Robert Jensen: I think any assessment of the current situation has to remember that the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 was illegal. The United States invaded the country with no legal authorization. It claimed the right to do this because of the relationship between the governing Taliban and Al Qaeda and the events of 9/11, but there were many ways that the United States could have pursued a just solution to the question of the terrorism of 9/11.

So, why would it pursue an illegal and, I would argue, immoral invasion? Here we have to remember that U.S. military interventions in the Middle East and Central Asia, whatever the stated reason for them, are really about energy resources. The Middle East especially is home to the most extensive reserves of petroleum. There’s a lot of natural gas in Central Asia, plus it has geostrategic importance. So let’s get rid of the idea that this is about the “War on Terror.” Does the United States want to end terrorist attacks against Americans? Sure, but that doesn’t mean that this particular war is a war on terrorism. We also should remember the phrase is a bad joke, that terrorism is a method by which people try to achieve political goals. You don’t have a war on a method. If you’re going to make war, you’re making war for specific purposes against specific people in specific places, and the “War on Terror” is simply way too obscure for that.

So with all of that background, if the United States were to pursue a just and legal path it would begin a withdrawal from Afghanistan, pay the reparations it owes to the people of Afghanistan, and attempt to work with the appropriate regional and international organizations to try to help Afghanistan transition to a decent government. The United States has no intention of doing that.

So, the proposed buildup in Afghanistan is not only immoral, it’s not only fundamentally unjust, it’s also incredibly stupid. On all counts, anyway you want to evaluate this, the United States is making crucial errors.

The fact that Barrack Obama, the alleged peace candidate in the last election, is willing to pursue this just reminds us of the limits of contemporary mainstream electoral politics with a choice reduced to Republicans and Democrats. What we should be thinking about is the whole structure of, and motivation behind, our involvement in the Middle East and Central Asia, and we should also be rethinking the whole structure of our political discourse at home.

CS: So if this is by all means a stupid endeavor to continue this occupation, why are we doing this? Who is profiting from this? What are the underlying motivations of our occupation?

RJ: Remember that just because people in power might be corrupt and immoral doesn’t mean they’re always competent in pursuing that corruption. If you look back at probably the most grotesque U.S. intervention in the post World War II period, the Vietnam War, there were corrupt and immoral reasons the United States invaded Vietnam — mostly to undermine independent development and try to dominate the third world — but in trying to carry out those objectives there were a lot of incompetent decisions made. And sometimes incompetence compounds itself, so as you get further and further into a set of bad strategic decisions, there is an instinct to want to rescue them, but unfortunately it often leads to even more bad strategic decisions.

So, why are we doing it? Well, there’s a certain amount of irrationality to these strategic decision making, even though it’s in the pursuit of a rational — albeit I would say immoral — goal, which is to dominate the Middle East and Central Asia. Why are we doing it? Are there profit motivations for private contractors, who are making a killing? Sure. Are there oil companies and gas companies that want concessions? Sure. There are always those things, but I think that the driving force behind U.S. foreign policy tends not to be the interest of any particular industry or any particular set of contractors, but the fact that the whole system is designed to perpetuate this quest for dominance. And those other factors, like the interests of Blackwater (which has changed its name to Xe Services) or ExxonMobil, just contribute to the motive force behind the policy more generally.

CS: So here we are in 2009, and we’ve entered the ninth year of the war in Afghanistan and we’ve similarly occupied Iraq since 2003, yet when you look around it’s hard to notice that we’re running on a war economy. It’s become so normalized, and from a student’s perspective it’s interesting to note that the majority of undergraduates across the country have spent all of their high school and college careers with our nation at war.

And my question is, how do you think history will judge this perpetual war? Do you believe we’ve entered into Orwell’s 1984 realm, are we living in a society where war has officially become peace?

RJ: I don’t think we have to wait for history to judge it. I think we can assess it today and it’s pretty straight forward. The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was illegal. The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was a cover for other interests, and that’s all doubly true with the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The whole project is corrupt beyond description. Yet, the propaganda industries, not just the propaganda emanating from the government, but the propaganda industries — advertising, entertainment, journalism — are all perpetuating this crazed interpretation of the War on Terror, because they all have an interest in doing that. They are all ideologically connected to the same project.

And yes, it’s Orwellian in that sense, it’s corrupt, it’s immoral, it’s illegal, it’s all these things that we’re talking about, and we don’t have to wait for history 30 years from now to make that judgment. What we have to do is recognize it, and try to organize against it. But I think what we should be doing is not just opposing this war but recognizing that the disease from which this war springs is more deeply set in the culture than ever before.

You can clearly see that on a college campus. Remember that when the United States invaded and began to destroy Vietnam, the opposition to that war started, and was always strongest, on college campuses. There was a kind of “natural,” if you’ll accept the term, resistance from students to that imposition of power from above.

Well in some sense, campuses are the most passive places when it comes to anti-war activity today. To the degree that there is an anti-war movement, it’s mostly rooted in the community. So, that tells us something about what’s happened in universities, the way universities have been turned toward a more corporate and ideologically neutered position, though campuses could potentially be centers of opposition, resistance, and struggle. Well, that’s about not just the war, that’s about what’s happened to American higher education, the corporatization of higher education.

In other words, the war is an indicator not just of the depravity of the war-makers, it’s a very important indicator of what’s going on in society more generally. And about that, I’m terrified. The direction the whole culture is heading is very scary. It’s an imperial culture in decline. The United States remains the most powerful country in the world, at least in raw military terms. It remains the largest economy in the world. But it’s an affluent imperial society in decline, and such a society is very dangerous. I think we should be paying attention not only to what these wars tell us about foreign policy and military affairs, but also what they tell us about our society at a much deeper level.

CS: So are you saying that the universities aren’t actually free? Do you think that that’s affected by the politics of tenure and publishing grants?

RJ: It’s affected by the structure of financing, it’s affected by the rewards and punishments that faculty members respond to in building careers. For students, it’s about the economy that the students are going into, and how students are conditioned to believe that college is career training. It’s about trying to create the University as an allegedly politically neutral space, but of course any time you talk about political neutrality what you’re talking about is de facto support for the existing distribution of power. All of these things are part of it, and we should be concerned with it.

Is the University free? Well at some level, obviously yes. Here we are in a University office, I’m a University professor, we’re talking about things that will be on a University radio station. Of course it’s free in that sense, but it’s also a system structured in a way that is going to divert most people from the kind of conversation we’re having. So there are constraints. That’s true of any institution. There are opportunities and freedoms, and then there are constraints. I think what we should be focused on — whether we’re talking about the Universities or the media or any of the other intellectual institution — is how the freedom that exists on the surface is often masking a deeper kind of pressure toward conformity, a conformity that’s not enforced through the barrel of a gun, as in a totalitarian society, but a conformity that’s enforced in a much more complex, and in some a ways a much more effective, fashion, through the rewards and the punishments we’re talking about.

CS: I’d like to move on to your most recently published article entitled “Is Obama a Socialist?” In this article you express a deep concern for our evolving ecological crisis, specifically I’d like to refer to the following statement: “Capitalism is an economic system based on the concept of unlimited growth, yet we live on a finite planet. Capitalism is, quite literally, crazy.” Can you explain this concept further to us?

RJ: For most of the past couple hundred years, we’ve been living really in a rather unique historical moment. First of all it’s a moment made possible by unleashing the enormous energy of coal, oil, and natural gas, the fossil fuels. That’s a blip in human history. There’s never been energy like that available to human beings before, and we’re quickly running out of it. So, all of this bonanza of consumption and material comfort is really subsidized by that energy source, and there is nothing on the horizon to replace it. All of the talk of alternative fuels and biofuels and wind and solar, that’s fine, they are all going to supply some energy, but they are not going to replace the energy we’ve been using from coal, oil, and natural gas.

The explosion of this energy is also the time in which modern industrial capitalism has emerged. It’s all based on a fantasy that is easy to understand because of all that energy. It did look like we could simply grow endlessly. But the ecological crises, and I use the plural quite specifically — multiple crises, not just global warming but levels of toxicity in the air, water, loss of top soil, the reduction in biodiversity — are part of a global pattern that is uncontroversial: We are reaching, and probably are long beyond, the carrying capacity of the planet, and we are drawing down the ecological capital of the planet at a rate that is increasingly threatening, not just centuries from now, but likely in decades.

That’s all part of an era in which capitalism led us to believe we could have unlimited growth. It’s a crazy claim, and more striking is that it is a crazy claim that is considered to be the conventional wisdom. This is the kind of thing we should be worried about. We’re not having a debate about capitalism in this country — there’s no debate for the most part in the mainstream. Capitalism is taken to be the only way to organize an economy, yet it is a system of organizing an economy that is literally crazy. Well, if that doesn’t scare people, then I don’t know what will.

CS: If you are implying that if we are at a level of overreach, that there will be, that we might reach a population crash?

RJ: I think it’s inevitable. Ecological overshoot is the key concept. The planet has a carrying capacity. The planet can host only so many human beings, depending on the level at which we live. I’m not a scientist, I’m not an ecologist, I’m not trained in any of this, but reading people whose judgment I trust, and trying to synthesize the information that I can, my judgment is that we’re probably well past the carrying capacity of the planet already.

