fairly aggressive, even looking at it through cynical eyes and realizing that the ultimate impact wasn’t particularly grand, but the investigation itself was pretty impressive—was that he forced his way into the National Security Agency and found at as much as he possibly could about it.

After the investigation concluded, he issued all sorts of warnings about the surveillance state and how it was emerging and the urgency of only allowing government officials to eavesdrop or surveil citizens if they had all kinds of layers of oversight with courts and Congress. But he issued a specific warning about the National Security Agency that is really remarkable in terms of what he said. This is what he said, and you can find this anywhere online, in The New York Times, everywhere. He said it as part of a written report and then in an interview.

The National Security Agency’s capability could be turned around at any time on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter.

He continued,

There would be no place to hide. If a dictator ever took over the United States, the NSA could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back.

There are several things that I find extraordinary about that statement. For one, the language that he uses. This is not somebody who is a speaker at the Socialism 2012 conference saying these things. This was literally one of the people who was one of the most established institutional figures in American politics. He was in the liberal wing of the Democratic Party but very much in its mainstream for many years. He chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. And here he is warning the country about the dangers not just of the U.S. government but specifically about the national security state and using words like dictator and total tyranny and warning of the way in which this power could be abused such that essentially it would be irreversible. That once the government is able to monitor everything we do and everything we say, there’s no way to fight back because fighting back requires doing it away from their prying eyes.

If you look now, 30 years later, to where we are, not only would you never, ever hear a U.S. Senator stand up and insinuate that the national security state poses this grave danger or use words like tyranny and dictator to describe the United States the way that Frank Church did only 30 years ago, but now it’s virtually a religious obligation to talk about the national security state and its close cousin, the surveillance state, with nothing short of veneration.

Chris Hayes, who is an MSNBC host on the weekends, used the opportunity of Memorial Day to express the view, in a very tortured, careful, and pre-apologetic way, that maybe it’s the case that not ever single person who has ever served as an American soldier or enlisted in the American military is a hero. Maybe we can think about them in ways short of that. And this incredible controversy erupted. Condemnation poured down on him from Democrats, Republicans, conservatives, liberals alike, and he was forced in multiple venues over the course of the next week to issue one increasingly sheepish apology after another. That’s how radically our discourse has changed, so that you cannot talk about the national security state or the surveillance state in these kinds of nefarious terms the way that Frank Church, who probably knew more about it, did just a few decades ago.

The second remarkable aspect of Church’s quote to me is that the outcome of that investigation was a series of laws that were grounded in the principle that, as I said earlier, we cannot allow government officials to eavesdrop on American citizens or in any way to engage in surveillance without all kinds of oversights and checks, the most illustrative of which was the FISA law, that said that no government official can eavesdrop on our communications without first going to a court and proving to a court that we’re actually doing something wrong and getting the court’s permission before they can eavesdrop.

There was a similar controversy in the mid-2000s, in 2005, when The New York Times revealed that the Bush administration had been using the NSA to do exactly what Frank Church warned against, which is spying on the communications of American citizens. The outcome of that was not new laws or new safeguards to constrain these sorts of abuses; it was exactly the opposite. In 2008, the Democratic-led Congress, with the support of President Obama and most of the supporters of his in the Democratic Party, as well as almost all Republicans, basically gutted that law, repealed it in its core, and made it much, much easier for the government to eavesdrop on American citizens without constraints, and then immunized the nation’s telecoms that had participated in that illegal program. So you see the radically different attitudes that the U.S. has to surveillance just from 30 years ago, when abuses result in a whole variety of weak but still meaningful legal constraints, versus what we do now when we find out that the government is lawlessly spying on us, which is to act as quickly as possible to make it legal.

But the third part of why I think Frank Church’s statement is so remarkable is also the most important. If you look at what he said, he phrased his warning in a conditional sense. He said if A happens, then B. A was, if the NSA starts using its eavesdropping capabilities and not directing them at foreign nationals whom we suspect of spying but instead at the American people, then B will happen, B being we’ll essentially live under a dictatorship, there will be total tyranny, where the American people will be unable to fight back because this net of surveillance will cover what we do. What’s really remarkable is that that conditional that he warned against, the apparatus of the NSA being directed domestically and inwardly rather than outwardly, has absolutely come to pass. That is the current situation, that is the current circumstance of the United States.

The NSA, beginning in 2001 under George Bush, was secretly ordered to spy domestically on the communications of American citizens. It has escalated in all sorts of lawless, and now lawful, ways such that it is now a normal part of what that agency does. Even more significantly, the technology that it has developed is now shared by a whole variety of agencies, including the FBI, so that this surveillance net that Frank Church warned so stridently about in a way that if you stood up now, you would be immediately branded as sort of a shrill, self- marginalized radical, has come to be in all sorts of entrenched and legal ways.

There are a few ways to think about the surveillance state and to try to understand its scope and magnitude. I think the most effective way to do that is just to look at a couple of numbers and to use the most mainstream sources to do that as to where we are in terms of the American surveillance state. In 2010, the Washington Post published a three-part series called “Top Secret America,” written by their Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter, Dana Priest, and William Arkin. The first installment in that series looked at the national security state and the surveillance state and how it functions in the U.S. One of the sentences that appeared in this article—listen to this—said,

Every day collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion emails, phone calls and other types of communication.

That’s every day they intercept and store, they keep for as long as they want, 1.7 billion emails and other forms of telephonic communications.

William Binney was a fairly high-ranking NSA official for several decades. He resigned in the wake of 9/11 because he was so outraged that the NSA was starting to be turned against the American people. Recently he’s begun to speak out about the NSA’s abuses. He gave an interview on Democracy Now! three weeks ago, and this is what he said about surveillance under the Obama administration:

Surveillance has increased every year since 9/11. In fact, I would suggest that they have assembled on the order of 20 trillion transactions about U.S. citizens with other U.S. citizens.

Twenty trillion transactions have been assembled by the NSA and its related agencies about U.S. citizens interacting with other U.S. citizens. He then went on to add that that’s only emails and telephone calls, and not things like financial transactions or other forms of video surveillance. So that pretty much tracks what the Washington Post reported as well. If you’re storing 1.7 billion emails and telephone calls each and every day, it’s likely that you will fairly quickly reach the 20 trillion level that William Binney identified.

The most amazing thing about the surveillance state, given how incredibly ubiquitous it is and how incredibly menacing it is, is that we actually know very little about it. We’re almost back to the mid-1970s, when nobody even knew what the NSA was. The big joke in Washington, whenever anyone would mention the NSA, was that NSA stood for No Such Agency. It was just something that you were not permitted to talk about, even in government. No one knew what it did. We’re basically at that point. We get little snippets of information, like the two statistics that I just described, that give us a sense of just how sprawling and all-encompassing the surveillance state is, but we don’t know very much about who runs it, how it’s operated, at whom it’s directed, and who makes those decisions.

In fact, so clear is that lack of knowledge that there is an amazing controversy right now about the PATRIOT Act. You may remember in the aftermath of 9/11 the PATRIOT Act used to be something that was really controversial. In September-October of 2001, Congress enacted this law, and everyone ran around warning that it was this massive expansion of surveillance that was unlike anything we had ever seen before. It became the symbol of Bush-Cheney radicalism. Now the PATRIOT Act is completely uncontroversial. It gets renewed without any notice every 3 years, with zero reforms, no matter which party is in control.

There are two Democratic senators who are mainstream, loyal Democratic Party supporters. They’re President Obama supporters. They’re like Frank Church but even a little bit more mainstream within the Democratic Party. One is Ron Wyden of Oregon and the other is Mark Udall of Colorado. What these two Democratic Party senators have been doing for the last 3 years is running around warning that the PATRIOT Act is so much worse than anything that any of us thought all that time when we were objecting to it. And the reason it’s so much worse is because the U.S. Government has secretly interpreted what the PATRIOT Act permits it to do in terms of surveillance on American citizens in a way that’s completely unrelated to what the law actually says, and it’s something that almost nobody knows.

Just listen to these two quotes that they gave The New York Times a month ago. Senator Widen said,

I want to deliver a warning this afternoon. When the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the PATRIOT Act, they will be stunned and they will be angry.

Now, he’s talking about a different American people than the one that I know, but the point that he’s making is that if you were paying attention and cared about these things the way you should, you would be stunned and angry to learn about what the government is doing, even under this already broad act. Senator Udall said,

Americans would be alarmed if they knew how this law is being carried out.

They are two, as I said, establishment Democrats warning that the Democratic-controlled executive branch is massively abusing this already incredibly broad PATRIOT Act.

One of the things that they’re trying to do is to extract some basic information from the NSA about what it is that they’re doing in terms of the surveillance aimed at American people, because even though they’re on the Intelligence Committee, the committee that the Church committee created to oversee the intelligence community, they say they don’t even know the most basic information about what the NSA does, including even how many Americans have had their emails read or telephone calls intercepted by the NSA. So one of the things they did a couple months ago was they wrote a demand to the NSA saying, We don’t want you to tell us anything sensitive. We just need to know the basic information about what it is that you’re doing. For example, the thing we really want to know is, how many Americans citizens on U.S. soil have had their emails read by you and their telephone calls listened to by you? That’s what we want to know most of all.

The NSA responded 2 weeks ago by saying—and I’m not exaggerating, I’m not saying this to be humorous, I’m not being ironic, I’m not snippeting out a part of it to distort it—their answer was, Look, we can’t tell you how many millions of Americans are having their emails read by us and their telephone calls listened in on by us, because for us to tell you that would violate the privacy of American citizens. Just so you believe me, because if I were you, I would be thinking, Oh, that’s ridiculous, whatever he’s saying can’t be true, I just want to read to you from the letter that the head of the NSA wrote to the Senate Intelligence Committee. They said,

The NSA Inspector General and NSA leadership both agree that a review of the sort you are suggesting would itself violate the privacy of U.S. persons.

I think the important thing to realize is how little we know about what it is that they’re doing. But the little that we do know is extraordinarily alarming in exactly the way that Frank Church described.

I just want to make a couple other points about the surveillance state that don’t get enough attention but that really are necessary for completing the picture about what it really is and what it does. We talk a lot about things like the NSA and federal government agencies like the FBI, but it actually expands well beyond that. We really live in a culture of surveillance. If you even go into any normal American city or even, increasingly, small and mid-sized towns, there are all kinds of instruments of surveillance everywhere that you probably don’t even notice. If you wake up in the morning and drive to your local convenience store, you’ve undoubtedly been photographed by all sorts of surveillance cameras on the street. If you go to the ATM to take out money to buy things, that will be then recorded. If you go into a convenience store to buy the things you want to buy, you have your photograph taken and it will be recorded.

An article in Popular Mechanics in 2004 reported on a study of American surveillance, and this is what it said:

There are an estimated 30 million surveillance cameras now deployed in the United States, shooting 4 billion hours of footage a week. Americans are being watched, all of us, almost everywhere.

There’s a study in 2006 that estimated that that number would quadruple to 100 million surveillance cameras in the U.S. within 5 years, largely because of the bonanza of post-9/11 surveillance money.

And it’s not just the government that is engaged in surveillance but, just as menacingly, private corporations engage in a huge amount of surveillance on us. They give us cell phones that track every moment where we are physically and then provide that to law enforcement agencies without so much as a search warrant.

Obviously, credit-card and banking transactions are recorded and tell anyone who wants to know everything that we do. When we talk about the scandal of the Bush eavesdropping program, that was not really a government eavesdropping program so much as it was a private-industry eavesdropping program. It was done with the direct and full cooperation of AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, and the other telecom giants. In fact, when you talk about the American surveillance state, what you’re really talking about is no longer public government agencies. What you’re talking about is a full-scale merger between the federal government and industry. That is what the surveillance state is. They are equally important parts of what the surveillance state does.

I think the most interesting and probably revealing example that I can give you about where we are in terms of surveillance in the U.S. was a really ironic and unintentionally amusing series of events that took place in mid-2011. What happened in mid-2011 was that the governments of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which, as we know, are very, very oppressive and hate freedom, said that what they were going to do was to ban the use of BlackBerrys and similar devices on their soil. The reason was that the corporation that produces BlackBerrys was either unable or unwilling to guarantee that Saudi and UAE intelligence agencies would be able to intercept all communications. The governments of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were horrified by the prospect that people might be able to communicate on their soil without their being able to intercept and surveil that communication, and in response they banned BlackBerrys.

This created huge amounts of condemnation in the Western world. Every American newspaper editorialized about how this showed how much these governments were the enemies of freedom. The Obama administration issued a stinging denunciation of both governments, saying that they were engaged in the kinds of oppression that we couldn’t tolerate. And yet 6 weeks later The New York Times reported that the Obama administration was preparing legislation to mandate that

all services that enable communications, including encrypted email transmitters like BlackBerry, social networking Web sites like Facebook, and software that allows direct peer-to-peer messaging like Skype, be designed to ensure government surveillance.

It was exactly the same principle that everybody condemned the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia for—the principle being that there can be no human interaction, especially no human communication, not just from foreign nationals and between foreign nationals but by American citizens, on American soil, that is beyond the reach of the U.S. Government.

This was the mindset that in 2002 led the Bush administration to dredge up John Poindexter from wherever it was that he was—he was actually working for defense contractors—to start the program that they called the Total Information Awareness program. The logo, which I actually looked at in the last couple of weeks, which you should go and look at just because you won’t believe how creepy it is, has a pyramid with this huge eye hovering over it, this eye that was going to be theawaall- seeing eye. [You can see it here.]

The only problem with the Total Information Awareness program was that they put a name on it that was too honest about what it was, and it freaked everybody out. So they had to pretend that they weren’t going to go forward with it. But, of course, what they did was they’ve incrementally and in very clear ways recreated the Total Information Awareness program under a whole variety of different legislative initiatives.

This idea that every single form of technological communication by law must be constructed to permit government backdoor interception and surveillance is an expression of what this surveillance state mindset is—that there can be no such thing as any form of privacy from the U.S. Government. That is the mindset that has led the surveillance state to be the sprawling, vast, ubiquitous, and always expanding instrument that state and corporate power users employ in order to safeguard their power.

The one other point that’s worth making about how the surveillance state works and how powers exercise through it—and this, I think, is probably the most pernicious part—is what I refer to as the government’s one-way mirror. At exactly the same time—this is really so remarkable to me—that the government has been massively expanding its ability to know everything that we’re doing, it has simultaneously erected a wall of secrecy around it that prevents us from knowing anything that they’re doing.

There was this amazing controversy when the documents from WikiLeaks were disclosed, and the American media had to rush to assure everybody simultaneously (1) that this was both a completely meaningless act and (2) that it was a completely horrible act. So the two claims that were made were, this horrible, traitorous organization of WikiLeaks has severely damaged American national security, but at the same time we want you to know, there’s nothing new in anything that they’ve disclosed, there’s nothing worth knowing. Those were literally the two claims that were made, and nobody ever bothered to reconcile those.

But what was true is that of the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of pages that WikiLeaks disclosed—it’s actually in excess of a million now—the vast bulk of it contained very banal content. It was stuff that really wasn’t particularly interesting, that didn’t reveal very much about anything that was worth knowing. And what was actually so scandalous about that was that very fact, because every single page that WikiLeaks disclosed was stamped “Classified,” which made it a crime to disclose any of it, even though so much of it was banal and revealed nothing worth knowing. What that reflected was that the U.S. Government reflexively labels everything that it does of any conceivable significance as classified and secret.

The government keeps everything that it does from us at the very same time that it knows more and more about what we’re doing. And if you think about what a radical reversal of how things are supposed to work, it’s really startling. The idea is supposed to be—and this is just basic political science, basic design of the founding of the country—that there’s supposed to be transparency for government. We’re supposed to know virtually everything that they do. Individuals, on the other hand, are supposed to live in a sphere of privacy: Nobody is supposed to know what we’re doing unless there’s a demonstrated good reason to invade that wall of privacy. We’ve completely reversed that so that the government now operates with complete secrecy and we have none.

The reason this is so disturbing is, you just look at the famous aphorism typically attributed to Francis Bacon that

knowledge is power.

If I’m able to know everything about you—what you do, what you think, what you fear, where you go, what your aspirations are, the bad things you do, the bad things you think about—and you know nothing about me, I have immense leverage over you in all kinds of ways. I can think about how to control you, I can blackmail you, I can figure out what your weaknesses are. I can manipulate you in all sorts of ways. That is the state of affairs that this surveillance state, combined with the wall of secrecy, has brought about.

I just want to talk a little bit about the mechanisms by which this has been done and the reasons why this loss of privacy matters so much in relationship to the government, and the corporate component of the surveillance state.

If you look at the way in which the “war on terror” functioned in the first, say, 5 to 7 years after it was declared and the civil liberties abuses that it ushered in, predictably and inevitably, you will find that almost without exception—there are a few exceptions but almost without exception they were directed toward foreign nationals, not American citizens but foreign nationals, who were on foreign soil, not on U.S. soil. The reason for that is that governments, when they want to give themselves abusive and radical powers, typically first target people whom they think their citizens won’t care very much about because they’ll think they’re not affected by it. That’s pretty much what happened. We detained without charges and without trials a bunch of Muslims who remain nameless, whom we picked up in places that nobody really knew about or cared much about. We sent drones to assassinate them. All of these powers were directed at foreign others.

But what has happened over last 3 to 4 years is a radical change in the war on terror. The war on terror has now been imported into U.S. policy. It is now directed at American citizens on American soil. So rather than simply sending drones to assassinate foreign nationals, we are now sending drones to target and kill American citizens without charges or trial. Rather than indefinitely detaining foreign nationals at Guantánamo, Congress last year enacted and President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act, that permits the detention without trial indefinitely of American citizens on U.S. soil. Rather than sending drones only over Yemen and Somalia and Pakistan, drones are now being approved at an alarming rate, not just surveillance drones but increasingly possibly weaponized drones that will fly over American soil watching everything that we do, in ways that, say, police helicopters could never possibly accomplish.

Even when President Obama promised to close Guantánamo—and lots of his defenders will say, not inaccurately, that he was prevented from doing so because Congress blocked the closure—the plan that he had was not to close Guantánamo and eliminate the system of indefinite detention that made it so controversial. The plan was to take that system of indefinite detention, close Guantánamo, because it had become an upsetting symbol, and import it, move it onto American soil in Thomson, Illinois. That was the plan that the Obama administration had for indefinite detention.

So what you see is the gradual importation of all of the abuses of the war on terror so that now they are entrenched and not just aimed at foreign nationals but U.S. citizens on U.S. soil as well. That’s the mechanism by which this is being done. If you listen to U.S. intelligence and defense officials talk about terrorism, what they emphasize now is not al-Qaeda in Pakistan, which they will largely acknowledge has been eliminated, or even al-Qaeda in Yemen, which isn’t really much of a threat to anybody. What they will talk about is the threat of home-grown terrorism. This is now the grave menace that American terrorism officials will warn needs to be restrained. And the solution to that has been the gradual transference, importation, of all of these abuses that we let take root because they weren’t happening to us but were happening to people over there, into domestic powers.

The reason that that’s being done is not very difficult to see. American policymakers know that the financial unraveling that took place in 2008, that’s even more visible in European states like Spain and Portugal and Greece, has never really been rectified, and it can’t be rectified because these are structural problems. The way in which oligarchs in the U.S. monopolize wealth and then use that wealth to control our political processes ensures that this is not going to change, it’s only going to worsen. Mass unemployment, mass foreclosure, all of these income-inequality pathologies are here to stay. The future that American policy makers see is visible if you look at what happened in London for a brief period of time, what happens all the time in Athens, what is happening with increasing frequency in Spain. Huge amounts of social unrest. You see lots of that happening. I think that’s what the Occupy movement in many ways is. And the elite in the U.S., both corporate and government, are petrified about that type of unrest.

What people in power always do when they fear unrest is they start consolidating power in order to constrain it, in order to suppress it. This is what this surveillance state is designed to do. It’s justified in the name of terrorism, of course. That’s the packaging in which it’s wrapped. But it’s been used extremely and in all sorts of ways since 9/11 for domestic application. That’s happening even more. It’s happening in terms of the Occupy movement and the infiltration that federal officials were able to accomplish using PATRIOT Act authorities. It’s happened with pro-Palestinian activists in the U.S. and all other dissident groups that have themselves been targeted with surveillance and law enforcement, using what was originally these war-on-terror powers.

I want talk about why I think this matters, because the attitude that you will typically encounter—and it’s not a very easy mindset to address or to refute, and it’s one that government has sold continuously and peddled—is, privacy in the abstract, I can understand why it’s something to value, but ultimately, if I’m not really doing anything wrong, if I’m not one of the terrorists, if I’m not plotting to bomb a bridge, I don’t really have much reason to care if people are invading my sphere of privacy and watching and learning what it is that I’m doing. So I think it’s worth talking about the reasons why that is such an ill- advised way to think, why it absolutely matters that privacy is being invaded in these systematic ways.

One obvious answer is that any kind of social movement needs to be able to organize in private, away from the targets of the organization. So if you look at the revolutionary movements in the Arab world, one of the greatest challenges that they had was that the governments sought all sorts of ways to prevent them from communicating with one another, either at all or in privacy. The fact that the Internet was not nearly as pervasive in those countries actually turned out to be a blessing, because it enabled them to organize in more organic ways. But if the government is able to learn what we speak about and know who we’re talking to and know what it is that we’re planning, it makes any kind of activism extremely difficult, because secrecy and privacy are prerequisites to effective activism.

But I think the more difficult value of privacy, the one that’s a lot harder to think about, is also the one that’s much more important than just the one I described. And that is that it is in the private realm exclusively where things like dissent and creativity and challenges to orthodoxy reside. Only when you know that you can explore without external judgment or you can experiment without eyes being cast upon you is the opportunity for creating new paths possible.

There are all kinds of fascinating studies that prove this to be the case. There are psychological studies where people have sat down at their dinner table with family members or friends and they are talking for a long time in a very informal way, and then suddenly one of them pulls out a tape recorder and puts it on the table and says,

I’m going to tape-record our conversation, just for my own interest. I promise I’m not going to tell anybody, I’m not going to show it to anybody, no one is ever going to hear it. I’m just going to tape-record it because I want to go over all the wisdom that you’ve given me.

It’s an experiment psychologically to assess what the impact of that is. Invariably what happens is the people who are now being recorded radically change their behavior. They speak in stilted sentences, they try and talk about much more high-minded topics, they’re much stiffer in their expression of things, because they now feel like they’re being monitored.

There was a pilot program in Los Angeles 6 or 7 years ago that was in response to a couple of exaggerated news stories about rambunctious elementary-age schoolchildren on buses who had apparently been bullying and abusing other students. And the solution that they came up with was that they were going to install surveillance cameras in every single public school bus in Los Angeles County, which is the second or third largest county in the U.S. The response, when it was ultimately disclosed was, Well, this is going to be extraordinarily expensive. How can you have tens of thousands of working surveillance cameras with people monitoring them or recording them every single day for every school bus in Los Angeles County?

The answer that they gave was, Oh, no, we’re not going to have working cameras in these buses. There may be a few buses that have working cameras, just so nobody knows which buses have those. We’re going to have faux cameras, because we know that if we put cameras up, even though they’re not working, that will radically change the behavior of students. In other words, we are training our young citizens to live in a culture where they expect that they are always being watched. And we want them to be chilled and we want them to be deterred. We want them not to ever challenge orthodoxy or to explore limits or to engage in creativity of any kind. This type of surveillance by design breeds conformism. That’s its purpose. And that’s what makes this surveillance so pernicious.

One of the things about the surveillance state, one of the things that happens is that the way in which it affects how people think and behave is typically insidious. It’s something that’s very potent, and yet it’s very easy to avoid understanding or realizing, even as it affects you. Sometimes people do know about the effects of the surveillance state and the climate of fear it creates, and it affects them. I went on a book tour last October and early November, and I went to 15 different cities. In each of the cities I really didn’t care honestly about the book events; I was much more interested in going to the Occupy encampments in each city and spending time there. It was much more enlightening and energizing. Literally almost the entirety of my book tour was taken up by talking about the Occupy movement. It was what everyone was thinking about, I had written about it many times, and I thought it was by far the most significant political development in many years. And I still think that.

And everywhere I would go that I would talk about the Occupy movement, literally all the time I would get people who would say things like—and I would be on radio shows and people would call in and say this— “Look, I’m really supportive of the Occupy movement. I want to go down there and be a participant in it. But I’m a woman who has a small baby,” or “I’m a man who has a bad leg.” And “given all the police abuse that’s taking place there, and all the infiltration, I’m just afraid of going and participating in these movements.” That was definitely part of the effect that this infiltration and the police abuse had. It created this climate of fear and a way that people knew.

I spent a lot of time with American Muslims and in American Muslim communities because of what I do and the work that I do and where I go and speak. One of the things that emboldens me and keeps me very energized and engaged about these issues is, if you go and speak to communities of American Muslims, what you will find is an incredibly pervasive climate of fear. The reason is that they know that they are always being watched. They know that they have FBI informants who are attempting to infiltrate their communities. They know that they have people next to them, their neighbors, their fellow mosque goers, who have been manipulated by the FBI to be informants. They know that they are being eavesdropped on when they speak on the telephone, they know that they are having their emails read, that they are eavesdropped on when they speak or communicate to anybody. What they will say all the time is that it has created this extreme suspicion within their own communities, within their own mosques, to the point that they’re even afraid to talk to any new people about anything significant, because they fear, quite rightly, that this is all being done as part of a government effort to watch them. And it doesn’t really matter whether it’s true in a particular case or it isn’t true. This climate of fear creates limits around the behavior in which they’re willing to engage in very damaging ways.

But I think what this surveillance state really does, more than making people consciously aware of the limits—in those two examples that I just described, people not wanting to go to Occupy movements and people in Muslim communities being very guarded—is it makes people believe that they’re free even though they’ve been subtly convinced that there are things that they shouldn’t do that they might want to do.

I always use dog examples. I have 11 dogs, so it’s one of the things that I know best. I know you probably think I’m crazy, and maybe I am, but they’re all rescue dogs. It’s just one of the things that we do. I know dog behavior really well, so I draw lessons a lot from dogs. One of the things that’s really amazing about dog behavior is, if you don’t want dogs to go into a certain place because it’s dangerous for them, one of the things that you can do is put a fence around the area where you want to confine them. But eventually you can remove the fence and you don’t need the fence anymore, because they will have been trained that the entirety of their world is within the boundaries that you first set for them. So even once you remove the fence, they won’t venture beyond it. They’ve been trained that that’s the only world that they want or are interested in or know.

There are studies in what was formerly East Germany, which was probably one of the most notorious surveillance states of the last 50 years, where even once their boundaries were removed, once the Stasi no longer existed, once the wall fell, the psychological effects on the East German people endure until today, because the way in which they’ve been trained for decades to understand that there are limits to their lives, even once you remove the limits, they’ve been trained that those are not limits they want to transgress.

That’s one of the things that constantly surveilling people and constantly communicating to them that they’re powerless before this omnipotent government/corporate institution does to people, it convinces them that the tiny little box in which they live is really the only box in which they want to live, so they no longer even realize they’re being imprisoned. Rosa Luxemburg put that best. She said,

He who does not move does not notice his chains.

You can acculturate people to believe that tyranny is freedom, that their limits are actually emancipation. That is what this surveillance state most insidiously does: By training people to accept their own conformity, believing that they are actually free, they no longer even realize the ways in which they’re being limited.

There are just a few quick points that I want to make about that. One is that you can do things that remove yourself from the surveillance matrix, not completely but to the best extent you can. There are people who only engage in transactions using cash. As inconvenient as that is, it at least removes that level of surveillance. There are ways to communicate on the Internet using very effective forms of anonymity, which I will talk about in a minute. There are ways of educating yourself about how to engage in interaction and activism beyond the prying eye of the U.S. Government, to stay, in essence, a step ahead.

There are important ways to educate yourself about the rights you have when directly interacting with government agents. So much of what the government learns is because people let them learn that without having any legal obligation to do so. Much of government searches or government questioning is done under the manipulative pretext of consent, where people thought they had to consent or didn’t know they had the right not to, and give up information they didn’t need to give up. And you can educate yourself about what your rights are by going to the Center for Constitutional Rights Web site or the National Coalition to Protect Civil Freedoms or the ACLU. Lots of places online will tell you how to do that.

A very important means of subverting this one-way mirror that I’ve described is forcible radical transparency. It’s one of the reasons that I support so enthusiastically and unqualifiedly groups like Anonymous and WikiLeaks. I want holes to be blown in the wall of secrecy, because the way in which this ends up operating effectively is only because they’re able to conceal what they do. That’s why they consider these unauthorized means of transparency so threatening.

A final point I want to make about things that can be done is that there are groups that are pursuing very interesting and effective forms of anonymity on the Internet. There’s things like the Tor Project and other groups which enable people to use the Internet without any detection from government authorities, that has the effect of preventing regimes that actually bar their citizens from using the Internet from doing so, since you can no longer trace the origins of the Internet user. But it also protects people who live in countries like ours, in which the government is constantly trying to monitor what we do, by sending our communications through multiple proxies around the world in a way that can’t be invaded.

There’s really a war taking place, an arms race, where the government and these groups are attempting to stay one technological step ahead of the other in terms of technological ability to shield Internet communications from the government and the government’s ability to invade them. Participating in this war in ways that are supportive of the good side are really critical, as is availing yourself of the technology that exists to make what you do as private as possible.

I really don’t think there are many more important fronts of battle, if there are any, than combating the surveillance state. That’s why I’m so interested in the topic and why I’m so happy to be able to speak with you about it. Thanks very much.

Q&A

Let me just address a few of those questions. The comment about Bradley Manning is one that really resonates for me, because one of the things that I’ve been able to do in this work is get to know Daniel Ellsberg pretty well, who, before Bradley Manning, was probably one of my greatest political heroes. He knowingly risked his liberty and even potentially his life just out of the conscience of needing to do something that he could to stop the Vietnam War.

One of the amazing things about Daniel Ellsberg is that if you stand up, even in mainstream Democratic liberal venues, and you mention the name Daniel Ellsberg, people will stand up and cheer, and they treat him like he’s a hero. It’s just like part of the dogma of being an American progressive or whatever that you’re supposed to cheer for Daniel Ellsberg. If you mention the name Bradley Manning in those same venues, there will be dead silence. And if you call for his prosecution and even his execution, that’s the far more likely way that you will get cheers in those kinds of places.

The thing that is so disturbing about that is that Manning is every bit the hero that Daniel Ellsberg was, if he did what he’s accused of. If you read the chat logs that are purportedly his, what he says about why he did what he is accused of doing is that he was horrified by the extent of the evil that his own government was doing, something that he never knew when he went to Iraq, and it wasn’t just in Iraq but the way in which his country and its allies operate in the world, and that he felt it was urgent that this information be liberated because he thought that that would lead to reforms. He even talked about the way in which he was willing to sacrifice his life and go to prison for a long time in order to achieve that end. That to me is the classic definition of hero.

And yet not just conservatives but even most mainstream progressives view him as a villain. Part of that is because it’s the Obama administration rather than the Republican administration prosecuting him. But I think the much bigger part of it is that we’ve really changed how we think, not just about surveillance, as I talked about earlier, but even authority, and the idea that you can challenge authority by nicely going into the voting booth and picking one of the two little holes that they’ve given you, but that anything more disruptive than that is inherently illegitimate. It’s not just that surveillance is more accepted, but so, too, is the idea that those who challenge authority in a meaningful way should be punished.

Just the last point I want to make is the two excellent comments that we just heard about the virtue and power of mass movements to defeat this. I certainly didn’t mean to stand up—and I actually said this last year—you can go into a room like this and you can talk about all the sort of forces that you face and you can just produce this kind of horrible gloominess, this defeatism. Oh, my God, I just listened to this guy for an hour and a half. He talked about all these horrible things. I think I want to go jump off a bridge or take a bunch of Xanax and play video games for the rest of my life or whatever. I definitely don’t want to suggest to anybody that this surveillance state is something that anyone should fear in the sense of driving you into inaction. But the reason why I didn’t emphasize that is that I assume that anybody, by virtue of your attendance here, is somebody who has already decided that you don’t the fear that. But, yes, absolutely overwhelming the surveillance state by just having too many people engage in too much prohibited conduct is definitely their vulnerability.

And the reason why they want to collect more and more is not because they want to read it all or they can read it all. They can’t. And the more they collect, in some senses, as this gentleman alluded to, the harder it is for them to find what they’re looking for. But the reason they want to cover and blanket everything with surveillance is because of what I talked about earlier. It’s that knowledge that the Los Angeles County had that if you make people think they’re being watched, that in and of itself will change behavior, even if you’re not really able to monitor what they do.

But I’m not here to discourage anybody from engaging in disruptions and mass movements. Quite the opposite. I just think it’s important to be aware of what these challenges are, not to hide under your bed in fear of them but to figure out how to defeat them.

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John Cusack interviews law professor Jonathan Turley about Obama Administration’s war on the Constitution

Wed, 05 Sep 2012 01:33:11 GMT

by John Cusack

From Truthout

Tuesday, September 4, 2012

I wrote this a while back after Romney got the nom. In light of the blizzard of bullshit coming at us in the next few months I thought I would put it out now.
______________

Now that the Republican primary circus is over, I started to think about what it would mean to vote for Obama…

Since mostly we hear from the daily hypocrisies of Mitt and friends, I thought we should examine “our guy” on a few issues with a bit more scrutiny than we hear from the “progressive left”, which seems to be little or none at all.

Instead of scrutiny, the usual arguments in favor of another Obama presidency are made: We must stop fanatics; it would be better than the fanatics—he’s the last line of defense from the corporate barbarians—and of course the Supreme Court. It all makes a terrible kind of sense and I agree completely with Garry Wills who described the Republican primaries as

a revolting combination of con men & fanatics, the current primary race has become a demonstration that the Republican party does not deserve serious consideration for public office.

True enough. But yet…

… there are certain Rubicon lines, as constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley calls them, that Obama has crossed.

All political questions are not equal no matter how much you pivot. When people die or lose their physical freedom to feed certain economic sectors or ideologies, it becomes a zero sum game for me.

This is not an exercise in bemoaning regrettable policy choices or cheering favorable ones but to ask fundamentally: Who are we? What are we voting for? And what does it mean?

Three markers — the Nobel Prize acceptance speech, the escalation speech at West Point, and the recent speech by Eric Holder — crossed that Rubicon line for me…

Mr. Obama, the Christian president with the Muslim-sounding name, would heed the admonitions of neither religion’s prophets about making war and do what no empire or leader, including Alexander the Great, could do: he would, he assured us “get the job done in Afghanistan.” And so we have our democratic president receiving the Nobel Peace Prize as he sends 30,000 more troops to a ten-year-old conflict in a country that’s been war-torn for 5,000 years.

Why? We’ll never fully know. Instead, we got a speech that was stone bullshit and an insult to the very idea of peace.

We can’t have it both ways. Hope means endless war? Obama has metaphorically pushed all in with the usual international and institutional killers; and in the case of war and peace, literally.
To sum it up: more war. So thousands die or are maimed; generations of families and veterans are damaged beyond imagination; sons and daughters come home in rubber bags. But he and his satellites get their four more years.

The AfPak War is more H. G. Wells than Orwell, with people blindly letting each other get fed to the barons of Wall Street and the Pentagon, themselves playing the part of the Pashtuns. The paradox is simple: he got elected on his anti-war stance during a perfect storm of the economic meltdown and McCain saying the worst thing at the worst time as we stared into the abyss. Obama beat Clinton on “I’m against the war and she is for it.” It was simple then, when he needed it to be.

Under Obama do we continue to call the thousands of mercenaries in Afghanistan “general contractors” now that Bush is gone? No, we don’t talk about them… not a story anymore.
Do we prosecute felonies like torture or spying on Americans? No, time to “move on”…

Now chaos is the norm and though the chaos is complicated, the answer is still simple. We can’t afford this morally, financially, or physically. Or in a language the financial community can digest: the wars are ideologically and spiritually bankrupt. No need to get a score from the CBO.
Drones bomb Pakistani villages across the border at an unprecedented rate. Is it legal? Does anyone care? “It begs the question,” as Daniel Berrigan asks us,

is this one a “good war” or a “dumb war”? But the question betrays the bias: it is all the same. It’s all madness.

One is forced to asked the question: Is the President just another Ivy League Asshole shredding civil liberties and due process and sending people to die in some shithole for purely political reasons?

There will be a historical record. “Change we can believe in” is not using the other guys’ mob to clean up your own tracks while continuing to feed at the trough. Human nature is human nature, and when people find out they’re being hustled, they will seek revenge, sooner or later, and it will be ugly and savage.

In a country with desperation growing everywhere, everyday — despite the “Oh, things are getting better” press releases — how could one think otherwise?

Just think about the economic crisis we are in as a country. It could never happen, they said. The American middle class was rock solid. The American dream, home ownership, education, the opportunity to get a good job if you applied yourself… and on and on. Yeah, what happened to that? It’s gone.

The next question must be: “What happened to our civil liberties, to our due process, which are the foundation of any notion of real democracy?” The chickens haven’t come home to roost for the majority but the foundation has been set and the Constitution gutted.

Brian McFadden’s cartoon says it all.

Here’s the transcript of the telephone interview I conducted with Turley.

JONATHAN TURLEY: Hi John.

CUSACK: Hello. Okay, hey I was just thinking about all this stuff and thought maybe we’d see what we can do to bring civil liberties and these issues back into the debate for the next couple of months …

TURLEY: I think that’s great.

CUSACK: So, I don’t know how you can believe in the Constitution and violate it that much.

TURLEY: Yeah.

CUSACK: I would just love to know your take as an expert on these things. And then maybe we can speak to whatever you think his motivations would be, and not speak to them in the way that we want to armchair-quarterback like the pundits do about “the game inside the game,” but only do it because it would speak to the arguments that are being used by the left to excuse it. For example, maybe their argument that there are things you can’t know, and it’s a dangerous world out there, or why do you think a constitutional law professor would throw out due process?

TURLEY: Well, there’s a misconception about Barack Obama as a former constitutional law professor. First of all, there are plenty of professors who are “legal relativists.” They tend to view legal principles as relative to whatever they’re trying to achieve. I would certainly put President Obama in the relativist category. Ironically, he shares that distinction with George W. Bush. They both tended to view the law as a means to a particular end — as opposed to the end itself. That’s the fundamental distinction among law professors. Law professors like Obama tend to view the law as one means to an end, and others, like myself, tend to view it as the end itself.

Truth be known, President Obama has never been particularly driven by principle. Right after his election, I wrote a column in a few days warning people that even though I voted for Obama, he was not what people were describing him to be. I saw him in the Senate. I saw him in Chicago.

CUSACK: Yeah, so did I.

TURLEY: He was never motivated that much by principle. What he’s motivated by are programs. And to that extent, I like his programs more than Bush’s programs, but Bush and Obama are very much alike when it comes to principles. They simply do not fight for the abstract principles and view them as something quite relative to what they’re trying to accomplish. Thus privacy yields to immunity for telecommunications companies and due process yields to tribunals for terrorism suspects.

CUSACK: Churchill said,

The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers, is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist.

That wasn’t Eugene Debs speaking — that was Winston Churchill.

And if he takes an oath before God to uphold the Constitution, and yet he decides it’s not politically expedient for him to deal with due process or spying on citizens and has his Attorney General justify murdering US citizens — and then adds a signing statement saying, “Well, I’m not going to do anything with this stuff because I’m a good guy.”– one would think we would have to define this as a much graver threat than good or bad policy choices- correct?

TURLEY: Well, first of all, there’s a great desire of many people to relieve themselves of the obligation to vote on principle. It’s a classic rationalization that liberals have been known to use recently, but not just liberals. The Republican and Democratic parties have accomplished an amazing feat with the red state/blue state paradigm. They’ve convinced everyone that regardless of how bad they are, the other guy is worse. So even with 11 percent of the public supporting Congress most incumbents will be returned to Congress. They have so structured and defined the question that people no longer look at the actual principles and instead vote on this false dichotomy.

Now, belief in human rights law and civil liberties leads one to the uncomfortable conclusion that President Obama has violated his oath to uphold the Constitution. But that’s not the primary question for voters. It is less about him than it is them. They have an obligation to cast their vote in a principled fashion. It is, in my opinion, no excuse to vote for someone who has violated core constitutional rights and civil liberties simply because you believe the other side is no better. You cannot pretend that your vote does not constitute at least a tacit approval of the policies of the candidate.
This is nothing new, of course for civil libertarians who have always been left behind at the altar in elections. We’ve always been the bridesmaid, never the bride. We’re used to politicians lying to us. And President Obama lied to us. There’s no way around that. He promised various things and promptly abandoned those principles.

So the argument that Romney is no better or worse does not excuse the obligation of a voter. With President Obama they have a president who went to the CIA soon after he was elected and promised CIA employees that they would not be investigated or prosecuted for torture, even though he admitted that waterboarding was torture.

CUSACK: I remember when we were working with Arianna at The Huffington Post and we thought, well, has anyone asked whether waterboarding is torture? Has anyone asked Eric Holder that? And so Arianna had Sam Seder ask him that at a press conference, and then he had to admit that it was. And then the next question, of course, was, well, if it is a crime, are you going to prosecute the law? But, of course, it wasn’t politically expedient to do so, right? That’s inherent in their non-answer and inaction?

TURLEY: That’s right.

CUSACK: Have you ever heard a more specious argument than “It’s time for us all to move on?” When did the Attorney General or the President have the option to enforce the law?

TURLEY: Well, that’s the key question that nobody wants to ask. We have a treaty, actually a number of treaties, that obligate us to investigate and prosecute torture. We pushed through those treaties because we wanted to make clear that no matter what the expediency of the moment, no matter whether it was convenient or inconvenient, all nations had to agree to investigate and prosecute torture and other war crimes.

And the whole reason for putting this in the treaties was to do precisely the opposite of what the Obama administration has done. That is, in these treaties they say that it is not a defense that prosecution would be inconvenient or unpopular. But that’s exactly what President Obama said when he announced, “I won’t allow the prosecution of torture because I want us to look to the future and not the past.” That is simply a rhetorical flourish to hide the obvious point: “I don’t want the inconvenience and the unpopularity that would come with enforcing this treaty.”

CUSACK: Right. So, in that sense, the Bush administration had set the precedent that the state can do anything it likes in the name of terror, and not only has Obama let that cement harden, but he’s actually expanded the power of the executive branch to do whatever it wants, or he’s lowered the bar — he’s lowered the law — to meet his convenience. He’s lowered the law to meet his personal political convenience rather than leaving it as something that, as Mario Cuomo said, the law is supposed to be better than us.

TURLEY: That’s exactly right. In fact, President Obama has not only maintained the position of George W. Bush in the area of national securities and in civil liberties, he’s actually expanded on those positions. He is actually worse than George Bush in some areas.

CUSACK: Can you speak to which ones?

TURLEY: Well, a good example of it is that President Bush ordered the killing of an American citizen when he approved a drone strike on a car in Yemen that he knew contained an American citizen as a passenger. Many of us at the time said, “You just effectively ordered the death of an American citizen in order to kill someone else, and where exactly do you have that authority?” But they made an argument that because the citizen wasn’t the primary target, he was just collateral damage. And there are many that believe that that is a plausible argument.

CUSACK: By the way, we’re forgetting to kill even a foreign citizen is against the law. I hate to be so quaint…

TURLEY: Well, President Obama outdid President Bush. He ordered the killing of two US citizens as the primary targets and has then gone forward and put out a policy that allows him to kill any American citizen when he unilaterally determines them to be a terrorist threat. Where President Bush had a citizen killed as collateral damage, President Obama has actually a formal policy allowing him to kill any US citizen.

CUSACK: But yet the speech that Eric Holder gave was greeted generally, by those others than civil libertarians and a few people on the left with some intellectual honesty, with polite applause and a stunning silence and then more cocktail parties and state dinners and dignitaries, back the Republican Hypocrisy Hour on the evening feed — and he basically gave a speech saying that the executive can assassinate US citizens.

TURLEY: That was the truly other-worldly moment of the speech. He went to, Northwestern Law School (my alma mater), and stood there and articulated the most authoritarian policy that a government can have: the right to unilaterally kill its citizens without any court order or review. The response from the audience was applause. Citizens applauding an Attorney General who just described how the President was claiming the right to kill any of them on his sole inherent authority.

CUSACK: Does that order have to come directly from Obama, or can his underlings carry that out on his behalf as part of a generalized understanding? Or does he have to personally say, “You can get that guy and that guy?”

TURLEY: Well, he has delegated the authority to the so-called death panel, which is, of course, hilarious, since the Republicans keep talking about a nonexistent death panel in national healthcare. We actually do have a death panel, and it’s killing people who are healthy.

CUSACK: I think you just gave me the idea for my next film. And the tone will be, of course, Kafkaesque.

TURLEY: It really is.

CUSACK: You’re at the bottom of the barrel when the Attorney General is saying that not only can you hold people in prison for no charge without due process, but we can kill the citizens that “we” deem terrorists. But “we” won’t do it cause we’re the good guys remember?

TURLEY: Well, the way that this works is you have this unseen panel. Of course, their proceedings are completely secret. The people who are put on the hit list are not informed, obviously.

CUSACK: That’s just not polite, is it?

TURLEY: No, it’s not. The first time you’re informed that you’re on this list is when your car explodes, and that doesn’t allow much time for due process. But the thing about the Obama administration is that it is far more premeditated and sophisticated in claiming authoritarian powers. Bush tended to shoot from the hip — he tended to do these things largely on the edges. In contrast, Obama has openly embraced these powers and created formal measures, an actual process for killing US citizens. He has used the terminology of the law to seek to legitimate an extrajudicial killing.

CUSACK: Yeah, bringing the law down to meet his political realism, his constitutional realism, which is that the Constitution is just a means to an end politically for him, so if it’s inconvenient for him to deal with due process or if it’s inconvenient for him to deal with torture, well, then why should he do that? He’s a busy man. The Constitution is just another document to be used in a political fashion, right?

TURLEY: Indeed. I heard from people in the administration after I wrote a column a couple weeks ago about the assassination policy. And they basically said, “Look, you’re not giving us our due. Holder said in the speech that we are following a constitutional analysis. And we have standards that we apply.” It is an incredibly seductive argument, but there is an incredible intellectual disconnect. Whatever they are doing, it can’t be called a constitutional process.

Obama has asserted the right to kill any citizen that he believes is a terrorist. He is not bound by this panel that only exists as an extension of his claimed inherent absolute authority. He can ignore them. He can circumvent them. In the end, with or without a panel, a president is unilaterally killing a US citizen. This is exactly what the framers of the Constitution told us not to do.

CUSACK: The framers didn’t say, “In special cases, do what you like. When there are things the public cannot know for their own good, when it’s extra-specially a dangerous world… do whatever you want.” The framers of the Constitution always knew there would be extraordinary circumstances, and they were accounted for in the Constitution. The Constitution does not allow for the executive to redefine the Constitution when it will be politically easier for him to get things done.

TURLEY: No. And it’s preposterous to argue that.

CUSACK: When does it become — criminal?

TURLEY: Well, the framers knew what it was like to have sovereigns kill citizens without due process. They did it all the time back in the 18th century. They wrote a constitution specifically to bar unilateral authority.
James Madison is often quoted for his observation that if all men were angels, no government would be necessary. And what he was saying is that you have to create a system of law that has checks and balances so that even imperfect human beings are restrained from doing much harm. Madison and other framers did not want to rely on the promises of good motivations or good intents from the government. They created a system where no branch had enough authority to govern alone — a system of shared and balanced powers.

So what Obama’s doing is to rewrite the most fundamental principle of the US Constitution. The whole point of the Holder speech was that we’re really good guys who take this seriously, and you can trust us. That’s exactly the argument the framers rejected, the “trust me” principle of government. You’ll notice when Romney was asked about this, he said, “I would’ve signed the same law, because I trust Obama to do the right thing.” They’re both using the very argument that the framers warned citizens never to accept from their government.

CUSACK: So basically, it comes down to, again, just political expediency and aesthetics. So as long as we have friendly aesthetics and likable people, we can do whatever we want. Who cares what the policy is or the implications for the future.

TURLEY: The greatest problem is what it has done to us and what our relative silence signifies. Liberals and civil libertarians have lost their own credibility, their own moral standing, with the support of President Obama. For many civil libertarians it is impossible to vote for someone who has blocked the prosecution of war crimes. That’s where you cross the Rubicon for most civil libertarians. That was a turning point for many who simply cannot to vote for someone who is accused of that type of violation.

Under international law, shielding people from war-crime prosecutions is itself a form of war crime. They’re both violations of international law. Notably, when the Spanish moved to investigate our torture program, we now know that the Obama administration threatened the Spanish courts and the Spanish government that they better not enforce the treaty against the U.S. This was a real threat to the Administration because these treaties allow other nations to step forward when another nation refuses to uphold the treaty. If a government does not investigate and prosecute its own accused war criminals, then other countries have the right to do so. That rule was, again, of our own creation. With other leading national we have long asserted the right to prosecute people in other countries who are shielded or protected by their own countries.

CUSACK: Didn’t Spain pull somebody out of Chile under that?

TURLEY: Yeah, Pinochet.

CUSACK: Yeah, also our guy…

TURLEY: The great irony of all this is that we’re the architect of that international process. We’re the one that always pushed for the position that no government could block war crimes prosecution.

But that’s not all. The Obama administration has also outdone the Bush administration in other areas. For example, one of the most important international principles to come out of World War II was the rejection of the “just following orders” defense. We were the country that led the world in saying that defendants brought before Nuremberg could not base their defense on the fact that they were just following orders. After Nuremberg, there were decades of development of this principle. It’s a very important point, because that defense, if it is allowed, would shield most people accused of torture and war crime. So when the Obama administration –

CUSACK: That also parallels into the idea that the National Defense Authorization Act is using its powers not only to put a chilling effect on whistleblowers, but to also make it illegal for whistleblowers to bring the truth out. Am I right on that, or is that an overstatement?

TURLEY: Well, the biggest problem is that when the administration was fishing around for some way to justify not doing the right thing and not prosecuting torture, they finally released a document that said that CIA personnel and even some DOJ lawyers were “just following orders,” but particularly CIA personnel.

The reason Obama promised them that none of them would be prosecuted is he said that they were just following the orders of higher authority in the government. That position gutted Nuremberg. Many lawyers around the world are upset because the US under the Obama administration has torn the heart out of Nuremberg. Just think of the implications: other countries that are accused of torture can shield their people and say, “Yeah, this guy was a torturer. This guy ordered a war crime. But they were all just following orders. And the guy that gave them the order, he’s dead.” It is the classic defense of war criminals. Now it is a viable defense again because of the Obama administration.

CUSACK: Yeah.

TURLEY: Certainly part of the problem is how the news media –

CUSACK: Oscar Wilde said most journalists would fall under the category of those who couldn’t tell the difference between a bicycle accident and the end of civilization. But why is it that all the journalists that you see mostly on MSNBC or most of the progressives, or so-called progressives, who believe that under Bush and Cheney and Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzalez these were great and grave constitutional crises, the wars were an ongoing moral fiasco — but now, since we have a friendly face in the White House, someone with kind of pleasing aesthetics and some new policies we like, now all of a sudden these aren’t crimes, there’s no crisis. Because he’s our guy? Go, team, go?

TURLEY: Some in the media have certainly fallen into this cult of personality.

CUSACK: What would you say to those people? I always thought the duty of a citizen, and even more so as a journalist, had greatly to do with the idea that intellectual honesty was much more important than political loyalty. How would you compare Alberto Gonzalez to Eric Holder?

TURLEY: Oh, Eric Holder is smarter than Gonzalez, but I see no other difference in terms of how they’ve conducted themselves. Both of these men are highly political. Holder was accused of being improperly political during his time in the Clinton administration. When he was up for Attorney General, he had to promise the Senate that he would not repeat some of the mistakes he made in the Clinton administration over things like the pardon scandal, where he was accused of being more politically than legally motivated.

In this town, Holder is viewed as much more of a political than a legal figure, and the same thing with Gonzalez. Bush and Obama both selected Attorney Generals who would do what they wanted them to do, who would enable them by saying that no principles stood in the way of what they wanted to do. More importantly, that there were no principles requiring them to do something they didn’t want to do, like investigate torture.

CUSACK: So would you say this assassination issue, or the speech and the clause in the NDAA and this signing statement that was attached, was equivalent to John Yoo’s torture document?

TURLEY: Oh, I think it’s amazing. It is astonishing the dishonesty that preceded and followed its passage. Before passage, the administration told the public that the president was upset about the lack of an exception for citizens and that he was ready to veto the bill if there was a lack of such an exception. Then, in an unguarded moment, Senator Levin was speaking to another Democratic senator who was objecting to the fact that citizens could be assassinated under this provision, and Levin said, “I don’t know if my colleague is aware that the exception language was removed at the request of the White House.” Many of us just fell out of our chairs. It was a relatively rare moment on the Senate floor, unguarded and unscripted.

CUSACK: And finally simple.

TURLEY: Yes. So we were basically lied to. I think that the administration was really caught unprepared by that rare moment of honesty, and that led ultimately to his pledge not to use the power to assassinate against citizens. But that pledge is meaningless. Having a president say, “I won’t use a power given to me” is the most dangerous of assurances, because a promise is not worth anything.

CUSACK: Yeah, I would say it’s the coldest comfort there is.

TURLEY: Yes. This brings us back to the media and the failure to strip away the rhetoric around these policies. It was certainly easier in the Bush administration, because you had more clown-like figures like Alberto Gonzalez. The problem is that the media has tended to get thinner and thinner in terms of analysis. The best example is that about the use of the term “coerced or enhanced interrogation.” I often stop reporters when they use these terms in questions. I say, “I’m not too sure what you mean, because waterboarding is not enhanced interrogation.” That was a myth put out by the Bush administration. Virtually no one in the field used that term, because courts in the United States and around the world consistently said that waterboarding’s torture. Holder admitted that waterboarding’s torture. Obama admitted that waterboarding is torture. Even members of the Bush administration ultimately admitted that waterboarding’s torture. The Bush Administration pushed this term to get reporters to drop the word torture and it worked. They are still using the term.

Look at the articles and the coverage. They uniformly say “enhanced interrogation.” Why? Because it’s easier. They want to avoid the controversy. Because if they say “torture,” it makes the story much more difficult. If you say, “Today the Senate was looking into a program to torture detainees,” there’s a requirement that you get a little more into the fact that we’re not supposed to be torturing people.

CUSACK: So, from a civil liberties perspective, ravens are circling the White House, even though there’s a friendly man in it.

TURLEY: Yeah.

CUSACK: I hate to speak too much to motivation, but why do you think MSNBC and other so-called centrist or left outlets won’t bring up any of these things? These issues were broadcast and reported on nightly when John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzalez and Bush were in office.

TURLEY: Well, there is no question that some at MSNBC have backed away from these issues, although occasionally you’ll see people talk about –

CUSACK: I think that’s being kind, don’t you? More like “abandoned.”

TURLEY: Yeah. The civil liberties perspective is rarely given more than a passing reference while national security concerns are explored in depth. Fox is viewed as protective of Bush while MSNBC is viewed as protective of Obama. But both presidents are guilty of the same violations. There are relatively few journalists willing to pursue these questions aggressively and objectively, particularly on television. And so the result is that the public is hearing a script written by the government that downplays these principles. They don’t hear the word “torture.”

They hear “enhanced interrogation.” They don’t hear much about the treaties. They don’t hear about the international condemnation of the United States. Most Americans are unaware of how far we have moved away from Nuremberg and core principles of international law.

CUSACK: So the surreal Holder speech — how could it be that no one would be reporting on that? How could it be that has gone by with not a bang but a whimper?

TURLEY: Well, you know, part of it, John, I think, is that this administration is very clever. First of all, they clearly made the decision right after the election to tack heavily to the right on national security issues. We know that by the people they put on the National Security Council. They went and got very hardcore folks — people who are quite unpopular with civil libertarians. Not surprisingly we almost immediately started to hear things like the pledge not to prosecute CIA officials and other Bush policies being continued.

Many reporters buy into these escape clauses that the administration gives them, this is where I think the administration is quite clever. From a legal perspective, the Holder speech should have been exposed as perfect nonsense. If you’re a constitutional scholar, what he was talking about is facially ridiculous, because he was saying that we do have a constitutional process–it’s just self-imposed, and we’re the only ones who can review it. They created a process of their own and then pledged to remain faithful to it.

While that should be a transparent and absurd position, it gave an out for journalists to say, “Well, you know, the administration’s promising that there is a process, it’s just not the court process.” That’s what is so clever, and why the Obama administration has been far more successful than the Bush administration in rolling back core rights. The Bush administration would basically say, “We just vaporized a citizen in a car with a terrorist, and we’re not sorry for it.”

CUSACK: Well, yeah, the Bush administration basically said, “We may have committed a crime, but we’re the government, so what the fuck are you going to do about it?” Right? —and the Obama administration is saying, “We’re going to set this all in cement, expand the power of the executive, and pass the buck to the next guy.” Is that it?

TURLEY: It’s the same type of argument when people used to say when they caught a criminal and hung him from a tree after a perfunctory five-minute trial. In those days, there was an attempt to pretend that they are really not a lynch mob, they were following a legal process of their making and their satisfaction. It’s just… it’s expedited. Well, in some ways, the administration is arguing the same thing. They’re saying, “Yes, we do believe that we can kill any US citizen, but we’re going to talk amongst ourselves about this, and we’re not going to do it until we’re satisfied that this guy is guilty.”

CUSACK: Me and the nameless death panel.

TURLEY: Again, the death panel is ludicrous. The power that they’ve defined derives from the president’s role as Commander in Chief. So this panel –

CUSACK: They’re falling back on executive privilege, the same as Nixon and
Bush.

TURLEY: Right, it’s an extension of the president. He could just ignore it. It’s not like they have any power that exceeds his own.

CUSACK: So the death panel serves at the pleasure of the king, is what you’re saying.

TURLEY: Yes, and it gives him cover so that they can claim that they’re doing something legal when they’re doing something extra-legal.

CUSACK: Well, illegal, right?

TURLEY: Right. Outside the law.

CUSACK: So when does it get to a point where if you abdicate duty, it is in and of itself a crime? Obama is essentially creating a constitutional crisis not by committing crimes but by abdicating his oath that he swore before God — is that not a crime?

TURLEY: Well, he is violating international law over things like his promise to protect CIA officials from any prosecution for torture. That’s a direct violation, which makes our country as a whole doubly guilty for alleged war crimes. I know many of the people in the administration. Some of us were quite close. And they’re very smart people. I think that they also realize how far outside the lines they are. That’s the reason they are trying to draft up these policies to give the appearance of the law. It’s like a Potemkin village constructed as a façade for people to pass through –

CUSACK: They want to have a legal patina.

TURLEY: Right, and so they create this Potemkin village using names. You certainly can put the name “due process” on a drone missile, but it’s not delivering due process.

CUSACK: Yeah. And what about — well, we haven’t even gotten into the expansion of the privatization movement of the military “contractors” under George Bush or the escalation of drone strikes. I mean, who are they killing? Is it legal? Does anyone care — have we just given up as a country, saying that the Congress can declare war?

TURLEY: We appear to be in a sort of a free-fall. We have what used to be called an “imperial presidency.”

CUSACK: Obama is far more of an imperial president than Bush in many ways, wouldn’t you say?

TURLEY: Oh, President Obama has created an imperial presidency that would have made Richard Nixon blush. It is unbelievable.

CUSACK: And to say these things, most of the liberal community or the progressive community would say, “Turley and Cusack have lost their minds. What do they want? They want Mitt Romney to come in?”

TURLEY: The question is, “What has all of your relativistic voting and support done for you?” That is, certainly there are many people who believe –

CUSACK: Well, some of the people will say the bread-and-butter issues, “I got healthcare coverage, I got expanded healthcare coverage.”

TURLEY: See, that’s what I find really interesting. When I talk to people who support the administration, they usually agree with me that torture is a war crime and that the administration has blocked the investigation of alleged war crimes.

Then I ask them, “Then, morally, are you comfortable with saying, ‘I know the administration is concealing war crimes, but they’re really good on healthcare?'” That is what it comes down to.

The question for people to struggle with is how we ever hope to regain our moral standing and our high ground unless citizens are prepared to say, “Enough.” And this is really the election where that might actually carry some weight — if people said, “Enough. We’re not going to blindly support the president and be played anymore according to this blue state/red state paradigm. We’re going to reconstruct instead of replicate. It might not even be a reinvented Democratic Party in the end that is a viable option. Civil libertarians are going to stand apart so that people like Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama and others know that there are certain Rubicon issues that you cannot cross, and one of them happens to be civil liberty.

CUSACK: Yeah, because most people reading this will sort of say, “Okay, this is all fine and good, but I’ve got to get to work and I’ve got stuff to do and I don’t know what these fucking guys are talking about. I don’t really care.”

So let’s paint a scenario. My nephew, Miles, decides that he wants to grow dreadlocks, and he also decides he’s falling in love with the religion of Islam. And he changes his name. Instead of his name being Miles, he changes his name to a Muslim-sounding name.

He goes to Washington, and he goes to the wrong organization or meeting, let’s say, and he goes to an Occupy Washington protest. He’s out there next to someone with a speaker, and a car bomb explodes. He didn’t set it off, and he didn’t do anything. The government can throw him in prison and never try him, right?

TURLEY: Well, first of all, that’s a very good question.

CUSACK: How do we illustrate the danger to normal people of these massive overreaches and radical changes to the Constitution that started under bush and have expanded under Obama?

TURLEY: I mean, first of all, I know Miles, and –

CUSACK: Yes.

TURLEY: –and he is a little dangerous.

CUSACK: Yes.

TURLEY: I played basketball with him and you and I would describe him as a clear and present danger.

CUSACK: I mean, and I know Eric Holder and Obama won’t throw him in prison because they’re nice guys, but let’s say that they’re out of office.

TURLEY: Right, and the problem is that there is no guarantee. It has become almost Fellini-esque. Holder made the announcement a couple of years ago that they would try some defendants in a federal court while reserving military tribunals for others. The speech started out on the high ground, saying, “We have to believe in our federal courts and our Constitution. We’ve tried terrorists before, and therefore we’re transferring these individuals to federal court.”

Then he said, “But we’re going to transfer these other individuals to Guantanamo Bay.” What was missing was any type of principle. You have Obama doing the same thing that George Bush did — sitting there like Caesar and saying, “You get a real trial and you get a fake trial.” He sent Zacarias Moussaoui to a federal court and then he threw Jose Padilla, who happened to be a US citizen, into the Navy brig and held him without trial.

Yet, Obama and Holder publicly assert that they’re somehow making a civil liberties point, and say, “We’re very proud of the fact that we have the courage to hold these people for a real trial, except for those people. Those people are going to get a tribunal.” And what happened after that was remarkable. If you read the press accounts, the press actually credits the administration with doing the right thing. Most of them pushed into the last paragraph the fact that all they did was split the people on the table, and half got a real trial and half got a fake trial.

CUSACK: In the same way, the demonization, whether rightful demonization, of Osama Bin Laden was so intense that people were thrilled that he was assassinated instead of brought to trial and tried. And I thought, if the Nuremberg principles were right, the idea would be that you’d want to take this guy and put him on trial in front of the entire world, and, actually, if you were going to put him to death, you’d put him to death by lethal injection.

TURLEY: You’ll recall reports came out that the Seals were told to kill Osama, and then reports came out to say that Osama might not have been armed when the Seals came in. The strong indication was that this was a hit.

CUSACK: Yeah.

TURLEY: The accounts suggest that this was an assassination from the beginning to the end, and that was largely brushed over in the media. There was never really any discussion of whether it was appropriate or even a good idea not to capture this guy and to bring him to justice.

The other thing that was not discussed in most newspapers and programs was the fact that we violated international law. Pakistan insisted that they never approved our going into Pakistan. Think about it — if the government of Mexico sent in Mexican special forces into San Diego and captured a Mexican national, or maybe even an American citizen, and then killed him, could you imagine what the outcry would be?

CUSACK: Or somebody from a Middle Eastern country who had their kids blown up by Mr. Cheney’s and Bush’s wars came in and decided they were going to take out Cheney–not take him back to try him, but actually just come in and assassinate him.

TURLEY: Yet we didn’t even have that debate. And I think that goes to your point, John, about where’s the media?

CUSACK: But, see, that’s a very tough principle to take, because everybody feels so rightfully loathsome about Bin Laden, right? But principles are not meant to be convenient, right? The Constitution is not meant to be convenient. If they can catch Adolf Eichmann and put him on trial, why not bin Laden? The principles are what separate us from the beasts.

I think the best answer I ever heard about this stuff, besides sitting around a kitchen table with you and your father and my father, was I heard somebody, they asked Mario Cuomo, “You don’t support the death penalty…? Would you for someone who raped your wife?” And Cuomo blinked, and he looked at him, and he said, “What would I do? Well, I’d take a baseball bat and I’d bash his skull in… But I don’t matter. The law is better than me. The law is supposed to be better than me. That’s the whole point.”

TURLEY: Right. It is one thing if the president argued that there was no opportunity to capture bin Laden because he was in a moving car, for example. And then some people could say, “Well, they took him out because there was no way they could use anything but a missile.” What’s missing in the debate is that it was quickly brushed over whether we had the ability to capture bin Laden.

CUSACK: Well, it gets to [the late] Raiders owner Al Davis’ justice, which is basically, “Just win, baby.” And that’s where we are. The Constitution was framed by Al Davis. I never knew that.

And the sad part for me is that all the conversations and these interpretations and these conveniences, if they had followed the Constitution, and if they had been strict in terms of their interpretations, it wouldn’t matter one bit in effectively handling the war on terror or protecting Americans, because there wasn’t anything extra accomplished materially in taking these extra leaps, other than to make it easier for them to play cowboy and not cede national security to the Republicans politically. Bin Laden was basically ineffective. And our overseas intel people were already all over these guys.

It doesn’t really matter. The only thing that’s been hurt here has been us and the Constitution and any moral high ground we used to have. Because Obama and Holder are good guys, it’s okay. But what happens when the not-so-good guys come in, does MSNBC really want to cede and grandfather these powers to Gingrich or Romney or Ryan or Santorum or whomever — and then we’re sitting around looking at each other, like how did this happen? — the same way we look around now and say, “How the hell did the middle of America lose the American dream? How is all of this stuff happening at the same time?” And it gets back to lack of principle.

TURLEY: I think that’s right. Remember the articles during the torture debate? I kept on getting calls from reporters saying, “Well, you know, the administration has come out with an interesting statement. They said that it appears that they might’ve gotten something positive from torturing these people.” Yet you’ve had other officials say that they got garbage, which is what you often get from torture…

CUSACK: So the argument being that if we can get good information, we should torture?

TURLEY: Exactly. Yeah, that’s what I ask them. I say, “So, first of all, let’s remember, torture is a war crime. So what you’re saying is — ”

CUSACK: Well, war crimes… war crimes are effective.

TURLEY: The thing that amazes me is that you have smart people like reporters who buy so readily into this. I truly believe that they’re earnest when they say this.

Of course you ask them “Well, does that mean that the Nuremberg principles don’t apply as long as you can show some productive use?” We have treaty provisions that expressly rule out justifying torture on the basis that it was used to gain useful information.

CUSACK: Look, I mean, enforced slave labor has some productive use. You get great productivity, you get great output from that shit. You’re not measuring the principle against the potential outcome; that’s a bad business model. “Just win, baby” — we’re supposed to be above that.

TURLEY: But, you know, I’ll give you an example. I had one of the leading investigative journalists email me after one of my columns blasting the administration on the assassin list, and this is someone I deeply respect. He’s one of the true great investigative reporters. He objected to the fact that my column said that under the Obama policy he could kill US citizens not just abroad, but could kill them in the United States. And he said, “You know, I agree with everything in your column except that.” He said, “You know, they’ve never said that they could kill someone in the United States. I think that you are exaggerating.”

Yet, if you look at how they define the power, it is based on the mere perceived practicality and necessity of legal process by the president. They say the President has unilateral power to assassinate a citizen that he believes is a terrorist. Now, is the limiting principle? They argue that they do this “constitutional analysis,” and they only kill a citizen when it’s not practical to arrest the person.

CUSACK: Is that with the death panel?

TURLEY: Well, yeah, he’s talking about the death panel. Yet, he can ignore the death panel. But, more importantly, what does practicality mean? It all comes down to an unchecked presidential power.

CUSACK: By the way, the death panel — that room can’t be a fun room to go into, just make the decision on your own. You know, it’s probably a gloomy place, the death panel room, so the argument from the reporter was, “Look, they can… if they kill people in England or Paris that’s okay, but they — ”

TURLEY: I also don’t understand, why would it make sense that you could kill a US citizen on the streets of London but you might not be able to kill them on the streets of Las Vegas? The question is where the limiting principle comes from or is that just simply one more of these self-imposed rules? And that’s what they really are saying: we have these self-imposed rules that we’re only going to do this when we think we have to.

CUSACK: So, if somebody can use the contra-Nuremberg argument — that principle’s now been flipped, that they were only following orders — does that mean that the person that issued the order through Obama, or the President himself, is responsible and can be brought up on a war crime charge?

TURLEY: Well, under international law, Obama is subject to international law in terms of ordering any defined war crime.

CUSACK: Would he have to give his Nobel Peace Prize back?

TURLEY: I don’t think that thing’s going back. I’ve got to tell you… and given the amount of authority he’s claimed, I don’t know if anyone would have the guts to ask for it back.

CUSACK: And the argument people are going to use is,”Look, Obama and Holder are good guys. They’re not going to use this power.” But the point is, what about after them? What about the apparatchiks? You’ve unleashed the beast. And precedent is everything constitutionally, isn’t it?

TURLEY: I think that’s right. Basically what they’re arguing is, “We’re angels,” and that’s exactly what Madison warned against. As we discussed, he said if all men were angels you wouldn’t need government. And what the administration is saying is, “We’re angels, so trust us.”

I think that what is really telling is the disconnect between what people say about our country and what our country has become. What we’ve lost under Bush and Obama is clarity. In the “war on terror” what we’ve lost is what we need the most in fighting terrorism: clarity. We need the clarity of being better than the people that we are fighting against. Instead, we’ve given propagandists in Al Qaeda or the Taliban an endless supply of material — allowing them to denounce us as hypocrites.

Soon after 9/11 we started government officials talk about how the US Constitution is making us weaker, how we can’t function by giving people due process. And it was perfectly ridiculous.

CUSACK: Feels more grotesque than ridiculous.

TURLEY: Yeah, all the reports that came out after 9/11 showed that 9/11 could’ve been avoided. For years people argued that we should have locked reinforced cockpit doors. For years people talked about the gaps in security at airports. We had the intelligence services that had the intelligence that they needed to move against this ring, and they didn’t share the information. So we have this long list of failures by US agencies, and the result was that we increased their budget and gave them more unchecked authority.

In the end, we have to be as good as we claim. We can’t just talk a good game. If you look at this country in terms of what we’ve done, we have violated the Nuremberg principles, we have violated international treaties, we have refused to accept–

CUSACK: And you’re not just talking about in the Bush administration. You’re talking about –

TURLEY: The Obama administration.

CUSACK: You’re talking about right now.

TURLEY: We have refused to accept the jurisdictional authority of sovereign countries. We now routinely kill in other countries. It is American exceptionalism – the rules apply to other countries.

CUSACK: Well, these drone attacks in Pakistan, are they legal? Does anyone care? Who are we killing? Do they deserve due process?

TURLEY: When we cross the border, Americans disregard the fact that Pakistan is a sovereign nation, let alone an ally, and they insist that they have not agreed to these operations. They have accused us of repeatedly killing people in their country by violating their sovereign airspace. And we just disregard it. Again, its American exceptionalism, that we –

CUSACK: Get out of our way or we’ll pulverize you.

TURLEY: The rules apply to everyone else. So the treaties against torture and war crimes, sovereign integrity –

CUSACK: And this also speaks to the question that nobody even bothers to ask: what exactly are we doing in Afghanistan now? Why are we there?

TURLEY: Oh, yeah, that’s the real tragedy.

CUSACK: It has the highest recorded suicide rate among veterans in history and no one even bothers to state a pretense of a definable mission or goal. It appears we’re there because it’s not convenient for him to really get out before the election. So in that sense he’s another guy who’s letting people die in some shithole for purely political reasons. I mean, it is what it is.

TURLEY: I’m afraid, it is a political calculation. What I find amazing is that we’re supporting an unbelievably corrupt government in the Karzai administration.

Karzai himself, just two days ago, called Americans “demons.” He previously said that he wished he had gone with the Taliban rather than the Americans. And, more importantly, his government recently announced that women are worth less than men, and he has started to implement these religious edicts that are subjugating women. So he has American women who are protecting his life while he’s on television telling people that women are worth less than men, and we’re funding –

CUSACK: What are they, about three-fifths?

TURLEY: Yeah, he wasn’t very specific on that point. So we’re spending hundreds of billions of dollars. More importantly, we’re losing all these lives because it was simply politically inconvenient to be able to pull out of Afghanistan and Iraq.

CUSACK: Yeah. And, I mean, we haven’t even touched on the whole privatization of the military and what that means. What does it mean for the state to be funding at-cost-plus private mercenary armies and private mercenary security forces like Blackwater, or now their names are Xe, or whatever they’ve been rebranded as?

TURLEY: Well, the United States has barred various international rules because they would allow for the prosecution of war crimes by both military and private forces. The US barred those new rules because we didn’t want the ability of other countries to prosecute our people for war crimes. One of the things I teach in my constitutional class is that there is a need for what’s called a bright-line rule. That is, the value for bright-line rules is that they structure relations between the branches, between the government and citizens. Bright-line rules protect freedom and liberty. Those people that try to eliminate bright-line rules quickly find themselves on a slippery slope. The Obama administration, with the Bush administration, began by denying rights to people at Guantanamo Bay.

And then they started to deny rights of foreigners who they accused of being terrorists. And eventually, just recently, they started denying rights to citizens and saying that they could kill citizens without any court order or review. It is the fulfillment of what is the nightmare of civil liberties. They crossed that bright line. Now they’re bringing these same abuses to US citizens and changing how we relate to our government. In the end, we have this huge apparatus of the legal system, this huge court system, and all of it has become discretionary because the president can go ahead and kill US citizens if he feels that it’s simply inconvenient or impractical to bring them to justice.

CUSACK: Or if the great O, decides that he wants to be lenient and just throw them in jail for the rest of their life without trial, he can do that, right?

TURLEY: Well, you’ve got Guantanamo Bay if you’re accused of being an enemy combatant. There is the concept in law that the lesser is included in the greater.

So if the president can kill me when I’m in London, then the lesser of that greater is that he could also hold me, presumably, without having any court involvement. It’d be a little bizarre that he could kill me but if he held me he’d have to turn me over to the court system.

CUSACK: Yeah. We’re getting into kind of Kafka territory. You know, with Bush I always felt like you were at one of those rides in an amusement park where the floor kept dropping and you kept kind of falling. But I think what Obama’s done is we’ve really hit the bottom as far as civil liberties go.

TURLEY: Yet people have greeted this erosion of civil liberties with this collective yawn.

CUSACK: Yeah, yeah. And so then it gets down to the question, “Well, are you going to vote for Obama?” And I say, “Well, I don’t really know. I couldn’t really vote for Hillary Clinton because of her Iraq War vote.” Because I felt like that was a line, a Rubicon line –

TURLEY: Right.

CUSACK: — a Rubicon line that I couldn’t cross, right? I don’t know how to bring myself to vote for a constitutional law professor, or even a constitutional realist, who throws away due process and claims the authority that the executive branch can assassinate American citizens. I just don’t know if I can bring myself to do it.

If you want to make a protest vote against Romney, go ahead, but I would think we’d be better putting our energies into local and state politics — occupy Wall Street and organizations and movements outside the system, not national politics, not personalities. Not stadium rock politics. Not brands. That’s the only thing I can think of. What would you say?

TURLEY: Well, the question, I think, that people have got to ask themselves when they get into that booth is not what Obama has become, but what have we become? That is, what’s left of our values if we vote for a person that we believe has shielded war crimes or violated due process or implemented authoritarian powers. It’s not enough to say, “Yeah, he did all those things, but I really like what he did with the National Park System.”

CUSACK: Yeah, or that he did a good job with the auto bailout.

TURLEY: Right. I think that people have to accept that they own this decision, that they can walk away. I realize that this is a tough decision for people but maybe, if enough people walked away, we could finally galvanize people into action to make serious changes. We have to recognize that our political system is fundamentally broken, it’s unresponsive. Only 11 percent of the public supports Congress, and yet nothing is changing — and so the question becomes, how do you jumpstart that system? How do you create an alternative? What we have learned from past elections is that you don’t create an alternative by yielding to this false dichotomy that only reinforces their monopoly on power.

CUSACK: I think that even Howard Zinn/Chomsky progressives, would admit that there will be a difference in domestic policy between Obama and a Romney presidency.

But DUE PROCESS….I think about how we own it. We own it. Everybody’s sort of let it slip. There’s no immediacy in the day-to-day on and it’s just one of those things that unless they… when they start pulling kids off the street, like they did in Argentina a few years ago and other places, all of a sudden, it’s like, “How the hell did that happen?” I say, “Look, you’re not helping Obama by enabling him. If you want to help him, hold his feet to the fire.”

TURLEY: Exactly.

CUSACK: The problem is, as I see it, is that regardless of goodwill and intent and people being tired of the status quo and everything else, the information outlets and the powers that be reconstruct or construct the government narrative only as an election game of ‘us versus them,’ Obama versus Romney, and if you do anything that will compromise that equation, you are picking one side versus the other. Because don’t you realize that’s going to hurt Obama? Don’t you know that’s going to help Obama? Don’t you know… and they’re not thinking through their own sort of self-interest or the community’s interest in just changing the way that this whole thing works to the benefit of the majority. We used to have some lines we wouldn’t cross–some people who said this is not what this country does …we don’t do this shit, you had to do the right thing. So it’s going to be a tough process getting our rights back, but you know Frankie’s Law? Whoever stops fighting first – loses.

TURLEY: Right.

This interview first appeared on Alaska journalist Shannyn Moore’s blog.

Also see Jason Leopold’s December 2011 report: Obama’s “Twisted Version of American Exceptionalism” Laid Bare

This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license.

John Cusack makes films.

© 2012 Truthout

Unending violence comes home to roost

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 19:11:06 GMT

One of the weapons Holmes used to shoot up the Aurora theatre

by Jay Wenk, World War II veteran, member Veterans for Peace> A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

What part of “regulated” isn’t understood by the people who want their guns pried from their cold, dead fingers?

Who thinks that an 18th century’s “well regulated militia” is not today’s National Guard?

Who thinks it’s all right that anyone can decide to stock up on lots of deadly weapons?

Who thinks that it’s not guns that kill and maim men, women, and children; that it’s “people” who do?

Who thinks that it’s OK for ammunition clips that hold 100 bullets to be sold legally?

Who thinks that it’s fine that automatic weapons of death and destruction are available over the counter?

Who thinks it’s part of the American dream that munitions are sold online?

Do these self-styled “patriots” consider themselves to be the Minutemen of today’s world?

How long will the selfish and violent members of the National Rifle Association and their supporters hold all of us hostage, literally?

How long will presidential contenders tremble before the votes of those who support the means to wreak lifelong grief and despair on the survivors of what happens as a result of their belief?

How long will the population listen to and accept the so-called “righteousness” of politicians wringing their hands over murders like Aurora, and at the same time consent to continuing support for the evil being committed overseas on innocent children and adults by drones and the other “toys” used by these politicians with crocodile tears?

“It’s horrible,” Obama says to Aurora. Then he swivels his chair around to push the buttons again.

If the Second Amendment can’t or won’t be enforced to mean what it’s clearly intended to be, then scrap it.

Slavery used to be Constitutional. We got rid of that, after buckets of blood and unknown numbers of lives were taken.

And what about the munitions makers? Should they be shut down and the workers fired? I say yes in order to save the lives of innocents.

The unending violence this nation exhibits comes home to roost every time someone goes out to kill and terrorize.

“The greatest purveyor of violence in the world : My own government, I can not be silent.” –Martin Luther King, Jr., April 1967. Still true, even under Obomba.

Dark Ages in the U.S.

Tue, 31 Jul 2012 20:44:04 GMT

Morris Berman
Elliot Bay Bookstore
Seattle, WA
November 4, 2011

available from Alternative Radio

You can listen to Morris Berman speak for himself here.

From the boarded-up storefronts to foreclosed homes to the homeless and unemployed, the signs of decay in the U.S. are all too apparent. The political class pretending to care about the 99% have little to offer beyond boilerplate rhetoric. We hear about the virtues of hard work. If only there was work to be had. From the White House to the state house, citizens are treated to a smorgasbord of slogans all capped with “God Bless America.” Abroad, the imperial war machine grinds on. State-of-the-art warships rule the seven seas. An air force, second to none, commands the skies. Meanwhile, back in the homeland, there are signs that the servants are getting increasingly restless. Occupy Wall Street might rock the structures of power sufficiently to generate the radical change so urgently needed.

Morris Berman is a cultural historian and critic. He has taught at universities in North America and Europe. He is an award-winning author. Among his many books are Twlight America Failed, Dark Ages America, and Why America Failed.

Despite the great pressure to conform in the U.S., to celebrate the U.S. as the best system in the world, the nation does not lack for critics. The last two decades have seen numerous works criticizing U.S. foreign policy, U.S. domestic policy, in particular the economy, the American educational system, the court system, the military/media/corporate influence over American life, and so on. I’ve learned lot from reading these books. But two things in particular, at least in my view, are lacking and have a very hard time making it into the public eye—partly because Americans are not trained to think in a holistic or synthetic fashion, and partly because the sort of analysis I have in mind is too close to the bone, it’s too difficult for Americans to hear. It’s not a question of IQ; it’s on a kind of an ontological basis. It’s primal.

The first thing that these works lack is an integration of the various factors that are tearing the nation apart. In other words, these studies are institution-specific. You can read works on how the educational system doesn’t work, problems with the military, the economy, and so on. All that’s typical. The second thing I find lacking is a relationship to the culture at large, that is, to the values and behaviors of Americans on a daily basis. As a result, for me, these critiques are rather superficial; they don’t really go to the root of the problem.

The avoidance involved enables the work to be optimistic, and that places them, in fact, in the American mainstream. The authors often conclude their studies with practical recommendations as to how the particular institutional dysfunctions can be rectified. As a result, they’re not much of a threat. It’s usually a mechanical analysis with a mechanical solution. If the authors were to realize that these problems don’t exist in a vacuum but are related to all the other problems and are finally rooted in the nature of American culture itself—in its DNA, so to speak—the prognosis would not be so rosy, I don’t think.

Two examples for me. There are many one could take, but two examples for me are Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky. I admire them greatly. They’ve done a lot to raise domestic awareness in the U.S. of what’s going on to show that foreign and domestic policy are both wrong-headed and headed in the wrong direction, dead ends, whatever. But both of these writers assume that the problem is coming from the top—in other words, from the Pentagon and the corporations. That’s basically the assumption they have. That’s partly true, of course. I don’t deny that. But the problem for me is that it rests on a theory of false consciousness. In other words, the belief is that these institutions have pulled the wool over the eyes of the average American, that basically the average citizen is ultimately rational and well intentioned.

I don’t know who they’ve been talking to. Maybe they haven’t been talking to anybody and that’s the problem. I don’t know. The idea is if you pull the wool off the eyes of these deluded individuals, the citizenry will spontaneously awaken, it will commit itself to some sort of populist, in the case of Moore, or, in the case of Chomsky, democratic socialist vision. Is that happening with Occupy Wall Street? That’s something we might want to discuss. What is going on and what is the significance of that?

But my question is, what if it turns out that the wool is the eyes? The so-called average citizen, as far as I can make out, in the U.S. really does, want, to quote Janis Joplin, a Mercedes-Benz—that’s the great American dream—and is probably grateful to corporations for supplying us with the oceans of consumer goods, to the Pentagon for protecting us from those awful Arabs lurking in the Middle East. So then, if you see that, then the possibilities of fundamental change appear to be quite small, because what would be called for in that case is a completely different set of institutions and a very different type of culture. And I doubt there’s much chance of that occurring. Even in the case of the Wall Street protests—we have to say—what’s the aim of that? America is what it is.

Surveying that critical scene, then, I find very few writers who see things synthetically or as an integrated whole and who further relate this to the nature of American culture itself. That being said, there are a few. I’m thinking of Sacvan Bercovitch, who wrote The Puritan Origins of the American Self, or Chris Hedges, War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, or Walter Hixson, The Myth of American Diplomacy. The titles, I think, are very revealing. It’s also the case that a few eminent historians come to mind. C. Vann Woodward, William Appleman Williams, David Potter, Jackson Lears. There are those who are radical, in the sense of going down to the root of things. There are not many, but they do exist.

Bercovitch, for example, is a Canadian who taught American studies for decades at Harvard. He argues that as early as 1630 the colonists remained imbued with the idea that they were establishing a new nation under the direction of Providence and reenacting the drama of the Exodus in the Old Testament. So crossing the Atlantic was equivalent to crossing the River Jordan. They were entering the new world, Canaan, flowing with milk and honey. They rejected the decadence of England and Europe in general—that is, ancient Egypt. And they established a new order, the new Jerusalem. And all of this in accordance with God’s will.

Walter Hixson, a historian at the University of Akron, claims that American identity originally coalesced around the idea of the Other, whoever it was, as being savage, and thus that our identity has always been based on war. We never really negotiated anything with anyone, as other nations found out, usually too late. Chris Hedges amplifies this notion by arguing that war gives Americans a reason for being, a meaning to their lives.

All of this, to me, is much more sophisticated than some theory of false consciousness, some belief that Americans are fundamentally well intentioned and rational, and it’s just a question of removing the wool from their eyes. Instead, it essentially argues that we are, and have been since our earliest days, hopelessly neurotic, and that the belief that we can pursue a truly different path at this stage in the game is quite deluded and would require yanking out the American psyche by its roots. Ain’t gonna happen.

I like that think that I fall in this latter category of historians, only because I think that it’s this version of American history that’s faithful to reality. There are a number of themes we could get into at this point, and I have examined some of them in the trilogy I wrote on the American empire. But you don’t want me speaking for 12 or 14 hours, I’m sure, so let me just take one idea and elaborate on that.

There’s an essay in this collection, A Question of Values, called “Locating the Enemy.” In that essay I take an idea from Hegel, that of negative identity, by which Hegel did not mean a bad identity, he meant reactive. That is to say, a negative identity is one that’s formed in opposition to something or someone else. It enables you to develop very strong ego boundaries, always pushing against an enemy. But since it’s formed against opposition, says Hegel, it has no real content. It’s just basically form. As a result, it looks strong, but it’s actually weak because its self-definition is relational. “What would a master be,” says Hegel, in a very famous passage in his work, “What would a master be without a slave?” Take away the slave, the masters would have nothing to define themselves by.

So what I argue is that this concept of negative identity applies particularly well to the history of the American continent. Opposition, in whatever form, provided the colonists with a guiding narrative that enabled them to make sense of their lives. And since, as Bercovitch easily demonstrates, this was a religious narrative, as we just talked about from the Exodus, it didn’t take much to turn that into a Manichaean one, in which the enemy, whoever he was, was the darkest of the dark. The target of this self-righteous hatred has metamorphosed over time, but the form, that of Manichaean opposition, has remained the same. So native Americans were quickly seen as little more than savages, an obstacle to “civilization,” and treated accordingly. Every Thanksgiving, we all sit down, carve up a turkey, and celebrate the genocide and near extinction of an entire indigenous people. Pass the squash.

The next target was the British, which surfaced during the American Revolution, although this was already present, obviously, when the Pilgrims left for America in 1620. Britain was decadent and corrupt, in the view of the colonists, hierarchical, while we, citizens of the future, the United States, were essentially not British, not European, but republican—that is to say, antimonarchical. The terror and brutality that was visited upon the loyalists, which you should know was nearly a half a million people at that time, that is, roughly 30% of the population on the continent, those who did not go along with the simplistic black-and-white agenda, almost never gets discussed in American history books. It does in Canadian ones, it does in British ones, but never in American ones, or rarely. But it has been recorded. Constant intimidation, tarring and feathering, confiscation or burning of property, being driven from their homes, frequently murdered as “traitors.”

The most recent study and probably the most comprehensive is called Liberty’s Exiles. It’s by Maya Jasanoff, and probably they have it somewhere upstairs. There are very few American books in this genre, because they violate the myth of American innocence, which is very important for Americans in their own minds.

Moving right along, we come to Mexico, in 1846-48. This involved provoking a phony war and then stealing more than half of the entire country. Remember the Alamo. As in the case of the American Indians, it was convenient to cast the Mexican people as ignorant and undeveloped, as savages of some sort, lacking the go-go energy of U.S. capitalism. And, frankly, that stereotype persists down to the present day. Just read the American papers about drug crimes and all that sort of stuff. It’s like 10% of what’s going on in Mexico, if that. But that’s the way that the U.S. likes to see Mexico. As in the case of the Native Americans, Mexicans were seen as being in the way of “progress”—and I use that word in quotes—of American manifest destiny, again, ordained by God.

The truth is that the Mexican government was quite aware of who they were dealing with. In the late 1820s, a Mexican commission wrote a secret report saying that Americans were

an ambitious people, always ready to encroach upon their neighbors, without a spark of good faith.

We have that now. It’s not classified anymore. Even without WikiLeaks I was able to get this and tell you about it. It’s actually quoted in a book by Robert Kagan called Dangerous Nation. Virtually everybody viewed the U.S. in this way, including the Spanish, the French, the Russians, and the British. French diplomats called the American populace “warlike” and “restless.”

Shortly after, that same framework was applied by the North to the American South. It was a lazy, do-nothing society sitting in the way of progress. As I discuss in a chapter in Why America Failed, it was not northern opposition to slavery that triggered the Civil War. Later on, obviously, it became an important unifying theme or rallying cry.

(I’m sure that critics of the book will say I’m pro-slavery or something. I can see it now, really. But these people are not that bright, and they’re not into nuance. It’s not their thing.)

But it could well be argued that without the Civil War slavery would have continued for several decades more. Probably that’s the case, although some historians have argued that it’s not true. But the more fundamental conflict was a clash of cultures. It was the slow, easy way of the South as opposed to the restless economic expansion of the North. Each side regarded the other as the devil incarnate. And the result was the loss of 625,000 lives and a massive destruction of the South, epitomized by Sherman’s march to the sea, which was violent beyond belief. Those scars still exist. As far as the South goes, the war is not really over. You just have to travel through the South to see that. The resentment runs very deep. And it’s because their way of life was never acknowledged as having any validity at all.

The Germans were next, although that’s an opposition that seems thoroughly justified. We got that one right.

And then the godless communists, of course. The conversion of the Russians from ally to enemy occurred almost overnight. And it isn’t difficult to see why. With the Axis powers out of the picture, there had to be an enemy in place to fill the resulting vacuum. And although the USSR as a regime was quite repressive—we all know that—it did not, as George Kennan was later to argue, have to be cast as the ultimate enemy, because its real goal was in securing its borders. That was really it. KGB files that came open after the fall of the Soviet Union revealed that Russia’s real fear was not of the U.S., but of a rearmed Germany. That was really the major thing in their minds that they were scared about. However, there was no attempt to negotiate anything with Russia. As Stalin pointed out as early as 1946, for the Americans negotiation actually meant capitulation. That was the American idea of negotiation, that the other side simply lie down, roll over.

In any case, the Cold War kept the U.S. busy for decades. And the so-called perimeter defense, which held that any disturbance in the world was a cause for U.S. military action, led to the disasters of Iran, Guatemala, Vietnam, Chile, and so on. A long and unhappy list, well documented by Stephen Kinzer in his book Overthrow and William Blum in his book Killing Hope.

Of course, the psychological structure of negative identity led to a crisis when Soviet Union finally collapsed. Suddenly we had no one to define ourselves against. The Gulf War of 1991 helped fill the gap for a time, but the Clinton years were largely meaningless. Without an enemy, we had no idea who we were, so we filled the space with O. J. Simpson and Monica Lewinsky, and that sort of kept us busy for several years.

Finally, the Islamic world did us the greatest favor imaginable: It attacked us. Overnight, terrorism replaced communism as the crucial buzzword. Bush Jr., like Reagan in characterizing the Soviet Union, said this is ultimate evil, it’s a contest between good and evil, it’s a crusade, not a good word to use if you’re talking to the Arab world.

There was no possible discussion of American foreign policy in the Middle East as having played a role in these events. In fact, the notion was tantamount to treason. Susan Sontag, who said it in The New Yorker shortly after, lost her job. Even today, you can’t talk in those terms. These people are evil and insane, end of discussion. They’re savages.

To this day, under the Obama administration, you should be aware, your tax dollars pay for workshops that teach the police and the military that Islam is an evil religion out to destroy America, and which must therefore be destroyed first. I don’t know if you’re aware of this. But if you don’t believe me, go to truthdig.com, Chris Hedges’s column of May 9 [2011], in which he names names: who are giving these workshops, how much they’re receiving, to whom they are giving these workshops, the funding. It’s all there. Once again, civilization and the savages. That’s the model.

Kennan tried to warn the American government that making a monolith out of communism was a big mistake, that there were huge conflicts, for example, between Russia and China. But since Manichaeanism requires cardboard figures, American presidents, from Truman on, paid no attention to his advice.

A similar thing now exists with respect to Islam. It turns out that only about 10% of American Muslims are religious. In this sense they’re like the Jews: It’s basically social. You go to the mosque, you meet people. That’s really what it’s about. Of the 10% who are religious, the tiniest minority are jihadists. But when your identity is a negative one in the Hegelian sense, this type of nuance has to be kept out of everyone’s consciousness.

For example, Americans tend to regard Pakistan as a dark and awful place, the country that hid Osama bin Laden and protected him from American troops and so on or that harbors al- Qaeda operatives—hence our drone strikes in that country that mostly kill civilians, making the president really a war criminal, basically—or that it’s in league with the Taliban and so on.

What would Americans say if they read in the newspapers—and you can’t in American newspapers. Just last June I happened to be in London and I picked up a copy of The Guardian. There was an article about a very popular TV show in Pakistan that’s run by a sort of Jon Stewart-type comedian. He pokes fun at the government and at Muslim fundamentalism. One would not think that. He hosts groups—there’s one group that has a song called “Burqa Woman,” which is based on Roy Orbison’s song, “Pretty Woman.” It’s the same music. So that song goes, “Burqa woman, walking down the street/Burqa woman, with your sexy feet,” because that’s all you can see. This did not get picked up by the American press, because basically it complicates the picture. Then the enemy is the not totally black, you see. It would open up a questioning of who we are beyond a nation in opposition to something, and that means the game would be up. So we don’t want that.

Marshal McLuhan once wrote that

all forms of violence are quests for identity.

I love that line. “All forms of violence are quests for identity.” More recently, David Shulman, who is a professor of humanities at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, wrote,

There is nothing more precious than an enemy, especially one whom you have largely created by your own acts and who plays some necessary role in the inner drama of your soul.

Boy, does that characterize an awful lot of what’s going on.

What is the American soul? Do we actually have one? It’s an interesting question. Beyond opposition, what defines the U.S.? This emptiness at the center makes our quest for identity especially violent, especially acute. The policy we pursue is always one of scorched earth, of shock and awe. That’s how we handle things. That means, at least to me, that in the fullness of time, it was we who proved to be the savages, not the savages. It’s interesting that the theme of Paul Auster’s novels, if you’ve read any of his work, is that American society is incoherent, that it lacks a true identity, and that it’s nothing more than a hall of mirrors. He’s been saying that for decades, and by and large Americans don’t know who Paul Auster is and they don’t read him. Auster is tremendously popular in Europe. He’s been translated into more than 20 languages. Those are the bulk of his sales. Americans are not interested in this kind of perception.

Criticism is not possible in a Manichaean world, of course, and the U.S. is very good at marginalizing writers who attempt to write a critique of the country in a fundamental way. Overt censorship, as a result, is not really necessary. I get this question all the time when I talk in Latin America. Aren’t your works censored? I said, there’s no need for it, the flood of information is so huge, how am I even going to get noticed? It would be like a sledgehammer to kill a fly. Why would they even bother? Famous last words.

The result is what you see in the famous Goya painting—which, if you go to Madrid, go to the Prado—Saturn Devouring His Son, Saturno devorando a su hijo. It’s really powerful. 1818. It’s really a horrifying painting. You have to see this. The U.S. is now imploding; it’s now eating itself alive. That’s what’s been going on. I argued this in Dark Ages America, in 2006.

The data for this that have accumulated since then are quite enormous. There is not a single American institution that is not seriously corrupt. I could document this for hours, but, again, you’ve got other things to do. Let me just cite a few examples.

First, Ronald Dworkin, one of America’s leading intellectuals, did an essay a few months ago in The New York Review of Books showing that the Supreme Court has become a court of men and not of laws. In the case of five out of the nine justices, he says, decisions are made in advance in a right-wing political direction, and then the justification for the decisions is trotted out after the fact, even though it often violates the Constitution. What kind of a court is this? It’s a kangaroo court.
In the book Academically Adrift, sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa report that after 2 years of college 45% of American students haven’t learned anything, and after 4 years 36% haven’t learned anything. Included in what they didn’t learn is any kind of critical, analytical reasoning ability, skills. They don’t have it. They don’t know what the difference is between an argument and an opinion, and they don’t know what evidence is. They literally have no idea. Most of the students, when asked, defined their college experience as social rather than academic or intellectual. That was what they were there for: to meet people, make friends, drink a lot of alcohol, and so on and so forth. Half the students in the study said they hadn’t taken a single course in the previous semester that required more than 20 pages of writing. A third said they hadn’t taken a course requiring more than 40 pages of reading. What were they doing? Watching videos? A Marist Poll released July 4 of this year showed that 42% of American adults are unaware that the U.S. declared its independence in 1776. Forty two percent. And when you go to the below-30 age group, it rises to 69%. Twenty-five percent of Americans don’t know from which country the U.S. seceded. Bulgaria? Ghana? A recent Newsweek poll revealed that 73% of Americans can’t give the official version of why we fought the Cold War, let alone the real version. But they can’t give the official version. And 44% are unable to say what the Bill of Rights is. A poll taken in the Oklahoma public school system—this is just a few months ago—turned up the fact that 77% of the students didn’t know who George Washington was. Seventy-seven percent. In a number of cities libraries have closed for lack of funding, but I also think it’s probably for lack of interest. Who wants to bother with books?

The new high school curriculum in American history in Texas does not have any units on Washington, Adams, or Thomas Jefferson, but it does have a study unit on Estée Lauder. It was like reading The Onion. When I first read that, I said, Oh, this is a joke. But satire has become reality in the U.S. I saw it, I think, in Common Dreams. I looked more closely. That article appeared in The Austin Statesman. It really is true. And I’ve been thinking of writing a letter to the Board of Education in Texas suggesting that they eliminate the unit on Franklin Delano Roosevelt, which I’m sure they don’t have anyway, and put in a major unit on Kim Kardashian. You laugh, but it’s only a couple of years away. Satire becomes reality in the U.S. Why not? You go to cnn.com and there articles about Kim’s rear end, her psoriasis, her wedding, her divorce. Why not? If Estée Lauder can make, I don’t see why Kim should be excluded.

In the aftermath of the crash of 2008, the very people who promulgated the ideology that led to the crash got appointed the President’s economic advisers. The fox now guards the henhouse. Lawrence Summers, Tim Geithner, Ben Bernanke, the whole crowd. Not a single Wall Street financial leader has faced jail. Major corporate figures who brought the economy down were, in fact, awarded huge bonuses. Some secured prestigious appointments at places such as Johns Hopkins University and the Brookings Institution. I couldn’t get a job as a janitor at the Brookings Institution. Let’s be clear about that. Meanwhile, the very practices that led to the crash, such as derivatives, credit default swaps, and all that sort of stuff, are now being pursued with more vigor than they were prior to the crash. It’s not that they say, “Oh, we can’t do this.” No, no. It’s more of the same. Paul Krugman asks, somewhat rhetorically,

How is it that in the wake of the obvious failure of casino capitalism and neoliberalism, the blame for the crash is not put on the banks, which received, finally, bailouts of roughly $19 trillion, and the corporations, but on the public sector.

