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.