And at the level of first-world consumption, we are dramatically past the carrying capacity. That is, if you are going to expand this high energy consumption and lifestyle of the first world to the whole planet, it would be game-over tomorrow. If everybody in the world lived like you and I live, the planet would literally die tomorrow. So the only reason we can continue this system is the fact that a good portion of the world’s population is living at a dramatically lower level than we are. Even at that level, I don’t think that the world can support this many people. So we’re in a position of overshoot.

When is the crash going to come? Well in some sense the answer is it’s already here. You have half the world’s population living on less than $2.50 a day, you have hundreds of people dying every hour in Africa from easily preventable diseases, you have the beginnings of ecological crises that are manifesting themselves not only in the reduction of biodiversity but in the direct threat to human life.

When is all of this going to come crashing? Well I don’t know, because I don’t have a crystal ball and no one else does. The question shouldn’t be when can you predict all of this is going to fall apart. More important is the recognition that it inevitably will fall apart, and we should prepare for it, in both physical terms and moral terms. My own view is that, if not in my lifetime certainly in yours, there will be a massive human die-off. That’s an antiseptic term — it means that millions upon millions of people will die in large sweeps across the planet. What do we do about that morally? What do you do if you’re living in a world in which you know that simply by virtue of the luck of where you were born, you are protected from a scourge that is literally killing millions around the planet?

Well we’re seeing small examples of that today with such things as the devastation from easily preventable diseases in Africa for instance, but what if that happens on a massive scale? I don’t think the human species has a way to cope with that. We’re not ready physically, technologically, but we’re also not ready morally. And the only way you get ready for that is by openly discussing it, but it’s still a culture that cannot come to terms with this. Everything we’re talking about today would have been unthinkable as subjects for the presidential election. No candidate could talk like this and expect to be elected, because the culture is still in such deep denial about the fundamentally unsustainable nature of our economic system and the moral implications of that.

CS: How do you think nation-states will respond to these collapse scenarios?

RJ: First of all I think we should recognize nation-states are not inevitable for the rest of human history. My own view is that were going to end up finding other ways to organize ourselves politically, because the nation-state is at the center of so much of this destruction.

How will people respond? Well I think a lot of that has to do with how the most powerful nations respond. Remember that one of the aspects of being the most affluent and militarily powerful countries on the planet is that what you do matters a lot. You can continue to pursue insane strategies in a crazy system, or you can tell the truth. And if powerful countries tell the truth, start to actively reduce their energy and other material consumption, start to take seriously the demands of justice in equalizing the distribution of wealth around the world, give up on fantasies of control and domination, well that would have a huge effect.

The developing world, which clearly doesn’t trust us and shouldn’t trust us, might be able to move into a posture of more cooperation. Democratic movements within those countries might strengthen when they know there is in fact a commitment from the powerful states to real law, real democracy, real justice, real moral principles. Well, all of that is possible. It’s not a guarantee of success. We could do everything we can imagine in the realm of just and sustainable policies and still fail. The human species does not have some magic guarantee of endless success. Other species have come and gone, and it’s quite possible — in fact, I would argue it’s probably likely — were going to go that way relatively soon. And people always say, well that’s a rather depressing fact. Well if it’s a fact, it’s a fact, but of course there’s no way to know for sure, and we can struggle to create a different future, without guarantees.

But even if it does seem to be our future, what of the time we are here? I think part of what makes one fully human is to resist that, to struggle, even with no guarantee of success. And that’s where I put my faith. Maybe it’s a faith that is going to be betrayed, but I don’t see any better option at the moment.

CS: If we were to inevitably make this transition, or at least in the process of making it, do you believe that there will be restoration of matriarchal values?

RJ: I don’t think it’s about matriarchy versus patriarchy. Patriarchy is a system that emerged in the last 8,000 to 10,000 years, and it imposed systems of hierarchy, not just around gender but around other differences as well, and we are still trying to get out from under those. If we succeed in that — if we succeed in realizing that power does not come only with the ability to control other people, that power comes in the creative potential of human collaboration, it can come in non-hierarchical ways to organize ourselves — it doesn’t mean obviously that there will be a matriarchy, if by that we mean a world in which women dominate. It means that we move into a real space where mutuality and egalitarian values can reign.

What will that look like? I don’t know. If we were to magically get there in my lifetime I couldn’t begin to imagine what it would look like. I know that it won’t look much like the institutions I live in today — it won’t look like the modern corporation, it won’t look like the modern nation-state, it won’t look like the modern University. But you don’t really predict those things, you try to live them. And you live them in small steps, not in some grand utopian fantasy.

CS: Given our trajectory towards this cliff, this ecological cliff, should college students be rethinking their career choices? Are we being trained properly?

RJ: Reality is going to force college students to reconsider career choices, when certain assumptions will no longer hold. The most important thing that Universities could do right now is be laboratories for experiments outside of the dominant system, which is exactly what we’re not doing.

What we’re doing is still training people to be rats in a maze. Well, what if we said, the maze is over. For now, the maze may still exist out in the world, but we’re going to spend four years here going beyond the maze, and your job as a student, and your job as a faculty member, is to experiment with alternatives. That would mean a dramatically different curriculum, that would mean a dramatically different classroom.

I would like to see that happen. In journalism education, the collapse of the commercial journalism industry — the fact that there are fewer jobs for our students in the traditional journalism institutions — gives us a kind of opportunity. It’s a disaster at one level, in that the way we’ve done things no longer works, but it’s also an opportunity to reshape those methods.

In my own experience, there is a lot of resistance to that kind of change, because it is kind of frightening. If you’ve been doing something on a model that in the past has worked, or at least appeared to work, and now people are saying that model is over, well it’s not exactly easy to jump to that position where everything is up for grabs. But that’s what Universities should be doing. Unfortunately, not only in journalism but in the University at large, I think there is a distinct lack of that spirit. There is an attempt to kind of hunker down, and make this model work, but I don’t think the model can work. I don’t think it ever worked for real education, but it’s certainly not going to work in a dramatically changing landscape.

CS: What advice do you offer UT students, or just to activists of all ages, who want to participate, want to fight the system, but feel overwhelmed by its strength?

RJ: If you feel overwhelmed, let’s recognize that that’s a rational response. If you feel overwhelmed, it’s because we face an overwhelming situation. We’re facing a collapse economically, a collapse of U.S. power around the world, and ecological crises that defy the imagination. Well that is overwhelming. But we should also look at history and realize that this is not the first time the world has appeared to be on the brink, and people didn’t lie down and die in the past. People organized, people committed to long-term projects to create a different future, and we can still do that.

In my case, I’ve moved toward a focus on helping to build local community networks and institutions that can help people explore other alternatives. One of the groups in Austin I’ve connected with is the Workers Defense Project, a wonderful group that helps immigrant workers, especially undocumented immigrant workers, who are vulnerable to exploitation by employers. Through that work it offers a critique of the underlying power structure and a vehicle for people to build the power to change things. It’s really inspiring.

If we’re going to be effective, we’ve got to dig in for the long haul. There’s a paradox in all this. We may feel the crisis is more urgent then ever — and I do feel that, more than ever — but we have to recognize there’s no short-term solution, and we have to dig in for the long haul. That might be difficult, but it’s the only way I can see us moving forward.

This is an edited transcript of an interview conducted for the KVRX radio show “The Pursuit of Injustice.”

An early version was published by Energy Bulletin, October 30, 2009.

Michael Yates: Corporate America began to wage what turned out to be a one-sided war against working people in the mid-to late-1970s, when it became apparent that the post-World War Two “Golden Age” of U.S. capitalism was over. As profit rates fell, businesses began to develop a strategy for restoring them. This strategy had many prongs, and one of them was ideological, that is, a struggle for “hearts and minds,” to use a military term now being applied to Afghanistan. The presumed failure of Keynesian economics, marked by the simultaneous existence of escalating inflation and unemployment, gave the ideological struggle its foundation. Maybe there had been too many restrictions placed on the market, and these restrictions (minimum wages, health and safety regulations, laws facilitating union organizing in labor markets; public assistance in the form of money grants, housing subsidies, and the like; restrictions on the flow of money internationally) had led to results opposite those that liberal Keynesians had thought most likely. If these complex arguments could be tied to simple cliches, like “get the government off our backs,” “the unions have gotten too powerful” (with always a hint that they are too radical thrown into the argument), and “welfare queens” (with that always popular whiff of racism), they could provide ideological cover for what was really a matter of corporate economics, namely the making of money.