So you have the crash because of the private sector and all the blame directed to the government.

Between 1987 and 2007 the number of Americans that are so disabled by mental disorders that they qualified for supplementary security income or Social Security disability insurance increased 2.5 times, so that one out of every six Americans now falls into this category. For children the increase is 35 times during the same period. That’s our future. Mental illness is now the leading cause of disability among the child population of the United States. A survey of American adults conducted by the National Institute of Mental Health over 2001-2003 found that 46% of them met the criteria of the American Psychiatric Association for being mentally ill. Ten percent of Americans over the age of 6 now take antidepressants. Actually, it stretches back to at least age 4 now. Toddlers are taking Prozac. And I read elsewhere that in the global market, in terms of volume of sales, American consumption of antidepressants is two-thirds of the entire world’s consumption. So here’s a country with less than 5% of the world’s population taking 67% of the antidepressant drugs. This has got to tell you something about the U.S. Some time ago a friend of mine in England, an art consultant, lived for many years in New York City. She bought a plaque when she was there. There’s no Woolworth’s, but it was a store like Woolworth’s. The plaque says, Evenings at 7:00 in the Parish Hall. That’s the title. And underneath it it says,

Monday, alcoholics;
Tuesday, abused spouses,
Wednesday; eating disorders;
Thursday, drug addiction;
Friday, teen suicide;
Saturday, soup kitchen;
and then finally, the Sunday sermon at 9:00 a.m., “America’s Joyous Future.”

Yes, we have some joyous future coming up.

The infrastructure in the U.S. is crumbling, and there’s no money to fix it. Also, in some cases, ideological opposition to fixing it is very strong. Apparently the levies of New Orleans are in the same shape now that they were before Katrina. I read an article some time ago about the attempt to address this. I don’t know whether it was on the municipal level of New Orleans or the state level. I can’t remember exactly. And I didn’t save the article. But the councilmen stated that they did not want to move on it because it would require a cooperative effort, and this, they said, meant socialism. So apparently working together is equivalent to socialism, and it’s better to risk another Katrina than to have that. It doesn’t get dumber than that.
The national debt now stands at more than $14 trillion. The official figure for poverty and hunger is 45 million citizens, but in fact that’s based on criteria that are pretty much obsolete. In fact, something like 200 million Americans live from paycheck to paycheck, if they can get a job. As far as that goes, don’t believe those figures about 9% unemployment. It’s close to 20% in real figures. This is verified by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. If you go to the Web site of the U.S. Department of Labor, you will find it. It’s like 18%, which means that one out of five Americans is out of work, and economists say there’s little chance they’re going to find it for another 10 years. Not a rosy prospect.
The President now has the right, although it violates the Geneva Accords, to designate any American citizen or, actually, anyone on the planet an enemy and have him or her assassinated. In fact, that recently happened on September 30 [2011]. Obama had two American citizens, Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan, murdered. And one can say, “Well, they were al-Qaeda supporters,” and so on. First of all, that’s not proven. And the second thing is, so what if they were? The Constitution says you have a right to have your day in court, not a right to get rubbed out. There’s no worry about that on the part of the government. And furthermore, American citizens don’t care. It doesn’t make any difference to them. In an essay entitled America’s Disappeared, Chris Hedges writes,

Torture, prolonged detention without trial, sexual humiliation, rape, disappearance, extortion, looting, random murder, and abuse have become, as in Argentina during the Dirty War, part of our own subterranean world of detention sites and torture centers…. We know of at least 100 detainees who died during interrogation at our “black sites.”

There are probably many, many more whose fate has never been made public. Tens of thousands of Muslim men have passed through our clandestine detention centers without due process.General Barry McCaffrey admitted:

We tortured people unmercifully. We probably murdered dozens of them…, both the armed forces and the C.I.A.

So tens of thousands of Americans are being held in super-maximum security prisons now, where they’re deprived of contact with anyone and psychologically destroyed. Undocumented workers are rounded up and they vanish from their families for weeks or months. Militarized police units break down the doors of some 40,000 Americans every year and haul them away in the dead of night as though they were enemy combatants. And, of course, as you know, habeas corpus no longer exists.

Once again, Philip Green comments on this.

A people that accepts as a normal course of events the bombing of civilians, torture, kidnapping, indefinite detention, assassinations, secret governments at home and covert wars abroad has lost touch with the moral basis of civil society.

A good description of us today, I think.

The U.S. military, which soaks up 50% of the discretionary budget, is apparently unable to win two wars in two small countries. In fact, it has not had a serious victory since World War II, after which it decided to play it safe and stick to tinpot dictators and minor nations.
A U.S. intelligence report released in 2007 called “Global Trends 2025”—you can download it on the Web—predicts a steady decline in American dominance over the coming decades, with U.S. leadership eroding

at an accelerating pace in political, economic, and cultural arenas.

To my knowledge, the President has never mentioned this report, nor has anyone in public office.

On July 19 of 2010, the Washington Post reported that 854,000 people work for the National Security Agency, the NSA, in 33 building complexes amounting to 17 million square feet of space in the D.C. metro area. Every day collection systems at the NSA intercept and store 1.7 billion emails and phone calls of American citizens in what amounts to a vast domestic spy system. Writing in The New Yorker on May 23 of this year, Jane Mayer reported that the NSA has three times the budget of the CIA and has the capacity to download every 6 hours electronic communications equivalent to the entire contents of the Library of Congress. Every 6 hours. They also developed a program called Thin Thread that enables computers to scan the material for key words, and they collect the billing records and the dialed phone numbers of everyone in the country. In violation of communications laws, AT&T, Verizon, and Bell South were only too happy to open their electronic records to the government. I have to say that at the height of its insanity, the Stasi in East Germany—you know that Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others)—was spying on one out of every seven citizens. The U.S. is now spying on seven out of every seven citizens. Everybody in this room, your emails, your phone calls, it’s all recorded.
You can now go to jail in the U.S. simply for speaking. In the late July of 2011, environmental activist Tim DeChristopher was sentenced to 2 years in prison for his repeated declaration that environmental protection required civil, that is to say, nonviolent, disobedience. One wonders if the same judge, Dee Benson, would have also put Rosa Parks and Mahatma Gandhi in jail had he been around during their lifetimes.
This is my favorite. This was also in July of 2011. Somehow this was symbolic, it seemed to me, of what’s happened to America in the last 60 years. Police in Georgia shut down a lemonade stand being run by three girls aged 10 to 14 who were trying to save up money for a trip to a local water park. The police said that they didn’t know what was in the lemonade and, in addition, that the girls needed a business license, a peddler’s permit, and a food permit in order to run the stand. It turns out that the permits cost $50 a day. Kind of counterproductive as far as the girls were concerned.
And finally, baker’s dozen, number thirteen, the deepest locus of corruption, it seems to me, is the American soul. I have to say again, it’s a question of macrocosm and microcosm. On page 56 of Why America Failed, I wrote,

As George Walden writes in his aptly titled study, God Won’t Save America: Psychosis of a Nation, “The peculiarities of nations, good and bad, tend to reflect the temperaments and qualities of their peoples. As Plato remarked, ‘Where else would they have come from?’”

At that point, when my editor, several months ago was working over the manuscript, at this point he wrote in the margin, “This is the turning point of the book.” This is it: this is the hinge point of the whole thing.

So as far as evidence for that goes, Jonathan Sheldon, in an article in The Nation, October 17, [2011,] talking about some of the meetings for Republican candidates, Ron Paul had apparently said something like he would recommend that anybody who got sick and didn’t have health insurance, it’s his risk, after all. And Wolf Blitzer asked him, “So he should just die?” That was the implication. And there were cheers from the crowd at this point. They roared in approval. They also applauded enthusiastically when Rick Perry reported that the state of Texas had murdered, 235 criminals on death row. That also brought enthusiastic cheers.

There is so much of this material now. Most recently, there was an article in The New York Times about a law firm, Steven J. Baum, located near Buffalo, New York. It’s commonly referred to as a foreclosure mill firm. It does the dirty work for banks in evicting people and so on. A year ago, Halloween 2010, they had a Halloween party and the staff showed up with their costumes being
homeless people. They dressed as the people that they themselves evicted. Here are the pictures. So the people dirtied their faces and they had signs, “Will Work for Food.” This was funny to them. Of course, the firm immediately denied it, but the pictures are online. Deny away.

Although he doesn’t get into the issue of negative identity per se, the French writer Denis Duclos, who is a director of the CNRS, the research institute in Paris, pegged the problem of the obsession with having an enemy and the violence that results from that in his book of 1994, Le Complexe du loup-garou (The Werewolf Complex). In his epilogue to the 2005 edition, Duclos writes that

America is always dependent on a werewolf figure, a dark, savage beast that’s out to destroy it. The beast changes in content, but the form is always the same. At the center of this is a terrible fear that Americans have of emptiness, which is an anxiety of not existing, and they disguise this with a hyperactive optimism.

Have a nice day.

“A curious society,” he writes,

a people who don’t know who they really are. Like the Romans, they see themselves under siege…. This could finally trigger a fascist populism [which, of course, we’re seeing with the Tea Party]. The American fear of the monster has always marked its history, whether this exists on the inside or the outside. This leads to isolating the country in a sort of collective psychosis that can only contribute to international instability.

In fact, that’s how most of the world sees us. A few years ago there was an international poll that asked the question, “Which nation do you believe is the greatest threat to world peace?” The United States and Israel said Iran, and everybody else said the United States. Writing in Der Spiegel last August, the German journalist Jakob Augstein argues that the U.S. is basically a failed state; it’s not part of the West anymore, and that Europe needs to keep its distance from what is a very different and apparently, his word, “insane” political culture. There is, he concludes, no deliverance in sight for the U.S.

What does mental health mean in an individual case? It’s at least this: That a person knows his or her personal narrative and is able to see it from the outside and, as a result of this transparency, at least try to do something about it. Perhaps the same thing is true of a nation or a civilization. I don’t know. But what I know is that there is very little understanding in the U.S. as to what the underlying narrative is, or even the fact that there is an underlying narrative. This seems to escape most Americans, almost all.

There’s also very little interest in thinking about national identity or lack of same in anything more than a superficial way, which is provided, for example, by The New York Times. In such a situation, change is simply not possible. The odds that we’re going continue on this unconscious path are overwhelming. We saw it with the tenth anniversary of 9/11. It was still a repeat of, This happened from the outside. We didn’t do anything. We never overthrew the regime of Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953 in Iran that led to this endless Islamic resentment of us. Oh, no, that had nothing to do with it.

In that sense, my work is indeed pointless. I’m a writer and social critic. I can’t stop the plane from crashing. Nobody can. But I’m rather like the engineer who surveys the wreckage and locates the black box and takes it apart and writes up the report, the postmortem. And that, I believe, does have some small value, because finally we need to know why America failed.

Q&A

The question is, we tend to vilify the enemy, whoever that is. Is there something special about the U.S. that creates that pattern? And I would say yes, for the reason that Marshall McLuhan gave, that violence reflects a search for identity. We don’t know who we are. We never did. And the notion that we were republican or anti- monarchical, those ideals of the 18th century really blew away like dandelion spores by the time the war of independence was over. The U.S. has always been—this is the theme of Why America Failed—a hustling culture. Basically, if your goal in life is more, then you have no goal. Because once you have more, then there’s always more. It never ends. So who are we and what are we doing? And once you have that kind of emptiness at the center, you’re going to be quite violent. De Tocqueville talked about this in Democracy in America. He said Americans are really strange. They live in a perpetual state of self-adoration; they’re always saying how fabulous they are. And he said, if you challenge that, they get very fierce, very quickly. This is 1831. Not too bad. Not too shabby an assessment.

The question is, I must have some observations about how we’re going to get out of this mess. I get letters on my blog regularly, especially from young people, what should I do? And I say, “What do you think is waiting for you 30 to 40 years down the line, when there’s no Social Security, no Medicare, no social safety net whatsoever and we are making yet another war on some verkakte country on the other side of the planet and spending trillions of dollars to do that? And if we run out of countries, we’re going to invade Antarctica and clean up those communistic penguins that are creating problems for the U.S.”

There’s no end to this. We don’t know how to do anything else. And the chances that we have, quite honestly, of turning this around are roughly the chances that we would have of turning around an aircraft carrier in a bathtub. So, quite frankly, not only is there no way out, but I would recommend you get out.

Things will only get worse in the U.S. And frankly, they could get very ugly. They could get quite nasty. And I think that it’s not very unusual to think that maybe 10-15 years from now a book like this couldn’t be sold, couldn’t be published. So as time goes on, who knows what’s going to happen? The Occupy Wall Street movement is an interesting thing to concern, but the general tendency in the U.S. as far as revolution goes is that it would occur from the right, not from the left. I don’t think that’s too far-fetched. It makes me edgy, I have to say. But I don’t have a crystal ball.

The question is not everybody can leave the U.S. What do you do if you’re trapped here? There are three possibilities. One is that you could change the country, turn it totally upside down. That’s not a possibility. The second is that you leave. The third is, if you can’t, you have to do a kind of inner emigration. And that’s what the monastic option was about. In other words, you have to find on a local basis, which I never was able to do, communities, groups, grass-roots organizations, study groups, whatever it is, that enable you to work toward the preservation of what’s good in the culture, and then you take your chances in terms of what’s going to happen. It’s obviously an important question. But that’s what I would recommend, fully undertaking the monastic option. You can live in a certain way, you can try to influence the people around you, you can organize in a local sense. What else do you have? But on a local level there are some possibilities. I never found it myself, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

I’ve always admired, for example, the Scandinavian countries in terms of how they’ve arranged their economy, but I am impressed by the fact that those countries are uniformly white, and so there’s a homogeneity that makes it easier to get along. We don’t have that luxury in the U.S., if that’s a luxury. They’ve arranged their economy a certain way. It certainly is a deeply embedded psychological trait. The only thing is that there also have been deliberate cultivations of not doing that. And the U.S., as far as I know, is not interested in that at all. You would think they could do it, because we don’t lack for a class of intelligent people in the U.S. But somehow those voices’ getting heard is very difficult.

The question is, what about our conquering Hitler and fighting World War II and that we triumphed and that was important. All that’s true. But the problem is that that was an unusual war. And what the right wing in the U.S. has convinced the rest of the country is that every war we get into is like that. So Ho Chi Minh was Hitler and Saddam Hussein was Hitler. They’re all Hitler. That becomes the model of war. When in fact there was only one Hitler and one war like that. That’s why I said, in the case of our opposition to Germany, that’s the one case that I think we were justified, that it really was the darkest of evil and that we had to defeat it. I doubt I would be here without that.

So that’s fine, that’s great. The only trouble is that it is not representative of the wars we have fought since 1945, even though every time Chamberlain, appeasement, Hitler are trotted out as reasons for us to go and kick the crap out of whatever—Grenada or something. Whatever it is we’re going to do, it’s Hitler redux, and we’re going to repeat the same story.

For information about obtaining CDs, MP3s, or transcripts of this or other programs, please contact:
David Barsamian
Alternative Radio
P .O. Box 551
Boulder, CO 80306-0551
phone (800) 444-1977
info@alternativeradio.org www.alternativeradio.org
©2012

The super-rich and the rest of us

Sat, 14 Jul 2012 18:08:48 GMT

by Paul Buchheit
Appearing in Hudson Valley Activist Newsletter
Reprinted from CounterPunch.

Paul Buchheit teaches Economic Inequality at DePaul University. He is the founder and developer of social justice and educational websites (Us Against Greed, Pay Up Now, and Rapping History) and the editor and main author of American Wars: Illusions and Realities (Clarity Press). He can be reached at paul@UsAgainstGreed.org.

Studying inequality in America reveals some facts that are truly hard to believe. Amidst all the absurdity a few stand out.

U.S. companies in total pay a smaller percentage of taxes than the lowest-income 20% of Americans. Total corporate profits for 2011 were $1.97 trillion. Corporations paid $181 billion in federal taxes (9%) and $40 billion in state taxes (2%), for a total tax burden of 11%. The poorest 20% of American citizens pay 17.4% in federal, state, and local taxes.
The high-profit, tax-avoiding tech industry was built on publicly-funded research. The technology sector has been more dependent on government research and development than any other industry. The U.S. government provided about half of the funding for basic research in technology and communications well into the 1980s. Even today, federal grants support about 60% of research performed at universities.

IBM was founded in 1911, Hewlett-Packard in 1947, Intel in 1968, Microsoft in 1975, Apple and Oracle in 1977, Cisco in 1984. All relied on government and military innovations. The more recently incorporated Google, which started in 1996, grew out of the Defense Department’s ARPANET system and the National Science Foundation’s Digital Library Initiative.

The combined 2011 federal tax payment for the eight companies was just 10.6%.

The sales tax on a quadrillion dollars of financial sales is ZERO. The Bank for International Settlements reported in 2008 that total annual derivatives trades were $1.14 quadrillion. The same year, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange reported a trading volume of $1.2 quadrillion.

A quadrillion dollars is the entire world economy, 12 times over. It’s enough to give 3 million dollars to every person in the United States. But in a sense it’s not real money. Most of it is high-volume nanosecond computer trading, the type that almost crashed our economy. So it’s a good candidate for a tiny sales tax. But there is no sales tax.

Go out and buy shoes or an iPhone and you pay up to a 10% sales tax. But walk over to Wall Street and buy a million dollar high-risk credit default swap and pay 0%.

Many Americans get just a penny on the dollar.
For every dollar of NON-HOME wealth owned by white families, people of color have only one cent.
For every dollar the richest .1% earned in 1980, they’ve added three more dollars. The poorest 90% have added one cent.
For every dollar of financial securities (e.g., bonds) in the U.S., the bottom 90% of Americans have a penny and a half’s worth.
For every dollar of 2008-2010 profits from Boeing, DuPont, Wells Fargo, Verizon, General Electric, and Dow Chemicals, the American public got a penny in taxes.
Our society allows one man or one family to possess enough money to feed every hungry person on earth. The United Nations estimates that $30 billion is needed to eradicate hunger. Several individuals have more than this amount in personal wealth.

There are 925 million people in the world with insufficient food. According to the World Food Program, it takes about $100 a year to feed a human being. That’s $92 billion, about equal to the fortune of the six Wal-Mart heirs.

One Final Outrage…

In 2007 a hedge fund manager (John Paulson) conspired with a financial company (Goldman Sachs) to create packages of risky subprime mortgages, so that in anticipation of a housing crash he could use other people’s money to bet against his personally designed sure-to-fail financial instruments. His successful gamble paid him $3.7 billion. Three years later he made another $5 billion, which in the real world would have been enough to pay the salaries of 100,000 health care workers.

As an added insult to middle-class taxpayers, the tax rate on most of Paulson’s income was just 15%. As a double insult, he may have paid no tax at all, since hedge fund profits can be deferred indefinitely. As a triple insult, some of his payoff came from the middle-class taxpayers themselves, who bailed out the company (AIG) that had to pay off his bets.

And the people we elect to protect our interests are unable or unwilling to do anything about it.

The Election reflects America’s conservative era

Sat, 14 Jul 2012 14:19:00 GMT

by Jack A. Smith
editor, Activist Newsletter

This year’s presidential campaign is taking place within an extremely conservative era in American political history that will substantially influence the domestic and foreign priorities of the next administration, regardless of whether it’s headed by Democrat Barack Obama or Republican Mitt Romney.

Romney and his party, of course, embrace rigid right-wing politics influenced by Tea Party extremism, while Obama and the Democrats—campaign rhetoric aside—basically echo the now extinct “moderate Republicans” of a quarter-century ago in a number of particulars.

A case in point about our decades-long conservative era is the Obama Administration’s major “progressive” achievement—the Affordable Care Act (ACA) health insurance plan, which was upheld by the Supreme Court two weeks ago.

The ACA, which congressional Republicans fought furiously to oppose when put forward by President Obama, was devised nearly 20 years ago by the conservative Heritage Foundation and implemented in Massachusetts by Romney when governor in 2006.

In his column in the New York Times June 29, the liberal Keynesian economist Paul Krugman pointed out that the act, which he supports, is

not perfect, by a long shot—it is, after all, originally a Republican plan, devised long ago as a way to forestall the obvious alternative of extending Medicare to cover everyone.

A page-1 news analysis in the Times has referred to the measure as “the most significant piece of social legislation since the New Deal,” ignoring Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, and the civil rights achievements of the 1960s in order to embellish its significance.

Doubtless, the new health measure contains several important new benefits, as well as several key shortcomings.

(For details and analysis of the ACA by Physicians for a National Health Program, see the following:)

PNHP leaders released the following statement June 28:

Although the Supreme Court has upheld the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the unfortunate reality is that the law, despite its modest benefits, is not a remedy to our health care crisis: (1) it will not achieve universal coverage, as it leaves at least 26 million uninsured, (2) it will not make health care affordable to Americans with insurance, because of high co-pays and gaps in coverage that leave patients vulnerable to financial ruin in the event of serious illness, and (3) it will not control costs.

Why is this so? Because the ACA perpetuates a dominant role for the private insurance industry. Each year, that industry siphons off hundreds of billions of health care dollars for overhead, profit and the paperwork it demands from doctors and hospitals; it denies care in order to increase insurers’ bottom line; and it obstructs any serious effort to control costs.

In contrast, a single-payer, improved-Medicare-for-all system would provide truly universal, comprehensive coverage; health security for our patients and their families; and cost control. It would do so by replacing private insurers with a single, nonprofit agency like Medicare that pays all medical bills, streamlines administration, and reins in costs for medications and other supplies through its bargaining clout.

Research shows the savings in administrative costs alone under a single-payer plan would amount to $400 billion annually, enough to provide quality coverage to everyone with no overall increase in U.S. health spending.

The major provisions of the ACA do not go into effect until 2014. Although we will be counseled to “wait and see” how this reform plays out, we’ve seen how comparable plans have worked in Massachusetts and other states. Those “reforms” have invariably failed our patients, foundering on the shoals of skyrocketing costs, even as the private insurers have continued to amass vast fortunes.

Our patients, our people and our national economy cannot wait any longer for an effective remedy to our health care woes. The stakes are too high.

Contrary to the claims of those who say we are “unrealistic,” a single-payer system is within practical reach. The most rapid way to achieve universal coverage would be to improve upon the existing Medicare program and expand it to cover people of all ages. There is legislation before Congress, notably H.R. 676, the “Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act,” which would do precisely that.

What is truly unrealistic is believing that we can provide universal and affordable health care in a system dominated by private insurers and Big Pharma.

The American people desperately need a universal health system that delivers comprehensive, equitable, compassionate and high-quality care, with free choice of provider and no financial barriers to access. Polls have repeatedly shown an improved Medicare for all, which meets these criteria, is the remedy preferred by two-thirds of the population. A solid majority of the medical profession now favors such an approach, as well.

We pledge to step up our work for the only equitable, financially responsible and humane cure for our health care ills: single-payer national health insurance, an expanded and improved Medicare for all.

— Physicians for a National Health Program is an organization of more than 18,000 doctors who advocate for single-payer national health insurance. To speak with a physician/spokesperson in your area, visit PNHP actions or call (312) 782-6006.

Back to the main article:

Many liberals are now suggesting the ACA—which will still leave over 25 million people without insurance and may deprive millions more poor families of Medicaid as well (thanks to a ruling by arch-conservative Chief Justice John Roberts allowing states to reject enlarging the program)—is a first step toward the development of a truly inclusive national healthcare system. The second step, however, may be decades in coming, if ever, given probable conservative attempts to repeatedly weaken the ACA, much less allow an expansion.

Another of President Obama’s major first term “progressive” initiatives was taken from the conservatives as well. This was his proposal for a cap-and-trade system to reduce carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere, where they contribute to global warming. This flexible market-based program allowed high greenhouse gas emitters to buy the right to continue polluting the atmosphere from companies with low emissions. Cap-and-trade was a less stringent alternative to tougher regulations sought by environmentalists and it was supported by Republican Presidents Ronald President, George H.W. Bush (who adopted a similar measure in the early 1990s to curb acid rain), and by George W. Bush.

By the time Obama took office, the Republicans had lurched further to the right and corporate interests, led by Big Oil and Dirty Coal, were campaigning passionately against cap and trade. Conservatives scuttled the legislation in the Senate.

In both instances progressive legislation far more appropriate to healthcare and environmental needs was waiting in the wings but Obama—a champion of bipartisanship despite continual humiliating rebuffs—opted for the moderate Republican plans. When cap and trade failed, Obama in effect abandoned the fight against global warming rather than introduce progressive alternatives and fighting for them.

[One of America’s best known environmentalists and outspoken climate scientist, James Hansen, head the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, has been leading a campaign against cap-and-trade for several years, charging it “does little to slow global warming or reduce our dependence on fossil fuels.” Some groups fighting climate change support the measure as a first step.]

The White House didn’t even allow the labor movement’s most important legislative request—the Employee Free Choice Act that would have removed roadblocks to union organizing—to come to a vote in the first term when the Democrats controlled both congressional chambers. A probable reason is that Blue Dog conservative Democrats would have voted with the minority to quash the measure.

Today’s conservative era is the product of an unrelenting drive for strategic ideological dominance by the right wing and its big business and financial sector allies for almost four decades. It is a reaction to the liberal reforms of the post-World War II era and social advances from the mass popular struggles of the 1960s-early ’70s period. As the Republicans moved ever further to the right in the intervening years, so too did the Democrats, now situated in the center right of the political spectrum. This leaves the U.S. as the world’s only rich capitalist state without a mass party left of center to at least offer some protection to working families.

The conservative assault accelerated with the implosion of the USSR and the dismantling of most socialist societies two decades ago. The existence of extensive social welfare programs, first in the Soviet Union and then in various socialist countries after World War II, obliged the capitalist “West” to implement reforms lest its own working classes be attracted to “the communist menace.” The ending of the Cold War also ended the adoption of significant social programs in America, and the weakening of existing benefits.

Many conservative goals have already been attained since the mid-’70s, and a number of them have taken place with partial or complete support of the Democratic party. They include:

The severe weakening of the labor union movement;
the redistribution of massive wealth to the already rich through individual and corporate tax cuts while the standard of living for most Americans is in decline;
off-shoring of manufacturing to enhance corporate profits;
increased wage exploitation;
deregulation of the financial economy, enhancing its casino configuration;
privatization of government services;
the elimination of social programs for the multitudes;
threatened cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security are now “on the table,” says Obama;
the fact that about half the American people receive low wages or live in poverty;
inaction on needed tax increases for the wealthy;
undermining the U.S. educational system;
setbacks for civil liberties;
and a massive increase in the prison population.

The conservatives made considerable progress during the presidencies of Reagan (1981-89), Bush I (1989-93) and Bush II (2001-2009). But rightist policies also spread during the Democratic administrations of Bill Clinton (1993-2001) and incumbent Obama from 2009.

Clinton’s two principal domestic achievements during 8 years in office weakened two key Democratic reforms, much to the delight of the Republicans. In 1996 he conspired with conservatives to dismantle “welfare as we know it” by passing the “Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act.” In 1999, Clinton joined forces with the congressional right wing to repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act—a decision that in large part was responsible for the Great Recession and several more years of economic stagnation, unemployment and some 6 million home foreclosures.

Obama’s first term in office is most noteworthy for his continual concessions to the right wing and refusal to fight for progressive goals, leading his wavering centrist party to the right of center in the process. He demobilized his enthusiastic and massive 2008 constituency upon taking office, evidently because he didn’t want a large activist organization in the streets pushing toward the liberalism many Democratic voters incorrectly believed he embodied.

The conservative campaign for even more control of the political system was signaled by the emergence of the activist right-wing populist Tea Party soon after Obama took power. The political impact of this nationwide organization of older white conservatives, libertarians, and the religious right—bankrolled in part by billionaires—has been considerable, not least because no mass activist liberal movement was available to challenge Tea Party activism or put forward a progressive counter-agenda. The liberal rank and file has been isolated by the party leadership, as have liberals in Congress. The few remaining center-left politicians have been objects of criticism from the White House and Democratic big wigs.

The Tea Party added a new element to the decades-long conservative campaign for dominant power in the U.S. Now the GOP isn’t just ideologically driven right-wing politicians, their business backers, and the wealthy 1% who finance their campaigns, but grass-roots activists with their own selfish axes to grind. Some are fuming because their taxes help the “undeserving” poor. Some think immigrants are “freeloaders.” Some are racists who do not accept a black president in the White House. Some will not abide gays and lesbians. Some reject separation of church and state. Some want to subvert the hard-earned rights of American women.

The conservatives rage against “big government” and “wasteful spending,” but this is demagogic rhetoric convincing or confusing a sector of the electorate largely ignorant of history and the details of current events. Both the Reagan and Bush II administrations—vocal proponents of a smaller state and lower spending—increased the size of government and created huge deficits.

The real Republican objective isn’t a “smaller” government per se but a government driven by free market laissez-faire capitalism and entirely controlled by monopoly corporations, Wall Street financiers, and the 1% ruling class. In the process, most government regulation of the economy and financial system will be eliminated, social programs will wither along with collective bargaining and the trade union movement, and key services will be transferred to profit-driven corporations.

Since the Affordable Care Act or cap-and-trade are conservative initiatives to begin with, why did congressional Republicans and the entire right wing, including arch opportunist Romney, fight against them?

The conservative movement has gravitated further to the right than it was 5 years ago, and the Democrats have moved in tandem, perhaps a dozen steps behind and two or three to the left, but quite distant from the domestic liberalism of the 1960s and the 1930s. The last significant social programs took place during conservative Republican President Richard M. Nixon’s first term (1969-72)—a product of the still popular though fading liberal era of social reform that he could not ignore. The conservative era began soon afterward.

Experience has taught the Republicans that the modern Democratic Party—particularly during the centrist Clinton and center-right Obama incarnations—hastily retreats and offers remarkably big concessions when confronted with obdurate opposition from the right. This is one reason why Republicans have adopted a policy of non-cooperation with Obama and Democrats in Congress. Even when the right-wing political resistance doesn’t get everything it seeks, it always seems to get something.

For instance, to gain big business and conservative backing for the healthcare act, Obama first rejected the progressive option of a less expensive and far more inclusive universal Medicare (single payer) covering all Americans, then dropped the liberal halfway notion of a “public option” in favor of the Republican plan. He then privately reached agreements with the major pharmaceutical and health insurance companies and hospitals, assuring them of huge profits for many years to come. Lastly he made further concessions to Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats.

The Republican leaders who demonize “Obamacare” are well aware of its limited nature but the absurdly characterized “socialist” ACA will remain a useful conservative target for years to come as long as the opposition party would rather compromise than fight for genuine progressive objectives.

Had President Obama initiated a hard-fought populist educational campaign for single payer, he may have lost the vote but he could have won many additional supporters and tried again and again until victory. Medicare for all has important advantages in addition to covering everyone. Overhead is only 3% compared to about 30% for the profit making insurance companies. Single-payer type health coverage exists in virtually all the leading industrialized capitalist countries of the world but will remain ridiculously overdue in the U.S. until a mass progressive movement or party takes up the challenge. By not daring to struggle, the Democrats don’t dare to win.

One of the major conservative strengths, despite various internal factions, is that the Republicans entertain several concrete long-range political and ideological goals and are willing to fight for them over the years. And their dishonest, obstructionist politics during Obama’s tenure have paid conservative dividends, even at the expense of deepening the nation’s economic crisis and further burdening workers and the unemployed by refusing to finance recovery.

The Democrats have no such long-range progressive goals—or any serious progressive goals, for that matter—and the party seems to have forgotten how to fight.

Even the staunchly pro-Democratic liberal magazine The Nation noted June 25 that aside from populist campaign speeches, Obama

will offer no transformational agenda, no new foundation for an economy that works for working people, no plan for reviving the middle class. And no matter who wins, only sustained popular pressure will forestall a debilitating “grand bargain” that will further undermine the middle class and the poor….

Americans understand that the system is broken—and rigged against them. They increasingly see both parties as compromised, and they have little sense of an alternative and even less of a sense that anyone is prepared to fight for them. Progressives must therefore be willing to expose the corruption and compromises of both parties. This requires not only detailing the threat posed by the right but honestly about the limits of the current choice.

These are extremely sharp words from a publication that virtually worshiped Obama during the last campaign and has often offered excuses for him since then.

It is clear today that as a result of conservative gains in recent decades the United States has become much more of a plutocracy than a democracy, the electoral system is now utterly corrupted by big money, gross inequality is our capitalist system’s norm, and civil liberties are being shredded.

Public consciousness of this reality has been expanding in recent years, particularly since the onset of the Great Recession—an unusually severe periodic economic failing that “officially” ended 3 years ago but remains a disaster for the over 60% of the U.S. labor segment who constitute the working class. But the two mass ruling parties, each rejecting or ignoring progressive goals in favor of Republican “heavy” or Democratic “lite” conservative politics, cannot fight the plutocrats or urgently reconstruct what is left of American democracy.

Only a left-of-center contending party or a truly mass and activist movement that puts forward a fighting progressive program has a chance of dumping the conservative era. The Democrats may be several political degrees better than the Republicans, but they have been gradually tilting toward the right without respite since the demise of the party’s final center-left manifestation 44 years ago. They now appear to be hopelessly stagnant and ideologically ill-equipped to transform the conservative era they helped create, even if Obama is reelected in November.

Who is the real terrorist?

Sat, 07 Jul 2012 21:40:17 GMT

Please watch this short video: Amazing speech of Iraq Veteran Against War.

If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy…. The loss of Liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against danger, real or imagined, from abroad….

–James Madison

What effect does Walmart have on American jobs?

Wed, 04 Jul 2012 11:57:31 GMT

What effect does Walmart have on American jobs? Thanks to Shy Girl for this infographic.

Gimme shelter: The housing crisis

Wed, 04 Jul 2012 01:18:31 GMT

Max Rameau
Eugene, OR
April 19, 2012

available from Alternative Radio

You can listen to Max Rameau speak for himself here.

Max Rameau is a community organizer. He is Executive Director of Movement Catalyst. He helped establish Take Back the Land, which organizes resistance to foreclosures and assists families to stay in their homes. He works on a broad range of issues impacting the poor, such as housing, immigrant rights, economic justice, and Cop Watch.

++++++++++

David Barsamian’s introduction:
Anatole France, Nobel Prize winner, wrote

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.

During the on going Great Recession, millions have lost their homes. Many of those who have ended up homeless, are living, if you can call it that, in the streets. You can see them from Santa Monica to Madison Avenue to Vancouver in Canada. In Boulder, where I live, every morning, they emerge from behind bushes and from under bridges. It is shameful, given the level of wealth, that so many are without shelter. The U.S. spends billions maintaining military bases all over the world and has 11 aircraft carrier battle groups roaming the seven seas, but at home people don’t have a roof over their heads.

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It is important to do this kind of work now, when we are in the midst of a historic crisis here in the United States and the society. Not just an economic crisis, but in a real way a crisis of conscience. People are not just taking this lying down, but we are starting to stand up and starting to respond to the crisis in a way that shares values and shares visions about what we think the society can be and what we think the society should be, but ultimately where the society will be.

I want to talk to you a little bit about what this historic moment is, what we think that it is at Take Back the Land, what kind of movement we are trying to build here, and why it’s important to build a movement in this particular time in history. Of course, it’s always important to join organizations and to build movements. But we are in a unique historical moment, and during this time we think that this message of building organizations and building movements is even more important than it is under normal circumstances.

The reason, of course, it’s so important is because of the context of the economic crisis in which we find ourselves. Right now we are facing an economic crisis where millions of people in the United States are suffering incredibly as a result of the actions and misdeeds of a very small number of people who became fabulously wealthy, even more wealthy as a result of their misdeeds and really as a direct result of the suffering of many millions of people. So the housing crisis right now that we’re experiencing in this country is bad, and it’s impacting a growing number of people across sectors—across class, across race, and across gender.

To be clear, because of structural inequities, including racism and patriarchy, those who are most disproportionately impacted by the housing crisis are low-income black women. Every study has demonstrated that that is the most disproportionately impacted group in this country as it relates to the housing crisis.

Nonetheless, everyone is getting impacted by the housing crisis, and certainly large numbers of people who normally are immune to these kinds of ups and downs in the market. So we’re having this huge crisis, people are suffering as a result of this crisis.

In response to the crisis, people are looking at it and reacting to it in different extremes.

On one side we have people who are opening their arms to those who are suffering, who are volunteering more, who are donating more money, who are joining organizations, who are taking over lands and occupying them and doing all kinds of other things. That’s the extreme on one side.
The extreme on the other side are the people who watch the suffering and see the suffering and react to that suffering or respond to that suffering by saying that the government should stop giving checks to people and should stop giving handouts to people and should stop helping people who are suffering in the midst of this economic crisis.

Either way, in both extreme responses, people are reacting to the crisis and to the impacts of the crisis, and they’re changing their ideas about what the different institutions in the society are as a result of the crisis. So in both extreme responses to the crisis, people are compelled to rethink their relationship to social institutions. We’re rethinking what our relationship is to social institutions.

The truth is, when you could go out and get a $200,000 mortgage to pay for a house that was worth only $100,000 because everyone thought that in 6 months you could turn around and sell it for $300,000, nobody was complaining about banks and the finance system and interest rates, etc.

That’s because when a Ponzi scheme is on its way up, nobody is complaining about it, as long as it’s paying out. The only time people start complaining about a Ponzi scheme is when it’s on its way down and you’ve lost money in it.

But if we are really against injustice, then we have to be against injustice even when that injustice is working to our personal individual benefit, not just when it turns against us. So for better or for worse, now that what was called the housing boom has turned into a housing bust, people are questioning the system that created the housing boom in the first place as well as created the bust.

So this new willingness to rethink ideas about institutions in the society presents the social justice movement with a unique and historic opportunity. That unique and historic opportunity is to explain how we would reshape the society, how we would re-envision, reimagine, and rebuild the society.

That means that if this crisis is as bad as it appears—and I think that it is—and if people are suffering the way they are, then that means that the people who are suffering are going to rethink the institutions in their lives and they’re going to be willing to make changes to those institutions in a way that they were not willing to make changes before we got hit by this crisis. The idea that you have a crisis and as a result of the crisis people are shifting their ideas, their conceptions of social institutions, speaks directly to theories of social transformation: How does social transformation actually happen, what leads to it, and how can you predict where it’s going and what areas it’s going to impact?

There are in every society, and even in small groups and organizations and families, contradictions and there are conflicts. Sometimes those contradictions and conflicts rise to the level of a crisis. And when those contradictions and conflicts rise to the level of a crisis, in response to that crisis ideas emerge about how to resolve the crisis, how to solve the crisis, or how to deal with the crisis. Those ideas or the people behind them, the social forces behind them, then fight it out in what we call a social clash in order to advance their particular position. As a result of this fighting out, whatever existed before is overturned and something new takes its place, for good or for bad. Sometimes it’s for better, sometimes it’s for worse, but either way that is the process.

For example, you might have in a society costs which go up so quickly and so high that millions of people in that society are not able to afford health care and the society determines that there is a real health care crisis. As a result of the health care crisis, different ideas then emerge about how to solve it:

Some people say the way you solve the health care crisis is you prevent patients from suing doctors.
Other people say the way you solve the crisis is that you have the government put out an insurance policy, which then competes with the other insurance policies.
And others say the way to solve the crisis is by ensuring that every single person–regardless of their age, regardless of their income, regardless of their current health situation–have full and total access to health care by mere virtue of the fact that they’re human beings and that universal health care is the only way to solve the crisis.

These different ideas emerge. There are social forces behind each one. They fight it out in a social clash. As a result, the existing way of running health care in the society is overturned, and a new one replaces it. It could be a new one for good, it could be a new one for bad, it could be a new one that ends up being a wash in many ways, but either way, it’s a new one.

So the process, then, involves a crisis. As a result of the crisis, you have different ideas on how to solve it, and then you have social clash where these ideas fight it out. And then at the end of the social clash, something is destroyed and something new replaces that institution. It’s a new society or a new segment or portion of the society.

Social clashes are nothing new. They happen all the time, and they happen at different levels and in different sizes. And they happen locally, they happen nationally, they happen internationally.

But sometimes social clashes rise to the level of major social clashes. To date, the U.S. has experienced three major social clashes, each of which has significantly transformed the way this country works.

The first social clash we commonly call the Civil War. There was a really crisis in that you had two economic systems competing for dominance in this country. One was slavery and the other was industrial capitalism. Of course, no country can have two economic systems operating at the same time, in the same place, so there was a social clash–in fact, the ultimate social clash, a civil war–about which way this economy, the economy in the U.S., would run and what would be the fundamental movement of the economy. As a direct result, you had the end of slavery (at least, the legal end of slavery), and you had the emergence of industrial capitalism. It completely changed the society forever. There’s no denying that. For good or for bad, for not enough, it completely changed the society.
The second major social clash was what we commonly call the Great Depression. The crisis was a complete and total economic meltdown. And as a result of the economic meltdown, different ideas emerged about how to solve the economic crisis. Are we going to allow the market to resolve it? Are we going to have greater government intervention? Are we going to build some kind of social safety net to protect people from these kinds of economic downturns and also put limits on the way businesses can do whatever it is they do? As a result of an extremely well organized labor movement with very clear objectives, the latter part won out, and a social safety net was built almost from scratch in this country, and all kinds of limitations were put on corporations. Not enough of a social safety net, not enough limitations, but this society was fundamentally changed forever as a direct result of the crisis and the social clash coming out of the Great Depression.
The third major social clash is commonly called the civil rights movement. First of all, there were many components to that, but just to focus in on one, there was an emerging black middle class that was beginning to develop some economic clout but couldn’t use it in any real significant way. We had people who had enough money to go out to nice restaurants and eat but weren’t allowed in because of Jim Crow laws, and they were no longer willing to tolerate that kind of behavior. So they organized and shut down parts of society and formed a real crisis in the society. There were ideas that emerged about how to resolve that. Was there going to be segregation of the races? Was there going to be complete separation, or was there going to be the end of legal segregation? As a direct result, there was the end of legal segregation in the U.S. and a complete transformation, which I think most people could not have possibly anticipated, certainly not in the 1950s.

Each of these three social clashes occurred as a result of crisis and overturned the way things work in this country and reshaped the country forever—for good, for bad, for indifferent, reshaped the country forever.

As a direct result of the ongoing economic crisis, we believe that the U.S. is on the cusp of entering its fourth major social clash. Because the economic crisis is deeply rooted in the housing and foreclosure crisis, we believe that the social clash is going to be fundamentally rooted in the housing industry and that at the end of this period we will see significant changes in how land relationships work and how housing in this country works. So therefore, because the crisis is firmly rooted in the housing sector, we think the part of the society that’s going to be overturned, transformed, and replaced is going to be firmly rooted in the housing sector.

At this time banks are reporting megaprofits, record profits in many instances. The executives of those banks are getting record bonuses at the end of the year, and all of those bonuses are being paid by our tax money. At the same time that this is happening, millions of people are losing their homes. And the ability for banks to kick those people out of their homes in a perverse way is being financed by the people who are getting foreclosed on and evicted. They’re paying the banks; they’re providing the banks with the money that the banks need to foreclose on and evict those families. So entire communities are suffering the consequences now of this housing crisis and this foreclosure crisis.

As a direct result, people are questioning the value of an economic system that can cause so much damage and so much pain to so many people while providing so much wealth, so much fabulous wealth, to such a small number of people and corporations. More specifically, people are wondering aloud, in ways that they did not before. Should people be kicked out of their homes even when the banks that are kicking them out have been compensated for that home through the federal bailout that we paid for?

What is the responsibility that we have towards our other fellow human beings to house them when they don’t have housing and to take care of them when they don’t have jobs or other support services? More importantly, what is a home? What is a community? What is our relationship to that community and what is the relationship of things like banks and other corporations to that community and to our homes? Who should control the land and the housing in our community?

These questions and the motivating factors behind these questions I think are forming the cornerstone of one of the pillars or posts that is going to emerge and turn into the fighting points for this coming social clash, where people will question the existing way of operating land relationships and argue that they should function in an entirely different way and we should move the society in that direction. This, again, is an unprecedented opportunity for the social justice movement to develop, articulate, and meaningfully struggle for transformation in the way society relates to land and land relationships in general and housing in particular. This presents for us a unique opportunity, which we haven’t had in many, many decades in this country.

In his seminal work, Wretched of the Earth, the great African writer Frantz Fanon said,

Every generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission and then either fulfill that mission or betray it.

As a direct result of the economic crisis and the housing crisis and this response that we are seeing now to that crisis, the mission of the social justice movement–the mission, indeed, of this generation–is becoming increasingly clear. We can in our lifetimes elevate housing to the level of a human right.

The mission of this generation, the mission of this social justice movement, is to elevate housing to the level of a human right and secure community control over land. We can accomplish that. And given what the crisis is and what the opportunity is, we have nothing less than that on our plate today. That’s what we have to address.

The opportunity, however, to go from a system where whoever has the most money can buy up all the housing and the people who don’t have any money don’t have access and have to hide in bushes and sleep there in hopes that the police do not find them and arrest them–the opportunity that we have to shift from that system to a system where housing is a human right–is here, but is by no means guaranteed. That is to say, there are very powerful people who don’t want to see it changed from the market system to the housing-as-a-human-right system because they benefit significantly from the existing way of doing things.

So in order for us to move in the direction of elevating housing to the level of a human right and securing community control of the land, we need to have clarity about what it is that we’re trying to do and how we are trying to do it so that we don’t make tactical errors during the social clash. If we’re not clear about where we’re going or how it is we want to go there, we’re going to continually make tactical mistakes as a movement, and we’re not going to get to the destination. Those who benefit from the existing system are going to find ways of ensuring that we don’t get to the destination where we want to end up at.

Confusion here is the enemy of progress. So we must develop clarity about the nature of this time in history, this particular social clash, and the potential that we have to transform society at this time. The lack of clarity about the core issues involved here will destroy this opportunity, will undermine this opportunity, and could actually force us to go backward rather than go forward.

At the end of the social clash, of course, we have a significantly different society, but the significantly different society doesn’t guarantee that it’s going to be significantly different in a better way. I think we’re heading to a T in the road, and we can take either a hard turn, where we go from the way things are now to housing as a human right, or we will go in the exact opposite direction to complete and total corporate control over our lives.

We don’t think about it this way now because we’re still in the midst of the crisis, but think about this 20 or 30 years out. The number of foreclosures and evictions that are happening, the number of banks that are taking over, there are a few, relatively small number, five banks, that are taking on the vast majority of foreclosures. It’s not difficult to imagine in 20 years that the U.S. has only five landlords and people are renting from one of the five landlords, and these five landlords are corporate barons. So just because we have this opportunity doesn’t mean that we’re going to get there. We could just as easily be either lulled to sleep and the opportunity goes in the other direction, or we could be tricked into having the opportunity go in the other direction.

The key to clarity here, I think, is to properly distinguish between a root issue and a surface issue—a root issue, or the cause of something, and the surface issue, or the manifestation or symptom of something. The failure to distinguish between the root issue and the surface issue is going to cause us great problems. It will cause you to go left when you think you’re going right, and it will cause you to go down when you think you’re going up, and it will cause you to run in circles, and because you will be running extremely quickly, you’re thinking you’re going somewhere but you’re actually not going anywhere at all.

So, to be perfectly clear, the foreclosures that we’re having during this crisis are a manifestation or symptom of the problem. It is not the actual problem. Gentrification, that has impacted low-income communities of color, closing of public housing units and all kinds of other things that have devastated communities of color and low-income communities are surface issues, not root issues. By surface issues we mean the manifestation of things we can touch and see and actually deal with. If we don’t deal with the root issue and we only deal with the surface issues, we’re going to put ourselves in a cycle where we are forced to repeat the battles in other generations to come, maybe not even in generations, maybe in just a few more years.

We have to deal with the root issue, not just with the surface issue. We saw this clearly in the 1950s and 1960s in this country. In the 1950s and 1960s, the larger white communities in many states–including, by the way, in Oregon and many local communities–was able to go to the black community and say to them,

You are only allowed to live in this area. You have to stay in between this street and that street. And you can’t go out of there at night. You can’t live in other neighborhoods. This is where you have to stay. You can’t go anywhere else.

That was called segregation, or Jim Crow laws.

Recently, in the early 2000s, as the housing boom was taking off and housing prices were going up, the larger white community was then able to go to these black communities and say,

The land that you’re sitting on right now, the one that we forced you into, is now valuable. It’s waterfront property. We want to build a stadium there, we want to build a performing arts center there. You have to get out of there, so that we can take your house, demolish it, and build condos or build a stadium or whatever it is we want to build.

That was called gentrification, or the forcible removal of low-income people in order to make room for higher-income people.

Objectively there’s no difference between someone saying to you “You have to stay over here” and someone saying to you “You can’t stay over there, you have to get out of there.” In either instance you have no real control over where you live, work, sleep, worship, etc. Either way, someone else is in control of your life and in control of the circumstances around your life. That’s because the real issue in the 1950s and the 1960s was not segregation, and the real issue in the early 2000s during the housing boom was not gentrification. Those were just surface issues or manifestations of the real issue. The real issue was land and the lack of control that we have over land. The real question was who has actual control over this land.

The failure to distinguish properly between the root issue and the surface issue of segregation led to tactical errors during the civil rights movement and ultimately doomed us to repeat today some of the same fights that we had to fight back then in the 1950s and 1960s. There were some people who actually thought that if you just changed a group of laws, the Jim Crow laws, which said that black people weren’t allowed to go here, black people weren’t allowed to eat over there, that that would somehow make the air cleaner and the water fresher and make everyone’s life better. They thought that would actually solve the problem. But the Jim Crow laws were not the problem, they were the manifestation of the problem. The problem is: You had a group of people who were saying,

We think we are better than you, and we’re human and you’re not human.

The way they made that real or the way that they made that tangible was by making these laws. You couldn’t, then, end the way they were feeling or the way they were acting just by ending the laws which they enacted in order to codify the way they were feeling or the way they were acting.

At some point we have to deal with the real issue. And that’s the fact that white supremacy existed and dominated the society. It continues to exist and dominate today. So not recognizing properly the difference between ending segregation and ending racism was a huge problem in the same way that not properly understanding the difference between ending segregation and changing land relationships was also a huge problem.

Let us be equally clear about the problem that we face today. The root issue we face today is not what interest rate you’re paying or what your principal is and whether or not you’re going to get your principal reduced, and it’s not about the number of foreclosures. All of those who are manifestations or the symptoms of the problem. The problem that we have today is faulty land relationships that are based entirely on who has the most money rather than who is a human being and what is the collective benefit or the proper collective use of this piece of land. If we don’t properly understand the difference between one and the other, we are going to make tactical mistakes in this time, and we are going to blow a huge opportunity to advance the human agenda, the right of human beings to have housing and community control over land.

To be perfectly clear, we want to stop foreclosures, we want to build more public housing. But we can’t build a movement just to stop foreclosures, and we can’t build a movement just to build more public housing. We have to build a movement to elevate housing to the level of a human right and secure community control over land.

The transformation of the society and the transformation, really, of land relationships is going to manifest itself in community control over land, and those communities will then figure out how to implement the human right to housing. As it relates to the clash, the building of this movement that we need to engage in right now in order to position ourselves to fight the social clash—because, you know, on the other side they’re building their own movement so that they can resist the fight to elevate housing to the level of being a human right and resist the efforts to secure community control over land—is going to require from us fundamental shifts in how we view certain phenomena in this society, particularly phenomena such as development.

Some people believe that development is fundamentally about tall buildings, beautifully designed buildings with curves, it’s about high-speed Internet, it’s about sleek roads, it’s about medical equipment or whatever the particular thing is. We, however, contend that development is not fundamentally about buildings or fundamentally about high-speed Internet or fundamentally about some of these other comforts that we have here in this country, but that development is fundamentally about human beings. Not about things but about human beings. If we can develop things to serve human beings, that’s one thing; but if we’re just building things, that’s not really accomplishing too much.

This society is completely and totally unmatched in terms of the building of technology, the development of technology, and the development of things like buildings and a lot of the trappings that we see. But at the same time that the society is building up these incredible structures and making these incredible technological and medical advancements, this society right here has more human beings in prison than any other society, any other country in the world, including China, with many times this country’s population. China is condemned worldwide as a human rights violator, but this country has more people in prison than China has or that any other country in the world has.

If development is fundamentally about things, then this society will go down as the greatest society in the history of humankind, because no other society has been able to create things and develop things the way this one has. If, however, development is fundamentally about human beings, the development of human beings rather than the development of things, the society will go down as one of the greatest failures in the history of humankind.

The richest country in the history of the planet is cutting education right now, it’s cutting people off of public assistance right now, and is turning people away from hospitals right now who are sick and can’t get treatment. If development is about things, this will be greatest society in the history of the world. If development is judged to be about people, however, this will be judged to be one of the worst societies in the history of the world.

In the same way that we have to adjust the way we think about development in order to engage in this social clash, at the core of what the social clash is or what the social clash will be about, I think, is the concept of the idea of what ultimately the fundamental purpose of housing is in the society. Most people think that the fundamental purpose of housing in the society should be to provide a home for human beings. That’s what most people think. But in this society, as with many others, the fundamental purpose of housing is not to provide a home for human beings but to serve as a profit center for banks, for corporations, for speculators, even for individual homeowners. This society is going to have to work out for itself what the real purpose of housing is, what the real purpose of four walls and a roof is, whether it’s to be a profit center or whether it is to house human beings in a decent way that they can afford.

The fundamental purpose of housing as well as the purpose of development–but the fundamental purpose of housing in particular–is at the core of the coming social clash. In a real way it’s about two existing rights, or at least two perceived rights. On the one hand, you have the human right to housing, and on the other hand you have the right of corporations to make a profit. The two rights seem to be increasingly mutually exclusive. If human beings get the right to housing, then corporations are not going to make the profits they want to make. If corporations get to make the profits they want to make, then there are going to be millions of human beings who don’t have access to housing.

The fact that there is a conflict here in rights, or two competing rights, is not new, it’s not unique to the U.S., it’s not even unique to countries. All the time we have people who suffer and have to work out how to resolve competing rights. One person has the right to free speech. Another person has the right to peace and quiet. How is that worked out in a society? How is that worked out in a community? This generation, I think, is going to be largely judged by how we resolve this particular clashing of rights, or clashing of perceived rights.

We assert at Take Back the Land that the right of human beings to housing supersedes the right of corporations to make a profit. And if we have to choose between the right of a human being to have housing and the right of corporations to make a profit, we must fall on the side of the human right to housing over and above the right of corporations to make a profit, even at the expense of the right of corporations to make a profit. In a real way, Take Back the Land as an organization and as a movement was organized around making this idea that human beings have the right to housing, and corporations do not have a right to profit real in practice, not just real in theory.

On October 23, 2006, in the midst of a crushing wave of gentrification to low-income communities in Miami, Florida, we at Take Back the Land, a small group, seized control of a vacant land in the Liberty City section of Miami, and we built an urban shantytown there called the Umoja Village shantytown, and we housed about 150 people in all. This is in 2006. We called this liberating land. On that piece of land, in a real way, we built a new society, where the people who lived there got to make the rules about their community, and they got to decide who moved in, who had to move out, what time the kitchen was open, and all those other different considerations. The Umoja Village shantytown 6 months later, in April 2007, fell to a fire that we can only call suspicious.

Several months later, we recognized that the forces that compelled us to seize land in the first place and to build the Umoja Village shantytown in the first place remained at work in our communities. But we also noticed something interesting, which was that the houses which were increasing significantly in value in our communities were now starting to show up vacant. We had vacant homes dotting our communities. So starting in October of 2007, we began the process of identifying vacant government-owned and foreclosed homes. We would break into them and we would move homeless people into peopleless homes. We called this liberating housing, or, again, liberating land.

In 2008 we began the process of not just doing this kind of work in Miami, which we had been doing at that point for over a year but building what we called a translocal network, not a national organization with a central body but a network of organizations that were engaged in similar types of work. We now have affiliated organizations all across the U.S.

Moving families into vacant homes made tangible the human right to housing by two inherent acts.

First, we directly challenged those laws, those immoral laws, which allowed human beings to live on the street while banks were allowed to warehouse vacant buildings so that they could profit on them later by manipulating the supply and demand of housing.
The second is that we affirmatively were implementing our own public policy by moving people into structures that were otherwise serving no public good whatsoever.

We liberated homes, and we defended families from eviction by engaging in eviction blockades. But we didn’t invent either one of the strategies or either one of the tactics. Take Back the Land was modeled after other land reform movements around the world, particularly the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign in South Africa, Abahlali baseMjondolo in South Africa, and the MST in Brazil.

The Take Back the Land movement is organized under four core principles.

The first is that housing is a fundamental human right.
The second is that local communities must control their own land.
The third is that any movement must be led by those who are impacted the most, must be led by impacted communities. For us that meant low-income black women.
And fourth, because of the particular political economy of this day and age, we couldn’t accomplish these objectives by lobbying or by meeting with elected officials. We had to engage instead in what we call positive action campaigns. Most people call them direct action or civil disobedience campaigns. We have another distinction that we make. We talk about them in terms of positive action or direct action campaigns.

So in order to enforce this assertion that housing is a human right and to realize the human right to housing, we must build a movement that will fundamentally transform this society in the coming social clash. In terms of leadership by impacted communities, movements must be led by those who are most severely impacted by the crisis, which sparks those movements to life in the first place. The housing crisis most impacts low-income communities. But inside of those low-income communities, it mostly impacts communities of color. A lot of poor people are impacted by the crisis. Poor people of color are impacted more than whites. Inside of those communities of color, it impacts black communities more than it does other communities of color. And inside of black communities this crisis impacted women more than it’s impacted men.

Therefore, the movement, if we are to be true to the movement, must be led by the most impacted, which is low-income black women. That means not only must low-income black women be at the leadership—that doesn’t just mean in physical appearance, being out in front of the cameras—but the solutions that we derive to the housing crisis must be based on the solutions which are most meaningful and most impactful to that group of people, not the solutions which are least meaningful to that group of people.

In terms of the positive action campaigns, on February 1, 1960, there were four North Carolina A&T College students out of Greensboro, North Carolina, who went into a Woolworth’s five and dime and sat down and they refused to leave until they were served. They were not served. Instead, they were arrested because they were violating Jim Crow segregation laws. But that didn’t stop there. It inspired many others to come immediately after them and sit in at the same place, and then ultimately sit in at lunch counters all across the South.

On the fiftieth anniversary of the sit-ins, Take Back the Land found itself greatly inspired and wanting to learn from the model and to reproduce the model except apply it in modern days. So 50 years later, Take Back the Land called for the May 2010 month of action to liberate land, to liberate housing, and to engage in eviction defenses. We had actions which took place all across the United States at that time, all across the country. But we weren’t sitting in for a burger. We weren’t engaged in sit-ins so that we could get a burger or were we weren’t engaged in sit-ins so that we could sit on the bus. Instead, we were engaged in live-ins, where we lived in for the human right to housing.

In the 1950s and 1960s, laws that were unjust were changed because people recognized those laws as immoral, recognized those laws as unjust, and they intentionally broke those laws as a means of righting a wrong. That is known as civil disobedience, where you intentionally break an immoral law. We believe that housing is a fundamental human right. Human beings cannot live without housing.

And what makes this particular crisis so bizarre and so pernicious, really, and strange is that there is not a shortage of housing, there is actually a surplus of housing.

I went to a commission meeting in Miami, and it was straight out of The Twilight Zone. They had a morning session, where they talked about the growing number of homeless in Miami-Dade County. They talked about the number of homeless individuals who were coming out and the explosion of homeless families.

How are we going to deal with this? Our shelters are not made to handle this. How are we going to solve this problem? We don’t know how to solve the problem.

They assigned it to a committee. We talked about that, broke for lunch, came back from lunch afterward. Next item on the agenda:

We have a crisis because we have all these empty houses in the county. What are we going to do with these empty houses? Are we going to board them up or what?

No one at any point said,

Hey, we have a bunch of people who need a place to stay, and we have a bunch of places that need people to stay in them. Why don’t we just match them up together?

It didn’t occur to anyone.

So what’s really bizarre about this crisis is that generally when you have a housing crisis, it takes place in one of two ways.

You can have a certain number of houses in a community, and for whatever reason there are more people entering that community than the houses that are available, so you have more people than houses. You have a shortage of housing.
In other instances you have the housing crisis because the opposite happens. An area like, for example, Detroit has huge industries. Those industries either shut down or significantly reduce, and people flee the area. There’s a crisis where you have all these empty homes and you don’t have enough people, there’s not enough of a population to fill all the empty homes.

Those are two different kinds of housing crisis.

This crisis is the worst, though, because you have a dual crisis of too many people without any places to live and too many houses that are just sitting there vacant.

It is morally indefensible to have empty houses on one side of the street and people being forced to live in bushes on the other side of the street. It is morally indefensible. So more than breaking the immoral laws, like we did in the 1950s and 1960s, where we said we have the right to sit here, we have the right to be served here—more than breaking immoral laws, by taking people who don’t have anywhere to live and moving them into a home where they have somewhere to live, somewhere secure to be—we are actually implementing moral laws. If civil disobedience is breaking these immoral laws, positive action we think of not as civil disobedience but as moral obedience. We are engaged in campaigns, therefore, of moral obedience. Positive action campaigns are those in which we implement moral laws ourselves because we recognize that the government or other people in power are not willing to do that.

If we have obligations toward one another and we have a social contract that is built up among people, among societies, among human beings that says we have some things in common and we have to move some things in common—all of us need to educate our children so we’re going to pool our money together, and we’re going to build schools and hire teachers—if we have an obligation to each other, that obligation is fulfilled through a social contract, where we say we’re going to create government as a way of dealing with some of these things that we can’t all deal with on a one-to-one basis but we can deal with collectively. That is a way of fulfilling our obligations under the social contract that we have towards one another.

But if the government part or the mechanism that we created to fulfill the social contract breaks down, we still have that obligation toward one another. We don’t lose the obligation because the mechanism that we created to deal with that obligation breaks down. We still have that obligation. If the mechanism breaks down, that doesn’t alleviate us of the obligation; it just means that we are now responsible for fulfilling that obligation in an entirely different way. We are doing that by implementing moral laws ourselves rather than just allowing the immoral laws to dominate.

Again, we’ve been doing this since 2006, and we now have a national network. We noticed something was a little bit different in the air at the very end of 2010 and throughout 2011. While we were just about the only organization in the U.S. that was doing this from 2007 all the way through the end of 2010, as 2010 faded out and 2011 came in, more and more organizations contacted us about doing the same thing and more and more organizations did it on their own without contacting us, which was a huge, huge shift that we saw.

I remember clearly, I got two emails I ignored and then I got a call, “Did you hear something happened in New York? They’re doing some kind of land takeover.” I said, “I know. They’re doing takeovers everywhere. I’m busy, I’m working on something.” And the same thing the next day. Finally we saw those iconic images of the police penning in those four women and then pepper-spraying them. And we said, “Wait a minute. Something is happening here, something is going on here.” Occupy changed forever the trajectory of what we’re doing or the way we even thought about what we’re doing.

Occupy Wall Street started on September 17, 2011, and has inspired people around the U.S. and all around the world. Occupy is doing some amazing things. We love what Occupy is doing. What we’re doing at Take Back the Land is slightly different from what Occupy is doing, but in a really good way. We think that we are in the process now of building a singular movement which will go largely toward the direction that we’ve laid out today, but we’re building that singular movement with two separate tracks: an Occupy track and a liberate track. We think the two tracks are good, we think the two tracks are important, we think it’s important to understand the distinctions and important also to not fall into some common mistakes that we could potentially make.

Just to give some characteristics—these are overly broad, these are certainly not true everywhere and there is some crossing of course, these are not pure lines—but to give some overly broad characteristics:

Occupy is mainly white. The core issue is the economic system, the economic injustice inherent in the system. And the way that that manifests itself is that Occupy has been taking over space, public space, space that is controlled by corporations, that kind of space.
Liberate, on the other hand, what Take Back the Land has been doing, has been mainly people of color rather than mainly whites. Our core issue is land rather than the economic system, although obviously the two dovetail together very nicely. And we’ve been engaged in liberating our own spaces, liberating individual homes that people are living in rather than public spaces that people are not living in but want access to the commons.

We recognize these as two separate tracks. There are tendencies, in thinking about these tracks, that we should avoid, we must resist.

The first tendency is to think that the two tracks are two separate movements and that we must keep those two separate movements apart—You do your thing and we’ll do our thing. That is a common thing. Here’s what the white people are doing, here’s what the black people are doing. Let’s keep them apart. That is a tendency. It is a mistake.

The second tendency is to think that the two tracks should, instead of remaining as two tracks, merge into one singular track because we’re all doing the same thing and doing it the same way. It is also a mistake to think of it that way, and we must resist that temptation as well.

The two tracks are different but they’re not contradictory, they’re complementary. And we can advance this movement by creating one singular movement, but one singular movement with two tracks.

Really quickly I want to cover a couple of other things: Land liberation and eviction offense. As a result of the objective conditions at this time and the explosion of Occupy, while, again, we were one of the very few organizations doing this work at one time, now there are organizations all over the U.S. doing it, including a large number of Occupy groups. This is exciting. But as we talk about it with clarity, we must move in the proper direction by understanding the time that we’re in and where we’re ultimately going with this objective.

The predominant model right now is to wage these eviction defenses for homeowners, and then once we win the eviction defense, to demand principal reduction. That the mortgage that the homeowner had, the principal will be reduced on the mortgage in order to be at market value or whatever. While we support the idea of principal reduction as a means, we do not support the idea of principal reduction as an end for the movement, as an objective for the movement. Principal reduction is necessary in order to build this movement. It’s necessary in order to achieve the kind of justice that we want, but it is insufficient, it is not enough to achieve the kind of justice that we want.

First of all, principal reduction helps only homeowners, it doesn’t help renters. It helps only homeowners who have jobs, because if you are a homeowner and even if your principal is reduced by half, that just means you have half as much of a mortgage that you can’t pay as you did before you got the principal reduction. It disproportionately helps higher-income people, because higher-income people are more likely to have mortgages than lower-income people. And it disproportionately helps whites. The majority of whites own their own homes, live in homes that they own. The majority of people of color do not live in homes that they own.

The most important thing is that principal reduction as an objective, not as a step but as an objective, fails to fundamentally transform the land relationship. It doesn’t add one more house to the housing stock, it doesn’t make any house affordable except for the individual family that benefits, and it doesn’t change the faulty parts of the system that created this Ponzi scheme in the first place.

So we must step up in two ways.

The first way is to frame the issue as housing as a human right and community control over land, not frame the issue merely as an issue of principal reduction, the levels of principal or interest rates or whatever. It manifests itself in two ways.
First, when we win a home, we can’t just demand that the bank reduces the principal on the home. We have to demand that the bank hands the home over to a democratically controlled community land trust, not to the individual homeowner but to a democratically controlled community land trust. This is important on many levels. First of all, if the community gets together and they fight for the land and they fight for the housing, then the community must have some benefit in the land and in the housing. The benefit we want is we want the land and the housing to be permanently affordable. The only way it’s going to be permanently affordable is if we remove at least a portion of it from the market. If we build a movement that just gives individuals homes, either reduced-principal homes or gives the homes outright and then those individuals turn around the very next day and they sell it to the highest bidder, then we’ve not only failed to change the system, we’ve actually reinforced it and we’re probably going speed up the time in which the Ponzi scheme rolls back up and then cracks back up.
The second thing is that the community land trust will be a way in which communities can have real control over the land in our communities and our homes. We still have to get the family taken care of, but instead of saying that the family should get principal reduction, the house should be handed over to the community land trust.
The other thing about handing it over to the community land trust is that, of course, you say, “We have to pay the banks for the house.” I just want to be perfectly clear: The banks have been paid for those homes through the bailout money. They’ve already been paid for those foreclosed homes. And this is a very strange situation, where the banks have been paid for the homes, but then after they’ve been paid for them, they get to keep the homes and resell them again later. If you went into a convenience store and you wanted a bottle of water and you went to the convenience store clerk and you gave them a dollar, you would expect them to give you the water. You would say to them, “Look, you can either take the dollar and give me the water or I’ll keep the dollar and you keep the water. I’m not going to give you the dollar and you keep the water and you get to sell it to the next person.” That’s exactly what happened here. We paid the banks for the houses, and then the bank gets to keep the house and they get to sell it again to the next person. We have already paid for these homes, and we don’t intend on paying for them again.

So the first track of demands has to be around the individual family and that the individual family gets to stay through the community land trust, not through them getting it individually. But then the second track must be that we make demands not just around the individual family but around policies. What were the laws that existed that made it possible for this family to get foreclosed on and evicted in the first place? We want those laws changed as well.

As we win these hard-fought victories, we can’t just win them for the individual families. We know how difficult it is to wage some of these campaigns. We cannot possibly wage 1,000 campaigns. And then even if we win all 1,000 of them, we only help 1,000 people. If we’re going to engage in these campaigns, we have to end foreclosures and evictions forever, not just for the individual families with whom we engage in this. So we have to change those laws.

The next thing you’re going to start seeing are not just the eviction defenses of these individual homes but entire eviction-free zones, where entire sections of cities are going to be declared eviction-free zones and no eviction is going to allowed to happen uncontested in those areas.

Now organizations, and rightfully so, are celebrating when they win principal reduction for families. We think that after this people will be unsatisfied when an organization comes to them and says, “Congratulations. We just got you a $150,000 mortgage,” when we can instead say we got this community control over land and whatever you are paying for your mortgage on the top is going to match as a percentage of your income, not just be whatever amount the bank can squeeze out of you. So democratically controlled community land trust is where we think this is going in the future. So we’re building now, Take Back the Land is and several other organizations are, a movement to elevate housing to the legal of a human right and to secure community control over land.

To be clear, social movements happen and social movements are the only way that we have seen significant advancements in our rights—in this country or in any other country. No people have ever walked and accidentally tripped into liberation. No oppressors have ever accidentally passed a law freeing the people that they are oppressing. The end of oppression only happens through organized struggle. It happens through organized struggle because people who believe in the same things join the same organization and that organization fights for the vision of the world they want to see.

If you say you are against injustice, then you have to join an organization that is fighting against injustice and fighting for the type of justice and the type of world that you want to see. If you say you are against injustice and you’re not in an organization that’s fighting against injustice, then you are not really for the end of the injustice. You must be part of an organization, because that is the only way that’s been proved to advance the idea of justice and to end injustice. You have to join an organization in order to advance the idea of justice.

Just to be clear, too, we all have an obligation to advance the human cause, to make life better for human beings. In fact, that’s the fundamental purpose of life, is to improve human life on Earth. We all have an obligation toward that. But the way we each fulfill that obligation could be different. There’s a group, organizations out there that are fighting for justice by engaging in eviction defenses and land liberation and getting arrested for it, that is the work we are engaged in. If you choose not to participate in that way, that’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with that, there’s nothing less than that, there’s nothing untoward about that. But just because you choose not to engage in the movement in the same way that Take Back the Land engages in the movement, that doesn’t alleviate your obligation to also participate in the movement. You still have an obligation to be engaged in the movement and to fight for the kind of world that you want to see.

If you are not joining Take Back the Land, then you have to join the Occupy movement. If the Occupy movement is not your thing, then you have to join an organization in your community that’s fighting for the type of world that you want to see. If there is no organization in your community that’s fighting for the type of world that you want to see, then you have an obligation to create that organization yourself and get other people to join it so that you can engage in the fight to see the world that you want to see. We’re building a movement to elevate housing to the level of a human right and secure community control over land. You must be part of that movement as we move forward in history.

Thank you.

For information about obtaining CDs, MP3s, or transcripts of this or other programs, please contact:
David Barsamian
Alternative Radio
P.O. Box 551
Boulder, CO 80306-0551
phone (800) 444-1977 info@alternativeradio.org www.alternativeradio.org
©2012

Ecology and socialism

Tue, 19 Jun 2012 18:49:32 GMT

CHRIS WILLIAMS
Interviewed by David Barsamian Santa Fe, New Mexico 20 March 2012

Chris Williams
Interviewed by David Barsamian
Santa Fe, NM
March 20, 2012

available from Alternative Radio

You can listen to Chris Williams speak for himself here.

Chris Williams is a long-time environmental activist. He is professor of physics and chemistry at Pace University and chair of the science department at Packer Collegiate Institute. He is a contributor to the International Socialist Review and The Indypendent. He is the author of Ecology and Socialism.

Tonight, I want to unmask and hold up to the light the root cause of our ecological crisis and pose a series of questions and suggest some answers. First, why is it so important that we identify the primary cause? It is imperative that we identify the root cause of our “metabolic rift” with nature, to use Marx’s phrase, because if we misattribute the cause, we will misidentify the solution. We will believe we are solving the problem when in fact we’re not even addressing it. We will believe we are coming to the table with some great proposals, when in reality we’re not even sitting at the right table.

In contrast to many other explanations for the dire ecological situation we find ourselves in, such as population growth, consumerism or merely poor energy choices, I contend that it is the system of free market enterprise, otherwise known as capitalism that is at the root of our ecological crisis. Indeed, there is a clue within the words themselves that all may not be as it seems in the system of free market enterprise as it is a system where nothing is, in fact, free.

If it is capitalism that is, following Aristotle, the “efficient cause” of the crisis, then the solution swims into our vision through the murk of carbon-trading, techno-fixes or lifestyle changes with great clarity and simplicity: we need to change the system. This immediately begs the next question: how? And, if we want to get rid of capitalism, which I would argue is the only rational course of action if we want to bequeath a planet to our children that looks remotely like the one on which we were born, then what economic, political and social system would we replace it with that is ecologically sustainable? What, if any, writers or alternative models can we turn to for guidance?

I’m going to begin with a debate in the scientific community. This is not the debate over climate change or whether it’s caused by human activities; that debate closed some time ago. The debate I want to touch on is whether we have entered a new geological epoch. As the last ice age ended around 12,000 years ago and there was a radical change in global climate, plant and animal life geologists felt able to designate a new epoch called the Holocene, from the Greek meaning “entirely recent.” This relatively benign and stable climatic period coincided with the rise of human civilization that saw humans for the first time living in towns. We were able to shift from small nomadic bands of hunter-gathers to permanent, fixed communities and agriculture.

Geologists are now debating whether humanity, by our activities, has so changed the living and nonliving environment that it justifies the designation of a new epoch; the Anthropocene, which translates as The Age of Man.

Unfortunately, there are many arguments in favor of this epochal change. To mention only a few: 80% of the earth’s land surface has been modified by humans, with about 40% being used for agriculture. There are now more trees existing as farmed monoculture plantations than there are in natural forests. Deforestation is continuing at a rate of 80,000km2/year. More than 90% of the total biological mass of mammals in the world is either human or the animals that we have domesticated. The oceans are more acidic than they have been in 800,000 years and new data indicates the rate of change is faster than anything seen in 300 million years. On the off-chance I’m not depressing you enough, we are wiping out species faster than we can discover and classify them–at 100 to 1000 times the geological statistical norm, leading to what some are calling the Sixth Great Extinction.

By the vast and unprecedented burning of ancient sunlight–that is, fossil fuels low in radioactive carbon–we are changing not just the amount of carbon but also the isotopic ratio of carbon in the atmosphere. Through various scientific techniques, all of these changes would show up clearly in the geological record.

As a growing number of geologists are coalescing around a positive answer to the Anthropocene debate, the next question arises: when would we say that the Age of Man began? The most compelling answer that would be easily measurable over extremely long periods of time and which was a global and highly distinguishable phenomenon brings me here to New Mexico and July 16, 1945, the year of the first nuclear test at Alamogordo. Suddenly and irrevocably Man–and we are talking about men in this instance–changed the isotopic composition of the earth’s atmosphere. In other words, a more radioactive atmosphere may be the easiest and most obvious way to spot the legacy of humanity, in a way the crowning achievement of our technological prowess.

Is it possible to use nuclear weapons and their off-shoot, nuclear power, as a metaphor for the anti-ecological, never-ending expansionism and short-term time horizon of capitalism? Without realizing it, our very language has certainly been shaped by the Atomic Age. Words are important and like radon gas seeping unseen into underground mines, the phrases of nuclear physics have slipped quietly into our culture and everyday vernacular. Think about when you last heard or used these words: critical mass; meltdown; ground zero; chain reaction; fallout.

To quote from the 1946 “Report on the International Control of Atomic Energy” by the U.S. State Department, a report drafted in part by Robert Oppenheimer:

The development of atomic energy for peaceful purposes and the development of atomic energy for bombs are in much of their course interchangeable and interdependent.

While this connection is often denied by government and corporate apologists for nuclear power, how else are we to explain the ratcheting up of war fever against Iran for its civil nuclear program, which it is perfectly entitled to pursue under international law, by the only state to have developed and actually used nuclear weapons?

In yet more bad news, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, a group formed out of the disillusionment and horror at the birth of the Atomic Age which they had helped usher onto the world historical stage, this year moved the Doomsday Clock two minutes closer to midnight based on two factors: the continued proliferation of nuclear weapons and the fact that virtually no concerted action is being taken to avert catastrophic climate change.

A small book that is mentioned as influential by one of the leading physicists who worked on the Manhattan Project, Leo Slizard, is by H.G. Wells, The World Set Free: A Study of Mankind. The book is remarkable as a piece of art and as a prophetic parable for our times. It is simultaneously a paean to the power of atomic energy as well as a warning about its dangers and connection to atomic weapons. Perhaps what is most remarkable is the prescience with which Wells writes in 1914, prior to WWI and only just after the discovery of the nucleus, about the future of the 20th century, after man has harnessed the almost immeasurable power of atomic energy:

This spectacle of feverish enterprise was productivity, this crowding flight of happy and fortunate rich people – every great city was as if a crawling anthill had suddenly taken wing – was the bright side of the opening phase of the new epoch in human history. Beneath that brightness was a gathering darkness, a deepening dismay. If there was a vast development of production, there was also a huge destruction of values. These glaring factories working night and day, these glittering new vehicles swinging noiselessly along the roads, these flights of dragonflies that swooped and soared and circled in the air, were indeed no more than the brightness’s of lamps and fires that gleam out when the world sinks towards the twilight and the night. Between these highlights accumulated disaster, social catastrophe.

There is an extreme disjunction between the technology that we have manufactured and the uses to which it is put; a disjunction that we can lay at the feet of capitalism, a social system which knows no other purpose than the accumulation of money. This dynamic was captured by the late Donald Trautlein, former CEO of Bethlehem Steel when he commented:

I am not in the business of making steel. I am in the business of making money.

More recently, you may have read the high profile resignation letter of Greg Smith, until March 14th an executive director at Goldman Sachs which was featured on the New York Times op-ed page where he stated:

I attend derivatives sales meetings where not one single minute is spent asking questions about how we can help clients. It’s purely about how we can make the most possible money off of them… It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off.

Now given the kind of angry, pitchfork-toting climate that quite rightly exists against bankers and the financial industry after they brought the world economy to its knees in 2008 and then got bailed out by the government for their troubles, one might think there might be a somewhat contrite response to this rather embarrassing revelation from one of their own. Not a bit of it. An editorial appeared on the financial site Bloomberg.com later that very day:

We have some advice for Smith, as well as the thousands of college students who apply to work at Goldman Sachs each year: If you want to dedicate your life to serving humanity, do not go to work for Goldman Sachs. That’s not its function, and it never will be. Go to work for Goldman Sachs if you wish to work hard and get paid more than you deserve.

Humility is not one of their strong points. Indeed Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs believes bankers in general and his company in particular are on a righteous, messianic crusade: in a 2009 interview with The Times of London he made his infamous claim to be an emissary from God:

We have a social purpose…we are doing God’s work.

Marx captured a similarly relentless and callous dynamic when he wrote of the dichotomy between machinery, humanity and the natural world under capitalism that contains within it one of the most problematic and contradictory facets of the system; its inherent short-termism:

In its blind unrestrainable passion, its werewolf hunger for surplus-labour, capital oversteps not only the moral, but even the merely physical maximum bounds of the working-day. It usurps the time for growth, development, and healthy maintenance of the body. It steals the time required for the consumption of fresh air and sunlight. It higgles over a meal-time, incorporating it where possible with the process of production itself, so that food is supplied to the labourer as to a mere means of production, as coal is supplied to the boiler, grease and oil to the machinery. It reduces the sound sleep needed for the restoration, reparation, refreshment of the bodily powers to just so many hours of torpor as the revival of an organism, absolutely exhausted, renders essential. It is not the normal maintenance of [a healthy human being] which is to determine the limits of the working-day; it is the greatest possible daily expenditure of [one’s] labour-power, no matter how diseased, compulsory and painful it may be…

Marx goes on:

Capital cares nothing for the length of labour-power. All that concerns it is simply and solely the maximum of labour-power that can be rendered fluent in a working-day. It attains this end by shortening the extent of the [worker’s] life, as a greedy farmer snatches increased produce from the soil by robbing it of its fertility.

No doubt all of us can relate to having to eat “fast food” while on the run, work longer than we wish, often in utterly pointless activities, fall asleep exhausted, wake before we’re fully rested, live in unhealthy conditions without the time or resources to live anywhere else or in any other way. But with his reference to the “greedy farmer increasing production to rob the soil of its fertility,” Marx’s passage suggests that the exploitation of the social world is simply the mirror image for the exploitation of the natural world. Hence, if we are to overcome the challenge of our Age, and avert the incipient ecological crisis, we have to simultaneously operate and work toward a social and an ecological revolution. We must be equally social justice activists as much as we are ecological justice activists. The success of one is predicated on the success of the other.

In this part of the world, perhaps nothing demonstrates this argument better than those who were exploited in order to obtain the raw materials for the nuclear project in the first place. Unwittingly dying disproportionately from a host of malignant diseases and who continue to die because their land, now robbed twice over, remains lethally contaminated.

The Navajo, who were promised wealth and a chance to serve their country in return for their labor in the uranium mines of their reservation, were also told by their so-called Guardian in D.C. that their land would be returned to them in the state in which it was found. The hundreds of abandoned uranium mines, mounds of contaminated tailings and radioactive pools that litter the landscape of their ancestral home tell another story. One of decades of broken promises, racism and economic exploitation in the service of enormous corporate profit and the U.S. government’s nuclear weapons stockpile. The Department of Defense knew about the negative health effects of radiation from the late ‘40’s and indeed sought to carry out health studies in order to find out more.

The DoD “Program Guidance Report” of 1952 by the Joint Panel on the Medical Aspects of Atomic Warfare states:

Advantage should be taken of any opportunities for the study of the biological effects of radiation, particularly in man.

Of course, the Navajo were never told about the risks they were running from uranium mining. If they had been it seems unlikely that they would have taken to building their houses from uranium-laced mining waste or perhaps not even given permission to sink the mines in the first place. The cancer rate among Navajo’s doubled between the 1970’s and 1990’s and legal cases against the mining companies and the U.S. government to admit culpability and effectively clean up all of the contaminated land and water continue to this day, 70 years later. The clean-up is likely to continue for decades. The EPA, which by its own admission does not have an end-date, began work on remediating the reservation’s largest mine at Northeast Church Rock in 2005 and do not expect to be finished until 2019. When even some committed environmentalists talk of nuclear power as the clean alternative to fossil fuels and the answer to climate change, the long-term ravaging of once healthy communities and ongoing clean-up gives us a primary lesson in the toxic inheritance conferred by nuclear operations. Not to mention the priorities of a system based on profit.

As climate change takes hold and unusual weather patterns become the norm, ironically Los Alamos, the birthplace of atomic weapons, was itself threatened last summer by the largest fire in New Mexico state history— the Las Conchas Fire that started on June 26 burned more than 150,000 acres in northern New Mexico. The fire forced the evacuation of the lab and raises more questions about the spread of radiological waste by wind from the fire-devastated areas contaminated with nuclear waste from decades of Cold War-era nuclear experiments.

Fortunately, New Mexico and local anti-nuclear activists did obtain some good news recently as the Department of Energy announced they were deferring the construction of the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement facility and plutonium reprocessing operation at Los Alamos National Labs. While there were the predictable howls of protest about jobs going elsewhere, New Mexico is another area of the world to suffer the so-called “resource curse” of capitalist exploitation. New Mexico is one of the poorest states in the country despite receiving a disproportionate amount of federal aid, lavished almost exclusively on Los Alamos and Sandia. Furthermore, not only is New Mexico one of the poorest in absolute terms, it also suffers as one of the states with the greatest disparity between rich and poor. It is one of the poorest, most unequal states, inside one of the most unequal countries.

I just returned from an area of the world which has been on the receiving end of the weapons developed here and is once again the scene of a nuclear catastrophe. Almost 1 year ago to the day, the people of Fukushima prefecture in Japan, already reeling from a gigantic earthquake and the ensuing tsunami that killed as many as 15,000 people, found they had to simultaneously contend with three nuclear meltdowns and explosions at the critically damaged reactors at the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power complex.

We now know that such was the chaos after the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear explosions, that contrary to initial reports that things were bad but under control, at one point TEPCO, the utility running the plants sent a report to the Japanese government arguing that Tokyo, a city of 35 million people, might have to be evacuated. The safety systems and emergency centers that were in place were either knocked out, unstaffed, not provisioned or not designed to be inside a high radiation zone – even though that was their express purpose. Many of the safety precautions that could have been mandated were instead voluntary. Hence, as a corporation focused on profit maximization, TEPCO took the logical decision not to implement them. If this sounds all too familiar to BP’s lack of concern for health, safety or the environment in the wake of the Gulf oil spill of 2010 or Massey Energy’s coal mine disaster in West Virginia of the same year, and you perhaps begin to discern a pattern, it’s because ultimately the dictates of bottom-line capitalism trump all other considerations.

Only through the bravery of the nuclear workers who stayed at the stricken plant, when TEPCO officials were saying it needed to be abandoned, was this much larger calamity averted. As bad as the situation is now, it is not possible to imagine what things would have been like if Daiichi had been abandoned, forcing the abandonment of the reactors at nearby Daiini and quite possibly Tokai, thereby forcing the evacuation of up to 100 million Japanese. Think about that for a second.
In Fukushima, I spoke with many people and they all said the same thing: they are now living in a state of constant fear and anxiety as they campaign for better information, more evacuations and better compensation. Because the government has clearly not been transparent, has been found to be far too cozy with the corporations and has constantly been minimizing or not testing for radiation, people have had to become amateur radiologists.

In order to minimize the number of evacuees – and there are still 110,000 of them, many of whom will likely never be able to go back to their homes in the radiation areas – the Japanese government arbitrarily raised the internationally accepted dose 20 times from 1mSv/y to 20. This new “safe” limit makes no distinction between the effects of radiation on adults versus children and pregnant mothers, nor between radiation exposure inside versus outside your body. In another sign of the importance of words, some evacuees are no longer referring to themselves as evacuees, because the word evacuee implies you will return. They are beginning to see themselves as members of the Fukushima “Diaspora” because they now think they will never go back.

A group of women from Kooriyama City showed me the government form they have to fill out for their children, noting down where their child has been for the day and what they ate, along with the radiation monitors that the children have to carry around with them. As one of the mothers, who would only give her name as Nihon Matsu, the town she is from for fear of reprisals, quite reasonably asked me, if it’s so safe here, why is the government giving us these? Imagine the kind of social, domestic and economic pressures the people are living under as they debate whether they should stay because of their jobs or leave because of their health.

I spoke with Hatsumi Terashima, a fisherman from Minima-Soma for the last 54 years. He showed me the 2-3 feet of foundations that poked up from the mud that are all that remain of his house. He was caught in the tsunami and dragged 3 kilometers inland, but unlike 5 of his family members, managed to survive. He can’t fish anymore not just because he doesn’t have a boat, a house or a crew, but because of fears of radioactive contamination of the fish off the coast. So even if he could go out, there’s no guarantee he could sell the fish once they are labeled as coming from Fukushima.

I met one inspiring person after another as people there are organizing and protesting. A young female DJ from Fukushima City called Chika Shishido ran to the local radio station after the earthquake and with one other DJ broadcast 24/7 for 10 days straight to get the word out about the state of infrastructure, emergency services and radioactive contamination. One of the striking things about the new movement against nuclear power in Japan is that it is mostly led by women who are not just challenging the nuclear power structure but also raising questions of gender equality. She was keen to tell me why that was so important:

It’s not a mother and child thing. It’s about women’s [rights]. People think that because [we are concerned with] the evacuation of women and children it makes it seem like it’s a traditional issue – [that women need to be protected]. We need to make this clear if we want change [That this is not why we are leading this fight]. It’s fundamentally about the right to life.

She would like to have a baby but is scared of the consequences and so has quit her job and is moving to Hokkaido in the north to try to find work and peace of mind.

I was taken to a mall in Kooriyama City where amongst the shops there is now a volunteer-run radiation testing center. They are testing food and they also have a full-body scanner. Anyone under 20 can get tested for free. Imagine going to a mall down the street and seeing the Citizens Radiation Testing Center. Or imagine walking into your apartment building to be met with a large chart listing weekly radiation readings from different areas in and around your building, with particularly high values circled in red. This is now the daily reality for people in Fukushima City.

I met the famous Japanese film actor, Taro Yamamoto. He has suddenly been without job offers since becoming an anti-nuclear activist. Given some of the hardships that have now been placed on him I asked him: why are you doing this? He replied:

Because I want to live. People’s human rights are being violated in Fukushima. And if they can do it to people here, eventually they will do it to me. And I don’t want to see Japan end. But this is not just about Japan, this is the whole world.

Completely by accident I bumped into him again at Tokyo train station. He was up on a soapbox with a megaphone exhorting people to sign a petition to demand a referendum on nuclear power. In the three months of the petition activists had collected an amazing 3 million signatures.

In parallel with the way the Navajo were treated as expendable labor here, so too we find in Japan that 80% of nuclear workers are subcontracted day laborers without employment rights, a pension or health plan. So even in such an inherently unsafe technology and dangerous industry as nuclear power, we still find corporations cutting corners to maximize profit. I had the honor of meeting one of the workers from Fukushima-Daiichi, Kitajima-San, when he was in New York City at a panel I moderated on the anniversary of the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster. He spoke of the day laborers’ situation in a recent interview:

They are paid day laborers, and they are cornered financially. They have no other choices. Those workers expect they will suffer from radiation poison or diseases caused by radiation in five years. But they have already given up hope of medical benefits or compensation from the federal government. It makes me angry to think of a system created to force these people to face this kind of danger. Sometimes I go through six changes of [radiation protective clothing] a day. They are not recycled, they are just thrown away. The clothes are disposable. And so are the people.

One has to wonder, who took the decision for Japan, a small geologically active island prone to earthquakes and tsunamis and known as “the land of volcanoes” to become so dependent upon nuclear power and in whose interests was that decision taken? Every single one of the 54 reactors in Japan is built along the coast. At the moment, only 2 of the 54 are operational and yet there are no blackouts. This is leading many Japanese to more questions, such as why did we build them in the first place? And why don’t we have a renewable energy sector worth mentioning despite the fact that we were once world leaders in solar technology?

As Kazue Suzuki of Greenpeace Japan has pointed out:

This disaster was predictable and predicted, but happened because of the age-old story of cutting corners to protect profits over people…the authorities are already recklessly pushing to restart reactors without learning anything from the Fukushima disaster and the people will once again be forced to pay the price of their government’s mistakes.

Of course, we know all about not getting renewable energy here too. Which U.S. president said the following:

Over the last three years we’ve opened millions of new acres for oil and gas exploration, and tonight I’m directing my administration to open more than 75 percent of our potential offshore oil and gas resources.

If you guessed the oil-and-gas misadministration of George W. Bush you would be wrong. That was President Obama in his most recent State of the Union address. And in case we were in any doubt about where his administration stands on the XL tar sands pipeline after the temporary halt forced on the administration by large anti-XL demonstrations outside the Whitehouse and the arrest of over 1,000 protesters, White House spokesman Jay Carney handily clarified that:

We support the company’s interest in proceeding with this project…We look forward to working with TransCanada…and we commit to taking every step possible to expedite the necessary federal permits.

The majority of this year’s budget request of $27.2 billion by the rather Orwellian-named Department of Energy is for nuclear weapons. While the Los Alamos project for processing plutonium was cut, there was still $7.6 billion for what is being called the “safe, secure” stockpile of nuclear weaponry, $2.5 billion for nonproliferation efforts and $5.7 billion to continue cleaning up the effects of nuclear weapons manufacture dating back 70 years that I mentioned earlier. Nuclear energy gets a further $770 million despite numerous reports documenting just how uneconomic it is. To mention one, Citibank, an institution that has rarely met a risky investment it could say no to, issued a report in 2009 on nuclear energy under the headline “Nuclear Power: The Economics Say No.” More recently, The Economist ran an article: “Nuclear Power: The Dream That Failed.” In contrast, the requested amount for solar energy was a mere $310 million.

Meanwhile, back at the Pentagon, they’re gearing up to embrace renewable technology. A front page New York Times article in 2010 reported:

Even as Congress has struggled to unsuccessfully pass an energy bill and many states have put renewable energy on hold because of the recession, the military this year has pushed rapidly forward. After a decade of waging wars in remote corners of the globe where fuel is not readily available, senior commanders have come to see overdependence on fossil fuels as a big liability, and renewable technologies – which have become more reliable and less expensive over the past few years – as providing a potential answer.

So, it appears that the U.S. military, which is the world’s single largest polluter, can have renewable energy to go and fight wars overseas, paradoxically to fight wars to secure access to fossil fuels, but we can’t have renewable energy here at home. To quote Martin Luther King from his historic 1967 Riverside Church speech in New York where he publically came out against the war in Vietnam:

A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

To that, we can only add that we are now also approaching ecological death. So if we don’t want nuclear, and we don’t want fossil fuels, what are the alternatives? And if they exist, why aren’t they being implemented?

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change last year released a “Special Report on Renewable Energy Sources and Climate Change Mitigation” illustrating how it would be possible, given a change in political priorities, to generate 80% of world energy from a mix of six renewable sources by 2050. While I would take issue with promoting the extension of biofuels as a future source of clean energy the report is significant in that it has to be reached by consensus – all of the participating governments have to sign off on it. It can therefore be taken as eminently possible.

Other, more radical but still comprehensive reports have been released by Price Waterhouse Coopers, Greenpeace, the European Climate Foundation, World Wildlife Fund, and the Institute for Policy Research and Development all indicating how 100% carbon-free generation of electricity is entirely possible within 40 years. Whatever skepticism people may have, carefully and expensively cultivated by the fossil fuel and nuclear lobbies, they can’t all be wrong.

A study reported in Scientific American showed how it would be possible to have 100% of world energy provided from renewable sources by 2030. It would require manufacturing 3.8 million large wind turbines and 90,000 solar plants alongside numerous geothermal, tidal and rooftop photovoltaic installations. The cost estimate was significantly less than if the same power was generated via fossil fuels and nuclear power. The construction of 3.8 million wind turbines might sound like a lot over a 20-year period but as there are 70 million cars manufactured every year, it is in fact quite feasible.

To give you another frame of reference, there are 101,000 Terawatts of solar power falling on the earth from the sun. Current global energy use is 15 Terawatts. Hence we would only have to capture a small fraction of 1% of this energy to power the earth. I’m not saying that’s what we should do as we would need a plan, but it gives you some idea of the potential.

Furthermore, the scope for reducing energy consumption through the enactment of energy efficiency regulations for appliances and retrofitting housing, commercial and industrial stock for energy efficiency is enormous. Not to mention a massive public transit program so that we can move away from the enormous inefficiency, pollution and waste associated with reliance on private automobiles.

There are currently millions of Americans without jobs or in part-time jobs that would relish the opportunity to rebuild the infrastructure of tomorrow along sustainable and energy-efficient lines. But the priorities of capitalism dictate that they remain rotting on unemployment lines and the millions of jobs that need doing to rebuild our collapsing bridges, build new train lines, energy grids and energy-efficient buildings and infrastructure that are so urgently needed don’t get done. We are not offered those kinds of jobs, the only jobs we get offered are those that force us into a Faustian trade-off between jobs and the environment. The kind that just happen to coincide with corporate priorities such as building the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline from Canada to Texas.

Then there is the production of useless things, in-built obsolescence, marketing, advertising and the military, alongside the gargantuan waste generated by the daily operation of capitalism. One half to three-quarters of resource inputs to industry are returned to the environment as waste within a year. Capitalism is only efficient at one thing, the generation of money. The generation of waste is not a sign of the failure of capitalism, but conversely, a sign of its success. The more waste is generated, the faster things are wearing out and the more things can be sold to replace them.

The problem is therefore not technical at all but entirely social and political and revolves around the question of social power: who has it and who doesn’t. Who makes the decisions in society and in whose interests are they made? What Occupy Wall Street has exposed is the reality we’ve all been living with: the answer to both those questions is the 1%; the tiny number of the ruling elite in each country who run the system in the interests of the gigantic multi-national corporations that dominate the economic and political landscape and are busily trashing the natural landscape in their relentless and insatiable pursuit of profit.

Capitalism is a system that is driven by the need to make money in order to stay afloat that in turn drives the constant expansion of the system. Marx explains it very simply in just 3 letters: M-C-M prime. A capitalist starts with money, M; he turns that into a commodity, C, which he sells on the market for more money, M prime. Then the whole process starts again but this time on a larger basis with a bigger pot of money to invest. As we live on a finite planet, there is a clear, logical contradiction. We are now finding out what the limits of the planet are to tolerate this form of unending and destructive growth. Furthermore, there is no possibility to consider the longer-term effects of whatever it is that was just made because every company is in cutthroat competition with every other company. And there’s certainly no incentive to take care of either the worker or the natural resource base except when forced to by social regulation.

So we do need to fight for more government regulation to limit feckless corporations from evading all constraints on health, safety and the environment. But we also need a much broader and more extensive vision for change. We all currently live in a world dominated by a single system of production that’s built around competition and production for profit predicated on a lack of real democracy; this is the system that has brought us to the edge of the ecological precipice. I want to live in a world defined by cooperation and production for need based on real economic and political democracy where the goal is not more money, but social equality and natural harmony. Such a system is socialism.

Whether machines control workers, as under capitalism, or workers control machines, as under socialism, is a critically important point as it relates to sustainability because the tools and machinery we use are extensions of our physical and mental abilities to manipulate, control and investigate nature. These tools are the product of tens of thousands of years of human development and are what allow us to understand nature on deeper and deeper levels, right down to the sub-atomic. Machinery is, or should be viewed as, the physical materialization of our brains and hands. It is nature’s way of discovering and linking itself to itself for we are a part of nature.

If machinery and technology was reconstructed on the basis of efficient use of resources, longevity, its labor- saving potential and minimization of waste products, then all of humanity could be freed – freed to fulfill the full range of human interests and pursuits. These would include an exploration and understanding of our fundamental connection to the earth as material beings – rather than enslaved to the rhythm and relentless pace of emails, texts, the vacuous nature of 24 hour news cycles and empty advertising slogans, automated machines and agricultural machinery, the production-line and time-in- motion studies and every other facet of our alienated existence under capitalism.

On this basis, as machines increase in efficiency, take over human functions, and save human labor for more creative activities, they will transform humanity’s former relation of life-and-death struggle against nature into a new relation; one of free time, of leisure, cultural pursuits and the opportunity for the fulfillment of distinctively human needs.

For the first time in human history, we can begin to relate to external non-human nature in non-competitive ways and not simply as a utilitarian need – what can we get from nature, how can we use it, what is it good for, how can we subdue and dominate it?

Rather we will have the time to stand back in awe and fully appreciate the natural world purely for the sake of its existence and the psychological, spiritual and material sense of uplift it gives us to know that we are alive in its midst; the serene beauty of the stars, the magnificence of a sunset, the intricate evolutionary delicacy of a bird’s wing matched so perfectly to its function.

Under an alternative ecologically sustainable and socially just system, no product would be made without it meeting the highest standards of use-value – the questions will not be as they are under capitalism: how quickly can it be made, at the lowest possible cost and how quickly can we get it to wear out before someone has to buy a new one, but instead a whole set of new questions will be asked: what need does it serve, how little energy can it be made with, are the materials adapted to its purpose, how can it be made to last as long as possible, how much waste is produced in its manufacture and how can we best deal with this.