This ideological attack bore fruit quickly. President Carter appointed Paul Volcker to chair the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, and Volcker, under the guise of fighting inflation, immediately began to snuff the life out of working class communities by forcing interest rates up to nearly 20 percent. Today, Volcker is treated like a hero by Democrats and above reproach (though ignored by President Obama’s more right-wing economic advisors), which shows just how far to the right economic discourse has moved. What Carter began, Reagan completed, firing the Air Traffic Controllers and putting the nail in labor’s coffin. Behind the scenes in all of this and growing in strength for the next twenty years (funded by wealthy business leaders) or so were the right-wing think tanks you mention. Just as retired generals go to work for military contractors and defeated politicians become lobbyists, government economic advisors get jobs at Heritage or the American Enterprise Institute or the Cato Institute. The staffs of these ideological centers churn out endless position papers and studies, which find their way into our newspapers and the offices of our congresspersons. A gigantic network of professors, journalists, politicians, lobbyists, and, today, a television network (Fox) bombard us with right-wing propaganda. That all of this has been successful is seen by the fact that the shibboleths of neoliberalism—such as the needs for privatization of public entities, the free reign of markets, the obviousness of the success of welfare reform, the evils of raising the minimum wage—are all commonplaces today.

While the public now knows that something is rotten, I am not sure that neoliberal ideas are so under attack that they will lose their sway. I think that the tenacity of these ideas owes something to the lack of an ideological alternative, which, in turn, is due to the abject failure of organized labor to provide one. For example, we need universal health care. Labor, however, has not consistently argued in favor of this or supported it at all. Now Congress is poised to enact healthcare legislation that might well be worse than the profit-driven system we have all come to hate. Labor should refuse to support this legislation, but I doubt it will. Then, when the new healthcare plans fail to deliver the goods, the right-wing will be lying in wait, ready to pounce and say, “See, we told you so. The government always makes things worse.” In other words, until there is a radical ideology to replace right-wing thinking, the latter is unlikely to lose its drawing power.

Fred Magdoff: Although these institutions were very successful, along with a number of other forces, in shaping public attitudes toward the economy, the reality of the current severe economic conditions are causing many, including some economists, to rethink their views of how “efficiently” markets function in the real world (as opposed to their ideological make-believe world) and that some different approaches may be needed. People seem to understand that the “big players” played a major role in the crisis, but most of the anger has been placed on the outrageous salaries of the top echelon. Of course, this is just “chump change” compared to the massive amounts at that are transferred to the wealthy through the speculative casino that our economy has become.

　
MW: Socialism has a huge public relations problem. Wouldn’t you agree that socialism has been effectively discredited in the U.S. media and that, even now–with unemployment soaring at 10 percent and more than 300,000 foreclosures per month–the average American worker still believes in the virtues of capitalism? How do you explain this phenomenon?

Michael Yates: Part of my answer here can be seen in my response to your first question. Socialism has, indeed, been discredited here, partly due to its rejection by its natural supporter, namely the labor movement. The CIO expelled in the late 1940s and early 1950s the left-wing forces who built the great industrial unions. When it did this, it abandoned the worker-centered ideology that might have laid the basis for support here for at least the kind of social democracy we find in the Scandinavian nations. This left the ideological field to the enemies of social democracy and socialism. Of course, we cannot ignore the long and inglorious history of police-state repression of those persons and organizations that championed socialism. Our government has never hesitated to arrest, imprison, and even kill the enemies of capitalism. So it has been dangerous to be a radical here, though not so much today when radical ideas aren’t taken seriously and there are no powerful radical organizations left. Suppose that after the Second World War, the left in the labor movement had grown, and the left-led unions had continued to successfully organize workers and win good collective bargaining agreements. Suppose that they had built upon their impressive worker education programs, made inroads in the South, and fought hard against U.S. imperialism and the Cold War. We might have a much different political terrain on which to fight today.

Two other factors that must be considered in the attachment of the working class to capitalism are racism and imperialism. In the past, employers routinely pitted white workers against black, and one weapon they used was to associate black workers (and the civil rights movement) with communism (It was interesting to note in this connection the attempts to make Obama out to be a radical socialist). The claim that black union supporters were reds helped to solidify white support for capitalism. By the same token, anti-imperialist struggles in the poor nations of the world (often former colonies of the rich countries) were typically led by political radicals. These could be made out to be anti-American, and then those in the United States who allied themselves with these struggles could also be labeled anti-American, despite the fact that they might also be supportive of policies that would benefit working people. The schools and the media could be counted out not to try to set anyone straight on any of this.

Now, having said this, I must also say that to the extent that left forces in the United States identified themselves uncritically with the former Soviet Union and its extremely undemocratic political system, they sometimes played into the hands of those opposed to socialism. And I must also admit that socialist forces were, at their strongest, never powerful enough here to force their best ideals permanently into the consciousness of the working class majority. Finally, in the past, the success of capitalism in the United States allowed for some sharing of the wealth with workers, and this, too, made people less willing to entertain radical ideas.

Old and deeply ingrained ideas die hard, and unless there are forces at work to develop new ones and unless there is at least widespread experimentation with new ways to organize production and distribution, little is likely to change, even in the face of economic catastrophe, such as so may working men and women are facing right now. Quite the contrary, workers might be persuaded that actions detrimental to their long-term self-interest need to be taken, such as, for example, draconian measures against immigrants.

Fred Magdoff: There is no question that the term socialism has a public relations problem. But while it’s true that most people don’t fully understand the basic workings of the capitalist system nor what socialism is, there are indications that many people are ready to talk about alternatives—and that includes socialism. The positive public response to Michael Moore’s movie, Capitalism, is one indication. But a Rasmussen poll last spring found that only 58% of American’s say that capitalism is better than socialism. For adults under 30, 37% preferred capitalism and 33% preferred socialism. It’s not clear what the poll results really mean. But it does indicate that people are willing to hear about and talk about alternatives to capitalism.
　
MW: In a chapter titled “Neoliberlism” you focus on the disparity of wealth in the US today. Here’s an excerpt:

By 2006 the top 1 percent of households received close to a quarter of all income and the top 10 percent got 50 percent of the income pie. In 2006, the 400 richest Americans had a collective net wealth of $1.6 trillion, more than the combined wealth of the bottom 150 million people. This degree of income and wealth inequality was last seen just before the beginning of the Great Depression. (pg 50)

Let’s ignore the moral issue for now, and focus on the supply/demand question. Is it possible for an economy to produce sufficient demand when more and more of the wealth and income goes to the upper 5 or 10 percent of the population? (isn’t this proof that capitalism is inherently crisis-prone?)

Michael Yates: If a certain amount of output is produced, an equal amount of income is generated. So, conceptually, there could be enough demand to buy the output, no matter that the incomes generated are getting more unequally distributed. It certainly has been the case that the rich people now getting such a large share of the pie spend gobs of money. And rich foreigners spend a great deal of money in the United States as well. However, the rich also save a lot of money (the more they get, the more they save), and this money does not enter immediately into the spending flow. Working people, on the other hand, can be counted on, by virtue of the limited income that they command, to spend all of their income. Therefore, the more income the rich have, the more savings there will be, and, unless some way is found to convert all this saving into spending on newly-produced goods and services, the more likely it is that there will be a crisis caused by not enough spending (and its corollaries of unsold goods and services and unemployed labor). If we understand that growing inequality is the normal trajectory of capitalist economies, a trajectory only mitigated by the power of organized working people to win a bigger share of the pie for themselves and to compel the government to intervene in the marketplace on their behalf, then it is correct to say that capitalist economies are crisis-prone for this reason alone.

Growing inequality also creates other potential problems for the system. Sometimes it can generate a political crisis, a crisis of legitimacy so to speak. The rich exert tremendous political power, and this power grows as those at the top command a larger and larger share of a society’s income. To the rest of us, the game looks increasingly rigged, with us having little chance to improve our circumstances through individual efforts. More inequality also has harmful social and economic consequences that we don’t normally think of. Recent research has shown that if we compare two entities (two states in the United States, for example) with equal average incomes but different degrees of inequality, then the place with more unequal incomes will also have higher rates of infant mortality, arrest and imprisonment, school dropouts, low infant birth weights, and many other measures of social well-being. Growing inequality actually kills some of us, makes some of us sicker, and puts some of us in jail.

I want to add an important point. To say that capitalist economies are crisis-prone, because of a tendency toward income inequality or whatever other reason, is not the same as saying that these economies are on their deathbeds, no matter how severe a crisis may be. It is possible for an economy to exist in a crisis or a prolonged period of slow growth (stagnation) without it being ready to collapse. In the end, it is political struggle, that is, class struggle, that truly destabilizes an economy and generates conditions in which it is possible to imagine the birth of a new system.

Fred Magdoff: It is one of the many contradictions of the system. If ordinary folk are paid well they can buy a lot of stuff and help keep the system going. So from the point of view of the system as a whole, higher paid workers would help the economy. However, there is only one driving force for individual capitalists–and that’s to make as much money as possible. What might be better for the overall economy can be of no concern to the individual trying to maximize profits. For an analogy, let’s take a look at ocean fishing. Almost every fish species is being fished to the point at which the population crashes. It would make sense for all of the companies operating the large trawlers to cooperate and fish less in order to preserve the resource on which they depend. So what’s good for their long-term future is sacrificed as each individually tries to maximize their catch and therefore profits.

MW: Here’s another excerpt from the book: “In 2006, the financial sector employed about 6 percent of the workers but ‘produced’ 40 percent of the profits of all domestic firms.”(pg 56) A few paragraphs later you add that, “Making money without actually making something turned out to be the largest growth sector of the U.S. economy from the early 1980s to the present crisis.”