Humanity interacts with its environment while simultaneously the environment acts back on us. In the process, both are changed. The environment is no longer a passive object to be plundered, or in the words of Marx’s lifelong collaborator Frederick Engels, made “an object of huckstering”, but would play a role in making us what we are. In this view, it is impossible to speak of any living thing, humans and their activity included, as anything but deeply enmeshed within each other, in a constant process of mutual interaction, transformation and co-evolution. This is why I avoid the word “environment,” because it posits that there are humans and then outside of us is the “environment” as if we are somehow apart from the natural world around us. That is why we ought to use the word “ecology” and see humans as just as much a part of nature as anything else.

We would be able to begin to fulfill our spiritual needs, cultivating non-utilitarian knowledge of the universe for beauty, play, recreation and for the observation of plants, animals and the inorganic world in all its diverse and wondrous forms. To paraphrase the ecological and leftist thinker Barry Commoner, nature is a self-enclosed system of energy exchanges. Nothing is isolated, nothing totally disappears, and nothing is free.

Nature and society cannot be seen as diametrically opposed but should co-evolve with one another as human naturalism and natural humanism become different aspects of the same thing. For Marx it was necessary to heal the “metabolic rift” created between humanity and nature by capitalism: “From the standpoint of a higher socio- economic formation, the private property of particular individuals in the earth will appear just as absurd as the private property of one man in other men. Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not owners of the earth, they are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations.” A concept which is totally alien to capitalism.

If you think talking in such terms is a utopian dream, I would answer that it is far more utopian to believe we can reform capitalism toward sustainability – and there are two decades of failed international climate negotiations as empirical evidence.

You know things are getting desperate when such a normally conservative group of people such as scientists are getting political. The March 16 issue of the leading U.S. scientific journal Science carries an article titled: “Navigating the Anthropocene: Improving Earth System Governance” where it is argued that: “Science assessments indicate that human activities are moving several of Earth’s sub-systems outside the range of natural variability typical for the previous 500,000 years,” and conclude that we have reached a “constitutional moment” in world politics. While they now recognize a significant international political rearrangement as necessary, we need to go further and indict the entire system.

Rather than have as humanity’s legacy the irradiation of the atmosphere, catastrophic climate change and planetary ecocide as implied by the term Anthropocene with which I began this talk, rather we should seek to enter an Age where we finally begin to understand what it means to be fully human; connected to each other and the land not as commodities to be bought and sold in the “callous cash nexus” of capitalism, but as a global community of cooperating humans working together toward a long term future of equality, sustainability and co-evolution with nature in all its living and non-living forms.

Capitalism itself was born through revolution as the rising bourgeoisie overthrew the previous feudal aristocratic ruling class in revolutionary upheavals such as 1776 and 1789 in order to impose the rule of the merchants and manufacturers that we have today. What was born through revolution can be ended by revolution. Thank you.

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Interview

You talked about the inherent nature of capitalism and its drive for profits, privileging profits over people. What would you suggest as an alternative? You mentioned socialism several times. What do you mean by socialism? And hasn’t it been tried in the Soviet Union and other places and shown to be a failure?

I think it’s been tried once, and it did fail ultimately. But capitalism has failed many times, and we keep trying that. It’s worth giving socialism another chance. Without going into all of the details, the Soviet Union failed for very specific reasons. During its early years, in the 1920s, it had a very different attitude towards ecology. It was one of the first places that you could take a degree in ecology in 1924. There were huge parts of the Soviet Union set aside as ecological areas, where you couldn’t even do tourism or anything; it was purely for research, to see how they could rejuvenate damaged areas of the land. All that was reversed with the ultimate triumph of the bureaucracy, represented by Stalin. So I think that failed for very specific reasons.

But I don’t equate socialism with state control. If there’s no democracy, if the people aren’t making the economic and political decisions, then I don’t see how you could call that socialism. So if you think about China or Cuba or North Korea or any of these other countries that call themselves socialist, I would argue that they aren’t. You’ve just got one giant corporation called the state that runs everything. I think socialism is about real democracy. People in communities and workplaces, production for need, not profit, based on cooperation rather than competition.

In your book you talk about some of the attitudes toward nature. You quote Francis Bacon, for example. I think there is a theological aspect to the attack on nature, with people like Winthrop and his “city on the hill.” And to achieve that “city on the hill,” it was necessary to exploit nature, which was given to us as bounty by God. Otherwise it wouldn’t have been given to humankind.

Senator Inhofe has a similar opinion as to that.

The Oklahoma Republican.

He doesn’t believe that climate change is real because God has already told him that it’s not true. I think that there was a radical change. If you look at how the Earth was viewed, some of the language of which we still retain in terms of the “veins of ore” and be so on, the Earth was seen as a living thing in feudal times and before that, because people were much more connected to the land. Capitalism, if it wants to make money, has to make machines. That means it has to understand nature. Therefore, you get Bacon and others completely changing the conception. Nature is now not something that we live with and on but something that needs to be investigated and defiled in many ways. And generations before the emergence of capitalism, people would have seen that as a defilement, that actually was celebrated in very overtly sexual language, by Bacon in particular, that I mention in the book. And I think that rather than that, as I mentioned in the talk earlier, conception of nature, that we need to dominate and control it for our own ends, which are towards the profit motive, we need to see ourselves as co- evolving, as something equal.

The OECD recently came out with a very shocking report. The Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, the major economies, came out and said that we may be heading towards a world that is 3 degrees to 6 degrees warmer than anything we’ve seen for hundreds of thousands, millions of years. Most scientists will tell you that 2 degrees is the maximum that we should be going up to. So they lay all this out—by 2050 we’re going to be 3 to 6 degrees higher, which would mean the sea levels would be heading towards 300 feet higher—and at the end of it they just say, the effect on GDP will just be a 14% reduction. So there are going to be no icecaps— that’s literally what they say—there are going to be no icecaps, there are going to be deserts across large areas of the world, but there’s only going to be a 14% reduction in GDP worldwide.

In other words, there’s this idea from economists and apologists for the system that we are essentially independent of nature. We can survive without air or water or a planet and things can roll along as they always have. Clearly, we need to change that radically and think about not just where we’re going tomorrow and making money from that, but a much longer-term, future- generational thing, which Marx talks about, as I mentioned.

And the impact on the most vulnerable. A couple of years I was in Nepal. At a place called Kala Patthar in the Himalayas, the Nepali cabinet met to dramatize the fact that the glaciers are melting. And around the same time, in the Maldives the cabinet met underwater to have a meeting to demonstrate their concern about rising levels of the oceans, which will inundate and wipe out the Maldives Islands. Again, the vulnerability of people in the so-called developing world is acute. I think a lot of us here may be insulated from that while we are busy driving fuel- efficient cars and recycling and doing the right thing, environmentally speaking.

Well, maybe, unless you go to Texas or the wildfires that were all over New Mexico last year or the unprecedented floods in the Midwest. I think that on the one hand we are certainly somewhat more insulated, but that doesn’t mean to say—I mean, people are already in a desperate situation in many areas of the world and are feeling the effects already. There are already climate refugees, there are wars because of the instability that climate change is bringing about in various areas of the world.

Part of this is also about the idea that we can save nature by setting aside small, little areas called national parks to protect it. Yet, how is that going to work if the climate is completely different? How are the animals that feed on other animals or plants going to survive when those things are moving north or south or up mountains, or the will the birds be able to migrate and change? Clearly, the whole idea that we can save nature in certain individual locations goes out the window with climate. So we have to rethink the whole climate on a sustainable and rational manner.

I would be depressed about all this stuff if it was that we don’t have the answers. We actually do have the answers. It’s not a technical problem. It’s much more about how do we take power from the people who currently have it and put it in our hands so that we can actually start implementing some of the answers that we know will work.

It was Eduardo Galeano who said, “We have to save pessimism for better times.” A bit more about Marx—he’s been dead for 150 years—and his relevance today. What is it about his analysis that you find urgent and vital and applicable to the problems that society is facing today?

What’s important about going back to Marx is not just the specific things that he talks about, because obviously we can’t backdate our concerns to him. And climate change was not on his horizon. But one of the things that he and Engels were both most concerned with was depletion of the soil. What was going on in his period of time, they were very concerned in Britain that the fertility of the soil was dropping and what would they do. They hadn’t invented artificial fertilizer by then. They had already raided the Napoleonic battlefields, digging up the corpses of people who died in their wars to take back as natural fertilizer for the fields of England. They had to go further away to go and start wars in South America over guano— there were the Guano Wars of the 1800s that Marx wrote about—in order to get that fertilizer back to England. So Marx and Engels, his collaborator, were very much involved with an ecological question. He was great admirer of Darwin.

But beyond that, I would say what’s most compelling right now is their analysis of not just capitalism but the methodology which they used. Because so often we’re taught in schools that history is not connected; they’re all a series of disconnected events. That’s one of the things that makes history boring. You think that something caused the First World War, and it wasn’t connected to the Second World War. You learn about famous people. There’s no relationship to what’s going on now in your life. In contrast, what Marx and Engels did, their methodology of historical materialism, was saying that everything is interconnected and everything affects everything else. That’s a very deeply ecological viewpoint.

Furthermore, when he talked about the “metabolic rift,” the word “metabolism” had only been recently invented, but it means an exchange of materials in and out of a single cell or an organism. What was revolutionary about the way he used it in the phrase “metabolic rift” is he applied it to the whole biosphere. That is an enormously powerful tool and way of thinking about energy in and energy out, waste, far ahead of his time, and I think is useful today.

Given the extraordinary depth of the economic collapse, with its attendant millions of homes foreclosed, millions of people thrown out of work, pensions lost, etc., do you see now a kind of Gramscian possibility for an opening for socialism? Do you think there’s more space now to even talk about a word that has been viewed so pejoratively in recent decades in the U.S.?

I think there’s enormous potential. When Barack Obama was first running for election, he was being accused of being a socialist.

That’s the “Change You Can Believe In” president?

That’s right, the change that didn’t come. But when he was running, he started being accused of being a socialist because the right wing thought that this would be a negative. It became the number one word Googled, because people were, like, Well, I like Obama. They’re calling him a socialist. I don’t like them. Maybe I’m socialist, too. Let me go find out about it. I think that is significant.

The economic crisis of 2008 coinciding with the ecological crisis is raising questions in young people’s minds and others’ that maybe there is a connection between those two things, maybe one caused the other. So they are open to the idea that there are new possibilities. I’m sure you saw the Pew poll that said young people in particular were more disposed to socialism than they were to capitalism because they know what capitalism is like, and who wants that in this day and age. So I think that that is something that has woken people up.

I also think that there was a huge change last year with the revolutions in the Middle East. It has just completely changed people’s reference point for what is possible. We’ve had 30 years of defeats. It’s been a terrible time since Reagan and Thatcher and the birth of neoliberalism. I grew up in the 1980s, a terrible decade. Very bad fashion sense, pretty bad music, too, unfortunately, with a few exceptions. But now things are very hopeful again. And people said, “The Middle East, what’s going to happen there? A bastion of reaction. Nobody is interested in democracy.” Then millions of people on the streets fighting for democracy. Fantastically inspiring.

I went to Madison, Wisconsin, as part of my union to see what was going on there last spring during the uprising and the occupation. It was amazing. Another area of the world, the Midwest, where we are told people are conservative, they don’t follow politics. People there were learning Arabic so that they could write their signs in Arabic and show their solidarity with the people in Egypt and Tunisia. It was amazing to be in a town so full of pro- union sentiment.

And then, of course, more recently, something I’ve been involved in, Occupy Wall Street. Phenomenal. It completely changed the narrative in this country. We haven’t won any practical victories yet, but we’ve won an enormous ideological victory. We’re not talking about the debt ceiling or any other nonsense. We’re talking about the rich, the 1%, and the 99%, everybody else, and why we need to get rid of them so that we can run things.

That’s fantastically exciting.

Indeed, the lexicon has changed. You mentioned the Middle East, a focus first of British and French imperialism, and then their successor, the United States, ever since 1945, having to do with a certain product that is known to be there under its sands. It might be a three-letter word.

God works in mysterious ways.

Talk about U.S. imperial policy dealing with energy issues and its relation to ecology.

It’s an enormously overlooked piece of the puzzle. There are a lot of great writers who write on environmental issues and ecological questions, and this question of imperialism is so often either overlooked entirely or barely given any kind of detailed analysis. I think that’s a real mistake. Because part of the big reason why the international negotiations go nowhere is because not only is there competition between individual corporations for power and prestige and profit, but there’s also, similarly, competition, economic and political, between countries.

That competition then leads and sparks warfare. Warfare is just as integral a part of capitalism as competition. So if you’re not talking about the economic and political competition that goes on between states and their desire to control resources and the geopolitical “great game,” as it used to be called, then you’re not providing a full analysis for people.

That’s one of the major reasons why they cannot get any kind of agreement on climate change. They have a hard time getting agreement on even things that they care about, like trade; but the things they don’t care about, like climate change, that is not even part of their frame of reference, they have even more problems with. If I regulate my economy more than you, then I suffer an economic disadvantage. You now can go places and do things and produce profits cheaper than I can, and I’m at an economic disadvantage. That kind of dynamic prevents them from coming up with a rational plan. They’d rather nuke each other over a disputed oil field than come up with an internationally coordinated plan to plant some trees.

What are your views on what is called sustainable capitalism?

Pretty low.

Why?

You cannot have a sustainable capitalism, because every year every capitalist entity has to grow larger for the process that I mentioned earlier. There is this constant dynamic of growth that if they’re not growing, then they die. We see the economy today. What’s the conversation about? We need to go back to growth. Every nation on the planet needs to have 2% or 3% growth. Otherwise what happens? We fall into a tailspin of unemployment, layoffs, cuts to social spending, obviously not the military budget, but everything else. So without that growth the system starts falling apart. Capitalism is literally a system that is based on the maxim “Grow or die.” So the idea that in any way that could be sustainable or that they could somehow care about the resources that they put in or the waste that goes out is an impossibility, I would argue. They don’t even see resources as anything but a free lunch: they take something free from the environment and then they put it back in as waste. They don’t pay for that stuff.

So I infer from that, then, that you are perhaps skeptical of tinkering around the edges, cosmetic changes such as recycling.

I’m not against recycling, but I think it’s important to recognize that that’s the first thing that we’re told to do. And there’s a reason for that. Because it takes it away from the product itself and says the product is okay, it’s fine. The problem is with you as you a consumer and an individual. You are the problem because you don’t put it in the right receptacle. It evades the whole question of why was that thing made in the first place and why was it made of plastic. There’s nothing wrong with plastic. For example, people often talk about plastic water bottles, which is a $100 billion-a-year industry. Plastic is an amazing material. It lasts virtually forever. So why would you make disposable things out of plastic? It should be illegal. Really, it should be illegal.

Yes, but these are panaceas that are being served up. If you do these things, if you drive the right car, things will be hunky-dory.

Absolutely. I think the idea is very much ideological, that we feel good about recycling, that we take it away from the production and we focus on the consumption, and if we do that, then everything will be okay. However, if you look at waste, only 2 1/2 % of all waste is domestic, i.e., what all of us produce. So even if we could magically get rid of all of that, that would still leave 97.5% of industrial and agricultural waste. It would be irrelevant, in other words. Apart from the fact that plastic cannot be really effectively recycled in the first place, which is why even if you put it to be recycled, 95% of it never is. So that would be last thing that you should do, not the first thing. The first thing should be to look at the production process and then match things to their function. Then we can go from there and talk about, at the end, if we really can’t do anything, if we can’t reuse it again, or maybe we should never have made it in the first place—that’s a radical idea—we should then think about how could we best recycle it.

You can expand that to any kind of argument about this tinkering around the edges and the focus on that. Every time capitalism messes something up, it doesn’t try and correct that problem, it just tries to sell you something else. So the food system has become so toxic now that they invented another subset of the food system called organic food so that—what was wrong with the first stuff? What did you do to that to make it so bad that we have to go and pay more money, if we can afford it, to get organic food? You can replicate that on any number of levels. The food crises, the various food scandals. People may remember swine flu a couple of years ago, where they’ve concentrated the animals in such horrendous situations, totally unhealthy, that they’re diseased, they’re incubators for disease. So during the outbreak what did they do? Did they think, You know what, we really need to regulate these corporations so they treat these animals more humanely? No. They just said, No, we’ll sell them sanitary masks, and then that will be fine. So they just are constantly figuring out new ways. So if we accept that paradigm, that there’s something else that we should buy, then we’ve already fallen into their trap.

You talked in your presentation about the Bush period, the oligarchy, it was easy to kind of explain what was going on. These were people with close ties to the oil and gas industry. Yet, as you point out, Obama has followed basically the same template and has expanded and increased drilling permits and has opened up the Arctic.

It was very easy to blame George W. Bush. In some ways Obama has got away with more than Bush could have got away with in his wildest dreams. Certainly on civil liberties I think you could say that Obama has been worse than George W. Bush. And I think there’s argument to be made on ecological issues that the same is true. If you think about the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history, in 2010 the Gulf oil spill, when Obama had supermajorities in both houses of Congress and a massive amount of public support at that time, he could have done anything. But he didn’t. In fact, he let the clean up to the criminal who carried it out in the first place, BP. So this is clearly not about changing Democrats for Republicans.

I also think it’s important to remember, all of the best environmental laws that we’ve got on the books—the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, etc.—came about under the presidency of a right-wing Republican egomaniac called Richard Nixon, who had already caused colossal environmental devastation, not to mention mass murder, in Southeast Asia. Why did he decide that now was the time I want to protect the water and the air? Because there was a massive movement on the streets that demanded it. So that’s really the answer. I don’t think it’s about the politicians; it’s about what we do on the streets and how organized we get.

The gravity of the multiple ecological crises demands collective and global action—not one-off, one country doing this or Canada doing that. How to get there, to collective action?

That’s the all-important question. We’ve had some examples I mentioned in the Middle East. Also, recently the massive protests in Germany against nuclear power completely changed another right-wing government, Angela Merkel’s, who is the premier and who is pro- nuclear. Yet now Germany has already shut nine of their nuclear reactors, they’re shutting down the rest within 10 years, and has a plan in place to reduce their carbon emissions by 30% by 2020, and then by 80% by 2050. That’s not because they suddenly became a green government. It’s because they were forced to become a green government. I think those kinds of things resonate around the world. The same is true in Italy and Switzerland which are also shutting down their nuclear power stations, and hopefully Japan will be the next country.

But I think it’s also significant that the countries that are resisting the most in terms of that kind of change are also the countries that have nuclear weapons. Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and Japan don’t have nuclear weapons. So the movements there have more latitude. I think it would be extremely difficult in this country for the government ideologically to justify keeping nuclear weapons, which they want, but abandoning nuclear power. So I think that the campaign here has to be much more powerful.

How do we get to that? I think it’s the same as any other movement. I think occupy Wall Street, we haven’t been fighting for a long time and finally we are. That’s exciting. It’s finally become a two-sided battle. And we need to catch up with our organization. That is the next challenge as we move forward. Where do we go from here? Because we really are in the belly of the imperial beast. So I think it’s a question of organization more than anything else.

A lot of people may think or have the idea that they don’t need to get involved with politics or political organization. I joined my first political organization when I was 15, which was the ANC, the African National Congress, in Britain. That’s where the government in exile was. As a 15-year-old, I couldn’t understand why black people couldn’t have a vote in their own country. It just didn’t make sense. So I started finding out more about it. I got involved. Then I joined CND, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. All of these things eventually made me realize that they’re coming from the same source, the economic system. So I became a socialist.

Around the time of resistance at Greenham Common, the big U.S. military base in Britain.

Yes, the movement in the early 1980s was started by about 35 women from South Wales who went to Greenham Common, where they had just started putting nuclear weapons in this U.S. base. They could launch nuclear weapons from Britain without the consent of the British government. So people were, like, What the hell is this? So, just like the sit-down strikes in Greensboro, North Carolina, started with 4 people, the movement against Greenham Common base started with 35. One woman was killed during the occupation by a military truck that ran her over, Karen Davis. But it evolved within a few months into an occupation of 30,000, predominantly women, where they ringed the base and shut it down so that they couldn’t get trucks in or out, which sparked an international movement, in Germany in particular, to do the same thing. That occupation went on for 19 years, which is something worth being inspired by.

Interestingly enough, I was in Japan over December and January. One of the meetings that I went to, that was run by predominantly women, showed the documentary of the occupation from Greenham Common. So women a generation away and on the other side of the world were inspired by this message and taking heart from it as they went to campaign. So the working class, the people, have a long memory.

Do you have some concrete suggestions for people, some things they can do?

It’s not about buying green stuff. It’s about getting involved in politics. It’s the only thing we have. They have all the money, they have all the guns, but there’s not very many of them. We are always more—many, many more. What we need to do is get organized and show our power, because we’re the people who make all the stuff. If we don’t go to work, nothing happens. So if you’re not involved in some political organization, you should think about joining one, whatever is your particular issue. I was first involved in an anti-racist struggle, that led me to an anti-nuclear power and nuclear weapons struggle that I kind of generalized from. So whatever is your issue, I would urge you to get involved and join an organization and think about what is connecting. I believe, as a socialist, it’s the economic system that we need to get rid of, the whole thing. If you don’t find an organization around here in Santa Fe that you like, start your own. Get some of your friends involved. I think that that is the key thing. Because ultimately, as far as I’m concerned, if we don’t get rid of this system—and we haven’t got much time left, but fortunately, as I said, we’ve got some inspiration from 2011 that is very, very exciting and points a way forward—but if we don’t get rid of the system and implement something else, as I mentioned, based on cooperation, real democracy, and a long-term time horizon, then we face a very diminished future within many of our lifetimes. I’ve been an activist, yes, since I was 15, I guess, and I think it’s the only life worth living.

As Shelley said, “Ye are many, they are few.”

(Due to time constraints some portions of the interview were not included in the national broadcast. Those portions are included in this transcript.)

Tar Sands: Canada’s Mordor

Tue, 29 May 2012 18:24:10 GMT

Andrew Nikiforuk
Interviewed by David Barsamian
Calgary, AB, Canada
March 2, 2012

available from Alternative Radio

You can listen to Andrew Nikiforuk speak for himself here.

Andrew Nikiforuk is an award-winning Canadian journalist. His articles appear in major newspapers and magazines. He is the author of Saboteurs and Empire of the Beetle. His book Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of the Continent was honored with the Rachel Carson Environment Book Award.

In Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent, you write:

The Alberta tar sands could make Canada the world’s second greatest oil exporter by 2050. Although growth has been tempered by the global financial crisis, U.S., Asian, and European investors are still pouring billions of dollars into the megaproject to extract the world’s ugliest, most expensive hydrocarbon. We are polluting our air, poisoning our water, destroying vast areas of boreal forest, and undermining democracy itself.

That’s quite a litany of charges. Before we get to them specifically, why don’t we place the tar sands geographically.

The tar sands are really a massive deposit of low-grade, junk crude in the northern forests of Canada that are located in northwestern Alberta very close to the border of the Northwest Territories. So this is a deposit of crude that at one time was light oil that has been badly degraded by bacteria. It’s now this really messy, clunky, heavy crude that is buried under the forest floor and that must be mined in order to bring it up to surface. Oil companies and geologists and scientists have all looked at this resource for nearly 100 years and said,

The day will come when we’re going to have to exploit a resource as extreme as bitumen.

Bitumen being?

Bitumen is the word used to describe this kind of hydrocarbon. Bitumen is really a mixture of, again, this low-grade junk crude with sand and clay. And it’s quite a process to remove the sand and clay and water from this resource in order to get heavy oil.

This has been actually known for more than a century. Going back to the 1880s, there’s a federal report, which you cite in your book, calling the tar sands

the most extensive petroleum field in America.

Fifty, sixty years later, The Saturday Evening Post, no radical U.S. magazine, declared,

Canada, so near and friendly a neighbor that her resources cannot thoughtfully be considered foreign and alien, has a vast bed of tar sands in Alberta, the largest known deposit of oil in the world.

That was in 1943.

Americans have always taken a very keen interest in this deposit.

Why?

The whole oil economy began in the U.S. The Americans were really, truly the first pioneers of petroleum. As a consequence, all the world’s major oil companies all started largely in the U.S., and then you had British Petroleum and Royal Dutch Shell trying to catch up. But the Americans realized that—one of the issues they always had was they kept on finding fields, depleting them, and then worrying about where they were going to get their next batch of oil from. J. Howard Pew, who was president of Sun Oil, which was a Pennsylvania-based company, the eighth wealthiest man in the U.S. in the 1940s and 1950s, was very much kind of an American Arab sheik, if you like. He had very strong religious beliefs, many of which today people would consider extreme, but he also valued heavy oil. He recognized the Athabasca tar sands as being a critical resource. He was actually one of the first to actually plunk down a heck of a lot of money in the 1960s to figure out an economic way to exploit it.

And bitumen you say “looks like black molasses and smells like asphalt.” Not a particularly attractive quality.

No. Because it is this really junk resource in the sense that there’s lots of it but it takes so much energy to pull it out of the ground. Then you have to upgrade it because it’s of such poor quality: you’ve got to get the sand and the clay and the water out of there; then you have got something called synthetic crude, and that requires even more complex refining, because it’s full of acids and tannins and sulfur and heavy metals. So it is what it is. It’s kind of a bottom-of-the-barrel resource. It’s a signature of peak oil in the sense that we wouldn’t be in tar sands which are capital-intensive, tenergy-intensive, and dirty if we weren’t running out of the cheap stuff and light oil. And, of course, we are.

And what about the environmental impact? Does it contribute to global warming?

The big issue with bitumen is that it is really rich in carbon. This is a resource that is carbon-heavy and hydrogen-poor. So one of the things you actually have to do when you’re upgrading it into synthetic crude is you’ve got to take those carbon atoms out, and you end up with these massive petroleum coke piles, millions and millions of tons, in the northern forest. Then you’ve got to put hydrogen in. And that hydrogen is coming from natural gas that has been cracked. So all along the way the production of this resource is much more carbon-intensive, 23% more, generally, than light oil or conventional oil. So it’s got a much bigger carbon footprint.

Now, does it contribute to go global warming? Every bit is a contribution. I put it this way: It is highly significant. It now accounts for 7% of Canada’s overall greenhouse gas emissions, and soon will surpass all emissions from transportation fuels in the country. That’s a big footprint.

What’s the political connection between Ottawa, where the federal government is located and where Stephen Harper, the prime minister sits, with these large oil corporations? This is Harper’s home turf, right, Calgary?

Alberta is his home turf. And Alberta is really kind of a Texas on steroids. It has been a petrostate for a long time in the sense that the government of Alberta is highly dependent on revenue from oil and gas. This dependence on oil and gas revenue has allowed one party to dominate politics in the province for 40 years. So the Conservatives, or the Tories, are the party that has basically run the province for 40 long years. It’s much like the Democrats in Texas. They ran Texas for 90 years on the basis of Texas’s oil wealth. So we have a similar here kind of pattern going on in Alberta.

From this power base of oil and money we now have a political party running the country, the Tories as well, that are behaving just like your typical petro-politicians, much like Rick Perry or other folks in the U.S. What’s really interesting to me is that when you look at the behavior of petrostates—and they’re very different from jurisdictions that don’t have all of this money from oil—one of the things they do is they take that oil wealth and they lower taxes. In so doing they immediately sever the very important and significant bond between representation and taxation. If you’re not being taxed, you’re not going to be represented. That’s the startling thing that happens in every petrostate. The first thing they do is say, Okay, you don’t have to worry about taxes anymore. Oil and gas revenue is going to pay for everything. It’s going to build your schools and pave your roads and run your hospitals. So you have this incredible transfer of power and accountability from duly elected political officials suddenly to an entire industry. That’s very much a force at work here in Alberta, as it is in Texas, Wyoming, Louisiana, and Alaska. The first thing all of those states did was to lower taxes and run on oil revenue.

When you do you that, who are you accountable to? At the end of the day, those jurisdictions come to represent the resource or the developers of the resource. Which is why Louisiana, Texas, Alaska, and Wyoming are such wacky states are considered so extreme and different from the rest of the U.S., just as Alberta is considered like, Wow, this is a really crazy jurisdiction in Canada. And it is, because nothing here that’s going on is normal. It’s not based on scarcity, it’s not based on any sort of prudence or resilience . It’s all based on, Man, we’ve got lots of money and we’re going to spend it and we’re going to use it to concentrate power. That’s what petrostates do.

We’re sitting in the studios of CJSW in Calgary. Just a few miles from here is a plethora of glass tower skyscrapers, kind of representing that concrete manifestation of oil power.

The world’s seven most profitable companies by revenue are all oil and gas companies, some of them privately owned, some of them state-owned.

The prime minister, Stephen Harper, who represents the Conservatives is from Calgary. He was a member of parliament. But his father—

He is also from the oil patch. He worked as a kid on the rigs. His father was an executive for Imperial Oil. He was an accountant. So Stephen Harper is as steeped in the culture of the oil and gas industry as George Bush was, coming from Texas. The same pedigree, the same religious beliefs in the sense that Stephen Harper is a Christian fundamentalist in the same way that George Bush Jr. was a Christian fundamentalist. It’s interesting that the funders of fundamentalism in the U.S. have been since the 1900s the oil patch. It was a California oil company that was the first publisher of a document called The Fundamentals, which really serves as the basis for Christian evangelical fundamentalism in the U.S.

So are you saying that the extraction of resources, in this case of oil, is almost given divine sanction, because if God didn’t want us to do that, he wouldn’t have put the oil in the ground?

It gives it a divine sanction. But there’s this very strange and odd connection between the power and the money generated by resource extraction and religious extremism. You go to Saudi Arabia, and who did oil enrich there? They, again, enriched this fundamentalist cult, the Wahhabis, that have this incredible lock on Saudi society and Saudi politics and Saudi economics. In the same way that you go to places like Louisiana, again, Texas, Oklahoma would be another good example, and Alaska—Sarah Palin would be a perfect example of this—where, again, you find defenders of rapid resource extraction, particularly oil and gas, all have this religious ideology to go along with it. Much like slaveholders did in the 19th century in the U.S. It was called divine providence, and the idea was, God has given us the right to do what we’re doing.

We see in the U.S. an urgent connection between Washington and Riyadh. That connection, because Saudi Arabia has the world’s largest oil reserves, has caused Washington to overlook misogyny, homophobia, racism, sectarianism, a whole list of transgressions, all because of oil. Does that go to your comment about how democracy is undermined?

It does. It’s another example of it. Oil just really blinds politicians, period. There’s a reason why it’s called “black gold.” There’s also a reason why the Venezuelans in the 1930s and 1940s, when oil was really taking off in that country, came up with the expression that “Oil is the devil’s excrement,” because they could see how rapidly the money was beginning to erode political accountability, was beginning to enrich a very small sector of the economy, the oil producers, the oil workers, and was orienting all life in Venezuela to the production of oil at the expense of all other economic sectors and all other classes. So oil, then, is very much a hindrance to democracy.

In fact, a very important group of political scientists, led by Terry Lynn Karl at Stanford University, as well as Michael Ross at the University of California, have been looking at this whole issue for years. They started out by saying,

Why are there no democracies in the Middle East other than Israel and ostensibly Lebanon?

They said,

Neither one of those countries has oil.

And they said,

Okay, what is it about oil that prevents democracies from arising in the Middle East?

They conducted these studies, and what they found was really quite fascinating. Oil enriches whatever the culture is there at hand. And oil has never been interested in democracy. Oil has always been about money and power. One of the peculiar characteristics of petrostates is the fact that the money is falling in such great streams that it allows the governor of a particular state or a political party to really have these long, unhealthy extended rules, whether we’re talking about Huey Long and his family in Louisiana, the Bushes in Texas, or the Tories here in Alberta for 40 years. Qaddafi ruled Libya for nearly 40 years. The Shah of Iran was there for 26 years. There’s this very strong connection between long, authoritarian rule and petrostates.

Speaking of Iran, the war drums are beating loudly in Washington and Tel Aviv about a possible attack on that country, which I think it’s fair to say would have catastrophic consequences on the price of oil. Now it’s over $100 a barrel. It may go to $200-$300 if that occurs. Wouldn’t a war be against the best economic interests of Israel and the U.S.?

It would really screw up the works in many ways. But there’s a very strong lobby to keep oil prices high. The U.S. really hasn’t looked hard and long at what’s really going on in Iran. Iran is a petrostate, has been for 50-60 years. And it has all of the characteristics of a petrostate in the sense that the government is incompetent and not terribly smart about how it goes about doing business, and its primary aim seems to be to subsidize its people with cheap oil. As a consequence of that, it’s really mismanaged its oil fields, so poorly that the revenue stream from oil is dropping in Iran.

That presented the Iranian government with a huge problem. How do we address that? That’s what got them into their nuclear program in part, was to say, Okay, if we have nuclear power, that will free up more oil for exports so we can keep the money coming into our government. The Americans just saw the nuclear program as, Oh, these guys to want blow up stuff in the Middle East, which is probably not the Iranian intent. But it does serve oil companies and petrostates and the Middle East to actually start beating the war drums. That just keeps the price of oil high.

One of the really interesting guys in the U.S. who has pointed this all out is Roger Stern. He’s a geographer, at the University of Tulsa now. Stern made the point that, look, the only way to respond to this kind of market power and to petrostates is for the U.S. to consume less oil, and to do so in a very concerted fashion and to get going with energy taxes and to get going with conservation in a big way. That’s the only way to break the market power of any group. He’s been making that argument for years. And, of course, no one in the U.S. seems to be listening.

In the mid-1970s, when Gerald Ford was the president of the U.S., his secretary of state Henry Kissinger brokered a deal with the Shah of Iran, who was telling the Americans, Look, oil is a finite resource, it’s not going to be here forever. I have to look after the long-term interests of the Iranian people and provide for a secure, clean energy source. He wanted nuclear reactors. Kissinger and Ford went along with that. They thought, Brilliant analysis there, Mr. Shah. You’re right on. However, now, when the Iranians say the same thing, it’s regarded as propaganda and is immediately dismissed.

That’s very much what has been happening. What is curious, too, is that for the U.S.—and Stern has pointed that out—the cost of keeping navy carriers in the Persian Gulf in response to the so-called threat of an oil blockade has been enormous. Since the 1970s the U.S. has spent $7 trillion alone on what Stern calls “force projection.” That’s simply keeping a navy there in the Middle East to keep a watch on things just in case the oil gets strangled. In addition to that is the $3 trillion the U.S. has spent on buying oil from the Middle East. When you start adding up those figures, it’s no wonder that the U.S. today is now bankrupt.

You have to ask, Who benefits from had this sort of policy? Petrostates benefit, oil companies benefit, military hardware guys benefit. But the American people don’t benefit from this kind of policy at all. We are strengthening extreme regimes by pouring more fuel onto the fire rather than standing back and saying, You know what, we made this mess. It’s actually motorists in the U.S. demanding cheap oil that made this mess. The only way to address it is to begin to walk away from it and make oil less part of our lives. That’s very hard for a petrostate. And the U.S. is the world’s very first petrostate.

I don’t know how closely you follow U.S. politics, but to raise these issues, to suggest that there must be an alternative to using oil as your main energy source literally results in a cascade of abuse and derision, you’re un-American. You are questioning the American way of life. It kind of goes back to that divine sanction.

I grew up in the U.S. and I do follow American politics, and I love Americans dearly. But I think that the debate today about energy in the U.S. reminds me very much of the debate that took place in the 1840s and 1850s in the U.S. about slavery, which was essentially a debate about energy. You had the North, which was becoming highly industrialized and becoming more and more dependent on fossil fuels, in particular coal, that was challenging the South and slavery in the South and saying, What’s this all about? Why do you think this is okay?

The South being largely agricultural.

Largely agricultural and largely dependent on 4 million Negro slaves as a critical and important source of energy. Southerners used slaves the same way we use oil today. They moved their slaves around to develop different plantations, open up different areas in the wilderness to produce new crops, and on it went. So then you ended up with this very extreme debate that was really about energy that resulted in the disastrous Civil War. The debate about renewables and about oil today and the “Drill, baby, drill,” and why don’t we conserve resources is beginning to take on the same extreme tone and tenor of the conversation that really unraveled the U.S. in the 1840s and 1850s.

In an article in The Tyee—am I pronouncing that correctly?

Yes, Tyee, T-y-e-e.

What is that?

It’s a salmon. The Tyee is a brilliant Internet newspaper in Canada.

And you write for it.

And I write for it.

I was interested to note, given the enormous amount of wealth in this province, that you say the government is running a deficit.

Yes.

How does that track?

The Alberta model for resource development is to give lots and lots of money to the developers and very little to the owners of the resource, which happen to be the people of Alberta. We have among the lowest royalty rates and the lowest corporate taxes in North America. We charge less for our oil and gas here in the province of Alberta than Louisiana, than Texas, than Wyoming, than Alaska, than Montana even, which is why oil and gas companies and state-owned companies are all here and want to play in Alberta, because they can take home more money than they can even by investing anywhere in the U.S. That to me is just wrong.

In Canada, what we in the U.S. call Native Americans, you call First Nations. How are they being affected by the developments in northern Alberta in the tar sands area?

First Nations consist largely of the Cree and the Dene and also Métis—they’re half-breeds—in northern Alberta. They’ve all been dramatically affected by this project. Just consider for a moment that the mining portion of the project will, when it’s fully developed, excavate an area the size of Rhode Island or Delaware in the boreal forest. Of course, you can’t do that kind of thing without affecting the traditional communities that live there. So the Dene and the Cree, those that are in this industrial area now, many are now working for the mining companies. They’ve stopped fighting, they’ve just joined in, because they really don’t have any alternative. Those that live downstream are incredibly concerned about the contamination of the Athabasca River with heavy metals and other oil pollution. People living downwind in Saskatchewan are concerned about acid rain.

All of the traditional aspects of aboriginal life in northern Alberta, whether it’s trapping or hunting or going out and harvesting bush food, they’ve all been disrupted and changed by this project. Many of the communities up there are incredibly poor. Some have made small fortunes in the scheme of things on the basis of oil wealth. So there’s also a great deal of dissension and just pure political dysfunction as a result of all this money and all these corporations.

I wasn’t able to get to northern Alberta, primarily because of weather concerns this time of year. But what does the landscape look like? I kind of see a scene from Avatar: giant holes in the ground and huge tractors and trucks and people working in lots of dust and smoke.

It is similar to Avatar. It is the world’s largest engineering operation. It is also the world’s largest mining operation and the world’s largest energy project per se. More than $200 billion have been poured into this. So you have huge holes in the ground for the bitumen mine sites that you can see in NASA photographs. That’s how big they are.

From outer space.

Yes. You have lakes of mining waste that are also extreme. The mining waste alone, which is in 20 different tailings ponds, covers an area of about 170 square kilometers. You could flood Washington, D.C., with that amount of mining waste, as you could Staten Island. Both of them would just be under mining waste. This waste is toxic. It’s sand and clay and water and heavy metals and lots of oil, all mixed into it.

The community of Fort McMurray would be like Williston, North Dakota. It’s a boom town, and you have this incredible influx of workers from all over the world. You have in the bush itself 20,000 to 30,000 workers working in these temporary work camps. You’ve got a very active drug trade, prostitution, you have infrastructure deficits. Some of the most horrendous traffic jams in all of Canada take place in Fort McMurray because there’s only one highway going north and south. So if you’re caught in the rush to get to the mines in the morning or when everyone is coming home from the mines in the evening, you can end up sitting in your car for 2 or 3 hours. It’s an extraordinary boom town, all based around the rapid extraction of bitumen out of the forest.

And who are the workers?

The workers come from all over the place. Some of the workers come from eastern Canada, from some of the poorest provinces in Canada, in particular, Newfoundland, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and Nova Scotia. A lot of workers, too, come from northern Ontario. A great many also come from Texas and various places in the U.S. We have workers from the Philippines, we have workers from Eastern Europe, we have temporary foreign workers from China, we’ve had workers from South Africa. All over the place. And you have this kind of stratified society in Fort McMurray, where you will see the Somalis are the cab drivers, the Filipinos work as nannies for the oil workers because both mom and dad are away for 12 to 14 hours a day.

That’s an average workday?

Yes. Two hours are just spent traveling to and back from the mines, and then you’ve got a 10-hour day on top of that.

Are there any worker protections in Canada?

Our labor laws are fairly good. They don’t always apply to temporary workers. We had an extraordinary case where a group of workers from China were blown off some scaffolding. Two died, three or four were injured. These workers had all been brought in by Sinopec, which is a state-owned oil company in China. The workers were never paid. After five years, 53 charges have been laid, but no one has yet been in court. Sinopec is fighting every action, saying it’s not liable or it doesn’t really have to recognize Alberta’s health and safety regulations. That’s typical of boom towns and what happens in them.

You’re writing about this. You’ve been looking into labor and work issues.

I’ve been writing about a lot of these issues for nearly 10 years. It’s interesting, in the U.S. there’s a very big literature about boom towns and what happens in boom towns: all of the divorces, the alcoholism, the petty crime that takes place, the itinerant workers who really don’t give a damn about where they are. You end up with these incredible social tensions and carelessness because the place is all about making a killing as opposed to making a living. Some really great American sociologists have written about all this, whether they’re talking about boom towns in Wyoming or boom towns in Texas or boom towns in North Dakota. And Fort McMurray is probably one of the world’s biggest boom towns.

There are 12 major oil corporations operating in Canada: BP Canada, Canadian National Resources, Cenovus, ConocoPhillips, Devon, Imperial Oil, Nexen, Shell Canada, Statoil, Suncor Energy, Total E&P, and Teck Resources. Do they all have a piece of the action in Alberta?

Most of them have a piece of the action. If they’re not involved in the mining operations, then they’re involved in what I call the steam plants or what the engineers call in situ production, which is where you’re taking massive amounts of steam, injecting it into the ground at high pressure, and trying to melt the bitumen and then bring it up that way. Almost every major oil and gas company in the world is playing in what is called “Alberta’s magic sandbox.” Total is there, Sinopec is there, Middle Eastern companies are there. Indian oil companies want to get involved, and just about every American multinational you can think of is there.

Talk about the impact on the environment. There was an infamous case a couple of years ago, the deaths of 1600 ducks who had the misfortune of landing in one of these toxic waste pools.

That’s generally almost an annual event. These waste lakes are open in the spring because they’re quite warm and have so many salts and pollutants in them. So ducks and geese flying over them think, My God, there’s a great body of water there that I can park my butt in for a while. And then they get coated in oil and they sink to the bottom of these ponds. This has been going on for 20 or 30 years. We then had this one big event in 2008.

That’s a very small environmental concern in the scheme of things when you have a volume of toxic waste on the landscape that, if it got into the Athabasca River, would kill almost all aquatic life all the way up to the Beaufort Sea. That’s a huge, huge, huge risk and issue. We have the destruction of boreal songbird habitat throughout the boreal forest as it’s rapidly becoming industrialized. We have threats to groundwater and groundwater contamination. Some of the groundwater aquifers in that region extend all the way to Hudson Bay, so if we mess that up, we’re contaminating groundwater across three Canadian provinces. We have issues with acid rain. We have very, very serious issues with water contamination, either, again, coming from the tailings ponds or coming from air pollution. This involves rather serious levels of heavy metals and oil, equivalent to an oil spill of 13,000 barrels every year into the Athabasca River.

Talk about the Keystone XL project, which did get some attention in the U.S. In the summer of 2011, 12,000 people demonstrated outside the White House. A thousand of them were arrested for civil disobedience. There was such an uprising of popular anger with this project, which would have gone under the Ogallala Aquifer in Nebraska, that first the State Department and then Obama have kind of put a kibosh on it. It’s not dead, but it’s been temporarily postponed, until after the presidential election in 2012. What’s going on with the Keystone XL project? And I learned from Maude Barlow of Council of Canadians that there are already existing pipelines to the Great Lakes from Alberta.

There are indeed. Right now in the U.S. Midwest about 70% of the oil that goes to Illinois and Michigan and states like that is coming from Canada, and the majority of that is coming from the tar sands. And the pipeline making those connections was built a couple years ago. But Keystone is a bit different. Keystone was proposed, really, to get around a bottleneck in Cushing, Oklahoma. There’s a huge bottleneck of oil there now, because essentially Canada has overproduced bitumen. We’ve approved too many projects, too quickly. We now have this enormous amount of bitumen, and it’s all getting bogged down in Cushing, Oklahoma. As a result, we’re getting a lower price for this oil, because it can’t be moved. So the Keystone was proposed as one way—How do we get around this Midwest market and get this oil straight to refineries in the Gulf of Mexico owned by the Koch brothers or owned by Saudi Arabia or Venezuela? And how do we get it down there as quick as possible? That’s what the TransCanada pipeline was all about.

I thought it was also the name of a construction company.

TransCanada is the Canadian company proposing this pipeline. And they behaved—Americans got to see sort of the crude side of Canadians because we do stuff like this in Canada all the time, Who the hell is going to be concerned if we propose to put this over one of North America’s most important aquifers? Well, Nebraskans were concerned. They gave a damn, and then you had this huge debate. But the oil industry and TransCanada tried to pass it off as, Well, this bitumen is all about improving American security and it’s all about lowering your dependence on Middle Eastern oil. Those arguments were pure nonsense. None of it was true. As Canadians we don’t give a damn about any of that stuff. We want to sell oil. Every petrostate wants to sell oil. We want a higher price for our oil. And all we want to do right now is we want Americans to assume the risks for this pipeline. We want to get it down to refineries in Texas, where refining this stuff will not improve the air in Houston, and then get it onto a supertanker to China or someplace else so we can get this imaginary premium we hope to make by building this pipeline. That’s what it was about.

Your book Tar Sands has a map for 2019 of North America virtually criss-crossed with these pipelines, including one from Alberta to British Columbia, and from there presumably on to energy-starved China.

Another way to look at the whole tar sands development is this way. You have to say, All right, this is the world’s most energy-intensive hydrocarbon in that it takes just extraordinary amounts of energy to get it out of the ground, upgrade it, and refine it. As a consequence, it costs loads of money. So this oil costs 10 to 20 times more than oil from the Middle East. And it comes with this huge carbon footprint and environmental footprint. So when you start running on a resource that’s this extreme,
business as usual cannot go on. But oil and gas companies are in the business of producing oil and gas, and they want business to go on as usual. They think that no one is going to notice that this product, which costs so much more in every sense of the word, can continue business as usual. But it can’t. It is a great way, though, to increase the shelf life of oil. And that’s what this project then, truly is about.

One of the saws that also accompanies military weapon spending is that it provides lots of jobs. But study after study shows that in fact it’s capital-intensive but not labor-intensive. This Keystone XL project which has been proposed and is now on the shelf apparently was going to create something like 4,000 construction jobs. That’s not much.

No. And temporary. It would all be over within two years, and then it would be probably less than 100 guys monitoring that pipeline thereafter. Pipelines are not forms of job creation. In fact, the oil and gas industry itself is probably the least labor-intensive industry in the world. I think .01% of the world’s population is engaged in oil and gas extraction, yet this industry accounts for more than 10% of the world’s GDP. So this is a very highly specialized, privileged, elite industry that is capital-intensive, that is not labor-intensive.

In The Guardian in March of 2012 there was an environmental blog by Damian Carrington. He says,

Even Canada doesn’t believe its own spin on tar sands.

In public Canada’s environment minister says tar sands are “a responsibly and sustainably developed resource.” In private the government says there is “no credible scientific information” to support this claim.

One of the big issues about the rapid development of this project has been the lack of scientific monitoring and high-quality science to go along with it. And it’s taken nearly two years and a ferocious battle led in particular by one of the world’s top water scientists, David Schindler, to force the Canadian government and the Alberta government to cobble together a proper monitoring program that would look not just at water issues and water contamination but also air pollution as well as what’s happening to wildlife in the forest.

Is Canada also engaging in deep-sea oil exploration?

We are actively looking at deep-sea oil operations in the Beaufort Sea which is just east of Alaska and right north of the Northwest Territories in the Arctic.

Also in The Guardian, George Monbiot, who writes frequently on environmental issues, says with some sarcasm that journalists writing for the corporate press are all of a sudden concerned about the poor as exemplified in such statements as, “If tar sands cannot be extracted in Canada, farmers in Africa will starve.”

(Laughter)
I don’t see how that is possible. I think the more bitumen we actually produce, the more likely it will be that droughts associated with climate change will actually cause an awful lot of people in Africa and India and China to starve.

What are your views to the economic system in which all of this takes place, that is to say, capitalism?

Capitalism, if you look at it in energy terms, is basically a system designed to dispose of cheap energy as quickly as possible and to get people hooked on goods that can be made with this cheap energy. I look upon capitalism somewhat differently than probably a lot of other folks in the sense that it is very much the product of what happens to a civilization or society when they suddenly come across an incredible pool of high energy that they gorge on. They’re kind of like an adolescent who has just got this amazing inheritance. So how do we spend it, and how do we make other people dependent on this whole process? We look at it in a variety of different ways, but we really need to seriously look at it as a system for using energy that makes it possible for very few people to accumulate enormous amounts of rather obscene wealth.

But isn’t it dedicated to amassing that “obscene wealth” in the short-term? And what may happen to the environment 10, 15, 50 years on, that’s somebody else’s problem. If I’m the CEO of one of these energy corporations in Canada or in the U.S., I have my stockholders, who are nipping at my heels wanting to see dividends. If I can’t produce those dividends, I’m out of a job. In terms of this institutional impulse for short-term gain, doesn’t that speak to the very nature of the economic
system?

It does. And it also speaks to the nature of energy in the sense that energy is wealth, and there is no wealth without that energy. So whenever we spend energy, we are actually spending wealth and going into debt at the same time, particularly when we’re talking about hydrocarbons and fossil fuels. We haven’t quite figured out yet the relationship of energy to wealth and wealth accumulation and how it has distorted all of our economic thinking. I think it’s really instructive and really important for most Americans to realize that, I think, 10 out of the last 11 recessions in the U.S. all happened after oil-price shocks.

You don’t need much more information there to recognize that if the oil is not flowing and the oil is not being spent, then our idea of what an economy is just doesn’t work very well.

Putting all of these cogent intellectual exercises aside and erudite opinion about how destructive tar-sands oil extraction is, etc., you come back to that salient point of this is about making money. And even if I agree with your analysis, I cannot deviate from that one overweaning goal.

Oil has always been about money and greed and power. When Daniel Yergin wrote his book The Prize, which is a rather elegant history of oil, the word ethics I don’t think appears anywhere.

I notice in your book that you quote Gandhi saying,

The earth provides enough for everyone’s need, but not for everyone’s greed.

And oil really goes to the greed factor. It concentrates power, it allows people to accumulate an enormous amount of wealth. It changes the metabolism of everything, just as too many carbohydrates will change the metabolism of a child and make him fat and unhealthy.

Vandana Shiva, a prominent environmental activist and scientist in India, has been talking about the rights of nature and trying to cobble together some kind of code to protect the most vulnerable resources, like water, land, hills, mountains, etc.

She’s got a great line, too. She says, “Soil, not oil.” I think Vandana is very much carrying on the Gandhi tradition. People forget that Gandhi, when he started fighting British rule in the early 1900s, also pretty much declared what he wanted for India. He said small, agrarian villages were the way to go because they supported the local economy, they served as a great counter to the accumulation of wealth or power, they ran on solar energy, they respected a long tradition of good stewardship with the land. That’s the kind of world he saw. He also questioned this massive industrialization and mechanization that was happening then to farming. He said, We have hands and foot. We should be using them. And we should be very careful about what kind of machines we adopt and use.

It’s interesting to me that you have someone like Gandhi coming from India at the time, pretty much a peasant country; someone like Leo Tolstoy coming from Russia, again, a peasant country; someone like G. K. Chesterton coming from a tradition of small farmers in England, all arriving at the same conclusion and saying, Look, hydrocarbons are changing us not just materially but spiritually as a people, and this concentration of wealth and power is going to be bad for us, really bad for us.

Going back to your point about the connection between oil and democracy, you contend that oil hinders democracy, corrupts the political process through the absence of transparent fiscal reporting. That doesn’t have to be. That’s not a law of nature.

No, it doesn’t have to be, but it tends to be the general experience. One exception to that is generally Norway. The Norwegians had a conversation in the 1970s about their offshore oil wealth. Parties on the left, parties on the right, parties in between said, There’s so much money here that if we don’t do something about it and take it off the table, we will destroy ourselves as a country and we will destroy our democracy. The Norwegians actually took time out to have that conversation. That’s pretty unusual. Louisiana never had that conversation, Texas never had that conversation, Wyoming hasn’t had that conversation, North Dakota didn’t have that conversation, Alaska never had that conversation. The Norwegians did. They took the money off the table, and they now have a sovereign fund worth more than $500 billion to use the day when the oil runs out. So they’ve done things differently. Their government runs on taxes; it does not run on oil revenue. Again, Louisiana, Texas, Wyoming, Alaska, they are following a totally different path that makes them totally dependent on the resource.

And you call Alberta, your home province, “a classic petrostate. It has one of the least accountable governments in Canada as well as the lowest voter turnout.” Why is voter turnout so low?

The thing about petrostates is that there’s so much money and the governments are trying to reward all kinds of different groups and special interest groups at the same time that you have this incredible apathy that develops over time. Everyone sort of concedes, The government is so powerful, it’s all bloated with this oil money. As long as they spread a little bit of this money my way, why do I need to be involved in anything? You also see, too, Look, I’m not paying taxes. If I’m not paying taxes, I’m not being represented. So why the hell should I even take part in the political process here and vote and exercise my rights as a citizen? Because petrostates don’t like citizens. They want clients or servants.

Consumers.

Consumers. That’s what they boil everything down to. That is why political participation in this province is extremely low, appallingly low, with the result that Alberta is purely and fundamentally a dysfunctional petrostate.

You say,

Every Canadian who drives a car is part of this political emergency, and every Canadian can be part of the solution.

What about the giant neighbor to the south?

Every American is part of it, too. We all use oil. And because we all use oil every day, and in everything that we do, whether it’s from transportation to eating—you cannot eat today without eating some oil in the form of pesticides, fertilizers, one thing or other—we’re all part of this story. And it is a rather remarkable story. It is a story about power and wealth and concentration. And fundamentally it is really now a story about servitude. We think we are free, but we are not free. We are beholden to a class of oil producers or a class of oil-producing states. We need to start questioning this servitude and begin to look different ways of living again.

You have another book coming out that kind of dovetails with Tar Sands. What is that about and what’s its title?

It’s very much about this theme. It’s called The Energy of Slaves: Oil and the New Servitude. It’s very much a critical examination of how oil has changed everyday life: how it changed agriculture, how it changed city making, how it changed economic thinking, how it’s changed even our attitudes towards happiness and what is happiness all about, and, fundamentally how it really changed the United States. I think Americans have forgotten that they were on a different path before they found oil in the 1850s. There was more of a Jeffersonian ideal of resilience, independence, self-sufficiency, and communities working together, fundamentally as agricultural producers. Oil changed that. It changed every part of the American character and arguably gave the U.S.A. whole new vision or dream, which is now rapidly becoming a nightmare.

In the latter part of the 20th century the U.S. went from being the world’s number one oil exporter to being the world’s number one oil importer.

That’s correct. So the tables have turned, and so have America’s economic and political fortunes.

I’d like you to read the last paragraph of Tar Sands, where you have a quote from the American social critic and writer Wendell Berry.

“The real work of transforming Canada’s fossil fueldependent economy will not be big or glamorous. It will be humbling work. Our tasks, as social critic Wendell Berry has noted,

will be too many to count, too many to report, too many to be publicly noticed or rewarded, too small to make anyone rich or famous.”

What I really like about what Berry is saying is that all energy transitions are ultimately made by the decisions of ordinary people. And in many cases some of the most important transitions that have taken place have been a matter of people walking away from bad systems.

(Due to time constraints some portions of the interview were not included in the national broadcast. Those portions are included in this transcript.) For information about obtaining CDs, MP3s, or transcripts of this or other programs, please contact:
David Barsamian
Alternative Radio
P.O. Box 551
Boulder, CO 80306-0551
(800) 444-1977
info@alternativeradio.org
www.alternativeradio.org
©2012

The Elections won’t bring progressive change, so what can?

Mon, 28 May 2012 01:30:10 GMT

By Jack A. Smith,
Hudson Valley Activist Newsletter editor

Less than six months before the November presidential elections in an exceptionally distressed United States the narrow, unpleasant parameters of political possibility are emerging. Two alternatives confront the American people, both to the right of center.

If President Barack Obama is reelected, with the Democratic Party retaining control of at least one chamber of Congress, there probably will be four more years of economic stagnation, high unemployment, increasing poverty and inequality, more wars, erosions of civil liberties and global warming.
If Mitt Romney is elected, with the right/far right Republican Party dominating either House or Senate, every particular of the travail afflicting the country today will be multiplied, with emphasis on fulfilling the desires of the 1% at the expense of the 99%.

What else could be expected during the present conservative era? Paul Krugman, the liberal Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist, recently described Obama, whom he supports, as having ruled like “a moderate Republican circa 1992.” Viewing the ultra-conservatives, African American professor and left intellectual Cornell West detected “creeping fascism.”

In today’s society — based on gross economic inequality facilitated by a two-party political system spanning center right to far right and where big money is the decisive factor in the electoral process — an ostensibly democratic election can hardly mitigate the worst of abuses afflicting working people and their families much less bring about substantial reform.

This dreary reality is offset by an important new development. For the first time over the last several presidential elections — when voters are usually cheering exclusively for their candidate — masses of people are protesting in the streets against inequality of income and opportunity, and the class war waged by the wealthy, as well as global warming, ending wars, dismantling NATO and the like. Some unions, too, are not simply backing Obama but protesting on their own against Wall Street’s depredations.

Thirty years of wage stagnation, the growing rich-poor chasm, evisceration of the so-called American Dream and the long, painful effects of the Great Recession are the objective conditions behind the developing political consciousness of many Americans. Like the Roman Catholic church after widespread evidence of priests molesting children, sacrosanct capitalism — the economic holy of holies — is finally attracting public criticism for its crimes and hypocrisy, not yet on a huge scale but growing.

The sudden entrance of Occupy Wall St. last September with an open critique of the substantial excesses of capitalism in American society, following the democratic Arab Spring and Wisconsin uprising, has energized much of the left and progressive forces. Nationwide May Day actions and the 15,000 who demonstrated against NATO in Chicago later in May, among other protests, including civil disobedience, are encouraging harbingers that many more people eventually will take their grievances to the streets and meeting halls, where all social progress begins. If this momentum manages to continue for the next few years it could become a broad and diverse national movement for social change — but it’s still a big “if.”

The political system seems no longer accountable to the public. Several matters of great importance to the American people do not even figure in this year’s election because both ruling parties basically agree about them and there’s little to squabble about but details. The administration has taken the U.S. up to its elbows in the quagmire of war, so the conservatives cry, “up to the shoulders!” Here are some issues the voters won’t be able to influence at the ballot box:

President Obama is presiding over U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen, killing “terrorist suspects” in Somalia and wherever the CIA targets its drones. May opinion polls show 66% of the American people want the expensive 10 ½ -year-old stalemated Afghan conflict to end, and 40% — many of whom want it terminated now — are strongly opposed. Only 27% support the war, 8% strongly. For all the chatter about nearing the end of the Afghan war at the NATO summit in Chicago May 20, Obama days earlier announced that he was prolonging the war a decade after his “final” pullout date at the end of 2014. An undetermined number of special forces combat troops, military trainers, and CIA paramilitaries will “defend” the corrupt Kabul government until 2024. American taxpayers will foot the bills — several billion a year. Progressive Democrats in Congress seek to restrain Washington’s penchant for wars, but they are consistently ignored and occasionally berated by the Obama Administration for their efforts.
Most citizens want cuts in the war budget. But as they go to the polls, the American people will be lugging a military and national security behemoth on their recession-bent backs, costing about $1.2 trillion a year. Rumors of meaningful reductions are illusory. The Pentagon accounts for over half of this amount (about $642 billion for fiscal 2013); the rest goes to Homeland Security, 17 spy agencies, nuclear weapons, interest on past war debts, and so on.
Global warming is here and getting worse while the White House is opening up new areas to drill for oil and supports massive development of shale-derived natural gas (a fossil fuel that requires fracking to extract), “clean” coal (though it does not yet exist), nuclear power (with no safe place to locate spent fuel), and dirty tar sands oil. The Obama Administration’s support for alternative non-carbon energy development is a token tossed to the environmental movement. Meanwhile, the U.S. — which demands to be recognized as world leader — is using its leadership to undermine international progress in fighting climate change. Big business and Wall St., primarily concerned with expansion and greater profits, heartily approve. Like Rhett Butler, the conservatives, frankly, just don’t give a damn.
Since he has borrowed populist phrases for the election, some of from Occupy, President Obama has finally mentioned the words inequality, poverty and low wages, but he has done nothing to remedy this extensive social iniquity since taking office and will not put forward an anti-poverty program if reelected.

Economic inequality dropped in United States between 1930-1980, mostly because of Roosevelt’s New Deal, World War II, 25 years of post-war development and a strong union movement, followed by Johnson’s Great Society programs and progressive social changes in the 1960s. The turnaround became visible with the conservative backlash of the mid-’70s and it’s continuing today. Taking office in 1980, Republican reactionary Ronald Reagan’s pro-business, anti-worker policies led the way to ever greater inequality from one administration to another, while the Democrats shifted toward the center and now the center right, contributing toward this historic setback for the American people.

Today, the U.S. is the most economically unequal of the top 20 advanced, industrialized capitalist economies in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). American capitalism also pays the lowest wages to its working class compared with OECD countries. Almost 25% of the American work force receives low wages (about $10 an hour down to minimum wage and below), usually without any benefits or healthcare. One in two Americans is low income or poor. The poor account for one in seven people. About 47 million Americans require food stamps to eat. Food stamps are the only “income” for six million of them. The impact of economic inequality, of course, is worse for African Americans and Latinos.

This catastrophe has not come about by mistake; it’s the political system’s payoff to the ever-richer plutocracy, the fractional pinnacle of the 1%. Inequality of this caliber is a major source of the increasing depletion of democracy in America as well.

The Obama Administration has responded more resourcefully to the Great Recession than the conservative opposition, but it only goes a quarter or half way in remedial action, which adds to the stagnation and prolongs the pain for the working class, lower middle class and a large sector of the middle class as well. When Obama delivers on the economy — whether in the stimulus, jobs, foreclosures, bank regulations, or infrastructure — it’s always partial and inadequate because the main concessions are made with the power structure up front before the inevitable compromises with the right wing. There’s a difference between talking like a fighter when trawling for votes, and avoiding confrontation as president. Krugman says

we have responded to crisis with a mix of paralysis and confusion.

This is a major reason why over 22 million Americas need but cannot secure full time work.
President Obama has retained all former President Bush’s many erosions of civil liberties, particularly the onerous Patriot Act, and added many of his own, such as when he approved of indefinite detention for suspects, including American citizens. A unique coalition of liberals and conservatives in the House tried to pass legislation to reject indefinite detention May 18, but the effort was defeated. The U.S., under Obama, is becoming a full fledged surveillance state. Tom Engelhardt writes that

30,000 people [are] hired to listen in on conversations and other communications in this country.
Any listing of the important issues that are not part of the election campaign and over which the citizenry has no say must include a foreign/military/national security policy based on exercising world hegemony backed by military power. What’s the “pivot” to East Asia really all about, other than to weaken China in its own sphere of possible influence and cling to world domination? Why has the U.S. been taking steps to bring about regime change in Syria, other than to dominate yet another country and weaken Iran in the process? Why did Obama facilitate a violent civil war for regime change in Libya, other than to gain another oil-rich client state, but this time with an enormous aquifer under its sands which may become more precious than the oil as water supplies dwindle through North Africa? Why did the president get behind the coup in Honduras, other than to dispatch a potentially progressive regime friendly to Venezuela? Further, why does Obama still maintain Cold War sanctions and a trade blockade against Cuba, other than to win Florida votes in November? Why is Washington supporting the vicious Sunni monarchy in Bahrain which routinely oppresses and attacks the Shi’ite majority seeking equality, other than satisfying the obnoxious rulers of Saudi Arabia? Why is Obama now fighting a war in Yemen (Obama just sent in American special forces as well as drones), other than to keep the new president, who ran unopposed with strong U.S. support, in his pocket, and to bestow another favor upon the Saudi lords? Why is the administration seeking to strangle Iran, other than to prevent an Iran-Iraq alliance that might compromise U.S. hegemony in the Middle East, especially the Persian Gulf, through which 40% of the world’s oil must pass? And what is the real purpose of the Oval Office’s new “scramble for Africa,” other than establishing a military presence throughout the continent while elbowing China out of the way to grab natural resources, trade and markets.

President Obama blames all his failures in office on the conservatives and the recession, and most Democrats accept this explanation. Even progressive Democrats, well aware of Obama’s abundant shortcomings, will cut him slack for fear of the “greater evil.”

The corrosive impact of far right ideology in America must not be underestimated. But despite Don’t-tread-on-me Tea Party reactionaries and conservative obstruction in Congress, Democrats in the House and Senate remain responsible for many unmet objectives and a weak legislative record. Led by Obama, they would not fight for progressive goals and spent much of the time trying to fulfill the naïve presidential fantasy of “governing like Americans, not Republicans or Democrats.” Once the conservatives understood Obama would rather compromise than fight they attacked full force and virtually paralyzed the Democratic agenda.

The silence of some Democratic politicians toward the erosion of civil liberties, indifference to climate change and support for unnecessary wars — a silence many would have broken had a Republican been in the White House — should subject them to publicly wearing scarlet letters inscribed with a “C” (for craven) around their necks.

Despite the stagnant economy — the main issue in the election according to 86% of potential voters — the Republican Party’s lurch to the far right and the bizarre legislative behavior of the Tea Party-influenced GOP House majority led by the ineffable Speaker John Boehner seem to have at least evened the election odds. Stranger things have happened in American politics, but it remains very doubtful that the critically important independent voters will swing toward fringe conservatism. This factor, in our view, gives Obama the edge.

In this connection the April 28 international edition of Britain’s conservative magazine, The Economist, wondered “What happens to a two-party political system when one party goes mad?” The article quotes the following from the new book “It’s Even Worse Than It looks,” a product of one author from the establishment Brookings Institute and the other from the conservative American Enterprise Institute:

The Republican Party has become an insurgent outlier — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science, and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

Many right wing voters despise Romney, a shape-shifting opportunist whom they distrust, but they will stick with him because Republican leaders and funders insist he has the best chance to defeat the “big government socialist” whom many Tea Partiers scandalously allege conceals his “true” nationality and religion. Those funders, by the way, will see to it that — as opposed to 2008 — the Republicans will spend at least enough money to buy the election as the Democrats, so the race should be close.

Once a moderate Republican, Romney adopted far right positions on most issues to secure the nomination, calling for severe cutbacks in social programs for the poor, unemployed, foreclosed and similarly discarded, among a plethora of counterproductive social and economic nostrums satisfying to the Rush Limbaughs and Michele Bachmanns. Now he’s in a tight bind. It is absolutely necessary to gravitate partially toward the center, where the independent votes are, but he is under considerable restraint from his own unforgiving constituency.

Consistent with mendacious ultra-conservative propaganda, Romney attributes the economic crisis entirely to Obama’s presidency, without suggesting that the Great Recession emanated from the millionaire tax cuts, war spending and the huge deficits of his Republican predecessor (following years of Clinton Administration deregulations of banking and Wall St. that set the stage for what by now had become a “winner take all” economic system.)

Romney’s nonsensical economic speech in Iowa May 15 was an epic self-exposure. While promising to cut social spending, increase the war budget and not raise taxes, he declared:

President Obama is an old-school liberal whose first instinct is to see free enterprise as the villain and government as the hero…. America counted on President Obama to rescue the economy, tame the deficit and help create jobs. Instead, he bailed out the public sector, gave billions of dollars to the companies of his friends and added almost as much debt as all the prior presidents combined.

Virtually every word was a lie, according to an analysis of the entire speech by the Associated Press the next day which pointed out that

the debt has gone up by about half under Obama. Under Ronald Reagan, it tripled.

AP didn’t mention Romney’s political characterization of Obama, but he’s hardly a liberal — as was clear during his first term, and his adhesion to “free enterprise” capitalism is indissoluble.

Romney has been sharply critical of Obama on two of the biggest issues of the campaign — healthcare and the Afghan war — despite the fact that his own past positions on both matters were nearly identical to those of his rival. Obama’s healthcare plan is based on the program Romney implemented as governor of Massachusetts. And despite far more hawkish rhetoric to please the far right during the primaries, the Republican’s views on Afghanistan did not differ markedly from those of Obama. In recent weeks before and after the NATO summit, Romney has hardly spoken of the Afghan war, obviously recognizing that his primary views are anathema to the American people as a whole.

Obama and Romney have agreed on other issues. An article in Grist April 24 by Lisa Hymas pointed out that Obama’s “smart growth” initiative — the Partnership for Sustainable Communities — was also created in the mold of a Romney program…. As governor, Romney actively fought sprawl and promoted density. He ran on a smart-growth platform:

Sprawl is the most important quality-of-life issue facing Massachusetts,

he said in 2002…. Under President Obama, the EPA moved from praising Romney’s smart-growth office to mimicking it. It went into effect in June 2009. Romney also supported abortion rights, environmentalism and immigration as governor.

These “coincidences” are the outstanding ironies of the campaign so far. “Far right” Romney and “liberal populist” Obama have both resembled “moderate Republicans” when in power. Obama will revert to his center-right configuration if reelected, but if Romney ever gets to the White House his constituency will force him to largely govern as an ultra-conservative.

A principal Republican issue in the past several presidential elections has been that the Democrats were “weak on defense,” including in 2008 when Obama opposed the Iraq war, but the right wing has lowered the volume significantly because it can’t work this year.

The Democratic Party, of course, voted for, supported and funded the Afghan and Iraq wars, but Obama defeated pro-war Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination because his critique of the disastrous adventure in Iraq accorded with that of most Democratic primary voters — then turned around when elected and stole the Republican thunder by transforming into a war president. He governs foreign/military affairs as a hawk, juggling several bloody conflicts simultaneously, abjectly pandering to the armed forces and fostering the growth of militarism in American society. A year after the Arab Spring in the Middle East and North Africa, the Obama Administration has launched its own Imperialist Spring in the same region.

Many Democrats voted for Obama in the 2008 primaries because he was considered a “peace candidate” of sorts. A recent article by Atlantic Magazine staff writer by Conor Friedersdorf compiled a brief partial account of Obama’s “peace” record:

Obama escalated the war in Afghanistan, adding tens of thousands of troops at a cost of many billions of dollars.
He committed American forces to a war in Libya, though he had neither approval from Congress nor reason to think events there threatened national security.
He ordered 250 drone strikes that killed at least 1,400 people in Pakistan.
He ordered the raid into Pakistan that killed Osama bin Laden.
He ordered the killings of multiple American citizens living abroad.
He expanded the definition of the War on Terrorism and asserted his worldwide power to indefinitely detain anyone he deems a terrorist.
He expanded drone attacks into Somalia.
He ordered a raid on pirates in Somalia.
He deployed military squads to fight the drug war throughout Latin America.
He expanded the drone war in Yemen, going so far as to give the CIA permission to kill people even when it doesn’t know their identities so long as they’re suspected of ties to terrorism.
He’s implied that he’d go to war with Iran rather than permitting them to get nuclear weapons.”

No matter who wins in November virtually nothing listed in the above paragraphs will change, except for the worse should Romney enter the White House. Butt does this suggest about the notion that free elections are the very essence of Washington’s claim to enjoy a superior democracy when the choice is really between bad and worse?

Progressive change certainly remains possible in America, although neither ruling party is equipped to bring it about. These parties were not prepared to end the Vietnam war either, or to get rid of Jim Crow, or to implement the eight-hour day, or to allow women the democratic right to vote. But the people organized radical mass movements to fight for these goals and won.

The struggles of various organizations that began coalescing early last year, propelled several months later by Occupy’s left critique of inequality, Wall St. and the 1% ruling plutocracy, have the potential to become a mass movement. Many such potentials have come along and faded for various reasons, including some that were co-opted or lost their vision. But broad and deep movements — as long as they are massive, activist, radical and well organized — also have significantly changed American history for the better. That’s the light at the end of this increasingly dismal electoral tunnel.

jacdon@earthlink.net,
P.O. Box 662,
New Paltz, NY 12561
available from Hudson Valley Activist Newsletter
©2012

Get up, stand up

Wed, 09 May 2012 16:47:29 GMT

Michael Moore
New York, NY
March 17, 2012

available from Alternative Radio

You can listen to Michael Moore speak for himself here.

Michael Moore first brought his humorous and progressive analysis to mainstream audiences with the award-winning documentary Roger & Me. His Bowling for Columbine won an Academy Award. His film Farenheit 9/11 broke box office records and won the top prize at Cannes. His latest films are Sicko and Capitalism: A Love Story.

I have to tell you, I have never seen a political or a social movement catch fire faster than this one. It really just took a few weeks before they started to take polls of Americans and they found that the majority of Americans supported the principles of the Occupy movement. This was back in October.

Then they took another poll, and it said 72% of the American public believes taxes should be raised on the rich. Seventy-two percent. I don’t think there was ever a poll that showed a majority in favor of raising taxes on the rich, because up until recently the vast majority of our fellow Americans believed in the Horatio Alger theory, that anyone in America can make it, it’s an even and level playing field.

Now the majority, the vast majority, at least know that that’s a lie. They know that there’s no truth to that whatsoever. They know that the game is rigged, and they know that they don’t have the same wherewithal on that playing field that the wealthy have.

What I am so happy with and what we are blessed with with Occupy Wall Street is that the hardest part of the job is done. Think about this. We don’t have to struggle for years to convince the American public that these banks are out to ruin their lives. We don’t have to work for years to convince our fellow Americans that the health insurance companies put profit ahead of their own health. We don’t have to do any of that anymore, do we?

You live in the real world, right? You know this. At work, at school, in the neighborhood, at church, at temple. You know this, right? This is where people are at. They are already there. They are with us. So we should just go, Wow, the biggest job. I have so many slacker tendencies, so this is what I really like. I just like the fact that the toughest part of the job is over.

Now, now we have tens of millions of our fellow Americans agreeing with us that the rich are up to no good, that these corporations have sold them out, they’ve sent their jobs someplace else to exploit people around the world, made them cut back on their health care, on their vacation days, on their sick days, made them work longer hours for less pay.

Somebody asked me a while ago, “How did this occupy Wall Street start? Who organized this?” They tried to look for the one person that organized it. There is no one person. I said, “If anybody organized it, I’ll tell you where to go. Go talk to Goldman Sachs. They organized it. They organized this movement. Go talk to Cigna Health Insurance. Go talk to BP. Just go down the list. They did the bulk of the work for us.” They opened the eyes and took the scales off those eyes of our fellow Americans, who woke up finally to realize that their best interests were not at the hearts of those in charge.

That’s where our fellow Americans are at; that’s where the majority of our fellow Americans are at.

So what are we going to do with this now? Because we’re not used to this. We’re not used to after just a few weeks being handed an army of millions of people who want to see change take place in this country, who want their lives back. Or a life at all. They never had the chance to have that life.

In case you’ve forgotten how lonely it is to be on the left in this country, to be for peace, women’s rights and gay rights and ending racism in this country, ending the prison-industrial complex in this country, it has seemed through most of our lives that we were never going to live to see the day when things would get better. Even the optimists amongst us, and I consider myself one of those. I’m not really a cynic. I have a really strong belief that people are good at their core and they just get messed up somewhere along the way. But I do believe that a majority of people, in the end, will to want do the right thing, if presented with all the information, if not kept in the dark.

Of course, we know that’s how fear works. You can make a country afraid by keeping them ignorant and stupid. That has been the equation. People don’t know what’s going on, so then they become afraid. And what does fear lead to? It leads to hate. And what does hate lead to? It leads to violence or wars.

Why are we such a warlike people? I don’t think Americans—we don’t really see—it’s never really discussed that way, is it? I remember there was an essay by D. H. Lawrence that he wrote back in the early part of the 20th century. He said, When you think of the Americans—he said something to the effect that they were a great bunch of killers. That’s the story history will record. History will not be kind to this era.

So I thought that this era would just continue on for the rest of my life. And I would keep going to things like this and go back to making movies and I’ll write books and I’ll do these things and I’ll put my part into this as best I can, but always knowing that the good days are someplace way off in the distance.

I no longer feel that way. I feel that that time is now. And I think it is so important for us, who don’t have much experience leading a majority, to very quickly learn how to do it. Because we have the majority of Americans with us. They’re not always necessarily going to stay with us. Because of the lousy education system, because of the control of the media and the little information that does get out to people, they can be easily manipulated back into a different place. So how long will we have here before we say to our fellow Americans, the majority, “Let’s go. Let’s go get this. We can do this. We’re a democracy.”

See, they know that the corporate chieftains, the people on Wall Street here are the real power. They know that now. They know that what’s left of our democracy is a thread or two. Those threads are the United States Constitution. There’s that problem with that piece of paper that still exists, that does give us the right to go into a booth and close the curtain and elect somebody, anybody, to stop this. We are never hopeful about that, right? Talk about being on the losing end of things and having to settle for Democrats over and over again, to the point where the kink in your neck is just “ooooohhh.” But right now the people are with us.

So I’d like to talk a little bit tonight about what we should do with that. I’d like to just throw my ideas out there. The great thing about Occupy Wall Street is that it’s open to anybody’s ideas. This is a horizontal organization; it’s not a vertical thing. “Who is the spokesperson here?” And everybody raises their hand. Because everybody has a story to tell. Everyone has been affected by this disparity of wealth in this country, so everyone is a spokesperson, everyone is the leader of Occupy Wall Street.

If you’re living in Boise, Idaho, and you want to start Occupy Boise, just do it. You don’t have to write in to national headquarters here for permission, and then we’ll take 10% of the dues that you collect. There’s no grants you have to write. You just have to exercise your constitutional rights as a citizen of this country. And we, those of us here, at least in New York at Occupy Wall Street, we want you to do this. We don’t want to be in charge of Occupy Boise. You know what Boise needs and you need to occupy it.

That’s why there are Occupies now in over 1,000 towns and cities in this country. It’s amazing. I’ve been to small towns in Michigan. I remember in the early weeks I went to a place called Niles, Michigan. I went to Grass Valley, California. Where is Grass Valley, right? It’s up near Nevada City. And there were like 400 people there at a demonstration at Occupy Grass Valley.

I saw this throughout the fall, everywhere I went. There were all these Occupies, and it was clear that nobody was going to wait for permission to do it. People knew this was the moment to seize, and people seized the moment. This is incredible that this has happened. And it continues on in different ways. People have had teach-ins, students have occupied college boardrooms, nurses have continued demonstrating and fighting for health care rights for all of us. It continues on.

And Wall Street has become afraid of us. No one has ever been afraid of us. They see us coming down the street with our all-yellow Workers World banners, all the same signs from the RCP. Here we come. They see us coming and they’re, like, it’s been embarrassing. Laughing at us every time for the last 30 years. They’re not laughing anymore. They’re afraid. The CEOs of Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan have been canceling things right and left because they do not want to be out in public making an appearance. They cannot go out in public to make an appearance. And why can’t they do that? We’re nonviolent people. Why? You can leave the house anytime you want, Jamie Diamond, Lloyd Blankfein. You can leave anytime you want. It’s a free country and we are nonviolent people. So what are you afraid of? They’re not afraid, actually, of us in this room, the Left Forum. They’re not afraid of us. They’re afraid of those tens of millions of Americans that they have screwed over the last decades. That’s who they are really afraid of. And who would know better than Lloyd Blankfein or Jamie Diamond how many people have been hurt by their mortgage fraud, by how they invested teachers’ pension funds?

When I went down there to film that scene, to put the crime-scene tape around the Stock Exchange, clearly I couldn’t get a permit to do that. And there’s all those barricades. You know what it’s like across the way here. So I decided, I’m going to do it anyways. Of course, the police show up, and this cop is coming toward me. And I went, Oh, geez. I don’t want to get arrested here, I’ve got to finish this. So I see him coming and he’s about 10-20 feet from me. And I said, “Officer, it’s just a piece of comedy and it will be over shortly. I’ll clean it all up. Don’t worry.” And he comes up to me and he says, “Don’t worry, Mike. You take all the time you want.” He said, “These bastards in here have lost millions of dollars of our pension funds.” That’s who they’re afraid of.

What if the cops and the firefighters and the nurses and the teachers and the auto workers and the steelworkers and the person who is bumping out your car and putting some Bondo on it, what if they actually decided to become politically involved? What would happen then? They’re so afraid this is going to happen because they know what I said at the beginning of this, that the American public is already convinced that we’re right and Wall Street is wrong. They already know this. Yes, Wisconsin is going to be the first, I hope, wonderful example of how the people are going to respond, in another month or two.

If you don’t mind, I would like to just throw out a few ideas here, a few tactical ideas and a few strategy ideas.

The purpose of Occupy Wall Street is to Occupy Wall Street.

Let’s never forget that. I said, this movement, by and large, the fuel of this is coming from young people, young adults. Those of you who know, who have been involved in Occupy Wall Street who are my age or older, it’s been just the most amazing thing to watch. And it’s been very important for us to not have them do it our old way, because I kind of like their new way. It’s a little messy, it maybe seems a little goofy sometimes, but there’s real heart there, isn’t there?

If you spend any time at the Occupies with any of these young people, one of the most encouraging things to see is the kind hearts that they have. The level of racism in the younger generation is almost nonexistent. Sexism, almost nonexistent. I will say without a doubt, whether it’s Alabama or New York City, that this younger generation has done a better job with these issues than we have. They’re already trying to see to it that this world is a less racist, less sexist, less homophobic place to live in. That’s very encouraging.

And it’s very encouraging, too, to see young people at Occupy, at the general assemblies, wanting to give everybody a chance to have their say. It’s like the opposite of our old way, where the left would just spend most of its time fighting each other. They don’t want to do that. They don’t want to fight each other. In fact, they want to do the opposite. They want to let everybody do whatever.

That’s the other thing with us. We’re such pessimists. Mike, don’t come out here and tell us everything is good. No, it’s horrible. That’s how I get up in the morning, because the world sucks. What’s Michael Moore saying? He’s saying the revolution might actually happen? He’s saying it is happening. Whoa. What are we going to do? Here’s a few things.

In this movement and for this movement to grow, we need to use our sense of humor. We need to employ satire and humor on a level that the left has not been used to for many, many years. I will submit to you that I believe, and I can say through my own personal experience, that humor is a great vehicle for your political message. It’s a welcoming vehicle. It’s why Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are so popular, because they’re able to impart information by using a sense of humor. This is so important in this movement. We need to go to The Yes Men. I think they should be a very important part of this movement. Because I want to see The Yes Men do their thing. They’ve actually started a thing called Occupy the Boardroom. I have a feeling that means they’re going to be doing something. I don’t know what that is. But I think that that is such a powerful way to drive these points home to people who are not on the official left.

We need to demonstrate differently. I don’t ever want to get on another bus in Chinatown and head down to Washington, D.C. That’s it. I’m officially resigning from that. The ways that these young people, the new ways that they’ve come up with to demonstrate, I love them. Have you seen it? Have you seen the silent-treatment protests? Have you seen this?

At UC Davis, after the cops pepper-sprayed those kids, a couple days later they lined the sidewalk that the chancellor was going to have to walk out of to her car with a few hundred people. And as she walked out, they said nothing. They just stared at her. Complete silence. She had to walk this walk of shame through them. Their silence was louder than anything.

A couple weeks ago women’s groups in Virginia did the same thing when the governor there proposed that women go through a “transvaginal probe.” If they had decided that they were going to have an abortion, they would have to have this probe. To protest this, the women organized, again, hundreds of people. They surrounded the capitol building and the steps. All the legislators going in had to walk through—you could have heard a pin drop it was so quiet. The quietness of it was deafening. And it looked like these politicians were doing a perp walk. I’m sorry we don’t have video here to show you this. Go online and watch this. It’s so cool. We need to come up with things like that, different ways to demonstrate, to make our point. I think it’s very powerful.

The use of social media. This I don’t really needing to go into. Everyone gets this now, right? People with no color in your hair or those with no hair? There aren’t any holdouts still, are there? Please don’t hold out. This is one of the most incredible inventions in the history of mankind, and we can use it. We can use it for the greater good. I encourage people to do that. If you don’t have a Facebook account, think about getting one. You don’t have to tell everything you did at the mall today, what you had for breakfast and lunch. You don’t have to do that. You can just use it with your other politically aware and active friends and you can share articles you run across, you can put these links up. You can educate people with this, you can encourage people to do this.

Two other ideas on this, and then I want to give you some strategy ideas. Two more of the tactics. I think that it’s very hard for average Americans to protest these days because of the time it takes. So many of our fellow Americans are having to work two jobs to get by. They work one on the books, one off the books. Or their health problems have gotten so bad because they haven’t had the money to get their teeth fixed. And if you don’t fix your teeth, you then eventually can’t chew food very well. And when you can’t chew food very well, you have to eat a lot of Wonder Bread and simple carbohydrates, because that’s all the mouth can handle. When you eat that, you have all the health problems that go with that. You’re so focused on your health and trying to get better and trying to get somebody to help you, because you can’t find the right help, and you certainly can’t afford it. And you’re fighting the insurance company, call after call, day after day, to try to get them to cover this procedure. These, of course, are the very people that would love to be with us but can’t, because just getting through the day is a struggle. That’s why I want to say to you that for every American who is in that position we need to go and get somebody who isn’t to join us in this movement, to be the stand-in for that person who can’t be there because of the suffering they’re going through. We should make that a commitment.

Don’t do meetings. Keep the meetings to a minimum. This movement needs action. I think in our past movements we’ve had way too many meetings. Does everybody agree with us? I do not want to go another meeting. I love the general assembly idea, and I think there’s things there that could make it even better, probably. But the idea of thinking that you’re actually being politically active by going to a meeting isn’t really true. You’re politically active when you actually take an action against those in power or for those who have a solution to help us out of the mess we’re in. That’s political action. Not a meeting.

Finally, I was on this panel with Naomi Klein here back in the fall, who is, I think, a hero. She said, I think it’s also important that we’re all kind to each other, that we make sure that in the infancy of this movement we take this pledge, really, amongst ourselves to be kind and generous to each other, and to understand that each of us, all of us, everybody has something they’re going through. And if they’re not going through it, their spouse is going through it or their kids are going through it, their parents are going through it, their neighbors are going through it. Somebody that they’re deeply attached to is going through something really bad. We need to make commitment to not have the typical infighting that goes on and to be kind to each other. To hear everyone out and then do what the majority feels like we should do, but respect the minority and make sure they always have a voice, because they’ll be there to keep the majority honest. I just wanted to second what she said.

If this were like a real army and I was a general, I would have my pointer and I would have, “Here’s how we’re going to do this. We’re not going to talk up here. This is the reality. There’s where they’re at, here’s where we’re going, here’s how we’re doing it.” So just kind of imagine the imaginary pointer and Wall Street and corporate America and everybody else up there on the screen. I get stopped a lot by people on the street, people when I’m traveling. Again, these are not political people. They say to me, “What can I do? I really want to get involved in this. What can I do?” They always say, too, that they really can’t sleep overnight in a park. I say, “That’s okay, you don’t have to sleep overnight in the park. There are many things we can do.” I think it’s very important that this movement make people aware of the fact that there are many avenues into this movement where they can join it and be part of it. That staying overnight in encampments is not the only way.

But thank God for those encampments. Thank God for the anarchists who started this on September 17. I’m telling you, this movement probably wouldn’t have got the traction it had if that first group of people hadn’t decided to go right into the face of power in that first week and not give up. Because at first they were ignored. Nobody covered them on the news, on the national news at all. And then when they started into the first week, it was basically, Oh, look at these hippies with their tambourines and their drums.

But by the end of the first week, when a march took place over by Union Square and the New York city police in the form of one individual decided to pepper-spray four women who were already penned in by the police and pepper-sprayed them in the eyes, that image went out across the country, went out in a viral way, as they say. People saw that and they felt one thing: They were being pepper-sprayed in the eyes. That’s what they felt. There was a catharsis. And the following Saturday, even more people decided to show up and decided to go on to the Brooklyn Bridge, and the New York City police made the huge tactical mistake of arresting over 700 people. I’ve never heard of an arrest that large in New York City. It was just amazing.

Ray Kelly yesterday was complaining about how they’ve spent $17 million on police overtime dealing with Occupy Wall Street. And I said, “I hope it’s $170 million this year. And you should make the people on Wall Street who you’re protecting pay for it. Because you don’t really have to protect them, because we are a nonviolent people. We are not going to harm anyone in the Goldman Sachs building. So why all the cops?

And to the undercover New York City cops who are in here tonight, I just want to say thank you for coming. We welcome you. You are the working class. Don’t be tools for the people who want to hurt you. Join us. Come be with us.

Number one, I think it’s very important that we occupy Wall Street. I think it’s important that Zuccotti Park keep going. If we can’t stay there overnight—where did I see this yesterday—was it in Memphis?—where they said no tents could be in the park, so all the demonstrators showed up wearing a tent. Where was that? The cops didn’t know what to do because they were clothes, they weren’t really tents, but they were tents. That’s the kind of jujitsu that we can do with them, because they just don’t know where we’re coming from. “Who’s the leader? Who’s the spokesperson?” We need for Zuccotti Park to continue.

I can tell you, most of the time I’m in Michigan, and Zuccotti Park is known by people all across the country. It is the holy grail. It is the epicenter to people who don’t live here.

You probably didn’t even know there was a Zuccotti Park before Occupy. I didn’t. I had never heard of it. But trust me, people out there have heard of it. I think it’s very important. Those of us who were down there a lot in the fall, after just a month or two those big red Big Apple tourist buses put us on the stop. It was like a group of senior citizens from Omaha. They all get their cameras out and they’re going like this. We have to keep this going.

One of the best mornings I saw was that day that we decided to really get on Wall Street early in the morning and tried to delay the opening of the Stock Exchange. I don’t know if anybody was there. There were hundreds of people there. It really did look like we were actually in the army, because we had all these different routes in, and when one would get to a block, we would radio over to the other and everybody would shift over to that. “No, there’s no cops over here. C’mon, we can go through here.” It was exciting and it was interesting to see how scared the Stock Exchange was that they weren’t going to be able to open on time. It was critical to them that they never miss a minute of their dirty work.

I said this in The Nation, and I want to say this here. We need daily and weekly nonviolent assaults on Wall Street. Nonstop. Nonstop. And it certainly would start with the people who live just a few hours’ drive from here. They would certainly do this. We should really think about organizing this, because it’s important for us to be visible and it’s important for the American public and the way that we/they have been trained with the visual media. It’s very easy for those in power to create out of sight, out of mind. We must not leave their sight. That’s why Zuccotti Park has to continue and we have to have these daily demonstrations of trying to get through those barriers to get to the Stock Exchange, because all we want to do is politely ask them to stop.

Other things in terms of direct action that I think we need to do—and some of them are already happening— the Occupy Our Homes movement is incredible. Some of the people who started this movement I had in my film three years ago. They were Take Back the Land. We followed them in the Miami area and put them in the movie. And then Marcy Kaptur, the congresswoman from Ohio, who in the film just told people,

Do not leave your homes. Do not let them evict you. Do not leave your home. They can’t find the mortgage, they can’t find the paperwork. Go to court and tell the judge to make them show you the mortgage. They can’t show you the mortgage because they cut it up a thousand ways, bundled it, and shipped it off to be sold in China or Switzerland or someplace.

So the whole Occupy Our Homes movement.

But I think we need to grow this, because what I would like to do, and I will do this as a citizen, I want us to be able to sign up in my neighborhood in Michigan to say that if anyone in our village where I live, if we hear of anyone being evicted by a bank, I commit to show up and stand in the doorway. Just imagine every town across America having a “mod squad” of people who will come at a moment’s notice and risk being arrested to stand there to prevent that family from being tossed out on the curb. The students have to continue occupying their schools and universities. The sit-ins. Stopping the business of the board of regents or trustees, doing whatever we can to support these students. And really, people of my age, like I said earlier, we done them wrong by allowing this system to come up to such a disgusting place that it’s now the number one cause of debt in this country, student loans. So students, do this. And we, your parents, will back you and we’ll be there for you.

We need to occupy our health care system. In the same way that we have these strike forces in our communities to show up when someone is being evicted, when someone is denied a treatment or a procedure or a surgery because their health insurance company said they weren’t covered or they don’t have health insurance, we have to stand up for them. We have to go that hospital and demand that they receive this treatment. If you live near one of the regional headquarters or main headquarters of the health insurance companies, we need to walk into their lobbies and occupy them. We need them to stop this.

We need to occupy our jobs. There are many examples taking place right now where workers are just refusing to allow these things to continue. We need to encourage people to sign union cards and be represented in the workplace. Like what happened at the glass factory in Chicago. When they try to move the company someplace else, don’t let them. Sit down. Bolt the doors. You can’t leave. You can’t leave, glass company, because my tax dollars gave the Bank of America, which is funding you—that’s my money. First you take the bailout from me, and now you throw me out of a job with that money. Are you fucking crazy?

And my last idea for direct action and civil disobedience is that we need to occupy peace. We often forget to talk about the wars we are currently fighting. We’re fighting wars in seven or eight countries right now, not just Iraq and Afghanistan. We’ve got our troops in many places around the world that are doing things, sometimes covertly, sometimes in the shadowy parts of what we would consider legal behavior in this country. The $2 billion to $4 billion a week that we spend on these wars, we’ve been doing this now for over 10 years. Just imagine those 10 years at $2 billion to $4 billion a week: 10 times 52 weeks, 520 weeks times $2 to $4 billion. How many schools could that have helped? How many people could that have covered with health problems? We can’t ignore this aspect of it, of how the military-industrial complex still runs large parts of this country.

That’s number one, direct action and civil disobedience. Number two, we need to provide for people so they can do individual actions. This is for a lot of people who are not necessarily political people. When they say to you, “What can I do? What can I do to be part of Occupy Wall Street?” I always say to them, “You’re part of Occupy Wall Street just by saying you’re part of Occupy Wall Street. At the moment you say ‘I Occupy Wall Street,’ you are occupy Wall Street. That’s it. You are now in the movement.”

Here’s something you could do. Make a sign and put it in your window or out on your lawn that says “We Are The 99%.” Imagine in the suburbs across America turning into a subdivision with street after street filled with these yard signs saying “We Are The 99%.” The politicians, the banks, no matter where they turned, if they were in a city, you would look up at an apartment building and you would see those in the windows, “We Are The 99%” or “We Support The 99%.”

It’s a very simple thing to do, is to make that, put it on your cars, put it in your home, put in on the lawn. But the lawn, just imagine the visual of looking down a street and seeing sign after sign after sign after sign after sign, “We Are The 99%,” “We Are The 99%,” “We Are The 99%,” or looking at an apartment building and seeing that. That’s a very simple thing that we can get started and get people to do. It’s something every American can do. We can encourage them to do what some have already done: Move their money out of these banks and put it in a credit union or a locally owned bank.

I think people need to be able to feel free to occupy their block. If you live on Oak Street, you could start an Occupy Oak Street. Just go and knock on the doors of your neighbors and ask them who would like to get involved in this. And if they say, “What are we going to do?” you can say, “We’re going to start by putting signs up saying ‘We Are The 99%.’” “Okay. What’s the next thing we’re going to do?” “We’re going to go and take our money and put it in the credit union.” “Yes, that sounds like a good idea. What else can we do?”

So those are some ideas that people can do as individuals. I think we need to create more of that for people on an individual basis who are not able to go to demonstrations or sleep overnight in the park. There are things any American can do, no matter what their station in life is. I think we really need to get behind that.

The final and third area is the area we don’t really want to talk about a lot because it has a lot of stinky poo around it, and that’s electoral politics. But there are those among us in the United States of America who do believe that electoral politics will do some good. We need to honor that and respect that and create a place for them within this movement so that they can take the principles of Occupy Wall Street and try to find candidates to run for office who believe in these things.

Or what they could be doing this year is do what I did in Flint with the guy who is running for Congress there. I asked him to take a pledge that his top priority in Congress will be to remove the money from politics, take all the money out. I think in every congressional district we should be asking the people running for Congress, Will you do this? Will you commit to doing this? And then when they get elected, hold their feet to the fire so that they do it.

I think that there are some of us who also need to push past the kind of visceral reaction I think a lot of us have toward politicians and electing politicians and thinking that they’re going to be the be-all and end-all for us, because we know that’s not true now. We’ve lived through enough of this. We know from just the last election of who our president is that he didn’t turn out to be everything that we wanted him to be. So people get disillusioned when that happens, because they put all their eggs in that election basket, and then the politician doesn’t come through and then it’s, like, Why did I bother?

The people that run now for office, those of you who have lived long, like I have, do you agree that the gene pool of politicians has been depleted? It’s beyond the incestuous part of depleting a gene pool. It’s sort of like when you have a Xerox copy and you make a copy of a copy, and then you make a copy of a copy of a copy, and then a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy? By the time you get to the tenth copy, what does it look like? That’s what we’ve got now in the state houses and in Congress.

We can stop that by running for office ourselves. No matter how much they can put into these elections with all their money, what they can’t do is, when we go in that voting booth, they can’t put their hand in our hand and pull the lever or punch the card or draw an X. They can’t do that. We really do hold the power. You know what? That’s got to scare the shit out of them—that there are more of us than there are of them. What if we actually ever decided to realize that and exercise our power? Where would they be then?

I don’t think they’re just sitting there at the country club or up in their penthouse apartments enjoying this. They’re not enjoying it. They’re really worried that we may figure out how to organize the tens of millions who support us. Can you imagine the dreams they have? As dark as we see the world, as unhopeful as we are about the future of this planet, trust me, their dreams are real nightmares these days. And that’s a good thing.

So we need to not ignore electoral politics. We need to get involved in it. And we need these two constitutional amendments that are being proposed now. We need our mass organization that we have around the country that’s going to build to get behind these constitutional amendments.

Number one, corporations are not people.

And, number two, we need an amendment that has all the electoral reforms that we need: taking money out of politics, moving election day to the weekend so more people can vote, making voter registration easy for people, preferential voting systems. There’s a whole bunch of them. And let’s go back to a paper ballot, please.

So direct action, individual action, and electoral politics.

The final thing that I want to say tonight is this is an evil system. It’s an evil system that is set up for the benefit of the few at the expense of the many. I get tired when I go on these talk shows and they say, “What’s the solution?” and I say, “Number one, capitalism has to go,” and they’re, like, “Whoa. You mean crony capitalism, Mike.” “No, I don’t think you need to put an adjective to it or repeat yourself by saying ‘crony’ and ‘capitalism.’” The sort of liberal media establishment want to hang on to this old Adam Smith idea of capitalism. They think it can come back magically someday, where if everybody just puts in a hard day’s work and you get paid for that, you can do better in life. I say to them, “Well, yes, but that’s not what capitalism is. You have to define a word by the way it is enacted and used now.

You don’t define marriage as a man has to ask permission of the woman’s father to marry her, and then, when married, the woman has no property rights and cannot divorce her husband. That is not how you would define marriage, is it?” “Of course not.” “Well, I hate to tell you, 100 years ago, that’s what the word ‘marriage’ meant. And then it changed.

And ‘capitalism’ may have meant something else, and there might have been a kinder, gentler version of it somewhere back there. But those days are long, long gone. Whatever kind of imagery you have of this pie-in-the-sky thing, Horatio Alger, everybody has got a chance, it was bullshit then, but it’s really bullshit now.”

So I want us in the long run, through this movement, to develop an economic system that will ensure that everyone has the means for food, for housing, for a job, for health, for transportation, for education, for a vacation, and where every American can truly feel that they can run for office because they don’t have to have a dime in the bank to do so.

I want someday for this country to say that the Earth’s resources don’t belong to a corporation, they belong to everyone. I want it to be a crime for anyone to make a profit off someone who is ill. I want education to be our top priority, because a democracy cannot survive with an uneducated and illiterate public. I don’t think anybody should have to work more than four days a week.

I’m just trying to make us look better for the history books. When they call us wage slaves, I want us to gradually get to the point where more than 50% of our time is really for us and our families and the other stuff, yes, we have to do because these lights have to go on and we’ve got to sweep the floor, we’ve got to do these things. I want to see the concept of a business be something that the workers own. I put a couple of examples in my film on cooperatives. This is such a great idea. Or even do it just as a nonprofit.

In closing, I just want to thank you for letting me speak here tonight to throw out some of my ideas on what we need to do. I really want to encourage you to not let this moment slip by. Our ship has really come in. The spotlight is on Occupy Wall Street.

And, again, thank you, everybody, for coming here tonight. Let’s not lose the moment. The moment is ours and our fellow Americans’. Occupy Wall Street!

For information about obtaining CDs, MP3s, or transcripts of this or other programs, please contact:
David Barsamian
Alternative Radio
P.O. Box 551
Boulder, CO 80306-0551
(800) 444-1977
info@alternativeradio.org
www.alternativeradio.org
©2012

Banks, fraud, and looting

Wed, 09 May 2012 16:04:43 GMT

William Black
Kansas City, MO
November 29, 2011

available from Alternative Radio

You can listen to William Black speak for himself here.

William Black is Associate Professor of Economics and Law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. He was litigation director of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board and senior deputy chief counsel of the Office of Thrift Supervision. He is the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One.

The focus of this talk is not on the plight of those who are unemployed but why people are unemployed in a situation of what is still the wealthiest country in the world, and why one aspect of America, the 1%, are getting incredibly wealthy.

The bright lie that you’re hearing is that it’s the bank CEOs, the ultra-wealthy Americans, who are the productive class. They are the opposite. When they operate as they are supposed to operate, under their models, they are parasites. But they rarely operate that well. Normally they operate to destroy wealth and destroy jobs. And they are the massive destroyers of both. The idea that we owe them thanks is an obscenity. The idea that we owe our jobs to them is an obscenity. That the wealth of the nation comes from their efforts is a lie, that we must not drive them overseas. But they are fine in driving all other businesses in America overseas.

It’s only a crisis if it’s their jobs. We must not tax them, we must not criticize them, and we assuredly must never regulate them.

This enormous lie of the productive class has spawned a whole series of other lies that beset our nation. That we simply have to accept that tens of millions of Americans should be unemployed. That we should simply accept that it’s acceptable that 20% to 25% of all children in America are in poverty. That we cannot afford to educate our children anymore, we cannot afford health care for everyone, we cannot afford to pay for Social Security. That our kids have to come out of college with massive debts that leave them behind the eight ball for 20 years, and that only our top graduates can get good jobs, and they’re the only ones who deserve to get good jobs. All of these are lies. But these are the lies that at least we sort of know are being sold. We have many more hidden lies that are so embarrassing we try never to admit them in society.

That is, that it’s really okay that the median white family has wealth 20 times that of the median black family. I’ll say that again: 20 times larger median wealth. And 18 times larger than the median wealth of a Latino family. And that it’s okay for the unemployment rate for blacks to be twice that of whites. Indeed, that’s not only acceptable, that’s kind of appropriate, goes the line.

So what we need to do is what the Society of Friends, the Quakers, uniquely, in their theology say, and that is, we have an ethical duty to speak truth to power instead of pandering to power. The economics profession overwhelmingly serves the 1% and panders to that power. Here’s, in fact, what a very conservative French economist, Frédéric Bastiat, said a long time ago.

When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.

That is precisely what we have. We now have looting from the C suite, the CEO, the CFO level, with impunity. And we have a system of so-called ethics or philosophy that delights in the impunity of the elites to defraud us.

I’m going to bring you a vision of what it looks like to the 1%. I’m not going to put words in their mouths. I’m going to quote their words, in context, extensively to show you what they think about us. This is the view from the 1% in what should be one of the most infamous memoranda in the world, a Citicorp 2005 document. This went to their private wealth group, private banking group. To get private banking, basically you have to have an income or wealth of a million dollars. So this is the elite of the elite that this goes to. And you have to envision the jolly tone of all this.

In early September we introduced the idea that the U.S. is a Plutonomy—a concept that generated great interest from our clients.

What’s a plutonomy? A plutonomy is when you have rule by the wealthy and where the wealth of the nation immensely disproportionately goes to a very small group.

Citigroup’s wealthy clients were thrilled to hear that the U.S. was ascending to [this] exalted state…., [that is, their definition of a plutonomy] where economic growth is powered by and largely consumed by the wealthy few.

So they send this message out to their wealthiest clients, who respond with great interest to this idea. Note that small idea that the economic growth is supposedly powered by the wealthy few. So you already have this great lie that starts everything—the great lie that they are somehow a unique productive class.

[T]he top 1% of households in the U.S. (about 1 million households) accounted for about 20% of all U.S. income in 2000

—by the way, since that time this has gone up considerably—

slightly smaller than the share of income of the bottom of 60% of households put together.

So that top 1% back in 2000 was equivalent roughly to the bottom 60% in terms of income. Again, this is much worse since then.

That’s about 1 million households compared with 60 million households, both with similar slices of the income pie!

Notice the exclamation point.

Clearly, the analysis of the top 1% of U.S. households is paramount.

We don’t even have to analyze you folks anymore. You don’t count. Only the 1% count. And once you get to wealth, which is far more unequal than income, this is the disparity:

…the top 1% of households also account for 33% of net worth, greater than the bottom 90% of households put together.

The top 1%—and this is worse since these statistics were computed—more than the bottom 90%.

It gets better. It gets better or worse, depending on your political stripe.

So tell me, what political stripe delights in the 1% having everything? The 1%. Exactly so. They are delighted.

It gets better.

Remember the current campaign about “It gets better”? They have their own campaign about “It gets better.” We’ll get even wealthier.

The top 1% of households account for 40% of financial net worth, more than the bottom 95% of households put together.

So that stock market stuff, that almost exclusively went to the top 1%.

But it really didn’t go to the top 1%. As Citicorp analysts helpfully tell us, it really went to the one-tenth of the 1%. Citi then warns that focusing on the top 1% masks the fact that their share of the pie is

almost entirely driven by the fortunes of the top 0.1%, roughly 100,000 households.

Citi goes on to praise the changes in taxes and the changes in senior executive compensation that have driven the tremendous increase in the share of the pie taken by these 100,000. One of our family rules is you can never compete with his unintentional self-parody. If we had written this stuff, people would have said, “This is absurd, class-bashing, da-dah-da-dah-da-dah-da-dah-da- dah.” No, they really do think this way. When they’re writing and talking to themselves, this is how they really talk about us.

They have a wonderful phrase that they’ve minted, The Managerial Aristocracy. Remember, they’re writing this to The Managerial Aristocracy, which obviously has no sense of humor and no sense, absolutely no sense, of morality or any of that stuff in any of the major religions about difficulty in getting into heaven.

[W]hile in the early 20th century capital income was the big chunk for the top 0.1% of households, the resurgence in their fortunes since the mid-eighties was mainly from [—what if we wrote this phrase?—] oversized salaries.

This is how they think about it themselves, as oversized salaries.

The rich in the U.S. went from coupon clipping, dividend-receiving rentiers to a Managerial Aristocracy [—and note the next word—] indulged by their shareholders.

You don’t even have to go to the Catholic Church in the old days to buy an indulgence. This is really quite wonderful. So it’s a Managerial Aristocracy.

Modern executive compensation has produced not just the 1% but the one-tenth of 1%. The C suite is taking virtually all of the gains in wealth, even from the people lower down in the food chain.

Remember that Bastiat warned that a moral code would arise glorifying the plunder. Cue Citicorp.

Society and governments need to be amenable to disproportionately allow/encourage the few to retain that fatter profit share. The Managerial Aristocracy, like in the Gilded Age, the Roaring Twenties, and the thriving nineties, needs [—needs? This is like when your 12-year-old daughter comes and tells you she needs—] to commandeer a vast chunk of that rising profit share, either through capital income, or simply paying itself a lot.

It “needs to commandeer” this. Commandeer is a word you use when you seize something you’re not entitled to. And what they need, therefore, is a philosophy to be brooded about by those schlubs in the media and such who are stooges for the 1% that says, “Oh, yes, okay, good. Outsized income, vast chunk by simply paying yourself a lot? Sounds good to us.”

And what’s the great excuse for this that Citicorp offers?

These are brave entrepreneurs taking risk.

Unlike the rest of us, who don’t have any risks in our lives, the CEOs, as it turns out, are the people who are most at risk in America. And how many people think that has any existence in any plane of reality?

We think that despite the post-bubble

—the bubble they’re talking about is an earlier bubble; this is the high-tech bubble of 1990s and such.

We think that despite the post-bubble angst against celebrity CEOs….

If we called them “celebrity CEOs,” oh, that would be class warfare. What do they call them internally? Oh, yes, they’re celebrity CEOs.

…the trend of cost-cutting, balance sheet-improving CEOs might just give way to risk-seeking CEOs, releveraging, going for growth and expecting disproportionate compensation for it.

This is written in 2005, when they are causing through their frauds the housing bubble to hyperinflate. What did they do? Massively increased risk, releveraged—that means have lots and lots of debt—and grew really rapidly, and then looted the place through. This is the road map that Citi laid down. And its exactly what they did—if you just add one little world, the F word. This is the F word you can use in polite society, except in economics, where there’s a tribal taboo against it. It’s called fraud.

This is a direct quotation from the same memorandum, their ode to inequality.

We project that the plutonomies…will likely see even more income inequality

—by the way, they were right again—

disproportionately feeding off a further rise in the profit share in their economies. capitalist-friendly governments, more technology-driven productivity, and globalization.

Because globalization in this context means we send the jobs abroad to cut costs and increase that capital profit share.

Really, you can’t make this up. They do it so much better than if we tried to do it. They then go to this line. And if you’re following it, this is the Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand-ish type nonsense. They ascend to poetry, which is hard for bankers.

The earth is being held up by the muscular arms of its entrepreneur-plutocrats, like it or not.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but we bailed them out. And we bailed them out to the tune of trillions of dollars. So if they were supposedly holding the Earth, they kind of dropped the ball, type of thing. But, of course, they were never holding the Earth, they were never creating the profits. It’s the people in this room who are creating the profits, many through a lifetime, many on the journey, as students and such.

So welcome. And you now have a new phrase for yourself, because you now know what they call you, us. We are the “multitudinous many,” which at least is alliterative. No money comes with it, you will notice, but we exist.

In a plutonomy…there are rich consumers, few in number but disproportionate in the gigantic slice of income and consumption they take.

Again, if we wrote this and said that, that would be class warfare. Inside the tent they’re quite happy to admit that that’s exactly what they take. This is not sharing the pie; this is: We get the pie and we take it. And then “There are the rest,” the 99%,

the “non-rich,” the multitudinous many, but only accounting for surprisingly small bites of the national pie.

Again, they say it directly in ways we could never say. They know that is the system is completely rigged to give them “gigantic slice[s]” of the pie and to give everybody else “surprisingly small,” and diminishing, “bites.” Remember, they told us plutonomy will create ever greater income inequality. And not even to the benefit of the 1% so much as the benefit of the one-tenth of 1%. I don’t know what they’re going to live with when the rest of us have been wiped out. And they don’t know either, because they certainly don’t know how to work.

This is the bonfire of the inanities. Since we think the plutonomy is here, is going to get stronger, its membership swelling from globalized enclaves in the emerging world

—this is like one of those novels, exciting, it’s got a hunk on the cover, I guess—

we think a plutonomy basket of stocks should continue to do well. These toys for the wealthy [—okay, that’s worth emphasizing—] toys for the wealthy have pricing power and staying power. They are Giffen goods,

which is an obscure economics concept: more desirable and demanded the more expensive they are. Remember, they’re writing this memo to the one-tenth of 1%, and they’re telling the one-tenth of 1%, You’re a bunch of morons. You are completely interested in who has more toys when they die. That’s your version of life. And you overpay deliberately for your toys so you can brag about how much money you overspent getting that car, that plane, that luxury limousine, etc., etc., etc. You are the most disgusting people we can imagine. Thank you for sending us your money. Bastiat turns out to have been an optimist.

This is Citicorp again:

At the heart of plutonomy is income inequality.

So you want an admission? Talk about an admission. The definition of plutonomy—the thing they love, the thing their clients love—the heart, the core of it is income inequality. It’s not something temporary, it’s not something incidental to the model. The heart and soul of their model is producing massive inequality.

Societies that are willing to tolerate/endorse income inequality are willing to tolerate/endorse plutonomy.

So let’s think about the difference between those two words: tolerate and endorse. Bastiat’s point was that you would get a whole crop of people who would endorse and try to claim that this was good, to plunder. Does anybody know any columnists like this? Does anybody know any politicians like this? Does anybody know a network like this? This is their heart and soul. And that’s horrific.

But notice what they also say. It’s not enough that there are the groups that endorses this obscenity. This obscenity can only continue from those who tolerate. As soon as we refuse to tolerate, it will end. So as horrific, as despicable as their own words make them out, we don’t need them to fix this. We the 99% can fix it. We have to stop tolerating a system that is based on an enormous lie, that is based on consigning huge chunks of America—and the rest of the world, by way—to unemployment and poverty.

That is precisely why they are trying to make it so difficult for the 99% to vote. This is why you see effort in state after state to keep you from the polls. Because it’s the next sentence that is explains it.

An examination of what might disrupt plutonomy, or worse, reverse it

— Citicorp has taken a stand. Gee, I’ll bet you didn’t know that they were in favor of plutonomy until we got to this point in the memo. But here it slips out that they’re all in favor of it.

Will electorates continue to endorse it or will they end it?

We can end it. That’s what Occupy really is fundamentally about. That’s what raised, in political science jargon, the salience. We now find that inequality is being discussed in the media more than 10 times as much as it was before the Occupy protest began.

It would be bad enough if the Citicorp memorandum was true, that these people really held up the Earth for the rest of us and then took virtually all the profits. But it isn’t true. That is the great lie. Because it is these folks who are the great job killers. They became wealthy, overwhelmingly, not through skill, not through risk taking, not through hard work, not through individual brilliance, not through any of this Ayn Rand nonsense, but through good old-fashioned fraud. They are destroying the world, not holding it up. They are the great job killers. They are the engines of mass destruction of societal wealth. They promote social Darwinism. They are Bastiat’s nightmare made real.

So let me start talking about how all of this came about in terms of this disaster and how these people became wealthy. I’ll just take the most recent crisis, although I’ll refer briefly to some comparisons to the savings and loan crisis. The FBI warned in open testimony in the House of Representatives in September 2004, over seven years ago, when there was plenty of time to stop it, that there was an epidemic of mortgage fraud and predicted that it would cause a financial crisis if it were not stopped. Those are their words. It was picked up, as I say, in the national media.

We’ve seen this before, in the savings-and-loan crisis. This NCFIR acronym stands for the national commission that looked into the causes of the savings- and-loan crisis. I’m quoting from the official report.

The typical large savings and loan failure grew at an extremely rapid rate, achieving high concentrations of assets in risky ventures. Every accounting trick available was used. Evidence of fraud was invariably present, as was the ability of the operators to milk the organization,

by which they mean loot it through executive compensation. At the typical large failure fraud “was invariably present.”

Two of the best economists in the world looked into this, and they published an article in 1993. The title of it pretty much says it all: “Looting: The Economic Underworld of Bankruptcy for Profit.” Plunder, per Bastiat. Looting is when the CEO loots his corporation, the corporation fails—that’s a bankruptcy—but he walks away wealthy. Have we seen any of that? All the time. The regulators saw this in the savings-and-loan crisis and began cracking down promptly. This is what George Akerlof and Paul Romer said. In fact, they made this the concluding paragraph to their article in order to emphasize it.

Neither the public nor economists foresaw the savings-and-loan deregulation of the 1980s was bound to produce looting, nor, unaware of the concept, could they have known how serious it would be. Thus, the regulators in the field, who understood what was happening from the beginning, found lukewarm support at best for their cause.

They’re being polite. We found total opposition.

Now we know better. If we learn from experience, history need not repeat itself.

So we knew what had caused it, we had an early warning from the FBI in September of 2004, and this is what happened instead.

In the savings-and-loan debacle, which I say here was 40 times worse, just the losses in the household sector in this crisis, according to the national commission that investigated the causes, just the household sector are $11 trillion. A trillion is a thousand billion. The savings-and-loan crisis cost $150 billion. So if you just took the household-sector losses—and there are far more losses—it’s actually 70 times larger than the savings-and-loan crisis. In the savings-and-loan crisis, our agency, that Office of Thrift Supervision made well over 10,000 criminal referrals, produced over 1,000 felony convictions in cases designated as major. Indeed that understates the degree, because we prioritized the absolute worst 500 to 600, and we prosecuted virtually all of them. We got a 90% conviction rate. It can be done, but it’s hard. You need systems and you’ve got to work cooperatively.

So what did the same agency, the Office of Thrift Supervision, do in this crisis where, remember, there was an epidemic of fraud identified as early as 2004? They made a grand total of zero criminal referrals. You can do the math. They weren’t about to make referrals.

The concept that people who wore nice suits could be criminals? Of course they can’t. They are the 1%. In fact, they are the only-tenth. In fact, they’re the 1/1000 of 1%. They must be good people.

At its peak we had 1,000 FBI agents working savings-and-loan cases alone. As recently as fiscal year 2007 we had a grand total of 120 FBI agents, one-eighth as many agents, for a crisis actually much larger than 70 times greater. There were well over 1 million cases a year of mortgage fraud. What are 120 agents going to do if they’re assigned to look at a million a year? This is like going to the beach, throwing handfuls of sand into the ocean, and wondering when you can walk to Hawaii. It ain’t ever going to happen. Every year you’re a million cases farther behind.

You have to go at the crooks, the crooks in the C suite. That is what they absolutely refuse to do. Because they had no criminal referrals. And there are no police on elite white-collar criminals.

Here’s a thought experiment. What if you had, say, in 2001, August, called up the Houston Police Department and said, “I think some really bad things are happening in Enron. Can you look into that for me?” We have roughly a million cops. How many of them look for elite white-collar criminals? Zero. Does the FBI patrol a beat? No. They’re in offices in various places. The only folks who are there, who can be there, are the regulatory cops on the beat. No. All of them had been pulled.

Where are all the cops now? Doing pepper spray. We won’t go after the real criminals, but we’ll go after peaceful protesters. In New York alone they had roughly 1,000 police assigned on the big crackdown day. Eight times as many FBI agents as we have looking at the little people, never at the big people in this crisis. As a result, we have no convictions of anybody senior on Wall Street. The only convictions we have is for somebody doing coke, type of thing, and they weren’t even terribly senior.

The FBI, to their credit, realized this was a disaster, realized it couldn’t possibly work, that every year you were more than a million cases farther behind. So they went to the Justice Department and they said, “We have to change the way we’re doing this. We have to have a national task force that prioritizes and we have to go after the major criminal lenders.” At which point Attorney General Mukasey—this was under President Bush, but don’t worry, I have no good things to say about his successor, President Obama—refused to create a national task force and said, famously, “This is simply white-collar street crime.” It’s just all trivial stuff. We can’t be bothered to look at any of the big folks.

How many people remember the 1990-1991 crisis in non-prime lending? It’s sort of a quick question because there wasn’t really one. Like all good frauds, it arose in Orange County, California, and we were the regional regulators for California and the West. And we said, “This is insane. You’re doing loans that are overwhelmingly fraudulent, that must lead to enormous losses. You can’t do this. So the leading place, which was called Long Beach Savings, gave up its federal charter, gave up Federal Deposit Insurance, became a state mortgage bank for the sole purpose of escaping our jurisdiction. Long Beach not only made liars’ loans and all kinds of fraudulent loans, it had a nice twist. It targeted minorities. Because it’s easier to do this to people who know can’t read English, for example, when you provide documents in English.

We gave a parting gift to them: a criminal referral to the Justice Department for discrimination in lending, which the Justice Department could still do, even though the place wasn’t federal. They found discrimination in lending. Then 49 state attorney generals, the attorney general of the District of Columbia, and the Federal Trade Commission all sued this entity for the third strike, because they were doing the same thing. After each time, of course, they said, “We’ll never do anything bad again.” They settled for over $400 million.

Then the CEO of that entity, which had changed its name to Ameriquest, which some of you will recognize, was, A, indicted, B, sued in personal capacity, or, C, made ambassador to the Netherlands. Got it in one. So we made him our ambassador to the Netherlands. And I bet you can guess why we made him our ambassador to the Netherlands. He was the leading contributor to President Bush. So what if he targeted minorities and was a three-time loser on fraud and caused hundreds of millions or billions of losses to people and cost tens of thousands of people their houses. Not my house. No problem. That was bad, but that’s politics.

You want to know why we knew there was going to be a crisis? Because, remember, Ameriquest, three-time losers, every day, every week, all year, what it does is fraudulent loans, where it is predatory and aims at minorities. That’s its reputation. Two entities rushed to acquire it and its personnel, who commit these frauds. Those two entities were Citicorp and Washington Mutual. This is the most notorious, abusive, illegal lender in the world, and two of our most prestigious banks rush to acquire them. I know it will shock you, but when they did that, Citicorp and Washington Mutual immediately began doing massive amounts of fraudulent loans. That’s when you knew that there was going to be a disaster.

It was followed by massive foreclosure fraud. The foreclosure fraud involved—really simple—we file an affidavit. An affidavit is done under oath. The affidavit is supposed to support the foreclosure. The affidavit in about five key spots was a lie. And they admitted it was a lie. By the way, the government didn’t discover this. Big law firms didn’t discover it, attorney generals didn’t discover it. Some very small law firm just finally took a deposition and said, “When you say this, what was your basis?” Whereupon—you can go online and see this on videotape—the person says, “Oh, no. I just was told to say that.” So they committed a felony, actually five different felonies typically, and they did it 10,000 times a month for over a year. So well over 100,000 felonies times 5, if you want to make it even bigger.

What would happen to any of us if we did that? Nobody has been indicted by the federal government. But the federal government is actually trying to negotiate a deal to give these frauds not only immunity from the criminal law for the foreclosure frauds but for the underlying frauds in making the fraudulent loans. It’s trying to give them immunity not just from prosecution but even from investigation so that we’ll never have the facts. That is how far we have descended into crony capitalism. Indeed, we have the Washington Post complaining, How dare the state attorney generals get in the way of giving this kind of immunity?

I told you about the FBI warning. The industry’s own experts gave this warning about liars’ loans. First a little data on liars’ loans. We know overwhelmingly it was the lenders who put the lies in liars’ loans. And they grew massively. You see that AltA, which is a euphemism for liars’ loans, grew 340% between 2003 and 2006. Except that this is not an accurate statistic, because this author, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, which is really right-wing, thinks that subprime loans can’t also be liars’ loans. And that’s simply false. In fact, by 2006, half of all the loans called subprime were also liars’ loans. So that’s actually well over a 500% growth in liars’ loans.

Anyway, the higher level of home originations after 2003 was largely sustained by the growth of subprime and liars’ loans. What does that mean? That means the bubble, folks. This is what hyperinflated the bubble. It was the liars’ loans overwhelmingly. By 2006 roughly one out of every three home loans in America made that year was a liars’ loan. The industry’s own antifraud experts reported to the industry that 90% of liars’ loans were fraudulent. Think about that again. Ninety percent. Here’s the other key: nobody—categorical statement—nobody ever mandated or pushed any lender to make liars’ loans. No governmental entity ever did so. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were never required to make liars’ loans. So this is a really great natural experiment, as we call it, to determine why the lenders were making these loans.

Why would you continue to make loans like this if you were told that 90% of them were fraudulent? Would any honest lender do that? Do you know what the industry did in response to the FBI warnings and their industry’s own warnings? They massively increased the amount of liars’ loans they made. That is only consistent with one explanation—that they intended the frauds to occur. This is the actual language of the warning: “They are open invitations to fraudsters.”

That’s a pretty in-your-face warning: If you make these loans, their own experts said, you are making an open invitation to them to commit fraud. And this is the third part: “The stated income loan deserves the nickname used by many in the industry, the ‘liar’s loan.’”

Step back and think about that as well. I showed you how Citicorp talks behind closed doors when it’s talking to the top 1% or top tenth of 1%. This is how the lending industry talked to itself behind closed doors. It called them fraudulent loans, it knew they were fraudulent loans. And you have people telling us we can’t prosecute this? This is a relatively straightforward prosecution.

What we have, to come back to Bastiat, is a complete collapse in ethics. Again, it’s not just the perpetrators; it’s the folks that allow it to happen. Which is to say, us. If we allow it to happen, it will happen. It will get ever worse. So this is the national commission to investigate the causes of this crisis:

We conclude that there was a systemic breakdown in accountability and ethics. The integrity of our financial markets and the public trust in those markets are essential to the economic well-being of our nation.

How many people have seen the Frontline documentary “The Warning”? You can see it for free on the Frontline site. I highly recommend it. But you will see in that documentary that Alan Greenspan, actually in the very first meeting with Brooksley Born, who was trying to regulate credit default swaps, said,

We’re clearly going to disagree, because you think fraud provides a basis for regulation.

Most people kind of do.

Only the Fed had authority, under an obscure kind of law called HOEPA, Home Ownership and Equity Protection Act, to regulate all entities making mortgage loans. And the great, great bulk of the entities making the liars’ loans were not federally regulated. So only the Fed could have stepped in and used that authority. And Greenspan refused to do anything, even after all these warnings about fraud. Because, after all, fraud can’t exist. And who are you going to believe, Ayn Rand or the facts? Greenspan was an Ayn Rand devotee.

I’ll end on this note. All of us, I would guess, other than some maybe really young people, have worked for businesses. This is not hostile to businesses, to prevent fraud, to prevent this mass unemployment that it caused. In fact, effective regulatory cops on the beat are the only thing that make it possible in finance for honest bankers to stay in business. Again, this was explained by that same economist who got the Nobel Prize, George Akerlof. He said,

Dishonest dealings tend to drive honest dealings out of the market. The cost of dishonesty, therefore, lies not only in the amount by which the purchaser is cheated. The cost also must include the loss incurred from driving legitimate businesses out of existence.

So we are the people, insisting on the rule of law, who are the real friends of honest businesses. The other folks are the death of honest businesses.
If you think that this is something that only economists have figured out, and only did it recently, there’s this guy named Jonathan Swift, who two centuries ago pointed out,

Where fraud is committed or connived at or hath no law to punish it, the honest dealer is always undone and the knave gets the advantage.

That is exactly what happened. The knave, the plunderer, the looter, the bankster got the advantage.

I will leave you with a fraud recipe which explains why we have mass unemployment, mass destruction of wealth. This is what Akerlof and Romer referred to as “a sure thing.” If you follow this recipe, three things in life are guaranteed. I’ll explain. Here’s the recipe:

Grow like crazy as a lender.
By making really, really, really crappy loans, but at a premium yield. That just means high interest rate.
Have extraordinary leverage. That just means a lot of debt.

Remember that memo by Citicorp? Grow like crazy, releverage, high-risk assets? And put aside next to no loss reserves. Akerlof and Romer says this is a sure thing in producing three events:

You are mathematically guaranteed in the short term to report record albeit completely fictional income;
With modern executive compensation, the top officers are guaranteed to become extraordinarily wealthy; and,
—let’s think through that recipe again—it also maximizes losses and produces disasters.

If we wanted to create a formula for producing massive losses, grow like crazy, make really crappy loans with extraordinary leverage, which increases the losses, and no reserves against the ultimate disaster that’s coming. That would be the perfect recipe.

And what happens if a bunch of us follow the same recipe, at the same time? We hyperinflate the market. And where normal businesses, knowing there was a glut, would cut back, under the fraud recipe, what do you do in a bubble? You go faster. You just hit the accelerator to the floor and keep it there.

Does any of this involve risk as we conventionally think of risk? No, it is a sure thing. These people hate risk. They want to make sure that all the risk falls on the 99%. They want a sure thing. This is the recipe that they used in finance to produce the massive wealth.

And, of course, it kicks through other things. All the lawyers and the top accounting firms produce their one-tenth of the 1% in the key partners as well from this same dynamic.

Now you know from the inside view at Citicorp, in their explanation to the wealthy, that that is exactly how they want it. That is what they are determined to continue. Their great fear is precisely all of you taking the time to come and express your statement that you will not allow it to continue, you will stop it.

They cannot defeat the 99% if the 99% act. Yes, it is the oldest of lessons from labor. With unity in numbers we have strength. We still have important aspects of democracy. It is slipping into crony capitalism. Crony capitalism always destroys and perverts democracy, if it’s allowed to continue. But we can take back the nation.

Thank you very much for all of your support.

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Alternative Radio
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©2012

A new economic paradigm

Wed, 09 May 2012 03:20:28 GMT

Gar Alperovitz
Interviewed by David Barsamian
Cambridge, MA
January 19, 2012

available from Alternative Radio

You can listen to Gar Alperovitz speak for himself here.

Gar Alperovitz is Professor of Political Economy at the University of Maryland and co-founder of the Democracy Collaborative. He is the author of numerous books, including Unjust Deserts, Making a Place For Community, Rebuilding America, Atomic Diplomacy, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, and America Beyond Capitalism.

In a New York Times op-ed on December 15, 2011, you wrote, “A mere 1% of Americans own just under half of the country’s financial assets and other investments. America, it would seem, is less equitable than ever. But at another level, something different has been quietly brewing in recent decades.” What’s been brewing?

What’s interesting—and, again, the press doesn’t cover this—is just below the surface of what the press normally sees. There are thousands and thousands of institutions that democratize the ownership of wealth. Political and economic systems are defined in terms of their power. But who owns the capital?

In the U.S. 1% owns just under half of the investment capital, 5% owns 70%. Literally, a medieval power structure. So if there is to be a democratic alternative, what you look for is: Are there ways that democratic ownership can happen? Indeed, if you look closely, there are some 13 million people involved in one form or another of worker-owned companies, a form that changes who owns; there are 130 million people involved in credit unions and co-ops, another democratized form of ownership; there are 4,000 or 5,000 neighborhood corporations, devoted to neighborhood development; there are 2,000 utilities that are owned by cities. People don’t realize that. A quarter of the American electricity supply is essentially socialized in a radically decentralized way, utilities and co-ops, city-owned utilities. And it’s been growing. There’s a whole quiet building up of a different model that has a very American tone to it but goes at the central question of who owns capital, who owns the wealth. That I think is a critical basis for possible longer- term change.

And what do you mean by a particular American tone?

Unlike France, for instance, or Russia or the former Soviet Union, we have a very decentralized tradition, localism and states and kind of participatory American idea that comes from the agricultural frontier days. So there is something in the culture that can go many different ways: it can go far to the right, to individualism, but it also has community spirit and a kind of you-can do-it, roll-up- your-sleeves, we-can-try-something-here.

The models that are interesting—and I think of this as a long historical development—are very much at the local, neighborhood, workplace level of democratizing. I see that, one, as a precondition of how you could actually develop a system which was not state-dominated but also change who owned the productive capital. That’s a precondition, building up that kind of an experienced culture and also a vision, models of what could be. It also in a funny way has a Gramscian aspect, because it cracks open in a very American way the ideological question. That is to say, it opens up the question of who owns capital in a practical way rather than in a challenging way. That’s another question. The challenge part is needed. But here you have ordinary Americans doing worker-owned companies. What do we make of that? Why not? And why can’t that expand?

You write further, “If such cooperative efforts continue to increase in number, scale and sophistication, they may suggest the outlines, however tentative, of something very different from both traditional corporate-dominated capitalism and traditional socialism.”

That is what’s interesting about this to me. At one level this is all very positive, it’s all useful and it’s helpful and it’s a good thing to do. But much more interesting is whether or not these kinds of developments, if we are aware and self-conscious and clarify the meaning, give people a sense, and even an ideological perspective, of what might be possible. Re-creating a sense of the possible and a sense of vision and something beyond rhetoric, something that gives content to an alternative structure of beyond corporate capitalism and beyond the traditional state socialist models. You need to have that if you’re to build a movement that gets beyond rhetoric and also has something concrete to do and say.

So, yes, I see it as both useful to do no matter what, but also laying down ideas and practices and experience and expertise of how actually do you do a good worker-owned company, not rhetorically. And what are its limits? There are problems with worker-owned companies, too. Getting much more sophisticated about what it is we want and what it is that makes sense.

And you realistically observe that these efforts are minor compared with the power of Wall Street banks and the other giants of the American economy. Are they willingly going to go along with the weakening and evisceration of their own power?

Of course not. The struggle for real triumph over the systemic issues is a many-decade struggle. So if you say now is the fight, tomorrow, it’s obvious that the deck is stacked. If that’s where the confrontation comes, that’s not going to happen. On the other hand, if you take—I wear a hat as a political economist and historian, but if you stand back and ask, how does historical change really take place, what you’re looking at is decades of developmental struggle, both negative, challenging, and the creation of ideas, projects, vision, concrete ideology.

What I think is interesting is the failures of the American system. I think they are endemic now. I don’t think they are going to go away, I don’t think the pendulum is going to swing. I think we’re into deep stagnation and decay and pain. That is the forming ground of people waking up and saying something is profoundly wrong, not just who wins the next election. Occupy cracked open the debate about the 1% and the 99%. But that would not have happened if people didn’t feel there was something wrong. Much more important even than Occupy is that there is a sense in the public that something is wrong. So I see it as a long, long battle and a long developmental process.

Another way to look at it is—and we’ve been doing a fair amount of work in the Midwest, where the destruction of cities is just powerful—that’s the internal empire. And at the tail end of the internal empire the pain is greatest. But it’s also the place where people are struggling to build something new. So if you see it historically—you can even see it in traditional terms—many of the preconditions of even the New Deal were developed in the states and localities, some of them state by state, decade by decade. The women got the vote in the 19th century decade by decade by decade, one state and another state and another state, until finally they accumulated enough power to go national.

This is the prehistory of a possible transformation, not the history of it. My heroes are the civil rights workers in Mississippi in the 1930s and 1940s. That’s when the real work was done, laying the groundwork and building up ideas and people and inspiration that ultimately could become the 1960s. That’s the hard place. Something roughly analogous is the way I think about this period.

In America Beyond Capitalism, to reinforce what you said about Americans in large numbers feeling that something’s not quite right, you write, “Repeated studies have shown the majority of Americans know full well that something fundamental is going on with ‘democracy’“— and I’m interested that you put “democracy” in quotes; I’ll ask you to explain that in a moment—“and four out of five judge that government leaders say and do anything to get elected, then do whatever they want, and another study found that seven out of ten felt that ‘people like me have almost no say in the political system.’”

Not only is that now true, that people sense that and they know money is dominating, and even more so with the Citizens United decision, that people understand that. But what’s very interesting—and, again, if you’re thinking about transformative change in stages of development— three decades ago the numbers were just the opposite. If you asked somebody, “Do the politicians or the president or the Congress do what people say?” they said, “Well, of course they do what the people say.” So there has been a major ideological shift, consciousness shift, negative in this case, that something is wrong, it’s all rigged, or Washington is broken or whatever the language is, or four out of five saying they will just do anything to get elected. That is a—more important than the shift— a profound change in the sense of direction of understanding in the ordinary public. You can’t get to much more fundamental change until you eliminate the possibility of believing in some of the foolishness. That’s going on big time in the U.S. People sense there’s something profoundly wrong. They don’t quite know what to do with it, they are still struggling with that. But awareness has grown over my lifetime in a way that’s astounding.

You suggest these efforts toward building some kind of alternative worker-owned structures will take many decades, that we’re now in the incipient stages. Am I summarizing correctly?

Not only worker ownership. Municipal ownership. That was the early part of the Debs revolution, was about municipal ownership and neighborhood development. All forms of changing, not just worker ownership. We are potentially in the incipient stages. We are further along than that. There’s lot on the ground. As I say, 130 million people are involved in credit unions and co-ops. A very American institution that doesn’t get taken seriously, except all of a sudden $4 billion or $5 billion have been shifted from big banks to credit unions as a matter of ideology, a matter of saying, We don’t want to be with the big banks. Let’s go there.

Some cities now are saying, Why can’t we set up a city bank or a city credit union? The state of North Dakota has an old state public bank. Publicly owned banks. In San Francisco they have about $28 billion in regular float, cash around. Why should that go to Bank of America? Why not put it in a city bank? Why not set up a city bank or a credit union?

Worker ownership is part of this, but there are all kinds of models that are emerging quietly that the central principle is democratizing ownership in one form or another, from my point of view, as the preliminaries to the transformation, or to an America beyond capitalism.

You trace the origins of this movement to actually a failed effort. In 1977 in Youngstown, Ohio, a big steel plant closed down, 5,000 workers lost their jobs. You were involved in an effort then to get that plant going again. It didn’t succeed. But from those efforts other things evolved. The Cleveland model.

Yes. Many of these things have grown up on their own. The industrial worker-owned co-ops, that’s very interesting and does trace back in part to Youngstown. There are many other roots we could go into. This was in 1977. Five thousand people got pink slips in one day, thrown out of work. In 1977 that was really big news. That was national news because it hadn’t been happening. Now it happens all the time.

So the steel workers there in the local in Youngstown—it was Youngstown Sheet & Tube, a big company—said, why don’t we take this place over and run it ourselves, along with the religious leaders of the city, the ecumenical council. That was the original idea. I was called in to try to help them design a plan and the strategy to do it. What happened was they did their politics very carefully. They got the whole state, Democrats and Republicans, including the so-called conservative governor, who had to be for it because the religious leaders and labor was for it, and they put forward a plan, which would have made for a worker-owned company, a large one. They even got the Carter administration in those days to commit $200 million in loan guarantees.

After the election of, I think it was, 1978 the money disappeared. There is a story there, too. Nonetheless it was popular. So the mill did not happen.

But what was interesting is that the leadership understood that might occur and they understood—and this is critical for activists now—they were self-consciously aware that even if it failed, they were injecting an important idea into political consciousness and that they couldn’t lose. Indeed, what happened in Ohio is there are probably more worker-owned companies now per capita in Ohio than perhaps any other state. There’s no study on that, but you get a sense of that if you go out there. A little center was set up at Kent State which began giving technical assistance to worker-owned companies.

The most sophisticated model that exists is in Cleveland. And it’s an interesting model because it’s in a very poor black area: $18,000 is the family income average, 40% unemployment. But there are also big hospitals there. The Cleveland Clinic is there and big universities. If we put two and two together in this case, building on the ideas of worker ownership, those hospitals and universities—and this can be done anywhere, in fact, many cities have picked up on this—they buy $3 billion in goods and services every year, $3 billion. That’s in addition to salaries and construction, just buying, none of which had been bought from this area. So the light bulb went on. Why not see if we can either induce them or ask them or force them to buy from worker-owned co-ops in this area that will service them and also service other things?

So the result is, in that area there are a series of worker-owned co-ops. They’re not simply to make a couple of workers rich, or not rich but make a lot. They’re linked to build a community. A nonprofit corporation ties them together. They can’t be sold off without a major decision. There’s a revolving fund so that the money is made, and a percentage, 10%, of profits go back in to make new companies. So that they want to build a complex of community building in a structure also of worker ownership, and partly stabilized by the fact that in these big hospitals and universities, taxpayer money, a huge amount in health care and in education, is being used to reconstruct the community on a wholly different institutional design. In America, right now.

Indeed, the small businessmen like it, it helps the tax base. And it has ideological resonance in a way that what we’ve learned there is if you speak concretely and make sense and know what you’re talking about, very, very fundamental institutional change can be made available in cities, particularly where the pain levels are growing and deepening. Cleveland has gone from a population of 800,000 to 400,000 in the last 30 years. Devastated. It’s like Detroit. Nothing has happened that works. If something like this works—and this is working; there are several companies—they have a possibility of reaching a much broader public. Which is critical. Not just small, radical groups; a much larger public.

So, for instance, they’re just about to open a greenhouse, partly solar, hydroponic. But the scale is not your little co-op. Three million heads of lettuce a year is the production, plus a lot of other stuff. They have an industrial-scale, very advanced, high-tech laundry, ecologically the greenest in the Midwest, perhaps—it uses about a third of the water and heat for laundries—that is servicing the hospitals and the nursing homes in the area. They have another solar installation company which is on track to put in just probably shortly more installations in Ohio and more capacity than existed in the whole state already. The goal is to build up not your own little, tiny worker co-op, but it’s to really get serious about developing scale and power. And community. Worker ownership, but not just worker ownership. Community development, in the largest sense of the community.

Talk about the role of organized labor. You trace in your book the steep decline from a peak of around 35% of the work force being unionized in the 1950s to what it is today, in single digits in the private sector a little higher in the public sector. You say it’s going to drop even further.

Historically unions were a countervailing force to capital. This is critical. The way in which most of the advanced systems around the world have been run—to say nothing is different in other parts of the world—is you allow the corporations and the capital owners to have a dominant role, and you build up union power as the basis of some form of progressive political coalition to keep distributional questions, social questions, environmental questions sort of in line. That’s the social democratic model in Europe or liberalism or progressive politics in this country. That’s the model. A “countervailing force” was what Galbraith called it. Indeed, without that, the situation would have been dreadful in most parts of the country and in many parts of the world.

That system model, that entire design of how you run a system, I think that’s decaying before your eyes, for better or for worse. There is a lot of pain associated with that. And the most fundamental of the reasons is that the power of organized labor, the muscle and money behind democratic elections, has radically declined, from about 35% in 1952 to just under 12% now, and probably declining further. So even the fights in Wisconsin—I’m from Wisconsin—recently and in Indiana and Ohio, very inspiring fights, but the thing to notice is that they were all defensive. They’re moving backwards saying, Do less, don’t take away more. They’re not on the offense. And they would love to be, to gain more power for both the unions and for social programs and economic programs. But there is a decay process at work.

Either there is going to be a new model of how you transform advanced systems in a new direction, or the decay will worsen and the pain will grow and the violence will come with it. I think this is the most important period of American history, bar none, and I include the American revolution, because we’re running out of options in the traditional models. The question that’s posed by all this experimentation and many other things and by Occupy is whether we’re in potentially the beginning of really reshaping our idea of where to go and how to get there. Critical to that is to get beyond rhetoric to what does it look like. What is it that makes sense in the design and politics and vision of the next system?

All these experiments on the ground—there are many, many more, some of them larger, some of them smaller—Alaska gives away the oil—if you go to Texas and Alaska and see what they do to oil, for odd reasons Alaska gives every citizen a right to a share of the profits from oil. Odd, historically. But there it is in America, that odd pattern.

If you look deeply, there are lots of elements that begin to form a mosaic, I think, potentially suggesting the direction of an America beyond capitalism and also beyond state socialism, a decentralized democratic model that begins to give content to a different vision and practical experience to build towards it. I think this is an extremely important development. Potentially, when it gets to politics—it doesn’t have a politics now; it has developments, experimentation, fragments—I think the next stage is a politics that begins to pick up on the knowledge and the experience and the practicality of all of this and begins to offer answers that you can explain to anybody.

I’m from Racine, Wisconsin. That’s kind of a decaying industrial town. I can go back to Racine and talk to my conservative high school buddies—and there are some who are really conservative, very intelligent but very conservative—and talk about all this, and it makes sense to people. It is explainable development and it has a vision that people understand,

That’s a good thing to do. We’ve got a lot of pain here in this town. So that content as well as the vision I think is very important.

The name of Marx’s book was Capital. It centers on who owns the power base.

People like Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky would say that socialism has never really been tried. That the Soviet Union was a distortion, an aberration. They took the name socialism, but it was a form of top-down state capitalism.

That’s definitely fair. Indeed. I think it’s also true that you can find libertarian socialist theory and communitarian socialist theory and also syndicalist socialist theory. So there are traditions you can draw upon. But for the most part we have dwindled to the place that socialism means for most people the state owning and controlling.

I was a student of Bill Williams, the wonderful historian at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He was always down on rhetoric. He was interested in content. What does it look like and why should this work any better, is the question we need to ask.

Indeed, you mention Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky, both of whom are friends of mine who have been kind of urging this book, because it gets very practical about where to go and how to begin to build. A lot of the book is simply reporting on what’s out there all over the country that the press does not cover that you can do in your community. If they can do it in Cleveland, Ohio, you can do it anywhere.

Then the problem becomes, what are you willing to do? It becomes existential. You want to do something? It is not that it is impossible. We know that from all the things that I report on in the book or the cities like Cleveland. It’s whether people get off their chair and begin to act. So there is an existential component to this, as in all movements. Unlike 30 years ago—we were talking about Youngstown—when to build a worker- owned company, there weren’t many people you could call and ask how to do it, that’s changed. It’s a massive historical evolution when we have people available who actually know how to do this kind of thing.

And they exist. If you want to do any of the kind of developmental trajectories we’re talking about, just get online or look in the book. There’s a website I should mention, community-wealth, which simply surveys this kind of thing. You can find people who can say, “Hey, we’re doing it in way here. And we’d be happy to help you if you want to do something.”

That’s the challenge in a democratic system. It becomes not just about what they’re doing but what we are willing to get off our chair and do. Because now it is possible to do things, and the ball is in our court. One never knows about historical development. All of this may decay. It’s possible. But we certainly know that if you don’t build, you’re never going to get anywhere. So this developmental trajectory is very interesting from that perspective as well.

The U.S. as well as much of the world is experiencing the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1920s and 1930s. There are well-documented studies of the tremendous increases in wealth and income inequality, massive unemployment. Curiously, as economist Richard Wolff points out, this unemployment is unusual because it is chronic and long-term. People are out of work for long periods of time, and many of them drop out of the work force. With this kind of background, I see several possibilities.

One is a fertile time for alternative points of view: Look, this is what this system has produced. But also there is a worry, to use Bertram Gross’s term, “friendly fascism,” scapegoating immigrants and gays to explain the crisis.

And civil liberties. The President just signed into law provisions that allow some bureaucrat to put you in prison without trial. Maybe that will get taken out in the next legislation. But there has been no violence yet. A little bit of violence and you could see civil liberties go out the window in the U.S., as they did in the 1920s or in the McCarthy era. Even worse now, with terrorism. So I think Gross was right.

You can lay out the options. One of the options is that decay will simply continue. Rome decayed, period. Another option is it will explode into violence. And with violence, suppression and loss of civil liberties, our “friendly fascism.” It’s certainly a possibility. A third option is the basis of a great transformation will be established in the coming decades. No one knows what can happen, but it’s clear where the action should be.

That is, to say, build as strong and powerfully and as intelligently as we can in the new direction and then see what happens. One of the really important things I think that we tend to ignore about the U.S.—and I use that language about the internal empire—this is a very large country, and there are lots of places locally where things can be built, slowly in ways that build up over time. It allows for the rebuilding of local politics and local people, people who learn to become leaders in doing. It’s unusual in that.

The scale question. Let me say a word about this, because I think a lot about scale these days. Bill Williams always thought about scale. The architect of the American Constitution, James Madison, formulated the problem first in exactly the way Karl Marx did. Politics depends upon who owns property, and the people with property need to control. And secondly, you’ve got to keep the people without property, without capital, out of the game. He also said—and Marx didn’t have it as clear as Madison did— that if we can build a very large country, we can keep dividing and conquering. That’s straight Madison in Federalist 10. The larger the sphere, we can keep the people without property from ganging up. You can drop Germany into Montana. People don’t realize that the scale of the U.S. is radically decentralized and very different. In Germany you can build a social democratic polity much more easily. Here it’s different. Conversely, at the external parts of the society, lots of things are possible in a decentralized way that can build up over time and lots of initiatives are taking place. That possibility also exists.

We all have a vested interest in pessimism. If you’re pessimistic, you don’t have to do anything. If you say maybe there’s a shot, then the responsibility is basically on our shoulders. Since we don’t know and since I see as a historian, revolutions are as common as grass in world history. Things radically change over time. We’ll see.

The task now is obvious: laying groundwork and building a base and understanding more clearly what makes sense. I want to emphasize that, because I think that’s really interesting, to get beyond rhetoric to really what makes sense. Like this design question. You can talk to a lot of Americans about it. They may be scared off by some things, but they’re not scared off by “You tell me how it’s going to work.” “Really?” You would probably get the Tea Party willing to nationalize the Wall Street banks. The anger is building up.

We’re talking mostly local, but the next big financial crisis—and everyone knows there’s going to be another one, experts left, right, and center know there’s going to be another financial crisis because they can’t regulate these guys—one of these days, they’re going to say, “Take them over.” Indeed, with Citicorp and AIG, Bank of America, probably the U.S. government, had it wanted to, could have used its power already, instead of giving it back, because they put so much taxpayer money in, to have a controlling share. I think that part of it is also going to happen.

We did nationalize two big auto manufacturers, Chrysler and GM. So there are other levels of the crisis. But the thing that I think is most important, if we’re to have a democratic system, is the rebuilding of local experience, individuals locally learning how to do this in a democratic way as the precondition of any kind of system.

A theme you keep coming back to is American values. You talk about liberty, equality, and democracy. I just want to get underneath that a little bit, because it seems that there’s a huge gap between the historical record and the historical fact.

Oh, indeed, indeed. If you look at the way democracy has been practiced in the destruction of liberty and certainly inequality, there is a great gap between the ideals and the practices. What is interesting about this time in history is that all the trends are going south. That is to say, inequality is getting worse and worse.

That’s why Occupy, as we said, was so successful. At a certain point something breaks and people say, “Hey, there’s something really wrong here,” partly because we proclaim ourselves as a society that cares about equality and democracy. I think that’s what we’re seeing.

In terms of liberty, it hasn’t yet broken. There’s awareness that there’s a danger. But in terms of the trends on liberty, you can talk about it in terms of civil liberties, where there’s been a narrowing, and that requires you to get into the law and the Constitution. But the simplest test of liberty in any system is what percentage of the population is put in prison. That’s how you take people’s liberty away. It’s the first place to look. In this country seven times as many people per capita than in all the other advanced industrial systems are in jail, a large percentage of whom are black people. Something going on that is changing what actual liberty is, to say nothing of technical aspects of civil liberties, which are also going south.

So there is an erosion of the value base. Proclaim, liberty, democracy, equality often enough and then begin to destroy it, and people begin to say, “Something is profoundly wrong here.” That’s the precondition of really fundamental change. I think that’s where we’re going, and in many areas that’s where we are. So this is an extremely important period. It’s just not the next election or some pendulum swinging.

Is that why you put “democracy” in quotes?

I think that is why, because real democracy, genuine democracy—we were talking earlier that the “Red Mayor” of London wrote a book saying that if democracy allowed you to achieve anything, they wouldn’t let you vote. Meaningful democracy.

And the U.S. version of that: If God wanted us to vote in elections, he would give us candidates.

Right. That is to say, what is a meaningful electoral process? A meaningful electoral process really gives choices and sufficient power to actually make the choices real. Right now it’s almost a joke, the way in which politics and the primaries is going. It is a joke. That is to say, the money is so powerful and so important, how much gets on television, and has nothing to do democracy. It has to do with very large amounts of money competing for the airwaves. You’ve seen the ridicule of this, Stephen Colbert doing this, and he’s doing it in a very brilliant way. Because he’s saying, This is total fraud, and everybody knows it. It’s not like this is 10 years or 20 years ago. It wouldn’t have rung true. Now it’s obvious.

So the decay of ideology, the decay of consciousness, the loss of belief in the standard nostrums is a critical precondition. You’ve got to get it out of the way, the old ideas, before you can begin to take seriously the next direction. That’s happening right before your eyes.

Let me stray a little bit from the actual topic of America Beyond Capitalism but ask a related question. That’s about imperialism, the U.S., with its string of bases around the world, with its massive military force. Are democracy and liberty and these values that we’ve been talking about compatible with empire abroad?

No. The reason I got to this book started with American imperialism. In particular, it started with the atomic bomb and the bombing of Japan. I wrote two books on that subject, asking why was it that this culture was able to kill that many people, knowing that it was unnecessary. We now know that they knew that it was unnecessary, that the war was about to end, that as soon as the Russians came in, that shock would end the war well before there could be an invasion. That’s what drove me.

That takes you to the question of why systems expand in either formal colonialism or informal empire, the American kind. We were talking about William Appleman Williams and his work on that. Essentially, the source of this, in my view, is an expansionary system, a system that has to expand. There are other sources. There have been empires that were not based on capitalism and corporate expansion. Whatever we call the former Soviet Union, there was a Russian equivalent that was not capitalist. But there is certainly a drive in capitalism and in corporate capitalism in particular, but also agricultural capitalism, for control of markets, for control of investment. And more than that, even a genuine belief that this is a way to spread democracy—genuine, authentic— mixed with that ideology.

You must go back to the base. The system that doesn’t do this would be a system that is not necessarily based on expansion. So that’s another way of asking the question, If you don’t like corporate capitalism and you don’t like state socialism, can you begin to get serious about nonexpansionary systems, where you both change the nature of ownership and change the structure of the system so it doesn’t have to expand.

Actually, that’s how I got into these questions myself. And we can get way into it. The same question is involved in climate change and in resource use and in growth: systems that don’t have to grow. If a big corporation stops growing and its numbers start changing on Wall Street, boom, its stock will be out, the management will be out, and the business will be out of business. That’s the nature of the game. You have to grow, out of either greed or fear. If you can’t change that institutional dynamic, you are into an expansionary system, which tries to control, control, control. And whatever you call it, that’s implicitly imperial.

In this cosmology, as you’ve been describing it, of worker- owned—I believe the acronym is ESOP. What does that stand for?

ESOP is one form of worker ownership: employee stock ownership plan. It’s a very American breed, very interesting, because it was put together by Huey Long’s son, who was at that point chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, and a maverick corporate banker named Louis Kelso. The way it works is very simple. Basically, if you have started a company and your kids, your son and daughter, doesn’t want it when you retire, you have a choice to sell it to a big corporation. They will probably take the productive capacity away from the city. You might make money on it. If you sell it to your workers— this is what they did—the law now gives a tremendous financial benefit to the boss who sells to his workers. That’s a very, very unusual American thing. Part of our maverick tradition. And the ESOPs—there are 11,000 of them and some 13 million people involved in these employee stock ownership plan—are a different form of worker ownership, many of which in the original stage were set up without voting power. So they’re not democratic, most of them. However, there are reasons why they wanted to keep the financing under a trusteeship.

But now what’s happening within here, as you can imagine, as the workers get more ownership, they’re beginning to break that down and get more direct formal and informal power, and some of them are beginning to unionize. So there’s a trend within the trend. It’s very intriguing. I think of it this way. If you’re in a nondeveloped country, the means of production is land. And if you want to get the land from the landowner, you’ve got to bribe him big time or you’ve got to take it. So the way you do it is essentially to get the means of production. You give him a very large chunk of money, if you can do it politically, or you take it. What these are is another way to find democratized capital with major taxpayer financing.

Perhaps one of the better known of the international worker co-op efforts is based in the Basque country of Spain, Mondragon. Explain what Mondragon is. And why is it significant?

It’s a very interesting development, because it’s now roughly 85,000, at the last count, people involved in a very complex worker-owned set of co-ops that are integrated and operate very successfully, everything from construction to supermarkets to high-tech equipment to advanced research. These are not little co-ops. The rate of pay from the top to the bottom in 90% of the co-ops is about 4 or 5 to 1, that the boss has only five times as much as the lowest worker, and then in the biggest parts it’s 9 to 1. Compare that to the American. It’s 250 to 1 in most big corporations.

It’s been very successful. It is running into the world market, however. This is not a part of a socialist plan. There’s no state plan. It’s kind of separate and grew up out of Catholic Worker tradition and a Basque culture and suppression by the fascist regimes, creating a hothouse culture, and Catholic social thought. Very interesting worker participation within. But it is now running into the world market, and that’s a difficulty. It’s looking for markets, and it’s up against competition. So there are some questions about it. Nonetheless, it has a great deal to teach us about how you can organize internally within co- ops and worker-owned companies. In the Cleveland discussion, part of it, the revolving fund, has been drawn straight from Mondragon. And the linking of different co- ops rather than being just separate is drawn from that principle. Mondragon has not used the public or quasi- public ownership market, the hospitals and universities, buying from it. That’s not its design. So it’s problematic in some areas. Nonetheless it has a great deal to teach.

Explain what happens to the profits? Are they plowed back into these efforts or are they paid out to the workers?

It’s critical, because in the early period of worker co-ops and worker ownership, they did not make provision for this problem. So if you pay out all the profits, what happens is that you don’t have investment and new technologies and new equipment. So most modern worker co-ops have a provision that a certain percentage has to be plowed back into investment and new technology and research, otherwise you’re going to fall behind. So most of them now do that.

I think a lot of people are familiar with the going-local movement. There has been an increase in farmers’ markets and what are called CSAs, community-supported agriculture, and food co-ops, all coming under this rubric of going local. But there’s much more than just the food aspect to it, isn’t there?

That’s an allied kind of vision, I think, building around the notion of local community. So there are various forms of new currencies that are trying to break the hold of the dollar. Many parts of the country are experimenting with that such as Ithaca, New York. There is a big one in the Berkshires and elsewhere in the country. The local merchants will take these paper “dollars” and recirculate them to rebuild the local economy. That’s partly what I was talking about. When I say internal empire, I mean the cities are dying within different parts of the country, the local areas. And one way to reverse it is agriculture, another is small co-ops, another is these currencies that say buy local, increase the local multiplier.

Notice that the vision there is communitarian: it’s community, not simply worker ownership, which is a syndicalist model. It has a very different flavor to it. I think there’s going to be a mix of these two different directions. And certainly political alliances are being built between the worker ownership model and the community kind of green model. There’s a lot going on at the grass- roots level where these things are coming together.

You say the appeal of many of these ideas that we’re talking about such as cooperatives reaches across traditional left-right political divisions. What’ s the evidence of that? And where does the Tea Party factor in?

I had a very strange experience recently, because I was asked to come talk to the Chamber of Commerce, of all places, in one of the suburbs of Washington. And I was describing things like what’s going on in Cleveland, the worker-owned model, and the hospitals buy from it and they stabilize and it builds up the tax base. And I pointed out that the local small businessmen like it because it helps them, too, more customers.

And here’s the Chamber of Commerce saying, “That’s fantastic. We ought to do that here.” Everyone at this particular meeting said, “That’s a great thing. Why can’t we do that here? It will help the community, help the tax base. That’s a good thing to do. It will recycle money.” That same evening I was talking to radical organizers in Baltimore, and exactly the same response. It has a way of speaking to different groups.

Again, it has to make sense. It gets beyond rhetoric. We’re changing, in this case, the ownership of the means of production, if you like, towards a collective ownership structure that is worker-owned. Done in an intelligent way, it will help them and the community. People, even very conservative people, at the local level, not the ideologues, like the idea that why shouldn’t everybody own parts of their work. This is a positive thing, not a negative thing, when you get down to the nitty-gritty. It doesn’t mean to say that the national ideologues don’t have very different ideas and propaganda. And the Tea Party, you can find ideologues, obviously. It isn’t quite clear where they break down on this. But the experience I’ve had and the experience of many people I know is, in many of these local areas what looks to be quite radical in fact, when done intelligently, when you’ve done your homework, makes sense to people. And it ought to make sense. If what people who care about changing this system want doesn’t make sense, you shouldn’t do it. So it’s very important to understand that if you can’t explain it to an ordinary citizen, why what you’re proposing is a better way of doing things in life, then you probably don’t know what you’re talking about.

Rational, intellectual arguments aside, that make perfect sense, still many people are not persuaded. This is any entrenched economic system, and there’s fear of change. How do you overcome that fear?

I think what’s changed in my lifetime is that the pain levels have gotten to a place where people now know personally or in their family or in their friends or in their neighbors something has to change or it’s going to get worse. That’s a big deal when that happens in a society, that you get beyond talk to see the pain levels change. People have a really different way of listening, when everything else is failing and you begin to offer both an explanation and answers that might build up. Even if building over time, even if there’s a long developmental process, even if that’s necessary, you find people listen differently and talk differently because of the pain levels and the failures.

But given the in extremis financial situation that millions are in right now, the unemployment, the foreclosures and the like, is there that kind of space in terms of time? Can we wait during what you’re suggesting might be a decades-long process?

The answer is no and yes. That is to say, of course we can’t wait. The pain levels are terrible. There either is a path forward that we can make or the pain will get worse. So it’s an agonizing reality. It’s a horrible experience that’s going on when the society goes through the wringer as we are going through the wringer.

The choice is to try to get to build away out of it or let it get worse. So, no, there’s not enough time, and, yes, that’s the only way forward.

You mentioned ideologues. George Will is certainly one such ideologue in the corporate media. He’s a widely circulated columnist. He writes about redistribution in extremely pejorative terms. To him it’s tantamount to a Stalinist gulag and a code word for a socialist takeover and elimination of so-called American freedoms.

That is pure ideology, as far as I’m concerned. There is a concern that a state can be too powerful. The conservatives were right to worry about a state that’s too powerful. Fair enough. And very often liberals and radicals didn’t take seriously the dangers of statism. I give them that and I think we ought to respect that, in genuine conservatives.

I did a book on this with Lew Daly called Unjust Deserts. If you look at the sources of wealth in America and in virtually all countries, overwhelmingly it is technological change that makes the difference.

That is to say, in 1790, if you go from then till now, one person can now produce 40 to 50 times as much per hour. That’s where all the wealth comes from, this increase in productivity. Who gets to benefit from that? Everybody is working as hard. It’s not a question of envy and greed.

That’s a social construction. Indeed, think of Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. They would have been nowhere, literally nowhere, without the Internet. Who paid for the Internet? Taxpayers paid for it. And the development of all the schools that led to the place where you could actually develop the knowledge for the Internet, who paid for that? The American people paid for that.

You can go right down the list and find that virtually all of what is modern wealth, the cream of which is taken off at the top, is a social construction. So that the source of what we’re having is not some guy who did a wonderful thing. People did do creative things such as Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. But their contribution is like a pebble on top of a Gibraltar of both taxpayer creation and historic creation of generations that created chemistry and physics and math, without which you couldn’t do anything.

Think of it this way. If the technological changes that come from both social processes and government processes continue at the rate they have been continuing in the last century, in 2100 the income levels will be something like seven times as much as they now are— none of which will have been due to the work of the people then, all of which will be the construction of taxpayer investment and social development and science and resources that they get to rip off then. They won’t have done any more work. So when George Will says this, it seems to me blatantly ignorant of the sources of wealth and who gets to control them.

There should be, perhaps, a study on really existing capitalism, not this laissez faire fantasy that is put forth in economics departments at Harvard and other learned institutions of higher education. You could add to that list of the Internet that it was taxpayer money that paid for avionics, the jet planes that we are flying, the airports, pharmaceuticals and all the medicine and vaccines developed at the National Institutes of Health. So there’s this really existing capitalism and then there’s the fantasy version of capitalism.

Exactly. The easy part is when you begin looking at pharmaceuticals, the jet airplane, radar, the sources of the computer. Bill Gates was under contract at MIT when he first started doing all of the developmental work. That’s one part of it. The other part is, schools and high schools, bringing the vast majority of the people to the level where they can actually create and invent, is all social investment. So I think that’s even more important than the easy ones to understand, like the computer and the Internet.

I’m looking at the pie chart of where income tax money really goes. It’s the U.S. federal budget for 2010. It’s published by the War Resisters League in New York. Anyone can access it at warresisters.org. What does this pie chart tell you about where money is going?

Certainly the military is a big piece of it, 30% on this chart; past military, 18%; general government, 8%; physical resources, infrastructure, 6%; human resources, 38%, but that means Social Security and health care primarily, and Medicare, which are being paid for out of your very, very regressive taxes, working taxes. The actual spending, federal government programs are financed in two ways. And it’s worse at the state and local level, which use the sales tax often. We have payroll taxes, which are Medicare and Medicaid, which is extremely regressive. That is to say, it’s $107,000 now, capped, so that anything above that just doesn’t get taxed. Which is amazingly regressive, when you think about it. And then the income tax, which has gotten worse and worse and more regressive as time goes on. I’m obviously not a Republican, but I think we ought to go back to Eisenhower’s income tax, because in the greatest American economic boom, the post-war boom, when Eisenhower was president, the marginal tax rate for people at the top was 91%. Now it’s down to 35-37%, depending on which year.

There has been a major change in the distribution of income, where the top 1% has gone from 10% of the income to 23%. Now, because of the recession, it’s down a little lower than that. Somebody lost that income, the other 99%. And then the tax rate went down on the top 99%. Mitt Romney’s being taxed at 15% because it’s all investment income. They tax working-class income and worker income at 20% and 25% and up to 35%, but if you make your money by investment, 15%. It’s wonderful to see an illustration in the national arena. Economists know this, but now the public is treated to the inside knowledge. Hey, he’s only being taxed 15% and I’m being taxed 30%. What’s going on here?

“Worker Owners of America, Unite” was the title of your New York Times. You say, “A long era of economic stagnation could well lead to a profound national debate about an America that is dominated neither by giant corporations nor by socialist bureaucrats. It would be a fitting next direction for a troubled nation that has long styled itself as of and by and for the people.” What are the prospects of that vision being realized?

All great revolutions look impossible before they happen. That isn’t to say great revolutions always happen. But it is to say, if you look at the folks who started the civil rights movement, the odds in Mississippi in 1930 and 1940 of achieving a civil rights revolution appeared to be far worse to people at the time. They would hang you from a tree if you made any kind of trouble. The odds even in the Middle East to break loose were greater than anything we face. The odds of the women’s movement. The greatest cultural revolution in modern advanced history, the cultural revolution of women in the last 40 years, I can still remember when it was not possible for women to be taken seriously in work, life, culture. That’s a radical shift that looked impossible. It is not to say it’s inevitable. But I think that a cool assessment from this historian and political economist is that it is within the range of reasonable possibilities that a transformation can be achieved and that this next two to three decades is the prehistory of such a transformation. In any event, all of the positive changes that would be necessary are useful to do, no matter what. So I’m cautious on it, but I think, there is a finite, realistic, and very much worth doing chance to build the basis of a next possibility.

You say America Beyond Capitalism is “a tool box” of practical precedents that can be built upon.

That’s what I think is very important, to realize that we can get beyond rhetoric, to the thousands of things on the ground that the press doesn’t cover, which alter the nature of the power base of most systems, who owns capital, and do it in a very American way. So I think there’s a lot that you can do. Worker-owned companies, neighborhood corporations, municipal ownership, state ownership. Twenty-seven states already own shares in companies and take ownership positions. That’s another interesting thing in America. There are state banks. There are something like 20 states that are considering single payer legislation. In another 15 states there are movements for state banking, public banking. So if you look beneath the headlines, and as the pain level grows, there are very real practical embodiments of a different idea, the democratizing of wealth. As I said, that’s the prehistory. That breaks the idea of system. That opens up a different debate. That’s not the history of the next transformation; that’s the step that’s necessary without which you can’t get to the next stage.

But it’s very well underway, if you look beneath the headlines.

(Due to time constraints some portions of the interview were not included in the national broadcast. Those portions are included in this transcript.)

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©2012

The tax code: Class warfare

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 19:06:26 GMT

interview with Richard Wolff
by David Barsaminan
New York, NY
December 29, 2011

available from Alternative Radio

You can listen to Richard Wolff speak for himself here.

Richard Wolff is Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and currently a visiting professor at the New School in New York. The New York Times called him “America’s most prominent Marxist economist.” He is the author of numerous books including Capitalism Hits the Fan and Occupy the Economy with David Barsamian.

In a time of acute economic stress, where municipalities, states, and the federal government are pressed to generate more revenues to cover such things as unemployment insurance and providing basic services, talk about the Tax Code and how it is structured, and about property taxes, real estate taxes.

This is an immense topic, the structure of taxes in the U.S., and you would think that our population was reasonably well educated about our tax system given how often it comes up in conversation, given how often politicians rail about the tax system in efforts to get votes and so on. But the truth of it is that Americans know very little about their tax system. And when you try to explain why, there really is no explanation that I’ve ever found anywhere near as persuasive as the following.

If you actually understood the structure of taxes in the U.S., you would be so angry as a working, average American that it’s not clear that you would tolerate the society to continue the way it operates. So maybe there’s a method to the madness of not teaching people about something they seem to care about. So let’s begin.

Taxes are levied by the government on a variety of entities, and you have to keep that separate. For example, taxes are levied on income, on the money you get; they’re levied on corporations for the money they get from selling their goods and services; and they’re levied on individuals, like you and me, on the income we get, the income from our wages and salaries, the income from our interest, if we have a savings account, the income on dividends or capital gains. Whatever kind of income we get, the governments tax us. So income is one thing that’s taxed. The second thing that’s taxed is expenditures. We get taxed when we spend money, for example, a sales tax when we buy a shirt or an excise tax when we fill our car with gas or buy a bottle of beer, and so forth. And the third thing that gets taxed is wealth, property. Let’s keep them separate. You tax income, you tax expenditure, and you tax wealth. Those are three different things, and they have to be kept separate.

Things get a bit more complicated when you discover that different governments tax different things. So, for example, the federal government taxes income. State governments tax income, but particularly also expenditures. And local governments, cities and towns, tax mostly property. So the different levels tend to focus on different things to tax.

All of us pay all of these taxes, so the notion that sometimes you hear people claim, “Gee, it’s not fair for us to be double-taxed,” is silly. We’re all taxed many times. For example, when I earn my income, there’s money withheld from my paycheck to pay income tax to the federal government and to the state government in which I live. I keep the rest of the money. But then when I go and buy a shirt, I pay a sales tax. So now I’m taxed a second time by the state in which I live with an expenditure tax. But on top of that, out of the money left over, I still have to pay a property tax on the house I own, on the car I own. So the notion of being double-taxed or triple-taxed is not something that’s fair or unfair, because it’s universal. Every one of us pays multiple taxes almost every day in one way or another.

Let’s look at them. And let’s start at the bottom. Let’s start with property taxes, because they’re very, very interesting in the U.S. The federal government does not tax your property: it doesn’t tax your house, it doesn’t tax your car, that is, on the property it doesn’t tax it, it doesn’t tax your bank account, it doesn’t tax your stocks and bonds. Those are properties that you have. It doesn’t tax your land. Neither does the state. Who taxes your property? Your local town, your local city.

Here’s how it works. In every town and city they have an official called a tax assessor. His job, her job, is to go around and figure out who’s got what property so that the city or the town can tax that property. But here’s the interesting part and here’s the first example of what people might think about and how angry they would get if they understood it. The job of the tax assessor is to assess the value of the property subject to taxation. So the tax assessor typically will look at your land, if you own any, for example, the land value of the house that sits on that land, if you own your home. So they will go and they will do a study of your land value, of your house’s value, if you’re a business and you have an inventory, you use machines. And then the tax assessor will say, “Okay, this company has this property, this person has that property.”

And you have to give the local town 2%, 4%, 6%. Some percentage of the value of that property has to be paid in taxes to the community.

Why is this interesting? Fundamentally, for the following reason. It is the normal, traditional practice in the U.S. to count as taxable property only a portion of the property, not all property is taxed. Many kinds of property are not taxed at all. The ones that are taxed are land, housing, business structures, and business inventories and automobiles. Those are the major kinds of property. This is interesting because what I’ve left out, all stocks and bonds are exempted from property tax. There is no property tax on stocks and bonds in the U.S., not by the federal government, not by the state government, and not by the local government. There is no property tax on your savings account. Money, that’s property you own. I own a savings account that has $50,000 in it, that’s my property. I’ve accumulated that over the years, I’ve inherited it. However I got it, it’s part of my property. To show you how dramatic this is, if I have a house worth $200,000 in Yipsidoodle, Mississippi, I have to pay a property tax to the town of Yipsidoodle on that property. If I sell that house for $200,000 and instead of having a house, I invest that $200,000 in tax and bonds, my tax bill to Yipsidoodle, Mississippi, is zero. There is no property tax. Neither by Yipsidoodle, Mississippi, nor by the state of the Mississippi nor by the U.S.

What kind of a society would tax some property and not other property, when we all know that the kinds of property average Americans have, if they have any at all, is a house and a car. And that’s what’s mainly taxed in America. Whereas what the rich have, that makes them rich, are stocks, bonds, and cash, which are not subject to property tax. You would revolutionize the financial conditions of every American city and town if its property tax were simply extended from the property now taxed— land, houses, business inventories, and so on—to tax also stocks, bonds, and savings accounts. If you want a quick solution to our problems as a nation, that would be one. And even if you didn’t believe in that solution, it’s worth it to think what it means that we have a so-called property tax that exempts the property of the richest amongst us. If ever there was an example of the point of occupy Wall Street’s 99% versus 1%, there it is.

There are other tax exemptions of property. Here are some examples. You will have to decide which of these are suitable dinner conversation. We do not tax the property of religious institutions. Every piece of land upon which a church, a mosque, or a synagogue sit is exempted from property tax. The buildings of all these churches are exempted from property tax. Here’s what that means. If you live in a town that has lots of religious institutions, it means that lots of the property is owned by somebody, a church, who doesn’t have to pay any tax to the community. The local community still has to deliver to these entities: police services, fire services, public education for their children services. All the things that cities and towns do with the money they raised has to be provided to the local churches and synagogues and mosques. But they don’t have to pay anything for it. There’s no way out of that other than to understand that if you deliver free services to tax-exempt properties, it means the rest of the community has to pay extra to deliver those services to those parts of the community that do not pay for them themselves.

This can become really bizarre if you have, in addition to the churches and synagogues and mosques who are tax-exempt from property tax in a town, the misfortune of having, I don’t know, a big, powerful, rich, private university. Here I can use as an example the city of New Haven in Connecticut, whose largest landowner and whose richest citizen is Yale University. Yale University, which has over 200 buildings in New Haven, and is the largest employer, the largest landowner, and by far the richest citizen of New Haven, pays no property taxes on its educational property, which is about 95% of all the property it has. That means the rest of the people of New Haven must pay more to deliver the police services, the fire services, the education for all those Yale employees, children, etc. And remember, the City of New Haven educates these people, who then go on to work for Yale and are productive employees for Yale because the City has paid for their education from kindergarten through high school and perhaps beyond. Yale pays nothing for that.

Here’s the irony, and it’s emblematic of what this all means. Yale is considered the third or fourth richest university on earth. It lives in New Haven, which is counted by the U.S. Census Bureau as one of the ten poorest cities in the U.S. So here we have it. New Haven, Connecticut, one of the 169 towns that make up the state of Connecticut, has the highest property tax rate of all 169 towns in Connecticut because its poor citizens have to pay higher property taxes to deliver free public services to Yale, that makes no payments for them. That’s called Robin Hood in reverse: the poor people of New Haven are subsidizing the third or fourth richest university on earth, who last year counted as its endowment, its wealth, something on the order of 18 or 19 billion—that’s with a B—dollars. That is an unbelievable story, in which a property tax system takes from the poor and brings it to the rich.

So that’s the property tax. Long ago critics of this system have said, all of the so-called public finance problems of American communities could be solved if you simply extended the property tax to include at least stocks and bonds of private individuals. By the way, we would be taxing those most able to pay, because only those most able to pay have significant quantities of stocks and bonds. If you didn’t want to punish poor people who have a little bit of stocks and bonds, you could always make the first $10,000 or $20,000 or $30,000 or $40,000 or $50,000 worth of stocks and bonds exempt, if you wanted to give those people a break. But the idea that people with tens of millions of dollars of stocks and bonds pay no property tax on that property while you tax the person with a 10-year- old jalopy for having that car is really outrageous. If the cities and towns could tap that property revenue, they would need a lot less help from the state governments, which in turn would need a lot less help from the federal government. So it would be a boon to the whole tax system if you just corrected the injustice of our property tax exemptions.

Let me turn next to the expenditure taxes. Most of those are called sales taxes. They’re taxes that you pay when you buy something. The criticism of them that ought to be made is that they make no effort to discriminate according to your ability to pay. If Rockefeller goes in and buys a T-shirt, he pays exactly the same tax as you or I do. So clearly there’s no effort to distinguish among them. There would be lot of ways of doing that, if you wanted to keep to a sales tax, one of which would be to make the rate change with the price of the item. So if you’re buying a very expensive automobile, the sales tax would go up relative to what you pay for a T-shirt or a pair of shoes, and so on. So you would be able to build in a capacity to pay, the way we do with our income tax. So the first rule would be, let’s talk about that.

The other thing about an expenditure tax is that it has built into it a fundamental inequality. Most Americans, for example, have to spend pretty much everything they earn, because they don’t earn enough to save. If you get an income that you have to spend all of, you’re going to get whacked by taxes twice: first you have to pay an income tax on all the money you get; and then, since you have to spend all of your money for food, clothing, shelter, and so on, you get whacked by the sales tax when you spend it. Compare that to a person who gets a very high income.

What that person can do is save some of their income and not spend it. Every dollar you save is a dollar that doesn’t have to pay a sales tax because you’re not spending it. So, for example, if you save money in this country and you use it to buy stocks and bonds, there’s no sales tax on that. No government comes in and says, you ought to pay a sales tax on buying a share of stock, just the way you do on buying a pair of shoes or getting a hamburger. That is also as grotesque inequality that rewards people whose income is high enough that they don’t have to spend all of it.

Let me turn finally to income taxes. They are by far the largest tax that Americans deal with. The federal government basically relies on income taxes. I’ll come to that. But many states also have income taxes, and there are even a few cities across the U.S., for example, New York City, that has a local, municipal income tax. It means, for example, that if you’re a resident of New York City, you pay a tax on your income to New York City, a tax on the same income to New York state, and a tax on that same income to the federal government. You pay three levels of taxes. Most Americans pay only to the federal government or to the federal government and to whatever state they’re in. But there are quite a few states in the U.S. that do not have an income tax. A minority of states, for sure, but still a significant number. And some of our bigger states, such as Texas, are like that.

Let’s look at the income tax. First of all, I’m going to focus only on the federal government because that’s the major place we pay our income taxes. The first thing to understand is that the income tax is the only tax in the U.S. at the federal level that has built into it the notion that you ought to pay more if you’re rich than if you’re not. We call that a graduated income tax. It’s sometimes referred to as a progressive income tax. The basic way it works is this: Everybody pays the same percentage on the first $10,000 of income, then everybody pays a slightly higher percentage on the next $10,000 or $20,000, and so it goes. The higher the income you get, the higher the percentage on the last portion of it. The federal income tax in the U.S. today peaks at 35%, so if you earn above whatever it is these days—I haven’t looked at the numbers recently—say, $70,000—then every dollar over that that you earn, you must give 35 cents to uncle Sam and you keep the other 65 cents for yourself. That’s the top income tax bracket, it’s called. So at least we see there some effort to tax people according to their ability to pay. I think that principle is very important. It’s been the principle of the income tax now for an entire century. The income tax began around 1910, so here we are, literally 100 years later, and nobody, however conservative, has basically been able to get rid of that. The American people, Republicans and Democrats alike, have endorsed a progressive structure of the income tax.

However, rich people, who don’t want to pay taxes and who I’ve already told you don’t pay property taxes on their stocks and bonds and get out of paying sales taxes by having enough income to put a lot of it into savings and investments, have not limited themselves to getting out of local and state taxes. They’ve also worked on the federal level. Let me show you how.

First, it’s interesting that progressivity stops at 35%. Why in the world does it stop there? Why doesn’t it continue? $20,000 more, you pay 40%; $20,000 above that, you pay 48%, and so on. Why does it stop at 35%? That’s, of course, a tremendous benefit to the rich— people who earn 200,000, 400,000, 800,000, 1 million, 2 million, 6 million, 10 million. And we have Americans in those categories, lots of them. Why are they not required to pay higher steps? That is a perfectly reasonable, logical question for a tax system that says it’s progressive but stops being progressive at a relatively low standard of, say, $70,000 or $80,000 and at a relatively low tax rate.

To drive my point home, let show you that at other points in American history we have been very different. For example, in the 1950s and 1960s, the top income tax bracket that the highest income tax payers had to pay was 91%. Let me make clear, everybody, say, in the 1950s and 1960s who got over whatever the top bracket was, say, $70,000 or $60,000, every dollar a man or woman got over that, they had to give Uncle Sam 91 cents, they got to keep 9. I’m not describing the Soviet Union or China or Cuba or places like that. I’m describing the United States not that long ago.

Something happened between the 1950s and 1960s and today which can only be described as a mammoth tax break, giveaway, to the richest Americans. Their top bracket went from 91% to 35%. No average American ever saw in those years a tax break even remotely that large or enormous. So there’s no way out of the conclusion that over the last 40 to 50 years the number one beneficiaries of tax cuts in the United States were the richest Americans. Part of the reason the gap between rich and poor has become so extreme in the U.S. is precisely because of the success of the rich in buying the political muscle needed to reduce their tax burdens so dramatically.

But that’s not all. Alongside the cut in the tax rates of American individuals, let’s remember that the income tax also falls on corporations. And they, too, have been busy shifting the burden of taxes off of them. The way I summarize that is with a simple statistic. In the 1940s, the end of the Second World War, for every dollar the federal government got from individuals it got about $1.50 in income taxes on the profits of corporations. In 2010 the same number reads as follows: For every dollar the federal government gets from individual income taxes, it gets 25 cents from corporate income taxes. In other words, corporations have reduced the burden of taxes drastically and shifted it over on to individuals.

Now put these two things together.

Corporations shifted the burden of taxes on the individuals, and rich individuals shifted the burden of their taxes onto the middle and the bottom. There we have a large portion of what is the economic history of the U.S. in terms of taxation over recent years.

The solution, therefore, to the tax problems of our federal government not having enough money to maintain a health service, not having enough money to provide decent Unemployment Insurance, of cities and towns not having enough money to keep their streets clean, to build proper public housing and all the rest is not about there being enough money. The real issue is and should be addressed as a country that has systematically reduced the taxes it used to get both from business and from the rich. The only thing that’s worse than having cut taxes on those who can afford it the most is to think that now the way to solve that problem is to cut the services that the middle and lower class need, because that is punishing the victim rather than the beneficiary of what’s been done with our taxes. So as I said at the beginning, if Americans understood even part of what I’ve just summarized, you would have a tax revolt of a very different kind, of a very different intensity than what we’ve seen.

When somebody goes to have a cup of coffee and a sandwich for lunch, they can’t use that expenditure as a tax write-off. But when a CEO or some bankers go to The Four Seasons, a very expensive restaurant here in New York, for lunch, they can write that off as a business expense.

It’s one of the many examples of how the Tax Code, which, by the way, takes hundreds and hundreds of pages, if you ever actually get it from the IRS—all those hundreds of pages have to do with countless details and regulations and rules that have been written into the Tax Code under the pressure of lobbyists for corporations, for rich people, and so on, to get them little gimmicks that will alleviate the taxes.

Let me address the big one that you referred to. Years ago, the Internal Revenue Service said to the mass of Americans, Look, you have the right to go and use the Tax Code and find each and every gimmick that might conceivably be used by you to lower your tax bill. But you don’t have the expertise, the language is legalese, hard to understand, and you don’t pay enough taxes for it to pay for you to hire a tax accountant or a lawyer to do that work for you, because it will cost you more to pay for that specialist than you will get as a saving in taxes. So we give you something called a general exemption. We give you the right to write off 15% or something like that of your income as somehow a summary of all your expenses. That’s probably more generous to you than you would be able to afford if you went through the trouble of finding little gimmicks or paid someone to do it.

But for rich people that’s not case. Rich people earn enough that for them paying $5,000, $10,000 to an accountant to make sure that every gimmick is used is well worth it, because they will save you 20 times what it costs you to hire them. They, therefore, go and not only get those gimmicks written into the law but make sure they take advantage of them.

Here’s how your example works. One of the gimmicks is to say that if you have an expense that is part of your business income, well, then it can be counted against that income. So, for example, if you had to spend $300 on a lunch to win a contract for your company, then the $300 for lunch is an expense of getting your income, and you’re allowed to deduct that from the income because you only get what’s left over from the profit. So now it means that an executive who goes and has a $300 lunch with a client can say, “This was an expense,” and that reduces their income tax. You can’t do that when you get a sandwich because it doesn’t pay you, you don’t make enough. But a rich person does.

That gets even more fancy because, for example, that same rich person can have a property, say, in some elegant resort in Vail, Colorado, where they go skiing, and they take a client from time to time. And therefore they claim, “The only reason I have this lovely place with a butler and maid and a chauffeur to get me from the airport to there is to do business.” And the little detail that they take their family five times a year also for having a good time, well, that’s a little detail no one quite pays.

Basically, we have to understand that those with the resources have been able over the years to rewrite, to add to, to modify the tax code in an innumerable number of ways to create for themselves opportunities to get out of paying taxes that simply have not been created on anything like that scale for the average American. As a result, you have the same thing in the existing Tax Code that I already described in terms of all the tax exemptions, where you don’t even have to pay anything.

And one of them is this whole notion of charging off allowable expenses of your life. The average person doesn’t do it, using the standard exemption, because it doesn’t pay. But if you’re rich enough, it pays, so you get out of it. That’s, by the way, why not only can you deduct fancy apartments in Colorado or costly meals in a restaurant, but you can do all kind of other things.

One of my favorite examples is, using this thing called the charitable deduction, you can give something you own to a charity of some sort and you can deduct the market price of what you gave them from your own income and reduce your income tax. This has led to some creative manipulation among wealthy institutions and wealthy people. Suppose you are wealthy enough to have a very expensive painting by Pablo Picasso hanging in your living room. And you realize that you’re earning so much money, you need some deductions, you need to reduce the amount of money for tax purposes so your tax bill is reduced. Here’s what you can do. Suppose you earn $10 million a year, you’re some hotsy-totsy executive, and you have this Picasso on your wall. Let’s say it’s worth $1 million, which many of his paintings are, they’re worth much more than that. So you have a $1 million Picasso, a little sketch. You can give it to—I don’t know, let’s pick Harvard University. Harvard University and you will work out the following deal, and this is legal by the Tax Code. You give to Harvard the painting this year, 2012, and that gives you the exemption this year. So suppose this year you earn $1 million but you give this painting to Harvard in this year worth $1 million. You then take the $1 million worth of painting you give to Harvard, deduct it from your $1 million worth of income this year, which means you have no income for tax purposes at all. The $1 million you actually earned has deducted from it the $1 million worth of painting you give to Harvard. So your tax bill this year will be nothing, even though you earned $1 million.

But that’s only the beginning. Now step two. Harvard, to whom you have given the painting, has the legal right to lend it back to you. Oh. And for how long? They can legally lend it to you for the rest of your life. Therefore, it never leaves your wall in your living room, it never goes to Harvard. This is all done on paper. It stays right on your wall, and it will stay there for the next 10 years or 20 years, however long you live. And then when you die, it will go to Harvard. Harvard is happy because it will eventually get it and it costs them nothing. You’re happy because now, many years before you die, you get the full value of that exemption. That’s all legal. That all had to be written into the Tax Code to make it legal.

That’s what’s done in a thousand ways to make rich people have—what? The results you read in the newspaper from time to time when some inquiring reporter goes and checks big corporations or wealthy individuals and discovers that they don’t pay anything like the taxes they’re technically supposed to pay. That was the famous example last year when Warren Buffet, one of the richest men on earth, explained that he pays as lower tax out of his income than the secretaries in his office do, and that’s because he has a tax accountant who takes advantage of all his expensive meals, all his fancy jets, all his multiple homes around the world, and makes them all into the legal expenses that reduce his burden.

The sales tax is often called regressive by those who are critical of it. Maybe just to give one example, let’s say you pick up a very expensive piece of electronic equipment for your home, not something essential to one’s existence. But then you have the whole issue of food being taxed, which is hardly a discretionary or luxury item.

Again, a sales tax can either be regressive, namely, it hits “everybody” at the same rate, precisely what the federal income tax does not do, or you could make it progressive. There are many ways of making it progressive. For example, you could charge a higher sales-tax rate for more expensive items. So on something that costs, say, between zero and $100, you pay a 1% sales tax, something that costs between $100 and $500, you pay—etc., etc. That could be easily done. Or even better—and that has been done in a few places where people mobilize to get it done—classes of items are simply exempted from the sales tax, for example, food. Or for a while many states have had a situation that any article of clothing worth, say, less than $50 is just not taxed. And the cash registers at department stores are set up so that if you buy something for $40, there is no tax part of that. And so on and so on. So if you wanted to make it progressive, that would be easy to do. But you would have to mobilize the political force of the mass of people to get that done. If you don’t, you leave the field to the wealthy, who use their tax lawyers and accountants and their political contributions to get a Tax Code that tilts in their favor. That’s what we have.

Grover Norquist, a Washington lobbyist and operative, has been almost single-handedly successful in demonizing taxation. He’s also managed to change the actual vocabulary. For example, the estate tax is now called the death tax. When you tell that to an average person who is going to die, they’ll probably think, I don’t want to have a tax when I die. But that’s not what this is about.

It’s clever to use names. It occurs to me sometimes, we ought to call the property tax a privilege tax. If we called it a privilege tax, everybody would wonder, whose privilege, and then we would explain to them the privilege of all the people who don’t pay property tax, whether they’re rich universities or folks with stock and bond portfolios and so on. Yes, the whole demonization of taxes has been brilliant, because you’re playing on people’s resentment that they have to pay any tax by trying to frame the issue as whether we pay or don’t pay rather than what the issue really is, which is who pays and who gets out of paying. If you framed it that way, then, of course, the logic would be, gee, who is getting out of it? And then people like me could explain exactly who is being privileged in this way and who isn’t. So, yes, I think Norquist and other tax battlers have been able to basically pull the wool over a lot of people’s eyes by not facing up to the real history, which is why I stress it as a historical example, in which one part of the community shifts the burden of taxes off of itself and on to the other part.

I think another example that might be interesting to people is Social Security. That’s a very big part of what the government has to do now. It has to help people who have done a whole lifetime’s worth of work. They retire at age 65. They have had money withheld by the government for their entire working life. And that then provides them with a pension of sorts. The pension is very modest. Social Security does not provide very much money to people. But it’s a lot better than getting nothing. And people are kind of grateful in America. It’s a very popular program, and always has been, to provide some help not only for the people who reach age 65 but, obviously, for their children, who therefore don’t have as big a burden to take care of their parents as they would otherwise have. So it really doesn’t just benefit the older folks; it benefits everybody in the society.

We don’t have a progressive Social Security system. We actually have a regressive one. Let me explain. Under the current system, the Social Security tax, the money raised to pay pensions and to help people who have debilitating injuries or loss of a parent, things like that, we don’t raise that money in a progressive way, we raise it in a regressive way. It’s very unfair, and I think it’s an important thing to understand, especially these days, when so much is made of the claim, which is false, that the Social Security system is in some kind of financial trouble, can’t pay its way, will dry up, things like that.

So let me explain. Under the law, an individual has a certain amount of money, a certain percentage of their income, withheld for Social Security, 4.-something percent, and the employer has an equal share withheld that they have to pay. So you get put into your account the 50% of what’s put into your account that’s taken out of your salary and an equal amount matched by your employer.

Here’s the interesting thing. It’s only on the first $107,000 of income. On the first $107,000 you earn, everybody pays the same percentage. If you earn $10,000 a year, $40,000 a year, $80,000 a year, up to $107,000, you have the same percentage, 4%. So there’s no progressivity there. But now it gets worse. On every dollar you earn over $107,000, nothing is withheld. So notice again, if you’re rich, if your income is $150,000 or $200,000 or $300,000 or $600,000 or $1 million or $2 million or $5 million, all of the money you earn over $107,000 has no Social Security withheld from you at all. And if you think that’s unfair, you’re just at the beginning. Social Security taxes are withheld only on your wages and salaries, not on any other kind of income. If you have dividends you earn from your stocks, interest you earn from your bonds, capital gains you make by buying stocks and selling them, or rentals you get, if you own property, all of those kinds of income have no Social Security deduction at all. It’s the rich in America who get those kinds of incomes. So there again, you see that the Social Security system puts the burden of taxes on everybody who earns $107,000 or less from wages and salaries. Everybody else, the rich, are exempted. It’s unfair, it’s not progressive. It’s the opposite. It’s regressive.

The Occupy Wall Street movement has certainly brought attention to some of the inequities and contradictions of the Tax Code, but in general, why is so little known about the intricacies of the Tax Code?

I think partly, and the least important, it’s complicated. Again I remind you, take a look at the Tax Code books issued by the Internal Revenue Service and you will see. These are tomes. These are mammoth volumes of immense numbers of pages. The Tax Code is effectively reworked almost every year. If you’re wealthy enough to use a tax accountant, you will get a memo from the tax accountant at least once or twice a year simply letting you know what some of the major changes are each year that might affect you if you’re rich. This is a kind of income that is now more or less taxed. And a clever tax accountant, well paid by a rich client will move assets, will get rid of a horse ranch and buy a painting or get rid of a painting and make a contribution to some university, in order to take advantage of the constant changes. Most Americans have no incentive and don’t have the resources to take advantage of this.

Remember, all the time, interests looking for a new tax break will pay high-priced lobbyists to do the work in Washington or the state house of a state to get the Tax Code adjusted, to get the regulation shifted, to get a new law passed. This adds up. That’s why particular groups have what we’ve come to call loopholes—all those little arrangements that get slipped into a bill at the last stages of it going through passage. Just before it reaches the president’s desk or the governor’s desk for signature, a little amendment is stuck in. Nobody pays much attention, because it’s such a little deal that only 16 sugar farms will be able to take advantage of it. But they will save hundreds of millions of dollars, so it will have paid them to spend $10 million giving some lobbying firm in Washington the ability to hire 50 people to bother the six congressmen and congresswomen they need to vote in a different way, to give them all kind of contributions and all the rest of it to get the thing written that nobody will notice but will save them $100 million over the next five years. And by them saving $100 million of taxes, we all have to remember, the government has to make up somewhere else the money it’s not going to be getting from the people who have gotten that loophole. You add that up, all the people getting loopholes, that’s why we pay the taxes, those of us who can’t get that kind of benefit, under this system.

Lotteries, now run by most states are, you say, disguised forms of taxation. Explain what you mean.

Over the last several decades the American tax system has faced a revolt, understandably, by the middle- and lower- income people, who pay a disproportionate amount of taxes given what the tax system is supposed to do, which is in the sense of the federal income tax, tax people according to their ability to pay. In all the ways I’ve described, that goal, that objective, which is in the interest of most Americans, has been systematically thwarted, frustrated, and indeed the opposite has been produced. Therefore, it’s not surprising that Americans, in general, are angry about taxes, want their taxes cut.

This has left the state in a kind of difficulty. How are you going to deliver all the services, particularly to the rich and the corporations who want those services, if you can’t get the taxes, either from them or from an angry population, to pay for it? One solution, one avenue of dealing with this that political leaders have found is gambling, that is, to reverse the long American distaste for gambling that has made it illegal to have lotteries, to have racetracks, to have all those things in most parts of the U.S. All that has had to be chucked out the window. We can’t afford these religious taboos. The government saw a way of taxing that they didn’t have to call a tax, so they wouldn’t have to admit, Oh, we’re taxing the people. They have to get rid, however, of the taboo on gambling. Why? Because the state could then become the monopoly gambler. Those who have ever lived in an urban area in the U.S. know that the numbers racket and lotteries have long been in existence, but they have been one of the black-market activities in our society, money to be made by illegal means, whether it’s run by criminal gangs or neighborhood folks.

Over recent decades, squeezed by the mass of people, angry about the taxes that have been shifted on them, even if they don’t understand that that’s happened, the politicians came up with lotteries. Here’s a way to tax the mass of people without calling it a tax while having the mass of people kind of enjoy the whole process. It’s a politicians dream—getting money out of the mass of people without offending them, without appearing to be doing what you’re doing because that can get you voted out of office, if you levy a tax.

Here’s how it works. The government establishes a lottery. It says to the mass of people, Here. Give me your money, in the form of buy lottery tickets. I’m going to then give a tiny handful of you a ton of money and the rest of you are going to get a fantasy, a few hours in which you can say to yourself, Gee, what would life be like if I won $1 million, or whatever it is. If you look at the statistics, here’s how it works. Every government—and it’s mostly been state governments—every government that has instituted a lottery takes in more money from ticket sales than it pays out. That’s the whole point of a lottery. So what we have here is a net flow of money out of the hands of masses of individuals in to the government to help pay for what the government already is doing, whether it be schools or highway maintenance or anything else. So it is a kind of tax. It’s taking more money from people than they otherwise would have. It’s just you’ve cleverly sold them a fantasy, an imaginary moment of thinking what life would be like if they actually won the lottery.

But when you think about it, here’s two facts about it that should show you what the real meaning is. I once spent some time in the state of Connecticut, where I used to live, looking at a map of the state. It showed where people lived who had different levels of income: where the poor people lived, where the middle-income people lived, where the rich people lived. Superimposed on that map of Connecticut was a map of where lottery tickets were sold. Guess what? The lower the income level of the people, the more lottery tickets were sold. In other words, the lottery is a regressive tax: it takes much more money from middle- and lower-income people than it takes from the rich. So it not only pleased politicians to earn more money for the government, it also allowed them to do something that basically fell as a burden on middle- and, particularly, lower-income people.

Economically speaking, lotteries are also a disaster, and it’s easy to explain. What lotteries do is take $2 or $3 or $4 a day, often from poor people. Here’s what economics teaches us. The poor people and the middle- income people, who are the overwhelming majority purchasers of these lottery tickets, would have spent that money on goods and services that would have given jobs to other people. What the state does is take that money from all the little ticket sales and give a huge amount of it to two or three or four individuals, making them suddenly very rich. But here’s what we know in economics. If you’re very rich, if you’re suddenly a millionaire, a huge portion of your income will no longer be spent on goods and services, because you don’t need to, you’re now a very rich person. You will save a lot of it, you will invest a lot of it. You will buy shares of stock, you will put it in a foreign bank account. You will do all kinds of things other than using it to buy goods and services. So this is moving money from people who would have spent it and thereby created a demand for jobs and giving it all to a handful of people who will not spend a good portion of it. It is therefore the very worst thing you want to do in an economy that needs stimulation, that needs demand, that needs consumers buying things, because you’re basically invading consumption by moving money from the masses who would have spent it to a tiny number of people whose very wealth guarantees that they won’t spend a significant part of it. So it is economic nonsense. It simply solves the problem of bankrupt governments unable or, more likely, unwilling to tax the rich and the corporations who have been exempted by their lobbying and their political contributions for the last 50 years.

You say lotteries are also powerful ideological and political weapons. In what way?

They sustain illusions. They sustain that this is a system and a society in which you can become suddenly rich. It’s interesting that at a time when the job situation makes the idea of everybody becoming rich by work look further and further away, look less and less likely, people have an even greater need to turn to the fantasy of a lottery as a way to sustain the illusion that wealth, comfort are within reach. Gee, by just buying one of those little tickets that’s available at every corner store. So, yes, it sustains that notion. Remember also that all the state lottery authorities make a big point of doing public relations, giving you the picture of the mother who won the lottery so you could imagine yourself, too, like her, being a winner. So it sustains the illusion. It plays the role that used to be played by the Horatio Alger myth. You tell a story about a person who came from poverty and worked real hard, and then he or she finally made it into the ranks of the rich. This is a story you tell to offset the misery and depression of all the people who can’t do that, who never did do that. The lottery keeps that going now that the notion of working your way to wealth has become the real fantasy.

(Due to time constraints some portions of the interview were not included in the national broadcast. Those portions are included in this transcript.)

For information about obtaining CDs, MP3s, or transcripts of this or other programs, please contact:
David Barsamian
Alternative Radio
P.O. Box 551
Boulder, CO 80306-0551
(800) 444-1977
info@alternativeradio.org
www.alternativeradio.org
©2012

Crimes are crimes, no matter who does them.

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 14:52:52 GMT

Please click this link for a telling PDF: Crimes are Crimes from World Can’t Wait:

“In some respects, Obama is worse than Bush. First, because he has claimed the right to assassinate American citizens whom he suspects of ‘terrorism,’ merely on the grounds of his own suspicion or that of the CIA, something Bush never claimed publicly. Second, he says that the government can detain you indefinitely, even if you have been exonerated in a trial, and he has publicly floated the idea of ‘preventive detention.’ Third, the Obama administration, in expanding the use of unmanned drone attacks, argues that the U.S. has the authority under international law to use such lethal force and extrajudicial killing in sovereign countries with which it is not at war.”

A brief and crucial history of the United States

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 13:40:16 GMT

Check out this brief and crucial history of the United States…
In less than 23 minutes, you’ll get the big picture.
Let your life be a friction to stop the machine.

We the People

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 19:51:35 GMT

by Paul Cienfuegos
Eugene, OR
May 16, 2011

available from Alternative Radio

You can listen to Paul Cienfuegos deliver this address here.