This seems to imply that as manufacturing and other parts of the “real” economy have become less lucrative, the trading of paper assets has become Wall Street’s new profit-center, the Golden Goose. What impact has the “financialization” of the economy had on ordinary working people?

Michael Yates: I think that an answer here has two parts. First, it was the neoliberal “revolution” begun in the 1970s that did immense harm to working people. For example, unionization rates began to fall dramatically in the 1980s, as Reagan began his “magic of the marketplace” assault on the working class. Real wages (the purchasing power of our paychecks) began to stagnate in the 1970s and are not much higher today than then. Relatively high-wage public employment began to endure a long period of privatization, which also damaged working class living standards. The move toward “free trade” did workers here no good, as manufacturing began to flee our shores for low-wage havens abroad. None of these things had to do with financialization per se.

Second, however, once the neoliberal attack on working class living standards took hold and incomes began to flow upward, those with a great deal more money began to look for ways to put this money to work. The corporations that they owned also had higher profits, and they did the same. The United States has always had a robust financial sector, though in the past, it was not the tail that wagged the dog as far as our system of production and distribution was concerned. Neoliberalism brought with it a deregulation of international movements of money and goods and services. [It is important to note that we see neoliberalism as a political response to capital’s quest for restored profits beginning in the mid-1970s when the post-Second World War two economic boom ended and the slow growth (stagnation) common to mature capitalist economies reasserted itself.] These, in turn, required a certain amount of financial innovation, to reduce, for example, the risks of fluctuations in currency exchange rates and sharp changes in political conditions that could threaten investments. From these innovations came still more, until finance began to take on a life of its own. And while neoliberalism and direct corporate actions inside workplaces did reduce costs and raise profits, they did not create nearly enough capital spending opportunities (investment) to absorb the growing individual savings and business profits. Finance of one kind or another then began to be seen as a place to dispose of surplus and make still more money. Leveraged buyouts, stock market speculations, real estate “investments,” all took off from the 1980s on, absorbing money that could not find enough opportunities in the real economy of production. As these things happened, financial “innovation” exploded, with all of the alphabet soup of financial instruments we describe in our book.

This explosion of finance proved detrimental to working people in a number of ways. Leveraged buyouts inevitably resulted in the hollowing out of what were often perfectly viable businesses. Companies were saddled with debt, assets were stripped and sold, and workers were furloughed by the tens of thousands. The inflation of asset values gave rise to the notion that it was the job of managers to increase the share price of their businesses—in any way possible. Businesses came to be thought of as mere collections of assets rather than entities that produced things. Asset inflation gave rise to asset speculation and the development of ever more complex financial instruments, all leading sooner or later to financial bubbles and the inevitable bursting of the bubbles. As we have seen, the bursting of financial bubbles has had tremendously negative impacts on working people: shuttered workplaces and unemployment to name but the primary ones. The last bubble, in real estate markets, was harmful to workers not only after it burst but also as it was developing. In the aftermath of the dot.com bubble, Alan Greenspan, former Chairman of the Fed Board of Governors, directed Fed policy to pressure interest rates down to very low levels. This helped to push loose money into real estate. As house prices began to rise, banks and brokers started to encourage working people to do two things: borrow money against the appreciated value of their homes and buy homes, either as first-time buyers or as purchasers of more expensive homes (after selling old ones). Working people were eager to do both because they saw houses as sources of cash to compensate for stagnating household incomes and as a form of wealth that could help secure them against the hazards of ill health, lost pensions, or college-age children needing money for school. Working class households began to take on large amounts of debt, making themselves more vulnerable, even as they thought they were making wise financial decisions. Ironically, those who saw their incomes rise so high because of neoliberalism were now, in effect, loaning money to those who didn’t fare so well. As banks accumulated mortgages, farsighted Wall Street swindlers saw golden opportunities to develop a slew of new financial instruments based upon the packaging and repackaging of mortgages into new and exotic instruments. Greenspan played their shill, arguing that they had uncovered the secret of hedging infallibly against risk. From here it was but a short step to the criminal schemes of Countrywide and a host of other financial institutions. The billions of dollars made were used not only to finance a new gilded age of revoltingly lavish consumption but to corral the most tractable politicians money could buy.

Fred Magdoff: Financialization of the economy created the possibilities for people to take on more and more debt—credit cards, new cars, 2nd mortgages, etc. It was the selling of a lifestyle way beyond people’s ability to pay for it plus the easy access of loans that created the bind that many people find themselves in today. In essence, it allowed people to live beyond their means. They were encouraged to take on debt as their house values seemed headed up forever, and the great rise in foreclosures and bankruptcies is the unfortunate result of the financialization of the economy. Also, those people who had retirement money in individual accounts or with pension systems and thought that they had become very wealthy, now found themselves with much less to rely upon.

MW: In the last couple of decades, consumer debt has skyrocketed, as you note, “doubling from 1975 to 2005, to 127 percent of disposable income.” (pg 60) Have we gone as far as we can without deleveraging and paying down debts? What happens to a credit-dependent economy when the consumer can no longer increase his/her debt-load? Is this just the beginning of a decades-long down-cycle?

Michael Yates: Certainly no entity—not a person, a family, a business, even a government— can take on rising levels of debt (relative to income) indefinitely. Sooner or later, the piper has to be paid. Working-class consumers took on large amounts of debt, to compensate in part for stagnating wages and incomes, and, it is important to note, to pay for health problems and other household traumas. This meant that the burden of the debt rose, since income wasn’t rising as fast as the debt, and also because the interest rates charged on credit cards and subprime mortgages were so high. We at Monthly Review have been decrying the rise of consumer debt for many years, and we said that the debt chickens would come home to roost sooner of later. I must say that I was surprised that debt could be broadened and deepened for so long. The ingenuity of creditors in extending loan periods and devising so many new forms of debt has to be admired for its audacity. Then, the ways in which these debts were packaged and sold so that more debt could be extended was truly breathtaking. Unfortunately, consumers ultimately couldn’t pay and all hell broke loose. Now, with so much unemployment, workers are truly strapped. They will not be borrowing so much or spending so much anytime soon. [One interesting recent development is that, as some households have defaulted on debts or simply stopped making payments, consumer spending has showed a bit of an upward tick!] So the question arises: what spending will fuel a sustained recovery? It won’t likely be consumer spending. Capital spending was stagnating to begin with and was the root cause of the crisis. There are no new “epoch-making” innovations on the horizon that would generate the amounts of investment that were brought forth by the automobile. U.S. exports seem a very unlikely demand support. That leaves the government. In a capitalist economy, especially one like the United States with its lack of a history of generally accepted public spending, it seems very unlikely that public spending will make up for shortfalls in aggregate demand. Already, there are widespread entreaties (and not just from the far right) urging the federal government to wind down in spending programs—well before, I might add, the economy has recovered. As we see it, the United States is, indeed, in for a long period of stagnation, a “down cycle” as you put it.

Fred Magdoff: This is one of the major constraints on the system. The economy is in a process that economists call “deleveraging,” which is just another way of referring to somehow getting rid of debt. Some are able to pay off what they owe, a few are able to renegotiate down some of their debt, many are losing their homes, and some are going bankrupt. Until this works its way out, and a lot of debt is shed one way or another, there will be a drag on the “consumer” portion of the purchases. This is particularly significant to the U.S. economy because it is so dependent on consumer purchases—in 2007, these absorbed approximately 70% of the goods and services produced.

MW: The ABCs of the Economic Crisis: What Working People Need to Know is as lucid and compelling summary of the financial crisis as any I have read. In the closing chapter you state that capitalism is undergoing a “crisis of legitimacy” and that “the system can never deliver what is needed for us to realize our capacities and enjoy our lives… That “instead of private gain” the purpose of society and the economy is “to serve the needs of people, by providing the necessities of life for all, without promoting excessive consumption (consumerism) while protecting earth’s life support systems.”

All of the things that which kept capitalism in check–progressive taxation, crucial regulations, and the power of unions–have either been reversed, repealed or greatly eroded. More and more people are beginning to see the greed which governs the system, and it scares them. But is the country really ready for structural change or will the vision of an economy which “serves the needs of its people” be dismissed as “pie-in-the-sky” Utopianism?