Paul Cienfuegos lectures and leads workshops on dismantling corporate rule. He co-founded Democracy Unlimited of Humboldt County in northern California. He’s based in Portland, Oregon, where he’s working to build a community rights movement..

What I want more than anything else in the world is for we the people of these United States to figure out how to bring authentic participatory democracy to this country. I totally believe that we could create a society where local communities have the right to define what they want to look like in the future, have the right to govern themselves, the right of self-government. If cities and towns had these rights, they could pass laws that would protect their communities in a whole variety of ways: laws which would guarantee the right to defend the safety of their drinking water, laws which would guarantee the right to keep their air and their soil free from poisons, the right to decide what kind of economies they want, the right to a sustainable future with sufficient renewable energy for all, the right to have meaningful work and a livable wage.

By governing authority, I don’t just mean the right to vote for a candidate who just so happened to raise more money than their opponent did. I mean the kind of governing authority that is talked about at the beginning of every state constitution in the country. Here’s the first paragraph of the state constitution of Oregon.

Section 1. Natural rights inherent in people. We declare that all men, when they form a social compact are equal in right: that all power is inherent in the people, and all free governments are founded on their authority, and instituted for their peace, safety, and happiness; and they have at all times the right to alter, reform, or abolish the government in such manner as they may think proper.

Imagine if we the people of this state and every state started to take that language to heart and to insist that all power really is inherent in the people. I’m here to speak to you about an extraordinary political development taking place in this country in more than 120 communities in six Northeastern states—Pennsylvania, Maine, New Hampshire, Virginia, Maryland, and Massachusetts. More than 120 communities which have made a truly profound shift in the way they think about themselves. More than 120 communities which have passed historically ground- breaking local ordinances that give the people of those places the right to govern themselves, the right to decide and then to create the kind of community they want to leave to their children and grandchildren and seven generations beyond them and so on. What’s most intriguing to me is that many of these are rural, conservative, Republican communities.

I have been a community organizer for more than three decades, and this is the most exciting and profound shift in American politics I have ever seen. But before I share more details about this, I want to first explore with you the political state, the legal state, but also the emotional state of all of the other communities in this country; to reflect on what hasn’t yet happened in all of those other towns and cities, which are still feeling mostly powerless. I want to start by asking you a few questions to ponder. Why is it such a stretch for we the people of almost every community in this country to actually envision this kind of potential? Why is it such a stretch for you, the people of Eugene and neighboring towns, to not only imagine what sort of community you want to live in but actually to envision the steps you might take to get there? How did it come to pass that we the people of this country, born out of revolution, have become totally locked out of the rooms where pretty much every decision is made that affects all of our lives? And just as important a question that needs to be asked and then grappled with, what steps do we need to take to place ourselves back at the center of power, to create governing structures that offer authentic democratic decision making as the normal way of building sustainable communities together? I don’t believe we have any other choice but to grapple with these huge questions, and quickly, while there is still possibly sufficient time left to respond to the ecological crises, the social crises, and the economic crises that are engulfing us on planet Earth.

To respond boldly to these crises, we are going to have to make a kind of commitment that we’re not used to making. Here are three things we’re going to have to commit to if we want our grandchildren to have a healthy future.

Number one, we are going to have to step out of our comfort zone and get really honest with ourselves about how our economic privilege and our skin-color privilege directly affect those of us who don’t have these privileges and thus struggle every day in ways many of us can scarcely imagine.

Number two, we’re going to have to step out of our comfort zone and start mingling with and building authentic relationships with people who think very differently about the world than we do. Simply networking with like-minded people isn’t going to cut it.

Signing online petitions with thousands of our political allies isn’t going to cut it. Marching in opposition to this issue or that issue and then going back to the comfort of our private lives isn’t going to cut it. Hoping or assuming that other people who have more time than we do will solve these problems for us isn’t going to cut it. Very few liberals and leftists and Greens have ever had a single conversation with a Tea Party activist. It’s way more fun to mock the Tea Party, to make insulting comments about his how stupid or politically naïve they are. The same is generally true in the reverse direction. This kind of behavior is the perfect way to guarantee that majorities can never be built across that supposedly huge political divide.

And who benefits the most when we behave in this way? The very, very small minority of mostly very wealthy white men who make all of the governing decisions in this country. Divide and conquer. It works so well. It always has. And it always will, until we recognize it for what it really is: It’s the most effective method the system has to keep we the people fighting each other instead of realizing how much common ground exists between us.

Here are just two examples of the substantial common ground that exists between so-called left- and right-wing Americans.

Number one, a majority of Americans across the political spectrum are opposed to the continuing occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. A president who ended these two occupations would be wildly popular. No surprise when you remember that about half of all your tax dollars go to a bloated military budget. Half. The federal government will lie to you and tell you it’s much smaller than that, but it isn’t true. You can view the actual budget numbers by going to the website of the War Resisters League.

Number two, a majority of Americans across the political spectrum are opposed to those endless international trade agreements that both Republicans and Democrats love to pass—trade agreements which have destroyed the industrial base of this nation and caused massive environmental harm. They have names like NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, CAFTA, the Central American Free Trade Agreement, and GATT, the Global Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. Conservative presidential candidate Pat Buchanan ran a very effective campaign years ago on this issue. So did Ralph Nader running as a Green. So did Libertarian Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul in the last election. Even candidate Obama ran against so-called free trade agreements in 2008, because he knew that most Americans oppose them.

So here we have two issues of enormous political importance that affect all of us: U.S. policy and spending on war, and trade agreements that wreck our economy and our environment. And on both issues the vast majority of Americans, both left and right, are in full agreement. Given that fact, you would think that active citizens from across the political spectrum would be working closely together to end these ridiculous policies. But you would be wrong. We have been divided and conquered. The left and the right would rather be booing and hissing at each other. It’s way less work and way more fun. And then we can act outraged that those crazy people on the other side of the fence are the cause of the problems. Divide and conquer. It’s such a great strategy. It works so well. It always has.

What would it take to break out of this way of thinking and acting? What would it take to find that common ground between us rather than focusing on the issues which divide us? On these two issues we the people are almost all on the same side. Who cares if a majority of us can’t agree on everything? What matters to me is that we stop losing almost every battle that we’re fighting. I want my democracy back.

Earlier in my speech I said there were three things that we’re going to have to commit to if there’s going to be any hope of solving the great problems that we face. The first one was the urgency of stepping out of our comfort zone and looking squarely at our own economic privilege and skin-color privilege. The second was the urgency of building real relationships with people who think very differently than we do.

Here’s number three. We are going to have to get a lot more honest with each other about whether our existing activism is up to the task. We need to really think about this with our colleagues in whatever issues of concern we are actively working on. Is our existing activism to end the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan getting us any closer to ending those occupations? Is our activism to protect the safety of our drinking water actually producing safer drinking water? Is our activism to stop the planting of GMO crops actually stopping the planting of GMO crops? Is our activism to try to ensure this all Americans have comprehensive, affordable health care actually moving us in that direction? Is our activism to end our dependence on fossil fuels before they’re in short supply actually causing our fossil fuel use to start dropping dramatically? Is our activism to get corporate money out of our elections actually succeeding in getting corporate money out of our elections? As far as I can tell, the answers to all of these questions are the same. No. Our activism is not achieving its aims, even though more and more people are battling more and more single-issue crises each and every year.

The central question that everyone here needs to be asking themselves, and soon, is this: How can we the people get a lot more effective, and quickly, in order to tackle the enormous problems we’re facing? What should we be doing differently, and when are we going to start?

Our communities are under assault day in and day out, mostly by large corporations, whose decision makers don’t give a hoot what we want for our communities; and by higher levels of government that seem to be in cahoots with the corporate decision makers. We’ve been taught that we need to respond to each corporate assault one at a time. But the assaults just keep coming. There are assaults on our air, and our water, and our food, and our soil, and our economy, and our elections, and our health, and our climate.

Many of you are experts in responding to assaults one at a time, right? What kind of actions do we almost always try to do to stop the ongoing assaults? We organize rallies and marches and pickets. We organize letter-writing campaigns to government and corporate officials. We organize endless online petitions. In other words, we beg, we plead, we demand of some higher government or corporate power holder. We place ourselves below them. We act powerless. This is the nature of single-issue activism. Remember that line in the very first paragraph in the state constitution, “that all power is inherent in the people”? What if all of these single issues we’re working on are merely symptoms of what happens when we the people forget who we are, symptoms of what happens when we the people fail to exercise our power?

Remember that I told you right at the beginning of my talk that more than 120 communities in this country had made a profound shift in the way they see themselves? Every one of these places had spent years battling corporate assaults on their communities until one day they said, Enough is enough. If our elected officials at the state and federal level won’t pass the laws we need to protect the health and welfare of our communities, we will. One community after another started passing local ordinances that are designed to defend their right of local self-government. They’re working closely with the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund based in Pennsylvania, which is helping them to draft these ordinances.

I’m going to spend the rest of my talk focusing on these local democratic uprisings. I want you to listen very carefully to what these communities are doing, because Eugene and Springfield and Cottage Grove and Corvallis and Albany and any other town or city in this country could be following in their footsteps. What they’re doing is fundamentally different from single-issue activism. They have stepped outside of the existing paradigm that tells them that they are powerless to stop these corporate assaults on their communities. They are refusing to abide by the threats being shouted at them by corporate lawyers and state governors and state attorneys general, who are all insisting that they do not have the legal authority to pass these laws. They are committing community-wide acts of civil disobedience. They are breaking existing laws openly and bodily, daring corporate and governmental officials to try to stop them.

It started in Wells Township, a rural conservative community of just 500 people in Pennsylvania, where the townsfolk got sick and tired of pleading with state government to stop corporate hog farm factories from setting up shop in their town. The townsfolk discovered that if they used the regulatory law structures they had always been told were their only option for opposing these operations, that all they could do was testify about the specific harms of the proposal, such as how the inevitable Wal-Mart-sized lakes of manure would be managed. They didn’t want to testify about lakes of manure; they wanted to say, No, we don’t want these massive 15,000-head hog factories in our town. So they abandoned the dead-end regulatory process and stopped begging the state to protect them and instead pass a local anti-corporate farming ordinance in September of 1999 that banned corporate engagement in farm factories.

Five other Pennsylvania townships passed similar ordinances over the next year. Other towns quickly followed their lead, passing ordinances that banned corporations from engaging in other types of activities, such as mining, logging, groundwater extraction for bottling, dumping of urban sewage sludge on farmland, et cetera.

Jumping ahead to today, in order to give you up-to- date details, I am thrilled to report to you that there are now cities and towns in six states—Pennsylvania, Virginia, New Hampshire, Maine, Maryland, and Massachusetts—which have thus far passed similar initiatives. As you can imagine, this growing number of local ordinance did not go unnoticed by the state government or the corporations they were trying to exclude, which started making threats against the communities and claiming they didn’t have the legal authority to pass such laws. Which just further irritated the locals and their elected officials, who, let’s not forget, were elected to defend the interests of the local inhabitants. The heavy-handed responses from state government and corporate attorneys just made the local communities more interested than ever in understanding how it could be that they had ended up with so little power to govern themselves at the local level when everyone had been taught in school that all power is inherent in the people.

At this point the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund started offering sessions they called “democracy schools,” which uncovered an extraordinary history that few people knew. I offer similar workshops, and I would be delighted to offer one here or anywhere that there’s sufficient interest. The residents of these communities learned that under the existing paradigm of the U.S. legal system, people have very little power to stop what they don’t want in their communities. Federal law trumps state law. State law trumps local law. The whole system is based on English common law, which was designed to preempt and centralize power in the hands of a few.

We may have been taught that the Constitution is a great and wise document that enshrines all sorts of rights for people, but that’s actually not true at all. What it enshrines is private property rights and protections for the free flow of commerce. None of us should be surprised by this, given that the people who drafted it were some of the richest landholders in the country.

James Madison, one of the Founding Fathers, believed that the primary role of government was “to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.” Madison was the main author of the Constitution. When the Constitution was finally completed behind doors that were literally locked and we the people got to read it for the first time, the primary response across the colonies was outrage. And thus began a demand from the citizens of this country to add what became the first 10 amendments to the Constitution, which we now refer to as the Bill of Rights.

Again, most Americans assume that these 10 amendments guarantee us all sorts of rights, like free speech. But that’s not quite true either. These amendments do protect our rights against infringement by our government. But government is no longer the only powerful institution in this country. Corporations can sometimes now eclipse government power. Corporations violate our constitutional rights all the time, and the Constitution says nothing about those violations of our rights. Every day corporations violate our free-speech rights, our rights against unreasonable search and seizure, our contract rights, and our property rights. It’s an absolutely fascinating history that all of us really need to know if we’re going to exercise our right to local self-government.

There are a number of specific legal barriers that are used quite effectively to stifle the rights of we the people. Some of them have been used for almost two centuries.

Here’s a list of some of these legal barriers:

The commerce clause of the Constitution, which enables corporations to sue local and state governments in order to overturn state laws that have been adopted to protect health, safety, and welfare of people and communities. This structure of law prevents people from implementing our visions of environmentally and economically sustainable communities.

There’s the contracts clause of the U.S. Constitution, which makes it quite difficult for government to prohibit or require various corporate actions.

There’s Dillon’s Rule, which authorizes municipal governments to have decision-making authority only in explicitly specified areas of governance. And there’s the flip side of Dillon’s Rule, known as preemption, which specifically prohibits municipal governments from doing anything that they haven’t explicitly been given permission to do. In addition, a municipal government is prohibited from banning any corporate activity that the state considers legal. The Wells Township hog factory ban is a good example of the use of preemption.

And finally, there’s corporate constitutional so-called rights—the claim that corporations should have the same rights as flesh-and-blood human beings, like free speech. The 1886 Supreme Court case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad is the most well-known case and has been credited as the one which first granted personhood to corporations. Yet it’s only one of many important cases granting rights to corporations. The January 2010 Citizens United case is just the latest expansion of corporate free speech rights.

That’s quite a lot to chew on, isn’t it? So as these communities were learning about all of these legal barriers to their right of self-government, each new local ordinance that was drafted became more comprehensive in directly addressing these barriers head-on, and thus the ordinances became less anti-corporate and more pro-rights. They were moving from no, what we don’t want in our communities to, yes, what we do want in our communities.

Here are three recent examples of ordinances around the country. Number one, in Mount Shasta, a town of 3500 residents at the base of Mount Shasta in northern California, the local residents collected enough signatures to place an initiative on the ballot in November 2010 which they called the Community Water Rights and Self-Government ordinance. Let me read you the first paragraph of the ordinance.

An Ordinance to assert and secure the right of the people of the City of Mount Shasta to natural water systems and cycles through the exercise of community self-government by enumerating certain rights held by the people and natural community and prohibiting activities that would deny those rights; By protecting the health, safety, and general welfare of the citizens and environment of the City of Mount Shasta; by not allowing corporations to engage in weather manipulation; by establishing strict liability and burden of proof standards for chemical trespass;…

They’re defining chemical trespass as your toxic chemical ended up in my body.

…by not allowing corporations to engage in water withdrawal for export and resale beyond the City of Mount Shasta; by removing claims to legal rights and protections to corporations that would allow a few people hiding behind the corporate shield to subordinate the people and the City of Mount Shasta to them; and by recognizing and enforcing the rights of residents to defend the rights of natural communities and ecosystems.

The county clerk pulled some last-minute shenanigans and removed it from the ballot before voters ever had a chance to cast their ballots. So the organizers are now preparing to place it on the November 2011 ballot instead.

Number two, in Spokane, Washington, local residents collected enough signatures to place on the ballot in November 2009 an amendment to their city’s home rule charter that would have added a comprehensive community bill of rights. The campaign was launched by an impressive group of neighborhood and other community organizations as well as labor unions. It was opposed by every local politician and all of the business associations, which greatly outspent the campaign and lied about what might happen if it passed. In the end, only one quarter of the voters supported it, which you could argue was a serious defeat for the campaign, or you could argue that nothing this boldly democratic had ever been put on a city ballot before, so getting one-fourth of the voters to vote yes was an early victory in a longer campaign.

The group is now preparing to place a scaled-down initiative on the ballot in November 2011, which includes four objectives: first, neighborhood residents shall have the right to determine the future of their neighborhoods; second, the Spokane River, its tributaries and aquifers shall possess inalienable rights to exist and flourish; third, employees shall have the right to constitutional protections in the workplace”—how many people know that you don’t have constitutional protections in the workplace?—and, fourth, corporate powers shall be subordinate to people’s rights.” You can learn about it in much more detail at EnvisionSpokane.org.

By the way, Eugene also has a home rule charter, which gives you some added options. You could amend it rather than passing an ordinance.

Number three. Perhaps the most significant victory so far is what happened in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in November 2010, when the city council, on a unanimous vote of 9 to 0, passed the Pittsburgh Community Protection from Natural Gas Extraction ordinance banning corporations from conducting natural gas drilling, also known as fracking, in the city. Pittsburgh sits atop the Marcellus Shale natural gas deposit. Fracking poses an enormous threat to surface and groundwater and has been blamed for fatal explosions and the contamination of drinking water and local rivers and streams. Other damages include lost property value, ingestion of toxins by livestock, and threatened loss of organic certification for farmers and communities.

In a press release after the vote, Pittsburgh City Councilman Doug Shields stated,

This ordinance recognizes and secures expanded civil rights for the people of Pittsburgh and it prohibits activities which would violate those rights. It protects the authority of the people of Pittsburgh to pass this ordinance by undoing corporate privileges that place the rights of the people of Pittsburgh at the mercy of gas corporations. With this vote we are asserting the right of the city to make critical decisions to protect our health, safety, and welfare. We are not a colony of the state and will not sit quietly by as our city gets drilled. We encourage communities across the region to take this step and join with us to elevate the rights of communities and people over corporations.

How about that?

Under the ordinance, corporations that violate the ordinance or that seek to drill in the city will not be afforded personhood rights under the U.S. or Pennsylvania constitution, nor will they be afforded protections under the commerce clause or contracts clause under the federal or state constitution. In addition, the ordinance recognizes the legally enforceable rights of nature to exist and flourish. You can read the full text of these and dozens of other ordinances at the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund’s website, which is celdf.org. I urge you to check it out.

It’s fascinating to me that no major news media reported the full story on what Pittsburgh did. Not CBS, not NPR, not Fox, not Democracy Now! It was a nationally ground-breaking ordinance. It happened in a major American city. But the media missed the main story. Perhaps because it didn’t fit into any of the existing sound bites about left versus right or workers versus environmentalists. Perhaps because no one is used to reporting on rights-based organizing regarding environment at issues. And because the media missed the story, it’s important that you not miss the story and that you spread it far and wide.

I want to speak for a few minutes about the Supreme Court’s January 2010 Citizens United decision, that further expanded the so-called free-speech right of large corporations to make even huger donations to manipulate our elections than they already legally could. Corporations won First Amendment free-speech rights long ago, contrary to the news reporting from such diverse sources as Fox, NPR, and Democracy Now! The reason I want to talk about this case is that it has generated an enormous amount of citizen response, and I want to the contrast that response with what the more than 120 local communities have already achieved.

The Supreme Court’s decision was opposed by 76% of Republicans, opposed by 81% of independents, opposed by 85% of Democrats. That’s 80% of all of us— once again piercing the myth that Democrats and Republicans can’t agree on things that matter. What was the response to the Court’s decision from the two corporate-funded parties? The Republicans praised the ruling as a victory for free speech. And the Democrats put forward some spineless new legislation to blunt its impact and then proceeded to do nothing more to get it passed. You can’t ask for a clearer example of why we the people of these United States, be we Republican or Democrat, Green, Libertarian, independent, need to stand together to end the corporate stranglehold on our elected officials.

In response to this quite logical expansion of free- speech rights that the courts keep granting, two competing Internet-based national campaigns sprang up to urge everyone to get involved in efforts to challenge the Court’s decision. The sponsors of my talk tonight, We the People Eugene, are actively involved with one of these two campaigns, called movetoamend.org. The campaign’s goal is to pass a constitutional amendment that ends corporate personhood. As you can see from the list of laws that corporations use day in and day out to stifle our rights, ending corporate personhood would only tackle a portion of this huge pile of legal powers that corporations wield against us. The other national campaign, known as democracyisforpeople.org. has as its goal the passing of a constitutional amendment that ends free-speech rights for corporations. It doesn’t address any of the other personhood rights, nor does it address any of the other legal powers that corporations wield against us.

Having been a community organizer now for more than three decades, I have a very strong opinion about these two campaigns. Neither of the campaigns tackles the full set of legal powers that corporations now wield. I can’t see the point of trying to pass a constitutional amendment unless you’re tackling all of the ways that corporations violate our rights. And both of the campaigns require a monumental effort across the country to convince an enormous number of elected Democrats and Republicans in both state and federal government to do the right thing by voting yes on the amendment. Let’s not forget that these are the same elected officials who are dependent on donations from large corporations to get themselves reelected. And if, by chance, only 37 states voted yes instead of the necessary 38, three-quarters of the states, the entire campaign collapses under its own weight, which is what happened in the 1970s when the women’s movement tried to pass the Equal Rights Amendment and failed after 10 years, falling short by just one state.

I personally think the strategy is a huge strategic blunder, especially when more than 120 communities in six states have already demonstrated to the rest of us they’ve found a strategy at the local level that appears to be very powerful politically and legally. I do not believe in top-down organizing. I don’t think it has the stamina or the long-term stability to win this kind of battle. What more than 120 communities are reminding us is that bottom-up organizing works.

I know that We the People Eugene is working right now on a resolution asking the city council to support this constitutional amendment. I say, by all means, do some effective grass-roots organizing and get your city council to pass it. And if a majority of them won’t vote against corporate personhood, then it’s time to elect a council that will. But once they’ve voted, get busy figuring out what corporate assaults on your community are most upsetting, and then figure out how to work together to pass a legally binding ordinance, not a resolution, that ends this corporate assault on your community and that puts in place a new set of locally enforceable rights for all residents. I am not claiming this it will be easy, but it’s a way more effective strategy than trying to stop one corporate assault at a time or to beg your state legislature to join 37 other states in passing a constitutional amendment.

Let me share with you a current example of a rural community here in the state that is stuck in the classic single-issue campaign mode that I described earlier and what it could be doing differently. I led one of my weekend workshops a few years ago in the Illinois Valley of Josephine County in the southwest part of this state. Their lands are under constant assault by logging and mining companies. Recently, a single-issue group formed there to try to stop the herbiciding of forests owned by a local logging corporation with the ironic name of Perpetua. The company has been spraying 24D and atrazine on its forests, and the chemicals are ending up in a public lake and in people’s bodies. The community group is reacting the same way every single-issue group reacts: petitions, rallies, letters to elected officials, meetings with the corporation’s representatives, appeals to the Oregon Board of Forestry. All of this activity to try to stop the herbicide spraying. These citizens are running head first into a maze of regulatory rules and agencies which they have to navigate. According to an article in the Register Guard newspaper in Eugene, it’s a dilemma as to how the Oregon Board of Forestry can and should respond. While the Board oversees the rules governing application of herbicides on forest land, it’s the Department of Agriculture that has at regulatory responsibility for making sure the state complies with federal law; while another board, the Pesticide Analytical and Response Center, investigates and responds to complaints like those raised by groups like this one. Whoof! What a perfect system, eh? Perfect if you’re the CEO of Perpetua Corporation and you don’t want those pesky locals interfering in your right to poison them.

Here’s a bit of background history. The regulatory system was created in the late 1800s to protect the interests of the nation’s first giant corporations, the railroads, that were under attack by an absolutely enormous populist social movement. President Cleveland’s attorney general explained to the railroad executives that the new railroad agency was to be

a sort of barrier between the railroad corporations and the people.

It was understood by both government and corporation that what was desired was

something having a good sound but quite harmless, which will impress the popular mind with the idea that a great deal is being done when in reality very little is intended to be done.

Doesn’t that sound familiar? And these regulatory agencies are still working exactly as they were designed, to tie us up in knots. As my colleague Jane Anne Morris says,

The main thing environmental regulations do is regulate environmentalists.

What could the good people of Oregon’s Illinois Valley be doing to stop the herbicide spraying? Instead of pleading with numerous regulatory agencies, they could be passing local ordinances that prohibit corporations from spraying cancer-causing herbicides. Let me repeat that. Instead of pleading with regulators, they could be passing local ordinances that prohibit corporations from spraying cancer-causing herbicides. I’ve met with them in person and by phone. I’ve sent them a lot of information linking them to what other communities are doing in the Northeast states. And yet they aren’t shifting gears yet.

Why not? I can only guess. Perhaps because it’s really scary to try some new strategies that they have absolutely no experience in, or to stop doing what they already know how to do, even if they are very unlikely to succeed. Perhaps because it seems like such an up hill battle that probably isn’t winnable anyway. Perhaps because most of us have become hard-wired to prevalent against the powerful rather than to exercise power ourselves. Perhaps because most of us have already given up any home whatsoever that our actions will make any difference at all. That most of us feel powerless, exhausted, angry, depressed, filled with sorrow, or numb. Perhaps it’s other reasons that haven’t occurred to me yet.

All I know is this: In six states in the Northeast people are actually winning their right to stop corporate assaults on their communities. And more towns are joining this movement all the time. As of today there are active community rights ordinances being considered in Washington, California, New Mexico, Ohio, New York, and Colorado. In fact, just yesterday I received the draft ordinance that Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is considering. It’s a sustainable energy ordinance, again the first of its kind. But let me just read you Section 7, titled “People’s Right to Self-Government.”

The foundation for the making and adoption of this law is the people’s fundamental and inalienable right to govern themselves, and thereby secure their rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. Any attempts to use other units and levels of government to preempt, amend, alter, or overturn this Ordinance, or parts of this Ordinance, shall require the City Council to hold public meetings that explore the adoption of other measures that expand local control and the ability of residents to protect their fundamental and inalienable right to self- government. Such consideration may include actions to separate the municipality from the other levels of government used to preempt, amend, alter, or overturn the provisions of this Ordinance or other levels of government used to intimidate the people of the City of Pittsburgh or their elected officials.

That’s quite extraordinary. I’m hoping that the people of Eugene will give these ideas serious consideration, and I’m crossing my fingers that the good folks in the Illinois Valley south of here will come on board soon.

Before I conclude my speech, I want to respond to something that I hear a lot from longtime activists, who have become very, very gloomy about the state of the world. I want to speak directly to those of you in the audience who might be saying to yourselves right now, That’s all well and good, but it’s already too late to turn this mess around. The climate is already too destabilized to get it back to normal. Peak oil is behind us. And it’s too late to transition to a sustainable society. I say to you, even if this is true—and it may very well be true— wouldn’t you still rather be living in a society that is collapsing but has worked as hard as it possibly could to put in place truly democratic structures so that as it collapses, its citizens are actively responding with passion and love and empathy, rather than to be living in a society that is collapsing and which is moving towards more and more civil unrest because its people never figured out how to work together to create the kind of community they wanted to live in, so now they’re just fighting each other for a shrinking pie. I am very clear which of these two societies I would prefer to live in.

Regardless of how optimistic or pessimistic you are about the possibility for real structural change in this country, I urge you to start paying attention very closely to the growing movement for community rights. I urge you to discuss what you’ve learned tonight with your friends, your co-workers, and your neighbors. Are you prepared to try something new? Are you prepared to reconsider your role in your community, not just as a private citizen who simply votes for candidates but as a public citizen who joins with others year in and year out to design and create the kind of community you want your children and grandchildren to live in. To be a part of a great, ongoing democratic experiment, rubbing elbows with people who are not like you, people who may not agree with you on many issues but who also want to create a more livable, more participatory, more fair, more sustainable community.

For some of you, getting active in this way may be really scary; for others it may be exciting and exhilarating. Please call on me for support. It’s time for us to put some real meaning back in those sacred words in our state constitution “that all power is inherent in the people.” We may not believe it yet, but it is true. We the people are the most powerful force in this country. Are you with me? I can’t hear you. I can’t hear you. Thank you very much.
************
Q&A

The question is, surely these kinds of ordinances are not pleasing to the corporations that are being excluded or to other layers of government. What kind of response has there been?

A small number of the ordinances have been legally challenged. In Pennsylvania, the corporations have been so effective in—how do I say this?—I can’t remember which ordinance it is, but because corporations pretty much play government layers against each other as their pawn pieces, they really just play us off against each other, and they’re used to that, corporations in Pennsylvania have gotten so good at this that their lawyers now basically just pick up a phone and call the governor or the speaker of the house of the state legislature and they demand that the state come down on the township because it violates the commerce clause or the contracts clause or something. Increasingly, the corporations are actually acting as if they’re not that involved. It’s initiated by them.

And what’s happening is, there’s not a lot of backbone. There have been some lawsuits, but 120 ordinances are now law. The day before the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, ordinance banning corporate fracking was passed, the Natural Gas Association—I forget what it’s so-called in Pennsylvania—sent a formal letter to all the city council members saying they would sue if it passed. They still passed it 9 to 0. And the association didn’t sue. Because they would have to argue that the natural-gas fracking company has more rights to drill in the city of Pittsburgh than the people in Pittsburgh have the right to say no. And that just generates a whole other level of democratic uprising.
You folks have to decide how serious you are. It’s very easy to pass a resolution compared to an ordinance. You have to do some serious slogging to pass an ordinance. As I said at the beginning of my speech, you have to talk to people who you can’t imagine talking to. But you’re going to actually find some very interesting possible cooperation in those ways. I think it’s pretty obvious what the difference is between the two.

So, again, are we the people or aren’t we? If we are the people, then of course we have the right to abolish, amend, etc., our government documents. But obviously this is a paradigm shift. So it’s not like you read for 2 hours and you learn about nuclear power or you learn about GMOs, and now you understand the basics and now you can be organizing around that issue. This is paradigm- shifting work. This is a whole different way of thinking about who we are in relation to our government and our corporate institutions. So it takes a much higher level of commitment, organizing commitment, intellectual commitment.

For more information, go to paulcienfuegos.com.

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©2011

On earth peace, good will toward men

Mon, 26 Dec 2011 04:29:34 GMT

Merry Christmas everyone. “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men” (KJV Luke 2:14)… wouldn’t that be nice to really give peace a chance? For all you theists: Ben Franklin said that God helps those who help themselves. Take a look and listen at what John and Yoko said: Happy Xmas (War Is Over)

And there’s this: The Christmas Truce of 1914, the interruption of a few days in the casualties (15 million deaths, 20 million wounded), when German and British soldiers sang Christmas carols together, exchanged gifts, and played soccer. But all too soon, the generals and the politicians, the suits, the warmakers back home, put a stop to the “fraternizing with the enemy.”

Makes you think, doesn’t it? Those who make war do not fight them. Those who fight them do not like them. Can all the medals and “honors” be any compensation for what the “universal soldier” goes through? Or the flag-draped coffins? Take a look at and listen to Buffy Sainte-Marie: The Universal Soldier

Somebody benefits, though. The industrialists and other capitalists who supply the armaments–and all of us whose jobs rely on the continuance of war.

Put the temporary truce of 97 years ago into present-day context: Give peace on earth a chance

Give peace a chance.

Merry Christmas.

The U.S. and Iraq after the war

Mon, 26 Dec 2011 01:10:23 GMT

by Jack Smith
(in Activist Newsletter)

Part 1: Obama’s interpretation of the war

President Obama bid farewell to the Iraq war after nearly 9 years of conflict in a November 14 speech to troops of the 82nd Airborne at Ft. Bragg, NC. He virtually damned the war with the faintest of praise.

The problem was that he couldn’t claim victory and had to conceal an historic defeat — but at least it wasn’t his war, as Afghanistan has become.

Meanwhile in Iraq, a perhaps inevitable major political crisis is brewing between the Shi’ite-led government and Sunni ministers in the regime.

The war was a fiasco for the Pentagon and a roadside bomb for America’s international reputation. Obama thus resorted to conveying a deceptively selective history of former President George W. Bush’s Iraq misadventure. Deploying the language of omission, ultra-patriotism, and gushing praise for the troops, Obama managed to smother the truth about the war’s origins, conduct, and ending.

Most Americans have long tired of the Iraq occupation, not least because the war hadn’t touched most people. It was a credit-card war that will burden future generations with debt, not them, and the troops were volunteers, not conscripts. People often waved the flag with gusto and participated in pro-forma displays of support for the troops and concern for their families, but not much more. Reporting about the official war-ending, flag-lowering ceremony in Washington December 15, Jim Lobe of Inter Press Service noted that

hardly anyone here seemed to notice, let alone mark the occasion in a special manner.

A majority of Americans opposed the bipartisan war — almost 70% today — and they have done so for years, although a much smaller number took to the streets where it counts. Many millions protested the war even before it began. Some 500,000 went to Washington in the cold of January 2003 to demonstrate against going to war 2 months before Washington’s “shock and awe” bombardment of Baghdad. The mass antiwar movement remained large and viable for several years, but dissipated, except for the dedicated left and pacifists, when Democrat Obama won the 2008 election. The movement had a much larger impact on public opinion and government policy than has been recognized.

In his speech Obama made no mention of such highlights as the nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, the shame of Abu Ghraib, or the astonishing cost of the war. He couldn’t even point to any concrete military accomplishments. The vaunted 2007-2008 “surge” concocted by Gen. David Petraeus was not evoked, perhaps because its main element consisted of paying the insurgents $30 million a month to stop fighting, which doesn’t say much about the Pentagon’s prowess. At that time some 170,000 U.S. troops maintained over 500 bases in Iraq against up to 20,000 decentralized irregular guerrillas without any of the accoutrements of modern warfare.

Instead of facts the president resorted to embellishing trifles and vacuous tributes to the troops:

The most important lesson that we can take from you is not about military strategy — it’s a lesson about our national character…. As your commander-in-chief I can tell you that [the war] will indeed be a part of history…. Now, we knew this day would come. We’ve known it for some time. But still, there is something profound about the end of a war that has lasted so long.

Obama characterized the withdrawal as a “moment of success.” To the uninformed this may imply some kind of victory, but it simply means the troops were withdrawn without incident.

At the beginning, the Bush Administrated estimated the war would end in victory in 3 months. Bush claimed victory on May 1, 2003, with his infamous “Mission Accomplished” speech from an aircraft carrier. It groaned to an ambiguous finale in 105 months. The combined length of America’s participation in World Wars I and II was 64 months.

The best Obama could say about one of Washington’s longest wars was that

American troops… will cross the border out of Iraq with their heads held high.

He couldn’t call it a victory, but “heads held high” is supposed to rule out the perception of defeat.

But defeat is the only suitable word. Any war between a rich, overwhelmingly powerful state deploying a military juggernaut and a small poor state with a broken army that ends in a stalemate after nearly nine years is a humiliating defeat. It is being covered up, but in time we assume historians will unite around this verdict.

The White House and Pentagon fear that public awareness of a defeat in either Iraq or Afghanistan may generate another “Vietnam Syndrome.” After that ultimately unpopular and vigorously protested war ended in triumph for the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam and D.R. Vietnam in 1975 — the American people were obviously disinclined to countenance another major war of choice in a foreign venue, especially against a developing country in Asia that doesn’t directly threaten the U.S.

This didn’t prevent the right-wing Reagan Administration from invading and walking over two tiny, weak countries (Grenada and Panama) and from supporting counter-insurgency campaigns in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, South Yemen, and elsewhere, but it took 16 post-Vietnam years (1976-1991) before the Pentagon was politically able to openly engage in a major war involving hundreds of thousands of troops (Iraq War I, otherwise known as the Gulf War).

Washington has been engaged in hot, cold, or surreptitious wars for 70 years, presently spending $1.4 trillion a year on its military and national security budgets, and has provided no evidence it will stop. As such it is essential to maintain the public belief that the U.S. military is the best in the world (a frequent Obama mantra) , and that Vietnam was an inexplicable fluke or largely the fault of civilian leadership.

Obama sought to compensate for being unable to claim victory by referring to the “extraordinary achievement” of the American troops, saying,

today we remember everything that you did to make it possible.

The “it” was not defined. Indeed,

Because of you, because you sacrificed so much for a people that you had never met, Iraqis have a chance to forge their own destiny.

He went on to call the U.S. military

the most respected institution in our land.

Presidential praise of the Ft. Bragg troops for “serving with honor [and] patriotism” deserves some comment.

There are those who maintain that it is as impossible to serve “with honor” in a dishonorable preemptive war — an unjust, illegal, and immoral war of choice for geopolitical advantage and access to oil — as in any grossly dishonorable enterprise, civilian or military.

They ask, can one participate with honor — even with bravery or at least showing up and following the leader — in a civilian gang attack on innocent people, or for burning down a block of urban housing, or for acts of vandalism in a rural village? Is doing so any different in a criminal war while waving the national colors to advance the interests of what is today termed “the 1%”?

How do conventional criminal deeds differ from the massive criminality of U.S. imperialism in invading a country half-way around the world that was no danger to America or any other country, destroying its civil infrastructure, killing between 600,000 and a million Iraqis and causing 3 to 4 million people to become refugees? (Some estimates of Iraqi dead are 100,000 “or more.” The higher figures, maintained over the years not just from newspaper accounts, derive from the British medical journal The Lancet and other independent sources.)

And what is “patriotic” about taking part in crushing a much smaller and virtually defenseless country already suffering from an earlier war and a dozen years of killer sanctions that were responsible for the deaths of yet another million Iraqis, half of them children, according to the UN?

Government hyper-patriotic propaganda probably did convince many of the military volunteers that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction that threatened America and that the Iraqi government played a role in 9/11, but these lies were exposed at least seven years ago. The soldiers, including the large number of men and women who joined primarily to obtain employment, or earn money for college, or escape poverty, or to avoid a dead-end future are daily subject to the Pentagon’s rah-rah version of its rationale for the war.

The U.S. military did have its members who served with honor and patriotism. Alleged WikiLeaks whistleblower PFC Bradley Manning is an outstanding example. He is essentially on trial for exposing war crimes. Others include those who joined Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) or March Forward, another veteran group, who turned against and condemned the conflict and devoted themselves to working for peace. Also, we assume there were many soldiers who consciously avoided harming civilians and performed acts of kindness as well.

But an undetermined number of U.S. soldiers were involved in reprehensible treatment of civilians in Iraq, or openly displayed contempt for Iraqi customs and beliefs — often with the approval of their officers. The public testimony of IVAW members a couple of years ago was chilling, as well as the many revelations of murder and abuse that have managed to become known to the media, such as the Haditha massacre of dozens of Iraqis in 2005. As U.S. troops were leaving Iraq this month, secret military testimony about the Haditha tragedy was discovered among papers in a junkyard where they were supposed to have been burned.

President Obama’s most bizarre statement at Ft. Bragg occurred when he declared that

what makes us special as Americans [is that] unlike the old empires, we don’t make these sacrifices [during the Iraq war] for territory or for resources. We do it because it’s right.

Being an empire of a new type, the U.S. did not plan to transform Iraq into an old-type colony. Bush’s intention in invading was to convert Iraq into a subservient satellite. Washington already had handpicked a puppet regime of exiles to take over. The next step was to use a swift Pentagon victory as a jumping off point for bringing about regime change in Iran and other countries. This was supposed to be the culmination of America’s geopolitical ambition to rule over the entire petroleum-rich Persian Gulf region and entire Middle East. One byproduct was to enhance the position of U.S. corporations. Another was to denationalize the oil reserves mainly to benefit American oil companies if possible.

The invasion quickly succeeded. Given the imbalance of power how could it not? But much else of Bush’s imperialist adventure turned out to be a huge exploding cigar in Uncle Sam’s unsuspecting face, at a cost at least $5 trillion (when future decades of veterans’ benefits and interest payments are included). Obama knows this, of course, just as he knows it’s ridiculous to depict U.S. foreign policy as selfless. But he has a major defeat to cover up, and the fact that the troops withdrew with heads held high doesn’t entirely do the trick.

It’s true Obama opposed the war as a member of the Illinois state legislature, though he was fairly quiet as a U.S. Senator and voted in favor of funding the incredibly expensive calamity year after year. During the 2008 campaign his critique of the Iraq conflict was a major factor in the defeat of warhawk Sen. Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination, and or his election victory.

Both Democratic superstars now are leading hawks on behalf of keeping Iraq under Washington’s thumb, and for the Afghan war, the drone attacks on Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere, NATO’s regime-change war in Libya, threats against Iran, the suppression of the Palestinians, support for pro-U.S. dictatorships, and most recently the dangerous new policy of “containing” China.

(To be continued in Part 2–after the following scare story, “What Bush told us about Iraq”)

What Bush told us about Iraq

[NOTE: The U.S. is getting out of Iraq after nearly nine years, but how did it get in? It was obvious by September 2002 that President George W. Bush was going to attack, and the peace movement, led by ANSWER, started organizing big time. There were demands for peace throughout the U.S. when the House and Senate passed legislation in mid-October giving Bush authority to unilaterally declare war if he thought it necessary. He invaded several months later in March. Part of what induced Congress and millions of Americans to approve a preemptive war was a peculiar speech Bush delivered October 8, 2002, so full of lies and transparent efforts to frighten people that we wrote a brief story in the October 15 *Activist Newsletter that included an introduction and quotes from Bush. It was titled “A Presidential Ghost Story” since the Halloween decorations were already up. Here’s the text*.]

President Bush’s speech October 8 defending his intention to launch a “preemptive” war with Iraq sounded like a Halloween ghost story calculated to scare the daylights out of guileless children.

The term “terror” or “terrorist” was employed 35 times; “weapons” — for use against the United States — 33 times; “threat,” to America, 17 times. Weak and wounded Iraq was virtually portrayed as a military superpower about to conquer the world.

Among the missing words was any mention of Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar, who have evaded capture [in Afghanistan] along with most leading operatives of Al Qaeda and the Taliban, much to the embarrassment of the White House war room. As a consequence, the two leaders — identified by Bush as enemies number one and two just a few months ago — have evidently been metamorphosed by the White House propaganda apparatus into Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, who Bush assured the world was also “a student of Stalin.” Al Qaeda itself was mentioned seven times, but only in reference to the Iraqi leader, not to the former “Evil One,” bin Laden.

Reduced to its simplistic scare-story essentials, the following excerpts from Bush’s speech tell his version of the age-old story of good against evil — the Crusading Avenger Vs. the Bogeyman of Baghdad. It’s a great tale to tell the kids on Halloween in a couple of weeks. Douse the lights, ignite a single candle, sit in the shadows, and begin:

I want to take a few minutes to discuss a grave threat to peace and America’s determination to lead the world in confronting that threat…. [Iraq] possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons. It has given shelter and support to terrorism and practices terror against its own people….

We are resolved today to confront every threat from any source that could bring sudden terror and suffering to America…. [The] Iraqi dictator must not be permitted to threaten America and the world with horrible poisons and diseases and gases and atomic weapons…. Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction are controlled by a murderous tyrant…. The same tyrant has tried to dominate the Middle East…and holds an unrelenting hostility toward the United States….

Saddam Hussein is a homicidal dictator who is addicted to weapons of mass destruction…. If we know Saddam Hussein has dangerous weapons today, and we do, does it make any sense for the world to wait to confront him as he grows even stronger and develops even more dangerous weapons? …. We’re concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using [aerial vehicles] for missions targeting the United States.

Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists. Alliances with terrorists could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints…. Confronting the threat posed by Iraq is crucial to winning the war on terror.

If the Iraqi regime is able to produce, buy or steal an amount of highly enriched uranium a little larger than a single softball, it could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year. And if we allow that to happen, a terrible line would be crossed. Saddam Hussein would be in a position to blackmail anyone who opposes his aggression. He would be in a position to dominate the Middle East. He would be in a position to threaten America and Saddam Hussein would be in a position to pass nuclear technology to terrorists.

Our enemies would be no less willing, in fact they would be eager, to use biological or chemical or a nuclear weapons. Knowing these realities, America must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun, that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud…. We have every reason to assume the worst and we have an urgent duty to prevent the worst from occurring.

Some have argued we should wait, and that’s an option. In my view it’s the riskiest of all options because the longer we wait, the stronger and bolder Saddam Hussein will become…. There can be no peace if our security depends on the will and whims of a ruthless and aggressive dictator…. Failure to act would embolden other tyrants, allow terrorists access to new weapons and new resources, and make blackmail a permanent feature of world events. The situation could hardly get worse….

At this point the kids at your Halloween gathering should be scared stiff. Then put on your Saddam Hussein mask, walk into the light, and shout “Boooooo.” After the children run home in panic, put on your George Bush mask and start shooting.

Part 2: Iraq’s future and U.S. intentions

President Obama emphasizes that he ended the Iraq campaign but he actually fulfilled the withdrawal agreement to pull out by the end of 2011 that was signed in December 2008 by outgoing President Bush and the Baghdad government. The Bush Administration labored long to compel President Nouri al-Maliki to agree that many thousands of U.S. troops could remain in the country after the bulk of forces withdrew, but the Iraqi leader ultimately refused. As a compromise the concord contained a stipulation allowing U.S. troops to remain if requested by Iraq’s government.

The Obama Administration then applied pressure on Maliki to “request” that 20,000 or so American troops remain indefinitely, but its plans fell through in October. Reflecting the views of the Iraqi people, Baghdad politicians insisted that only a small number of troops may remain to train the Iraqi army. They added, however, that the troops would now be subject to the Iraqi legal system if they broke laws. The U.S. does not permit this in the many countries where its military is stationed. Washington thus was obliged to give up on retaining the troops.

The decision was an important setback for the Obama administration but a victory for Iraqi independence and a most agreeable outcome for neighboring Iran, which has considerable influence in Iraq. Washington’s principal concern is that Shi’ite Iran and majority Shi’ite Iraq will in time enter in a close and relatively powerful alliance that would oppose U.S. hegemony in the Persian Gulf, perhaps backed by China and Russia.

According to IPS news analyst Gareth Porter December 16:

The real story behind the U.S. withdrawal is how a clever strategy of deception and diplomacy adopted by Prime Minister Maliki in cooperation with Iran outmaneuvered Bush and the U.S. military leadership and got the United States to sign the U.S.-Iraq withdrawal agreement.

Iran, which supported Bush’s overthrow of Ba’athists, is a country against which Washington has held a grudge since 1979 when a popular revolution ousted the Shah of Iran, occupied the U.S. embassy in Tehran and held 62 American personnel for 14 months. The Shah was reinstalled on the Peacock Throne in 1953 by the U.S. and UK after they arranged for a monarchist coup against the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, crushing Iranian democracy but denationalizing the country’s petroleum fields to benefit British and American oil companies.

The U.S. and Israel (which had very close relations with the Shah’s regime) have long been seeking the opportunity to replace the anti-imperialist Islamic regime with a pro-American government, lately with threats of war, subversion, support for opposition elements, and ever tightening extreme sanctions in response to unproven allegations that Iran is constructing a nuclear weapon.

Obama told the troops that

Iraq is not a perfect place… but we’re leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq, with a representative government that was elected by its people…. This is an extraordinary achievement… and today we remember everything that you [the troops] did to make it possible.

After the first false justifications for the invasion were exposed, and the Pentagon was settling in for a long occupation since notions of quick victory had had gone up in smoke like a bombed out Iraqi home, Bush Administration neoconservatives discovered that the “real” reason for the war was to “democratize” Iraq.

Iraq had been a one-party state run by the secular Ba’ath Party with Saddam Hussein as the president. Hussein crushed the Communists, then the left and other vocal opponents and organizations. The Ba’athists brooked no political opposition. They favored the minority Sunni over the majority Shi’ite Muslims. Hussein led Iraq into an unjust, unnecessary war against Shi’ite Iran throughout the 1980s, with U.S. backing.

Domestically, the Ba’athists embraced a program of social services for the people. Oil reserves and certain enterprises had been nationalized and profits provided a broad array of support for the masses, such as subsidized food. Iraq boasted the best public educational system in the Middle East. It maintained a far-reaching national healthcare system for all citizens. Iraqi women were considered to be the most equal and liberated in the Arab world. Internationally, the Ba’ath Party practiced an anti-imperialist foreign policy. For many years it upheld Pan-Arabism until its decline throughout the region, and was critical of Israel and supported the Palestinian people until the end.

Historically the U.S. supported and continues to back several dictatorships in the Middle East. It’s 30-year tacit alliance the Mubarak regime in Egypt (and current backing for the quasi-military junta now in power) was hardy the worst. What set Iraq apart for Washington was its strategic geopolitical position, opposition to certain U.S. goals in the vicinity, possession of great petroleum resources, anti-Israel focus, and by 2003 its helpless military vulnerability.

Today after 20 years of U.S. wars, Iraq is a ruin. The country was virtually crippled after the destruction caused by Washington’s first Iraq war in 1991 followed by debilitating sanctions and occasional bombings until the second war which started in March 2003.

The education system has been shattered. Healthcare is now poor to nonexistent for much of the population. Many rights for women have been wrenched away. Infrastructure is a wreck. Energy from the battered electrical grid remains sporadic or not available. Businesses and a number of government tasks have now been privatized to the detriment of the people. Oil has been denationalized. Poverty and inequality are widespread. Corruption is endemic. The new “democratic” political system is frequently undemocratic, and great injustices exist throughout society. Torture is a frequent tool of the police.

In addition, Washington’s divide-and-conquer tactics have greatly exacerbated religious tensions, leading to near civil war at one point, and engendered the continual terrorist violence that exists to this day. The war opened the door for al-Qaeda terrorists to enter Iraq for the first time, and they are still there. The Ba’athists in power would not tolerate their presence, but the chaos of the occupation was a virtual invitation. Divide-and conquer also increased national and gender antagonisms.

America’s formal war is now over but it hardly is the last of the U.S. in Iraq. Obama told the troops that

We’re building a new partnership between our nations.

The Bush Administration’s initial “partnership” was based on becoming a virtual behind-the-scenes government in Baghdad — one of its many failures.

But Washington retains considerable power in Iraq — from economic support and credits, to arms sales, military training, trade opportunities, a connection to America’s many allies and dependencies in the Middle East and worldwide, and more.

Part of that partnership is the newly built largest embassy in the world and a staff of nearly 17,000. This includes a security force of over 5,000 personnel, and 150-200 U.S. troops remaining in Iraq as part of a “normal embassy presence.” (By comparison, the capital city of Albany, N.Y., with a population of nearly l00,000, is served by 340 police officers.) It has been reported that much of the diplomatic staff works with Iraqi government departments or is engaged in activities for the U.S. intelligence network.

Iraqi Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, long a critic of the U.S. occupation and a friend of Iran, argues the embassy contingent and security detachments are far too large, indicative of Washington’s intention to play a major role in Baghdad. He told Al-Arabiya TV Nov. 3 that the

American occupation will stay in Iraq under different names.

The embassy’s main responsibilities seem to be to keep the new Iraqi government in check, to protect American commercial interests, to monitor and diminish Iranian influence, to distance Iraq from present-day Syria, to keep China and Russia at bay, to contact dissidents, to gather intelligence and to discourage Iraqi criticism of Israel.

The Obama Administration is strengthening the U.S. military machine in the wake of events in Iraq. Secretary of State Clinton announced recently:

We will have a robust continuing presence throughout the region, which is proof of our ongoing commitment to Iraq and to the future of that region.

The Associated Press reported that Defense Secretary Leon Panetta

expects about 40,000 U.S. troops to be stationed across the Middle East after they are pulled out of Iraq.

The Pentagon wants to station some in Kuwait, next to Iraq, and intends to keep a substantial force in Afghanistan after the 2014 withdrawal, close to Iran and China. In addition the U.S. Navy is expected to increase the number of warships in the region.

The New York Times reports that

the administration is also seeking to expand military ties with the six nations in the Gulf Cooperation Council — Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman. While the United States has close bilateral military relationships with each, the administration and the military are trying to foster a new “security architecture” for the Persian Gulf that would integrate air and naval patrols and missile defense.

Ironically, these six oil-rich U.S. allies, led by ultra-reactionary Saudi Arabia, offer their people less freedom and rights for women than Iraq under the Ba’athist government, but neither Washington nor the mass media single them out for criticism or demonize their leaders.

Iraq’s future is a great unknown. The Sunni-Shi’ite split is far worse today than before Washington interfered. The immediate crisis is that the political system seems ready to explode. As the New York Times reported December 20:

The Shiite-dominated government ordered the arrest of the Sunni vice president [Tariq al-Hashimi] accusing him of running a death squad that assassinated police officers and government officials…. A major Sunni-backed political coalition said its ministers would walk off their jobs.

Speaking later in the day from the safety of the Kurdish north (where he intends to stay for the time being), Hashimi

angrily rebutted charges that he had ordered his security guards to assassinate government officials, saying that Shi’ite-backed security forces had induced the guards into false confessions

.
Three of the guards confessed to the charges and the video was played on nationwide TV.

Even before this latest predicament, Washington’s imposed “democracy” obviously was very fragile. Some quarters have predicted a possible future civil war or an eventual three-way separation of the country into Kurd, Sunni and Shi’ite territories, a situation that would not necessarily displease the Obama Administration if the Iraqi government cannot be brought to heel, particularly in relation to Iran.

The Iraqi military is loyal to the Maliki government, but its deportment in relation to successor regimes or in a serious political crisis hasn’t been tested. It cannot be ignored that it has been trained, equipped and influenced by the Pentagon, which would be derelict had it not developed close ties to elements in the command apparatus. The semi-independent Kurds in the north are protected by the U.S. now. Their goal is complete independence in what they call Kurdistan. America will use them as a wedge, but it has sold out Kurd aspirations before and may do so again if conditions warrant.

The U.S. can still stir up lots of trouble in Baghdad by siding with and financing this or that political faction, religious community or ethnic group — a practice at which it has become adept. It has the entire country under intense air, sea, and land surveillance, with spies and informants in every branch of government, political party, and the military. Key telephones are tapped and computers are hacked. The entire region is encircled with U.S. military might.

The U.S. government does not intend to let Iraq get away, unless it becomes a subordinate ally. Now one knows what comes next.

In many ways — despite one-party rule and a ruthless leader capable of tragically counterproductive decisions (the invasions of Iran and Kuwait, for instance) — the masses of Iraqi people were better off before America’s two decades of pain, destruction and chaos. The Bush and Obama Administrations, echoed by the mass media, have always sought to depict the majority of Iraqis as favorable to the occupation, but this was merely propaganda aimed at domestic public opinion. Most Iraqis are very happy the U.S. is finally gone, but of course they are worried about what the future holds.

They have been living in a hell, and are now closer to emerging, but still have many problems to overcome before they break out.

Mission accomplished in Iraq: Blood and treasure wasted, empire’s lies unmasked

Sat, 17 Dec 2011 19:50:29 GMT

Our new Secretary of “Defense,” Leon Panetta, insists, while announcing the supposed end to our war in Iraq, while referring to our soldiers who died there, that

those lives were not lost in vain.

Yeah? He regurgitates that cheap clause, used again and again since Lincoln famously used it at Gettysburg, to excuse a continuing slaughter, to justify any continued bloodbath adventure: In other words, were we to stop a war now, the lives already wasted will have been for nothing–so we need to continue the wasting.

I beg to differ. I’m sorry. Those U.S. soldiers died in a war premised and continued on lies. Though we need to honor their sacrifice, we need to admit that, yes, they did die in vain, that their sacrifice was pointless.

This article covers several points, beginning with the casus belli on the eve of the war, and ending with an honest assessment, after Abu Ghraib, after “Collateral Murder,” after countless other atrocities.

Commentary: Illogical reasoning of a war against Iraq (March 13, 2003), questioning the Mad Hatter-style logic of our going to war in Iraq
Pillagers strip Iraqi Museum of its treasure (April 13, 2003), after then-Secretary of “Defense” Donald Rumsfeld proclaimed: “Iraqis celebrating in the streets, riding American tanks, tearing down the statues of Saddam Hussein in the center of Baghdad, are breathtaking. Watching them, one cannot help but think of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Iron Curtain. We are seeing history unfold, events that will shape the course of a country, the fate of a people, and potentially the future of the region,” came this article in the New York Times, describing the desecration of ancient Mesopotamian cultural heritage, while petroleum facilities are protected, all the while thousands of twenty-first-century Mesopotamians are slaughtered: “Please remind [President Bush] that he promised to liberate the Iraqi people, but that this is not a liberation, this is a humiliation.”
Cultural catastrophe (April 13, 2003), my reaction to the pillage, distributed as an email rant to many of my friends
Intellectual catastrophe (April 16, 2003), one (former) friend’s reaction to my email rant, exhorting me, among other things, to apologize to my distribution list once the WMDs are found in Iraq
Abu Ghraib and “Collateral Murder”–a “few bad apples” or inevitable dehumanization of “sand niggers” and systemic insensitivity to committing atrocities?
U.S. withdrawal from Iraq: “In terms of destroying Iraq, it’s ‘mission accomplished'”: Sami Rasouli, the founder and director of the Muslim Peacemaker Teams in Iraq, discusses the results of the war from Najaf
The costs of war: Tens of thousands dead, billions spent, and a country torn apart: Catherine Lutz, Brown University professor and co-director of the “Costs of War” research project at the Watson Institute for International Studies: “The costs have really been staggering. We know that Congress appropriated $800 billion over the years for the Iraq War. But the true costs, of course, go much farther than that, starting with the people of Iraq, who have lost lives in the hundreds of thousands.”
Iraqi women’s activist rebuffs U.S. claims of a freer Iraq: “This is not a democratic country”: Yanar Mohammed, president of the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq, discusses the impact of the nearly 9-year U.S. occupation, particularly on Iraqi women. “The women are the biggest loser in all of this. We went to the Iraqi squares. We demonstrated. The Arab Spring was there very strongly but got oppressed in ways that were new to Iraqi people. Anti-riot police of the American style was something that we witnessed there… This is not a democratic country.”

Commentary: Illogical reasoning of a war against Iraq
March 13, 2003

MICHELE NORRIS, host: The deliberations at the UN over possible military action in Iraq have featured thousands of pages of documents and hours and hours of debate, not to mention all the press conferences, Op-Ed articles, and pure speculation that have filled the airwaves in the last few months. But even after all of that evidence and discussion, commentator Peter Freundlich still wants to express the trouble he’s having trying to make sense of the argument to go to war.

PETER FREUNDLICH:
All right, let me see if I understand the logic of this correctly. We are going to ignore the United Nations in order to make clear to Saddam Hussein that the United Nations cannot be ignored. We’re going to wage war to preserve the UN’s ability to avert war. The paramount principle is that the UN’s word must be taken seriously, and if we have to subvert its word to guarantee that it is, then by gum, we will. Peace is too important not to take up arms to defend. Am I getting this right?

Further, if the only way to bring democracy to Iraq is to vitiate the democracy of the Security Council, then we are honor-bound to do that too, because democracy, as we define it, is too important to be stopped by a little thing like democracy as they define it.

Also, in dealing with a man who brooks no dissension at home, we cannot afford dissension among ourselves. We must speak with one voice against Saddam Hussein’s failure to allow opposing voices to be heard. We are sending our gathered might to the Persian Gulf to make the point that might does not make right, as Saddam Hussein seems to think it does. And we are twisting the arms of the opposition until it agrees to let us oust a regime that twists the arms of the opposition. We cannot leave in power a dictator who ignores his own people. And if our people, and people elsewhere in the world, fail to understand that, then we have no choice but to ignore them.

Listen. Don’t misunderstand. I think it is a good thing that the members of the Bush administration seem to have been reading Lewis Carroll. I only wish someone had pointed out that “Alice in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking Glass” are meditations on paradox and puzzle and illogic and on the strangeness of things, not templates for foreign policy. It is amusing for the Mad Hatter to say something like, `We must make war on him because he is a threat to peace,’ but not amusing for someone who actually commands an army to say that.

As a collector of laughable arguments, I’d be enjoying all this were it not for the fact that I know–we all know–that lives are going to be lost in what amounts to a freak, circular reasoning accident.

Pillagers strip Iraqi Museum of its treasure
New York Times
April 13, 2003

BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 12: The National Museum of Iraq recorded a history of civilizations that began to flourish in the fertile plains of Mesopotamia more than 7,000 years ago. But once American troops entered Baghdad in sufficient force to topple Saddam Hussein’s government this week, it took only 48 hours for the museum to be destroyed, with at least 170,000 artifacts carried away by looters.

The full extent of the disaster that befell the museum came to light only today, as the frenzied looting that swept much of the capital over the previous three days began to ebb.

As fires in a dozen government ministries and agencies began to burn out, and as looters tired of pillaging in the 90-degree heat, museum officials reached the hotels where foreign journalists were staying along the eastern bank of the Tigris River. They brought word of what is likely to be reckoned as one of the greatest cultural disasters in recent Middle Eastern history.

A full accounting of what has been lost may take weeks or months. The museum had been closed during much of the 1990’s, and as with many Iraqi institutions, its operations were cloaked in secrecy under Mr. Hussein.

So what officials told journalists today may have to be adjusted as a fuller picture comes to light. It remains unclear whether some of the museum’s priceless gold, silver and copper antiquities, some of its ancient stone and ceramics and perhaps some of its fabled bronzes and gold-overlaid ivory, had been locked away for safekeeping elsewhere before the looting, or seized for private display in one of Mr. Hussein’s myriad palaces.

What was beyond contest today was that the 28 galleries of the museum and vaults with huge steel doors guarding storage chambers that descend floor after floor into unlighted darkness had been completely ransacked.

Officials with crumpled spirits fought back tears and anger at American troops, as they ran down an inventory of the most storied items that they said had been carried away by the thousands of looters who poured into the museum after daybreak on Thursday and remained until dusk on Friday, with only one intervention by American forces, lasting about half an hour, at lunchtime on Thursday.

Nothing remained, museum officials said, at least nothing of real value, from a museum that had been regarded by archaeologists and other specialists as perhaps the richest of all such institutions in the Middle East.

As examples of what was gone, the officials cited a solid gold harp from the Sumerian era, which began about 3360 B.C. and started to crumble about 2000 B.C. Another item on their list of looted antiquities was a sculptured head of a woman from Uruk, one of the great Sumerian cities, dating from about the same era, and a collection of gold necklaces, bracelets and earrings, also from the Sumerian dynasties and also at least 4,000 years old.

But an item-by-item inventory of the most valued pieces carried away by the looters hardly seemed to capture the magnitude of what had occurred. More powerful, in its way, was the action of one museum official in hurrying away through the piles of smashed ceramics and torn books and burned-out torches of rags soaked in gasoline that littered the museum’s corridors to find the glossy catalog of an exhibition of “Silk Road Civilizations” that was held in Japan’s ancient capital of Nara in 1988.

Turning to 50 pages of items lent by the Iraqi museum for the exhibition, he said none of the antiquities pictured remained after the looting. They included ancient stone carvings of bulls and kings and princesses; copper shoes and cuneiform tablets; tapestry fragments and ivory figurines of goddesses and women and Nubian porters; friezes of soldiers and ancient seals and tablets on geometry; and ceramic jars and urns and bowls, all dating back at least 2,000 years, some more than 5,000 years.

“All gone, all gone,” he said. “All gone in two days.”

An Iraqi archaeologist who has taken part in the excavation of some of the country’s 10,000 sites, Raid Abdul Ridhar Muhammad, said he went into the street in the Karkh district, a short distance from the eastern bank of the Tigris, about 1 p.m. on Thursday to find American troops to quell the looting. By that time, he and other museum officials said, the several acres of museum grounds were overrun by thousands of men, women and children, many of them armed with rifles, pistols, axes, knives and clubs, as well as pieces of metal torn from the suspensions of wrecked cars. The crowd was storming out of the complex carrying antiquities on hand carts, bicycles and wheelbarrows and in boxes. Looters stuffed their pockets with smaller items.

Mr. Muhammad said that he had found an American Abrams tank in Museum Square, about 300 yards away, and that five marines had followed him back into the museum and opened fire above the looters’ heads. That drove several thousand of the marauders out of the museum complex in minutes, he said, but when the tank crewmen left about 30 minutes later, the looters returned.

“I asked them to bring their tank inside the museum grounds,” he said. “But they refused and left. About half an hour later, the looters were back, and they threatened to kill me, or to tell the Americans that I am a spy for Saddam Hussein’s intelligence, so that the Americans would kill me. So I was frightened, and I went home.”

Mohsen Hassan, a 56-year-old deputy curator, returned to the museum on Saturday afternoon after visiting military commanders a mile away at the Palestine Hotel, with a request that American troops be placed in the museum to protect the building and items left by the looters in the vaults. Mr. Hassan said the American officers had given him no assurances that they would guard the museum around the clock, but other American commanders announced later in the day that joint patrols with unarmed Iraqi police units would begin as early as Sunday in an attempt to prevent further looting.

Mr. Hassan, who said he had spent 34 years helping to develop the museum’s collection, described watching as men took sledgehammers to locked glass display cases and in some instances fired rifles and pistols to break the locks.

He said that many of the looters appeared to be from the impoverished districts of the city where anger at Mr. Hussein ran at its strongest, but that others were middle-class people who appeared to know exactly what they were looking for.

“Did some of them know the value of what they took?” he said. “Absolutely, they did. They knew what the most valued pieces in our collection were.”

Mr. Muhammad spoke with deep bitterness toward the Americans, as have many Iraqis who have watched looting that began with attacks on government agencies and the palaces and villas of Mr. Hussein, his family and his inner circle broaden into a tidal wave of looting that struck just about every government institution, even ministries dealing with issues like higher education, trade and agriculture, and hospitals.

American troops have intervened only sporadically, as they did on Friday to halt a crowd of men and boys who were raiding an armory at the edge of the Republican Palace presidential compound and taking brand-new Kalashnikov rifles, rocket-propelled grenades and other weapons.

American commanders have said they lack the troops to curb the looting while their focus remains on the battles across Baghdad that are necessary to mop up pockets of resistance from paramilitary forces loyal to Mr. Hussein.

As reporters returned from the national museum to their hotels beside the Tigris tonight, marines guarding the hotels were caught in a heavy firefight with Iraqis across the river, and the neighborhoods erupted with tank and heavy machine-gun fire. Western television cameramen who went onto the embankment beside the Palestine Hotel to film the battle were pulled from danger by helmeted marines who dragged them down behind concrete parapets and waved to reporters on the hotel’s upper balconies to get down.

Mr. Muhammad, the archaeologist, directed much of his anger at President Bush. “A country’s identity, its value and civilization resides in its history,” he said. “If a country’s civilization is looted, as ours has been here, its history ends. Please tell this to President Bush. Please remind him that he promised to liberate the Iraqi people, but that this is not a liberation, this is a humiliation.”

Cultural catastrophe
My reaction to the pillage
April 13, 2003

Iraq was supposedly a major threat to world peace, a threat so grave that the U.S. and the U.K. had to bypass the UN Security Council and NATO to confront it without approval. Confronting this terrible threat, utterly overwhelming this mighty regime, took about three weeks. What a threat it was! Seems more like a tin-pot third-rate dictatorship to me.

The rationale for this confrontation was to “disarm” Iraq, to force the Iraqi regime to give up its Weapons of Mass Destruction. It somehow occurs to me that if there had been WMDs to be found, the ruthless, irresponsible Iraqi regime would have used them, even at the risk of shocking France and Germany, rather than face utter destruction. Where are these WMDs ??

That the cruel regime of Saddam Hussein is over is a good thing. That the cost in lives to the U.S. and U.K. has been relatively light is a good thing (although that cost would have been zero if this war had not started).

The cost to Iraqi civilians has been staggering, and the news media in the U.S. has largely ignored that cost.

Today, I had another of my fears confirmed– a cultural catastrophe. What would you think if the ancient Egyptian pyramids were blown up? Or the priceless ruins of Athens pulverized? The culture of Mesopotamia is more ancient than that of the Nile or of Greece–it goes back more than 7000 years (including Sumer, Ur, Chaldea, Babylonia, Assyria, and the Persian Emprie), and today I’ve learned that this heritage has been ransacked– thousands of years of culture messed up within just the last week.

I heard an archeologist on the radio this morning, in tears, telling how he had provided the Defense Department with a list of cultural sites to protect, and high on this list was the Baghdad Museum, utterly pillaged by looters within the past few days.

Oil fields were secured. Why wasn’t this museum secured?

Allan

Intellectual catastrophe
Bob W.’s response to my email
April 16, 2003

Allan,

Your inability to understand virtually anything dealing with geopolitics and current events is truly breathtaking. You ought to read something other than the New York Times, listen to something other than NPR and watch something other than CNN. The coverage of the war by these three organizations has been discredited. Every prediction made by these organizations has proven very wrong in spite of their best efforts to slant the news to bolster those predictions.

As to your note…

First, the danger posed by Saddam Hussein was not that he would attack us directly, but rather indirectly through a third party terrorist. His secret service was closely allied with Al Qaeda and provided that organization with the official documents those terrorists needed to move about the world. He also provided training grounds for Al Qaeda terrorists, including a plane fuselage used to train hi-jackers, and very likely several of those who participated in the 9/11 attack trained at this facility. Two of the top Al Qaeda leaders were former Iraqi intelligence officers. Think there might be a connection there?

Second, your concern for the Iraqi people is truly touching, but a bit late. Saddam Hussein started the war against Iran and as a result of his attack, 500,000 Iraqi conscripts were killed – and that’s in a population of 26 million. And then he had at least 10,000 Kurds, mostly helpless women and children, killed with various chemical weapons. Guess you missed that one too.

As for weapons of mass destruction, when they’re found, and they will be, I expect you to send an apology out to your original distribution list.

You ask why weren’t they used. First, our attack was so swift that the Iraqi military was caught flat-footed since their war plans were developed by the Russians who are still fighting the Napoleanic War. Second, our military special ops destroyed much of their delivery capability at the very outset of the war. Third, we destroyed the Iraqi command and control systems that were necessary to initiate such an attack. And finally, our military made it very clear that anyone who participated in such an attack would be tried as a war criminal and since our troops were better prepared to survive such an attack, it was very likely that those who initiated the attack, would bear the brunt of it.

As for the artifacts, are you willing to trade the lives of your sons and daughter to save archeological artifacts? You may be but I am not. As for saving the oil wells, by doing so we prevented an environmental disaster that would have taken decades to recover from. We don’t need Iraqi oil. We have plenty of it in Alaska. (As an aside, what is the mileage you get with your RV?)

Thank God we have a President from Texas and not one from Tennessee or Arkansas. The previous President, an emotional adolescent, left te great President Bush with a terrible mess to clean up and he’s doing it.

Please take me off your copy list as I’ve already read more far left clap-trap disguised as analysis than I care to.

Bob W.

Abu Ghraib and “Collateral Murder”
The pictures tell the story of Abu Ghraib, and this article and this one make a vain effort to explain that particular travesty, which the commanders blamed on a “few bad apples” but which is really a policy-encouraged dehumanization of “sand niggers” and a systemic insensitivity to committing atrocities, all made inevitable by war.

The brutal policy of our warmakers includes strenuous efforts to hush all these nasty side effects up, but whistleblowers leak anyway, and we are indebted to WikiLeaks for revealing some ugly, inconvenient truth about our generous nation building: Here is “Collateral Damage,” and here is that revelation put into perspective.

Alleged U.S. Army whistleblower Private Bradley Manning made his first court appearance on Friday, December 16, 2011, after being held for more more than a year and a half by the U.S. military. Manning is suspected of leaking hundreds of thousands of secret U.S. diplomatic cables to the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks in the biggest leak of classified U.S. documents in history. Supporters of Manning are rallying outside Fort Meade, Maryland. Kevin Zeese, attorney for the Bradley Manning Support Network, had this to say:

The people who should be prosecuted are not Bradley Manning. He’s accused of letting the truth out. He’s not accused of doing any criminal activity. He’s accused of letting the truth out, and he should be given an award for that, not prosecuted. He’s facing the death penalty, potentially. He’s facing the death penalty for exposing war crimes.

Discussing this is perhaps the nation’s most famous whistleblower, Daniel Ellsberg. Noting that the WikiLeaks revelations helped spark the Arab Spring and in turn the Occupy Wall Street movement, Ellsberg offers this qualified praise, if Manning indeed committed the leak of which he stands accused: “The Time magazine cover gives protester, an anonymous protester, as ‘Person of the Year,’ but it is possible to put a face and a name to that picture of ‘Person of the Year.’ And the American face I would put on that is Private Bradley Manning.”

[The Article 32 hearing Manning is being subjected to is] equivalent to a grand jury hearing. It’s kind of symptomatic of the present state of law in the United States, sort of like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland: punishment first, trial afterwards, sentence after that. He’s been effectively punished now ten-and-a-half months in Quantico in isolation, a kind of torture, according to the U.N. standards and to our own domestic law, that he couldn’t be sentenced to under our amendment to the Bill of Rights against cruel and unusual punishment. He couldn’t be assigned to that, but he has already. That, in itself, makes a travesty of this continued trial.

I was the first to face the kind of charges that he’s facing, under the Espionage Act, specifically, a civilian charge that he’s facing, 18 U.S.C. 793, back in 1971, the first time that act had been used against someone disclosing information to the American people. In the end, my trial was ended because of gross governmental misconduct against me under President Nixon. This court-martial should be ended now for exactly the same reason. There has been gross, illegal conduct against Bradley Manning in the form of his incarceration for these many months without trial. And that’s one of several reasons why this trial is a travesty….

One of the witnesses [the defense lawyer has not been permitted to call] is Juan Méndez, the U.N. special rapporteur for torture, who has heard credible reports, as he puts it, of inhumane treatment. And under his mandate, under the U.N., he should see, in private, as an official representative of the U.N., Private Manning to see that. He has not been allowed to do that, either in Quantico or Leavenworth. And he has specifically complained about prevarication of the—by the American government in their unwillingness to let him see that. U.N. and Red Cross representatives have seen people in Guantánamo, but they can’t get in, apparently, to Quantico or Leavenworth. Representative Dennis Kucinich, in his official capacity, tried repeatedly to see him in there, for the same reasons, and was again put off, again and again, told that he would be able to see him, but never allowed to see him.

I think that other witnesses, I see from the witness list without their names, are to establish the point that the strictly military charges that he’s facing, that Bradley Manning is facing, things like unauthorized downloading or uploading of software onto military computers, are done by virtually everyone in his department. And this is selective prosecution, obviously intended to get him, even if they can’t prove the charges that they want to get connecting him to Julian Assange of WikiLeaks. Obviously, the torture to which he was subjected was meant to break him down, to get him to acknowledge links that would enable them to indict Julian Assange. And evidently that pressure has failed against Private Manning….

[About the “Collateral Murder” video], which I’ve seen a number of times, let me speak as a former Marine company commander, and I was a battalion training officer who trained the 3rd Battalion, 2nd Marines on rules of war. No question in my mind, as I looked at that, that the specific leaked pictures in there of helicopter gunners hunting down and shooting an unarmed man in civilian clothes, clearly wounded, in an area where a squad of American soldiers was about to appear, as the helicopter gunners knew, to take custody of anyone remaining living, that shooting was murder. It was a war crime. Not all killing in war is murder, but a lot of it is. And this was.

The Time magazine cover gives protester, an anonymous protester, as “Person of the Year,” but it is possible to put a face and a name to that picture of “Person of the Year.” And the American face I would put on that is Private Bradley Manning. The fact is that he is credited by President Obama and the Justice Department, or the Army, actually, with having given WikiLeaks that helicopter picture and other evidence of atrocities and war crimes—and torture, specifically—in Iraq, including in the Obama administration. That, in other words, led to the Tunisian uprising, the occupation in Tunis Square, which has been renamed by—for another face that could go on that picture, Mohamed Bouazizi, who, after the WikiLeaks exposures of corruption, in Tunis, himself, Bouazizi, burned himself alive just one year ago tomorrow, Saturday, December 17th, in protest. And the combination of the WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning exposures in Tunis and the exemplification of that by Mohamed Bouazizi led to the protests, the nonviolent protests, that drove Ben Ali out of power, our ally there who we supported up ’til that moment, and in turn sparked the uprising in Egypt, in Tahrir Square occupation, which immediately stimulated the Occupy Wall Street and the other occupations in the Middle East and elsewhere. So, “Person of the Year,” one of those persons of the year is now sitting in a courthouse in Leavenworth. He deserves the recognition that he’s just gotten in Time. Julian Assange, who published that, another person of the year, I would say, who’s gotten a number of journalistic awards, very much deserve our gratitude. And I hope they will have the effect in liberating us from the lawlessness that we have seen and the corruption—the corruption—that we have seen in this country in the last 10 years and more, which has been no less than that of Tunis and Egypt.

U.S. withdrawal from Iraq: “In terms of destroying Iraq, it’s ‘mission accomplished'”: Sami Rasouli, the founder and director of the Muslim Peacemaker Teams in Iraq, discusses the results of the war from Najaf.

Over the past 9 years, the U.S. invasion has left a bloody toll on Iraqi civilians and foreign troops. Nearly 4,500 U.S. troops died. Another 32,000 were wounded. An accurate toll of Iraqis killed may never be known. According to Iraq Body Count, at least 104,000 Iraqi civilians have died. In 2006, the British medical journal Lancet estimated 600,000 Iraqis had already been killed. Other studies put the death toll over a million. Hundreds of thousands of more Iraqis died due to the crippling sanctions in the years between the 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 U.S. invasion. After 20 years of war and sanctions, Iraq’s infrastructure has been devastated….

Well, the war, as President Obama said, is over. But we understood from George Bush back on May 1st, 2003, that major combat operation was over and supposedly mission was accomplished. In terms of destroying Iraq, it’s really “mission accomplished,” as I witnessed through the last, let’s say, eight years, since [the] end of 2003.

But to see what we’ve gotten from this war, after the violence went down dramatically and the dust of war has been settled, now we see the damage clearly everywhere in Iraq, where the electricity high—still the basic public services is almost not there, in terms of the electricity, never has been advanced by the two terms of the Iraqi government or even with the—no intervention by the U.S. efforts to improve these needed public services for an average Iraqi. The healthcare system has been really destroyed. As you mentioned, the infrastructure is a total catastrophe that began not only since 2003, and actually, it’s more than 20 years since 1991.

You know, we should not forget the effect of the sanction before the invasion. The Iraqi people have suffered a lot, and many of them have died. And now, death is not stoppable, because of many unknown diseases that’s caused by poisons that the U.S. military has been—has used against major cities in Iraq. In 2001 and, as well, in 2003, tons—hundred tons of depleted uranium has been—have been thrown on the city of Fallujah, where women today cannot get pregnant due to the deformation of their newborn babies. This is happening here in Najaf, as well. When the U.S. fought the resistance, so-called, the insurgents led by Muqtada al-Sadr.

But to go across the country today and hear the news locally, the Iraqi people are really jubilant and happy that the U.S., if this is true, eventually is pulling out its troops….

[There] is an estimate about 5 million people have been displaced: within the country, about 2 million, and out of the country, 3 million. And those mostly are the middle class, the cream of the crop, the professionals, the engineers, the doctors. Where the country can rely on and get developed and get rebuilt, they are not there, due to the displacement effort through the violent period between 2005, ’06, ’07 and middle of 2008….

The costs of war: Tens of thousands dead, billions spent, and a country torn apart: Catherine Lutz, Brown University professor and co-director of the “Costs of War” research project at the Watson Institute for International Studies, discusses the true costs of the war.

The costs have really been staggering. We know about the number of U.S. servicemembers who have died. Most Americans know that. It’s over 4,500 individuals. We know that the Congress appropriated $800 billion over the years for the Iraq War.

But the true costs, of course, go much farther than that, starting with the people of Iraq, who have lost lives in the hundreds of thousands, the people of that country who have been displaced from their homes…. [Those] numbers are very hard to come by. But the U.N. estimates 3.5 million Iraqis are still displaced from their homes, and again, many widowed, many orphaned, and an environmental damage that has yet to be assessed.

But the idea that the war is over is, I think, what we really need to question, the idea that the war ends the day that the U.S. servicemembers leave that country. We know that many are staying behind in the form of private contractors and State Department employees. We know that the war won’t end for the people who are still, again, struggling to get back home, struggling with missing family members and so on. So I think we need to ask, is the war really over? And the answer is, really, no….

The State Department mission in Iraq, as Amy pointed out, has the largest embassy on the planet, a $6 billion budget. Much of that is going toward the support of 5,500 security contractors. And those people are guarding State Department employees, civilians, who are, again, engaged in a variety of activities there. But in some very important sense, that’s an index of how significantly—how significant the violence remains and the risk remains to the Americans who are there, because of, again, a continuing attempt to evict all of the Americans from Iraq….

How are the Iraqis going to be treated by those contractors? What are the rules of engagement? And what are the ways in which these contractors are permitted to respond when they feel threatened or when they feel that they’re—the people that they’re protecting are threatened? The inspector general for Iraq was not given the kinds of information that Secretary [of State Hillary] Clinton suggests is something that they’ve worked out, which is to say, those rules of engagement. So I think there’s really quite a risk to the Iraqi people that these contractors will, again, not be operating with that kind of—you know, operating in an environment in which violence is likely….

[The contractor] companies are … Triple Canopy, the Global Strategies Group, and—and again, some additional contractors—SOC Incorporated are the three main ones….

They do not have immunity in the same way that the troops did, and that’s why the Iraqis were allowing them to stay. But I think, again, if we look forward to what the rest of the country can expect in the next several years, it’s to continue to deal with the kinds of things that Sami talked about—a lack of electricity, the kinds of things that this mission is not going to help solve. And so, I think that the basic human needs to recover from injuries and losses of the nine years of war, that’s what we need to be talking about, is, what is the State Department doing vis-à-vis those issues?

Iraqi women’s activist rebuffs U.S. claims of a freer Iraq: “This is not a democratic country”: Yanar Mohammed, president of the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq, discusses the impact of the nearly 9-year U.S. occupation, particularly on Iraqi women.

If I start with the basics, the Iraqi cities are now much more destroyed than they were, I would say, like five years ago. All the major buildings are still destroyed. If you drive in the streets of the capital, your car cannot survive more than one month, because all the streets are still broken. So there was no reconstruction for the buildings, for the cities.

And in the same time, we have turned to a society of 99 percent poor and 1 percent rich, due to the policies that were imposed in Iraq. While Iraq has more than one million widows—some of the counts say one million, some of the counts say two million widows—these widows try to survive on a salary of $150, and most of them cannot get this salary because they don’t have proper ID due to internal displacement. And in the same time, the 1 percent, who lives—of Iraqis, who lives in the Green Zone, they drown in a sea of money. And there was a scandal of losing $40 billion from the annual budget of the country, and nobody is accountable for it. So we have—after nine years, we have the most corrupt government in the world.

We are divided to a society of Shias, who are ruling, and Sunnis, who want to get divided from the country of Iraq. We are now on the verge of the division of country according to religions. And to ethnicities, it has already happened. We know that the Kurdish north is now a Kurdistan, the region of Kurdistan. And the constitution that we have in Iraq allows everybody to get divided or to get their autonomy. So now the Sunni parts of Iraq, they want to be their own agents. They don’t want to be part of the central government anymore. And in the same time, destruction is everywhere. Poverty is for all the people but the 1 percent who are living inside the Green Zone.

And I would like to add one thing. If President Obama wants to make it sound like one unified society, that’s not the true story. We are living in a huge military camp, where one million Iraqi men are recruited in the army. And on top of that, there’s almost 50,000 militia members, of the Sadr group and the other Islamist group, who are not only local militias, like army within the country, but they are now being exported to other countries to oppress the Arab Spring in Syria and maybe later on in other countries. We are not a united country, because the Islamic Republic of Iran, which is another country, has the upper hand in Iraq. And the decisions that were done lately about who stays from the Americans and who doesn’t stay inside Iraq was due to the pressure of the Islamic Republic of Iran. They are the decision makers in Iraq.

And the biggest loser out of all of this are the women. Now, by the constitution, there are articles that refer us to the Islamic sharia, when this was not in action in the times of the previous regime. Under Islamic sharia, women are worth half a man legally and one-quarter of a man socially in a marriage. And we still suffer under this. As a women’s organization, we daily meet women who are vulnerable to being bought and sold in the flesh market. We see widows who have no source of income, and nobody to get them IDs for themselves and their children, because they have been internally displaced. So poverty and discrimination against women has become the norm. And the government doesn’t care much about this. They talk about it a lot, but not much is being done about it….

In the last year, we were told that Iraq’s economy is going to be changing, and there’s going to be a new phase of investment. But in reality, those who were invited into the Green Zone were surprised to see that it’s all about privatization, that we have new foreign oil companies. Some of them are already functioning in the south, like British Petroleum, who have an oil field from which they are extracting oil.

They are beginning to—they have brought some foreign workers to work in there, and they have totally discriminatory workplaces where the foreigner is paid much more than the Iraqi. I was told that the foreigners are paid in the thousands of dollars monthly, while an Iraqi employees is paid something like $400. And even the workplaces are very discriminatory and racist, in the sense that the foreigner workers are treated much better than the Iraqi employees.

And the question is, how did they get these foreign oil companies to come into Iraq? Like British Petroleum is one of them. It has many oil fields. It’s functioning. It’s extracting Iraqi oil. On which terms? We, the Iraqi people, don’t know. On which agreement did they come and they are functioning fully in Iraq? We, the Iraqi people, don’t know.

And the question is, why is all the money being shared by the 1 percent who are ruling Iraq and the U.S. administration and all these multinational companies, while the Iraqi widows cannot even have $150 as a salary? Most of the widows we’ve met in our organization do not have one penny coming into their pockets. No government finds themselves accountable for the women of Iraq, who have been turned deprived because of this war.

And I would like to add one thing. There is a new generation of women and men in Iraq who are totally illiterate. You see a woman in her twenties. She might have children, or not, and that’s another story about the widows. But she has witnessed no schooling because of the sectarian war, because of the war on Iraq. It’s a generation of illiteracy in Iraq, while, before this war, you know, we know that Iraq in the 1980s, and even in the following years, it had the highest literacy rate in the Arab world.

And the last point I would like to add, and I would have liked you to ask me about it, is the Arab Spring, when it started in Iraq, specifically on the day of February 25. When the government held a curfew in all the Iraqi cities, especially in Baghdad, we had to walk three hours to reach to the Tahrir Square of Baghdad, and 25,000 people were in that square expressing their political will that this is not the political system that they want to rule them—the Islamist government of the Shia, who is oppressing all the others, the Sunni, who are oppressed in the west, the ethnic divisions on the people.

And mind you, the gender divisions? In the Tahrir Square of Baghdad, many of us women were there, and we were so respected. Nobody told us to put on the veil on, while in these days the prime minister’s office is spreading out policies that all the female workers in the public sector will have to wear decent dress code—decent as in respecting our culture. The prime minister is imposing a mentality of discriminating against women based on Islamic sharia, while the demonstrators of the Arab Spring in Iraq want an egalitarian society.

And one thing that this new democracy, so-called democracy, proved in Iraq is that they were the best in oppressing the Arab Spring in Iraq. They sent us police, army and anti-riot groups to shoot us with live ammunition in the Tahrir Square. They detained and they tortured hundreds and thousands of us demonstrators. And this is because we only led a free demonstration.

And this is not only one demonstration. All the Fridays since the beginning of February have witnessed demonstrations in the main squares of Iraq—Baghdad, Sulaymaniyah, Basra, Samarra, all of Baghdad. People went into the squares, and there were no slogans of asking for a religious government. The U.S. administration came into Iraq: it divided the Iraqi people according to religion, according to their sect, according to their ethnicity. It’s divide and conquer. And now the women are the biggest loser in all of this. We went to the Iraqi squares. We demonstrated. The Arab Spring was there very strongly but got oppressed in ways that were new to Iraqi people. Anti-riot police of the American style was something that we witnessed there. The big vehicles that sprayed us with the hot water, polluted water, pushed us out of these squares. And sound bombs were thrown at us, live ammunition, the full works. This is not a democratic country. And it is not united, because it’s being divided into Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish regions….

[then responding to Donald Rumsfeld’s 2003 boast about how Iraq was being “liberated”]

I think that the victims and the parents of the victims of this war, the half-a-million dead of this war, were not invited to the celebration of the U.S. and the military in Baghdad. They should have been invited to give their say about this Iraqi war that left their families hungry and poor and really unable and helpless.

Capitalism hits the fan

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 00:52:51 GMT

by Richard Wolff
Santa Fe, NM
September 13, 2011

available from Alternative Radio

You can listen to Richard Wolff deliver this address here.

Richard Wolff is Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and currently a visiting professor at the New School in New York. He is the author of numerous books on economics, including Capitalism Hits the Fan.

This is a crisis. I wasn’t so sure back in 2007, and even into 2008, that it would be a serious crisis. Like so many in my profession, I had not seen just how bad things could get. But that’s all better now. I see clearly. And while most of my colleagues in the profession don’t, because of their commitments over a lifetime, I do want to tell you a little bit about how it is as well as how we got here.

First, how it is. This is the worst economic crisis in my lifetime, which means it’s probably the same in yours. This is the fifth year. This crisis really begins in the middle of 2007. We’re now in the second half of 2011. That’s really bad. Our unemployment is extremely high, not the 9% you read in the newspapers. The Bureau of Labor Statistics in Washington keeps a whole bunch of unemployment statistics. They have even names, U-some number, to distinguish one from the other.

The most important of those is called U-6. Let me make sure we all know what that means. It counts three groups of people. Those looking for work but not able to find it. That’s the 9% you read in the newspapers about. And then it adds two other groups: people who have a part-time job but want a full-time job but can’t find one— there are millions of those people in the United States, and then it adds a third group. These are the people who have stopped looking. And they get different names, depending on which year you look at the statistics. They’re sometimes called—and you have to appreciate the compassion here—“discouraged workers.” More recently, they’ve been given the name “marginal workers,” which is probably less good to be called. When you put all those three together, you get the U-6 statistic. It’s currently 17 1/2%. Not 9%, 17 1⁄2%. That’s not my adjustment of the unemployment data; that’s the official government data. Seventeen percent is one out of six, better than, which basically means that every single American family has somebody in their extended numbers, if it’s one out of six, who is in that group, who is not earning any kind of money that they can live on.

Therefore, this is not a crisis that is a part of our economic system failure. It is a general crisis. I want to drive that point home. It’s not a financial crisis. That is an adjective designed to suggest that the crisis is limited to a part of the economy—finance. As you will see in a few minutes, this crisis comes out of the entire economic functioning of our society and is not particularly financial. It shows up in finance, but that’s not where its origins are and that’s not where its impact has been felt exclusively.

This is a general crisis of our system. So I want to turn, having said that, and talk a little bit about the system.

But even before I do that, one more point. Let’s keep the human dimension of a crisis of these proportions in our minds. Somewhere between 20 and 30 million people are in this U-6 number. That’s an enormous number of people. They have been out of work, on average, more weeks than in any other crisis for many decades. It’s a long-lasting unemployment. When people are unemployed for a long time, they exhaust their savings, they become burdens on other members of their family or circle of friends. Every statistic we know means that those people suffer mental problems, physical health problems, problems in their relationships with spouses and children and parents, and the damage and the scarring from all of that lasts for decades. The social costs of a crisis of these dimensions are staggering. It is a blot on the reputation of economists that there are very few studies that even try to measure what those costs are.

And if we were to add to it, if we had more time, the costs of the millions of people who have been thrown out of their homes through foreclosure actions, that would only add. The millions of people who have seen the benefits that go with the jobs they still have be cut back and the anxiety that produces, that would have to be added. And for all of you that are wondering whether Medicare and Social Security will be there when you need them—and that’s something you should wonder a lot about—how do you measure the costs of those anxieties and those shattered relationships and those strained family structures that come out of all of this? The costs are incalculable. And we’re not doing much about it, so it sits there. Again, we are in the fifth year of this economic decline.

So what is it that’s having the problems? It is our economic system. Let me be clear. I don’t believe it is valuable or useful to look for a scapegoat. I know that some people want to blame the Federal Reserve system, our monetary system. They want to get really angry at Ben Bernanke, which I encourage you to do, but not as an analysis of our difficulties. Then there are those who think it’s the evil machinations of Wall Street. Once again, please, be angry at Wall Street, but as an analysis of our problem, no.

Our problem is that everyone over the last 30 years has played the game of economics as best they could: workers, businesses, government. They’ve played by the basic rules of how this system works. And by doing so, they brought the system to this disastrous end result. So don’t get angry at any one of them. Don’t decide that the evil culprit were those folks who took out loans that they couldn’t afford, those things we later called subprime loans. They, too, were trying to live the American dream, to follow the encouragements to borrow money, to enjoy that, and to pass on the dream to their children. Everybody was doing what the system calls them to do, what the system rewards them for doing, what the system invites them to do. The problem is the system and not this or that player in it.

What is this system? It has a name. This system is called capitalism. It’s been the dominant economic system for several hundred years, first in Europe and then brought here. I want to talk to you briefly about that system. It is extraordinarily unstable, and it always has been. Capitalism bounces up and down. That’s why we have so many words for that: recession, depression, inflation, upturn, downturn, boom, bust. I could go on all night. Cultures develop many words for something when it’s very important in their lives. And that is.

It is so unstable meaning periodically millions of people are thrown out of work. The resources that people normally work with sit idle, gathering rust and dust. Currently, by the way, the government says we are working at about 70% capacity. That’s what it’s called. That means 30% of the tools, equipment, machines, office space, mall space is empty, is sitting idle. We will live in an economic system in which millions of people want work and don’t have it, in which all the raw materials, equipment, and machines they need to work with are sitting there idle. If we had a system that worked, it would put the people who want to work together with all the stuff that they need to work with to produce the wealth that could all make our situations much better. But our economic system cannot and does not put those together. And what’s worse, it’s a-bouncing up and down.

In my classes in the university, to get this idea across, I tell a joke, which I’m going to impose on you. If you lived with a roommate as unstable as this economic system, you would have moved out or demanded that your roommate get professional help. But you live, or most folks do, in an economic system where they make neither of those kinds of demands on it. They live with it. It’s extraordinary.

So we’re in another one, another economic downturn, of which there have been so many. But this one is really bad and lasting a long time, which they sometimes do. The last time we had that in the U.S. was the Great Depression, the 1930s. Let me remind you, it begins in October of 1929, and depending on what historian you like best, it ends 1939, 1940, 1941. My message—it lasted a decade. These things don’t have to be short. And in case you think that only the happened in ancient history, in the 1930s, think about Japan, which settled into a depression in 1989 and is still in it. Still in it 20 years later. That’s why the newspapers are full of the U.S.’s economic position and the great challenge mounted by China. What happened to Japan? Japan is in a terrible economic mess it cannot find its way out of. So is it possible that the one we’re in is going to last a long time? You bet. And could it get worse before it gets better? I used to have to say it could. Now I can tell you that all the current statistics indicate it already is getting worse. It’s extraordinary.

But this one has a particular set of qualities I want now to turn to. This crisis comes after 30 years of an extraordinary economic development of the U.S. Thirty years ago, the U.S. was one of the least unequal societies in terms of the distribution of income and wealth when you looked at the whole collection of advanced industrial economies. Today we are the most unequal. Something happened over the last 30 years that dramatically widened the gap between rich and poor. For reasons you’re going to see in a few minutes as I go through it, we produced enormous wealth for the top, and we wiped out the middle, which probably some of you have already noticed in very intimate and personal ways. So that now we have a small group of rich at the top and a vast group of people struggling to make ends meet.

You might imagine—you would be wrong but you might imagine—that if a crisis happens in a society at the end of 30 years of extraordinary wealth at one end of the society and a hard time for everybody else, that the system would try to fix its dilemma by asking those who have done well over the last 30 years, who are the most able to pay now compared to everybody else, to kick in and do something to help the system get out of its mess. But that’s not what’s happening. This society is trying to solve its economic problems by having debates in Washington on what? On how much to cut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, aid to education, helping students go to school. It’s extraordinary. The solution to an economic crisis coming at the end of a tremendous explosion of wealth at one end of the distribution is by taking more away from those who have had a hard time for the 30 years, just to avoid taxing those whose have the most and those who have done the best? How is that possible?

Again, to drive it home, that’s not what happened in the U.S. in the 1930s, which came after a period when much less of an inequality of wealth had been experienced. Let me remind you of what happened the last time the U.S. faced this situation, because the contrast could not be starker. In comes Roosevelt on a program of balanced budgets. A very conservative Democratic leader was our President Roosevelt. But three or four years into the crisis, when it looked as bad as ours now looks, when the unemployment kept getting worse, even worse than it is today, Mr. Roosevelt underwent a transformation. He became a different president. I would like to suggest it was because he saw the light. Clearly, that was not the case.

What he saw was the heat. And the heat was coming from below. The trade union movement of the U.S., just to remind you, had the most explosive growth in the history of the U.S.—we had never had it before, we have never had it since—sweeping across America’s basic industries, steel, auto, rubber, chemical, all of them. The CIO organized millions of workers whose reaction to the Great Depression was to become more militant on the left politically. Beyond that, the Socialist Party had a renaissance of membership and the Communist Party became an important political force, more than it had ever been, more than it has been since, a lot more. Mr. Roosevelt faced a mass of people whose reaction to a protracted depression was to demand fundamental help from the government and fundamental change. So Mr. Roosevelt saw an opportunity and a pressure.

So what did he do? Faced with unemployment, he did something very different from what we see today. He said, If we’re going to solve the problem of unemployment, and if the private sector is either unable or unwilling to do it, well, then I’ll do it. Between 1934 and 1941, Roosevelt and the federal government created and filled 11 million jobs, paid by the federal government, giving those people and their families and their communities a job instead of a dole, a decent income, the ability to maintain their mortgage payments and so keep their homes, etc., etc. In today’s numbers it would be roughly double that number of people, and that would be a major address of unemployment issues. That’s what he did.

In case you’re wondering how that was paid for, he went to the corporations and he went to the rich, and he said to them, My fellow rich Americans, you’re going to pay for it. And you’re going to like it, because you’re not doing anything to get us out of this mess from which you as rich people are endangered and you as corporations are suffering. You’re not able or willing to help yourself, so I’m going to do it for you, but you’re going to pay for it. And they did.

A couple of statistics. You know, I’m an economist. We have to pepper our conversations with statistics because it helps the average person think we really know what we’re talking about. So here’s one. At the end of World War II the federal government relied, as it does to this day, on taxing individuals and taxing corporations— individuals’ incomes, corporations’ profits. In 1945, for every dollar that Washington got from taxing individuals, it got $1.50 from taxing corporations. Corporations paid 50% more in toto than individuals. What’s the relationship today? For every dollar that the government gets by taxing individuals, it gets from corporations—ready?—25 cents. That is a massive shift over the last half century of the burden of taxation off of business and onto all of you. But that’s only half the story.

Here’s the other half. Roosevelt went to the rich people and he said, I’m not just going to tax the corporations to pay for the jobs program, I’m going to tax all you rich people. And he really went after them. First, in the 1930s he said, I’m going to raise the rates of taxation on rich people. You’re going to pay a lot more than middle-class people and low-income people, a lot more. The rates were jacked up into the 90th percentile. What does that mean? For every dollar over, say, $100,000 or whatever the cutoff was then, for every dollar over that that a rich person gets, he or she would have to give the government 90-plus cents, keeping the remaining 10 cents, roughly, for themselves. Wow.

In 1942 Roosevelt makes an even more dramatic proposal as president. He says, I believe we ought to have a maximum income in the U.S. Yup, the president. And what was it? $25,000 a year? His proposal was, every dollar you earn over $25,000, the federal government is going to come and take it away and use it to fix this economic system. Of course, wealthy people, as you might imagine, didn’t like this, and the Republican Party opposed it. The Republican Party threatened not to allow the national debt to be raised back in the 1940s, just like they did a few months ago. Roosevelt made a lot of public speeches and they fought, and they reached a compromise. Okay, said Roosevelt, I won’t insist on a cap, a maximum income, but in exchange I want the maximum tax rate to be 94%. For every dollar over $100,000 that rich people get, 94 cents will go to Washington, you get to keep 6. And the Republicans went along. That became the law.

In the 1950s and 1960s, it was 91%. In the 1970s, it was 70%. What is it today? 35%. Are you with me? Over the last half century, the top income bracket, for the richest people, was dropped from the 90s to 35. That’s a tax cut. The last 50 years in this country, if you just look at our tax system, is a sign that the issue in America isn’t: Will there be a class war? We’ve had 50 years of class war, and we lost, because we’re paying those taxes. We are the middle, we’re paying the taxes. It’s so grotesque that we even have in the U.S. rich people, really rich people,—I’m thinking, as you probably can guess, of Warren Buffet, one of the richest, who is making a career these days of explaining that there is something wrong in a system in which he pays a lower rate of taxes, earning hundreds of millions of dollars a year, than any of the people in his office, the secretaries and the clerks. He’s able to see it. This is a society that has relieved the rich in a staggering way while making them richer over the last 30 years. Stunning.

Their plan right now? What are they going to do to help this economic crisis? Nothing. No tax increases. Last December you all watched as Obama tried to see whether we could, for people over $250,000, not give them the tax cut that Bush had gotten through, make them pay a little more. You know what his proposal was, for those of you who don’t watch the numbers? To let it go from the 35% it is now up to the lofty level—ready?—39%. That was defeated, and the President accepted that defeat. Wow. They weren’t even willing to pay another 4% to help the situation. So we don’t have the 1930s, we don’t have Roosevelt, we don’t have a jobs program, we don’t have a tax the rich. We have the opposite of all those things.

A few days ago the president of the U.S., in what is arguably one of the major speeches of his campaign for the presidency next year, had a jobs proposal to make. What was it? Exactly the same as the last time. He’s going to provide incentives to business to solve the problem of hiring more workers, and he’s going to give them big orders to help rebuild our infrastructure. For those of us who watch these things, it’s a little painful. The last time we had a program like this, it was for $800 billion, two and a half years ago. Now the president, when the situation is worse, is proposing a program whose price tag is about $400 billion. The problem is worse and the program is half as big. Hello. Where is this going? Nowhere.

And in that lies a lesson. Here’s what that lesson is: Capitalism has always been highly unstable. And here’s how the downturns of capitalism have always been managed: You wait. You wait for what? You wait for the unemployment to convince more and more people, based on their desperation, to offer to sell their ability to work for less money. Wages go down. As more and more businesses collapse because the economy is in such bad shape, guess what happens? They have to sell their equipment at secondhand, fire-sale prices: their computers, their machines, their fleets of vehicles. The price of the equipment, the inputs to business, collapse, just as the wages collapse.

Let me give you the example that’s so stark in America today. The autoworkers, who used to be among the best-paid workers in the U.S. They were getting up until recently roughly $28 an hour plus benefits. They had to sign a contract. It’s different now. All new employees get half of that—$14 an hour. And they have tens of thousands more people applying for those jobs than they have jobs in Detroit. If you want to see where the future of American capitalism is, go to Detroit. It will terrify you, what you see.

So the system corrects itself by waiting. What are they waiting for? Until the wages get low enough and the costs of inputs from collapsed businesses become low enough that those capitalists who have survived see an opportunity for profit. At such low wages, at such low costs of doing business, now it becomes interesting. So we wait as a society. We wait until it’s profitable again for capitalism to renew the investment process and hire people. Then the economy turns up until the next bounce down.

Then what is all this talk in Washington? What are all these events about policy? A thesis I want to ask you to think about—that it’s all a kind of diversionary political theater. We have the Republicans and the Democrats positioning themselves, arguing: What are we going to do? blah blah blah blah We should do A. No, we should do B. But in reality they’re just waiting. We’re all supposed to get excited in the debate between Republicans and Democrats, not because either of their policies can or will do anything. We’re waiting until the system can once again get going, when enough people have suffered enough to accept $14 instead of $28 an hour. And then the system comes back. Extraordinary.

And from some of your faces, let me drive it home with an example, with some numbers. Another thing we do as economists, numbers. We’re supposed to get you to believe that by talking about numbers it’s all more real than it otherwise would be. It’s a game, but it’s the game we know how to play. So let me do that for you.

The federal government’s budget right now in the U.S. is a peculiar one. Voted by Republicans and Democrats last year, the current budget works as follows: The government of the U.S. is scheduled to spend $3 1/2 trillion. That same budget has the U.S. government bringing in in taxes on individuals and corporations and a few other things, like rubber tires and gasoline and alcohol, about $2 trillion. Are you with me? The difference between what the government is supposed to spend is $1 1/2 trillion, the difference between 3 1/2 and 2. What is $1 1/2 trillion? It’s kind of a hard number to get your head around. It’s $1,500 billion: $1,500,000,000,000. That’s the deficit. If you’re upset about deficits, which every politician in Washington claims to be, you’d have to be upset about the fact that in this year alone we are going to be at deficit, that is, spending more than we earn as an economy, as a government, to the tune of $1,500 billion.

So what was the debate in Washington between Republicans and Democrats all about? The Republicans came in with a dynamic proposal to cut the deficit by the huge number of $100 billion. Hello. How big is the deficit? $1,500 billion. So if the Republicans proposed a draconian program to cut $100 billion, they’re not proposing anything. The Democrats came riding into the debate saying, That’s much too much. We only to want cut it $30 billion. And then they fought for months, threatening to stop the government, and they reached a historic compromise, $38 billion—that was the number— $38 billion out of $1,500 billion. To take this seriously you have to be crazy. You’re watching theater. Bad theater.

But it’s also dangerous theatre. We’re scheduled to have a deficit this year of $1,500 billion. Next year’s deficit is scheduled to be over a trillion dollars. We are borrowing money like it’s going out of style. Our debt now is about $14 1/2 trillion. That’s what we produce in an average year. Our debt is 100% of the output of goods and services. It’s so bad, the level of debt, that the Standard & Poor corporation a few weeks ago made a big splash by reducing the creditworthiness of the U.S., which you always do when someone is borrowing way too much, too fast, which we’re doing, and which neither political party is doing anything about.

Why? The answer is simple. The way to reduce our deficit is to tax the wealth. Since that’s politically impossible in the U.S., we can’t do it. But to appreciate the full irony, we are borrowing ourselves into oblivion. We are reproducing the exact behavior that got that little country of Greece into the mess it’s now in. And the reason is, we don’t tax the rich. So the government, in order to spend $3 1/2 trillion when it only taxes $2 trillion, has to borrow it.

Now, if you get the next point, you will understand modern economics. If the government has to borrow $1,500 billion to perform the activities we want it to perform, and therefore it has to borrow $1,500 billion, who do you think it borrows it from? Here it comes. Why, of course, from the rich people in the corporations who have the money because the government didn’t tax them. From the standpoint of corporations and the rich, follow the logic. Instead of paying taxes, the way they used to, they now have a much better deal. We corporations and rich people don’t pay the taxes, which if we did, the government would take it, end of story. Instead, much better: We lend it to the government, which has to pay it back. And while we wait, it pays us interest.

When I made my criticisms of capitalism as I was learning economics, I remember that the single most powerful critique of what I was saying, given to me by my professors, and later by my colleagues, was, Well, yes, there are these problems. But the bottom line is, Capitalism delivers the goods.

Well, you’ve got to stay with an argument like that through good times and bad, don’t you? Capitalism is not delivering the goods now. It’s delivering the bads, big time. And that’s going to change this country’s history.

Let me turn in the time I have left to offering two things briefly: one, a brief explanation of how we got into this mess over the last 30 years, and then a suggestion of what we need to do to get out of it.

First, how we got into it. Ours is a peculiar country. From 1820, shortly after we became independent, to 1970, the U.S. paid higher wages to its workers year after year. Stunning. No other capitalist country did it. It developed in the U.S. the idea that every generation lives better than the one before, there’s an American dream, if you’re an immigrant, come here, you work hard and you will make more money. And it worked. It was extraordinary. It happened because we had a labor shortage here. Capitalists were successful: they made money, they built their businesses up. But they always ran against the problem—not enough people. We weren’t very nice to those whom we found here—some of you know that story, particularly in this area—so they weren’t available. We had to bring people, and we had to have high wages to bring people here. And when they came here, they wanted to run off and have a farm somewhere in the West, so we had to keep paying higher wages to keep them here even once we got them.

In 1970, all that changed, stopped. We don’t have a labor shortage anymore. Here’s why. We replaced huge numbers of American workers with computers, starting in the 1970s. We moved jobs out of the U.S. because that 150 years of rising wages had made wages higher here. So corporations said, Oh, you see, the wages are higher here. I’m going to China. They’re much lower. So there was less demand for people to work. At the same time in the 1970s, women in America, for a whole host of reasons, demanded jobs, paid jobs, and immigrants, particularly from the South, came into the U.S., the latest wave. Women and immigrants looking at the same time as there were fewer jobs. All businesses in America, Main Street and Wall Street, discovered they didn’t have to raise wages anymore, there was no more labor shortage. So they didn’t. Statistic: The real wage in the U.S. today, the value of an hour’s worth of work for the average worker adjusted for the prices you pay, in 2011 is the same as it was in 1978. Thirty years of no increase of wages.

American families were traumatized. After all, we grew up in a society where you’re supposed to live the American dream, do better each year, give that to your children, etc. So Americans reacted, working people, the way traumatized people often do, particularly when you can’t discuss it. There was no discussion in America in the last 30 years about this sea change. So Americans did two things.

They sent everybody in the family out to work. Another statistic, OECD: Americans do more hours of paid labor per year than the working classes in any other country on this Earth. We work ourselves to death.
And when that wasn’t enough, the American working class became a pioneer in a new way. It undertook a level of debt no working class had ever undertaken before. We had to develop a whole new instrument, the credit card, and distribute it to everybody. And many of them. So you could really accumulate debt.

By 2007, of course, what? The American working class is exhausted. It can’t work anymore, it is stressed beyond words because with the women entering the labor force, they become exhausted, they can’t hold together the emotional life of American families the way they once had. The stress levels are unbearable. And then that debt which you’re freaked out about because you don’t think you can pay.

So the collapse happens in 2007 just where you would expect it—the inability of an overindebted working class to make the payments. Then the whole house of cards collapses. That’s why we’re still in it now. Corporations are not going to go invest and hire workers. Why should they? Nobody’s buying what they’re producing. And there is no prospect that they will. Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal contains a wonderful article about the Procter & Gamble Company and how it has to reorganize its investment programs. Because they used to direct much of their advertising and their production to the vast middle class of the U.S., and their extensive research shows them it’s not there anymore. So they’re cutting their business into two parts: the part that deals with rich people and the part that deals with—and I won’t use any pejorative terms—the rest. No middle. It’s over.

Now, 30 years later, the American people are coming to a recognition that they postponed for a generation the end of rising wages. They substituted borrowing to keep up the illusion that they were living the American dream. They can’t do that anymore. It’s over. The realization of that is just beginning to sink in to the American people.

The corporations already knew it. Forty years ago they moved production out of the U.S. Fifteen years ago they started moving white-collar jobs out of the U.S. And today they’re realizing that their markets are only outside the U.S. They’re done here. You’re watching that play itself out and the desperate struggles of a society trying to come to terms with it.

What do you do about this situation? Well, you could try to do what some folks suggest: Let’s get a bigger stimulus. What? How are you going to do that? Are you going to borrow even more money when you can hardly stand the level of debt of the government? There are lots of voices saying that. That’s not going to happen. Here’s another thought. Let’s regulate the businesses. They shouldn’t do this. We had the greatest explosion of regulation in American history in the 1930s. What has happened ever since? The business community used the profits they had to systematically evade, avoid, weaken, or overturn every regulation. What in the world makes you think, having learned how to do it over the last 50 years, if we throw them a new bunch of regulations, they won’t do the same. They’ll do it, and they’ll do it faster, because they know better how to do it.

Here’s the conundrum that I want to leave you with. If this is a systemic problem, if everything that has happened comes out of banks doing what they do and corporations doing what they do and workers doing what they do, trying to make a living within the rules of this game, if it’s a systemic problem, then we have to overcome a 50-year taboo in the U.S. We have to talk about the system. We have to ask the question, like mature adults, the way we question our educational system, our transportation system, our health delivery system. Does it work, is it serving our needs? We have to ask that question about the economic system, too. Capitalism. Does it meet our needs? Did it and does it continue, and is it reasonable to go that way?

I would submit to you that it cannot, that the benefits of capitalism have been won. The gains it is capable of have been achieved. It’s no longer working, and we’re not getting anywhere by refusing to face that reality. So what change would I propose? Would it be a return to the examples and experiments of the Soviet Union and China? No. No.

For me, the change has to come at the base of society. We have a problem in the way we organize the production and distribution of goods and services in America. We use an institution called a corporation. Therein lies the problem. Every day in America people come to work from 9:00 to 5:00, Monday through Friday. We help to produce the goods and services that we all depend on. At the end of each day, when our work is done, we go home. We don’t take with us the goods and services we’ve produced.

You might have wondered—and I’m sure you all did—what happens to those goods and services we produce that we must leave there? Well, someone makes a lot of decisions. That someone is a board of directors, 15 to 20 people, who run most of the corporations in this country. And who selects those 15 or 20 people? A group called the major shareholders, another group of 15 or 20 people. Fifteen or 20 people select the 15 or 20 other people. Who make what decisions? What to produce, how to produce, where to produce, and what to do with the profits.

Folks, what they do is understandable in this system. They use the profits to shape politics, they use the profits to shape the society they live in to keep themselves in the wonderful position of being among those who make the decisions and get the profits. They’re the ones who make the decisions that make our economy work the way it does. If you don’t want it to work the way it’s now working to deliver the bads, then you’ve got to deal with this problem.

And what would that mean? It’s an idea as old as the U.S. and older still. You’ve got to change the way organizations like corporations work. You have to make it for the first time the rule that the people who work in the corporation make the decisions. You come to work Monday through Thursday and you do your job. on Friday you come to work dressed down a little bit, relaxed, and you don’t do your regular job. You sit around all day Friday with your fellow workers having meetings to decide democratically, one worker, one vote, what to produce, how to produce, where to produce, and what to do with the profits.

How do you summarize what I propose? Here’s a thought. Democracy at work. Because, after all in, a society that prides itself on believing in democracy, that the people who have to live with the decision ought to be participants in making it, something we claim as a nation to hold dear, it’s kind of strange, if you think about it, that the most important activity of our adult lives, what we do five out of seven days, the key part of each day—work— should be organized in a way that isn’t democratic at all, where all of us who work have to live with the decisions of a board of directors over whom we exercise no power whatsoever. Why would democracy be good, but not at work? Either it’s good or it isn’t. This is long overdue. This is an alternative way of organizing your economy.

And, boy, would it lead to different results. Let me close by giving you a taste. Let’s go back to the 1970s, when corporations all over America realized the labor shortage was over and we don’t have to pay rising wages. Suppose a decision on wages was not made by the board of directors but by the collective of workers. Do you think they would have stopped the 150-year history of raising wages? Unlikely. Do you think they would have voted to move production to China, thereby depriving themselves of a job? Unlikely. You think they would have paid their executives staggering amounts of money while everybody else’s wage was stagnant? Probably not. In short, we would have had a completely different history as a nation over the last 30 years. If their wages had kept going up, as they had been able to do for 150 years, then they would have had to borrow so much, and we wouldn’t have had the credit explosion, and everything would have been different.

A mature nation that isn’t afraid should, especially now that the Cold War is 20 years behind us, finally be able to look squarely in the face at an economic system that isn’t working and to be able to say, Let’s have a national debate over the strengths and weaknesses of the capitalist system as it works in the U.S. and as we can compare it to alternative arrangements, one of which I’ve just sketched briefly for you. It is way too dangerous not to have that debate. It is way too costly. Think of the millions of families with which I began tonight’s talk.

In case you think it’s unthinkable or impossible, think about an unusual political party that arose in one of the most powerful capitalist countries over the last few years. I’m speaking of Germany. In Germany, a new political party, brand-new in many ways, formed 10 years ago. To make it clear what it believed in, it called itself Die Linke in German, meaning “the left.” Hint. Here’s one of its basic slogans: Germany can do better than capitalism. In the last national election they got 12% of the vote. Because Germany has a system of proportional representation, if you get 12% of the vote, you get 12% of the deputies in the parliament, which they have.

If it is possible among the German people, given their history, to have a party that makes this part of the national debate, which it is, then there is no reason why a determined American public, aware of the dilemmas it faces economically, cannot rise to the challenge of making a comparable determination.

It is very dangerous, the situation we’re in. To do less than that dishonors whatever we take seriously of the American tradition and is no service to one another or to the rest of the American people, who need once again to see a movement arise like the one, although it will be new and different, that got Mr. Roosevelt to change so dramatically in the 1930s. We can’t ask Mr. Obama to do that for us. As with Roosevelt, he’s going to do it, if he ever does it, because we have independently built the pressure below demanding different kind of responses.

I hope these arguments are of some interest. Thank you for your attention.

For information about obtaining CDs, MP3s, or transcripts of this or other programs, please contact:
David Barsamian
Alternative Radio
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©2010

Capitalism versus the climate

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 16:03:37 GMT

by Naomi Klein, the author of Shock Doctrine, currently working on a book about climate change. Her article originally appeared in The Nation.

What the right gets–and the left doesn’t–about the revolutionary power of climate change. This is the most powerful article I’ve seen on explaining what’s really going on.

Responding to climate change requires that we break every rule in the free-market playbook and that we do so with great urgency. We will need to rebuild the public sphere, reverse privatizations, relocalize large parts of economies, scale back overconsumption, bring back long-term planning, heavily regulate and tax corporations, maybe even nationalize some of them, cut military spending and recognize our debts to the global South. Of course, none of this has a hope in hell of happening unless it is accompanied by a massive, broad-based effort to radically reduce the influence that corporations have over the political process. That means, at a minimum, publicly funded elections and stripping corporations of their status as “people” under the law. In short, climate change supercharges the pre-existing case for virtually every progressive demand on the books, binding them into a coherent agenda based on a clear scientific imperative.

There is a question from a gentleman in the fourth row.

He introduces himself as Richard Rothschild. He tells the crowd that he ran for county commissioner in Maryland’s Carroll County because he had come to the conclusion that policies to combat global warming were actually “an attack on middle-class American capitalism.” His question for the panelists, gathered in a Washington, DC, Marriott Hotel in late June, is this: “To what extent is this entire movement simply a green Trojan horse, whose belly is full with red Marxist socioeconomic doctrine?”

Here at the Heartland Institute’s Sixth International Conference on Climate Change, the premier gathering for those dedicated to denying the overwhelming scientific consensus that human activity is warming the planet, this qualifies as a rhetorical question. Like asking a meeting of German central bankers if Greeks are untrustworthy. Still, the panelists aren’t going to pass up an opportunity to tell the questioner just how right he is.

Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute who specializes in harassing climate scientists with nuisance lawsuits and Freedom of Information fishing expeditions, angles the table mic over to his mouth. “You can believe this is about the climate,” he says darkly, “and many people do, but it’s not a reasonable belief.” Horner, whose prematurely silver hair makes him look like a right-wing Anderson Cooper, likes to invoke Saul Alinsky: “The issue isn’t the issue.” The issue, apparently, is that “no free society would do to itself what this agenda requires…. The first step to that is to remove these nagging freedoms that keep getting in the way.”

Claiming that climate change is a plot to steal American freedom is rather tame by Heartland standards. Over the course of this two-day conference, I will learn that Obama’s campaign promise to support locally owned biofuels refineries was really about “green communitarianism,” akin to the “Maoist” scheme to put “a pig iron furnace in everybody’s backyard” (the Cato Institute’s Patrick Michaels). That climate change is “a stalking horse for National Socialism” (former Republican senator and retired astronaut Harrison Schmitt). And that environmentalists are like Aztec priests, sacrificing countless people to appease the gods and change the weather (Marc Morano, editor of the denialists’ go-to website, ClimateDepot.com).

Most of all, however, I will hear versions of the opinion expressed by the county commissioner in the fourth row: that climate change is a Trojan horse designed to abolish capitalism and replace it with some kind of eco-socialism. As conference speaker Larry Bell succinctly puts it in his new book Climate of Corruption, climate change “has little to do with the state of the environment and much to do with shackling capitalism and transforming the American way of life in the interests of global wealth redistribution.”

Yes, sure, there is a pretense that the delegates’ rejection of climate science is rooted in serious disagreement about the data. And the organizers go to some lengths to mimic credible scientific conferences, calling the gathering “Restoring the Scientific Method” and even adopting the organizational acronym ICCC, a mere one letter off from the world’s leading authority on climate change, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But the scientific theories presented here are old and long discredited. And no attempt is made to explain why each speaker seems to contradict the next. (Is there no warming, or is there warming but it’s not a problem? And if there is no warming, then what’s all this talk about sunspots causing temperatures to rise?)

In truth, several members of the mostly elderly audience seem to doze off while the temperature graphs are projected. They come to life only when the rock stars of the movement take the stage—not the C-team scientists but the A-team ideological warriors like Morano and Horner. This is the true purpose of the gathering: providing a forum for die-hard denialists to collect the rhetorical baseball bats with which they will club environmentalists and climate scientists in the weeks and months to come. The talking points first tested here will jam the comment sections beneath every article and YouTube video that contains the phrase “climate change” or “global warming.” They will also exit the mouths of hundreds of right-wing commentators and politicians—from Republican presidential candidates like Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann all the way down to county commissioners like Richard Rothschild. In an interview outside the sessions, Joseph Bast, president of the Heartland Institute, proudly takes credit for “thousands of articles and op-eds and speeches…that were informed by or motivated by somebody attending one of these conferences.”

The Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based think tank devoted to “promoting free-market solutions,” has been holding these confabs since 2008, sometimes twice a year. And the strategy appears to be working. At the end of day one, Morano—whose claim to fame is having broken the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth story that sank John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign—leads the gathering through a series of victory laps. Cap and trade: dead! Obama at the Copenhagen summit: failure! The climate movement: suicidal! He even projects a couple of quotes from climate activists beating up on themselves (as progressives do so well) and exhorts the audience to “celebrate!”

There were no balloons or confetti descending from the rafters, but there may as well have been.

* * *

When public opinion on the big social and political issues changes, the trends tend to be relatively gradual. Abrupt shifts, when they come, are usually precipitated by dramatic events. Which is why pollsters are so surprised by what has happened to perceptions about climate change over a span of just four years. A 2007 Harris poll found that 71 percent of Americans believed that the continued burning of fossil fuels would cause the climate to change. By 2009 the figure had dropped to 51 percent. In June 2011 the number of Americans who agreed was down to 44 percent—well under half the population. According to Scott Keeter, director of survey research at the Pew Research Center for People and the Press, this is “among the largest shifts over a short period of time seen in recent public opinion history.”

Even more striking, this shift has occurred almost entirely at one end of the political spectrum. As recently as 2008 (the year Newt Gingrich did a climate change TV spot with Nancy Pelosi) the issue still had a veneer of bipartisan support in the United States. Those days are decidedly over. Today, 70–75 percent of self-identified Democrats and liberals believe humans are changing the climate—a level that has remained stable or risen slightly over the past decade. In sharp contrast, Republicans, particularly Tea Party members, have overwhelmingly chosen to reject the scientific consensus. In some regions, only about 20 percent of self-identified Republicans accept the science.

Equally significant has been a shift in emotional intensity. Climate change used to be something most everyone said they cared about—just not all that much. When Americans were asked to rank their political concerns in order of priority, climate change would reliably come in last.

But now there is a significant cohort of Republicans who care passionately, even obsessively, about climate change—though what they care about is exposing it as a “hoax” being perpetrated by liberals to force them to change their light bulbs, live in Soviet-style tenements and surrender their SUVs. For these right-wingers, opposition to climate change has become as central to their worldview as low taxes, gun ownership and opposition to abortion. Many climate scientists report receiving death threats, as do authors of articles on subjects as seemingly innocuous as energy conservation. (As one letter writer put it to Stan Cox, author of a book critical of air-conditioning, “You can pry my thermostat out of my cold dead hands.”)

This culture-war intensity is the worst news of all, because when you challenge a person’s position on an issue core to his or her identity, facts and arguments are seen as little more than further attacks, easily deflected. (The deniers have even found a way to dismiss a new study confirming the reality of global warming that was partially funded by the Koch brothers, and led by a scientist sympathetic to the “skeptic” position.)

The effects of this emotional intensity have been on full display in the race to lead the Republican Party. Days into his presidential campaign, with his home state literally burning up with wildfires, Texas Governor Rick Perry delighted the base by declaring that climate scientists were manipulating data “so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects.” Meanwhile, the only candidate to consistently defend climate science, Jon Huntsman, was dead on arrival. And part of what has rescued Mitt Romney’s campaign has been his flight from earlier statements supporting the scientific consensus on climate change.

But the effects of the right-wing climate conspiracies reach far beyond the Republican Party. The Democrats have mostly gone mute on the subject, not wanting to alienate independents. And the media and culture industries have followed suit. Five years ago, celebrities were showing up at the Academy Awards in hybrids, Vanity Fair launched an annual green issue and, in 2007, the three major US networks ran 147 stories on climate change. No longer. In 2010 the networks ran just thirty-two climate change stories; limos are back in style at the Academy Awards; and the “annual” Vanity Fair green issue hasn’t been seen since 2008.

This uneasy silence has persisted through the end of the hottest decade in recorded history and yet another summer of freak natural disasters and record-breaking heat worldwide. Meanwhile, the fossil fuel industry is rushing to make multibillion-dollar investments in new infrastructure to extract oil, natural gas and coal from some of the dirtiest and highest-risk sources on the continent (the $7 billion Keystone XL pipeline being only the highest-profile example). In the Alberta tar sands, in the Beaufort Sea, in the gas fields of Pennsylvania and the coalfields of Wyoming and Montana, the industry is betting big that the climate movement is as good as dead.

If the carbon these projects are poised to suck out is released into the atmosphere, the chance of triggering catastrophic climate change will increase dramatically (mining the oil in the Alberta tar sands alone, says NASA’s James Hansen, would be “essentially game over” for the climate).

All of this means that the climate movement needs to have one hell of a comeback. For this to happen, the left is going to have to learn from the right. Denialists gained traction by making climate about economics: action will destroy capitalism, they have claimed, killing jobs and sending prices soaring. But at a time when a growing number of people agree with the protesters at Occupy Wall Street, many of whom argue that capitalism-as-usual is itself the cause of lost jobs and debt slavery, there is a unique opportunity to seize the economic terrain from the right. This would require making a persuasive case that the real solutions to the climate crisis are also our best hope of building a much more enlightened economic system—one that closes deep inequalities, strengthens and transforms the public sphere, generates plentiful, dignified work and radically reins in corporate power. It would also require a shift away from the notion that climate action is just one issue on a laundry list of worthy causes vying for progressive attention. Just as climate denialism has become a core identity issue on the right, utterly entwined with defending current systems of power and wealth, the scientific reality of climate change must, for progressives, occupy a central place in a coherent narrative about the perils of unrestrained greed and the need for real alternatives.

Building such a transformative movement may not be as hard as it first appears. Indeed, if you ask the Heartlanders, climate change makes some kind of left-wing revolution virtually inevitable, which is precisely why they are so determined to deny its reality. Perhaps we should listen to their theories more closely—they might just understand something the left still doesn’t get.

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The deniers did not decide that climate change is a left-wing conspiracy by uncovering some covert socialist plot. They arrived at this analysis by taking a hard look at what it would take to lower global emissions as drastically and as rapidly as climate science demands. They have concluded that this can be done only by radically reordering our economic and political systems in ways antithetical to their “free market” belief system. As British blogger and Heartland regular James Delingpole has pointed out, “Modern environmentalism successfully advances many of the causes dear to the left: redistribution of wealth, higher taxes, greater government intervention, regulation.” Heartland’s Bast puts it even more bluntly: For the left, “Climate change is the perfect thing…. It’s the reason why we should do everything [the left] wanted to do anyway.”

Here’s my inconvenient truth: they aren’t wrong. Before I go any further, let me be absolutely clear: as 97 percent of the world’s climate scientists attest, the Heartlanders are completely wrong about the science. The heat-trapping gases released into the atmosphere through the burning of fossil fuels are already causing temperatures to increase. If we are not on a radically different energy path by the end of this decade, we are in for a world of pain.

But when it comes to the real-world consequences of those scientific findings, specifically the kind of deep changes required not just to our energy consumption but to the underlying logic of our economic system, the crowd gathered at the Marriott Hotel may be in considerably less denial than a lot of professional environmentalists, the ones who paint a picture of global warming Armageddon, then assure us that we can avert catastrophe by buying “green” products and creating clever markets in pollution.

The fact that the earth’s atmosphere cannot safely absorb the amount of carbon we are pumping into it is a symptom of a much larger crisis, one born of the central fiction on which our economic model is based: that nature is limitless, that we will always be able to find more of what we need, and that if something runs out it can be seamlessly replaced by another resource that we can endlessly extract. But it is not just the atmosphere that we have exploited beyond its capacity to recover—we are doing the same to the oceans, to freshwater, to topsoil and to biodiversity. The expansionist, extractive mindset, which has so long governed our relationship to nature, is what the climate crisis calls into question so fundamentally. The abundance of scientific research showing we have pushed nature beyond its limits does not just demand green products and market-based solutions; it demands a new civilizational paradigm, one grounded not in dominance over nature but in respect for natural cycles of renewal—and acutely sensitive to natural limits, including the limits of human intelligence.

So in a way, Chris Horner was right when he told his fellow Heartlanders that climate change isn’t “the issue.” In fact, it isn’t an issue at all. Climate change is a message, one that is telling us that many of our culture’s most cherished ideas are no longer viable. These are profoundly challenging revelations for all of us raised on Enlightenment ideals of progress, unaccustomed to having our ambitions confined by natural boundaries. And this is true for the statist left as well as the neoliberal right.

While Heartlanders like to invoke the specter of communism to terrify Americans about climate action (Czech President Vaclav Klaus, a Heartland conference favorite, says that attempts to prevent global warming are akin to “the ambitions of communist central planners to control the entire society”), the reality is that Soviet-era state socialism was a disaster for the climate. It devoured resources with as much enthusiasm as capitalism, and spewed waste just as recklessly: before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Czechs and Russians had even higher carbon footprints per capita than their counterparts in Britain, Canada and Australia. And while some point to the dizzying expansion of China’s renewable energy programs to argue that only centrally controlled regimes can get the green job done, China’s command-and-control economy continues to be harnessed to wage an all-out war with nature, through massively disruptive mega-dams, superhighways and extraction-based energy projects, particularly coal.

It is true that responding to the climate threat requires strong government action at all levels. But real climate solutions are ones that steer these interventions to systematically disperse and devolve power and control to the community level, whether through community-controlled renewable energy, local organic agriculture or transit systems genuinely accountable to their users.

Here is where the Heartlanders have good reason to be afraid: arriving at these new systems is going to require shredding the free-market ideology that has dominated the global economy for more than three decades. What follows is a quick-and-dirty look at what a serious climate agenda would mean in the following six arenas: public infrastructure, economic planning, corporate regulation, international trade, consumption and taxation. For hard-right ideologues like those gathered at the Heartland conference, the results are nothing short of intellectually cataclysmic.

1. Reviving and Reinventing the Public Sphere

After years of recycling, carbon offsetting and light bulb changing, it is obvious that individual action will never be an adequate response to the climate crisis. Climate change is a collective problem, and it demands collective action. One of the key areas in which this collective action must take place is big-ticket investments designed to reduce our emissions on a mass scale. That means subways, streetcars and light-rail systems that are not only everywhere but affordable to everyone; energy-efficient affordable housing along those transit lines; smart electrical grids carrying renewable energy; and a massive research effort to ensure that we are using the best methods possible.

The private sector is ill suited to providing most of these services because they require large up-front investments and, if they are to be genuinely accessible to all, some very well may not be profitable. They are, however, decidedly in the public interest, which is why they should come from the public sector.

Traditionally, battles to protect the public sphere are cast as conflicts between irresponsible leftists who want to spend without limit and practical realists who understand that we are living beyond our economic means. But the gravity of the climate crisis cries out for a radically new conception of realism, as well as a very different understanding of limits. Government budget deficits are not nearly as dangerous as the deficits we have created in vital and complex natural systems. Changing our culture to respect those limits will require all of our collective muscle—to get ourselves off fossil fuels and to shore up communal infrastructure for the coming storms.

2. Remembering How to Plan

In addition to reversing the thirty-year privatization trend, a serious response to the climate threat involves recovering an art that has been relentlessly vilified during these decades of market fundamentalism: planning. Lots and lots of planning. And not just at the national and international levels. Every community in the world needs a plan for how it is going to transition away from fossil fuels, what the Transition Town movement calls an “energy descent action plan.” In the cities and towns that have taken this responsibility seriously, the process has opened rare spaces for participatory democracy, with neighbors packing consultation meetings at city halls to share ideas about how to reorganize their communities to lower emissions and build in resilience for tough times ahead.

Climate change demands other forms of planning as well—particularly for workers whose jobs will become obsolete as we wean ourselves off fossil fuels. A few “green jobs” trainings aren’t enough. These workers need to know that real jobs will be waiting for them on the other side. That means bringing back the idea of planning our economies based on collective priorities rather than corporate profitability—giving laid-off employees of car plants and coal mines the tools and resources to create jobs, for example, with Cleveland’s worker-run green co-ops serving as a model.

Agriculture, too, will have to see a revival in planning if we are to address the triple crisis of soil erosion, extreme weather and dependence on fossil fuel inputs. Wes Jackson, the visionary founder of the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, has been calling for “a fifty-year farm bill.” That’s the length of time he and his collaborators Wendell Berry and Fred Kirschenmann estimate it will take to conduct the research and put the infrastructure in place to replace many soil-depleting annual grain crops, grown in monocultures, with perennial crops, grown in polycultures. Since perennials don’t need to be replanted every year, their long roots do a much better job of storing scarce water, holding soil in place and sequestering carbon. Polycultures are also less vulnerable to pests and to being wiped out by extreme weather. Another bonus: this type of farming is much more labor intensive than industrial agriculture, which means that farming can once again be a substantial source of employment.

Outside the Heartland conference and like-minded gatherings, the return of planning is nothing to fear. We are not talking about a return to authoritarian socialism, after all, but a turn toward real democracy. The thirty-odd-year experiment in deregulated, Wild West economics is failing the vast majority of people around the world. These systemic failures are precisely why so many are in open revolt against their elites, demanding living wages and an end to corruption. Climate change doesn’t conflict with demands for a new kind of economy. Rather, it adds to them an existential imperative.

3. Reining in Corporations

A key piece of the planning we must undertake involves the rapid re-regulation of the corporate sector. Much can be done with incentives: subsidies for renewable energy and responsible land stewardship, for instance. But we are also going to have to get back into the habit of barring outright dangerous and destructive behavior. That means getting in the way of corporations on multiple fronts, from imposing strict caps on the amount of carbon corporations can emit, to banning new coal-fired power plants, to cracking down on industrial feedlots, to shutting down dirty-energy extraction projects like the Alberta tar sands (starting with pipelines like Keystone XL that lock in expansion plans).

Only a very small sector of the population sees any restriction on corporate or consumer choice as leading down Hayek’s road to serfdom—and, not coincidentally, it is precisely this sector of the population that is at the forefront of climate change denial.

4. Relocalizing Production

If strictly regulating corporations to respond to climate change sounds somewhat radical it’s because, since the beginning of the 1980s, it has been an article of faith that the role of government is to get out of the way of the corporate sector—and nowhere more so than in the realm of international trade. The devastating impacts of free trade on manufacturing, local business and farming are well known. But perhaps the atmosphere has taken the hardest hit of all. The cargo ships, jumbo jets and heavy trucks that haul raw resources and finished products across the globe devour fossil fuels and spew greenhouse gases. And the cheap goods being produced—made to be replaced, almost never fixed—are consuming a huge range of other nonrenewable resources while producing far more waste than can be safely absorbed.

This model is so wasteful, in fact, that it cancels out the modest gains that have been made in reducing emissions many times over. For instance, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences recently published a study of the emissions from industrialized countries that signed the Kyoto Protocol. It found that while they had stabilized, that was partly because international trade had allowed these countries to move their dirty production to places like China. The researchers concluded that the rise in emissions from goods produced in developing countries but consumed in industrialized ones was six times greater than the emissions savings of industrialized countries.

In an economy organized to respect natural limits, the use of energy-intensive long-haul transport would need to be rationed—reserved for those cases where goods cannot be produced locally or where local production is more carbon-intensive. (For example, growing food in greenhouses in cold parts of the United States is often more energy-intensive than growing it in the South and shipping it by light rail.)

Climate change does not demand an end to trade. But it does demand an end to the reckless form of “free trade” that governs every bilateral trade agreement as well as the World Trade Organization. This is more good news —for unemployed workers, for farmers unable to compete with cheap imports, for communities that have seen their manufacturers move offshore and their local businesses replaced with big boxes. But the challenge this poses to the capitalist project should not be underestimated: it represents the reversal of the thirty-year trend of removing every possible limit on corporate power.

5. Ending the Cult of Shopping

The past three decades of free trade, deregulation and privatization were not only the result of greedy people wanting greater corporate profits. They were also a response to the “stagflation” of the 1970s, which created intense pressure to find new avenues for rapid economic growth. The threat was real: within our current economic model, a drop in production is by definition a crisis—a recession or, if deep enough, a depression, with all the desperation and hardship that these words imply.

This growth imperative is why conventional economists reliably approach the climate crisis by asking the question, How can we reduce emissions while maintaining robust GDP growth? The usual answer is “decoupling”—the idea that renewable energy and greater efficiencies will allow us to sever economic growth from its environmental impact. And “green growth” advocates like Thomas Friedman tell us that the process of developing new green technologies and installing green infrastructure can provide a huge economic boost, sending GDP soaring and generating the wealth needed to “make America healthier, richer, more innovative, more productive, and more secure.”

But here is where things get complicated. There is a growing body of economic research on the conflict between economic growth and sound climate policy, led by ecological economist Herman Daly at the University of Maryland, as well as Peter Victor at York University, Tim Jackson of the University of Surrey and environmental law and policy expert Gus Speth. All raise serious questions about the feasibility of industrialized countries meeting the deep emissions cuts demanded by science (at least 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050) while continuing to grow their economies at even today’s sluggish rates. As Victor and Jackson argue, greater efficiencies simply cannot keep up with the pace of growth, in part because greater efficiency is almost always accompanied by more consumption, reducing or even canceling out the gains (often called the “Jevons Paradox”). And so long as the savings resulting from greater energy and material efficiencies are simply plowed back into further exponential expansion of the economy, reduction in total emissions will be thwarted. As Jackson argues in Prosperity Without Growth, “Those who promote decoupling as an escape route from the dilemma of growth need to take a closer look at the historical evidence—and at the basic arithmetic of growth.”

The bottom line is that an ecological crisis that has its roots in the overconsumption of natural resources must be addressed not just by improving the efficiency of our economies but by reducing the amount of material stuff we produce and consume. Yet that idea is anathema to the large corporations that dominate the global economy, which are controlled by footloose investors who demand ever greater profits year after year. We are therefore caught in the untenable bind of, as Jackson puts it, “trash the system or crash the planet.”

The way out is to embrace a managed transition to another economic paradigm, using all the tools of planning discussed above. Growth would be reserved for parts of the world still pulling themselves out of poverty. Meanwhile, in the industrialized world, those sectors that are not governed by the drive for increased yearly profit (the public sector, co-ops, local businesses, nonprofits) would expand their share of overall economic activity, as would those sectors with minimal ecological impacts (such as the caregiving professions). A great many jobs could be created this way. But the role of the corporate sector, with its structural demand for increased sales and profits, would have to contract.

So when the Heartlanders react to evidence of human-induced climate change as if capitalism itself were coming under threat, it’s not because they are paranoid. It’s because they are paying attention.

6. Taxing the Rich and Filthy

About now a sensible reader would be asking, How on earth are we going to pay for all this? The old answer would have been easy: we’ll grow our way out of it. Indeed, one of the major benefits of a growth-based economy for elites is that it allows them to constantly defer demands for social justice, claiming that if we keep growing the pie, eventually there will be enough for everyone. That was always a lie, as the current inequality crisis reveals, but in a world hitting multiple ecological limits, it is a nonstarter. So the only way to finance a meaningful response to the ecological crisis is to go where the money is.

That means taxing carbon, as well as financial speculation. It means increasing taxes on corporations and the wealthy, cutting bloated military budgets and eliminating absurd subsidies to the fossil fuel industry. And governments will have to coordinate their responses so that corporations will have nowhere to hide (this kind of robust international regulatory architecture is what Heartlanders mean when they warn that climate change will usher in a sinister “world government”).

Most of all, however, we need to go after the profits of the corporations most responsible for getting us into this mess. The top five oil companies made $900 billion in profits in the past decade; ExxonMobil alone can clear $10 billion in profits in a single quarter. For years, these companies have pledged to use their profits to invest in a shift to renewable energy (BP’s “Beyond Petroleum” rebranding being the highest-profile example). But according to a study by the Center for American Progress, just 4 percent of the big five’s $100 billion in combined 2008 profits went to “renewable and alternative energy ventures.” Instead, they continue to pour their profits into shareholder pockets, outrageous executive pay and new technologies designed to extract even dirtier and more dangerous fossil fuels. Plenty of money has also gone to paying lobbyists to beat back every piece of climate legislation that has reared its head, and to fund the denier movement gathered at the Marriott Hotel.

Just as tobacco companies have been obliged to pay the costs of helping people to quit smoking, and BP has had to pay for the cleanup in the Gulf of Mexico, it is high time for the “polluter pays” principle to be applied to climate change. Beyond higher taxes on polluters, governments will have to negotiate much higher royalty rates so that less fossil fuel extraction would raise more public revenue to pay for the shift to our postcarbon future (as well as the steep costs of climate change already upon us). Since corporations can be counted on to resist any new rules that cut into their profits, nationalization—the greatest free-market taboo of all—cannot be off the table.

When Heartlanders claim, as they so often do, that climate change is a plot to “redistribute wealth” and wage class war, these are the types of policies they most fear. They also understand that, once the reality of climate change is recognized, wealth will have to be transferred not just within wealthy countries but also from the rich countries whose emissions created the crisis to poorer ones that are on the front lines of its effects. Indeed, what makes conservatives (and plenty of liberals) so eager to bury the UN climate negotiations is that they have revived a postcolonial courage in parts of the developing world that many thought was gone for good. Armed with irrefutable scientific facts about who is responsible for global warming and who is suffering its effects first and worst, countries like Bolivia and Ecuador are attempting to shed the mantle of “debtor” thrust upon them by decades of International Monetary Fund and World Bank loans and are declaring themselves creditors—owed not just money and technology to cope with climate change but “atmospheric space” in which to develop.

* * *

So let’s summarize. Responding to climate change requires that we break every rule in the free-market playbook and that we do so with great urgency. We will need to rebuild the public sphere, reverse privatizations, relocalize large parts of economies, scale back overconsumption, bring back long-term planning, heavily regulate and tax corporations, maybe even nationalize some of them, cut military spending and recognize our debts to the global South. Of course, none of this has a hope in hell of happening unless it is accompanied by a massive, broad-based effort to radically reduce the influence that corporations have over the political process. That means, at a minimum, publicly funded elections and stripping corporations of their status as “people” under the law. In short, climate change supercharges the pre-existing case for virtually every progressive demand on the books, binding them into a coherent agenda based on a clear scientific imperative.

More than that, climate change implies the biggest political “I told you so” since Keynes predicted German backlash from the Treaty of Versailles. Marx wrote about capitalism’s “irreparable rift” with “the natural laws of life itself,” and many on the left have argued that an economic system built on unleashing the voracious appetites of capital would overwhelm the natural systems on which life depends. And of course indigenous peoples were issuing warnings about the dangers of disrespecting “Mother Earth” long before that. The fact that the airborne waste of industrial capitalism is causing the planet to warm, with potentially cataclysmic results, means that, well, the naysayers were right. And the people who said, “Hey, let’s get rid of all the rules and watch the magic happen” were disastrously, catastrophically wrong.

There is no joy in being right about something so terrifying. But for progressives, there is responsibility in it, because it means that our ideas—informed by indigenous teachings as well as by the failures of industrial state socialism—are more important than ever. It means that a green-left worldview, which rejects mere reformism and challenges the centrality of profit in our economy, offers humanity’s best hope of overcoming these overlapping crises.

But imagine, for a moment, how all of this looks to a guy like Heartland president Bast, who studied economics at the University of Chicago and described his personal calling to me as “freeing people from the tyranny of other people.” It looks like the end of the world. It’s not, of course. But it is, for all intents and purposes, the end of his world. Climate change detonates the ideological scaffolding on which contemporary conservatism rests. There is simply no way to square a belief system that vilifies collective action and venerates total market freedom with a problem that demands collective action on an unprecedented scale and a dramatic reining in of the market forces that created and are deepening the crisis.

* * *

At the Heartland conference—where everyone from the Ayn Rand Institute to the Heritage Foundation has a table hawking books and pamphlets—these anxieties are close to the surface. Bast is forthcoming about the fact that Heartland’s campaign against climate science grew out of fear about the policies that the science would require. “When we look at this issue, we say, This is a recipe for massive increase in government…. Before we take this step, let’s take another look at the science. So conservative and libertarian groups, I think, stopped and said, Let’s not simply accept this as an article of faith; let’s actually do our own research.” This is a crucial point to understand: it is not opposition to the scientific facts of climate change that drives denialists but rather opposition to the real-world implications of those facts.

What Bast is describing—albeit inadvertently—is a phenomenon receiving a great deal of attention these days from a growing subset of social scientists trying to explain the dramatic shifts in belief about climate change. Researchers with Yale’s Cultural Cognition Project have found that political/cultural worldview explains “individuals’ beliefs about global warming more powerfully than any other individual characteristic.”

Those with strong “egalitarian” and “communitarian” worldviews (marked by an inclination toward collective action and social justice, concern about inequality and suspicion of corporate power) overwhelmingly accept the scientific consensus on climate change. On the other hand, those with strong “hierarchical” and “individualistic” worldviews (marked by opposition to government assistance for the poor and minorities, strong support for industry and a belief that we all get what we deserve) overwhelmingly reject the scientific consensus.

For example, among the segment of the US population that displays the strongest “hierarchical” views, only 11 percent rate climate change as a “high risk,” compared with 69 percent of the segment displaying the strongest “egalitarian” views. Yale law professor Dan Kahan, the lead author on this study, attributes this tight correlation between “worldview” and acceptance of climate science to “cultural cognition.” This refers to the process by which all of us—regardless of political leanings—filter new information in ways designed to protect our “preferred vision of the good society.” As Kahan explained in Nature, “People find it disconcerting to believe that behaviour that they find noble is nevertheless detrimental to society, and behaviour that they find base is beneficial to it. Because accepting such a claim could drive a wedge between them and their peers, they have a strong emotional predisposition to reject it.” In other words, it is always easier to deny reality than to watch your worldview get shattered, a fact that was as true of die-hard Stalinists at the height of the purges as it is of libertarian climate deniers today.

When powerful ideologies are challenged by hard evidence from the real world, they rarely die off completely. Rather, they become cultlike and marginal. A few true believers always remain to tell one another that the problem wasn’t with the ideology; it was the weakness of leaders who did not apply the rules with sufficient rigor. We have these types on the Stalinist left, and they exist as well on the neo-Nazi right. By this point in history, free-market fundamentalists should be exiled to a similarly marginal status, left to fondle their copies of Free to Choose and Atlas Shrugged in obscurity. They are saved from this fate only because their ideas about minimal government, no matter how demonstrably at war with reality, remain so profitable to the world’s billionaires that they are kept fed and clothed in think tanks by the likes of Charles and David Koch, and ExxonMobil.

This points to the limits of theories like “cultural cognition.” The deniers are doing more than protecting their cultural worldview—they are protecting powerful interests that stand to gain from muddying the waters of the climate debate. The ties between the deniers and those interests are well known and well documented. Heartland has received more than $1 million from ExxonMobil together with foundations linked to the Koch brothers and Richard Mellon Scaife (possibly much more, but the think tank has stopped publishing its donors’ names, claiming the information was distracting from the “merits of our positions”).

And scientists who present at Heartland climate conferences are almost all so steeped in fossil fuel dollars that you can practically smell the fumes. To cite just two examples, the Cato Institute’s Patrick Michaels, who gave the conference keynote, once told CNN that 40 percent of his consulting company’s income comes from oil companies, and who knows how much of the rest comes from coal. A Greenpeace investigation into another one of the conference speakers, astrophysicist Willie Soon, found that since 2002, 100 percent of his new research grants had come from fossil fuel interests. And fossil fuel companies are not the only economic interests strongly motivated to undermine climate science. If solving this crisis requires the kinds of profound changes to the economic order that I have outlined, then every major corporation benefiting from loose regulation, free trade and low taxes has reason to fear.

With so much at stake, it should come as little surprise that climate deniers are, on the whole, those most invested in our highly unequal and dysfunctional economic status quo. One of the most interesting findings of the studies on climate perceptions is the clear connection between a refusal to accept the science of climate change and social and economic privilege. Overwhelmingly, climate deniers are not only conservative but also white and male, a group with higher than average incomes. And they are more likely than other adults to be highly confident in their views, no matter how demonstrably false. A much-discussed paper on this topic by Aaron McCright and Riley Dunlap (memorably titled “Cool Dudes”) found that confident conservative white men, as a group, were almost six times as likely to believe climate change “will never happen” than the rest of the adults surveyed. McCright and Dunlap offer a simple explanation for this discrepancy: “Conservative white males have disproportionately occupied positions of power within our economic system. Given the expansive challenge that climate change poses to the industrial capitalist economic system, it should not be surprising that conservative white males’ strong system-justifying attitudes would be triggered to deny climate change.”

But deniers’ relative economic and social privilege doesn’t just give them more to lose from a new economic order; it gives them reason to be more sanguine about the risks of climate change in the first place. This occurred to me as I listened to yet another speaker at the Heartland conference display what can only be described as an utter absence of empathy for the victims of climate change. Larry Bell, whose bio describes him as a “space architect,” drew plenty of laughs when he told the crowd that a little heat isn’t so bad: “I moved to Houston intentionally!” (Houston was, at that time, in the midst of what would turn out to be the state’s worst single-year drought on record.) Australian geologist Bob Carter offered that “the world actually does better from our human perspective in warmer times.” And Patrick Michaels said people worried about climate change should do what the French did after a devastating 2003 heat wave killed 14,000 of their people: “they discovered Walmart and air-conditioning.”

Listening to these zingers as an estimated 13 million people in the Horn of Africa face starvation on parched land was deeply unsettling. What makes this callousness possible is the firm belief that if the deniers are wrong about climate change, a few degrees of warming isn’t something wealthy people in industrialized countries have to worry about. (“When it rains, we find shelter. When it’s hot, we find shade,” Texas Congressman Joe Barton explained at an energy and environment subcommittee hearing.)

As for everyone else, well, they should stop looking for handouts and busy themselves getting unpoor. When I asked Michaels whether rich countries have a responsibility to help poor ones pay for costly adaptations to a warmer climate, he scoffed that there is no reason to give money to countries “because, for some reason, their political system is incapable of adapting.” The real solution, he claimed, was more free trade.

* * *

This is where the intersection between hard-right ideology and climate denial gets truly dangerous. It’s not simply that these “cool dudes” deny climate science because it threatens to upend their dominance-based worldview. It is that their dominance-based worldview provides them with the intellectual tools to write off huge swaths of humanity in the developing world. Recognizing the threat posed by this empathy-exterminating mindset is a matter of great urgency, because climate change will test our moral character like little before. The US Chamber of Commerce, in its bid to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating carbon emissions, argued in a petition that in the event of global warming, “populations can acclimatize to warmer climates via a range of behavioral, physiological, and technological adaptations.” These adaptations are what I worry about most.

How will we adapt to the people made homeless and jobless by increasingly intense and frequent natural disasters? How will we treat the climate refugees who arrive on our shores in leaky boats? Will we open our borders, recognizing that we created the crisis from which they are fleeing? Or will we build ever more high-tech fortresses and adopt ever more draconian antiimmigration laws? How will we deal with resource scarcity?

We know the answers already. The corporate quest for scarce resources will become more rapacious, more violent. Arable land in Africa will continue to be grabbed to provide food and fuel to wealthier nations. Drought and famine will continue to be used as a pretext to push genetically modified seeds, driving farmers further into debt. We will attempt to transcend peak oil and gas by using increasingly risky technologies to extract the last drops, turning ever larger swaths of our globe into sacrifice zones. We will fortress our borders and intervene in foreign conflicts over resources, or start those conflicts ourselves. “Free-market climate solutions,” as they are called, will be a magnet for speculation, fraud and crony capitalism, as we are already seeing with carbon trading and the use of forests as carbon offsets. And as climate change begins to affect not just the poor but the wealthy as well, we will increasingly look for techno-fixes to turn down the temperature, with massive and unknowable risks.

As the world warms, the reigning ideology that tells us it’s everyone for themselves, that victims deserve their fate, that we can master nature, will take us to a very cold place indeed. And it will only get colder, as theories of racial superiority, barely under the surface in parts of the denial movement, make a raging comeback. These theories are not optional: they are necessary to justify the hardening of hearts to the largely blameless victims of climate change in the global South, and in predominately African-American cities like New Orleans.

In The Shock Doctrine, I explore how the right has systematically used crises—real and trumped up—to push through a brutal ideological agenda designed not to solve the problems that created the crises but rather to enrich elites. As the climate crisis begins to bite, it will be no exception. This is entirely predictable. Finding new ways to privatize the commons and to profit from disaster are what our current system is built to do. The process is already well under way.

The only wild card is whether some countervailing popular movement will step up to provide a viable alternative to this grim future. That means not just an alternative set of policy proposals but an alternative worldview to rival the one at the heart of the ecological crisis—this time, embedded in interdependence rather than hyper-individualism, reciprocity rather than dominance and cooperation rather than hierarchy.

Shifting cultural values is, admittedly, a tall order. It calls for the kind of ambitious vision that movements used to fight for a century ago, before everything was broken into single “issues” to be tackled by the appropriate sector of business-minded NGOs. Climate change is, in the words of the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, “the greatest example of market failure we have ever seen.” By all rights, this reality should be filling progressive sails with conviction, breathing new life and urgency into longstanding fights against everything from free trade to financial speculation to industrial agriculture to third-world debt, while elegantly weaving all these struggles into a coherent narrative about how to protect life on earth.

But that isn’t happening, at least not so far. It is a painful irony that while the Heartlanders are busily calling climate change a left-wing plot, most leftists have yet to realize that climate science has handed them the most powerful argument against capitalism since William Blake’s “dark Satanic Mills” (and, of course, those mills were the beginning of climate change). When demonstrators are cursing out the corruption of their governments and corporate elites in Athens, Madrid, Cairo, Madison and New York, climate change is often little more than a footnote, when it should be the coup de grâce.

Half of the problem is that progressives—their hands full with soaring unemployment and multiple wars—tend to assume that the big green groups have the climate issue covered. The other half is that many of those big green groups have avoided, with phobic precision, any serious debate on the blindingly obvious roots of the climate crisis: globalization, deregulation and contemporary capitalism’s quest for perpetual growth (the same forces that are responsible for the destruction of the rest of the economy). The result is that those taking on the failures of capitalism and those fighting for climate action remain two solitudes, with the small but valiant climate justice movement—drawing the connections between racism, inequality and environmental vulnerability—stringing up a few swaying bridges between them.

The right, meanwhile, has had a free hand to exploit the global economic crisis to cast climate action as a recipe for economic Armageddon, a surefire way to spike household costs and to block new, much-needed jobs drilling for oil and laying new pipelines. With virtually no loud voices offering a competing vision of how a new economic paradigm could provide a way out of both the economic and ecological crises, this fearmongering has had a ready audience.

Far from learning from past mistakes, a powerful faction in the environmental movement is pushing to go even further down the same disastrous road, arguing that the way to win on climate is to make the cause more palatable to conservative values. This can be heard from the studiously centrist Breakthrough Institute, which is calling for the movement to embrace industrial agriculture and nuclear power instead of organic farming and decentralized renewables. It can also be heard from several of the researchers studying the rise in climate denial. Some, like Yale’s Kahan, point out that while those who poll as highly “hierarchical” and “individualist” bridle at any mention of regulation, they tend to like big, centralized technologies that confirm their belief that humans can dominate nature. So, he and others argue, environmentalists should start emphasizing responses such as nuclear power and geoengineering (deliberately intervening in the climate system to counteract global warming), as well as playing up concerns about national security.

The first problem with this strategy is that it doesn’t work. For years, big green groups have framed climate action as a way to assert “energy security,” while “free-market solutions” are virtually the only ones on the table in the United States. Meanwhile, denialism has soared. The more troubling problem with this approach, however, is that rather than challenging the warped values motivating denialism, it reinforces them. Nuclear power and geoengineering are not solutions to the ecological crisis; they are a doubling down on exactly the kind of short-term hubristic thinking that got us into this mess.

It is not the job of a transformative social movement to reassure members of a panicked, megalomaniacal elite that they are still masters of the universe—nor is it necessary. According to McCright, co-author of the “Cool Dudes” study, the most extreme, intractable climate deniers (many of them conservative white men) are a small minority of the US population—roughly 10 percent. True, this demographic is massively overrepresented in positions of power. But the solution to that problem is not for the majority of people to change their ideas and values. It is to attempt to change the culture so that this small but disproportionately influential minority—and the reckless worldview it represents—wields significantly less power.

* * *

Some in the climate camp are pushing back hard against the appeasement strategy. Tim DeChristopher, serving a two-year jail sentence in Utah for disrupting a compromised auction of oil and gas leases, commented in May on the right-wing claim that climate action will upend the economy. “I believe we should embrace the charges,” he told an interviewer. “No, we are not trying to disrupt the economy, but yes, we do want to turn it upside down. We should not try and hide our vision about what we want to change—of the healthy, just world that we wish to create. We are not looking for small shifts: we want a radical overhaul of our economy and society.” He added, “I think once we start talking about it, we will find more allies than we expect.”

When DeChristopher articulated this vision for a climate movement fused with one demanding deep economic transformation, it surely sounded to most like a pipe dream. But just five months later, with Occupy Wall Street chapters seizing squares and parks in hundreds of cities, it sounds prophetic. It turns out that a great many Americans had been hungering for this kind of transformation on many fronts, from the practical to the spiritual.

Though climate change was something of an afterthought in the movement’s early texts, an ecological consciousness was woven into OWS from the start—from the sophisticated “gray water” filtration system that uses dishwater to irrigate plants at Zuccotti Park, to the scrappy community garden planted at Occupy Portland. Occupy Boston’s laptops and cellphones are powered by bicycle generators, and Occupy DC has installed solar panels. Meanwhile, the ultimate symbol of OWS—the human microphone—is nothing if not a postcarbon solution.

And new political connections are being made. The Rainforest Action Network, which has been targeting Bank of America for financing the coal industry, has made common cause with OWS activists taking aim at the bank over foreclosures. Anti-fracking activists have pointed out that the same economic model that is blasting the bedrock of the earth to keep the gas flowing is blasting the social bedrock to keep the profits flowing. And then there is the historic movement against the Keystone XL pipeline, which this fall has decisively yanked the climate movement out of the lobbyists’ offices and into the streets (and jail cells). Anti-Keystone campaigners have noted that anyone concerned about the corporate takeover of democracy need look no further than the corrupt process that led the State Department to conclude that a pipeline carrying dirty tar sands oil across some of the most sensitive land in the country would have “limited adverse environmental impacts.” As 350.org’s Phil Aroneanu put it, “If Wall Street is occupying President Obama’s State Department and the halls of Congress, it’s time for the people to occupy Wall Street.”

But these connections go beyond a shared critique of corporate power. As Occupiers ask themselves what kind of economy should be built to displace the one crashing all around us, many are finding inspiration in the network of green economic alternatives that has taken root over the past decade—in community-controlled renewable energy projects, in community-supported agriculture and farmers’ markets, in economic localization initiatives that have brought main streets back to life, and in the co-op sector. Already a group at OWS is cooking up plans to launch the movement’s first green workers’ co-op (a printing press); local food activists have made the call to “Occupy the Food System!”; and November 20 is “Occupy Rooftops”—a coordinated effort to use crowd-sourcing to buy solar panels for community buildings.

Not only do these economic models create jobs and revive communities while reducing emissions; they do so in a way that systematically disperses power—the antithesis of an economy by and for the 1 percent. Omar Freilla, one of the founders of Green Worker Cooperatives in the South Bronx, told me that the experience in direct democracy that thousands are having in plazas and parks has been, for many, “like flexing a muscle you didn’t know you had.” And, he says, now they want more democracy—not just at a meeting but also in their community planning and in their workplaces.

In other words, culture is rapidly shifting. And this is what truly sets the OWS moment apart. The Occupiers—holding signs that said Greed Is Gross and I Care About You—decided early on not to confine their protests to narrow policy demands. Instead, they took aim at the underlying values of rampant greed and individualism that created the economic crisis, while embodying—in highly visible ways—radically different ways to treat one another and relate to the natural world.

This deliberate attempt to shift cultural values is not a distraction from the “real” struggles. In the rocky future we have already made inevitable, an unshakable belief in the equal rights of all people, and a capacity for deep compassion, will be the only things standing between humanity and barbarism. Climate change, by putting us on a firm deadline, can serve as the catalyst for precisely this profound social and ecological transformation.

Culture, after all, is fluid. It can change. It happens all the time. The delegates at the Heartland conference know this, which is why they are so determined to suppress the mountain of evidence proving that their worldview is a threat to life on earth. The task for the rest of us is to believe, based on that same evidence, that a very different worldview can be our salvation.

Systemic crisis of capitalism

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 18:23:55 GMT

by Richard Wolff
Interviewed by David Barsamian
Santa Fe, NM
September 12, 2011

available from Alternative Radio

Richard Wolff is Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and currently a visiting professor at the New School in New York. He is the author of numerous books on economics, including Capitalism Hits the Fan.

You write that “we had a remarkable 150 years during which workers enjoyed a steadily rising standard of living.” When and why did that stop?

The remarkable thing about American history that distinguishes it in many ways from almost every other experiment in capitalist systems is that in this country, from 1820 to 1970, the reality is, as best we can tell from the statistics we have, that every decade the real wage, that is, the amount of money an average worker got for an average hour of work kept rising, decade over decade. Real wage simply means the money you get, adjusted for the prices you have to pay. That’s remarkable. There’s probably no other capitalism that delivered to its working class that kind of 150-year history that produced in the U.S. this sense that every generation will live better than the one before, that if you work real hard, you will make it, that you can imagining an American dream that not only you can enjoy but you can deliver, if anything, even better to your kids and so on.

Before I answer your question about why it stopped, just think with me for a moment about the trauma that it must represent to a population of Americans to have become used to this, to think you live in a charmed land that delivers such a wonderful, rising standard of well- being for American working people—try to imagine the trauma if in the 1970s that stops, never to resume since. It is the end of a world, the end of a set of expectations, the end of a notion of a good future that will come as the reward for hard work that you do. And imagine with me that the trauma is all the worse if there’s no discussion of it, if there’s no way to share the experience of being in that kind of situation with other people because there’s a need in the population to literally believe it hasn’t happened.

So now let me answer your question. Why did it happen? As all major phenomena in human history, it has many reasons, many causes. But I’m going to select four of them that I think were key. The first two have to do with the offering of jobs. That is, in our system we depend for jobs on the decisions of private employers as to whether or not it is profitable for them to hire people. In the 1970s American employers did two things that made them need and want fewer employees.

The first one was a technological breakthrough called the computer, which made it possible for employer after employer to reduce the number of people he hired, because he didn’t need so many since the computer did it for him. The simplest example is to remember that once upon a time supermarkets needed an army of workers to keep track of how many boxes of cereal, how many rolls of toilet paper were leaving the shelves. With a computer, as we all now know, you have a scanner at the checkout counter, and nobody needs to keep track of it. There’s one man or woman sitting at a computer somewhere in the middle of nowhere who can tell you exactly how many new boxes have to be ordered, in which supermarket, in what town, because it’s all done automatically and you don’t need an army of inventory replacers.

The second thing that happened in the 1970s besides the computer coming in to replace jobs, was the recognition and the decision of American employers that the wage level of the U.S., which had been rising for all these years, was now way ahead of the wage level in many other parts of the world, and it would be more profitable to move production to those parts of the world and to therefore make more money. Between the computer replacing people and the jobs being moved out of the U.S., the demand for labor in the U.S. shrank. In the 1970s this really heated up as a phenomenon.

At the same time, two other phenomena—that’s why I said there were four basic reasons—two other phenomena also contributed. The first was the movement of American adult women out of their homes, out of the role of mother and housewife into the role of mother, housewife, and paid employee in the work force. Millions of American women started in the 1970s to look for work. At the same time, we had the latest in our endless series of in-migrations of foreign folks looking for a life and a job, this time from Latin America. So you had at the same time in the 1970s a reduction in the demand for jobs by employers and an increase in the number of people looking for work—women and immigrants. The combination meant that for the first time in American history, there was no labor shortage. We had a system that was successful as a capitalism. Employers were making money, wanted to grow their businesses, and were hiring. But there was always a shortage. That’s why we had to bring immigrants here.

In the 1970s, capitalists in America discovered that it was no longer necessary to raise wages: they had less need for workers and more workers looking. And every capitalist in America, not just on Wall Street but on Main Street, realized that now what they had learned at M.B.A. school could be put into effect, namely, the great lesson, if you’re an employer and you don’t have to raise the wages of your workers, don’t do it. You will make more money. Since the 1970s that’s what American employers have enjoyed—a record period of time, now more than 30 years, during which the real wage did not have to be raised. So here’s a fundamental statistic. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics in Washington, which keeps these records, the average wage earned by an American worker in 2011 is about what it was in 1978. We’ve had 30-plus years in which the real wage, on average, hasn’t changed in the U.S. That is a sea change in our history.

Something also is going on parallel to wages flattening out. I believe American workers work more hours than any other work force in the world. Is that right?

That’s right. According to the OECD, an important data- gathering service for industrialized countries, Americans do more hours of paid labor per year than any other working class in any advanced industrial country. That is because one reaction of American working people to the end of rising wages—if you don’t get more per hour, one way you try to keep up with the American dream, with the hope of delivering a better life to your family and your children, is by doing more hours of work. So Americans have been driving themselves. Men who had a job took a second job. The women, I’ve already mentioned, leave the home and take a full-time job if they had a part-time job before. We have retired people coming out of retirement to help the family. We have teenagers working on weekends. The whole modern story of the American family committed to a life of an incredible number of hours per household of work trying to hold on, after the 1970s, to this thing they had gotten used to in the whole history of America before that, which is a rising standard of living. Let’s remember, all this time Americans are being bombarded by advertising from every corner telling them that if you’re a success in America, you have a better house, a better car, a better vacation, you have a college education for your children. The barrage of what it was to define you as a successful American, which you could no longer afford to do with your wages. So you had to work crazy hours.

And, of course, the other great thing the American working class did, a kind of pioneer of a new sort, is, starting in the 1970s, to undertake debt. The way to keep your consumption rising, your standard of living rising, when your wages don’t go up and when adding a few hours a week is not enough, is to borrow. Starting in the 1970s American working people borrowed money on a scale that has never been seen before in any country, including our own. We had to develop in America whole new mechanisms for providing credit to the mass of people.

For example, before the 1970s, the only people who carried a plastic credit card in their wallets were businessmen working off an expense account, traveling around the country. The only company that was into that was American Express. But in the 1970s all that changed. We began pumping credit cards into everybody’s hands as fast as we could. We developed new companies—MasterCard, Visa, and all the rest—to make mass credit available to people because there was such a hungry need on the part of our working class to cope with the pressures of success in America when your wages could not longer afford it for you. So at this time you have wages flattening out, hours and productivity soaring, and huge individual debt accumulating, as if the banks are saying, “No problem, we’ll lend to you, easy credit,” and then they charge usurious rates.

The amazing thing about the last 30 years is the degree to which there was a kind of collective self-delusion in the U.S. You cannot keep borrowing money, as American working people did, if the bottom line of your ability to pay it back is a level of wages that isn’t going up. In other words, you don’t need a Ph.D. and it’s not rocket science to know that if your wages aren’t going up, then the basis upon which you’re ever going to go pay back these loans you keep accumulating isn’t there.

At a certain point—we call that 2007—the American working class had accumulated a level of debt under this system that was not sustainable, that they could not make the payments. Then we had the end of this bubble. You can kind of think of it as a crisis that really began in the 1970s, when the wages stopped going up, that was postponed for a generation, for 30 years, by debt, until that couldn’t last anymore, that couldn’t be expanded anymore. And then comes 2007, and this entire mass of the American people is literally exhausted—exhausted physically by all that work; exhausted psychologically because the family, that had held people’s lives together, had been blown apart because mother, father, grandpa, and teenager were all working crazy hours.

Women had held the emotional life of our families together. When you move the women out of the house into the workplace, for all kinds of reasons, good and bad, the bottom line is the tensions in the family become unmanageable. There’s a reason why the sitcom of the 1950s and 1960s was the happy family, the Nelsons, whereas the sitcom of today is the dysfunctional family that doesn’t work. So I think that when 2007 comes, the American working class is physically exhausted, psychologically stressed. Let me remind people that we are 5% of the world’s population; we consume 65% of the world’s psychotropic drugs, tranquilizers, mood enhancers. We are not a drugged people; we are a people under unbelievable stress.

And then in 2007 the final straw. Can’t pay back the debt. The anxiety of being a person or a family that cannot meet its obligations to its creditors blows the system up. One of the reasons our crisis today is so severe and is lasting so long and is defying the ability and efforts of the U.S. government to cope is because it isn’t a typical business cycle. This is the culmination of a 30-year postponement of what it means in a society when 150 years of wage increases comes to an end.

Apropos of that, there have been a series of busts and recessions and depressions throughout the history of capitalism in the U.S. Is this one different? And if so, in what way?

I think this one is different. First let me comment on your good point about capitalism being an inherently unstable system. And there’s no polite word for that. I like to make my students sometimes giggle, in a classroom that is full of information that’s sometimes hard to take, by saying to them something like this: If you lived with a roommate as unstable as this economic system, you would have moved out long ago or demanded that your roommate get professional help. We, however, live in a capitalist system making neither kind of demand, even though the reasons to do so are pretty much the same. Capitalism is notorious for its upper and downs. We have a whole vocabulary in English to refer to that: booms and busts, recessions and prosperities and depressions and upturns and downturns. You know, the reason people have a lot of words for the same thing is because it’s a very important phenomenon in their lives, and they need a rich vocabulary to articulate it, so we have that.

You would expect that a population that lives in a capitalist system would know this about its history and would therefore not believe that it was over; that somehow we had managed in some magical way to escape the instability. But the truth of the matter is that over the last 30-40 years, just the time I’ve been talking about, we have been a society unable and unwilling to think critically about capitalism. And it shows. We thought we weren’t going to have any more of these crises like we had, for example, in the 1930s, 10 years of depression, or that the Japanese have had, which is 20 years of depression since 1990. We kind of imagined in some fanciful, wishful thinking that these kinds of things had no longer relevance to our modern life. So we were, of course, unprepared for what we have. Nothing shows our unpreparedness better than the inability of either President Bush or President Obama to basically deal with this problem. We are as suffering here in the autumn of 2011 with the risks and dilemmas of this economy as we were last year and the year before and the year before that. This is a sign of a society that hasn’t come to terms with capitalism in general. So that’s part of the reason why this one is so much different: it’s coming at the end of a long period of denial about all of this.

Let me give you one illustrative example. When I began my work as graduate student getting a Ph.D. in economics, the typical department’s curriculum had a course called The Business Cycle, where students were at least introduced for a semester a history of the ups and downs of capitalism in their own country and other countries with a sense of what some of the causes were, what was done to try to cope with them. So at least you would come through your education with some sense of this. Nowadays, in 2011, if you do a survey of curricula in graduate programs in economics, you will find the vast majority of schools have no course in the business cycle at all. It fell away. It became no longer necessary. We had overcome that, we had out grown it, we had learned to master this problem of capitalism.

It was never true. It should have never happened. But it helps explain and illustrate the kind of euphoria of the last 30 years, that we were in a new economic system, that it was a mature capitalism, that we now had all the mechanisms to control the system. The irony is, it left us unprepared to see it coming, although we should have, and it has left a generation of economists unprepared to manage it, which you can see in terms of the inability of the advisers both of President Bush and of President Obama to come up with a reasonable plan to deal with this situation.

So I think the answer is, we have a very severe economic downturn because not only is capitalism always unstable, but this one comes at the end of a 30-year program of denial, of substituting credit for a working economy that grows and allows people to have higher wages. We never helped our people understand any of this, so now it’s like a tsunami of economic proportions has hit us as a nation. And we look really badly equipped as well as unprepared to deal with it.

To what extent do the mainstream media contribute to this lack of understanding as to what has happened?

I think the blame is spread around a lot, so I’m about to answer your question but I don’t want it to be understood that I single them out particularly. But certainly they contributed. First of all, the mainstream media have been not intellectually alive as critics of the system, able to evaluate its strengths but also its weaknesses. I would describe the media much as I would describe my own profession of economics—I’ve been a professor of economics all my adult life—as being less analytic and more cheerleaders. We were cheerleaders for capitalism. It was efficient, it was a growth engine, it would make everybody happy. Capitalism delivers the goods. The courses, the students, the training, the whole experience of economics as a discipline produced a generation in this country, maybe even two generations, who thought that what economics was about was celebrating capitalism’s greatness instead of a balanced assessments of its strengths and weaknesses that might have contributed to a national discussion.

Capitalism is an institution. It’s like your public school system, it’s like your health delivery system. We as a nation think it’s appropriate to question and debate whether our schools are working adequately, meeting our needs, whether our health system is. Why in the world has it been taboo to ask, is the capitalist system, the way we organize the production and distribution of goods and services, working to meet our needs or not?

But we’ve had a taboo on that topic. The Cold War and many other things made it impossible to question, let alone criticize, capitalism. Instead of that being a normal exercise of a democratic society evaluating its institutions, it turns out to be an act of disloyalty or something we shouldn’t have. It gets squelched, it gets marginalized. And I’m afraid the mass media in the U.S. went right along with that plan and that program and denied the American people what they needed, which was a critical sense of its flaws, so that when a big breakdown happened, as happened in 2007 and 2008, we would be prepared, not so surprised, and able to bring to bear the good sense of the American people to cope with it.

There’s a certain kind of market fundamentalism. Capitalism is equated with freedom—we’re all for freedom, of course—the free market, the free enterprise system. In some respects it’s almost taken on a theistic, theological dimension. To question it becomes equivalent to heresy.

Again, let me give examples to underscore your point. In the 1970s, employers were free, in this free system, to stop raising the wages of the mass of their workers. That’s a freedom that the free enterprise system gives them. But their freedom, their exercise of that freedom, deprived the mass of Americans of a rising standard of living based on their continuing rising productivity. That is, workers after the 1970s were increasingly productive, as they had been before, but now their increasing productivity, instead of making it possible for their wages to go up, their wages were stagnant. They were kept stagnant because of the free choice of employers, who therefore got all the benefits of the productivity increase for themselves in rising profits. So the freedom of one part of our population deprived another part of the population of its freedom.

Freedom is not a universal good that only has happy news as a result. An honest person says, “Okay, if I give this group freedom, what is the impact of their freedom on the freedoms of others?” If you ask that question, you discover that freedom is a complicated matter: if you enhance the freedom of some, it often involves depriving others of their freedom. To face that would require a much more critical notion of freedom and democracy than the kind of happy, cheerleader mentality we have, in which we imagine, because it saves us from difficult thinking, that enhancing freedom of somebody is always good for everybody else. It isn’t.

How do you talk about freedom to the mass of Americans who have no job now, numbering in the 20 to 30 million? Are they free? They’re not free. They’ve been denied the freedom that comes from having a decent job, and through no fault of their own.

Something didn’t go wrong with 20 million Americans who suddenly can’t get jobs or can’t get the jobs they want in a way that they used to. That isn’t a problem of individuals, that’s a problem of an economic system that isn’t delivering the goods.

So I think that you’re right, that this debate and discussion of freedom has been like so much in our culture for 30 years: very carefully abstracted from the hard economic realities that were unfolding over that time and that were, in fact, depriving huge numbers of our people, a majority, of freedoms that they had enjoyed for a long time before but were no longer available.

One of the salient characteristics about the Great Recession is long-term, chronic unemployment. Is this something that distinguishes this economic crisis from previous ones?

The statistics are startling. The proportion of unemployed that have been unemployed more than a year, which is a standard statistic that economists use, is greater than what we have seen in any economic downturn for many, many, many years. So there’s no question that one of the ways this crisis is more severe than any we’ve seen basically since the Great Depression of the 1930s is in the longevity of unemployment.

But there are plenty of other markers, too, that indicate. This is the fifth year of this crisis. It basically begins in the middle of 2007. So do the math. We’re now well beyond the middle of 2011, and consequently we’re in the fifth year, number one.

Number two, other economic downturns like this in the U.S. have had a “recovery” at least for a while, even if it falls down again. But the reality in the U.S. is, while there has been much discussion of recovery, roughly from the spring of 2009 to the spring of 2011, that recovery didn’t affect the vast majority of Americans. If I can spend a moment on that. We did have a recovery from early 2009 to early 2011, but only for banks, insurance companies, large corporations, and the stock market. Those are important parts of our economy, heaven knows, but they only affect a relative minority of the people. For the vast majority of Americans, there has been no recovery. It’s not appropriate to talk about a double dip as if there’s a second downturn, because they never had the upturn to make this downturn the second one. If you look at the unemployment statistics simply, or the number of people who have been out of work for a long time, or the number of people losing their homes through foreclosure, or the number of people whose benefits, even if their wages haven’t been cut, their benefits have been cut, sick days, pensions, and all the rest of it, then the mass of the American people have had a crisis in their lives, economically speaking, for a good four years now.

To talk about recovery to these people, as the mass media did, is cruel. What it does is it makes each individual American, who isn’t participating in this recovery, feel as though it’s somehow his or her personal fault or failing: Everybody else is recovering. I’m not. That’s cruel. That’s adding a psychic punishment to people who are not responsible for this crisis in the first place and who should not have been told about a recovery as if it were general when it never was general. That would have helped them to avoid feeling angry and betrayed. Nothing shows the anger and sense of betrayal of the American people more than the political turns in our society over the last few years, whether it’s anger in the Tea Party movement or anger elsewhere that’s building. And part of the reason for that is the peculiar way we couldn’t debate our capitalist system beforehand, we wouldn’t prepare ourselves to deal with its ups and downs. We now reap the whirlwind that results from such an incapacity to debate your own economic system and face its problems.

The conventional chronology of the economic crash actually is dating from, I believe, the summer of 2008, when Lehman Brothers goes belly up. What happens in 2007 that you identify as triggering this?

The real shift shows up first in the sector of our economy that has in many ways been the epicenter, if you might use the metaphor, of a hurricane or a storm, the epicenter of the problem. That industry is called housing. It’s the building of homes, the furnishing of homes, the redesign of communities, to facilitate housing construction. And that was in an unsustainable boom basically from 2001.

Why do you say it was unsustainable?

Because what it was based on was credit. The only reason we had a boom in housing, in building housing, in construction jobs—and by the way, this affects all parts of American culture. The boom in our housing construction enabled a vast flood of Mexican young men and women to come and work in the construction industry, legal and illegal. So if you’re interested, for example, in the immigration problem and all that, it’s itself a derivative of the housing boom. It was created in the aftermath of 2001 because we had a very bad crash of the stock market early in the year 2000. That whole period of time from the crash of the market early in 2000 until the 9/11 events at the end of 2001 put the American economy in a very, very bad position, with a major economic recession bearing down on us.

The response of the government at that time was to drop interest rates. Over a year period, the Federal Reserve reduced interest rates faster and further than had ever happened in American history. It suddenly reduced the cost of borrowing money—that’s what it means if you drop interest rates—on an unprecedented scale. If you remember what I mentioned to you before, that we had a 25-year history prior to that of Americans becoming more and more debt-dependent, what you were doing was fueling an addiction with more of the drug. You were saying to an American population that was already borrowing too much, Here, borrow even more, and we’ll make it cheaper for you.

So Americans did. They started in 2002 and 2003 in using their houses as a kind of cash machine, refinancing their homes, going and borrowing more money against their homes, which the banks were eager to lend to them at very low interest rates. And so you had an artificially boosted housing boom. Everybody built a new addition on their home. Young people were able to borrow huge sums of money with very little money you had to put down, at very low interest rates, so houses were built like crazy. So we had a kind of explosion of building that went up until—and here’s the answer to your question—the middle of 2007.

Then it started going down. Then suddenly it became clear that many of those people who had borrowed vast amounts of money at low interest rates didn’t have the jobs that would allow them to raise enough money to sustain those debts. They couldn’t pay. They couldn’t pay off their mortgages. And many middle-class who had bought a second home because it was so cheap to borrow the money, now couldn’t sustain that. They were beginning to lose their jobs, they were beginning to suffer from the cutback of benefits, they were beginning to have medical expenses—all kinds of pressures that made it impossible for them to keep up the payments.

It showed up first in the housing industry, as people were defaulting, beginning to default on their loans to pay for the houses. Houses were beginning to be foreclosed and put back on the market, so that potential buyers were now no longer needing to build a house, to engage a builder to make a house, because there were so many houses being dumped on the market by people who couldn’t pay for them. So suddenly the builders of houses saw their market collapse. That begins in the middle of 2007, and it drags the whole economy down, partly because the whole economy had been built up on this credit bubble fueling the housing industry. So when that stopped, the whole system began to implode. So by a year later, late summer of 2008, it became a wholesale collapse.

The reason for that is important. In the 30 years since the 1970s, as wages were stagnant, the other side of the coin was that productivity kept rising. That is, workers didn’t get paid more by their employer, but they kept producing more for the employer, because of the computer that they had to work with, because they were working harder and longer hours, because they had better training, because there were more and better machines. In other words, what we had had before the 1970s continued after the 1970s in terms of worker productivity. American workers are productive and continued to become more so after the 1970s.

Now let’s put the two together. If what the employer pays the worker since the 1970s is flat, doesn’t go up, but what the worker gives the employer for every hour of his or her work keeps going up—that’s what rising productivity means—then, again, look at what the results are. Basically, it’s been the best 30 years that employers in this country have ever had. Rising stuff being produced for you by your employees, but you don’t have to pay them any more. You keep all the benefits of rising productivity for yourself—precisely what you could not do before the 1970s, because the labor shortage meant you had to keep paying workers more, which is why we had that wonderful history from 1820 to 1970. So after the 1970s profits go crazy. Employers are in the wonderful position to get more and more from their workers—rising productivity—but not paying them any more. And what employers did was to begin to get really excited about the profits. Most of our history over the last 30 years is about this, if you think about it.

Let me give you a couple of examples. What I find charming, because I don’t want to cry and laughing is an alternative—what I find charming is one of the first things the business community did, noticing that the profits were wonderful, they didn’t have to raise their workers’ wages but they got more and more per hour from each worker with rising productivity, this is what you dream of if you’re a businessman or -woman. This is what the master’s of business administration teaches you is the best of all possible worlds. They were enjoying it. But they didn’t give the explanation I just did. They didn’t understand that they were getting the benefit of stagnant wages and rising productivity. They probably knew it, but they didn’t think about that. They told a completely different story. The story they told was a kind of folklore mythology. That the reasons the profits are so big in the 1980s and the 1990s and so on because our executives are geniuses. We began to develop new folk heroes: Lee Iacocca of Chrysler, Jack Welch, the leading executive of GE. They had books written about them as if they were icons of some magical, mystical productivity that accounted for the profits.

Well, let me tell you, as an economist, it’s embarrassing to read. I know and every other economist who looks at the numbers knows where the profits came from. You stopped raising your workers’ wages, you kept getting more and more out of them. There it is. No mystery here. They didn’t suddenly become genius executives, implying, by the way, that before that they were dumb executives. That’s kind of silly. But it’s what was done. Of course, there was method in this madness because if the reason the company’s profits are going crazy is the genius of their top executives, then it becomes reasonable for the top executives to say, “Hey, you should be paying me since I’m so important to these profits.” It’s in the 1970s when the U.S. begins to pay its top executives out-of-whack sums of money. And I say out- of-whack because nothing like that happened in Europe, nothing like that happened in Japan. It didn’t happen in other capitalisms that weren’t experiencing this the way we were. Suddenly we began paying multimillion-dollar bonuses at the end of the year, huge salaries, huge stock options. So there is a reason to tell a story of the genius of an executive, because it became the rationale.

Americans in the last couple years have gotten angry when they’ve read stories about Goldman Sachs or somebody else getting big bonuses as executives. I’m glad the American people have woken up, are angry. But they’re about 30 years late. Because this has been going on with the money created by workers’ productivity that they didn’t get in higher wages. The money was made available for astronomical salaries for top executives, who, in turn, used some of that money to enhance the dividends they paid to shareholders, who used that money to hire professionals, including economists like me, at very lofty salaries, etc.

It helps us to understand why the last 30 years exhibits yet another problem of our economic system—a widening in the disparity between rich and poor. If the mass of workers have wages that are flat for 30 years, whereas all the increases in profitability and productivity accrue to the top, the employers, then the people who become rich, shareholders in these companies making big profits, top executives of the companies making big profits, top professional employees of the companies making big profits, then you’re taking 5 or 10% of the people and giving them an enormous boost in income and everybody else is stagnant. Thirty years ago the U.S. was one of the least unequal societies in terms of the disparity between rich and poor. Now, 30 years later, 2011, we are the most unequal of all the advanced industrial countries.

That, by the way, is the root explanation for why this crisis is lasting so long. We have put the mass of American people in an impossible situation, so they are not spending money. Those that are unemployed obviously cannot, but everybody else is so frightened by the prospect of reduced benefits, of an insecure job, of unemployment that may hit you, of the value of your house going down as the housing market tanks that they’re holding back. They’re paying off their debts, if they can, they’re saving a little money, if they can. So they’re not buying stuff. American corporations are reacting by saying, Okay, we’ll serve the rest of the world. We’re more interested in selling abroad, because the American market is exhausted. That’s the way this mistaken way of developing our country for 30 years is coming back to haunt us now, to perpetuate this crisis, and to make it so difficult for the government to figure a way out.

Income inequality is well documented and is hardly a controversial issue. There’s another factor at work here as well, and that’s wealth inequality, which is a whole different set of indices.

Yes, although I do think they have a common root. The wealth inequality in the U.S. has basically occurred by an explosion in the value not so much of high income, but in the stock market—all those people who could hold a portion of their wealth in a form that could participate in this boom in profits. The way you hold wealth that can participate in the boom in profits I’ve just described is if you own shares of stock in the companies enjoying these profits. The vast majority of Americans either have no stocks or a trivial amount of them. That’s a tiny proportion of our people, therefore, that can participate as shareholders. And that’s where the big growth has come. The reason the rich have become richer is because they’re shareholders. We might like to think about the occasional basketball star who gets a huge salary or the actor or actress who gets one. They’re there, but that’s not the statistical reality. For that you need to understand that the stock market is the place to be to really participate in the boom of the last 30 years.

Here’s another way to put it. Most Americans have no appreciable wealth. That is, they live on their income. They depend on that job and that check. Those Americans in large numbers that have any property have it in one form—the home. The home, the house, the apartment, the co-op, whatever it is, is the single most important form of wealth that the mass of Americans have. And houses have dropped in value by 25% to 35% across the U.S. over the last four years of this crisis. That has made the inequality of wealth greater. The so-called recovery from 2009 to 2011 in the stock market recouped for those who have significant amounts of stocks some of their losses. But for those whose only wealth is their home, they’re now 33%, roughly, behind what they were. Their job is not more secure, their wages have not gone up, the risk of losing their job is greater, their benefits have been reduced, and the only piece of wealth they have has dropped by 33%. Of course, wealth inequality is even more grievous than the income inequality I spoke about, and is a serious problem in terms of getting out of this crisis anytime soon.

The great Canadian singer/songwriter Leonard Cohen has a song where he says, “The poor stay poor, the rich get rich/ That’s how it goes/ Everybody knows.” It’s intriguing to me, particularly that last line. I do a lot of public speaking and media work these days. And I can tell you, I think everybody knows what’s going on. But the taboos in this country—it’s a little bit like, if I could be allowed, the metaphor of sex. We kind of all know what that’s about, but there’s a taboo about discussing it or talking about it in a straightforward way. We all know that our economic system is broken, is not working, is causing us grief, pain, anxiety, you name it. But there still remains—less than the past but there still remains—a large amount of taboo about facing this reality, about admitting that it’s happening, and that therefore we have to develop some new, different ways of thinking and coping or else this is going to continue. People want to believe that it’s going to be over next week.

I know every president says it, but it hasn’t been true. And, by the way, every single president since Roosevelt has been in office when the economy turned down. Not as bad as today, and not as bad as the 1930s was, but they’ve had downturns. And every president comes up, therefore, with a set of policies. And every president makes an announcement of his policies and says, “These policies are not only to the get us out of this crisis but, even more important, my fellow Americans, it will prevent future downturns like this.” By that standard every president has been a liar, because he hasn’t delivered on that. We have a big crisis that proves that getting rid of the future of crises has not been anything that any president has yet accomplished.

I think we now face a situation that we’re looking at the potential for a 10- or 20-year downturn of the sort that Japan is now suffering if we don’t stop and face the music of a long-overdue discussion and debate about the particular system we have called capitalism, which is now not working for the majority of people and either needs to be changed in a significant way or we have to move to some other system that works better. Not on the grounds of some abstract ideological commitment, but on the very practical grounds of making our economic system work for us in the way that we want our schools, our health system, our transportation system, and our other basic institutions to work for us.

One of the factors you failed to include in this potpourri of things that have been going on over the last decades has been the decline of the union movement, of organized labor, which acted as a check against the rapacious appetites of some of the capitalist owners. What’s happened to the union movement?

You’re absolutely right. Your criticism is well taken. I think, to put a different twist on it, that my own relative neglect of that part of the story is itself a symptom of what has happened. The trade union movement in the U.S. is now at the end of a 50-year period of decline. Year after year the number of Americans who are represented by a union, who are in any meaningful sense union members has shrunk, despite all kinds of efforts by the union movement to change that situation.

Think of the statistics today. Seven percent of workers in the private sector of the U.S., which is our major sector, are in a union. Ninety-three percent of people working do not have the protection of a union contract or a union organization to make sure they get treated properly, to avoid arbitrary firings, and all the rest. But the thing is that the current attack of governors in a number of states—Wisconsin is the most famous but there are many other states that are experiencing this—is focused on the public-sector employees. So we have not only a weak trade union movement but one that is under special attack of a politically sustained, coordinated nature across many states in the U.S., so that is the prognosis for the trade union movement is not only not good right now but even more of this dismal story.

I think it’s been very important that the union movement has declined. Let me give you an illustration of why that’s the case. In the 1930s, the last time we had a crisis of the proportions we have now, even worse than what we have now but of these proportions, we saw a president who had been elected—I’m talking about Franklin Roosevelt—on a balanced-budget, kind of conservative platform radically change his attitude after two or three years in office. He realized, the story goes, that the crisis was severe, that it was lasting a long time, that it was resisting the hopes and measures, weak as they were, taken by the government. In other words, he was in a situation quite like Obama’s. But he then did something that Obama, at least has not yet done, which is he radically changed his direction.

Let me give you one example. In 1934 he goes on the radio to the American people and he says, in effect, If the private sector either cannot or will not hire tens of millions of Americans who want a job, then there is no alternative but for me as the president to do that. Between 1934 and 1940, the federal government under Roosevelt created and filled 11 million jobs. This was a direct way to use the government to put people back to work: to give them a job, to make them feel like useful citizens, to give them a decent income, to allow them to maintain their mortgage payments so they didn’t lose their homes, therefore not a destroying of the housing market. Why did Roosevelt do it? The story is often, he saw the problem. Yes, but there’s a missing part of this story. One of the things that Roosevelt did was to say to the wealthy in America, By the way, you’re going to pay for this. I’m going to raise taxes on your companies and I’m going to raise your taxes, rich people. That’s where the money is going to come from for me to hire all these unemployed. Wow! What we say in this country is unthinkable and undoable was thinkable and doable and got done then. Why? Here comes the role of the trade union movement. We had in the middle of the 1930s the most dynamic, the most powerful, sweeping growth of the union movement we’ve ever had in American history before or since. It was called the Congress of Industrial Organizations, the CIO, the future partner with the AFL, of the AFL-CIO, which swept across basic industries—steel, auto, rubber, chemical, and so on—to organize millions of workers in a very short period of time. Those unions demanded that something be done about unemployment—or else, that something be done about the suffering of people—or else. And next to them there were two other organizations that were strong in the 1930s, the Socialist Party and the Communist Party. They, too, were mounting demonstrations in the streets involving large numbers of people.

That gave Mr. Roosevelt a card to play that is crucial for us to understand. When he went to the corporations and the rich, he said to them, I’m going to put people back to work, and they’re going to have an income and then they’re going to buy your products. You’re not hiring them. I’ll take care of it. But you’re going to pay for it, because you’re going to benefit from it. And here’s the trump card. If you don’t do this with me, behind me are coming the unions, the socialists and the communists, and you’re not going to get anywhere so good a deal if they take over. There was enough fear that that might happen— remember, there’s also the Soviet Union across the ocean—that this gave a card to Roosevelt, which he played and which allowed him to get the rich and the corporations to pay big time compared to what they pay now.

When people tell you it can’t be done, or if you advocate taxing corporations and the rich to give jobs to unemployed people, you’re talking socialism, communism, no, you’re not. You’re talking about a chapter in which a president of this country, facing conditions rather like today, was pushed and enabled by a powerful trade union movement to take a radically different course that changed the history of this country.

The sadness today is, we have a weak trade union movement, not a strong one, and the socialists and communists have basically disappeared from our political life. So we don’t have the social force that might persuade or convince the president today, whether it’s Obama or anyone else, to do what happened in our last bout with a serious crisis. And while many people may be happy that the trade union movement is weak and the socialists and communists are very weak—the reality is, it may get us a depression that hurts more and lasts longer than the last one.

The militancy of workers in that period was noteworthy. The threat of strikes and actual strikes, sit-down strikes, general strikes. There was muscle in the streets. And today, except for a few examples—would you consider the demonstrations in Madison, Wisconsin, and the like equivalent or not. I don’t think they’re equivalent. I don’t think anyone thinks that yet. But they are straws in the wind, and I think they are therefore very worthwhile focusing on. I think what happened in Wisconsin was dramatic. It showed that the American people have a left wing, if you like, of people who are committed to the trade union movement, who do not want workers to be deprived of their rights of collective bargaining, etc., who will not sit idly by and watch these long and hard-won gains for working people to be erased by a Republican governor or, for that matter, a Democratic governor. So I think, yes, it’s a very important sign in the wind.

I see many such signs in the wind. I think Americans need to pay attention. There were riots recently in London and many other British cities of people very angry about the suffering caused to masses of working people by the crisis in England, which, by the way, is very severe and being handled by their government even more severely than is happening here in this country. But that’s a straw in the wind, too. And in countries like Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy we’ve had general strikes, a rising militancy of the working class the likes of which we haven’t seen in half a century. It’s all about this economic crisis and all about the ineffective government attempt to cope with it and the injustice of it all. And to imagine that the U.S. is going to in some magical way not have these problems coming here, even as this crisis deepens, is naïve and counter to the history of the world.

My guess is we’re going to be rudely awakened one day when we see the other side of the coin, when the other shoe drops. We’re going to see an American working class whose ideas of what’s going on are not only that it’s unjust and not only that it’s intolerable, but that the solution does not involve pandering more to business than we already have, sort of the Tea Party approach, but is rather a different push from the other side of the political spectrum. It takes longer in America because we don’t have the trade union, socialist, and communist organizations that they have in Europe. That’s why they’ve been able to mobilize a left alternative anti- austerity program. What we lack here are the organizations we allowed to disappear over the last 50 years that we just discussed. But Americans will be resourceful. The point of view is well represented in this country. So they will either resuscitate those old organizations or they will build new ones, because the basic problems in Europe are the same as those that exist here.

Warren Buffet, one of the wealthiest Americans, says, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” Why isn’t there more discussion about class?

I think that’s part of the taboo of the last 30 years. We had to believe in America that we don’t have classes. I like to point out to my students that the U.S. and the Soviet Union, the two adversaries of the Cold War, had one thing in common. Each side had its government and its intellectuals constantly telling the mass of people that they were a classless society. The leaders of the Soviet Union said it from their perspective, and the leaders of the U.S. said it from theirs. It wasn’t true there, and it wasn’t true here either. We can’t discuss class. It’s an explosive issue. Again, to use the metaphor, it’s a little bit like sex or religion or something: you’re not supposed to think about it or talk about it, even though everyone knows that we are thinking and talking about it.

So I think it’s one of those horrible lapses of a culture. When it can’t talk about something, all that that does is make that issue even bigger in people’s minds, even more powerful, even more influential, even to the point of becoming dangerous, because it’s this tabooed thing. It’s like a child. “You mustn’t ever go in that room” makes that room really interesting. So I think we will come to rue the day that we excluded discussions of capitalism or of class in the U.S.

There is one discussion of class here, and that is the magical, mystical middle class.

Right. I always love this notion of the middle class. Everybody in America, when answering a question, says he or she is in the middle class—very wealthy people, very poor people. They all agree. I think that was just an American way of magically wishing oneself in a society that didn’t have the differences that are so scary. But we, of course, had them. Now we have them in spades. So we can’t afford anymore the make-believe world in which we’re all in the middle. We’re not.

The economy is full of signs that the middle has disappeared. For example, the stores in America who serve the middle—Sears Roebuck, dozens of them like that—they’re all gone or disappearing. There is no middle. You don’t buy your clothes at Sears Roebuck. You buy them at discount places like Marshalls or TJ Maxx, where they sell stuff real cheap. Or even more, Target or Wal- Mart, the stores for the mass of the people who can’t afford any more. Or you’re at the other end. You shop in a lovely boutique, in a lovely part of town, and you pay five times what everybody else pays for more or less similar stuff. It’s an economy that’s splitting into the haves and the don’t-haves, with the think-they-haves in the middle, and that’s a shrinking part of our population.

I think another way to get at this is to talk about Warren Buffet’s important remark. He at least is the first, the kind of vanguard of the rich class. There are always people among the wealthy and among the capitalists who are not trapped in make-believe land, who want to face the reality, because they’re afraid of what might happen if you don’t. Mr. Buffet is very clear. He says, Look, I did a survey—if you read his whole article—of the 20-odd people who work in my office as secretaries, clerks, and assistants. He said, I pay a lower tax rate on my income, which is thousands of times larger than theirs, than they do. In my office I paid the lowest rate of taxation of anybody. He said, I’m the richest person there. That’s crazy. The hidden message—and it wasn’t much hidden in his statement—was, they’re going to get angry about this one day, and I’d be a lot smarter and so would the fellow members of my rich class if we understood that and took steps to deal with it than to put our heads in the sand and wait for that anger to overtake us all.

Let me show you how correct Mr. Buffet is. I’m going to give you two examples. The first comes from the relationship between taxing corporations and taxing individuals. If you go back to the end of World War II, here’s the relationship. For every dollar that Washington got from the taxpayers of America as individuals, it got $1.50 from corporations. That is, the corporate income tax, tax on profits, brought in 50% more money to Washington than the total tax on individuals. What’s the relationship today? Well, I’ll tell you. In 2011, for every dollar that the federal government gets in revenue from taxing individuals, it gets 25 cents from corporations. Corporations have shifted the burden of income tax from their income, which is called profits, on to our income, which is called wages and salaries and so on. That’s a tremendous shift. But that’s what class warfare means. They have warred against people, corporations have, by pushing the tax on them.

Now my second example. If you look at the individual income tax, let’s start with the 1950s and 1960s, not that long ago, heaven knows, in the 1950s and 1960s the top income tax bracket of an individual was 91%. Here’s what that means. For every dollar over the maximum—let’s just say roughly $100,000—for every declare over $100,000 that a rich man or woman got, they had to give Uncle Sam 91 cents and they got to keep 9. Even in the 1970s it was still 70%. So every dollar over $100,000 you got in the 1970s, you had to give Uncle Sam 70 cents, you kept 30. What is the rate for the richest Americans today? Thirty-five percent. Think of it: a drop in the tax for the richest Americans from 91% to 35%. That’s a tax cut. Nothing remotely like that has been enjoyed by the vast majority of Americans.