Michael Yates: Well, first thank you Mike for the kind words. They are much appreciated. Typically, the best we have been able to hope for from the public in the United States has been an amorphous populism; people are willing to say that the system is corrupt and that it is biased in favor of the rich. But proposals for change, much less a radical transformation of the economic system, are rare commodities. I think things would be different, however, if we had a real labor movement, one that was rooted in communities, broad in its composition, and not afraid to have principles and stand by them come hell or high water. This should be the lesson that progressives learned from the right-wing. The talking heads of Fox may seem insane to us, but they and their intellectual gurus almost never deviate from the set of reactionary principles with which they began to transform the “common sense” of the nation. We suggest at the end of our book that we ought to ask ourselves if a return to the pre-economic crisis status quo is what we want. In the best of times, there is plenty of unutilized labor, a degraded environment, poverty, dead-end jobs, and much more that is not so desirable. So we chose a number of alternative outcomes to what we have now that we think have mass appeal, from universal healthcare to basic food guarantees. However, as you say, these might well, and I think will cause people to react with a pie-in-the-sky indifference. What might make working men and women stand up and take notice would be for these goals to have a mass-based advocate, one that would make these goals matters of rigid principle and begin to fight for them through mass actions. We might think that the right-wing ideologues we see on television are insane. Yet, come hell or high water, they stick to their guns. Their political and economic adherents have wielded tremendous power for a long period of time, and even today when they seem to be losing their grip on the national “common sense,” they can still mobilize the faithful. The left needs to take a lesson from this. More particularly, the labor movement must take a firm and rigid stand on issues like national health care, food security, environmental degradation, full employment, good and cheap housing, U.S. war-making and imperialis, racism, and a host of others. Then it must educate members rigorously and constantly about such principles. Most importantly, it must begin to actively fight to achieve them, activating its millions of members and allies, wherever it can find them. It is through action, bold and unafraid, that people’s minds will get changed and a new “common sense” developed.

Having said this, I think it is clear that the labor movement, as currently constituted, is not up to the tasks at hand. Too many unions are moribund, stuck in the failed labor-management cooperation mind set of the past and run by people too old and infirm to do much of anything. So, not only will we have to have a worker-led opposition to the status quo, fighting to change it radically, but this opposition will have to be built on a new basis. There are some hopeful signs, such as the development of community-based worker centers, mainly in immigrant communities. These may be models for the labor movement of the future.

Fred Magdoff: Just getting what should be the most reasonable reforms through Congress is a major effort, which usually fails or is corrupted in the process. Look what’s happening with health care “reform.” Even if a “public option” is finally part of the bill, it will be a bill that helps some people, but is primarily a boon to the health care industry, which will get a lot of new revenue. It’s not a bill designed with the single purpose in mind: how can we supply medical care for everyone at reasonable cost. Rather it’s a bill designed with significant input from the for-profit sector that will end up supplying them with extra profits. It is clear that government-run systems (and there are a variety of ways to do this) are far cheaper and more efficient and can actually cover everyone. SO, it seems as though piecemeal reform is a) very difficult to obtain and b) can be reversed as the power of the wealthy increases. A system is needed that can break the power of the wealthy and create a real political and economic democracy in order to be able to meet the basic needs for all the people.

In this interview, Law talks specifically about how women are affected by solitary confinement and other forms of torture in US prisons, and what women are doing to fight back. Exposing solitary confinement as torture has been the focus of recent campaigns in Maine, Pennsylvania, and around the US. This is also a central issue in the campaign to free the Angola 3, who are a trio of Black Panther political prisoners: Robert King, Albert Woodfox, and Herman Wallace. King was released in 2001 after 29 years in continuous solitary confinement. Woodfox and Wallace remain imprisoned and have spent over 36 years in solitary confinement, where they remain today.

Angola 3 News: What do you think of the case of the Angola 3?

Victoria Law: The case of the Angola 3 is one of the most visible (and damning) indictments of the U.S. prison system.

As broadcast by NBC Nightly News, the widow of slain prison guard Brent Miller has even stated that she wants justice and that, if Woodfox and Wallace did not kill her husband (and there is so much evidence that they did not), they should be freed. It’s interesting to note how the voices of victims and their family are used to whip up pro-imprisonment hysteria, but when they speak out against railroading people, they are ignored. For example, the widow of Daniel Faulkner publicly condemns Mumia and urges people not to let out her husband’s alleged killer. The media loves this and uses her to play on public opinion against freeing Mumia. However, when Brent Miller’s widow Leontine Verrett says, “If these two men did not do this, I think they need to be out,” her words are ignored.

Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace should be released. The fact that they have not been released clearly demonstrates the racism that is rife in the prison system and how “justice” isn’t really a factor in who goes to prison and why.

A3N: Do you consider the use of solitary confinement in US prisons to be torture?

VL: I most definitely consider solitary confinement a form of torture. Solitary confinement is used not only to break the woman (or person) who is resisting, but also to scare others around them into not only complying but ostracizing the person who is challenging prison rules or conditions. And, unfortunately, it often does.

A3N: What other practices in US prisons would you consider to be torture?

VL: I consider the whole prison system to be torture. But to narrow it down to actual practices: I would consider the use of strip status, in which all of a person’s clothes and belongings are removed from the cell, as a form of torture. You have to remember that over half of incarcerated women have suffered past abuse and trauma. To strip them of all of their clothing and place them in a bare cell with guards watching them retraumatizes them. I recently reread an account from Lisa Savage, a woman who was placed on strip status for talking to the other women on her unit about the psychological reprogramming of the Close Management unit (a unit where women are held in their separate cells 23 ½ hours a day). Being on strip status meant that everything was taken from her—clothes, toothbrush, bedding, and sanitary napkins. She wrote, “As bad luck would have it, I just started my monthly. Now, I must beg for a pad for hours before receiving it.”

Other practices that I would consider to be torture are:

• The use of male guards in female prisons
• The shackling of pregnant women while they are in labor
• Loss of access and custody to their children simply because they are incarcerated
• The denial of health care and the life-threatening slow health care in prisons

A3N: How is solitary confinement used against women prisoners? How does it effect women in ways that are different from male prisoners?

VL: Solitary confinement makes women more vulnerable to staff sexual assault since no one can see what is happening. In my book, I write about the experience of Christina Madrazo, a transsexual immigrant who was placed in INS detention. Originally, the INS (now called ICE) did not know what to do with her since her assigned gender at birth was male, but she identified (and was seeking asylum status) as a transgendered female. Madrazo was placed in solitary confinement where she was raped twice by a prison guard.

Even when they are not being physically assaulted, the women have no privacy—toilets are in full view of the cell door windows, guards can look through those windows at any time and, in many prisons, male guards can watch the women in the showers, on the toilet or when they are trying to dress or undress.

In addition, solitary confinement is used to punish women who have either reported being sexually assaulted by staff, or who have been discovered to have “consensual relationships” with staff members. I put “consensual” in quotation marks because, given the power dynamics in prison, especially the ability of guards and staff members to withhold services and/or provide small amenities, the relationship can never truly be consensual. I recently received a letter from a woman incarcerated in Colorado whose cellmate was accused of having a “consensual” relationship with a staff member. While the accusation was being investigated, the staff member was allowed to continue working in the prison. The woman was placed in solitary confinement for the duration of the investigation and only released once the charge was found to be unwarranted.

Also, with women, there’s the prevailing notion that women need to be “good girls” and “to behave.” Thus, women are punished for behaviors that violate gender norms, behaviors such as spitting or cursing or not following orders, behaviors that men are not punished for. This is also why women are sent to segregation when they report sexual misconduct or engage in sexual activity; they’re violating what we, as a society, see as “good girl behavior.”

A3N: Do you believe activist prisoners are disproportionately targeted with solitary confinement?

VL: Yes! This is obvious in the case of the Angola 3. This has also been true among women who have been challenging prison conditions. Most female facilities have some form of solitary confinement. At California’s Valley State Prison for Women, the Special Housing Unit consists of eight-foot by six-foot cells with blacked-out windows where women are confined for 23 hours a day. Even in their cells, the women have no privacy — toilets are in full view of the cell door windows, guards can look through those windows at any time and male guards often watch the women in the showers. If the women complain, the guards turn off the water.

In 1986, the Bureau of Prisons opened a control unit specifically for women political prisoners in the federal prison at Lexington, Kentucky. It was built underground and entirely white. Women were prohibited from hanging anything on the white walls, causng them to begin hallucinating black spots and strings on the walls and floors. Their sole contact with prison staff came in the form of voices addressing them over loudspeakers. The unit was shut down in 1988 following an outside campaign and a court decision that determined their placement unconstitutional, but the solitary confinement is still used to punish and silence jailhouse lawyers and other incarcerated activists (of all genders, I should add).

A3N: How have women prisoners resisted the use of solitary confinement?

VL: In 1974, a woman incarcerated in Bedford Hills (the maximum-security prison for women in New York) filed a lawsuit challenging the practice of placing women in solitary confinement without 24 hours notice and a hearing (basically any sort of due process). She won a court injunction prohibiting this practice. In response, she was beaten by male guards and placed in solitary confinement (again with no due process). Other women in the prison protested by rioting.

More recent ways in which women have resisted solitary confinement aren’t as visible. While she was in the Close Management unit in Florida, Lisa Savage joined the StopMax campaign and became part of the Steering Committee. Her participation added gender to the way that people were viewing (and organizing around) the use of solitary confinement. She also wrote a long (16 pages!) piece about the Close Management unit for Tenacious, the zine that I publish of women prisoners’ art and writings. Writing about that reality is, in and of itself, a form of resistance, but she also included ways in which she, as an individual woman being held in the Close Management unit, was resisting:

I’ve finally gained a firm sense of self by holding fast to my beliefs in equality, liberty and life without threats or coercion. Each accomplishment, may it be emotional, psychological, or mental “growth,” is a form of resistance.