So over the last 40 or 50 years, here’s what we can say about taxes. They have been shifted from corporations on to individuals and from the richest individuals on to the rest of us. So when you’re angry at the government and you’re angry at the taxes and you’re angry at the situation, at least it’s important to be well informed rather than to celebrate the middle class and capitalism. The fact of the matter, as Buffet knows, is there’s been a class warfare and most Americans have been on the losing side of it.

Is this crisis of capitalism systemic?

There’s no other way I could possibly imagine describing it, although I am surrounded, I must say, by my fellow economists. An awful lot of them still don’t want to face the systemic nature of this, still want to look for a bad guy. The media join in. If you’re one kind of persuasion, you think the bad guys are the bankers, if you’re another kind of persuasion, you think the bad guys are the people who took out subprime loans and can’t make their payments. You blame the poor, you blame the rich. We’re beyond that. Everybody who contributed to this crisis did his or her part. The bankers did what bankers do, the working people did what working people do, each one trying to make it in this system.

When a system has everybody playing by its rules, more or less, and you get the level of dysfunction we now have, it’s time to stop looking for scapegoats and understand that the problem is a system that isn’t working, that is driving all of its parts—corporations, individuals, banks, a business on Main Street making ladders, whatever it is—to do things that don’t work together for the economy as a whole. That’s what a systemic crisis means. That’s why in my conversation with you I stress, look, here was a situation where workers couldn’t pay back their debts, for understandable reasons. Here’s reasons why employers stopped raising wages, because that was the system’s way for them to function. Everybody is doing their part, but the results don’t work. That’s when the system has to change.

It’s a little bit liking calling the repairman or -woman into your home to fix that damn refrigerator that has been on the fritz for a while. After a while, after the repairman putters around with the motor and with the condenser and with the this and the that, he stops and he looks at you and says, “Look, I can fix this. It’s going to cost you $50 for me to do this, and $47 for that and $50 for that. But I got to tell you, this is a refrigerator that has had it. And you can pump money in and you can blame the condenser and you can blame the motor, but you’ve gotten 20 years out of this. It’s time to move on and think about a new and different way to manage the refrigeration problems you want to solve in your home.”

I think we’re at that stage with capitalism as a system, and I think the American people have the Cold War far enough out of our lives, we have gone beyond that, we’re mature now. We’ve got a crisis in this system. It is systemic. Let’s finally have the long-postponed national conversation about capitalism, its strengths and weaknesses, how much it has to be changed or whether we need a new refrigerator.

What immediate steps would you recommend?

There are two things that I think would be the things I would focus on. One you might call a short-term or an immediate step that ought to be taken and one intermediate step, because I know it will be harder to do.

Let me deal with the easy one first. We ought to have a national jobs program. What we need in this country is to put our unemployed people back to work, and we ought to do it. We ought to stop the plan that has now failed for four and a half years. That’s the plan of Mr. Bush and that’s the plan of Mr. Obama, namely, to provide incentives, inducements, etc., so that the private sector can hire people. That’s been the mantra, that’s been the policy. And that has failed. We have as high unemployment now as we did one, two, even three years ago, or worse than those times. Therefore, we have a failed arrangement here. It is unconscionable and unethical to stay with a policy of proven failure.

Two and a half years ago, President Obama had a stimulus program that was supposed to put people back to work. It was over roughly $800 billion, it was passed by the Congress. It didn’t solve the problem. Then, in September of 2011, the same President Obama goes on television again, proposes yet another stimulus, when the situation is worse than it was then. Only this stimulus is half the size of the one before. You do not need an advanced degree to understand, this cannot solve the problem, even if it were a direct program, and it isn’t. It is once again incentives of various kinds: tax cuts, subsidies, government orders that hopefully will lead the private sector to hire more people.

The solution is, do it directly. Do what Roosevelt did after 1934 and do it properly. Use every dollar of the program you’re going to use to hire people. Not to provide orders, some of which will end up in the hands of executives or in the corporation’s profits. No, no, no. You want people to go to work? Hire them, pay them a decent salary.

And by the way, have them to do what? Have them do all kinds of useful things in this country. Daycare centers, because we have a very sad condition for daycare, that people really need. Programs for the elderly. Our population is getting older every year, relatively. There should be ways to give old people an important way of contributing to this society, and we ought to have the people around to do that. Green our society, improve the ecological relationship with the environment which we’ve neglected, whether that be insulating homes or building a proper public transportation system that will save the use of the car, that is such a polluter of our environment. Just as in the 1930s what workers hired by the government did: building national parks, conservation, constructing levees in flood-prone areas, and so on. It turned out to be useful for generations. So could be what we do now.

It is unconscionable to have in the U.S. today millions of people idle who want to work, side by side with one- quarter of our productive capacity sitting idle. That’s a government statistic. That measures the amount of floor space in factories, machines, tools not being used, gathering rust and dust. Instead of what? Being worked on by workers who want to work, who could produce with those available resources wealth that would solve many of our problems that we’re losing out on. Because we have side by side unemployed workers who want to work, unused materials, raw materials, and tools to work with, and therefore we’re losing out. This is nonsense. So a jobs program is what ought to exist right away. And it’s a copy of something done by another American president in comparable circumstances.

But more important than that, I would stress, is something else. A bit more far-reaching but, again, part of what we have to face up to. We need to democratize our enterprises. We need to stop an economic system in which all the enterprises that produce the goods and services we depend on are organized in the following way. The vast majority of people come to work Monday through Friday, 9:00 to 5:00. They arrive and they use their brains and muscles to work with equipment provided by the employer to produce an output, a good or a service. At the end of the day they go home. They take with them their brain and their body, but they leave behind what they’ve produced, and the employer takes it and sells it and makes as much money as he can.

All the decisions in this arrangement are made by whom? A tiny group of people. In most companies in this country that are organized as corporations, that group is called the board of directors, 15 to 20 people who decide what to produce, how to produce, where to produce, and what to do with the profits. And who selects these people? The major shareholders. Another tiny group of 15 to 20 people. They make all the decisions. The vast majority of working people make no decisions. If the company decides to close down here and go somewhere else, what does that mean? It means that a small group of people, board of directors and major shareholders, are moving the factory from Ohio to Canton, China. Okay. All the people who work there are going to lose their jobs. All the people in the community who depended on that employer are now going to suffer 10 ways to Sunday. Their children are going to have a harder time in school. You know the story. We permit that decision to be made by a minority. We do not accept democracy, that the majority of people who have to live with the consequences of a decision ought to participate in making it. I think that’s a key root of our problems.

Those corporations made all kinds of decisions of the sort I talked to you about. For example, in the 1970s they decided to stop raising wages, even though they could do it because the workers’ productivity rose up. If workers themselves ran these enterprises, if they were run by the workers as a whole—and how would that work, by the way? Monday through Thursday you come and do the job the way you always did. Friday you come to work, you don’t do your usual job. You sit around all day in meetings with the other workers and you make decisions democratically, together. You decide what to produce, how to produce, where to produce, and what to do with the profits.

If we had had that, let’s review over what might have happened over the last 30 years. First, in the 1970s the workers would not have stopped raising their wages. There was no need to do it, and they wouldn’t have been persuaded by the great opportunity of the labor market to stick to it workers by not raising their wages anymore. So the whole basis of the borrowing frenzy, the credit card, all of that could have been avoided if we had had a different system. Number two, would those workers destroy their own jobs by moving production out of the country? Highly unlikely. Would those workers employ a dangerous technology, one that pollutes the environment? I don’t think so, because they live there, because their children live there and their families there. They’re not going to want, even if it makes a bit more money, to risk the health of themselves and their families in the way that a board of directors located many miles away might be and has been traditionally quite willing to do. Would they have used the profits to speculate in dangerous derivatives? I doubt it. Would they have used the extra profits they made in good times to allow some managers to get astronomical salaries while the rest of the people didn’t? I do you tell it. In fact, every part of our economic history over the last 30 years would have been radically different, and I think in much preferred directions, had we had a different way of organizing our enterprises. Not the top-down, undemocratic, hierarchical and bureaucratic arrangement of corporations today, but a much more cooperative, collective, community-focused way that is democratic at its core.

For a country that prides itself on its commitment to democracy, to letting the people have a real, ongoing participation in the decisions that affect their lives, there has always been a terrible gap. The most important activity of an adult’s life in this country is work. It’s what we do five days out of every seven, what we get up in the morning and brush our teeth to be able to do, what we travel to and from for. That’s what we’re doing most of our adult lives between childhood and death. If democracy belongs anywhere, it belongs in that major portion of our lives. Yet we accept, as if it were given by nature, that we are supposed to enter the threshold of our store, of our factory, of our office, and give up all of our democratic commitments, all of our democratic rights. If it at least delivered us a rising standard of living, it might make sense that people would accept it. But now we have an economic system that imposes an undemocratic way of work and doesn’t deliver us a decent economic result either. The time has come to question and debate what has been taboo, at our cost, for 30 years.

Where do you get your politics? Who and what have inspired you?

It’s a little bit of everything. I was the child of immigrants, born in Youngstown, Ohio. At the time, my father was pushing a wheelbarrow in the Youngstown Sheet & Tube Company, a famous steel company that no longer exists. He was in that position because he was an immigrant, and his life in Europe—he came from France—didn’t count for much when he came here. But I was the first child, so it was important for me and my family to succeed. So I went to Harvard as an undergraduate, and then I went to Stanford and got my master’s degree, and I finished my education at Yale, which is where I got my Ph.D. in economics. So by most American standards I’m a bit of a poster boy for elite education. And I’m grateful for the education, and I was trained in conventional economics, the very kind of economics that I have been criticizing in this conversation.

I learned to criticize in part from the very economics I was taught, because I was taught by my teachers, in part, to ask tough questions. I did what I shouldn’t, which is I turned those questions on the very system I was being taught to revere and I found it wanting. Once I saw that capitalism was producing results I could not justify, for example, the coexistence at the same time, as I mentioned earlier, of unemployed people who want to work, unutilized means of production that are sitting there rusting, and unmet social needs that could be met if these people who wanted to work would be put together, it seemed to me that an economic system that couldn’t solve this problem, couldn’t put the people in the jobs they want, with the equipment they could use to produce the wealth that would make all of us better, that such a system didn’t deserve my unquestioned loyalty. It might deserve my loyalty, but not without big questions.

Once I began to ask the questions, then I discovered, like I think a lot of folks do, that I’m not the first one, that there have been lots of people who have asked these questions about capitalism and have come to a variety of conclusions—some of whom said it needs to be badly changed, some of whom said it’s no good, we can doing better than capitalism, and here are some ways we might do that. And I found that literature very interesting.

I was influenced by the people who designed and developed modern economics, which celebrates capitalism, but on my own I made sure to supplement that education with an exposure to a whole list of critical thinkers.

It’s a little bit like, if you wanted to understand a family. Let’s imagine a family with mother, father, and two children—and you happen to know that one of the two children thought that they lived in the greatest family ever invented and the other one was extremely critical of mother and father and felt the family wasn’t effective. If you want to understand that family, do you just talk to the child who thinks it was the greatest thing or do you talk to both of them? My feeling is, if you want to understand capitalism, you need to talk to the people who think it’s wonderful, by all means, but you also need to think and talk and expose yourself to the arguments of those who don’t think it’s so wonderful, who think we could do better.

I don’t shy away from saying, the single most developed tradition of critical thought about capitalism is called Marxism. It was begun by Karl Marx, even though he built his work on many people who went before him. It’s not the only solution to our problems, it has its own shortcomings and failures. But if you want to think critically about capitalism, you sooner or later are going to have to encounter the Marxian theoretical tradition, because it is the most developed, it has had contributions from every country on Earth, from a thousand struggles against business and governments supporting capitalism. It’s a repository, a rich resource that ought to be made use of by anyone who wants to have a balanced brain when it comes to dealing with the real problems.

Your answer triggered one last question. One hears constantly from Democrats and Republicans that the government is like a family, that it must balance its budget. Which on the surface seems very reasonable. We all want to live within our means. Is there anything wrong with that argument?

There are so many things wrong I’m a little overwhelmed as to where to start. First of all, the very people saying it, Republicans and Democrats, are on record for the last 50 years of consistently voting for unbalanced budgets, which have been passed under Republican and Democratic presidents alike, under Republican- and Democratic- controlled Senates and Houses of Representatives alike. So I don’t know who it is that is supposed to believe these characters when they give these little homilies about what the government ought to do. But in their actions, in their votes as our representatives, they ignore that.

Let me give you one example. The summer of 2011 we witnessed an astonishing political theatre in Washington in which Republicans and Democrats yelled at each other in front of the cameras about the need to do something about the debt: The government should not live beyond its means, all that stuff. Here’s what the reality was. In the year 2011 the government is running a budget as follows: It is scheduled to spend roughly $3 1/2 trillion. It is scheduled to take in in taxes on individuals and companies roughly $2 trillion. That means it is a budget, which was voted into office by Republicans and Democrats alike the year earlier, that requires the government to borrow the difference between what it takes in in taxes and what it spends, which is $1 1/2 trillion or, to say the same thing another way, $1,500 billion.

So what were the Republicans and Democrats debating this summer? Here’s what they were debating. The Republicans wanted there to be something done about the deficit and began with a very bold plan to cut the government’s deficit by $100 billion. Ryan and Cantor, the leaders in the Congress of the Republican Party, pushed that. Let me remind everyone, the size of the deficit this year is $1,500 billion, and the Republican drastic proposal was to cut $100 billion. That’s nothing, out of $1,500 billion. But then they modified their demands, the Republicans, and came down to $60 billion. The Democrats didn’t want to cut that much, so they counterproposed $30 billion.

They finally, after much yelling at each other and much invocation of the importance of dealing with the deficit, reached a compromise to cut $38 billion. What’s the size of the deficit this year? $1,500 billion. They reached a compromise to cut that by $38 billion. That’s silly. That’s not dealing with our deficit problem. That is an avoidance of dealing with it. But it was portrayed by the politicians and the media as a grand historical struggle.

The truth of it was, both sides agreed that in this situation of a crisis the government has to help the economy by spending huge amounts of money. Why? Precisely because corporations, above all else, are not spending that money. They don’t have any confidence in the American economy. They’re not going to risk hiring workers and buying materials and putting people to work, because they don’t think they can sell that stuff, neither here nor abroad, so they’re not doing it. So the government has to spend the money that they are not, or else we’re in real hot soup.

So the discussion about the deficit is phony. There is no other way to discuss it. It’s a way of saying to the Americans, We want to deal with the problem in a serious way, the way your family would if it was unable to meet its debts. But what your family faces is a problem they don’t think they have. By the way, they do have it. The deficit will cause all kinds of problems in America, not the ones they tell us about, a different set. But they are not credible. They are not dealing with the deficit. Over the last five years, over the last 10 years, whatever you look, the deficits in America have gotten steadily worse because both parties vote for them over and over again. And they simply try to cover their tracks by these speeches to Americans about what the government ought to do, but when it comes to their vote, there is no reality and no truth to what they’re doing. It’s a pretty unpleasant picture, because, if I use harsher terms, it would be words like liars and fakers and cheats.

(Due to time constraints some portions of the interview were not included in the national broadcast. Those portions are included in this transcript.)

For information about obtaining CDs, MP3s, or transcripts of this or other programs, please contact:
David Barsamian
Alternative Radio
P.O. Box 551
Boulder, CO 80306-0551
(800) 444-1977
info@alternativeradio.org
www.alternativeradio.org
©2010

Rule of law

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 12:04:24 GMT

by Fred Nagel

Most US citizens don’t know whether to cheer the assassination of US citizen and cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki, or not. Apart from the fact that he was a Muslim and wore religious garb, we just don’t know too much about him.

What did he say or write that brought on the death penalty? There was a time in our nation’s history when free speech was protected. In fact, it says in the First Amendment of our Constitution that our government will never “abridge the freedom of speech.” But Awlaki got blown up for what he said. When did things change?

The Fifth Amendment talks about something else, due process. That means charges, trails and legal proceedings before the state can murder its own. The Sixth Amendment guarantees a citizen’s right to a “public trial by an impartial jury.” Muslims don’t get these rights now?

The US media credits President Obama with “authorizing the request” to kill Awlaki. Who requested this murder? Where in our Constitution does it allow some agency or committee to “request” the assassination of a US citizen? Does that secret request go straight to our Commander in Chief? And what would our founding fathers have had to say about a President who gives his OK to cold blooded murder without charges, without a trail, without anything really.

Was there a law passed making our President a judge, jury and executioner all in one? And is there anything left of our Constitutional rule of law?

Did Hiroshima and Nagasaki save lives? (and other thoughts on the use of nukes)

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 00:16:32 GMT

The following is an excerpt from War Is a Lie by David Swanson, who served as press secretary for Dennis Kucinich’s 2004 presidential campaign. He is the cofounder of WarIsACrime.org (formerly AfterDownStreet.org) and was instrumental in exposing the Downing Street Minutes and other evidence of Iraq War lies. He is also the author of Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union. He holds a master’s degree in philosophy from the University of Virginia.

Most supporters of war admit that war is hell. But most human beings like to believe that all is fundamentally right with the world, that everything is for the best, that all actions have a divine purpose. Even those who lack religion tend, when discussing something horribly sad or tragic, not to exclaim “How sad and awful!” but to express–and not just under shock but even years later–their inability to “understand” or “believe” or “comprehend” it, as though pain and suffering were not as clearly comprehensible facts as joy and happiness are. We want to pretend with Dr. Pangloss that all is for the best, and the way we do this with war is to imagine that our side is battling against evil for the sake of good, and that war is the only way such a battle can be waged.

If we have the means with which to wage such battles, we must expect to use them. Consider what Senator Albert J. Beveridge (R-IN) offered the Senate at the turn of the twentieth century as his own divinely guided rationale for war on the Philippines:

God has not been preparing the English-speaking and Teutonic peoples for a thousand years for nothing but vain and idle self-contemplation and self-admiration. No! He has made us the master organizers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns.

During our Vietnam travesty, Senator William Fulbright (D-AR) explained the phenomenon for using the power we have this way:

Power tends to confuse itself with virtue, and a great nation is peculiarly susceptible to the idea that its power is a sign of God’s favor, conferring upon it a special responsibility for other nations–to make them richer and happier and wiser, to remake them, that is, in its own shining image.

Madeline Albright, Secretary of State when Bill Clinton was president, was more concise:

What’s the point of having this superb military that you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?

The belief in a divine right to wage war seems to only grow stronger when great military power runs up against resistance too strong for military power to overcome. In 2008 a U.S. journalist wrote about General David Petraeus, then commander in Iraq,

God has apparently seen fit to give the U.S. Army a great general in this time of need.

[Andrew Bacevich, Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010), p. 205.]

On August 6, 1945, President Harry S Truman announced:

Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese Army base. That bomb had more power that 20,000 tons of TNT. It had more than two thousand times the blast power of the British “Grand Slam,” which is the largest bomb ever yet used in the history of warfare.

When Truman lied to America that Hiroshima was a military base rather than a city full of civilians, people no doubt wanted to believe him. Who would want the shame of belonging to the nation that commits a whole new kind of atrocity? (Will naming lower Manhattan “Ground Zero” erase the guilt?) And when we learned the truth, we wanted and still want desperately to believe that war is peace, that violence is salvation, that our government dropped nuclear bombs in order to save lives, or at least to save American lives.

We tell each other that the bombs shortened the war and saved more lives than the some 200,000 they took away. And yet, weeks before the first bomb was dropped, on July 13, 1945, Japan sent a telegram to the Soviet Union expressing its desire to surrender and end the war. The United States had broken Japan’s codes and read the telegram. Truman referred in his diary to “the telegram from Jap Emperor asking for peace.” Truman had been informed through Swiss and Portuguese channels of Japanese peace overtures as early as three months before Hiroshima. Japan objected only to surrendering unconditionally and giving up its emperor, but the United States insisted on those terms until after the bombs fell, at which point it allowed Japan to keep its emperor.

Presidential advisor James Byrnes had told Truman that dropping the bombs would allow the United States to “dictate the terms of ending the war.” Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal wrote in his diary that Byrnes was “most anxious to get the Japanese affair over with before the Russians got in.” Truman wrote in his diary that the Soviets were preparing to march against Japan and “Fini Japs when that comes about.” Truman ordered the bomb dropped on Hiroshima on August 6th and another type of bomb, a plutonium bomb, which the military also wanted to test and demonstrate, on Nagasaki on August 9th.

Also on August 9th, the Soviets attacked the Japanese. During the next two weeks, the Soviets killed 84,000 Japanese while losing 12,000 of their own soldiers, and the United States continued bombing Japan with non-nuclear weapons. Then the Japanese surrendered.

The United States Strategic Bombing Survey concluded that,

… certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.

One dissenter who had expressed this same view to the Secretary of War prior to the bombings was General Dwight Eisenhower. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral William D. Leahy agreed:

The use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender.

[Howard Zinn, The Bomb (San Francisco City Lights Books, 2010)]

Whatever dropping the bombs might possibly have contributed to ending the war, it is curious that the approach of threatening to drop them, the approach used during a half-century of Cold War to follow, was never tried. An explanation may perhaps be found in Truman’s comments suggesting the motive of revenge:

Having found the bomb, we have used it. We have used it against those who attacked us without warning at Pearl Harbor, against those who have starved and beaten and executed American prisoners of war, and against those who have abandoned all pretense of obeying international laws of warfare.

[Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, “Were the Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki Justified?” in Bombing Civilians: A Twentieth Century History, ed. Yuki Tanaka and Marilyn B. Young (New York: The New Press, 2009), p. 127]

Truman could not, incidentally, have chosen Tokyo as a target–not because it was a city, but because we had already reduced it to rubble.

The nuclear catastrophe may have been, not the ending of a World War, but the theoretical opening of the Cold War, aimed at sending a message to the Soviets. Many low and high ranking officials in the U.S. military, including commanders in chief, have been tempted to nuke more cities ever since, beginning with Truman threatening to nuke China in 1950. The myth developed, in fact, that Eisenhower’s enthusiasm for nuking China led to the rapid conclusion of the Korean War. Belief in the myth led President Richard Nixon, decades later, to imagine he could end the Vietnam War by pretending to be crazy enough to use nuclear bombs. Even more disturbingly, he actually was crazy enough:

The nuclear bomb, does that bother you?… I just want you to think big, Henry, for Christsakes,

Nixon said to Henry Kissinger in discussing options for Vietnam.

President George W. Bush oversaw the development of smaller nuclear weapons that might be used more readily, as well as much larger non-nuclear bombs, blurring the line between the two. President Barack Obama established in 2010 that the United States might strike first with nuclear weapons, but only against Iran and North Korea. The United States alleged, without evidence, that Iran was not complying with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), even though the clearest violation of that treaty is the United States’ own failure to work on disarmament and the United States’ Mutual Defense Agreement with the United Kingdom, by which the two countries share nuclear weapons in violation of Article 1 of the NPT, and even though the United States’ first-strike nuclear weapons policy violates yet another treaty: the UN Charter.

Americans may never admit what was done in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but our country had been in some measure prepared for it. After Germany had invaded Poland, Britain and France had declared war on Germany. Britain in 1940 had broken an agreement with Germany not to bomb civilians, before Germany retaliated in the same manner against England–although Germany had itself bombed Guernica, Spain, in 1937, and Warsaw, Poland, in 1939, and Japan meanwhile was bombing civilians in China. Then, for years, Britain and Germany had bombed each other’s cities before the United States joined in, bombing German and Japanese cities in a spree of destruction unlike anything ever previously witnessed.

When we were firebombing Japanese cities, Life magazine printed a photo of a Japanese person burning to death and commented “This is the only way.” By the time of the Vietnam War, such images were highly controversial. By the time of the 2003 War on Iraq, such images were not shown, just as enemy bodies were no longer counted. That development, arguably a form of progress, still leaves us far from the day when atrocities will be displayed with the caption “There has to be another way.”

For more on the myth of the nuke attacks on Japan saving lives, see

Hiroshima: New facts and old myths

and Atomic coverup: The hidden story.

Disturbing power the Code Pink way

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 20:17:56 GMT

by Jodie Evans
Interviewed by David Barsamian
Boulder, CO
August 7, 2011

available from Alternative Radio

Jodie Evans is a veteran activist with more than 30 years experience in organizing for social change. She cofounded Code Pink with Medea Benjamin. They’ve also edited the book Stop The Next War Now: Effective Responses to Violence and Terrorism. She was Executive Producer of the documentaries The Most Dangerous Man in America and The People Speak. She is the boardchair of the Women’s Media Center.

What kindled your activism?

In1970 I was a maid in one of the big hotels in Las Vegas, and we got organized to march for a living wage. Jane Fonda came and marched with us. In that process I found my power. And we won. To this day maids get a living wage in Las Vegas. They can buy a house. Years later, I made a documentary, Stripped and Teased: Voices of Las Vegas Women. It was about a woman who raised her 11 children on a maid’s salary. Her husband had died. She became the president of the union. She led the six-year strike against the Frontier Hotel and won.

And then I was an antiwar activist. As my friends from high school started to go off to war, I became an antiwar activist and used a lot of the skills I got from being organized as a maid. And then I joined the McGovern campaign, and turned 18 a month before. I got to be one of the first 18-year-olds to vote. I still remember how powerful that was and how much I wanted to use my vote.

What was the spark that launched CODEPINK?

About May of 2002, about 35 of us who were activists got together, and we called ourselves The Unreasonable Women for the Earth. And Caroline Casey called us Code Hot Pink, with the idea that we should get together and save the earth and do some radical activism. We started a hunger strike to keep India from changing the [Bhopal] crime, [the 1984 Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal in which thousands died], to a misdemeanor. Diane Wilson, who had called us The Unreasonables, did the hunger strike, and people from all over the world joined her. And at the end of August we won. The pressure on the court prevented it from changing the felony down to a misdemeanor.

So that’s the end of the summer 2002. Then we get into September, and they started selling the Iraq war.

Remember, you don’t sell things during the summer? At the time, Bush was trying to frighten us with Code Orange and Code Red and Code Yellow. Then one day Medea and Diane and I got on the phone, and the resolution was going through Congress, and the Democrats had put something forth and Bush had said no. And we said, “Okay, we’ve got to get to Washington.” We found out through another girlfriend that he was going to have all the members of Congress in the Rose Garden the next morning and he was going to give them the resolution and it was just going to go through Congress like lightning.

We got together that night and we said, “We’re going to call ourselves Code Hot Pink.” But the problem was, when you went to the Internet, it was a porn site. So we changed the name to Code Pink. And the next day we were at the White House and hung a big banner on the White House that said “No War in Iraq.”

And Diane got up on the pole and she wouldn’t come down. And media from the Rose Garden came running out, and it was on all the morning news. But as soon as they found out she was an antiwar activist and not a terrorist, it was gone. The story disappeared.

We then went to the steps of the Capitol at lunchtime. We had painted pink doves of peace and put them on our bras and took our shirts off. And on our bellies we wrote

Read My Tits. No War in Iraq.

And members of Congress stopped and talked to us. We were the first people in the hearing and we had our banners. And because we had taken our shirts off, all the cameras in the congressional hearing were on us. We disrupted the Hyde hearing.
And the funny story out of that day was that Medea had to go to New York to help Amy Goodman at a fundraiser, so she said, “I can’t get arrested. So I’ll sit over here, and when you get up, I’ll be over here supporting you.” We got up in the middle and we held the banner and we were screaming out everything that we heard wrong in the hearing. And Medea clapped over where she was. They were dragging us out, and Hyde said, “And her too.”

Cynthia McKinney said, “When did it become illegal to clap in a hearing room?” And he said, “She’s bothering me.” Cynthia McKinney said, “She’s not bothering me.”

And he looked over at her and said, “Well, your skin is thicker than mine.” It was gross. So Medea got arrested. And he turned around, and she was still there, and she got arrested and we didn’t. So we had Medea and Diane in jail for the first day.

Code Pink has pretty much been that since the beginning, that we’re in the face of power, wherever it is. We were at the White House, the steps of Congress, and inside a hearing screaming out when madness was happening, which is literally what that hearing was like. No one knew what they were talking about, and they were all telling stories that were totally false and driving us to war.

Since those early days, how many members do you have and chapters, and how many men are part of Code Pink?

Men have been part of Code Pink since the beginning. Medea and I had been involved as activists our entire lives, so it was really wonderful to have all the men who were running all these major organizations show up and say, “What can we do for you?” John Passacantando from Greenpeace. John Sellers from Ruckus. And Mike Brune from Rainforest Action Network. They were just, like, “How do we help you? It’s very important that it’s a women-led, women-initiated organization that wants to end war.” It was great, because in the beginning we felt very appreciated.

Right now we have about 200,000 people who get our e-mails each week. We send out an Action Alert, because we believe that if you’re in action, you won’t feel as powerless. So we use the Action Alert to educate, inspire, and then, hopefully, activate. We have a small staff of five.

We feel that we’re just the container to give people the tools for activism, and then it’s really the locals that create the color and the intelligence and the vibrancy that is Code Pink.

And how many local chapters?

About 100.

Your comments on the debt deal that Obama struck and its impact on women.

Women and children will suffer the most. It’s devastating what they’ve done. And what’s hardest for us is that we’ve been out there saying bring the war dollars home since we started. Code Pink’s purpose is to end war and bring those resources back to the life-sustaining needs of our community. To watch that happen, and, again, on the backs of women. In every way they will be suffering from
this debt deal, which could have been solved by ending the wars and bringing the troops home.
And also, just recently 30 American troops died in Afghanistan, a few weeks before that 12 in Afghanistan and Iraq. Nobody even talks about the cost in lives—the costs that we’re incurring by how insanely we are operating in Afghanistan.

And even now, even after the Taliban hit that Chinook helicopter and killed everyone on board, the generals are like, Now we’re even more out to win. To win what? Nobody even asks the questions of why we’re there anymore. Osama bin Laden is not the argument anymore. It’s quite devastating to watch this happen.

Those metrics can be measured. What about the moral costs?

That’s the part that’s just mind-boggling. Back in World War I, 10% were civilian casualties. In Iraq it was 90% civilian casualties. With these drones it’s 99%. They are so inaccurate, who knows what they’re hitting?

Not only that, the drones they’re using are operated out of Las Vegas. We do vigils and actions outside of Creech Air Force Base all the time. It’s so inhuman. It’s just mind-bogglingly inhuman what the drones are.

Or that Obama can say that what’s happening in Libya isn’t a war because Americans aren’t getting killed. How does somebody say something like that? I don’t know.

These generals that could say something like, Now we’re just even more revved up to get the Taliban. It wasn’t even the issue. Haven’t we learned after Vietnam and now Iraq that you can’t win anything with insurgencies?

The other moral question is, how much money we have spent on these wars and how we have destroyed countries. They say we’re in Afghanistan for the women. They’ve done nothing for the women. It is less safe for the women. That level of violence creates the power with the violent.
I spoke to some of the women in Afghanistan. They’re not training police; they’re training soldiers. They said,

We don’t need more soldiers. Our fears are civil wars. We don’t need soldiers. We need police.

We have not trained any police; we’re training soldiers. You look at the violence and the number of American soldiers that are dying in Afghanistan, it’s usually, recently, from soldiers that we’ve trained. The Taliban even said that the missile, the way that they got the helicopter, was the way the U.S. trained them to go after the Russians. They always trained them to hit a helicopter that’s carrying troops because it’s the best use of a missile. So we’ve created the disaster that is destroying our country.

That’s the Afghan Mujahideen in the 1980s. And later, elements from the Mujahideen morphed into what is now called the Taliban.

I remember the Indian writer and activist Arundhati Roy saying at the time of the Afghan invasion that, This may be the first time in history that the U.S. Marine Corps claims to be a feminist organization.

It’s devastating to think, even that they say they’re helping these women. You can’t imagine what life is like for these women in Afghanistan. To help them would have been to educate them, would have been to restore their country, would have been to create structures. Everything is in shambles. The only place that’s safe is in Kabul, but anything outside of that isn’t safe. But the only people that anyone speaks to are the people and the women inside of Kabul. Of course, they feel safe, so they want American soldiers to stay. So it becomes a very complex issue, even for women’s organizations.

So you were able to get out into the countryside?

We were not able to get out into the countryside. But a lot of friends and some other Code Pinkers who have traveled there have been.

What do you think of RAWA, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan?

I’m in awe of it and the courage of the women. As a matter of fact, before I help start Code Pink, I raised enough money to build them a hospital in Pakistan in one of their education camps, which is still there. And when Malalai Joya tours the U.S., Code Pink is always involved in organizing events. The last time she was in L.A., we raised $12,000 so she could buy a new car, because it was very dangerous for her to be driving and her car breaking down in Afghanistan, because there’s a price on her head.

I’m concerned with how hard it is for RAWA to operate, because it’s dangerous for them. They do have a lot of courage, because of what she’s been able to say in the parliament. She’s been able to say what no one says and talks to the warlords as warlords instead of pretending that they’re parliamentarians and upstanding members of society. What she does takes more courage than anyone I know.

She later was expelled from parliament. And she has been subjected to death threats.

It’s 10 years of the war on terror, now rebranded by Obama to an innocuous-sounding “overseas contingency operation.” Where are we 10 years on?

We’ve created a more dangerous world. We’ve created more violence. We’ve unraveled the fabric of our own society. At Code Pink we’ve been thinking about what do we do with the 10-year anniversary coming up in October. And watching the antiwar movement slowly just evaporate with Obama coming in and putting everyone to sleep.

Also, you remember back in 2006 it was the antiwar movement that shifted the whole political spectrum, and all these amazing people got elected. But then they got there, and then they still voted for war. When people see that happening, they quit going in the streets and quit being active, because we’ve done this and we’ve done this and we’ve done this, and it’s gotten worse and worse. We pay more taxes that go to war than ever in our history, both percentage-wise and number-wise. So I really was grappling with this. We’ve watched everything get worse. We’ve watched countries be destroyed and we’ve watched war become the answer to every question. Libya happened, and our diplomats are the ones saying to go to war, which is the opposite of what their job is. So it just becomes the answer. Everyone has just gotten super lazy. And the Pentagon has become a behemoth. It’s crazy. I call it crack cocaine. I have no idea what they think over there, because it isn’t about people.

So what we’re doing, with a coalition of other organizations, is something called Ten Years and Counting. It’s about creating, not hate. So it’s called Create Not Hate. Because it was a way of getting back in communities and saying, Through your art, your theater, your music, your cultural center, what would you say these last 10 years have cost you, have cost your community, have cost our country, have cost the world? Because I’m afraid it’s so overwhelming that people don’t even feel about it anymore. And unless you can feel about it, you can’t be active about it. If you don’t want to write about what has the cost been, create about what would have been a different response to 9/11 than going to war on two countries.

It’s another way of just getting into new communities, because for the last year our campaign has been called Bring the War Dollars Home, and we’ve been working in many communities on city resolutions.

We organized the resolution at the mayors’ conference, which won, which shocked everyone, which was really great. You could see where the media was on the issue, because they wrote the story better than I could have. They said “U.S. Mayors Vote for Antiwar Resolution, First Time Since Vietnam,” which really tells the story about what the mayors were willing to stand up and do. And we were trying to leverage the mayors to then go to Congress and go to Obama and say, “You’ve got to stop these wars and bring the war dollars home.” And they did. Los Angeles Mayor Villaraigosa has it high on his list of what his job is as the head of the mayors.

And still Obama’s withdrawal was only 10,000 soldiers out of Afghanistan, even when he had the opportunity after the death of Osama bin Laden. I have no idea what goes through these people’s minds.

There is an embedded assumption in your argument that if those wars were stopped immediately, then, as Code Pink states on its website, the monies would then be redirected “into healthcare, education, green jobs, and other life-affirming activities.” Okay, great. But will the ruling class go along with that?

Obviously not, given what we’ve seen, that the fight in Washington has just degraded down to romper room, that has nothing to do with the needs of the people. And I just want to say that the mayors knew when they were signing the resolution that it wouldn’t come home to them. They know that. They know it’s not really money they’re going to get back in their cities.

But what was great about the mayors doing it was they knew that us being at war was wrong. And it was great that they were willing to lead on it. Not that it came from the cities. That was a good way to pull Obama’s chain. But at least the mayors know it’s wrong and that it’s destroying not only our country but the world.

Our chains are being pulled by a well-organized right-wing faction that must be just bent on destroying the country. Because why would they be unraveling the whole fabric of our society?

That doesn’t make sense. They live in the country. Why would they be bent on destroying it?

Nothing they’re doing makes sense. And they are bent on destroying it. They are taking the spoils. What do the Koch brothers think that they’re doing? Don’t they think that they live in the fabric of the society?

For example, I grew up in Vegas. It was run by mobsters. Vegas had the best education. There was no violence. Why? Because they lived in Las Vegas, and they made it a model community. When they left, it became quite horrible, I have to say, when that structure of power left.

And I wonder who these people are that don’t understand—even the mobsters understood—that your families are growing up in this city. You have to take care of it. What do they think they’re creating? I think they must be crazy, stupid. Because how can you live in a country where you’re not educating the people or taking care of them or taking care of those in the greatest need? How do you even live with yourself? I don’t understand where those choices come from.

They’re sending their kids to private school.

Yes, but haven’t they been to other countries where the difference between rich and poor creates an untenable situation? I think of Brazil, when I went in the 1992 to the Earth Summit. They were really grappling with that problem, and it went to the edge. While we were there, I was at a person’s house having dinner, and they said,

Well, we’re just taking 10,000 street kids and we’re just going to kill them all.

They got to an insane place. And we stopped it from happening.

But what person thinks that they can kill someone because they want to be safe? It’s just an insane notion. Fortunately, Brazil has been changing since then, and there have been enough leaders to come in that understood that they were destroying the country, that it became unlivable for everyone.

And who was able to stop it?

It happened from the streets. It happened from grass-roots activism, people like Sebastião Salgado and the Movimiento Sin Tierra, the landless people’s movement. So many, many forms of activism in the street changed it. And that changed the leadership. And they have really exciting leadership now, too.

Maureen Dowd of The New York Times quipped recently that Obama’s “Yes, we can!” slogan has devolved into “Hey, we might.” You were an early supporter of the president, and you’ve met with him on at least one occasion. What do you think happened in that transition from candidate to president-elect, and then to President Obama? And I’ll just remind you that such people as Norman Solomon and Cornel West are using the word “betrayal” to describe what Obama has done.

I was way ahead of them. In 2007, when he started to run, I wanted to support a black man for president, I wanted to support an antiwar activist for president. Everybody else who was running was for war. So the reason I was supporting him were those two issues. I thought it would be amazing while we were at war with Iraq and Afghanistan to have someone leading the country who said he was against war. By the general election he had started talking about Afghanistan as “the good war,” and I had pulled back. As a matter of fact, when I did go to events, because my husband continued to support him, I confronted him and I said, “There is no such thing as a good war,” and I got in arguments with Obama. I took the opportunity to really get under his skin and make him uncomfortable. Then at the inaugural Code Pink was the only organization—as a matter of fact, Amy Goodman wrote about it—that was out there against Obama. We had our little pink ribbons on our fingers. Remember your promises for peace? And then we did can-cans outside of all the balls. “Yes, we can-can end war.” We already knew that it was going in the wrong direction.

We were in Washington constantly. We have not stopped pushing and having the courage to speak out against him, which has been hard, because people are, like, “Oh, give him a chance.” Why do you give him a chance? You can already see. The writing is already on the wall. And also, watching everybody see it and turn dumb, turn quiet, dumb in the sense of quiet. It was so shocking for people. That place of betrayal happened very early, but it quieted everyone. They didn’t know what to do with it. And it was really complex for them, I think. We call it, like, a blanket over the antiwar movement. Nobody knew what to do with it.

People are, like, “Well, he’s trying.” No, he’s not trying. He’s giving in constantly. There is no leadership there. They continue to give him excuses. And you saw it early on. There is no leadership. He compromises before he’s at the table. The Republicans are even shocked at what they get from him. They thought it was going to be way over here, and he’s past what they thought they were going to get.

He’s giving away the structures of the country that have held it together. He’s giving away the heart, the beauty, the thing that can actually hold us together. And to have that happening at the same time that you have billionaires funding also the unraveling of the social structure of our country, it’s quite shocking. There’s no one that’s upholding the value and importance of the social structures that bind the country together. Talk about insecurity. It’s here in our country. We see it here already. There aren’t the social structures that are needed. It will continue to show up in very ugly ways.

You come out of the Democratic Party. You worked for Governor Jerry Brown of California in his first administration. What about breaking this two-party duopoly, which enables and buttresses the existing structures and the oligarchy?

I would love to. I ran Jerry Brown’s presidential campaign in 1992, which was the campaign around campaign finance reform. It was our only issue, that if we didn’t change campaign finance, that it didn’t matter what you believed in or what you worked for, the corporations would fund the opposite. And that’s what we’ve seen. After I ran that campaign, I left the Democratic Party, because I thought it was part of the problem. I’ve been a Nader supporter, I have been in the Green Party.

There are some interesting things happening right now that will start to reveal themselves. There is a Digital Party. I don’t know that I believe in the structure anymore. I feel like it needs a revolution, not another party. The structure is so corroded that we’re saying words that are meaningless and pretending they exist, like “democracy” and “freedom.” There are all these words that get thrown around, and they don’t exist. I think we need a new politics and a new economy. That’s more interesting for me.

Where are the fissures in the power structure that you see vulnerable that could be cracked into and widened?

First of all, I think that in the same way Obama gives everything away, I think the people give everything away. One of our hopes is that after organizing all these cultural events for people to feel into what they’ve lost, that isn’t just from war, but to feel into what we’re really living inside of and then meet in Freedom Square in Washington and really make power nervous.

Because here’s what hasn’t happened. We haven’t actually made power uncomfortable. We actually make it very comfortable. We allow it to do all of this. We allowed 2000 to happen [Bush v. Gore], then we allowed the war to happen. Really, the people have just continued to allow the madness to happen. Until we turn the heat up and make them uncomfortable and make them feel like there is something out there that’s going to hold them accountable, they will continue.

There is no fissure until the people stand up and say, “No more!” Because right now it’s crack cocaine for the military, for the people in Congress, for the people in the White House. They’re in a delusional madness, and taking us down with them. And until people get in the streets and start telling the truth about what’s happening, and start screaming it and yelling it, there’s nothing that’s going to happen. It’s got to happen in the streets.

Did you see some of that in Wisconsin?

Yes. And look at it. It was impressive. I think Wisconsin is what started to wake up activists again. You can really feel it now. And you can feel it not happening in a corporate way.

There was that period of time where there were organizations happening in Washington. But they weren’t change organizations; they were organizations kind of feeding on money. It’s one of the things that happened around Obama.

He has this Wednesday Morning Club or whatever, which is the 40 biggest progressive organizations that somebody from the White House has breakfast with every Wednesday. In anthropology what you learn is that if a culture doesn’t have a negative feedback loop, it dies. I think that’s part of Obama’s problem. There is no negative feedback loop. He’s off the cliff. It’s that thing that’s supposed to be rising up and saying, “No, you’re taking us off a cliff, and we’re not going to participate anymore,” isn’t happening.

I think the Arab Spring was part of the inspiration to Wisconsin, and I think Wisconsin is waking up the people in a different way. Instead of these corporate democratic structures and giving the power away to yet another stupid, powerful force, it’s people really taking it into their own hands and coming up with ideas and being a citizens’ brigade of some sort that’s self-organized, it’s open-source, it’s inspiring, it’s not controlled at the top. It’s in that way vibrant because it isn’t some structure. It’s coming out of a passion and a set of values.

Can we use the master’s tools, like elections, to dismantle the master’s house?

Not while they’re being stolen by corporations and funded by corporations. Not after Citizens United. It’s going to get worse. Again, if you don’t hold power accountable, which is what the Founding Fathers understood, that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. It’s out of control. So the corporations are just owning the elections and they’re manipulating the masses. And God knows, maybe another election is stolen that we don’t even know about at some level of our voting system that’s corrupt, our courts that are corrupt. State houses. Congress, even with the good intentions of some people is corrupt. We have to come up with a new system, because this one is broken.

But it’s a deeply entrenched pattern: imperialist foreign policy and rapacious capitalism at home.
That’s why I work very hard to create new patterns. Code Pink itself and why we’ve kept Code Pink different from other NGOs, is constantly rethinking itself, it’s constantly in response to what’s happening.

There isn’t something, one thing, that we do. We’re in relationship with the organism, and we’re trying to find ways to disrupt it and to put up a mirror to it so it can see how ugly it is or in humorous ways to be able to show the elephant in the room.

You look at the photos of Code Pink that go around, they’re the ones that say what everybody knows is true but nobody wants to say. That’s what we live inside of. Nobody is telling the truth.

And the truth tellers are put in jail. Bradley Manning. WikiLeaks. What are we afraid of? We’re afraid of the truth, because it’s going to crack the insanity that we live inside of. If the truth gets told, the inmates are going to start rattling the prison bars. We’re living in all forms of prison and pretending that it’s democracy and pretending we’re free and telling stories like they’re jealous of our freedoms. We’re the most frightened people, that live in this abundance. Then we pretend that we’re poor, and then we take that out of the backs of the poor. The insanity that we live inside of and the stories that we tell each other, they’re so false.

Bradley Manning being the soldier who’s allegedly leaked classified documents to WikiLeaks.

Code Pink was very active early finding him in Quantico, going and doing actions there. The guys in Code Pink went naked outside the State Department and outside the Justice Department. And just weeks later he was moved to Leavenworth, which is a bit friendlier and easier place. And he’s not in solitary confinement, held naked at night anymore as he was in Quantico for almost a year.

During the Bush administration, people were righteously indignant about Alberto Gonzales, the attorney general. And, again, with the election of Obama there was thought to be, with Eric Holder, a bright new day in the system of justice. But it turns out that whistleblowers are being prosecuted more aggressively under the Obama Justice Department than under Bush.

There have never been as many whistle blowers in jail in the history of the U.S. than under Obama. We have a whole campaign called Truth Set Free working to also educate—our first job around Bradley has been just to let the public know that he exists and how he’s been treated and to create some kind of understanding of what’s happening and what it means to Americans. That somebody who tells us the truth, who exposes what we’re doing is being treated this way is barbaric. And, question: Why are we so afraid of the truth, and why do people think the only way the world works is to tell each other lies? Where has that gotten us?

A lot of what we’ve been doing at Code Pink is around our war criminals campaign. The first book that came out was Karl Rove’s, and I disrupted his first two book events. He had to totally transform his book tour. He could no longer speak to audiences. They were full of security. He really was afraid of us. Because they got off scot-free.

We have a card deck that we have of 52 war criminals out there walking around, doing jobs, being seen as experts. John Yoo, we are outside of his house every day, we disrupt his classroom. Judge Bybee, whenever he sits, there’s a Code Pinker that disrupts the courtroom.

These are the two former Bush Justice Department officials who okayed torture.

They created the whole excuse for the torture that occurred under the Bush administration. So now we have Cheney’s book about to come out. And we’re always trying to find ways to engage people, to stay engaged, to stay activists. If we aren’t activists as citizens, this is what we get: We get this devastating place that we are. So we’re always trying to find ways that we can disturb power. If we can’t put them in jail, at least we can tell them someone’s watching and that we know they’re war criminals. With all the books—even Bush had to cancel his whole book tour because of us.

We have bookmarks that you can print out on your printer. And you put them in the book and you move the book to the crime section. And when somebody buys the book, inside it is that this person who wrote the book is a war criminal and what they did.

So we find every way we can to educate the public and to keep power nervous.

What accounts for the Obama Justice Department being so aggressive in prosecuting whistleblowers?

What’s interesting is it didn’t start out as bad as it’s becoming, and it becomes worse, I think, by the week. I am also on the board of Drug Policy Alliance. And the Obama administration started out understanding that issue, and now it’s constantly gotten worse. We confront Eric Holder all the time.

What does he say?

On Bradley Manning, we ask him question after question. He won’t talk. He turns the other way and won’t answer our questions.

The multiple uprisings in the Arab Middle East were quite startling, and how the great have fallen. I’m reminded of Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias,” about the pharaoh Ramses the Great. There was Mubarak and his sons in the dock. So if Egypt can get its criminals at least in court, that might be an inspiration to people here.

I think it has been.

That’s what I was saying earlier. I think the Arab Spring has started to wake people up from the sleep they went into from the betrayal they felt from Obama and reminded them of the power of their voice and of being engaged and their own responsibility. That really we’re in agreement with what’s happening by not getting up and finding a way to change it.

It’s more complicated in the U.S., because we don’t have a dictator that we can dethrone. It’s a whole system that is corrupt, and the whole system isn’t holding anyone accountable. There is a collusion between everyone when they get into power that we’re not going to hold each other accountable so we can all get away with something. If we don’t prosecute these war criminals, what’s the next horrible thing they can do?

As anyone knows, if you’re not held accountable, you think you can get away with it and it becomes okay. It just becomes like you’re not awakened from whatever delusion you’re in that allows you to do horrible things. Because I think that it’s a delusional place that you’re in. And if somebody doesn’t say, “No, you can’t do that,” you will just keep doing
worse.

In terms of the Arab Middle East, what has been the role of women in these multiple revolts?

Women have been amazing. Look at just in Egypt. That woman who did the YouTube that said “Don’t leave the square.” One of the great feminists is Nawal El Saadawi. This is an example of how all our work is important every day. She has been doing feminist work in Egypt for years, sometimes getting kicked out of the country, sometimes being put in jail. But that seeding of the revolutionary spirit of the feminine and seeding these young women: We do need to use our voice, we do need to stand up, we do need to work together.

Esra’a Al Shafei is a terrific Bahraini woman who has the Middle East youth websites. She has about 20 of them. She’s brilliant, and on no money has created tons of activism in Bahrain and around the Middle East. What she does is organize artists and activists to create videos to educate and inspire and activate the youth community in the Middle East.

One of Code Pink’s campaigns involves Ahava. You call it “Stolen Beauty: Expose the Ugly Secrets from the Dead Sea.” What is the ugly secret of this Israeli beauty products company?

We’ve been going to Gaza for two years, since the Israeli invasion. And we’ve taken almost 500 people to see what happened, because the story wasn’t getting out. We’ve been a group that’s been able to get in. And what we’ve been trying do is, like, how do we get peace in the Middle East? We want to hear from the Palestinians, how can we help them, how can we be of service here. They said, You could be of service by joining our Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement.

We had to find, how would we join that. We found this company, Ahava, where the product is created in the occupied territories on the Dead Sea, which is a violation of international law. So it’s a very clear violation, because you’re not allowed to steal the resources of an occupied country, or an occupied territory, because the Palestine is not a country. So this company Ahava violates the law. And ahava means love in Hebrew. We say there is nothing loving about occupation. So it’s stolen beauty: they’re stealing the beauty of this community. So it becomes a very easy way to identify the problem. It’s not like we think we’ll ever close down Ahava. But by highlighting what Ahava is doing in communities, especially Jewish communities, you let the argument start to happen and the conversation start to happen, so that it
actually educates everyone in that community about what’s happening. Because they’re not.

We found that out when we took people to Gaza. The people who were Jewish that we took to Gaza came back and they couldn’t talk for a month. They felt so betrayed. They couldn’t quite grapple with all the lies that they had been fed. And to see what it is to be Jewish, this goes against everything they believe in. And it’s not a story that’s told.

It’s not only our Stolen Beauty campaign but our Move Over, AIPAC campaign. Every year, when AIPAC has their annual convention in Washington, we’re out there challenging what AIPAC is doing.

Have you noticed a change in the country, not in official Washington, in terms of talking about Israel?
Oh, yes. First of all, when you do something at the edge, it’s very uncomfortable. So when we first started on this issue, it was very uncomfortable for people. Some didn’t want to go there, they didn’t want to talk about it, and it frightened them. And what I found is that much more of the conversation can happen, because all these people that went to Gaza, they came back and did reports to their synagogues, they gave talks in their communities, they got on the radio, they told their stories. It started to kind of loosen up the conversation. And I think by having J Street, that’s also changed the conversation. More than 50% of American Jews don’t agree with AIPAC, but it was the only voice out there. So there are many American Jews that feel that there’s somebody who is more aligned with their values.

We’re a little further over than J Street, but activism is all about continuing to move the story over and moving the person closest to you. So it’s a movement. And definitely in many communities you can see that you can talk about the issues in the Middle East much easier.

What about the state of patriarchy and misogyny? How has that evolved since the early days of the women’s movement?

It’s still alive and well. But the women’s movement has—I’m so excited by women right now, not just in America but globally. Women really are coming into their own. We’re standing on the shoulders of 40 years of hard work and messy work. And it’s really coming to the place of the deep understanding of where it’s not just to become a better patriarch when you get to leadership positions. It’s really women standing on their own power and their own voice and supporting each other. I’m quite excited by it.

But that doesn’t meant the patriarchy isn’t alive and well, and we’re fully functioning under that structure. I’m the chair of the Women’s Media Center. It was started by Gloria Steinem and Jane Fonda and Robin Morgan to make the female half of the population visible. And why I say that is that 3% of the media that we get, the decision making is by a woman. So that means 97% of media is created by men. And look at the faces. Since we started six years ago, you’ve seen the faces change. As a matter of fact, Rachel Maddow credits us with getting her her job.

We just ran a campaign against Ed Schultz, when he called Laura Ingraham a “slut,” which was a great opportunity for him to get up and do a beautiful apology. If you ever want to see something where he articulates the issue in his apology and what’s wrong with degrading women and why that made him embarrassed in front of his wife and his children. It really was an opportunity to say, look at what we’re doing and what that means to women.
Then we had a meeting with MSNBC, and we were able to take them and show them, you don’t have enough women, and it’s not okay to have one token woman. So the next week Obama did his first press conference in a long time, and they had three women on Ed Schultz’s show responding instead of three men, which it usually is.

So there is a lot of work to be done, but globally women are doing amazing things and being inspired and activated and supported. I think the problem with the women’s movement still is it’s a little too northern, white, and rich. And where the most exciting things are happening are more the low-resourced, southern. It’s a constant work to shift that balance. But I really feel like right now we have so much more to stand on and so much more leadership that’s been able to really ground itself and mentor other women.

One of the hard-earned victories was reproductive rights. That is under severe attack. It is being constantly constrained as state after state passes new legislation limiting it.

Another example of where Obama has been watching that dynamic with women’s groups, the same as with Congress voting for war. When the issue came up in the health care fight, the Democrats were going to throw abortion funding under the bus to get the votes. Reproductive rights was, like, a taboo. This was something you never touched. You didn’t get elected, it had to be on your platform. But they were willing to throw this under the bus. And because the heads of NOW and Planned Parenthood, didn’t want to lose their seat at the table at the White House, they didn’t quite fight that one hard enough.

This is the thing. If we don’t fight, and constantly fight, our rights will be taken away. Something happened when

Obama got elected, and the fight left a lot of people. I don’t know why. I said, “Why are we not screaming in the streets?” And their attitude was, “Well, because, you know, we don’t want to lose those invitations to the White House.”
The seduction of access.

Yes. I was running the Women’s Media Center, and I said, “Look, I’m going to do something, then.” And I started something called Not Under the Bus so that there was at least some activism happening that created kind of a cover for all the other women’s organizations.

But too many organizations that represent progressive values have become enamored with power. It happened to the Democratic Party a long time ago, and now it’s happening to the progressive organizations. What you watch is that we are responsible, the progressive movement, for what’s happening, because we haven’t stood up, we haven’t fought.

One of the things I say to Code Pink activists is, you have to be willing to give up as much as those who go to war are willing to give up to create peace. A lot of people aren’t willing to give up their safe and happy lives. These things that we have were hard-earned.

There was just an amazing documentary made about the Freedom Riders. I want everybody to see that, because they were willing to give up their lives for what we are willing to give up. It’s sad, it’s tragic. But until we understand that this stuff is real, until it really hits home—and it’s hitting home to everybody. Ten million people had their homes foreclosed on, the unemployment rate that we have, and for youth, it’s 28% for youths. That’s a crime.

What is that to come into? And that we’re allowing that to happen and that we’re not raising our voices, that we’re not in the streets fighting? I want to see everybody in the streets on October 6.

What’s happening on October 6?

That’s the tenth anniversary of the Afghanistan war. We want to all gather in Freedom Square in Washington, D.C. But I want you to find a freedom square in your city and say, “No, I’ve had enough.” That they’re eroding what’s beautiful and what’s going to hold our culture together, and that we need to come up with new solutions, be creating them.

I know wonderful people are creating—there are Businesses Allied for Local Economies and there are all kinds of things that have been sprouting up. If we really exposed all these other alternatives that are life-sustaining and life-giving and life-enhancing. They are what we really care about. They’re what we all really care about—Democrat, Republican, Independent, Iraqi, Afghan, Egyptian, Bahraini. We want to live life. We want to be related to each other. We want to raise our children. We want to be able to obtain the potential that is our life.

And that’s just being eroded away by us not being engaged as citizens and by us thinking that power is what we want, when really what we want is just to live a safe and happy life where everyone is respected and everyone has equal opportunity.

How do you talk to those who are diametrically opposite you in terms of the political spectrum? What approach do you find effective?

It would depend on what the situation is. I’ll tell you, I’m just coming back from a retreat here in the mountains of Colorado. And when the gathering started, there was a very right-wing Republican in the room, and everybody couldn’t wait to see what it was going to look like when Jodie and this guy got together. And actually, by the end we were friends, because we respected each other and we understand exactly what I just said to you, that we value life and being able to live a beautiful life. And he was able, actually, to hear everything I had to say and why I do the work I do. And he thought I was going to be a scary monster person, like on Glenn Beck’s blackboard, but he actually listened and he kind of liked what I had to say.

Usually what I try to do is be as disarming as possible, to really be in relationship with them and listen to them and listen to why they believe what they do, and then from that place try to have a conversation.

But if I’m in a hearing in Congress, I take the opportunity to tell the truth and to say the elephant in the room or the thing that nobody is willing to say to them because they’re powerful. I think that’s the advantage that we have as Code Pink, that we have no access to power and we have no desire to have access to power. Lots of people run inside-outside games. And I don’t know that you can. Because if you’re trying to play an inside game, having that power and that access is something that you will compromise to get. We’re really just an outside game.

The funny thing about that is in being an outside game, members of Congress call us and tell us where a weak link is or where there is an opening. When Netanyahu was speaking to Congress, a congressperson called and gave us their ticket so that they could make sure there was a Code Pink disruption. Because they get the value that they’re living inside of a hall of mirrors, and they really appreciate when we can come in and disrupt that hall of mirrors. So it’s really funny that we’re the outside organization, with some members of Congress really valuing our work.

One of the outstanding international issues is Kashmir. A rebellion began there in 1989. Seventy thousand people have been killed, 8,000 have disappeared. There is a huge Indian army presence there. It’s one of the most densely occupied areas on Earth, with something like 700,000 Indian security forces. Does Code Pink have a position on Kashmir?

We don’t have a position on Kashmir. I actually just met a woman from there at the Nobel women’s Peace Prize winners conference. She told us the horrible story. We tend to have positions on things that the U.S. government can affect. So, yes, it’s horrible and a disaster. But can we do anything about it but make a statement? We don’t have a statement on the website. I know what the statement would be. But because there’s so much happening, and you can only make something happen if you really focus, we tend to focus on what we can do to affect the U.S. government and what it’s doing in the world.

Then how about Pakistan, which has been receiving billions of dollars in U.S. aid?

We’ve definitely been out there fighting against that and against the drone attacks there. So, yes, in Pakistan we have. And we’ve been trying to stop the money that’s going to Israel also.

What actions have given you the most satisfaction and have yielded concrete results?

I think the recent winning of that resolution with the mayors was beyond our expectations. I haven’t felt that happy and satisfied in a really long time. Even though it didn’t have the result that I would hope, which would be Obama would do something really courageous and pull the troops home from Afghanistan, I loved how many people it affected. How many city council members stood up. How many people participated locally, because you have to make change locally and engage people in that way. I was happy about that.

There are so many things. Taking people to Gaza is huge, where I can really see the effects of it. That just makes me want to cry I know what it was like before we started. Alice Walker wrote a book out of it, Overcoming Speechlessness. I’ve seen how it’s changed those people’s lives. And just working inside a complexity like that and being willing to take people into a complex place and show what it is and have them come back and tell stories and have their community change, that’s huge.

I think another one of my favorite things is Mother’s Day. Because Mother’s Day, the call from Julia Ward Howe was for women to come together and end war. Every Mother’s Day we are 24 hours outside of the White House. One of my favorite things we did was, for the month leading up to it, we had women and men around the world send us 5-by-5 knitted squares of green and pink. Because war is not green, it’s one of our favorite colors. And we for 24 hours sewed them together outside the White House, listening to women from war zones tell us their stories. When we finished, it read, “We will not raise our children to kill another mother’s child.” It spanned the fence in front of the White House.

You’re clearly energized by your activism, you’re inspired by it, and you inspire others. But a lot of people are facing dire economic times: they’ve lost their homes, their savings, their jobs, and have, as a result of watching the shenanigans in Washington, become deeply cynical and apathetic. How do you overcome those things?

By giving them a container to feel powerful. They’re feeling powerless, so to find a way that they can find their own power again. That was Wisconsin for a lot of people, not only those engaged in it but those not engaged in it. With Code Pink in this issue, it’s been understanding that we partner with a lot of organizations. Our Bring Our War Dollars Home campaign and organizing locally and then taking it to the mayors was lot of that, and having a city council pass a resolution, because it was about bringing the money home to their community, it was about getting engaged in saying, “I have a voice, I can use it.”

I go around and speak. And having been a maid, it’s an issue I work a lot on in L.A. I work with maids trying to get them a living wage. So I use the opportunity to go and speak to them and remind them that the power is within them and that being in a community, finding a community to be engaged with is crucial. It’s not going to help them to fall down into the blackness. That the only way that they can actually make change is to pick something that they can do, something small, something local, something immediate, something that will change their lives and to get engaged in it.

The wonderful thing is that once they start to do that, they come up with tons of ideas. They can actually come up with ideas that are needed in their community. Then they feel useful and they feel hopeful. There’s one guy I met who’s found more meaning in his life from doing that than he had from the job that he lost and the house that he lost.

Solidarity is a big part of it.

It really is. We also try to help create those opportunities for people. I think a lot of what organizing is is keeping people together, creating that community. Because you don’t know when you’re going to need the community. That’s what I sense this Ten Years and Counting will do. Asking the community the question of what has this 10 years cost you. Having them feel that. And who knows what will come out of that? What’s beautiful is the experience of creating art together, the experience of singing together or dancing together or creating theater together. That’s enriching. It gives you something juicy back. And then out of that who knows what happens?

But they win if the devastation that they created turns us all into blackness. That’s what they want. They want everybody to fall asleep and be depressed and not be educated. And they win.

How do you respond to criticisms of Code Pink tactics at public events particularly in Congress where you shout slogans and unfurl banners and are hauled off as being mere publicity stunts? Is there anything substantive after the soundbite or photo, if you even get one?

Not sure why people would think putting ourselves on the line is for publicity. But the photos that do circulate are because we have stood in the face of power and said what everyone knows and no one says. Desiree Fairooz’s red hands around Condi Rice’s face while saying you have the blood of the Iraq children on your hands. Or the images that are used in hearings where our signs say what isn’t being said in the hearings. They are appreciated by members of Congress, the media and the public. They are effective at making people pay attention, or not think they are getting away with everything. It seems most people will allow power to get away with anything these days and Code Pink is in the halls of Congress at least reminding them some of us are watching.

These actions are so successful that many other groups have come to us for support and training, including Dan Choi who was successful in ending Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.

The Internet is full of vitriolic attacks against you. Have you been threatened?

Yes, I have. I report all threats. But women around the world take far greater risks than I in fighting for peace and justice. To protect myself I stay visible and engaged.

The worst thing that happened to me was when one soldier’s mother claimed that I had told her that her son deserved to die in Iraq. I’ve lost a child and could never say such a thing. It turns out I wasn’t where she was, but the reporter just ran what she said without even checking with me.

We assume sometimes when they get very vitriolic that we must be getting more effective than they are comfortable with. They hated us when we got Bush and Rove to have to change their book tours.

Do you think if Code Pink were mostly a male organization, the nature of the venom directed toward you and the group would be different?

The men of Code Pink do not get attacked like the women. Most of the remarks are sexist and attempt to denigrate us because we are women.

I hate to say it but if Code Pink were a male organization, it would have been taken far more seriously. Left and right aren’t quite sure what to do with us. I think because we have no attachment to power we confuse them both. We are interested in being effective and ending war and bringing the money home to our communities. Most of the organizations they are dealing with want power. We want to use our power as creatively and effectively as we can. Sometimes we cross the line and miss, but we feel it is more important to try than to play it safe.

(Due to time constraints some portions of the interview were not included in the national broadcast. Those portions are included in this transcript.)

For information about obtaining CDs, MP3s, or transcripts of this or other programs, please contact:
David Barsamian
Alternative Radio
P.O. Box 551
Boulder, CO 80306-0551
(800) 444-1977
info@alternativeradio.org
www.alternativeradio.org
©2010

Obama abuse

Sun, 25 Sep 2011 16:25:20 GMT

by Fred Nagel, Rhinebeck, NY
in a letter to the Woodstock Times
September 22, 2011

Even for a politician who has made his career out of serving the rich and well connected, these must seem like dismal times. Back in Chicago, all Obama had to do was to obey the corrupt Democratic machine. And he did it well, running against progressive black candidates for the city council. Once elected, he simply followed what the monied interests told him to do, despite his rhetorical flourishes about peace and social justice.

That must seem like long ago. Now as president, Obama has come to be the whipping boy of just about every powerful interest in the country. Look at the beating he took from the Israel lobby, despite the fact that he has consistently promoted the interests of right-wing Zionists over America’s need to bring peace to the Middle East.

The same has been true of the huge corporate behemoths. Obama has sold his soul for big oil’s right to drill without worrying about the environment. He has given away his health “reform” to the big insurance and pharmaceutical companies. He has devastated the rights of working people, even cut Social Security and Medicare, all to give more tax cuts to the corporations and the very rich who own them. Yet, all these elites can do is badmouth him, and make him grovel even more.

Cowardly sellouts have never gotten much respect, no matter which side they secretly worked for. Can all this abuse and disdain be worth the millions he will make after he is president?

The gamble of Abu Mazen (أَبُو مَازِن‎)

Sat, 24 Sep 2011 03:26:45 GMT

by Uri Avnery,
September 24, 2011
following President Obama’s speech before the UN, giving his reasons for the US not supporting Palestine

First this (where President Obama was more right wing than most Israelis [see this]) and then:

A WONDERFUL SPEECH. A beautiful speech.

The language expressive and elegant. The arguments clear and convincing. The delivery flawless.

A work of art. The art of hypocrisy. Almost every statement in the passage concerning the Israeli-Palestinian issue was a lie. A blatant lie: the speaker knew it was a lie, and so did the audience.

It was Obama at his best, Obama at his worst.

Being a moral person, he must have felt the urge to vomit. Being a pragmatic person, he knew that he had to do it, if he wanted to be re-elected.

In essence, he sold the fundamental national interests of the United States of America for the chance of a second term.

Not very nice, but that’s politics, OK

IT MAY be superfluous–almost insulting to the reader–to point out the mendacious details of this rhetorical edifice.

Obama treated the two sides as if they were equal in strength–Israelis and Palestinians, Palestinians and Israelis.

But of the two, it is the Israelis–only they–who suffer and have suffered. Persecution. Exile. Holocaust. An Israeli child threatened by rockets. Surrounded by the hatred of Arab children. So sad.

No Occupation. No settlements. No June 1967 borders. No Naqba. No Palestinian children killed or frightened. It’s the straight right-wing Israeli propaganda line, pure and simple–the terminology, the historical narrative, the argumentation. The music.

The Palestinians, of course, should have a state of their own. Sure, sure. But they must not be pushy. They must not embarrass the US. They must not come to the UN. They must sit with the Israelis, like reasonable people, and work it out with them. The reasonable sheep must sit down with the reasonable wolf and decide what to have for dinner. Foreigners should not interfere.

Obama gave full service. A lady who provides this kind of service generally gets paid in advance. Obama got paid immediately afterwards, within the hour. Netanyahu sat down with him in front of the cameras and gave him enough quotable professions of love and gratitude to last for several election campaigns.

THE TRAGIC hero of this affair is Mahmoud Abbas. A tragic hero, but a hero nonetheless.

Many people may be surprised by this sudden emergence of Abbas as a daring player for high stakes, ready to confront the mighty US.

If Ariel Sharon were to wake up for a moment from his years-long coma, he would faint with amazement. It was he who called Mahmoud Abbas “a plucked chicken.”

Yet for the last few days, Abbas was the center of global attention. World leaders conferred about how to handle him, senior diplomats were eager to convince him of this or that course of action, commentators were guessing what he would do next. His speech before the UN General Assembly was treated as an event of consequence.

Not bad for a chicken, even for one with a full set of feathers.

His emergence as a leader on the world stage is somewhat reminiscent of Anwar Sadat.

When Gamal Abd-al-Nasser unexpectedly died at the age of 52 in 1970 and his official deputy, Sadat, assumed his mantle, all political experts shrugged.

Sadat? Who the hell is that? He was considered a nonentity, an eternal No. 2, one of the least important members of the group of “free officers” that was ruling Egypt.

In Egypt, a land of jokes and jokers, witticisms about him abounded. One concerned the prominent brown mark on his forehead. The official version was that it was the result of much praying, hitting the ground with his forehead. But the real reason, it was told, was that at meetings, after everyone else had spoken, Sadat would get up and try to say something. Nasser would good-naturedly put his finger to his forehead, push him gently down and say: “Sit, Anwar!”

To the utter amazement of the experts–and especially the Israeli ones–this “nonentity” took a huge gamble by starting the 1973 October War, and proceeded to do something unprecedented in history: going to the capital of an enemy country still officially in a state of war and making peace.

Abbas’s status under Yasser Arafat was not unlike Sadat’s under Nasser. However, Arafat never appointed a deputy. Abbas was one of a group of four or five likely successors. The heir would surely have been Abu Jihad, had he not been killed by Israeli commandoes in front of his wife and children. Another likely candidate, Abu Iyad, was killed by Palestinian terrorists. Abu Mazen ( أَبُو مَازِن‎, Abbas) was in a way the choice by default.

Such politicians, emerging suddenly from under the shadow of a great leader, generally fall into one of two categories: the eternal frustrated No. 2 or the surprising new leader.

The Bible gives us examples of both kinds. The first was Rehoboam, the son and heir of the great King Solomon, who told his people: “My father chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions.” The other kind was represented by Joshua, the heir of Moses. He was no second Moses, but according to the story a great conqueror in his own right.

Modern history tells the sad story of Anthony Eden, the long-suffering No. 2 of Winston Churchill, who commanded little respect. (Mussolini called him, after their first meeting, “a well-tailored idiot.”). Upon assuming power, he tried desperately to equal Churchill and soon embroiled Britain in the 1956 Suez disaster. To the second category belonged Harry Truman, the nobody who succeeded the great Franklin Delano Roosevelt and surprised everybody as a resolute leader.

Abbas looked like belonging to the first kind. Now, suddenly, he is revealed as belonging to the second. The world is treating him with newfound respect. Nearing the end of his career, he made the big gamble.

BUT WAS it wise? Courageous, yes. Daring, yes. But wise?

My answer is: Yes, it was.

Abbas has placed the quest for Palestinian freedom squarely on the international table. For more than a week, Palestine has been the center of international attention. Scores of international statesmen and -women, including the leader of the world’s only superpower, have been busy with Palestine.

For a national movement, that is of the utmost importance. Cynics may ask: “So what did they gain from it?” But cynics are fools. A liberation movement gains from the very fact that the world pays attention, that the media grapple with the problem, that people of conscience all over the world are aroused. It strengthens morale at home and brings the struggle a step nearer its goal.

Oppression shuns the limelight. Occupation, settlements, ethnic cleansing thrive in the shadows. It is the oppressed who need the light of day. Abbas’s move provided it, at least for the time being.

BARACK OBAMA’s miserable performance was a nail in the coffin of America’s status as a superpower. In a way, it was a crime against the United States.

The Arab Spring may have been a last chance for the US to recover its standing in the Middle East. After some hesitation, Obama realized that. He called on Mubarak to go, helped the Libyans against their tyrant, made some noises about Bashar al-Assad. He knows that he has to regain the respect of the Arab masses if he wants to recover some stature in the region, and by extension throughout the world.

Now he has blown it, perhaps forever. No self-respecting Arab will forgive him for plunging his knife into the back of the helpless Palestinians. All the credit the US has tried to gain in the last months in the Arab and the wider Muslim world has been blown away with one puff.

All for reelection.

IT WAS also a crime against Israel.

Israel needs peace. Israel needs to live side by side with the Palestinian people, within the Arab world. Israel cannot rely forever on the unconditional support of the declining United States.

Obama knows this full well. He knows what is good for Israel, even if Netanyahu doesn’t. Yet he has handed the keys of the car to the drunken driver.

The State of Palestine will come into being. This week it was already clear that this is unavoidable. Obama will be forgotten, as will Netanyahu, Lieberman and the whole bunch.

Mahmoud Abbas–Abu Mazen ( أَبُو مَازِن‎ ), as the Palestinians call him–will be remembered. The “plucked chicken” is soaring into the sky.

The future of journalism and democracy

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 20:03:56 GMT

by Robert McChesney,
speech delivered in Boston, MA,
7 April 2011,
available from Alternative Radio

Robert McChesney is co-founder of the Free Press, a non-profit organization working to increase public participation in media policy debates and a creator of the National Media Reform Conference (www.freepress.net). He is professor of communications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He’s the author of numerous books including Rich Media, Poor Democracy, The Political Economy of Media, and co-author with John Nichols of The Death and Life of American Journalism.

We’re in an extraordinarily deep crisis in journalism, an existential crisis which very much threatens the ability of our governing system to work at all effectively. As flawed as it is, this will look like a golden age in 10 years, the way we’re going right now.

There is a study that came out about a year ago that really captured what’s going on with American news media. Because what we’re seeing right now is the corporate news media for the most part have decided they can’t make money doing journalism. They’re jumping ship. That’s what’s taking place. I’ll give you a study that explains what’s going on, why we’re seeing the end of journalism as we know it in this country. The Pew Center, which is a mainstream group funded by the Pew Foundation, the Pew family, does a lot of research on journalism in the U.S. They did a major study of Baltimore, Maryland in the fall of 2009. For one week they went into Baltimore and said, “We want to see what the news ecology is in this major American city,” that’s pretty much representative of a major American city. It’s blue-collar, it’s got universities, it’s got the standard mix of what you would expect from a city of a million, million and a half people. They wanted to look at all the news for a week and ask, Where is the news coming from and who is doing it? And how much is the Internet filling the gap? They looked at original news stories, not just sort of repeating what someone else did but where someone actually did something original in journalism.

They found out, to a lot of people’s surprise, that 96% of the original news stories in Baltimore, in that week of 2009 came from old media. New media only produced 4%. I think people were surprised that new media weren’t doing much more. Although they shouldn’t necessarily have been surprised. But before you get out the champagne corks at the Baltimore Sun newspaper, the other information in the study was rather depressing. The first thing that the Pew Center found out was—because they have been doing this every five years for the last 25 years in Baltimore, is that there were 30% fewer original news stories in 2009, than there had been in 2001. A 30% drop in a decade in original news stories. And, more striking, there had been a 73% decline in the number of original news stories in Baltimore from 1991 to 2009.

Pretty much this is what John Nichols and I have found in our research for our book. We’ve probably gone to 20 cities in the last year, major cities, including Boston a year ago. We usually go to major journalism schools or newspapers, to the newsrooms, in every city. And pretty much everywhere we go the reporters or the professors say there has been about a 50% decline in the number of working reporters here from, say, the mid- to late 1980s. There is about half as many as there used to be. That’s pretty much standard everywhere we’ve gone. It varies in some cities, but that’s pretty much it. We’re seeing a sharp drop-off in reporters in coverage. State houses have far fewer reporters covering them than ever before. County governments are barely covered at all anymore. There are whole branches of governance in this country that have strong links to private commercial interests. They’re just uncovered now completely.

That’s the good news. It gets worse. What else did the Pew Center study find out? They wanted to look at the source of a news story. Where does the news come from? It’s critical in media, one of the first things you learn in media education and media literacy when you see a news story is, why is that story in the paper? Why are they taking that perspective? What are the sources for the story? Why does that story exist? What the Pew Center did was they looked at all the original news stories, and it found out that 86% of the original news stories came either from a press release or came from an official source saying something that was reported. That was an original news story: “The Mayor said today” or “The Governor said today.” What the Pew Center found out was of those 86% of stories, in the vast majority of them there was no reporting at all. They simply repeated what a press release said, with no intervention, no calling to check the facts. Just, Here’s the press release, and that’s our original news story. Only 14% of the stories were done by reporters going out and making a story, saying, “I’m going to cover this and find out what happened and report it.” Eighty-six percent PR, official sources; 14% actual reporting.

To put this in context, a generation ago there was a lot of PR information and official sources in our news media. That’s not a new thing. But the ratio was much more like 40-60 or 50-50, not 86-14. That’s an enormous difference. And of that 40% or 50% of the stories that were based on public relations, press releases, and the like, there actually was reporting done. They would call up and check out the facts, they would get another opinion on it. They just wouldn’t run verbatim the press release.

There is a lot of data to support this. Some of the research we did for our book was we wanted to look at the number of PR people there are in America working, getting paid to do public relations compared to the number of working journalists. We think that’s sort of an interesting ratio. The number of people trying to doctor the news surreptitiously so you think it’s a legitimate news story but you don’t know that they’ve actually planted it versus the number of people that are supposed to cover the news out in the open so you know what’s going on. In 1960 that ratio was .75, three-quarters of one PR person for every one working journalist. .75 to 1, 1960. In 1980 the ratio was two PR people for every one working journalist. So it went from .75 to 2 in 20 years. Today, the ratio is four PR people for every working journalist, a 4- to-1 ratio. And at current rates it’s going to be 6-to-1 in two years, with the growth of PR and the decline of working journalists.

In this environment, what else could you expect but nothing but propaganda? And that’s what we have. That’s where we’re at and that’s where we’re looking for journalism. The immediate question when you hear that is, what caused that? Why do we have this deplorable situation? Why is it no longer profitable for corporate and commercial news media to do journalism? Why are they jumping ship? Why are they lowering the number of workers and no longer taking it seriously?

The conventional wisdom says, Oh, the Internet is responsible. The Internet is taking away advertising, the Internet is taking away young people, and everybody has gone online now, so the traditional newspapers, radio and TV news no longer have the commercial support they’re used to, and as a result they can’t make any money. The problem with that argument is that it doesn’t account for the fact that a lion’s share of this began long before Google ever existed, began long before Yahoo or Facebook or Twitter. The peak of employment for journalists in this country was in the mid- to late 1980s on a per-capita basis. It’s been falling since then. Anyone who has studied news media in the 1990s knows, even though those companies were making record profits throughout that decade, they were closing down bureaus, they were laying off reporters. They were doing whatever they could to make as much money in the here and now, and laying off reporters was one of the key ways. So what the Internet really did is it aggravated a situation that was already taking place.

A key factor that’s been overlooked is what we saw starting in the 1970s, an enormous amount of concentration in media ownership. You have fewer and fewer companies with much less competition. In these huge empires, when you have less competition, the first thing you do is cut off workers—that’s the red ink to you—and you still keep the same amount of black ink. So they were gutting the system long before Google came along. But however you look at it, the system is now at a point of teetering on total collapse, and it’s already collapsed a good bit of the way.

Ironically, the same people who have blamed the Internet for destroying journalism as we know it say that the Internet will also solve the problem for us. It’s the cause and the solution simultaneously. All we have to do is sit back, relax, and people will come up with new ways to find a way to support themselves doing journalism online. The evidence is now in on that idea. It’s not happening. That one’s not going to happen, not at all. In fact, we might be further from shore today than we were a year ago. We’re not getting closer to that port; we’re getting farther from that port. In fact, what we’re finding is, as traditional news media go under and traditional media stop having resources, then they fire their digital reporters, too, because they are being bankrolled by the traditional media.

Ironically, on the Internet what happens is that because the geographical issues are eliminated—there are no regional newspapers on the Internet, geography means nothing—there is no middle class, there is no mid-size media. So media or political Web sites on the Internet are more concentrated than old media. There are fewer actual sites being used than in old, traditional newspapers. That’s true of the blogosphere as well. So it isn’t producing the effect we were told. Having the right to open a Web site and go on there and jump up and down and, “Hey, look at me,” does not mean anything if no one knows you exist. If you’re not on the first page of a Google search, you don’t exist. Maybe on the second page you’re in the suburbs, but if you’re past page 2, you don’t exist. Most of those Web sites aren’t even on the first 10 pages of a Google search. That’s the problem they face. That’s why that’s not solving the problem.

At this point Americans—and I apologize to our Canadian friends, this is a quasi-ethnocentric talk I’m giving—throw their hands in the air and say, “Well, I guess it’s hopeless. If corporations can’t make money doing journalism, I guess we can’t have journalism. We’ll just have to throw in the towel and call up Queen Elizabeth and ask her if she’s got any relatives who want to take over our country, since we can’t have democracy anymore since we don’t have any journalism. That’s really where we’re left. We have this fantasy that journalism is a business, pure and simple, and if you can’t make money at it, then you can’t have it. That’s the way it’s got to be, that’s what our Founders wanted.

In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Instead, what we should understand and the message that I would bring to you tonight and you should take from this talk is that the crisis in journalism, the collapse of journalism in the U.S. is a very solvable problem. It’s a very easy problem to solve. We just have to open our eyes to our own history and to the experience of other democratic nations in the world. Let me explain and make it a little concrete. What we have to understand is journalism is not a commercial undertaking. Journalism should be understood as a public good. What I mean by public good is it’s something society desperately needs that the market can’t produce in sufficient quality or quantity.

The classic examples of public goods that are used in economics textbooks are things like defense spending, military spending. We figured out a long time ago, you have governments handle all national defense. That’s the only way it works. Everyone’s covered, everyone pays for it. It’s not a marketable enterprise. If you leave it to markets, you don’t have a country.

The same thing with public education. If you leave public education to the market—which this might be a test in our new Dickens era we’re entering, we might find out the answer to this—you will probably have a system where a significant percent of the population will not be educated at all because there is no money to be made in educating working-class kids or poor kids. It’s a public good. That was one of the great revolutions in this country in the 19th century, was understanding education is a public good.

Basic research is a public good. Corporations will be glad to do research to get you from the one-yard line into the end zone, where they can cash in some chips, but they have no incentive at all to get you from the 50-yard line to the 1-yard line. That’s why basic research is done at public universities and you only do it through public support. Corporations will never support it. If we didn’t have basic research as a public good, we wouldn’t have things like the Internet. The Internet is a result of 40 years of public-good expenditure by the government. AT&T was offered the Internet in the mid-1970s, the story goes. The government said, “We’re tired of paying for this darned thing. You guys to want take it?” AT&T studied it and said, “We can’t make any money off it. You keep it.” That’s the story from the 1970s. So the Internet is a result of basic research as a public good. Public good is a very important concept, and journalism should be understood, first and foremost, as a public good.

Another reason you should understand journalism is a public good—this is a very crucial point—is that public goods are something that you can’t as a citizen use the market to express your desire for. It’s not something that as a citizen I can say, “I want this. I’m going to vote in the marketplace by buying something so I can get it.” Here’s an example I would give. I promise you, I make a holy vow that I will never go to a national park again in my life. If I do, it will be purely by accident. I have no intention of ever going to one again. The reason simply is I’ve been to several, I like them, they’re great, but I’m 58 years old, and in my remaining years, when I have some my free time, there is other stuff I would rather do than go sit in a national park. It’s just not going to do it for me. According to traditional economic calculus, the people going through their Milton Friedman textbook, they would say, “Well, Bob McChesney clearly doesn’t like national parks. He’s not visiting them, he’s not going to them. He wants to pave them over, sell them off, turn them into parking lots, just lower his taxes. That’s what Bob McChesney wants.” My market behavior says that. In fact, it’s the exact opposite. I’m willing to pay more taxes to have national parks, because I understand having national parks is a good thing, it’s a very healthy thing. I’m willing to pay for it. And it’s not just about whether I go to it. The world’s not just about me. We’re complex people. We can want things even when we aren’t going to consume them ourselves. We understand that. That’s what public goods are all about. And journalism is a public good.

How come no one, until Bob McChesney came up with this brilliant theory, thought of it as a public good? The reason is, for the last 125 years the existence of advertising has given us the deception, the illusion that journalism could be a commercially solvent enterprise, that the market would produce sufficient quantity, if not quality, of journalism. Because advertising has provided since the late 19th century anywhere from 50 to 100% of all the revenues for our news media. No major news medium received less than 50% of its money from advertising. That’s the catch. That advertising was only there for opportunistic reasons. Businesses advertised because they wanted to sell their product. They had no concern about journalism per se. If they found another way to accomplish their commercial ends, they would do that, but journalism was the best way they could do it. Now advertising is jumping ship. They’ve found better ways to use their funds to accomplish their commercial ends, and journalism is now withering down to less advertising support. In 2010, for the first time in its history, The New York Times got less money from advertising than it did from other sources, under 50%. Those of you who know your newspaper economic history know that 20 to 30 years ago The New York Times got, like most daily newspapers, 65%, 70%, 75% of its revenues from advertising. Now it’s under 50. It’s going away. It’s not coming back. Advertisers have no concern about journalism per se. Why should they?

The truth of the matter is that readers, viewers, purchasers of journalism have never provided enough money in our country’s history or any country’s history to give us the full-throttle journalism that a democratic society needs. Never. It’s never been. It never has been and it never will be. It’s a public good. It never will be markedly solvable. Advertising deceived us into thinking it was. Advertising is gone. Now journalism is standing naked in the market and it’s shivering. What are we going to do?

At this point my smartest students say, “Okay, Mr. Smarty Pants Professor, if advertising deceived us into making us think it’s not a public good for the last 125 years, how do you account for the fact that for the first 100 years of American history, before there was that much advertising, we had the most dynamic press system in the world? We had probably 10 times the number of newspapers per capita of any other country—Britain, France, or Canada—in the first half of the 19th century. And there was very little advertising in those papers. How do you explain that?” That’s a good question I think we all should ask. And that’s why we wrote this book.

We did a lot of research into the first hundred years of American journalism, into the First Amendment to answer that exact question. That is really the key to solving the problem. What we discovered was, if you look at the founding of this country, the Constitution and the creation of the republic, in the first hundred years of American history, there were two core principles of freedom of the press, at the beginning of this country and for the first several generations. We know one of them today. We all know it. It’s the one we think is the only core principle. That is the government shouldn’t censor media, shouldn’t censor journalists. We all agree with that. We think that’s the be-all and the end-all of the First Amendment. But it isn’t.

There is a second core component of the First Amendment, freedom of the press, that our Founders understood and wrote about and internalized. It wasn’t even debated, any more than they debated the censorship thing—it wasn’t debated that much; it was just understood and internalized—which was, the first duty of the democratic state is to make sure that you actually have a press system, that you actually have a fourth estate. If you don’t have a viable fourth estate, the right to not have it censored doesn’t mean anything. You’ve got to actually have a press system in place that’s independent before you worry about whether you censor it or not. No one in the beginning of this republic thought the market would deliver the goods. That wasn’t even thinkable for the first hundred years of American history. “Oh, we’ll just leave it to the market. The entrepreneurs will figure it out. We’ll get our free press from them.” No one said that. No one, nada. So where did it come from? And this is the interesting part of the story. It came from extraordinarily large public subsidies. Off-the-charts, huge public subsidies created the press system in this country, primarily through the Post Office, but also through federal and state printing subsidies, from the State Department, Congress, and the White House.

To get some sense, before I go into these subsidies, I think it’s worth backing up, because part of the research that John and I did for the book is we went back and we reread or for the first time read a lot of Jefferson’s and Madison’s work especially, because they were the two framers who talked the most about press issues. To understand why they were so obsessed with press, other than the obvious, sort of almost cliché that you need to know what’s going on and the press gives people the information they need to have self-government work. In both the case of Jefferson and Madison, they both wrote specifically about the core reasons, from their understanding, of why the press thing was central to everything.

In Jefferson’s case, in his most famous essay in 1787 he wrote about—someone asked him, “Why do we need this freedom of the press thing, Jefferson? What’s that all about?” And Jefferson said,

It’s very simple. Look at Europe. In Europe basically the society is divided between the wolves, and the lambs and the wolves are devouring the lambs.

For those of you who aren’t good with allegory, he said the wolves were the rich and the lambs were everyone else.

And we will have the exact same thing here unless we have a credible press system, because the only thing that prevents inequality, the only thing that can prevent inequality and make our system work, is if people without property have access to the same information as people with property. People with property will always get the information they need to run society. That’s never a concern. But people without property, that’s the concern. People who are poor, that’s the concern. They cannot participate unless they have access to the information they need equal to the access given to the wealthy and powerful, the property owners.

That was Thomas Jefferson in 1787.

Madison took it up a notch. especially late in his life, when he wrote pensively after he left the White House. Really, this was a theme throughout his life, but his best words were after he left the White House. Madison was a classical scholar, as were most of the framers. He knew Greek and Latin. He studied ancient Greece, he studied the Roman republic. And he knew that the decline of the Roman republic and classical Athens had been when those democracies had become formal empires. Basically, there is a conflict between being an empire, a militaristic state, and being a democracy. Something has to give. In Greece and in Rome what gave was the republic or democracy. They became full-throttled empires.

So Madison was obsessed with not letting the U.S. become a military empire. That was one of the core things. As George Mason said, one of the other framers,

When we wrote the Constitution, the idea was to make it really hard to go to war. We didn’t want to make it easy to go to war. We wanted to make it extremely difficult, put lots of barriers in front of the government before it could take us to war.

Madison’s most famous quote on this was,

A country cannot remain free if it is simultaneously at permanent war abroad. There will be corruption, there will be inequality, there will be secrecy.

All the things that come with empire, antithetical to democracy and to self- government. In Madison’s view, the only thing that would prevent the U.S. from becoming an empire would be a credible press system that would keep an eye on people in power. Because as in Athens, as in Rome, it would be the same in the U.S. No matter how benevolent our elected leaders are, when you’re sitting on top of the richest country in the world—and even in 1790 it didn’t take a genius to see where this country was going—even the most benevolent elected leaders are going to get imperial ambitions. It just goes with the territory. It happened in Greece, it happened in Rome, it happened in Britain, it would happen here. And the only thing to prevent that, and therefore the destruction of the republic to an empire, would be a press system that would monitor government and make it very difficult, if not possible, to go to permanent foreign war.

What’s interesting about Jefferson’s and Madison’s point, I think, if you look at our news media and our society today, in retrospect, I would give them sort of an A+ on the Nostradamus scale. These guys sort of nailed it, if you think about it. If you look at the two core, great crises of our society—grotesque inequality, a collapsing public sector as a result; and an empire and all the things that come with it, secrecy, corruption—that’s right there, that’s the problem we have. And they hit it on the head. That’s why they were obsessed with creating a free press and not just leaving it to the market, leaving it to rich merchants to produce journalism for each other, but instead they had a democratic press.

They did it through extraordinary subsidies, the most important of which is the postal subsidy. I don’t know how many of you are familiar with the history of the American Post Office. It’s certainly fair enough, if you know nothing about it, it’s been a source of ridicule for the last generation, jokes, a silly sort of place. It’s nothing of the kind. It’s a truly great democratic institution. America’s great tangible contribution to democracy and the world was the Post Office. The Post Office was by far the largest branch of the government for the first 100 to 125 years of American history. 80% of all federal employees in the 19th century were postal workers.

First and foremost, what the Post Office delivered was newspapers. Ninety-five percent of the weighted traffic of the Post Office in the 19th century was newspapers, 70% of the individual units were newspapers. The Post Office was the distribution and circulation department for all American newspapers until the 1820s, and all weekly newspapers deep into the 20th century. That’s how they distributed all their papers. Non-postal deliveries of newspapers only began in the largest cities in the 1830s, where it was sold independent of the post office. Otherwise it was mailed. The Post Office used to go out two or three times a day in large cities in that period. What the Post Office charged to mail a newspaper was determined by how many newspapers you had. It was an absolutely foundational issue, what they were going to charge newspapers to be mailed, how many newspapers would exist.

Today, of course, if you listen to Glenn Beck’s rendition of Tom Paine, you would expect that they would have been waving copies of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations and demanding these newspapers pay full freight: no free lunch, no free ride, no corporate welfare, no subsidies: newspapers pay full freight. Instead, what we find, if you look at the debate starting in 1792 on the floor of the House on what to charge newspapers, the debate went something like this, because the Constitution required Congress to set up the Post Office.

At one extreme position were those who argued that newspapers should be very, very heavily subsidized compared to normal mail and the government should chip in money to subsidize the mailing of newspapers. So if a first-class letter cost 24 cents to mail, a newspaper would cost 1 or 2 cents, even though the first-class letter could be very small and the newspaper could be very fat. It didn’t matter. One or 2 cents to 24 cents. A huge subsidy to encourage newspapers. That was one extreme position. The other extreme position, supported and endorsed by no less than President Washington at the time, who, interestingly enough, was considering making Tom Paine the first postmaster general at Jefferson’s urging, the other position, the position of James Madison, was that all newspapers at all times should always be sent for free anywhere in the country. Any charge for postage, Madison said, would be a form of censorship, because the first newspapers to go out of business would be the most marginal, dissident newspapers, the most “out there” would be the first ones to go under. Madison was a person from the Enlightenment. He said,

Those are exactly the viewpoints we need.

Because in the Enlightenment view, that’s where the truth came from. The truth never came from the powerful. That’s where the lies came from. So you have to encourage keeping those viewpoints open with a subsidy. That’s an investment in democracy. That was Madison’s position, and Washington’s.

The former position won, not the latter. They were extremely heavily subsidized. But to give some sense, I said 95% of the weighted traffic, 70% of the individual units for newspapers in the 19th century. Only 10 % of the revenues for the Post Office came from newspapers. There were also huge printing subsidies. I won’t go into those. But I will tell you this, that as part of our research we were so astounded when we looked at the original data on this. The Post Office did studies to find out how much it was costing them to send all these newspapers everywhere. We went back and looked at the original data and tried to figure out, what would the U.S. Government have to spend today as a percentage of GDP if the federal government subsidized journalism today to the same extent it did in the 1840s, where we have hard data for both the printing and postal subsidies? The figure is $35 billion. Just to keep this in context, we’re currently spending $420 million total federally on public and community radio and television. Thirty-five billion dollars is what we would spend if we were spending the rates of the 19th century.

And it paid off. I urge you all, if you haven’t read de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, or if you read it and didn’t know this, go back and reread it. There are like 10 pages where he writes about newspapers. And he’s flummoxed. First he says,

The Post Office is amazing. It connects all of America, from the Atlantic to the Mississippi. It’s more connected, thanks to the Post Office, than a single province in France. That’s how brilliant this Post Office is that they have in America. There are newspapers everywhere. You can publish a newspaper even if you only have a couple hundred people reading it. It’s incredible.

He couldn’t understand the economics of it. How do they do this? How do they have a newspaper with 200 readers and it can stay in business?

It’s because of the postal subsidy and the printing subsidies that kept them going. And the genius of these subsidies was that no one in the government said, “You get it, and you don’t.” No one is cherry-picking. The abolitionist press got it and the slave-owning press got it. Everyone was eligible; there was no cherry-picking. That did didn’t become an issue until World War I. It was a long time before the Post Office got in the game of cherry- picking winners and losers.

That’s something we should be very proud of. Most nation states in the world in the 19th century in Europe primarily were just armies, they were just police forces, they collected tariffs. They were bad guys to the people in the country. That’s why there’s the government evil thing that runs through Western theory. Our national state was different, because we had this Post Office. We had this enormous subsidy in making democracy happen, in making a free press happen. It’s really our tangible great contribution to the world. It’s one we’ve forgotten, but interestingly, as I’m about to tell you, the world learned after we forgot it. That’s the good news.

Oftentimes at this point people will go,

Okay, professor, that was back in the 19th century. That wasn’t the real America. The Founding Fathers, let’s face it, those guys were weird. They were almost French. They didn’t have football, they didn’t have shopping centers, they didn’t have electric guitars, they didn’t have pizza. They had nothing that real America is all about. So maybe the Supreme Court, when it considers freedom-of-the-press issues, says, We’ve got to take a mulligan on the 19th century. Freedom of the press starts in the 20th century, when corporations kick into gear and they own the news media. And the First Amendment now is to protect their right to do whatever the heck they want. That’s the meaning of the First Amendment. Because, let’s be honest, the Supreme Court tends to frame its interpretation of law given the environment it’s in. It changes it given the political winds. And maybe the Supreme Court said, We’ve got to rethink the First Amendment in light of the fact that now the news media is run by big corporations making money and that’s got to be the new sacrosanct right.

So as part of our research we went back and reread the seven or eight major Supreme Court decisions on the First Amendment in the 20th century—and there have only been seven or eight—that consider the relationship of the press system to the government. We reread them. I had read them all in graduate school 30 years ago. And to put it mildly, it’s astonishing to reread them. The words that I didn’t even pay much attention to in 1985 jumped off the page at me.

There are a couple of great decisions, for those of you who are really interested in this. The AP v. United States decision in 1945 has a majority opinion by Hugo Black that’s one of the most brilliant statements of freedom of the press that’s ever written; the 1971 Pentagon Papers case, Hugo Black again and Potter Stewart, two extraordinary statements. What they said in these statements was, in effect, that it’s the duty of the government to make sure you have an independent fourth estate. It’s not an option; it’s a duty, it’s a requirement. The entire constitutional system depends on it. If there isn’t a viable, credible, independent news media, fourth estate, nothing works. We lose our freedoms, the whole system collapses, corruption takes over. It’s not an option; it’s a duty on a free people to do that. That’s what they say.

And for those who didn’t read the law opinions, Potter Stewart in 1974 wrote an article in the Yale Law Journal. I don’t have the exact quote in front of me, but he said, in effect, the free-press clause of the First Amendment is a structural requirement on the U.S. government to create a press system—a structural requirement—because without it you can’t have the governing system work. It’s the only way you can keep tabs on people in power. And in Stewart’s 1971 Pentagon Papers opinion, he basically channeled James Madison. It was just exactly what James Madison had written about empire and press, was what Potter Stewart wrote in 1971 in the Pentagon Papers case.

So the Supreme Court, if we take it seriously, we’re going to be a strict constructionist and take what the Court has said repeatedly, in every decision, including recent decisions. It doesn’t just give us the right to intervene in our press system, it requires it of us. Not the right to do subsidies, since the market has failed, but the obligation to do subsidies. The logic, in my view, is obviously, we have to have massive public subsidies to create independent, uncensored competitive newsrooms, largely nonprofit and noncommercial. That’s the only way we’re going to have a credible press system that’s going to work in this country going forward. That’s the obvious conclusion I think the evidence points to. I see no other conclusion that works.

Let’s look at all the other major advanced democratic nations of the world with similar economies to ours and that have democratic systems, not dictatorships but countries that might have more in common with us, and see what they’re doing. Maybe we can learn more from Canada, Britain, Germany, and Sweden than we can from Uganda and Pol Pot’s Cambodia. Maybe that’s a more relevant pool of comparison for us if we want to figure out our way out of this problem. What do we learn then? This is what we learn.

We learn, for example, that if the U.S. spent, if all levels of government spent, to support just public broadcasting per capita the same level as Canada, New Zealand, or Australia—and this is the low end—we would have to spend on a per capita basis, instead of what we’re currently spending, the $420 million federally, and a billion if you include all the states and universities and all that, we would have to spend between $7 billion and $10 billion annually, not $1 billion. If we were to ramp it up to the next level and we were to support public and community radio and television to the same level of, say, Japan and Britain, then we would be look more at the $20- billion-a -year rate. That’s what our government budget would be, $20 billion as opposed to what it is, $1 billion, even less. And then, if you want to take it to the top level—Germany, Sweden, Iceland, Finland, Norway, Denmark—then we’re looking at $35 billion a year. That’s what they spend per capita. We would have to
spend that if we had the same per capita rate as they do in federal subsidies, government subsidies to journalism, $35 billion. Remember that number 35? You heard that before, didn’t you? That seems to be the democracy level. If you’re going to invest in credible democracy, that’s the sort of amount you spend, $35 billion. That’s what we used to do and that’s what these countries do.