Every time I teach someone geometry or basic reading or tell them of their own intrinsic ability to be autonomous and secure with themselves, I resist the mentacide, and hopefully arm the women with ways to combat their own mental slow death sentence here in CM SHU…

Every time I get mail from you or Anthony of the South Chicago ABC Zine Distro or Abigail of Burning River or the meeting notes from StopMax (I am on the Steering Committee for the National Campaign to End Solitary Confinement and Torture in U.S. prisons), it confirms that I am part of this resistance movement.

As I conclude this piece, I have been informed of an increase in my custody to CM Level I. I know this is only a label, not who I truly am. DOC may have condemned me for my actions, but I know in my heart that for the past 7 months, I have taken the measures necessary to ensure my beliefs and integrity remain intact within a corrupt system. I have done my best to stand up for my CM sisters and myself. Yes, I have been DR’ed [issued disciplinary reports”] and “gave up” my privileges to take up for women who would spit on me if given a chance. I’ve asked nothing from them, I’ve only tried to show them that they must fight for their beliefs and happiness. I’ve wanted to show them that they do not have to be the label placed upon them—dumb ho, loser, etc—that they can achieve positive healthy goals even while locked in a cell 24/7. I wanted them to have a piece of my courage until they could find their own. Yes, I shouted about the unjustifiable psychological abuse they suffer—I shouted so that they could at least whisper of their own hurts in their own hearts… For this I have no regrets, and I will not apologize.

These aren’t ways that are clearly visible to those on the outside looking for instances of prisoner resistance. Still, her actions are forms of resistance to solitary confinement.

1. Recently reviewed at Alternet.

New Unionism: The union movement is the largest democratic force in the world today, by far. However, too many union members complain about bureaucratic behaviour at leadership level. Do you accept this is a problem, and, if so, what do you think are the root causes?

Dan Gallin: First, let’s get the problem in perspective. The level of bureaucracy in unions is constantly overstated. We have much less difficulty in this area than corporations do, for instance. Of course corporations are, by their very nature, top-down power structures – what could be less democratic than your average workplace? – and I cannot imagine anything as wasteful as some management bureaucracies. Similarly, think about bureaucracy in government, or in tri-partite bodies, or in non-governmental organisations. The difference is that unions, by their very structure and purpose, are consciously committed to internal democracy, and so failures are clearly seen as such. The basic structures of unionism are democratic and the internal struggle to assert and reassert democracy is always there. Trade unions have to deliver; there is a very short time span between demand and the delivery. Think of collective bargaining, for instance. Unions are constantly being held to account by their members.

NU: Are you trying to tell us there’s no real problem, then?

DG: No. I am not trying to minimize the problem. What I am saying is that bureaucracy is a pervasive feature of all institutional and organizational life. What, after all, is a bureaucracy? It is an administration, and all organizations need an administration. The problem arises when this administration develops a collective interest of its own, separate and eventually even opposed to the interests of the people it is supposed to serve.

This is serious enough in government, where the civil service constitutes a bureaucracy that can easily overreach its authority. In a democracy, the civil service is supposed to be the servant of the people. When it starts to act as its master, democracy is in danger.

In the trade union movement, the problem is even more serious because its administration, its own civil service if you wish, must represent people who have no other source of power than their organization. If this organization ceases to be responsive to their needs, they lose everything. An administration that builds its own power at the expense of the membership is betraying its trust – that is treason.

NU: If, as you say, trade unionism is inherently democratic, why is it that we hear these complaints about unions being run as dictatorships and/or oligarchies?

DG: Actually, there are not so many cases of this, in proportion. What happens is that we have some spectacular examples of organizations which degenerate and then become notorious. They are falsely represented as typical of the movement, most often in anti-union propaganda. But there is never any guarantee against an organization, even with the best democratic traditions, being hijacked by anti-democratic cliques or personalities.

The hijacking of the Russian revolution by the Communist bureaucracy led by Stalin is a classical example. After four or five short years, a vibrant, radically democratic, revolutionary mass movement started giving way to the rule of a bureaucracy which first asserted, then consolidated power by means of terror, police and military terror against its own people, on a scale not seen before in modern times. A whole new society with a bureaucratic ruling class!

How do these things happen? In order to work, democracy needs the active support of large masses of people at all times. In a union, this means the active participation of most of the membership. Democracy is not a state of being, it is an activity, it is in fact hard work, and it is a constant work in progress. You might say the same thing about freedom.

Most people are not able to maintain a high level of commitment over time. They are not organization professionals, they need to get on with their lives, as they should, so “democracy fatigue” might set in; especially after periods of great social stress. They might not pay attention to what happens in the organization for a time, routine sets in and the professionals take over. If the leaders are not trained in the right kind of politics, if they are not persons of the highest individual integrity, and if they are not supervised and controlled, they may start treating the organization as if it were their own property.

This is why it is the responsibility of every progressive and democratic trade union leadership to maintain constitutional and practical conditions in which membership participation and control is ensured and welcomed, without making conditions of participation too onerous for ordinary members.

NU: Just by way of clarification, can you explain what you mean by “trained in the right kind of politics”?

DG: Socialist politics, of course. And by that I mean the kind of politics based on the values that were at the origins of the labour movement and that made it great: solidarity, selflessness, respect for people, a sense of honour, and the modesty that comes with the awareness of being a soldier in the service of a great cause, a contempt for self-promotion, or “le refus de parvenir” as Monatte¹ called it.

NU: Do you think the Cold War contributed to bureaucratizing the movement?

DG: It certainly did. In a situation of extreme political polarization by outside forces, it is easy to lose sight of the original purpose of the exercise.

First, let us be clear what we are talking about. The Cold War was a conflict between States, between two blocs of States, led by the two superpowers of the time: the United States and the USSR, more or less from 1949 to 1989.

However, this conflict had nothing to do with a much older conflict within the labour movement. This earlier conflict arose after the October Revolution, when the Russian Communist Party created an International of its own and declared war on all other movements of the Left unless they accepted total subordination to its dictates.² That conflict became unbridgeable once the Communist leadership had moved to imprison and execute activists of other Left tendencies in the territory under its control, including its own opponents and dissidents. Under Stalin, this became a systematic campaign of extermination, with hit men spreading out all over the world to assassinate opponents.

It is small wonder that a majority of the Left, of all tendencies, became “anti-Communist”, meaning that they organized to defend themselves as best as they could against Communist claims of hegemony and terror.

When Nazi Germany attacked the USSR in 1941, breaking the treaty it had signed two years previously, the USSR found itself part of the anti-fascist war-time alliance. Despite past history and experience, much of the Western trade-union movement, which was predominantly social-democratic, was ready for organizational unity with Soviet bloc labour organizations. The result was the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU), which was founded in 1945. However, it lasted only four years as an inclusive organization of the world’s labour movement (though it continued, and still exists, as a Communist rump).

The unity on which the WFTU had been founded was the temporary unity of governments, not a unity of labour – none of the contentious issues between the Communists and everyone else on the Left had been resolved. When the unity of governments gave way to the rivalry between the US and the USSR for world power, the artificial top-down unity of the WFTU also broke apart.

What happened then was a race between the two blocs to secure the support – in fact, the control – of civil society organizations (labour, youth, students, women, etc.), with trade unions as prime targets.

And now comes the complicated part, which must be clearly understood. The Western governments and the non-Communist Left suddenly had the same enemy. The conflict between governments – the “Cold War” – and that earlier conflict within the labour movement, became superimposed. For some, they became indistinguishable.

This is how the war-time relationships which some socialists – and others – had formed with the political services of the US or UK governments (among others) to fight the Nazis continued seamlessly into the fight for a “free world”, against the new totalitarian menace.

In reality, we were of course still dealing with two different conflicts and two distinct interests. One was fighting Stalinism to defend working class interests, the other was fighting the USSR as a rival imperialism to that of the US. These are hardly compatible positions, but the most difficult thing to comprehend in politics, especially if you have the knife at your throat, is that the enemy of your enemy is not necessarily your friend!

Despite the apparent symmetry of the situation of the trade union movement within the two blocs, the reality was quite different. In the Soviet bloc, the trade union apparatus was part of the government structures of a police state, and a fairly subordinate structure at that. Dissidence was treated as a criminal offence or as a mental disorder. So in that context, the bureaucracy issue does not even arise in connection with the Cold War — the whole system had been thoroughly bureaucratized long before. In its first decades, that system was impossible to crack from within.

The situation in the West was much different: here a three-way battle was being fought between the advocates of an alignment on pro-American policies, the advocates and apologists for Soviet policies, and those who kept saying that neither option represented working class interests and that the labour movement should refuse to be aligned with either side.

Those of us who held the latter position believed that the lines of cleavage that mattered most in the world were not the vertical ones separating the two blocs, but the horizontal ones between the working class and the rulers of both systems, a fundamental division cutting across both blocs.

This was not an easy position to hold. The pressures to align and to conform were very strong. Having been put in charge of the AFL-CIO’s International Department by George Meany,³ Jay Lovestone⁴) — the Dr. Strangelove⁵ of the labour movement — with his acolyte Irving Brown⁶ and the various AFL-CIO Institutes, were running around the world buying unions with US government money, in close cooperation with the CIA , and trying to destroy any organization or individuals that did not accept their line, whether Communist or not. They were not looking for allies, they were recruiting agents.