But wait a second. We have to be skeptics here. How do we know that money is being spent effectively? How do we know those countries are really democracies? So what we did is we looked at a couple of measurements. One is The Economist. I’m sure many of you are familiar with it. It’s a British weekly news magazine, very pro-business. Loves Ronald Reagan, loves Margaret Thatcher, loves free markets. It’s also libertarian on social issues. And it does some very good reporting at times as well. Every year they rank all the countries in the world in what they call their Democracy Index. They’ve been doing it for a long time. You can go online to The Economist Democracy Index. They rank them from top to bottom, the most democratic nation in the world to the least democratic. The least democratic is invariably North Korea. Any communist country is down at the bottom. They use traditional political science criteria for who are the most democratic: ease of vote, lack of corruption, ability to start parties, civil liberties; anything political scientists say, This is what a good democratic society would have. What’s interesting, in last year’s, the most recent ranking of the Democracy Index, The Economist put the U.S. 17th in the world. And guess who the first four countries in the world are, just a wild guess? I wouldn’t mention it if it wasn’t who you think it’s going to be. Denmark, Norway, Finland, Sweden. The countries with the highest per-capita press subsidies in the world are the most democratic countries, according to The Economist.

They don’t talk about free press exactly there, so maybe that’s not good enough evidence. So what I did is I went to another group you may have heard of, Freedom House. Freedom House is a group that was started in the Cold War to monitor the freedom of people around the world. They’re especially monitoring freedom in left-wing governments and communist countries. They’re particularly concerned with communist countries harassment of individual civil liberties and the private press system percentage of the media. Every year Freedom House, which is based in Washington and has a very close relationship with Langley, (CIA) as well as the State Department, ranks all the countries in the world on how free their press systems are.

They have a number of criteria. It’s actually a very sophisticated system. It’s not just government harassment of private media. But they rank all the countries as either a free press, a semi-free press, or an unfree, not free, press. Every communist country in the world is tied for last, because they don’t have any private media. So they are unfree; they’re hellholes. But they have very sensitive antennae, again, for any government harassment of private media. Venezuela, which has a thriving private media that is extraordinarily critical of the sitting government and gets a lot of attention in the country and not very much censorship, ranks as an unfree press, because they’ve been threatened by the government enough that it’s a chilling environment, according to Freedom House. So Venezuela ranks right down there with Cuba as the only country in the Western Hemisphere that has an unfree press. These guys at Freedom House are not left-wingers. You get the picture of where they’re coming from.

So Freedom House ranks all the countries in the world. Guess who their most free presses are? The top five are the heaviest press-subsidizing countries. The U.S. is ranked 24th in the world, this free press system, for a variety of reasons, including the fact that it’s hard to get access to sources and there is so much secret information in this country. Freedom House says the freest systems in the world, private press systems, commercial press systems, are in the countries with the largest public subsidies of journalism.

The evidence is pretty clear. You can easily have huge press subsidies that not only promote democracy but also make it possible to have a private, independent news media that prospers with less censorship and more credibility and does better. In fact, the research now that’s come out, and it’s conclusive, is that in Europe, as they’ve increased subsidies for journalism in Norway, Sweden, Finland, and France, it’s increased the opposition to the government. It hasn’t created a more quiescent, lackey press, it’s had the opposite effect, because the subsidies are set up to encourage the second, third, and fourth papers in a town to survive, not just have one newspaper in a community. So it creates more diversity.

The reason I go through all this is not that we should imitate those countries but that this is a very solvable problem. That’s my point. Other countries are all doing it. They’ve figured out ways. They’re struggling, they don’t have perfect answers. They’re going through the same stuff we’re going through with their commercial media. But at least they’re sort of pointed in the right direction, like we once were. And it’s the direction we have to go if we’re going to solve this problem. There’s just no other way around it.

At this point, again, in my talks, what tends to happen is I open it up to questions, and the first question is,

Are you insane? Do you honestly think you could ever do anything like that in America? How crazy are you, professor? What is going on with you?

I think that that’s an understandable response, and I take it seriously, although I’m an optimist, as you can probably tell. Or maybe you can’t. But I am. I wouldn’t be doing this if I wasn’t. I’m an inveterate optimist, and I think it’s grounded in good reasons. But understand this: In the last two years there has been such a sea change that even people who normally wouldn’t notice it are noticing it. We have major studies being done right now at the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission on the collapse of journalism, with the idea to come up with policy recommendations to address the crisis. And I can tell you, they understand the problem. They definitely understand the problem, from talking to the heads of these commissions and key people doing the research. Whether they’ll do much about it and make the sort of recommendations that I think the evidence leads you to, that’s probably not going to happen, at least not in the near term, for political reasons, because they’re scared to death of the sort of attacks that have said, “You want to create Pravda or Izvestia and kick Glenn Beck off the air,” and that that’s their mission in life,” which might not be a bad mission. Hi, Glenn.

It’s going to be difficult because of that, but this is just the near term. Let me talk a little bit about where I could go, what sort of solutions in the near term we could look at and where I think we’re going to have to go in the next few years if we’re going to solve it.

First of all, let’s dramatically increase the money to public and community radio and television. I emphasize community there, because I think a lot of people say, “I really don’t like PBS. I’m really tired of their mainstream news. I really don’t like NPR. I don’t like their mainstream news.” The first stations that go under when that funding goes from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting are all the community stations in the country. Those are the first ones that go down. WGBH is the last one to go, the community and college stations are the first ones to go. Understand that immediately. So that is a war we have to fight. That is a war we can’t afford to lose. We should be spending instantly $5 billion or $10 billion so we have competing newsrooms, public, community, college stations in every town independently run covering their communities, because no one else is covering them.

Secondly—and I talk to a lot of students—this is probably the worst labor market for a young person wanting to be a journalist in American history. I think it would have been easier in 1932 to graduate from an American college with a journalism degree and get a job in a newsroom than it is today. I’m dead serious. In fact, I’m positive it would have been easier in 1932. It’s hopeless today. There is such downward pressure in wages, and the work you end up doing is PR spin junk, it’s not journalism. It’s a dreadful situation, and it’s something we can’t tolerate.

The thing we have to do, take 10,000 kids out of college and give them a one- or two-year stipend. Like Teach for America? Make it Write for America. Assign them to newsrooms all over the country. Get them working, get them covering this community, assign them to the community stations. Get people doing journalism. We can’t lose a generation. All the research shows that when people do journalism, they respect it and they respect freedom and democracy a lot more. When people stop doing it, they don’t really appreciate it anywhere near as much. We can’t lose a generation. And I can tell you right now there are thousands of people. I talk to them all the time. I just came from Ohio University. Young people are desperate to do journalism. It’s frightening to think they won’t even be able to get a minimum-wage job doing that, let alone a job where they can pay their bills. We can’t allow that. I want to close on two points.

The point I would make here on why it is so important is that what’s happened to the current administration is they have accepted the Republican framing of the economy, which is basically that the economy is in bad shape because we have a deficit, so if we get rid of the deficit or lessen the deficit, the economy will grow. That’s a type of economics that comes from Herbert Hoover, it comes from the Great Depression, it comes from Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon. That was basically, lower taxes on rich people, slash all social services, balance your budget, and the economy will magically grow. It’s preposterous economics.
That’s an aside.

The reason I mention all this is that President Obama and his administration, regrettably, have bought into that and they’ve accepted that logic as the defining logic. So there can be no new expenditures unless you can pay for them. Unless it’s a war. That’s another matter. But anything else that’s good, you can’t add it to the payroll, to the budget unless you can pay for it. Otherwise it’s off limits, even though that would be very good for the economy, probably. But that’s another matter.

So Nichols and I said,

Okay, what are we going to do, then? If we can’t add new programs like Write for America or more money for public broadcasting, what could we do with the current spending in our budget to address the journalism crisis? There are two places we could go right away that would make a huge dent in it, with current spending. The federal government today spends roughly $4 billion a year on public relations through all its bodies, and a lot of this in the Pentagon. Why not take half of that and devote it to journalism? Maybe there is some good use for public relations, they have to do some stuff, but a lot of this is just PR people spinning journalists so they have a favorable treatment of some government program or agency. That’s offensive in the first place, but it’s especially offensive when we have an army of PR agents spinning no journalists left to spin. What a joke! Why don’t we just give the money to journalists, let them cover the thing, and get rid of the PR agents? Right there we could come up with 10,000 reporters that we could get working around the country.

Secondly, another place we could go with currently being spent money, most Americans aren’t aware of this, but we spend roughly twice as much money on Voice of America and overseas broadcasting than we do on NPR and PBS. We spend $750 million a year on Voice of America and overseas broadcasting. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was just in Washington at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee testifying about this two or three weeks ago, and she acknowledged that it’s a complete failure, that our radio message, especially in the Middle East, isn’t working. Our commercial stations come across as just junky with advertising, like CNN International, and our Voice of America, publicly subsidized stations, come across as clumsy propaganda that’s not telling the truth. Al Jazeera in the region totally blows us out of the water. She said that, Hillary Clinton. So we need much more money to do the job; we’ve got to change our strategy.

I agree. Let’s say we can’t get the money for now. But we can change the strategy. Currently it’s illegal for Voice of America to be broadcasting in the U.S. That’s the condition of its existence. We aren’t allowed to hear that propaganda, apparently, or that journalism. It’s now off limits. What I recommend we do is take most of that money, not all of it, keep some for translations, and take the rest and give it all to public and community stations in the U.S. And all the money has to go exclusively to international coverage. And then what we’ll do is we’ll take the results of that and we’ll air it around the world. We won’t have a double standard. The same journalism we get we’ll air to the Middle East and to Africa and Asia, and they can hear what we’re getting, too. That’s $500 million. That buys you a lot of journalists. That gets you more foreign coverage than we’ve ever had in our history.

When we finished our revised edition, we were depressed. This is in January. This is hopeless now. The Obama administration is not doing anything, really, to speak of. They’ve pretty much sold us out. It doesn’t look good for this election. The last election was bad. It seems like we’re playing defense. It seems like we’re getting nowhere. And it seemed like our argument, when we started drafting the new version of the book, we thought, We’re going to have to go back to the streets, we’re going to have to get demonstrations, we’re going to have to raise hell. And then we looked at each other and said, “What are the chances of that?”

That conversation took place literally the day before all hell broke loose in Madison, Wisconsin. We were both in Madison. We live there. I must say, even if you watched sympathetic media—and there has been some. Amy Goodman and Democracy Now! Ed Schultz, Cenk Uygur, Rachel Maddow—that’s about it. Even if you watched that, you had no idea what took place in Madison and what an extraordinary, life-changing experience that has been for everyone who was involved in it. It reminds you, first and foremost, that one of the five core freedoms in the First Amendment is the right to assemble. Another one of the five core freedoms in the First Amendment is the right to peaceably address your grievances to the government, because the power that comes from 150,000 people together, united, the words are not in our language to convey it. You have to experience it. People in power understand that. That’s why that’s in our First Amendment.

If you were there in Madison, you saw large chunks of the people demonstrating every single day, at least 10- or 15,000 people coming down, and on weekends 50-,100-, 150,000. You would see these large chunks of the people assembled and you would say, “This looks like what we’re told by the media is a Tea Party rally.” Working-class white people. They’re supposed to be really reactionary? I was there every day. I was in the crowd. I wasn’t the leader; I was just one of the people there. I didn’t see a single racist thing, I didn’t see a single immigrant-bashing thing. By the end of it, the last two weeks, the chants were: “Tax the Rich! And “Stop the Wars!” It was sort of like being in France in 1789, the vibe. It got more radical every day. And the spirit, the nonviolence, the compassion, the humanity of the protesters, again, it was life-changing.

I mention this now because if we’re going to change the sort of the stuff I’m talking about in journalism, that is a revolution. It really is. If we got what I’m talking about, that’s a revolution in this country. It’s not going to come in the abstract. It’s not going to come in isolation and everything else in this country stays the same: the same horse-manure health system, the same crappy tax system, the same unemployment, the same inequality, the same garbage-can environmental policies. It’s not like those things will all stay the same, plus we’ll get this world-class media system. Who is kidding who? It doesn’t work that way. They’re all together. We win them all or we win nothing. We organize together on all or we lose everything. It’s basic politics. Saul Alinsky put it well:

The only way you beat organized money is with organized people.

That’s the oldest rule of politics. It’s as true today as it was back in 9000 B.C., when they planted the first seed between the Tigris and Euphrates.

We can win. But we’ve got to do some serious organizing. And part of it is we’ve got to change our media. Because the media coverage that took place in Madison was appalling. But it did do one thing of great value. For the people of Wisconsin participating, when they go home and watch the news or pick up the paper, go online and check the coverage, they get a world-class education in bad journalism and how important it is to have good journalism. Now they’re media reformers. Because when you get involved in politics, you learn pretty quickly, you have to be a media reformer if you want to win your cause. That’s the lesson we got there. Thank you very much.

For information about obtaining CDs, MP3s, or transcripts of this or other programs, please contact:
David Barsamian
Alternative Radio
P.O. Box 551
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©2010

The real implications of climate change

Sun, 18 Sep 2011 01:07:14 GMT

by Naomi Klein, journalist, author, and social activist calls for system change through a relocalizing of our economies and a fundamental shift away from market-based “free trade” globalization.

Please watch this 11-minute video

We cannot deal with climate change unless we deal with the underlying system that impedes any efforts toward amelioration: capitalism gone beserk. So-called market-based efforts are futile.

Capitalism needs endless growth in order to survive–and it is precisely that need for growth that obviates sustainability. The planet is overburdened not just with carbon emissions but with overfishing, with overuse of water–of course, with overpopulation, too, but just hopefully, if only we could rethink our need for continuous growth (every period without growth is a crisis in capitalism: a recession, a depression), we might find a way to sustain continued support for the biosphere, including human life.

I so highly recommend y’all listen to this 11-minute speech by this eloquent author. Most everyone is in denial about the fundamental implications of climate change.

Former Israeli Minister of Education Shulamit Aloni discusses how to use the charge of antisemitism

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 16:11:57 GMT

In an 14 August 2002 interview with American journalist Amy Goodman, Shulamit Aloni– שולמית אלוני‎, a prominent member of the Israeli peace camp, founder of the Ratz party, leader of the Meretz party, Minister of Education from 1992 to 1993–described how she believes the charge of antisemitism is used to suppress criticism of Israel.

Goodman:

Yours is a voice of criticism we don’t often hear in the United States. Often when there is dissent expressed in the United States against policies of the Israeli government, people here are called anti-semitic. What is your response to that as an Israeli Jew?

Aloni:

Well, it’s a trick, we always use it. When from Europe somebody is criticizing Israel, then we bring up the Holocaust. When in this country people are criticizing Israel, then they are anti-Semitic. And the organization is strong, and has a lot of money, and the ties between Israel and the American Jewish establishment are very strong and they are strong in this country, as you know. And they have power, which is OK. They are talented people and they have power and money, and the media and other things, and their attitude is “Israel, my country right or wrong”, identification. And they are not ready to hear criticism. And it’s very easy to blame people who criticize certain acts of the Israeli government as anti-Semitic, and to bring up the Holocaust, and the suffering of the Jewish people, and that is justify everything we do to the Palestinians.

For other revealing quotes, see the following:

“There is a huge gap between us [Jews] and our enemies not just in ability but in morality, culture, sanctity of life, and conscience. They are our neighbors here, but it seems as if at a distance of a few hundred meters away, there are people who do not belong to our continent, to our world, but actually belong to a different galaxy.”
Israeli president Moshe Katsav, The Jerusalem Post, May 10, 2001
“The Palestinians are like crocodiles, the more you give them meat, they want more”
Ehud Barak, Prime Minister of Israel at the time, August 28, 2000. Reported in The Jerusalem Post, August 30, 2000
“[The Palestinians are] beasts walking on two legs.”
Menahim Begin, speech to the Knesset, quoted in Amnon Kapeliouk, “Begin and the Beasts,” New Statesman, 25 June 1982
“The Palestinians would be crushed like grasshoppers … heads smashed against the boulders and walls.”
Isreali Prime Minister Shamir in a speech to Jewish settlers, New York Times, April 1, 1988
“When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle.”
Raphael Eitan, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defense Forces, New York Times, 14 April 1983
“How can we return the occupied territories? There is nobody to return them to.”
Golda Maier, Israeli Prime Minister, March 8, 1969
“There was no such thing as Palestinians, they never existed.”
Golda Maier, Israeli Prime Minister, June 15, 1969
“The thesis that the danger of genocide was hanging over us in June 1967 and that Israel was fighting for its physical existence is only bluff, which was born and developed after the war.”
Israeli General Matityahu Peled, Ha’aretz, 19 March 1972
David Ben Gurion: “If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel . It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been AntiSemitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault ? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?”
Quoted by Nahum Goldmann in Le Paraddoxe Juif (The Jewish Paradox), pp 121
Ben Gurion also warned in 1948: “We must do everything to insure they [the expelled Palestinian] never do return.” Assuring his fellow Zionists that Palestinians will never come back to their homes. “The old will die and the young will forget.”
“We have to kill all the Palestinians unless they are resigned to live here as slaves.”
Chairman Heilbrun of the Committee for the Re-election of General Shlomo Lahat, the mayor of Tel Aviv, October 1983
“Every time we do something, you tell me America will do this and will do that . . . I want to tell you something very clear: Don’ t worry about American pressure on Israel . We, the Jewish people, control America , and the Americans know it.”
Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, October 3, 2001, to Shimon Peres, as reported on Kol Yisrael
[Voice Of Israel] radio
“We declare openly that the Arabs have no right to settle on even one centimeter of Eretz Israel … Force is all they do or ever will understand. We shall use the ultimate force until the Palestinians come crawling to us on all fours.”
Rafael Eitan, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defense Forces, Gad Becker, Yediot Ahronot, 13 April 1983, New
York Times, 14 April 1983
“We must do everything to ensure they [the Palestinian refugees] never do return”
David Ben-Gurion, in his diary, 18 July 1948, quoted in Michael Bar Zohar’s Ben-Gurion: the Armed Prophet, Prentice-Hall, 1967, p. 157
“We should prepare to go over to the offensive. Our aim is to smash Lebanon , Trans-Jordan, and Syria. The weak point is Lebanon, for the Moslem regime is artificial and easy for us to undermine. We shall establish a Christian state there, and then we will smash the Arab Legion, eliminate Trans-Jordan; Syria will fall to us. We then bomb and move on and take Port Said, Alexandria, and Sinai.”
David Ben-Gurion, May 1948, to the General Staff. From Ben-Gurion, A Biography, by Michael Ben-Zohar, Delacorte , New York 1978
“We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its [Israeli] Arab population.”
Israel Koenig, “The Koenig Memorandum”
“Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahlal arose in the place of Mahlul; Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Huneifis; and Kefar Yehushua in the place of Tal al-Shuman. There is not a single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.”
Moshe Dayan, address to the Technion, Haifa, reported in Ha’aretz, April 4, 1969
“We walked outside, Ben-Gurion accompanying us. Allon repeated his question, ‘What is to be done with the Palestinian population?’
Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a gesture which said ‘Drive them out!'”
Yitzhak Rabin, leaked censored version of Rabin memoirs, published in the New York Times, 23 October 1979
Rabin’s description of the conquest of Lydda, after the completion of Plan Dalet. “We shall reduce the Arab population to a community of woodcutters and waiters”
Uri Lubrani, PM Ben-Gurion’s special adviser on Arab Affairs, 1960. From “The Arabs in Israel ” by Sabri Jiryas
“There are some who believe that the non-Jewish population, even in a high percentage, within our borders will be more effectively under our surveillance; and there are some who believe the contrary, i.e., that it is easier to carry out surveillance over the activities of a neighbor than over those of a tenant. [I] tend to support the latter view and have an additional argument:…the need to sustain the character of the state which will henceforth be Jewish…with a non-Jewish minority limited to 15 percent. I had already reached this fundamental position as early as 1940 [and] it is entered in my diary.”
Joseph Weitz, head of the Jewish Agency’s Colonization Department. From Israel: An
Apartheid State by Uri Davis, p.5
“Everybody has to move, run and grab as many hilltops as they can to enlarge the settlements because everything we take now will stay ours… Everything we don’t grab will go to them.”
Ariel Sharon, Israeli Foreign Minister, addressing a meeting of militants from the extreme right-wing Tsomet Party, Agence France Presse, November 15, 1998
“It is the duty of Israeli leaders to explain to public opinion, clearly and courageously, a certain number of facts that are forgotten with time. The first of these is that there is no Zionism, colonialization or Jewish State without the eviction of the Arabs and the expropriation of their lands.”
Yoram Bar Porath, Yediot Aahronot, of 14 July 1972
“Spirit the penniless population across the frontier by denying it employment… Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.”
Theodore Herzl, founder of the World Zionist Organization, speaking of the Arabs of Palestine, Complete Diaries, June 12, 1895 entry
“One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail.”
Rabbi Yaacov Perrin, Feb. 27, 1994 [Source: New York Times, Feb. 28, 1994, p. 1]

The strange politics of the U.S. 2012 election–Part 2

Fri, 09 Sep 2011 13:18:03 GMT

Part 2: Problems ahead for Obama?

by Jack S. Smith,
Activist Newsletter

The New Yorker magazine published a memorable front cover a year after President Barack Obama assumed office. It was a four-panel cartoon-like drawing by artist Barry Blitt of a man walking on water, a reference to the Apostle Paul. In panel 1, the walking figure, illuminated by a heavenly shaft of light, shows a small unidentifiable figure in the background. By panel 2, the tall, thin man is clearly Obama. By number 3, a still walking confident, serious president dominates the panel, looking sternly at the viewer. And in panel 4, he sinks.

He is still sinking today. According to the Pew Research Center poll released Aug. 25:

For the first time in his presidency, significantly more disapprove than approve of the way Obama is handling his job as president (49% vs. 43%), and…. 38% strongly disapprove of Obama’s job performance while 26% strongly approve.

The poll shows that 22% approve of the job performance of Republican congressional leaders, while the figure is 29% for Democratic leaders. At 43%, the Democratic Party is viewed more favorably than the GOP at 34%.

At issue now is what the important and very disappointed liberal, progressive, and labor union sector of the Democratic constituency is going to do during the 2012 election campaign, which already seems well under way 14 months before the voting.

Many Democratic Party supporters, especially those of the center-left, virtually venerated their candidate during the 2008 campaign. Liberals and unionists not only chanted slogans on cue at rallies but volunteered and donated money to elect him. The union movement invested a few hundred million dollars. Obama was not only viewed as the anti-Bush redeemer but the rescuer who would bring the party left wing back to relevance after being exiled to the sidelines when the leadership began its nearly four decade trek to end up right of center.

During the earlier campaign in Des Moines, Oprah Winfrey–who is arguably the most influential woman in the world–declared to a crowd of 15,000 enthusiasts,

I am here to tell you, Iowa, he is the one. He is the one!

But in her New York Times column Sept. 3, titled “One and Done?” Maureen Dowd devilishly observed,

The One is dancing on the edge of one term.

Even though Obama will occasionally pretend to liberal populism to mesmerize selected audiences during this campaign, his first-term record of concrete concessions to conservative ideology cannot be camouflaged. As viewed from the party center left, and even from the center, the Obama Administration’s record is lamentable when matched against reasonable Democratic voter expectations in 2008.

Most Democratic voters, liberal or not, expected a reduction in U.S. military violence, not the increase Obama produced. They preferred a strengthening of civil liberties, not a continuation of the Bush Administration’s Patriot Act and additional erosions of rights. They sought progress on reducing environmental despoliation and global warming, not policies that produce opposite results. Many anticipated at least moderate efforts to mitigate the appalling increases in economic inequality, and to alleviate the hyper-inequality afflicting some national minorities.

So far, it is premature to anticipate how many defections are expected from the Obama camp due to increasing malaise and anger from much of the liberal sector and its further left cohorts who usually end up on the Democratic Party treadmill every four years. They are caught once again–although by surprise this time for many–in the familiar lobster-like pincers of the lesser evil/greater evil dilemma.

Most fear that voting for existing small third party progressive alternatives will help elect the “greater evil” right/far right half of the ruling duopoly, so they will vote for the center-right Obama, who occupies political territory once claimed by the now extinct “moderate” wing of the Republican Party. The White House inner circle, Democratic Party bigwigs and the main sector of the ruling class are counting on it, and seek to raise a record-setting $1 billion dollars to keep their man in the Oval Office.

The Democratic Party strategy for gaining a second term in the White House seems based on two main assumptions about the Republicans, as well as blaming the GOP for everything except Hurricane Irene, and putting forward a popular program that after the elections may never see the light of day.

The first assumption is that the GOP will be perceived by much of the electorate as having moved too far to the right, alienating independent voters who will now vote for Obama in greater number, and keeping the dissident Democrats in line. There is also the possibility of splits between the Tea Party stalwarts and the less doctrinaire parent party as a whole and possibly within the TP itself.
The second assumption is that the GOP simply does not have a broadly attractive presidential candidate if the field remains narrowed to Tea Party favorites such as Texas Gov. Rick Perry, Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, or flagrantly opportunist conservative former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, backed up by secondary candidates including libertarian Texas Rep. Ron Paul and longshot mainstream Republican former Utah Gov. John M. Huntsman. At this point Perry (an aggressive climate change and evolution denier, who thinks Social Security is a Ponzi scheme) and Romney (who probably was the last of the “moderate Republicans” until duty to his country called him to the farther right) have the inside track, but Palin hasn’t announced yet. The Democratic establishment probably thinks all of them (with the exception of Huntsman) are bunch of clowns and hopes one of them gets the nomination.

For his part, President Obama will strive to convince the American people that the Republicans are entirely responsible for the political gridlock in Washington. He will charge the GOP with putting petty party interests ahead of “American,” not merely Democratic, interests, intentionally conflating the two to imply the Republicans are lacking patriotism. The White House will propagate the notion that Tea Party extremists left Obama with “no choice” but to cut social programs to lower the deficit instead of fighting harder for taxing the rich, and “no option” but to put Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid up for grabs–concessions that were in fact entirely voluntary. It is highly doubtful for obvious reasons that the Democratic candidate will repeat his most stirring crowd pleaser from the 2008 campaign:

Our time has come, our movement is real, and change is coming to America.

The Democratic domestic platform will be a glistening cornucopia of promises and good intentions for every sector–the right, center, and even a trifle for the left. In essence, however, it will tilt toward conservatism. There will be elevating talk about needed programs, but it is highly doubtful a viable social agenda that serves the needs of an increasingly desperate American people will emerge from an Obama triumph, including anything more than token gestures toward rebuilding infrastructure or protecting the environment. Foreign policy will remain the same, as will military/national security strategy and its ruinous price tag. Full spectrum power and global domination remain the name of the imperial game.

This may keep the bulk of Democrats content and attract independents. Most rank-and-filers have followed their party into the center right over the years, consciously or often not even aware of the political shift, and remain comfortable with Obama even though the blush has departed the rose. Most liberals are no longer sanguine and some will fight back within the party and may be able to wrest small favors.

Obama will be traveling on a bumpy campaign road, however, and there will be some potential Democratic voters who stay at home, probably including younger and first time voters who played a big role in 2008, and Latino voters dismayed by the Obama Administration’s George Bush-like immigration policies, among others.

Several score liberal, progressive and labor organizations are complaining loudly, from Move-On, Campaign for America’s Future, and Progressive Democrats of America, to the AFL-CIO federation of 56 unions. It is expected that a developing coalition of such forces will exert considerable pressure on the Democratic Party leadership to include at least a few key liberal programs in the platform, although most campaign priorities are ignored or delayed indefinitely after the election.

Nearly 70 groups that describe themselves as progressive sent a communication to President Obama Aug. 30 insisting that he fight for a jobs program “that does not just tinker around the edges.” Similar groups are pushing for a legislative drive to “Restore the American Dream.”

Some groups are threatening to withhold campaign contributions should Obama ultimately agree to making cuts in federal entitlement programs. A grassroots group called the Progressive Change Campaign Committee composed of liberals who raised money for the Democrats in 2008 brought 200,000 signed pledges to Obama’s national campaign headquarters in Chicago in July with precisely that message.

The most important critic is the 10.5 million-member AFL-CIO and its new community affiliate, the 2 million members of Working America. Total U.S. union membership may have suffered a precipitous decline since its apogee in 1954, when it constituted 33% of the workforce, compared to 11.9% this year–but the unions are key to the Democrats’ existence, although the party has given very little in return.

Criticism of the Democrats of any kind is a fairly new attitude for the AFL-CIO, after many decades of conservative, pro-war, Cold War, pro-business leadership from former AFL and AFL-CIO presidents George Meany and Lane Kirkland from 1952 to 1995. The more militant John Sweeney, federation president 1995-2009, broke with many of the earlier right wing practices while remaining close to the Democratic leadership.

Former United Mine Workers leader Richard Trumka, who was part of the now-retired Sweeney’s winning New Voices reform team, succeeded to the presidency. He has been remarkably vocal this year about the failure of the Obama Administration to fight the right and to support progressive programs for jobs, the Employee Free Choice Act, a public option for healthcare, and raising the minimum wage from $7.25 to $9.50 an hour as Obama promised in 2008. Free Choice was the labor movement’s key legislative priority. It would have removed several barriers to increasing union membership–but the White House didn’t even bring the bill to a vote, knowing conservative Democrats would join anti-union Republicans to defeat the measure, not that Obama twisted any arms on behalf of labor.

In addition to public criticisms, Trumka has been suggesting that the AFL-CIO intended to declare a certain independence from the Democratic Party. In early June he told union nurses meeting in Washington that

We want an independent labor movement strong enough to return balance to our economy, fairness to our tax system, security to our families and moral and economic standing to our nation…. We can’t simply build the power of any political party or any candidate. For too long we’ve been left after the election holding a canceled check and asking someone to pay attention to us. No more!

In the equivalent of aiming a hefty whiff of grapeshot across the White House lawn, Trumka declared Aug. 25:

This is a moment that working people and quite frankly history will judge President Obama on his presidency. Will he commit all his energy and focus on bold solutions on the job crisis or will he continue to work with the Tea Party to offer cuts to middle class programs like Social Security all the while pretending the deficit is where our economic problems really lie?

Some other indications of the labor movement’s more active stand include the recent federation announcement that it is organizing a nationwide week of demonstrations for jobs in 450 locations in October. On Sept. 4 it was reported that union donations to federal candidates at the beginning of this year were down about 40% compared with the same period in 2009. In August, a dozen trade unions, including the 2.5 million member AFL-CIO building trades division, said they would boycott next year’s Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C., because of “broad frustration with the [Democratic] Party” and to protest the event’s location in an anti-union right-to-work state.

Despite some unprecedented criticism, and positive evidence of a tilt toward labor independence, a break with the Democratic Party is not in cards for the 2012 election. But it is a long delayed warning that has a powerful potential should it be ignored. A token of opposition may transpire next year by union refusal to back selected Blue Dog Democrats; perhaps labor candidates will run against some conservative Democrats in primaries or in some cases stand as third party election entries against anti-union candidates of the two ruling parties. Some money may be withheld and there may be few volunteers.

When President Obama took office on Jan. 20, 2009, the news media often compared him favorably to Dr. Martin Luther King, suggesting, in effect, he was the fulfillment of King’s “Dream,” a reference to the great civil rights leader’s “I Have a Dream” speech at the 1963 March on Washington. On the anniversary of the march Aug. 28, Rep. John Lewis (D-GA), who was a civil rights fighter in his youth and who at spoke at the historic event, speculated on what King would say to Obama were he alive today, in a public statement that was both a plea and a sad censure:

“Dr. King,” Lewis wrote, would tell President Obama

that it is his moral obligation to use his
power and influence to help those who have been left out and left behind. He would encourage him to get out of Washington, to break away from handlers and advisers and go visit the people where they live…. He would urge Obama to feel the hurt and pain of those without work, of mothers and their children who go to bed hungry at night, of the families living in shelters after losing their homes, and of the elderly who chose between buying medicine and paying the rent….

[He would tell him] to do what he can to end discrimination based on race, color, religious faith and sexual orientation…. There is no need to put a finger in the air to see which way the wind is blowing. There is no need to match each step to the latest opinion poll. The people of this country recognize when a leader is trying to do what is right…. Let the people of this country see that you are fighting for them and they will have your back.

This is no doubt true, but fighting for the people is simply not among Barack Obama chief priorities.

The strange politics of the U.S. 2012 election–Part 1

Fri, 09 Sep 2011 12:59:35 GMT

Part 1: What both parties are up to

by Jack S. Smith,
Activist Newsletter

When was it that the most extremely disturbed inmates seized control of the madhouse known as the American political system? We know they are wielding decisive influence within the two-party structure by their destructive antics in Washington and various state capitals, but when and how did this happen?

Some contend that the takeover was accomplished last January, when the new Republican House majority assumed office. Granted that the intransigent buffoonery of the right/far right party is a substantial factor, but it by no means is the only factor, as the Democrats suggest.

The Tea Party (TP) phenomenon is a symptom of one of the more bizarre political moments in American history between the odd couple that constitutes the two-party system, not the principal causative agent. It is a new formation but composed of the old hard core right wing and religious right reinvigorated with conservative populism, anti-government libertarianism, garnished with an element of racism in response to a non-white chief executive, and performing the political equivalent of wilding in the streets.

The larger Republican Party and its leadership may not be as fanatical but is going along with the far right because it’s producing positive practical gains for conservative ideology and programs, and seems to have tied the bewildered and misled Democrats into impotent knots. The big danger for the GOP is going so far to the right that it gets trounced in the 2012 elections, which is what the White House is counting on.

Others maintain seizing the asylum was facilitated when President Barack Obama took office in January 2009–the argument being that he is a weak pushover who doesn’t understand how to fight for his beliefs.

Obama, however, is a tough, exceptionally ambitious politician who knows what he wants and goes after it with cool precision. How else could have migrated to the U.S. Senate and the presidency of the United States in five years after an unremarkable dozen years in academia and the obscurity of the Illinois state senate? With virtually no record of accomplishments he whipped the formidable Hillary Clinton electoral machine, then the McCain/Palin opposition, and then his own party’s left wing in the process.

The president does indeed fight for his convictions, much to the dismay of the liberals and progressives–a prominent sector of his own party constituency whom he mocked as the “professional left,” then rendered powerless by furling his brows. The problem isn’t the president’s “weakness” but his now only partially disguised moderate conservative convictions that allow him to pull his party to the right in the name of bipartisanship, even if it takes humiliating his most fervent supporters.

It wasn’t Obama’s fear and trembling but self-confident chutzpah during the deficit debates when he gratuitously consigned the greatest achievements of the New Deal and Great Society to the future chopping block, and in House Speaker John Boehner’s opinion gave the Republican leadership 98% of what it actually sought.

In fact there was no real debt crisis or probability of default. Raising the debt limit is as American as Thanksgiving dinner, and it’s an economic necessity in a recession. Obama had a perfect right to avoid default unilaterally by invoking his 14th Amendment obligation to pay the country’s bills. He chose to allow the charade to fester. Wall Street was well aware there would be a last minute agreement to cut programs and not raise taxes, although the mass media converted the farce into a potential national calamity until the end.

Liberal critics and the trade union movement were appalled by Obama’s primary focus on reducing the deficit during a severe economic crisis as opposed to recognizing that the first priority should be heavy government investment in creating jobs. The headline over economist Paul Krugman’s New York Times column told it all: “The President Surrenders.”

Continuing high unemployment is one of the main reasons working class/middle class families may experience a painful double-dip recession, extending the crisis many years. Officially, 9.1% or 14 million American workers are jobless. Black unemployment 16.7%. When the total includes “discouraged workers” who have given up constant job seeking for lack of success, along with part-time workers who cannot obtain needed full-time employment, the pool expands to nearly 30 million workers or 16.2% of the labor force.

Obama responded to intense criticism and dismay about his inattention to unemployment from various quarters by putting forward a jobs program in a major speech to a joint session of Congress Sept. 8. The proposal, titled the American Jobs Act, appeared to offer considerably more breaks and financial incentives to businesses to hire more employees than to the jobless workers.

The chief executive stressed the bipartisan the nature of his proposal, maintaining that virtually all of its aspects were supported by conservatives as well as Democrats, and assuring Republicans fixated upon deficit reduction that “everything in this bill will be paid for” through a scheme to increase the amount of money the to be sliced from future spending. Part of such reductions will derive from cuts in Medicare and Medicaid, just as the liberals and unions feared. Much of the $447 billion pricetag will go to tax breaks for business and a reduction in payroll taxes to employees and companies.

The initial reaction to the plan by liberal economists was that it will create jobs but hardly cause a serious reduction in the jobless rate, assuming that it passes Congress without big cuts. The plan envisioned many jobs would derive from a campaign to rebuild a portion of America’s decaying infrastructure, but it is extremely doubtful this will get off the ground. More details are expected next week.

There was also no compelling necessity for Obama to decide “you have to put everything on the table” for the budget cutters including Social Security as well as Medicare and Medicaid. That was the administration’s political preference, regardless of bitter howling from the 83-member Congressional Progressive Caucus, co-chaired by Reps. Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ) and Keith Ellison (D-MN). The House Democratic Blue Dog coalition of fiscal conservatives has only 26 members but patently enjoys considerably more influence in the White House than the marginalized progressives. The GOP controls the House, but the hyperactive Tea Party Caucus, chaired by Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), has 23 fewer members than the Progressive Caucus, and it has been far more effective because it has leadership support.

The Progressive Caucus has been sharply critical of what the White House and the Democratic political and funding powers are giving away to the conservatives, but few dare speak as frankly as Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH)–the best and boldest of the remaining center-left House members–during an interview with Truthdig Aug. 4 in discussing the deficit agreement with the Republicans:

I think that this idea that somehow the White House was forced into a bad deal is politically naive. When we saw the White House signal early on that it was ready for cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid by actually setting aside bedrock principles that the Democratic Party has stood on for generations, that signal indicated that they were ready for a deal that would involve massive cutting of social spending, and increasing or locking in increases for war, and helping further the ambitions of the Defense Department, not touching the Bush tax cuts. And that’s exactly what happened.

During his June 8 speech, Obama justified cutting two of the three historic Democratic Party achievements in these words:

I realize there are some in my party who don’t think we should make any changes at all to Medicare and Medicaid…. But with an aging population and rising health care costs, we are spending too fast to sustain the program. And if we don’t gradually reform the system while protecting current beneficiaries, it won’t be there when future retirees need it.

This is doubletalk, based on catering to conservatism by refusing to consider a number of available alternatives to program reduction.

It should be noted that the Obama White House routinely shifts to the right on issues that do not necessarily depend on House votes, undercutting the argument that the Republicans always tie his hands. The administration’s dreadful environmental record, for instance, is largely independent of the antediluvian climate change deniers in Congress. The White House decision to abandon the Environmental Protection Agency’s tough new air pollution regulations Sept. 2 was a concession to big business, which could have lost some excess profits due to reduced emissions of smog-causing chemicals, not the result of a filibuster or lack of votes.

This “betrayal,” as it has been termed by environmental leaders, follows recent Oval Office decrees to allow more oil drilling in the Arctic and Gulf of Mexico, approval of the tar sands Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada to Texas, calls for more nuclear power plants, and increased drilling for polluting natural gas as well as utter passivity toward climate change. None of these decisions were “forced” upon the Obama Administration.

What all this suggests to us, is that the White House is dedicating its principal efforts to imposing a more conservative economic and political agenda on the American people, and that part of the process is bending over backward to create an informal but virtual government of national unity between the center right and right/far right ruling parties.

The Obama Administration evidences a breezy willingness to give away the Democratic Party’s tattered remnants of liberalism, to weaken some past attainments achieved after years of struggle, and forego fighting for new social programs. The result has been two or three steps to the right, by commission or omission, for every nebulous step to the “left,” such as the administration’s health care plan, which was based on the moderate Republican effort in Massachusetts.

Much closer political unity with the right wing was the meaning of the continuing mantra during the 2008 Obama campaign about extending his hand “across the aisle,” governing “as Americans not as Republicans or Democrats” and insisting that

There is not a liberal America, or a conservative America, but a United States of America.

As we declared in this newsletter a few days before Obama was elected almost three years ago:

Does this mean there is no need for political struggle–that lion and lamb are about to bed down together, solving the problems of the country and world with some pillow talk among all us Americans finally freed from the stressful complications of politics? This notion is preposterous, of course.

Why would President Obama put forward such a policy? There are several factors, but in our view the main one is an effort to address America’s declining superpower status globally and domestically, economically and politically. The erosion of U.S. power was hastened during eight years of Bush Administration mismanagement and imperialism, two lost wars, record military spending, tax cuts for the rich, enormous debts and finally the Great Recession.

In his jobs speech Obama emphasized the need to

show the world once again why the United States of America remains the greatest nation on Earth.

Retaining world “leadership,” i.e., geopolitical economic and military supremacy, has been a constant refrain from Obama since at least two years before winning the presidency, and is obviously a factor in the support he receives from a large sector of those who rule America.

Domestically, the White House seeks to strengthen the capitalist sector, reorganize the economy to confer even greater powers upon the corporations, banks, Wall St. and the wealthy; renegotiate downward the social contract with the working class and middle class by further limiting popular spending, entitlements, and government programs to help the people; and reduce union power even further while mumbling pro-labor sentiments. In addition, there has been an effort to reassert the unifying spirit of national chauvinism, militarism, and warrior worship.

Internationally, the White House policy is to reinvigorate American global domination; refurbish Washington’s dilapidated international reputation; retain U.S. hegemonic interests in the Arab world by intervening in the regional uprisings; restore a more subtle form of U.S. dominion in Latin America; and reverse recent history by finally winning some wars for the $1.4 trillion Washington forks out annually for the Pentagon and national security (i.e., the Afghan “surge” to forestall yet another defeat, extending the war to western Pakistan, crushing tiny Libya and keeping U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan long past the deadline for complete withdrawal).

But if the Democrats are right of center these days and making concessions for functional unity with the right/far right party why are the Republicans creating dysfunction and saying “no” to everything and creating political havoc? Because they want a lot more and think they can grab it. The GOP is obtaining a good political deal at bargain basement prices. For its part, the White House is selling out cheaply to clear the shelves of old liberal merchandize to make room for new more conservative product of its own. Since Republican antics usefully convey the public impression of “forcing” Obama to make concessions against his will, the Democrats won’t get too much blame for the even more corporate and unequal, even less generous and forgiving America to come.

Conservatives have wanted to destroy the progressive gains of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Great Depression era New Deal since their inception in the 1930s, including Social Security. And the right wing backlash against the activism of the 1960s, focused on hard fought social and cultural advances as well as the abundant liberal legislation of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society–including Medicare and Medicaid–has been never ending since the 1970s.

Since that time a blanket of conservatism gradually began to cover much of the U.S., along with stagnant wages, the dwindling of the American Dream and the end of significant new government social programs for the people. Now, in the midst of a devastating economic breakdown and cutbacks in essential federal and state government services, the once center left Democratic Party is offering the to put the three crown jewels of the Roosevelt-Johnson period “on the table” to be examined by the new bipartisan Joint Selective Committee for Deficit Reduction, which is due to make decisions by late November.

One thing is certain about the 2008 election. The American people wanted change, big change from their next government. Candidate Obama promised change they could “believe in.” The people were encouraged to respond in unison by chanting “Yes we can,” entertaining hopes of fewer wars, more secure incomes, greater attention to health, education, job creation and the environment, some help for the poor, and perhaps more equality with an African American in the White House. The Democratic platform was filled with empty generalities, but the campaign remained intentionally vague about what its “change” was all about. This was the tip-off to an impending deception that became obvious after the election, when the changes they hoped for were not what Obama had in mind.

Now, following several grave concessions to conservatism before, during and after the early summer deficit fiasco with more to come, President Obama has to indulge in voicing populist rhetoric about jobs and infrastructure to galvanize the faithful into providing campaign dollars and innumerable volunteer hours to defeat the “evil doers” in 2012.
—

Part 2 will focus on liberal and labor misgivings about Obama’s policies and on what these forces will end up doing, among other election points.

American troops to remain in Iraq

Fri, 09 Sep 2011 12:26:43 GMT

by John Glaser
appearing in Activist Newsletter, September 9, 2011

The Obama administration has endorsed a plan that would keep 3,000-4,000 American troops in Iraq past the Dec. 31 deadline to withdraw, although the full there will be much larger. Just how large isn’t yet certain, but the numerous agencies and jobs planned for the future of Iraq could mean many thousands more armed men that will not be classified as “troops.”

After months of jostling the Iraqi government into allowing a large U.S. military force to remain after the full withdrawal date specified under the 2008 Status of Forces Agreement between President Bush and the Baghdad government, the Obama administration publicly voiced support for this plan without having received the permission of the Iraqi Prime Minister or Parliament. Some elements of the Obama administration and the Pentagon pushed for tens of thousands more troops to remain.

The few thousand troops would reportedly be left to provide training and support to Iraqi Security Forces as well as “filling in gaps” in Iraqi defense capabilities. An additional force of private military contractors, numbering somewhere between 5,000-7,000, would also remain in order to provide security for an expanded diplomatic and contractor presence.

The reduced level of troops is possible in tandem with the expanded diplomatic mission because the U.S. has been largely successful in its intentions in Iraq, setting in place the intended political, military, and economic elements for Iraq to become a long-term client state instead of a warfront. As the New York Times reported this week, the debate over specific numbers and figures is to some extent unimportant. “The administration has already drawn up plans for an extensive expansion of the American Embassy and its operations, bolstered by thousands of paramilitary security contractors.”

Iraq may rival long-time client, Egypt.
“An Office of Security Cooperation,” reported the Times,

like similar ones in countries like Egypt, would be staffed by civilians and military personnel overseeing the training and equipping of Iraq’s security forces

for an indefinite period.

The State Department is expected to have up to 17,000 employees and contractors for this ongoing diplomatic presence, which has been described as necessary to provide

situational awareness around the country, manage political crises in potential hotspots such as Kirkuk, and provide a platform for delivering economic, development and security assistance.

Cutting through the bureaucratese, this means essentially to maintain Iraq’s client-state status.

Providing housing, workspace, medical facilities, and security for a legion of civilian workers this large requires exorbitant funds, expansive land use, and construction not yet finalized in most areas.

According to the most recent Quarterly Report of the Special Inspector General for Iraq, the Department of State “will assume primary responsibility for a planned $6.8 billion operation” carried out

from 11 locations around Iraq, including three consulates and the world’s largest embassy.

Responsibilities also include carrying out

two of the largest Foreign Military Sales (FMS) and Foreign Military Financing (FMF) programs in the world and to spend the $2.55 billion in Iraq Security Forces Fund (ISFF).

As detailed in a declassified, partially redacted State Department document, a “fleet of 46 aircraft” will be “based and maintained in Baghdad, Basra, and Erbil” and will include 20 medium lift S-61 helicopters, 18 light lift UH-1N helicopters, three light observation MD-530 helicopters, and five Dash 8 fixed wing aircraft. Flight and landing zones, maintenance hangars, operation buildings, and air traffic control towers, along with maintenance and refueling will all be a part of the contracted construction operations.

Agreements will be negotiated with Iraq, Kuwait, and Jordan to secure authorization for continuous Embassy flight plans between the three countries, which all contain a massive presence of U.S. military, diplomatic, and contractor personnel.

The State Department’s $3.7 billion request for Iraq in FY 2012 includes funding for integrated programs of economic management as part of this so-called withdrawal plan. The United States Agency for International Development, alongside the United States Department of Agriculture, will continue to oversee sectors of Iraq’s economy, especially its natural resources, as agreed upon in the secretive Strategic Framework Agreement.

Signs are that the Iraqi government will conform to U.S. wishes on the size, scope, and nature of the continuing American presence in Iraq. Given the political, military, and economic infrastructure set to be implemented by Washington post-2011, it is also likely that Iraq may soon become another prosaic Middle Eastern state under the U.S. domain of influence.

— John Glaser writes for Antiwar.com, where this article appeared Sept. 7.

Two Santa Clauses, or how the Republican Party has conned America for 30 years

Wed, 07 Sep 2011 22:40:22 GMT

by Thom Hartmann
Published on Monday, January 26, 2009,
by CommonDreams.org

Thom Hartmann (thom@thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored Award-winning New York Times best-selling author, and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk program, The Thom Hartmann Show. His most recent books are Rebooting the American Dream: 11 Ways to Rebuild Our Country and an updated edition of Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became “People”–And How You Can Fight Back. Previous books include: Threshold: The Crisis of Western Culture, The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, We The People: A Call To Take Back America, What Would Jefferson Do?, Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class and What We Can Do About It, and Cracking The Code: The Art and Science of Political Persuasion.

This weekend [as Obama was inaugurated], House Republican leader John Boehner played out the role of Jude Wanniski on NBC’s “Meet The Press.”

Odds are you’ve never heard of Jude, but without him Reagan never would have become a “successful” president, Republicans never would have taken control of the House or Senate, Bill Clinton never would have been impeached, and neither George Bush would have been president.

When Barry Goldwater went down to ignominious defeat in 1964, most Republicans felt doomed (among them the then-28-year-old Wanniski). Goldwater himself, although uncomfortable with the rising religious right within his own party and the calls for more intrusion in people’s bedrooms, was a diehard fan of Herbert Hoover’s economic worldview.

In Hoover’s world (and virtually all the Republicans since reconstruction with the exception of Teddy Roosevelt), market fundamentalism was a virtual religion. Economists from Ludwig von Mises to Friedrich Hayek to Milton Friedman had preached that government could only make a mess of things economic, and the world of finance should be left to the Big Boys–the Masters of the Universe, as they sometimes called themselves–who ruled Wall Street and international finance.

Hoover enthusiastically followed the advice of his Treasury Secretary, multimillionaire Andrew Mellon, who said in 1931:

Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate. Purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down… enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.

Thus, the Republican mantra was:

Lower taxes, reduce the size of government, and balance the budget.

The only problem with this ideology from the Hooverite perspective was that the Democrats always seemed like the bestowers of gifts, while the Republicans were seen by the American people as the stingy Scrooges, bent on making the lives of working people harder all the while making richer the very richest. This, Republican strategists since 1930 knew, was no way to win elections.

Which was why the most successful Republican of the 20th century up to that time, Dwight D. Eisenhower, had been quite happy with a top income tax rate on millionaires of 91%. As he wrote to his brother Edgar Eisenhower in a personal letter on November 8, 1954:

[T]o attain any success it is quite clear that the Federal government cannot avoid or escape responsibilities which the mass of the people firmly believe should be undertaken by it. The political processes of our country are such that if a rule of reason is not applied in this effort, we will lose everything–even to a possible and drastic change in the Constitution. This is what I mean by my constant insistence upon ‘moderation’ in government.

Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt [you possibly know his background], a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.

Goldwater, however, rejected the “liberalism” of Eisenhower, Rockefeller, and other “moderates” within his own party. Extremism in defense of liberty was no vice, he famously told the 1964 nominating convention, and moderation was no virtue. And it doomed him and his party.

And so after Goldwater’s defeat, the Republicans were again lost in the wilderness just as after Hoover’s disastrous presidency. Even four years later when Richard Nixon beat LBJ in 1968, Nixon wasn’t willing to embrace the economic conservatism of Goldwater and the economic true believers in the Republican Party. And Jerry Ford wasn’t, in their opinions, much better. If Nixon and Ford believed in economic conservatism, they were afraid to practice it for fear of dooming their party to another forty years in the electoral wilderness.

By 1974, Jude Wanniski had had enough. The Democrats got to play Santa Claus when they passed out Social Security and Unemployment checks – both programs of the New Deal – as well as when their “big government” projects like roads, bridges, and highways were built giving a healthy union paycheck to construction workers. They kept raising taxes on businesses and rich people to pay for things, which didn’t seem to have much effect at all on working people (wages were steadily going up, in fact), and that made them seem like a party of Robin Hoods, taking from the rich to fund programs for the poor and the working class. Americans loved it. And every time Republicans railed against these programs, they lost elections.

Everybody understood at the time that economies are driven by demand. People with good jobs have money in their pockets, and want to use it to buy things. The job of the business community is to either determine or drive that demand to their particular goods, and when they’re successful at meeting the demand then factories get built, more people become employed to make more products, and those newly-employed people have a paycheck that further increases demand.

Wanniski decided to turn the classical world of economics – which had operated on this simple demand-driven equation for seven thousand years – on its head. In 1974 he invented a new phrase–“supply side economics”–and suggested that the reason economies grew wasn’t because people had money and wanted to buy things with it but, instead, because things were available for sale, thus tantalizing people to part with their money. The more things there were, the faster the economy would grow.

At the same time, Arthur Laffer was taking that equation a step further. Not only was supply-side a rational concept, Laffer suggested, but as taxes went down, revenue to the government would go up!

Neither concept made any sense – and time has proven both to be colossal idiocies – but together they offered the Republican Party a way out of the wilderness.

Ronald Reagan was the first national Republican politician to suggest that he could cut taxes on rich people and businesses, that those tax cuts would cause them to take their surplus money and build factories or import large quantities of cheap stuff from low-labor countries, and that the more stuff there was supplying the economy the faster it would grow. George Herbert Walker Bush–like most Republicans of the time–was horrified. Ronald Reagan was suggesting “Voodoo Economics,” said Bush in the primary campaign, and Wanniski’s supply-side and Laffer’s tax-cut theories would throw the nation into such deep debt that we’d ultimately crash into another Republican Great Depression.

But Wanniski had been doing his homework on how to sell supply-side economics. In 1976, he rolled out to the hard-right insiders in the Republican Party his “Two Santa Clauses” theory, which would enable the Republicans to take power in America for the next thirty years.

Democrats, he said, had been able to be “Santa Clauses” by giving people things from the largesse of the federal government. Republicans could do that, too – spending could actually increase. Plus, Republicans could be double Santa Clauses by cutting people’s taxes! For working people it would only be a small token–a few hundred dollars a year on average–but would be heavily marketed. And for the rich it would amount to hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts. The rich, in turn, would use that money to import or build more stuff to market, thus increasing supply and stimulating the economy. And that growth in the economy would mean that the people still paying taxes would pay more because they were earning more.

There was no way, Wanniski said, that the Democrats could ever win again. They’d have to be anti-Santas by raising taxes, or anti-Santas by cutting spending. Either one would lose them elections.

When Reagan rolled out Supply Side Economics in the early 80s, dramatically cutting taxes while exploding (mostly military) spending, there was a moment when it seemed to Wanniski and Laffer that all was lost. The budget deficit exploded and the country fell into a deep recession–the worst since the Great Depression–and Republicans nationwide held their collective breath. But David Stockman came up with a great new theory about what was going on – they were “starving the beast” of government by running up such huge deficits that Democrats would never, ever in the future be able to talk again about national health care or improving Social Security–and this so pleased Alan Greenspan, the Fed Chairman, that he opened the spigots of the Fed, dropping interest rates and buying government bonds, producing a nice, healthy goose to the economy. Greenspan further counseled Reagan to dramatically increase taxes on people earning under $37,800 a year by increasing the Social Security (FICA/payroll) tax, and then let the government borrow those newfound hundreds of billions of dollars off-the-books to make the deficit look better than it was.

Reagan, Greenspan, Winniski, and Laffer took the federal budget deficit from under a trillion dollars in 1980 to almost three trillion by 1988, and back then a dollar could buy far more than it buys today. They and George HW Bush ran up more debt in eight years than every president in history, from George Washington to Jimmy Carter, combined. Surely this would both starve the beast and force the Democrats to make the politically suicidal move of becoming deficit hawks.

And that’s just how it turned out. Bill Clinton, who had run on an FDR-like platform of a “new covenant” with the American people that would strengthen the institutions of the New Deal, strengthen labor, and institute a national health care system, found himself in a box. A few weeks before his inauguration, Alan Greenspan and Robert Rubin sat him down and told him the facts of life: he was going to have to raise taxes and cut the size of government. Clinton took their advice to heart, raised taxes, balanced the budget, and cut numerous programs, declaring an “end to welfare as we know it” and, in his second inaugural address, an “end to the era of big government.” He was the anti-Santa Claus, and the result was an explosion of Republican wins across the country as Republican politicians campaigned on a platform of supply-side tax cuts and pork-rich spending increases.

Looking at the wreckage of the Democratic Party all around Clinton by 1999, Winniski wrote a gloating memo that said, in part: “We of course should be indebted to Art Laffer for all time for his Curve… But as the primary political theoretician of the supply-side camp, I began arguing for the ‘Two Santa Claus Theory’ in 1974. If the Democrats are going to play Santa Claus by promoting more spending, the Republicans can never beat them by promoting less spending. They have to promise tax cuts…”

Ed Crane, president of the Libertarian CATO Institute, noted in a memo that year:

When Jack Kemp, Newt Gingich, Vin Weber, Connie Mack and the rest discovered Jude Wanniski and Art Laffer, they thought they’d died and gone to heaven. In supply-side economics they found a philosophy that gave them a free pass out of the debate over the proper role of government. Just cut taxes and grow the economy: government will shrink as a percentage of GDP, even if you don’t cut spending. That’s why you rarely, if ever, heard Kemp or Gingrich call for spending cuts, much less the elimination of programs and departments.

George W. Bush embraced the Two Santa Claus Theory with gusto, ramming through huge tax cuts–particularly a cut to a maximum 15 percent income tax rate on people like himself who made their principle income from sitting around the pool waiting for their dividend or capital gains checks to arrive in the mail–and blowing out federal spending. Bush even outspent Reagan, which nobody had ever thought would again be possible.

And it all seemed to be going so well, just as it did in the early 1920s when a series of three consecutive Republican presidents cut income taxes on the uber-rich from over 70 percent to under 30 percent. In 1929, pretty much everybody realized that instead of building factories with all that extra money, the rich had been pouring it into the stock market, inflating a bubble that–like an inexorable law of nature–would have to burst. But the people who remembered that lesson were mostly all dead by 2005, when Jude Wanniski died and George Gilder celebrated the Reagan/Bush supply-side-created bubble economies in a Wall Street Journal eulogy:

…Jude’s charismatic focus on the tax on capital gains redeemed the fiscal policies of four administrations. … [T]he capital-gains tax has come erratically but inexorably down–while the market capitalization of U.S. equities has risen from roughly a third of global market cap to close to half. These many trillions in new entrepreneurial wealth are a true warrant of the worth of his impact. Unbound by zero-sum economics, Jude forged the golden gift of a profound and passionate argument that the establishments of the mold must finally give way to the powers of the mind. He audaciously defied all the Buffetteers of the trade gap, the moldy figs of the Phillips Curve, the chic traders in money and principle, even the stultifying pillows of the Nobel Prize.

In reality, his tax cuts did what they have always done over the past 100 years: They initiated a bubble economy that would let the very rich skim the cream off the top just before the ceiling crashed in on working people.

The Republicans got what they wanted from Wanniski’s work. They held power for thirty years, made themselves trillions of dollars, cut organized labor’s representation in the workplace from around 25 percent when Reagan came into office to around 8 of the non-governmental workforce today, and left such a massive deficit that some misguided “conservative” Democrats are again clamoring to shoot Santa with working-class tax hikes and entitlement program cuts.

And now Boehner, McCain, Brooks, and the whole crowd are again clamoring to be recognized as the ones who will out-Santa Claus the Democrats. You’d think after all the damage they’ve done that David Gregory would have simply laughed Boehner off the program – much as the American people did to the Republicans in the last election–although Gregory is far too much a gentleman for that. Instead, he merely looked incredulous; it was enough.

The Two Santa Claus theory isn’t dead, as we can see from today’s Republican rhetoric. Hopefully, though, reality will continue to sink in with the American people and the massive fraud perpetrated by Wanniski, Reagan, Laffer, Graham, Bush(s), and all their “conservative” enablers will be seen for what it was and is. And the Obama administration can get about the business of repairing the damage and recovering the stolen assets of these cheap hustlers.

Downgrading democracy

Sun, 21 Aug 2011 13:22:04 GMT

by Ilyse Hogue
August 10, 2011

This article appeared in the August 29-September 5, 2011, edition of The Nation.

Most of the endless rehashing of the debt deal has correctly focused on the fact that corporate interests and Tea Party politics have prevailed again, at the expense of the middle class, children in poverty, students and the elderly. But too little attention has been paid to the blow this drawn-out debate has dealt to the foundational principles of our democracy.

A CNN/ORC International poll conducted after the deal shows that a whopping 77 percent of Americans believe that elected officials acted like “spoiled children.” The yawning gap between the mindset of decision-makers in Washington and the daily reality of most Americans is a grave threat to what organizers call “little-d democracy.” This is about neither the Democratic Party nor the procedural machinery by which our nominally democratic government operates. “Little-d democracy” is the basic idea that ordinary Americans, regardless of rank or stature, can have a voice in shaping their destiny.

When all is said and done, the process that created the debt deal may end up being as destructive as the deal’s effects. While the country watched helplessly, each new turn and every talking head in the saga demonstrated that ordinary people had no real part to play. Unless we employed an army of lobbyists or had a key to the Congressional washroom, it seemed, there was no reconciling the debate on the Hill with the needs and desires of those most affected by the final deal.

Some points to consider:

For months, poll after poll showed that rank-and-file Americans of all political persuasions believe that revenues (the nice way to say taxes) should be a part of any deal. Seventy-two percent of Americans polled between July 14 and July 17 said taxes should be raised on those making more than $250,000 per year, including 73 percent of independents and a stunning 54 percent of Republicans. Fifty-nine percent wanted taxes raised on oil and gas companies, including 60 percent of independents and 55 percent of Republicans. Yet Republican legislators refused to vote for any deal that included revenues, and the Democratic leadership capitulated, even though the GOP’s position was exactly the opposite of what large majorities wanted.
In the week leading up to the vote, more than 600 rallies were held around the country supporting the passage of a clean debt-ceiling bill and protecting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid from cuts. MoveOn.org alone made more than 125,000 calls to Congress to support a clean debt-ceiling raise. Coverage of all of these rallies was minimal at best. There was also one Tea Party rally, which, despite the impressive resources of its corporate backers, was sparsely attended. Yet the talk in Washington almost exclusively centered on what the Tea Party would accept.
Respected economists on both sides of the partisan divide agree that cutting spending during a recession is all but certain to make things worse. This consensus was hardly mentioned in the debate and not at all reflected in the outcome.
The press skewed coverage away from reporting the facts in favor of presenting both parties’ claims equally, regardless of facts. As a result, most major media reported that both sides were compromising when, in fact, the GOP—the party less representative of the views of most Americans—was winning far more concessions and compromising far less.
The president’s simple reminder to the American people that they can and should communicate with those they voted into office set off a firestorm of debate on cable news and other news outlets about whether this was an act designed to anger Republicans and whether it was appropriate for the president to make such an ask. Andrea Mitchell of MSNBC asked Democratic strategist Bill Burton if the president should really be taking his case to the American people and if the crisis would be better solved by leaders meeting behind closed doors.
Finally, the construction of a new “Super Congress,” also nicknamed the Gang of Twelve, is yet further separation between the deal-makers and the people whose lives hang in the balance. In 2008 a similar issue arose when it appeared that unelected “superdelegates” might decide the outcome of the Democratic primary. A nationwide frenzy about direct democracy resulted. Contrast that response with the lack of such an outcry over the Super Congress—evidence, perhaps, of a weary citizenry that has given up.

This combination of factors—overlooked citizen action, disregarded public opinion, unheeded expert warnings, uncritical press coverage that ignores the facts and denigrates citizen participation—creates conditions for a broad-scale disengagement from the processes that nominally allow citizens to participate in governance. In fact, when a Washington Post/Pew Research Center poll asked for single-word characterizations of the budget negotiations, “ridiculous” was at the top of the list, along with “disgusting” and “stupid.” Seventy-two percent responded with a negative word, and only 2 percent had positive feelings to offer. This is a far more disturbing trend than what we would have seen if the poll had reflected voter anger and frustration. Anger moves people. Disgust and contempt for government create apathy.

We are coming off a decade of unprecedented organizing opportunity. With the emergence of online engagement and social media, Americans were beginning to feel that they had a way to participate strategically in the conversations in Washington that shape their lives. This president was the first one elected using broad engagement strategies, and his election changed the national psyche by demonstrating to millions of Americans that their participation could pay off and democracy could work. The disappointment about the debt deal is especially acute against the backdrop of the record levels of participation, enthusiasm and hope generated during the 2008 election.

In between, we had the 2010 Citizens United decision, which rebuilt the gates around the Capitol that the online revolution had supposedly crashed. Corporate cash, already omnipresent in lobbying, dominated the airwaves; and thirty-second ads, played over and over again, drowned out the millions of organized voices crying out for change. That led to the 2010 election of radical candidates representing a tiny minority of Americans who were more concerned about the federal deficit than they were about joblessness and the overall economy.

The debt deal’s final resolution of what essentially amounted to a hostage crisis by that minority represents a complete unmooring of official decision-making from the will of the American people. The past few weeks could be the final straw that leads to a collapse of confidence not just in this government but in the American project of self-governance. At a time of so much great need in our country, sending the message that citizen involvement is futile is dangerous not just to the substance of one debate but to the core principles that allow us to call ourselves a democracy. Are we really prepared to risk that?

Hiroshima to Fukushima

Tue, 16 Aug 2011 18:28:17 GMT

by Helen Caldicott,
speech delivered in Albequerque, NM
20 March 2011
available from Alternative Radio

Helen Caldicott, an Australian-born pediatrician, is a world-renowned environmental activist. She was the founding president of Physicians for Social Responsibility, an organization which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. She is the author of Missile Envy, If You Love This Planet, and Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer.

I think what I should do as a doctor and a pediatrician is to walk you through radiation and internal emitters and what it means. It wasn’t developed in New Mexico. The first nuclear fission reaction took place, actually, at the University of Chicago, but the nuclear weapons work was all done first in Los Alamos. Robert Oppenheimer chose a school that was isolated and formulated Los Alamos Labs. I’m not going do uranium mining now, because things are so complex, I have to try and teach you about nuclear power, Fukushima, the medical effects, Chernobyl, and then I’ll go on to the labs and Sandia and Kirtland Air Force Base here in Albuquerque and all the rest.

Basically, there are five sorts of radiation. There are X-rays. Hands up, those whose have never had an X-ray. You’ve never had your teeth X-rayed? You don’t need your teeth X-rayed every year. That’s ridiculous. My ex- husband was a radiologist. They make a lot of money. If you’ve got a very sore tooth, you might need an X-ray to diagnose an abscess or whatever. Never have an unnecessary X-ray. Doctors take too many. CT scans give you a hell of a dose. My daughter, who is a doctor, persuaded me, because I’ve got some heart disease, to have a CT scan recently. And I had it, and then they found some stuff in my liver which they thought might be cancer, so she took me in the next day to have another one. And I got a total of 22 rems, which is a hell of a dose. I was really freaked out. And she said, “Mom, don’t worry. You won’t live long enough to get cancer.” So I was very reassured. That’s daughters for you.

Radiation is basically cumulative: each dose you receive adds to your risk of getting cancer. Never go through those X-ray machines at the airports. That’s absolutely medically contraindicated. In fact, I have whole body searches. And I don’t care what cavities they search, I’m not going to have an X-ray.

The biggest irradiators of the public at this time are the medical profession. Often they don’t really know what they’re doing. The New York Times has just had an excellent series of articles where people have been irradiated incorrectly. The technicians haven’t gradated the machines accurately, and have been actually giving CT scans to neonates. Babies are very, very sensitive to radiation, because as the cells divide, the genes are replicating, and so they tend to mutate. Fetuses are thousands of times more sensitive, and pregnant women are walking through those X-ray machines and their babies. One X-ray to the pregnant abdomen doubles the incidence of leukemia in that child. Similar work was done by a wonderful woman called Dr. Alice Stewart, whom the AEC tried to discredit for years and years, but she was proven to be right.

So be careful and be tough with your doctor. I know that we tend to be godlike, and we’re a bit arrogant and we don’t always communicate with you adequately. But ask why you’re having an X-ray and be tough. If you’ve got pneumonia, you need an X-ray. The risk is minimal, the benefit is great. But each dose you get adds to your risk of getting cancer. And there is no radiation that is safe, despite the fact that people on television all over the world are saying the doses are too low to have any significance. You already get background radiation from the rocks on the Earth, from the sun, from radon. And I can’t remember the figure, but I think it’s about 30% of cancer we already see is induced by background radiation.

When the Earth was very, very hot, no one could survive. As it cooled down radiologically, life forms developed, and then mutations arose from the radiation. And that’s how birds developed wings and fish developed lungs and the like. They’re called that advantageous mutations. It takes billions of years for an advantageous mutation to survive. Almost all other mutations are deleterious, inducing genetic disease, like cystic fibrosis, which is my specialty. One in 25 Caucasians carry that gene. We all carry several hundred genes for diseases in our cells and in our reproductive cells. So any more radiation increases the incidence of those diseases. But it takes up to 20 generations for an abnormal, deleterious mutation to express itself. The National Academy of Sciences produced the BEIR 7 report, “Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation,” which said no radiation is safe; every dose you get adds to your risk. We’re seeing a lot of cancers partly because the scientists at Los Alamos and in Nevada absolutely dowsed America with fallout from testing weapons at Nevada. How dare they? I’ve got the maps and the levels of radiation, and they’re really very high.

Why are we seeing an epidemic of cancer? Well, it’s partly because of that, but it’s also partly because we live in a chemical cocktail of 80,000 chemicals in everyday use, most of which have never been tested for carcinogenicity. And the chemical companies have made sure that the regulations say that we have to make sure the chemicals are dangerous. They don’t have to prove that they’re dangerous or safe before they cast them out. So we use in them our sinks and our kitchens and our bathrooms and in our carpets and in our curtains. Many plastic bottles have bisphenol A, which is carcinogenic, so never use a plastic bottle and never drink water out of one. Drink it out of the tap. That’s if you’ve got some water to drink out here.

So X-rays. They’re nonparticulate. So when the technician says, “Breathe in, hold it,” and runs out of the room and hides behind lead glass and it goes click, then you are irradiated, but you don’t become radioactive. It’s like irradiating food: it doesn’t become radioactive; it just passes through. And in that instant genes can be mutated.

The next one is gamma radiation, which is, like X- rays, nonparticulate, being given off by radioactive materials. What they’re doing at Fukushima, because all the monitors that normally monitor radiation are offline because either the tsunami damaged them and destroyed them or they were turned off, they’re running around with Geiger counters. A lot of the isotopes released from Fukushima give out gamma radiation—and I’ll give you an example of a few—but many do not. Because they’re either alpha emitters—an alpha emitter is an atom that emits two protons and two neutrons, and it’s large in mass. You can hold an alpha emitter, like uranium or plutonium, in your hand and it doesn’t penetrate the layers of dead cells in the epidermis to damage living cells. However, if you inhale plutonium into your lung, just a microgram, a millionth of a gram, it just irradiates a tiny volume of cells, because alphas do not travel far, but the dose is so high that almost all the cells in that volume are killed. But because radiation decreases with the square of the distance, on the periphery some cells survive. And the regulatory genes are mutated. Therefore, plutonium is a very potent carcinogen.

They want to set up a plutonium factory up at Los Alamos. And there is plutonium in the ravines up there, that drain into the river. And the Indians who live out there, many are exposed to plutonium. In fact, Glenn Seaborg, who discovered plutonium, said it’s the most dangerous element we know. Actually, there are more dangerous ones, like Americium, which is in all our smoke detectors. But when they injected plutonium into beagle dogs, they didn’t find a dose low enough that didn’t give all the dogs cancer, and that might be 10-9 grams, picograms.

Then there is beta radiation. It is just an electron emitted from the unstable atom. And they all do the same thing. Then there are neutrons, and they developed the neutron bomb, I suppose, up at Los Alamos. That’s the ultimate capitalist weapon. There’s very little blast, so not many buildings are destroyed, but it gives such a blast of neutrons that the brain swells in a fixed box and people develop ataxia, they develop seizures and severe headaches and die within days of acute encephalopathic syndrome. But the buildings actually become radioactive, because if you irradiate calcium and iron and all the rest, they become radioactive. They’re called activation products. So that’s radiation.

How does radiation cause cancer? In every cell of the body there’s a pair of genes—and I’m being simplistic because it’s getting quite complex now, genetics—called regulatory genes that control the rate of cell division. And if one is hit by X-ray—I got that one—or by an alpha particle missed all, it’s random. The gene itself mutates and biochemically the DNA molecule, and you don’t even know it’s been hit by radiation. It sits latently and cryptogenically for any time from 5 to 60 years. That’s the incubation time for cancer. That’s the ace that the nuclear industry had up their sleeve. Because if I sneeze on you, in two days you’re sneezing, you’ve got a cold. The measles, mumps, chicken pox, whooping cough, it’s three weeks’ incubation. But for cancer it’s long, silent, and cryptogenic. And when the cancer arises and you feel a lump in your breast, and then you think, Oh, god, and you go to your doctor and they do a biopsy and it’s cancer, it doesn’t wear a sign saying what it was caused by.

The only way you can work out if irradiated populations have a high incidence in cancer, their normal populations who are not irradiated, is to take the whole group—and that’s what America did with Hiroshima and Nagasaki with the Hibakushas—and compare on them to a nonexposed group. And you have to do autopsies on all of them, because our death certificates are very inaccurate. We get up in the middle of the night, we have woken up, we have to listen to the heart of a dead person and sign the death certificate. And because we’re tired and lazy, we might say they died of pneumonia, but actually they died of an underlying cancer.

The Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission studied the Hibakushas for years but they never treated them. And now they’re still dying of cancer. And they didn’t study them for a year, so many people died and were not included in the survey. But five years after the bomb dropped there was an epidemic of leukemia, and 15 years later solid cancers started appearing. And they’re still rising as I speak. Different cancers have different incubation times. Now we’re seeing cancers of the bone marrow and the genitourinary tract. Breast, thyroid, lung were pretty early. Little girls who were irradiated who had no breasts but nubbins of breast tissue later on had a very high incidence of breast cancer. So that’s how we got our data.

But there are literally thousands of studies showing that radiation causes cancer. So it takes a single alpha particle to hit a single gene in a single cell to kill you, okay? That’s what nobody understands who is on television today talking about Fukushima. That’s just simple radiation biology. I learned it in the first year of medical school.

There are cells that are more important than the somatic body cells, and they are the sperm and the eggs. In every sperm and egg there is half the number of genes, so when they unite, you’ve got a normal diploid number of genes. And they carry all the genes. We’re human because we have human genes, although 99.2% of our genes are the same as the chimps’, so I still think we don’t know much about genetics yet at all. Anyway, there are 2,600 genetic diseases now described. Most are recessive. So here’s a quiz. Two parents had blue eyes and they had a brown-eyed baby. Where did the brown eyes come? Y es, the milkman. You’ve got it. And because it takes 20 generations sometimes for recessive genes to get together, like cystic fibrosis, like diabetes, like phenylketonuria, like inborn errors of metabolism, we’ll never see it. But what we do know is that a man called Muller years ago irradiated Drosophila fruit flies, that reproduce very quickly over a year and you get many generations. He irradiated them once and developed genes for a crooked wing and the like. That gene was passed on generation to generation. It was obviously dominant. I saw a family at Children’s Hospital in Boston once, there were two parents. One was an achondroplastic dwarf, very short arms and legs, big heads and normal trunk. Five of the six children were achondroplastic. So it’s a roll of the dice every time, whichever genes you get.

What we’re going to see over time, as radioactive waste accumulates from nuclear power and weapons—there is a huge amount of waste at Hanford, Washington, and Savannah River. It’s almost unbelievable. As it leaks, as it’s leaking now over time, there is no container that can contain radioactive material for greater than 100 years. Plutonium has a half-life of 24,400 years, and it’s around for half a million years, some say a quarter of a million. It doesn’t really matter. We think Jesus was antiquity, and he only lived 2,000 years ago. You only need 5 pounds to make yourself a nuclear weapon, and each reactor makes 500 pounds of plutonium a year. That’s why, as we export nuclear power all over the world, because it’s the latest, we’re exporting nuclear weapons. Proliferation. That’s wicked. So that’s a basic lecture in genetics.

I’m not going to go through the whole of nuclear power. Suffice it to say that nuclear power is supported by a vast industrial infrastructure, which creates huge amounts of CO2 and CFC gas and global warming. I outline that in the first chapter of my book, Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer to Global Warming. But, don’t you know, it’s clean, green, and sustainable. When I debated with generals about nuclear war, really, they hated the Russians and the Communists, but they knew that one nuclear bomb on a city would vaporize hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people. So they were honest. But when I debate with the nuclear power people, they are notoriously dishonest. That’s what really upsets me, for if I was dishonest in medicine, I would be deregistered. I would be killing my patients. Science is science is science.

The first thing is, their number one lie, it causes global warming in its own right. All I’m going to do is go along to the nuclear power plant. I won’t talk about mining uranium. In Australia we have 40% of the world’s uranium and we’re being wicked exporting it, because we’re exporting cancer, leukemia, genetic disease, and nuclear weapons. Remember what Einstein said when he discovered E=MC2? He said, “The splitting of the atom changed everything, all reality, save man’s mode of thinking.Thus we drift towards unparalleled catastrophe.” And you see it up there with those blokes at Los Alamos, you see it at Sandia. I addressed thousands of nuclear scientists at Sandia years ago and described bombs dropping and the medical effects of nuclear war. And they lined up in queues to ask me questions and they said, “That was very good.” They said they needed to hear this. They, not me.

A nuclear power plant has typically 100 tons of uranium packed into it in the form of fuel rods, which are like curtain rods, half an inch thick and 12 feet long. They’re made of zirconium, and I’ll get on to that in a minute. So 100 tons of uranium are packed into the reactor core. And between the uranium are rods of boron, which moderates the flux of neutrons, because uranium is always giving out neutrons. And as they’re slowly lifted out, the whole mass, 100 tons, reaches critical mass. It doesn’t explode like a nuclear weapon, but it starts shooting out neutrons everywhere, breaking apart the large uranium atoms, producing 200 new elements, all of which are medically extremely dangerous. Some last seconds and some last millions of years. What happens is, you’re releasing E=MC2. Energy equals the mass of the atom times the speed of light squared. We’ve captured the energy of the stars, which is totally inappropriate for our poor little fallible brains, moral or not.

Tremendous heat is produced when you withdraw the rods, and the heat boils the water. The water turns to steam, and it’s taken to a turbine, which generates electricity. So all a nuclear power plant is designed to do is to boil water. It’s like cutting a pound of butter with a chainsaw. And, as Einstein said, “Nuclear power is a hell of a way to boil water.” I worked with many of the blokes who worked in the Manhattan Project: George Kistiakowsky and Jerry Wiesner and Philip Morrison and many. They were so guilt-ridden about Hiroshima and Nagasaki that they thought if they could harness atoms for peace, they could die in relative peace. Well, they didn’t. They died guilt-ridden. Because they knew damn well the dangers of nuclear power.

Nuclear power plants need a million gallons a minute of cooling water circulating through them to keep them cool, from the sea or from a lake or from a river. This goes back relatively radioactive, not very, but relatively. But what happens is that the algae concentrates Ci tritium or strontium-90, thousands of times and the crustaceans concentrate it thousands of times, then the little fish, then the big fish. And we stand at the apex of the food chain. You can’t taste, smell, or see any of these things, and you don’t know the food is radioactive. So the solution to pollution by dilution when it comes to radiation is fallacious, biologically speaking.

What happens is that this circulation, the electricity to run the pumps, is not provided by the nuclear reactor, it’s provided by external power. And because of the earthquake, the power was lost, not just to the reactors, those six reactors built on an earthquake fault, but to many millions of people in Japan. So the pumps stopped. However, every reactor has big diesel generators as large as a house. And they had been—often they don’t work in an extreme situation, but they got drowned by the tsunami, so they didn’t work. So all the cooling to the reactors stopped. Yes, the boron rods went down as they should and stopped the fission reaction. But these rods are terribly, terribly hot, and so they had batteries which last for 8 hours. But they ran out of batteries. So what happened is that four of the reactors—I think it’s four—got into trouble and lost their cooling water. Two started to melt down.

What does a meltdown mean? Their heat is so intrinsic that if they’re not continually cooled, the zirconium cladding reacts with water to produce hydrogen, which collected in the building above the containment vessel, and it exploded. So I think three reactors had explosions, or four. But the containment vessel was okay, except I think reactor 4 or 3 has a crack in the containment. The water is leaking out, and they won’t be able to fix it.

On the roof of the reactor are the cooling pools. Every year they remove 30 tons of fuel rods, because they’re so full of these fission products they’re inefficient. And they’re so hot that if you stand next to one fuel rod for a couple of seconds, you get such a gamma dose of radiation, you will die within days with your hair falling out, vomiting and bleeding to death. Those men going to those reactors are all going to die. They’re dead men walking. My heart goes out to them. But the people living nearby could be getting large doses, too. The fuel pools were designed not to hold much because they were going to be transferred a waste storage facility. But there are none in the world. Nuclear power has been running since, what, 1954, when Eisenhower opened the first reactor. They’re put on racks. But because they’re running out of room, they’re reracking the rods closer and closer together, which means, in fact, they could reach critical mass themselves and burn and explode.

Two of the reactors lost their cooling water, so the zirconium reacted with air and it burnt. So there have been fires. And as it burns, the fuel rods are exposed, and so they can start melting. A real meltdown happens when the reactor runs out of water—and a couple have—and the zirconium collectors and the pellets of uranium—they’re like pieces of chalk—collect in a mass at the bottom, and they melt their way through the bottom of the reactor into the earth. It’s called the melt-through-to-China syndrome, hence the name of the film that Jane Fonda was in.

So what they’re doing, they’re pouring seawater in. They can’t get into the containment vessel because it’s a fixed system. They’re pouring it over the reactor core to try and cool it. Seawater makes these reactors unusable forevermore. As my son just pointed out to me in Boston, if one of them melts down, that’s the end, and they’ll all go.” I said, “What do you mean, Will?” He said, “No one will be there to fix it. They’ll all go.” That had not occurred to me. The ramifications are so vast.

So a meltdown in a cooling pool. There’s 2 to 20 times more radiation in the cooling pools, of course, than there is in the reactor itself. These reactors are about 40 years old. I know the GE guys who designed them. They resigned in 1976 because they were so dangerous, Bridenbaugh, Hubbard, and Minor. No one took any notice. But in fact, the reactors weren’t too badly damaged in the earthquake. It was actually the tsunami that did most of the damage. But the earthquake destroyed the electricity. They’ve rehooked some electricity up, but it won’t make any difference now. The pumps, apparently, are all damaged. A meltdown in a cooling pool will release 2 to 30 times more radiation than in the core itself. When you fission uranium, it becomes one billion times more radioactive than the original uranium. There is as much long-lived radiation in the core as 1,000 Hiroshima bombs. So the stuff is going up into the air and into the stratosphere. And in the stratosphere the winds go from west to east. And what’s east of Japan? You are. Already it’s spreading. The water in Tokyo apparently has radioactive elements in it, and they’re finding radioactive iodine and other things in the spinach and the like. So it’s already happening.

Now I’m going to tell you about the various isotopes. I’m only going to choose four of 200. You’re all intelligent. Go to the Internet, Google it, look up the periodic table, and look up the radiation that each element gives out—beta, gamma, alpha, and the like—and look at their half-lives. The half-life of a radioactive element is such that radioactive iodine has a half-life of eight days. So in eight days half of the radiation has decayed. In eight more days, half of that has decayed, in eight more days half of that. So it’s six weeks before it becomes relatively benign. What gland does iodine go to? The thyroid. We use it in medicine, actually, to diagnose cancer, radioactive iodine. And if you’ve got cancer and it’s spread, we give you a high dose of radioactive iodine—it’s called a drink—and we hope it migrates to all the metastases of the thyroid so it kills them with high doses of gamma radiation. The patient is radioactive for six weeks afterwards. We used to discharge them from hospital and just send them home, and they’re excreting in their urine, their feces I-131. But now they’re being a little more careful. I-131 I just talked about. Half-life eight days, six weeks it’s around for.

The next one is strontium-90. You all know about that because America and Russia and China dowsed the whole of the northern hemisphere with strontium 90 and the like in the 1950s and 1960s. The two AMSs at the equator don’t tend to mix, so we got irradiated by the British and the French. I led the movement against the French nuclear tests in the Pacific and Australia. And the Australians don’t like the French anyway: they think they’re arrogant, and they have no right to come down and damage our hemisphere, and our water was radioactive. So people stopped buying French perfume, French wine, the postal workers wouldn’t deliver French mail. It was a massive uprising. Seventy-five percent of people rose up spontaneously and said, “Those bloody French.” We took them to the World Court, the International Court of Justice, and they were forced to do tests underground. I’m getting warmed up.

Strontium 90 is a beta and a gamma. It has a half-life of 28 years, it’s around for 600 years. It’s a calcium analog, so it goes—where does it go? It goes to bone. It’s the femur. And it deposits just a little bit, irradiating osteoblasts, which are the bone-forming cells. And one of them can be mutated and used later. The patient develops a really sore lump on their leg. And it’s diagnosed, they’ve got osteogenic sarcoma. It spreads really rapidly to the lung and the like. Teddy Kennedy’s son Edward had one, lost his leg. Or it can cause leukemia, because the white blood cells are formed in the bone marrow, and if they’re irradiated—“leukemia” means white blood—the blood becomes full of immature white blood cells and there is no room for the platelets. So the patient dies either of massive hemorrhage or infection, like AIDS patients die.

Caesium-137 is a potassium analog. Potassium is ubiquitous, in every cell of the body. Its half-life is 30 years, it’s around for 600 years. It’s a beta and a gamma. It causes brain cancers and cancers in many organs. It’s concentrating in food. I want you to look at this map. And this, of course, is Europe and Russia. And here’s Chernobyl, pertinent today. The very dark red areas are areas of exclusion zones, and no one can live there because it’s so radioactive. The wind changed 360 degrees in the first 24 hours after Chernobyl melted. Gorbachev didn’t tell the world until 10 days later. They all obfuscate. The radiation was first picked up in Sweden by some monitors. They got a hell of a dose—Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, right across Europe. This is only caesium-137, but it’s indicative or symptomatic of many other isotopes, about 100 or more, that got out of the reactor, including one-third of the plutonium. So one-third of 500 pounds is what? Nearly 200 pounds. Austria, Italy, Greece. Turkey got a hell of a dose.

Do you get the picture? That’s what’s happening now in Japan. Suddenly I realized, five nights ago, before I came here, I thought, Oh, my God. If those reactors really melt down, that’s sort of the end of the northern hemisphere. In Australia we haven’t got any radioactive stuff, just a little bit from French and British tests. We only sell uranium. We don’t like having nuclear power because it’s too dangerous for us. We just sell it so everyone else can have the benefits. We’re wicked. I think it’s time to start using proper English. It’s time to stop being polite and using euphemisms.

The last but not least that I will describe—and then I’m going to get on to weapons—is plutonium. I’ve told you a little bit about that. Plutonium-239 is made when uranium-238, which is ubiquitous in the reactor, captures a neutron. This is great gear, because that’s what you make bombs from. At the height of its popularity America made 77,000 hydrogen bombs. That’s these bloody labs up here in Sandia and Los Alamos. And do I resent them. How dare they set up the world to be extinguished overnight? And it still holds true, and I’ll tell you why in a minute.

Plutonium has a half-life of 24,400 years. It’s an alpha emitter only. It has to get inside your body. It’s not absorbed too well from the gut, except in neonates, whose gut is immature. And it’s absorbed in chlorinated water better than in ordinary water. But it gets into the lung. It’s an iron analog. Iron is ubiquitous in hemoglobin. So it gets into the lung, and it may cause lung cancer—it does—but macrophage as white blood cells come and pick it up and take it to the mediastinal lymph glands, where it can cause leukemia or lymphomas. It’s stored in the liver, because liver stores iron, where it can cause liver cancer. It goes to the bone, because that’s where the hemoglobin is made, where it can cause bone cancer or leukemia. It crosses the placenta into the developing fetus, where it can kill a cell that’s going to form the right side of the brain or the left arm. And that’s called teratogenesis—damage of a genetically normal fetus. The placenta lets virtually nothing through, but it lets plutonium through because it thinks it’s iron.

It has a predilection for testicles. And every male in the northern hemisphere has a tiny load of plutonium in his testicles. It tends to deposit next to the seminiferous tubules, which are made of the spermatogonia, the precursors of sperm, where it irradiates the cells. And as the genetic mutations are induced, thus they pass on generation to generation. Meanwhile, if the man is cremated, which is contraindicated because it adds to global warming—I’m going to be buried in a cardboard coffin to feed the worms—the plutonium goes up the chimney, so another man can breathe it in. You can see there will be an exponential increase in genetic mutations. And we’re not the only ones who have sperm. All animals have sperm. And all plants have genes and can get cancer and deformities. So that’s plutonium. I said 500 pounds are made every year in the reactor.

Now the bombs. We led the movement, the Physicians for Social Responsibility. And millions of people in America got really alarmed about the medical effects of nuclear war because we taught them what it was.

I’ll just describe. Your city is targeted with at least—well, I would say probably 10 hydrogen bombs. The Russian bombs are really big. Los Alamos is targeted with a lot. New York is targeted with 10 H-bombs—I wrote an article with Bob McNamara about that—Washington probably with many more. You see, there is such a redundancy of nuclear weapons, and they use junior officers to work out the targeting strategy, never a senior officer. It was like pin the tail on the donkey—“Well, we’ll drop it on here.” They target factories, they target—in fact, in my book, The New Nuclear Danger, one general said, “We target whatever the enemy holds most dear.” And he said, “If indeed the enemy holds most dear grandmothers, that’s what we target.” That is obscene. And I’m a grandmother. That’s how they think. They’re killers.

American society is totally geared to killing. You spend a trillion dollars a year on weapons and killing and death. Not life. You don’t even have a free medical care system, and we do in Australia. My friend broke her kneecap, shattered into eight pieces. She went to hospital, best orthopedic surgeon in Sydney, anesthetic, hospital for 10 days. It cost her $700. You are crazy not to have free medical care. And it’s socialism. But guess what? Jesus was a socialist. Jesus said, “It’s more difficult for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.” You have been brainwashed and you’ve been socially engineered. You’ve got to not reduce the spending of the Pentagon but stop it. No one is going to attack you. Except the Russians might by accident.

Now, let me tell you, there are about 23,000 hydrogen bombs in the world and atomic. Of that, Russia and America have 97%. So who is the real rogue state? Who is the axis of evil? Russia and America. And it’s all about testosterone. I called my book years ago Missile Envy, à la Freud, and the generals hated it, but they all had a copy on their bookshelves because they knew it to be true. Anyway, we led the freeze movement, and Gorbachev, bless his heart, allowed the Berlin wall to fall. It had nothing to do with Ronald Reagan, whom I met with for an hour and a quarter in the White House and held his hand and established a doctor-patient relationship with him because he got quite anxious. He knew nothing. He said, “People who work for the nuclear weapons freeze are either KGB dupes or Soviet agents.” I said, “But that’s from last month’s Reader’s Digest.” It was verbatim. And his daughter Patti told me that’s the only thing he ever really read. He was a nice old man. He would have been a good chicken farmer. I estimated clinically his IQ to be about 100, because you have to estimate an IQ of the patient to make sure they put their suppository in at 7:00 a.m. and that they take their tablet. You have to work out how intelligent they are. And I came out saying I thought he had impending Alzheimer’s, and he did. So that’s Reagan. He spent more money than all past presidents combined on weapons. And that’s all in national defense.

The Coast Guard can protect you, and you’ve got friendly countries to the north and south. It’s such rhubarb that you’re sold. It’s ridiculous nonsense. Nonsense. And it’s all patriotism. “We’re the greatest country on earth.” No. What about Australia? We’ve got kangaroos, we’ve got koalas. What about that? We’ve got the most poisonous snakes in the world and the most poisonous spiders. And we’re very racist towards the aborigines. But we’re okay. We’re sort of like you guys.

When George the First got in, he was pretty good. He eliminated a lot of nuclear weapons unilaterally to support Gorbachev. And then we got William Jefferson Clinton. He had no spine and no guts. He had no courage to take on the Pentagon. And we handed him nuclear abolition on a silver platter. Everyone in the world wanted it. He had a partner in the Kremlin called Yeltsin who was such a hardened alcoholic, he probably had Korsakoff’s syndrome and Wernicke’s encephalopathy, which you get from drinking too much alcohol. Clinton could have got on Air Force One with a document flown to Yeltsin and said, “Sign here, Boris. We’re going to eliminate nuclear weapons in five years.” He did not. They are all still on hair-trigger alert. We could be blown up tonight, and I’ll tell you how in a minute. That’s his legacy.

Do I resent him for that? I’ve spent my life trying to get rid of these bloody things, and I’ve given up medicine, which is my true love. It’s like being a nun. My vocation is medicine. Yes, I’m practicing global preventive medicine, but it’s boring, and I have to give the same speech again and again. “Come on, children, 1+1=2.”

The other thing is that there is a precedent for abolition. Reagan and Gorbachev met in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1987. This is a fascinating story. There is a little house—and I was taken to it when I went to Iceland—and they evacuated the area a mile radius around and they had men with machine guns all around. So here’s Reagan and here’s Gorbachev and here’s Shultz in the next room with Shevardnaze, the foreign minister. Reagan came prepared with nothing. The Russians came with a plan to abolish nuclear weapons. Richard Perle, called the Prince of Darkness by the Pentagon, there was no room for him. He was up in the bathroom sitting on the lavatory with a board on the bath writing numbers on bits of lavatory paper because he had no paper. They came totally unprepared. So Gorbachev would suggest something, then Schultz would find out, and he would run up and talk to Perle. Meanwhile, in the basement were the KGB. They were imbibing their vodka, and of them chucked a match into the wastepaper basket. And it caught flames and nearly burnt the house down with Reagan and Gorbachev.

Reagan and Gorbachev agreed to abolish nuclear weapons, but they got stuck on Star Wars. You know, they had this yellow thing over America, boink, boink, and the missiles were diverted. It would never work. It was Reagan’s fantasy and Teller’s idea. Gorbachev was obstinate, because he knew it wouldn’t work, too. So he should have said to Reagan, “Okay, have your Star Wars. And we’ll do it.” So we missed the opportunity. Schultz was devastated. He came out and he said, “We did this, and we did this, and we did this.” And then he said, “And we did this.” It turned Schultz into a statesman. Two mere mortals over a weekend in a little house almost agreed to abolish nuclear weapons between the major superpowers.

America’s got about 2,500 nuclear weapons on hair- trigger alert. So does Russia. We don’t really know the figures. But they’re hydrogen bombs. I’m going to describe one bomb dropping on Albuquerque. Sometimes on NPR, you hear, “Wooooo. This is a test of the emergency broadcasting system.” They would say, “This is not a test. Get to the nearest fallout shelter. You’ve got 5 minutes.” Because once the weapons are launched, they take 30 minutes to go from launch to land. The other country’s satellite picks the attack up, they launch their weapons, and it’s over in one hour. The bomb will land on you at 20 times the speed of sound, so you won’t hear anything. It will explode with the heat inside the center of the sun like is captured in a nuclear power plant. It will dig a hole three-quarters of a mile wide and 800 feet deep, turning you and the buildings and the earth below to radioactive fallout in the mushroom cloud.

Five miles from the epicenter everyone will be turned into gas and vaporized. In Hiroshima a little boy was reaching up to catch a red dragonfly in his hand against the blue of the sky. There was a blinding flash and he disappeared and left his shadow on the concrete pavement. Never before had we been able to leave shadows of human beings. His shadow is in the Hiroshima Museum.

Twenty miles out everyone will be dead or lethally injured. People will be turned into missiles, sucked out of buildings at 100 miles an hour, incurring the most dreadful fractures, head injuries, and the like. There will be third- degree burns. People will be lying in what is left of the streets thinking, Why didn’t I stop this? They’ll all die.

And then a huge firestorm will spontaneously ignite of 3,000 square miles, burning absolutely everything—all buildings, even in the depth of the winter, covered in snow. The Pentagon never takes into account fires from nuclear war. And I just dropped one bomb. And then a huge cloud of toxic black smoke from all the bombs dropped will rise into the stratosphere and surround it with a cloud so thick it will block out the sun for years, causing nuclear winter, an ice age, and the end of life on earth.

If you watch the President as he’s walking, just behind him is an officer with a big suitcase, and that’s called the “football.” In the “football” are the codes for the president to start a nuclear war. What happens is the satellites pick up the attack, they radio it back to, I think, the Air Force base here, they then radio to the White House. The President gets told, and he’s got 3 minutes to decide whether or not to blow up the planet. Actually, the choices he has are, is it countervalue: do you bomb only the cities? Or is it counterforce: do you bottom the missile silos? Or do you do both?

In 1995 America launched a weather satellite from Norway, and the Russians saw it and thought, Oh, my God. So the first time ever, in the history of the nuclear age, Yeltsin opened his football. He had officers standing over his shoulder saying, “Press that button, Mr. President.” Thirty seconds before the end of that 3 minutes elapsed, the missile veered off course, and they knew it wasn’t an attack. That’s why you and I are still here. Those accidents occur not infrequently.

The weapons are all computerized. There are two men in each missile silo. In the Dakotas, you look down when you fly over them, and Colorado you can see them. Eighteen to 21 years old. “Shall I press the button, sir?” Each armed with a pistol, one to shoot the other if one shows signs of deviant behavior. What if the deviant one shoots the other one? The locks to turn the keys are 12 feet apart, but they worked out if you tie a string to one key, one man can turn both locks and start the annihilation. I’ve talked to some of their girlfriends. Some of them take drugs before they go on duty. We are fallible. What if President Obama develops a cerebral tumor and does some crazy things before the diagnosis is made? I’ve had patients, normal businessmen, who overnight had developed acute psychosis. I won’t go into it, but it’s very scary. The Chinese are hacking as I speak, sometimes into the early warning system of the Pentagon. They can hack into anything, these young kids. They’re very smart. And it’s all computerized.

I don’t know how long we’re going to go on. So is it a whimper or a bang? Do we have epidemics of leukemia, cancer, and genetic disease for the rest of time from radioactive waste infiltrating into the water and the food, or do we do it with a bang? And that’s these bloody labs up there.

And am I angry. It’s appropriate to be angry with people who are going to kill us all. They’re killers. And I’m pissed off, because I’m 73, I’ve devoted my life to this. We nearly got rid of the nuclear weapons. And then we got Clinton. How dare he? And I’m going to die knowing I didn’t succeed. And I think in medicine, us doctors, we like to cure our patients. And we’ve got these stupid politicians, all in Congress, who know nothing. They know no science, they’re scientifically illiterate. They’re retards. Some of them are sociopaths with no conscience, like Domenici. And Obama, I’m sorry, I’ve totally lost respect for him. I was hoping and hoping and hoping. He’s so intelligent. Now he is going ahead with nuclear power…

So what are we going to do? Do you know what a revolution is? Do you know what Egypt just did? Do you know what putting your bodies on the line means? Martin Luther King said, “If you haven’t got something worth dying for, you’re not really living.” What did Jesus do? Did he die for the principles he espoused, and did those principles live on 2,000 years? I’ve had eight death threats. I’ve run off the stage when people have threatened. What’s my life compared to evolution? I once said to Carl Sagan, “Are we the only life in the universe?” And he said, “Yes, I think we are.” What a responsibility we’ve got. We can’t be passive anymore. Don’t sit in front of those stupid computers and doing Facebook. They will change nothing. Take over the Congress. You own it. It’s your building, they are your representatives. And they’re out to lunch.

I thought about the farmers. There was a bill before Congress they didn’t like. They took hundreds of cows, pigs, and sheep, put them all over the steps of Congress and they made a filthy mess. They got their bill through. What about Babies Against the Pentagon? Releasing hundreds of naked toddlers into the Senate chamber as they are debating nuclear weapons and nuclear power. And they can clean up the mess, too, what’s more. Because they’re the symbols. But really it’s gone beyond anything we could possibly imagine. And I haven’t even talked about global warming and those bloody coal companies and the oil companies.

Rise up. It’s this country that has to save the earth. You have no right not to do anything.

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