The Soviet bloc operators were doing the same for the other side, also backed by considerable diplomatic and financial resources. The result of this competition is not difficult to guess: it spread a culture of corruption, especially in Africa where the movement was weakest and most vulnerable, but also in parts of Asia, Latin America, Europe and the United States itself, where some labour leaders were co-opted into Cold War politics, although most had no idea what the International Department was up to, and did not much care until all these operations were exposed in the mid-1960s.

In that sense the Cold War was a very powerful factor of bureaucratization in the West: it created and strengthened corrupt leaderships who no longer had to take their memberships into account, it enforced political conformity, stifled discussion, suppressed dissent and isolated all radical opposition through ‘red baiting’.

NU: Some labour writers contend that the acceptance of Cold War politics, and anti-Communist purges by the leadership of the American labour movement, contributed to its paralysis during the conservative onslaught of recent years.

DG: Yes and no. It’s not that simple. True enough, after the anti-Communist purges in the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and the merger with the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in 1955, the conservative elements of the AFL prevailed in the merged AFL-CIO. These people would later prove totally at a loss in the face of globalization and the conservative onslaught launched by Reagan, and continued by his successors, both Republican and Democrat.

But the problem with this story is that it exonerates the American Communist Party of any responsibility in these developments. The CP and its trade union activists are cast in the role of innocent victims. This overlooks the war the CP waged against all of the Left from its earliest days: first against the IWW and the socialists, then against the Trotskyists and against every other kind of radical group it didn’t control, and of course against most union leaderships, progressive or not. The CP did what it could to destroy the American Left and, like in Niemöller’s poem,⁷ when they came to get it there was nobody left to defend it.

This said, most conservative labour leaders didn’t need the Cold War in order to be ferociously anti-radical, super-patriotic and, eventually, helpless before the anti-labour campaigns of the Right. You have to remember that we’re dealing here with very stupid people. They may have been street-wise and cunning, but they knew nothing about the world and couldn’t think strategically. The roots of conservatism in the American union movement are very perceptively described by authors such as Daniel Fusfeld and Patricia Cayo Sexton.⁸) What the Cold War situation did, was to give people like Lovestone the opportunity to organize the right-wing of the American trade union bureaucracy as a base for a major international operation, and to isolate leaders of the labour Left, like Walter Reuther,⁹ Ralph Helstein¹⁰ and Pat Gorman,¹¹ as well as some good unions with a Communist history, like the ILWU and the UE.

NU: Did the Communists not at least denounce the clandestine right-wing operations the American unions were involved in?

DG: Not at all. Of course they would denounce operations like the overthrow of Arbenz in Guatemala, or of Goulart in Brazil, as examples of American imperialism in action, but there was never any exposure of the union involvement. The CIA and British government operations in the labour movement were blown open by Trotskyists and independent radicals in the mid-1960s. Then the New York Times picked up the story and it became a major scandal. But the CP had nothing to do with it at any stage. Afterwards, of course, everyone started writing about it.

NU: While all of this was happening in the US, bureaucratization must surely have been a growing problem in the European trade union movement as well?

DG: In Europe and elsewhere, for instance in Japan, the polarized politics of the Cold War also enforced political conformity and stifled dissent, but Europe is a complicated place with many political and trade union cultures, so generalizations are not very useful. In some countries Cold War politics played a major role in the labour movement, in others hardly at all.

Far more pervasive and general were the consequences of the war. Today it is hard to imagine the extent to which the historical labour movement had been destroyed, first by the rise of fascism in the 1920s and 1930s, then by the war itself, with the occupation of most of Europe by the Nazi armies and police. In most of Europe, the structures of the labour movement were wiped out, parties and unions of course, but also the entire institutional network that rooted the movement in society: welfare institutions, credit unions, co-ops, cultural and leisure time activities – everything.

Most of the leadership of the movement, right down to local level, had to go into exile, or into concentration camps, or died in the war. Many of the best people were lost. One of the important parties of the Socialist International, the Jewish Labour Bund,¹² was destroyed entirely, together with the population that supported it. No one had imagined anything like this could happen, and those who had hoped that the end of WWII would usher in another period of social revolution, a re-play of 1918, had lost touch with reality.

Superficially, the unions emerged in a strong position – after all we were on the side of the victors, whereas big business had collaborated with fascism throughout Europe and had much to be forgiven for. In fact, labour was far weaker than it appeared, and far more dependent on the State than before the war. That too did not seem to be a problem at first, since most post-war governments were pro-labour in one way or another, but it did eventually lead to the loss of the political and material independence of the movement and, yes, it did promote bureaucratization.

Whereas the pre-war movement conceived of itself as a counter-culture and an alternative society, at least in principle, the post-war movement made its peace with the “social market economy” and demanded no more than a better life within the system (full employment, welfare, social protection, good wages and working conditions).

In that situation, the leadership of the movement became increasingly unwilling to maintain a whole network of flanking institutions. If you don’t want to change society then you don’t need to build an alternative counter-culture or an alternative economy. Think of all the money you can save. So the unions concentrated on their presumed “core business” – collective bargaining with “social partners” – the parties concentrated on elections, and the movement lost its roots in society, lost many of its think tanks and educational institutions, and lost its periphery, a sphere of influence and protection.

At the same time, you had the surge of prosperity in post-war Western Europe through the Marshall Plan. An exhausted working class, after the deprivation and the sufferings of the war, started to get its life back and became gradually more comfortable over the next thirty years. And why not? But as it played out, as a major political factor, it created a problem the movement couldn’t cope with, because it also coincided with the rise of media empires, with television, financed largely by advertising. Our movement was not ready to compete at that level. This is where we lost the communications war. We lost our press and any independent expressions of working class culture, with the long-term effect of losing the culture wars in the 1990s.

Many of the issues of the vanished civil society of labour eventually got taken over by others (feminists, environmentalists, human rights activists, etc.), but that’s another story.

Then, in countries like France, Italy and Greece, where the CP was dominant in the labour movement, the working class became hostage to Cold War politics and political positions, as well as labour alignments. They were frozen for about thirty or forty years. In some other countries, notably Germany, Cold War polarization also contributed to deadening the political debate and distorting trade union priorities.

Finally, European unions have become accustomed to State subsidies, in general for specific activities, such as education or participation in a host of official and quasi-official institutions and meetings. Today, in many countries, unions would be unable to function without the government subsidies they have become accustomed to.

So what do you get? A heavily bureaucratized and passive movement, initially led by survivors, then rapidly replaced by complacent and arrogant careerists who are happy to depend on the State. They administer the gains of past struggles but are unwilling to conduct any new ones, opposing any ideas they have not thought of themselves and believing that nothing must ever happen for the first time. That kind of leadership educates union members to be passive consumers of union services, not participants in struggle.

NU: You said before that, as far as Europe was concerned, generalizations were not very useful. Should we take that to include what you just said?

DG: You got me there. I think what I have tried to do is draw a common denominator, a composite picture which applies in general but not exactly in any one country. For example, in the Nordic countries, except for a short-lived split in Finland, the Cold War had hardly any impact at all. In Spain, where the labour movement emerged from a fascist regime only in the 1970s, rank-and-file democracy is a strongly-felt aspiration. All of Eastern Europe is a different situation again, and a very complicated situation, with many cross-currents. And of course there are always exceptions. There have been outstanding labour leaders like Otto Brenner,¹³ Wilhelm Gefeller¹⁴ in Germany, Jack Jones¹⁵ in Britain, André Renard¹⁶ in Belgium. So, one has to fine-tune every national situation. But some will recognize my descriptions and, as the saying goes, if the shoe fits, wear it.

Neither do I want to idealize the pre-war labour movement in Europe. There were too many entirely avoidable and disastrous defeats. The leading labour parties of Germany and Austria had armed militias ready to fight which were awaiting orders that never came. The French Popular Front government refused to support the Spanish Republicans in the civil war, who, had they won, would have changed the course of history. Not to speak of the catastrophic Communist policies, in Germany, in Spain, all over. One needs to reflect on these defeats and learn from them. But even so, the level of ambition in those days was higher.

NU: You were general secretary of the IUF for many years, and active in the international union movement. How does the international movement cope with the problem of bureaucratism?

DG: With difficulty. You have to realize that the international movement is yet another level removed from the rank-and-file: the actual members of international trade union organizations, in a statutory sense, are national unions, not individual workers, so the international organization will reflect to a very large extent the culture and practices of its affiliated unions, particularly the large affiliates.

So, structurally, it is almost inevitably bureaucratic. The politics of the leadership, basically the secretariat and the governing bodies, makes a big difference. You can have an organization with a deeply rooted culture of militancy and a democratic culture, which will do two things: first, ensure that democratic practices are respected and encouraged in the way it operates, within its own governing bodies, and, second, encourage democratic participation within its affiliates wherever it can, for example through its educational programs, in its publications, etc.

NU: And then you have the others…

DG: Indeed. Again, it is a question of politics, of how you interpret the situation and, consequently, how you evaluate the union response required. If you believe that “social partnership” is an accurate description of labour/management relations, and that social change occurs through conversations between political leaders and experts – “social dialogue” – then you will invest your resources and energies in a lobbying operation. The privileged counterparts in these conversations will be the bureaucrats of government organizations and of employers’ organizations. In meeting after meeting, you will be bargaining about words, and you will believe you have won a significant victory when you have changed a sentence in a statement. This can go on forever, and no one will ever know the difference. The workers who are members of such organizations don’t even know they exist.

NU: How can workers, at rank-and-file level, learn to tell the difference between useful and useless organizations? Where does usefulness become apparent?

DG: Very simple: workers certainly can tell the difference when they become involved in a conflict. When it comes to conflict, the differences are very quickly apparent. And whether our international sell-out artists like it or not, unions are about conflict. Either the international organization pulls out all stops and the saying “one for all, all for one”, (especially the second part) becomes a concrete reality, for as long as it takes, or else the international organization starts mediating instead of fighting, tries to minimize and kill the conflict, even sides with the employer just to be rid of the problem.

NU: How does this relate back to the issue of bureaucratism? Are you suggesting that bureaucracy and politics are related?

DG: They are, very much so. However, the relationship is not a mechanical one. For instance it would be simplistic and wrong to say that left-wing politics protects us against bureaucracy. If we are talking about the Communist tradition, the opposite is true, almost always, and this includes Maoism, which is actually an extreme form of Stalinism. People who come out of that school are often dangerous authoritarians. Even when they change their politics, they don’t necessarily change their methods.

And of course social-democracy has its own awesome bureaucratic traditions; even anarchist and syndicalist organizations, contrary to legend, can be run in extremely authoritarian and bureaucratic ways.

No, the only form of politics which is an effective antidote to bureaucratism is the kind of socialist politics that contains a strong element of radical democracy. This goes back to Marx himself, but despite appearances, this current was never dominant in the socialist movement. It surfaces from time to time, a person like Rosa Luxemburg would be fairly typical, there were others within the political families of the Left. Eugene Debs in the United States would be another example.

NU: That’s not a very broad political base. If that’s all we have, is the struggle against bureaucratism lost in advance?

DG: No, because in fact we have very much more. The politics of radical democracy respond to a very deep and fundamental need felt by workers. They keep coming back to this on their own, and they very often spontaneously develop democratic forms of organizing, of conducting struggles, of running their organizations. Rosa Luxemburg understood this. This aspiration is very strong. That is the basic reason why the labour movement has such a democratic culture, despite all the pressures to the contrary from the society that surrounds it… the “old shit”, as Marx called it.¹⁷

NU: Do you see workers’ desire for deeper forms of democracy extending from union HQ all the way down into the workplace?

DG: Yes, except I would put it the other way around, from the workplace – the “point of production”, as the IWW used to say – to union HQ. It has to start at the point of production. As I said, this is a very fundamental need of workers, and actually very often of people in general. Think of women’s movements or peasant’s movements – in all progressive mass movements there is this demand for transparency and accountability in the leadership.

The point is to nurture and strengthen the politics of radical democracy, the particular strand of socialist politics which I believe is the authentic Marxism, which insists that power, where it matters, always has to remain in the hands of the workers. Today this means almost all of society, since nearly everybody is part of the working class, whether they know it or not. To get there, you have to start from the bottom, the point of production, and then build democratic institutions, like democratic unions, impose democratic procedures at every level, democratize the decision-making mechanism in public administration. We don’t want to abolish bureaucracy if bureaucracy means administration, we all need administration and we want it to be honest, transparent and efficient, in our own organizations to start with, then in society at large. We want an administration built on our key values: justice and freedom. These will be the values of the society of the future – if we make it that far.

1. Pierre Monatte (1881-1960) A proofreader by profession, he was a leader of the French CGT when it was a revolutionary syndicalist organization and, in 1909, founded its journal, La vie Ouvrière. He was an anti-war internationalist during World War I., joined the French Communist Party in 1923 and was expelled in 1924 for opposing its bureaucratization. He then returned to revolutionary syndicalism, and in 1925 he founded La Révolution Prolétarienne, which is still being published. “Le refus de parvenir” means: “the refusal of social climbing”.
2. The Second Congress of the Comintern in 1920 agreed on ‘Twenty One Conditions‘, which formalised the beginning of ‘the great split’: a split which was to divide the labour movement for the rest of the century. Note in particular: ‘In the columns of the press, at public meetings, in the trades unions, in the co-operatives – wherever the members of the Communist International can gain admittance – it is necessary to brand not only the bourgeoisie but also its helpers, the reformists of every shade, systematically and pitilessly.’
3. George Meany (1894-1980), president of the American Federation of Labor from 1952 to 1955, then, following its merger with the Congress of Industrial Organizations, president of the united AFL-CIO from 1955 to 1979.
4. Jay Lovestone (1906-1989), a founder of the American Communist Party, later leader of the Right-Wing opposition group (the pro-Bukharin faction) which dissolved in 1941. In 1943 Lovestone became international affairs director of the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union and, in 1963, director of the international affairs department of the AFL-CIO. He held that position until 1974 and as the main architect of the collaboration of the AFL-CIO with the CIA. For more on Lovestone, see: A Covert Life: Jay Lovestone, Communist, Anti-Communist, and Spymaster by Ted Morgan (New York: Random House, 1999
5. Dr. Strangelove: the 1964 black comedy film by Stanley Kubrick, featuring a paranoiac American general launching a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, hoping to thwart a Communist conspiracy to “sap and impurify” the “precious bodily fluids” of the American people with fluoridated water. The US president in the film is advised by a “mad scientist” type: Dr. Strangelove.
6. Irving Brown (1911-1989) , chief lieutenant and hatchet man for Lovestone since the 1930s, set ujp”anti-Communist” operations in the trade union movement, mostly in Europe, including the notorious Mediterranean Committee, organized with the help of gangsters in French, Italian and Greek ports.
7. Friedrich Niemöller (1892-1984), prominent German anti-Nazi theologian and Lutheran pastor. He is best known as the author of the following lines (and variations thereof):
   “First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a communist; Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist;
   Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist;
   Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew;
   Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak out for me.”
   
8. Daniel Fusfeld: The Rise and Repression of Radical Labor 1877-1918, Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, Chicago, 1980 (ISBN 088286050X) and Patricia Cayo Sexton: The War on Labor and the Left – Understanding America’s Unique Conservatism, Westview Press, Boulder/San Francisco/Oxford, 1991 (ISBN 0813310636
9. Walter Reuther (1907-1970), leading organizer and after 1946 president of the United Auto Workers’ union, a Socialist Party member until 1939, president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1952, negotiated the merger with the American Federation of Labor in 1955, eventually clashed with Meany over the conservative policies of the AFL-CIO and formed a short-lived alternative center, the Alliance for Labor Action (1958–1972) with the Teamsters and a few smaller unions. On May 9, 1970, Reuther and his wife May were killed when their chartered plane crashed while on final approach to the airstrip near the union’s recreational and educational facility at Black Lake, Michigan. In October 1968, a year and a half before the fatal crash, Reuther and his brother Victor were almost killed in a small private plane as it approached Dulles airport. Both incidents are amazingly similar; the altimeter in the fatal crash was believed to have malfunctioned. When Victor Reuther was interviewed many years after the fatal crash he said, “I and other family members are convinced that both the fatal crash and the near fatal one in 1968 were not accidental.”
10. Ralph Helstein (1908-1985), president of the United Pckinghouse Workers of America (UPWA) from 1946 to 1968. Under his leadership, the union, a CIO affiliate, became one of the most militant and democratic unions in the US. It organized the meat packing industry in the US and Canada and played a leading role in fighting for minority and women’s rights. When the UPWA merged with the Amalgamated Meat Cutters union in 1968, Helstein became vice president and special counsel. He worked with the union until 1972 and died in Chicago in 1985.
11. Patrick Emmet Gorman (1882-1980), a life-long socialist, International Secretary-Treasurer of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen (AFL) from 1942 to 1976 (the Meat Cutters were an old socialist union which had a European constitution, where the secretary-treasurer, not the president, was the chief executive officer). Gorman opposed Meany on the Vietnam war and on many other political issues.
12. The General Jewish Labour Union of Lithuania, Poland and Russia, in Yiddish the Algemeyner Yidisher Arbeter Bund in Lite, Poyln un Rusland, generally called the Bund (from German: Bund, meaning federation or union) or the Jewish Labour Bund, was a Jewish political party and trade union in several European countries operating predominantly between the 1890s and the 1930s with remnants of the party still active in the United States, Canada, Australia, France and the United Kingdom. The Bund opposed Zionism and fought for the recognition of Jews as an autonomous cultural community within European countries. In this and in other respects, it was strongly influenced by the Austro-Marxist school of socialism, and was a left-socialist party in the context of the Labour and Socialist International. In WWII it was active in the resistance movement against the Nazi occupation in Poland and in Lithuania, one of its leaders, Marek Edelman, was a leader of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in 1943, and later of the Workers’ Defense Committee (KOR) in 1976 and of the Solidarity movement. Two leaders of the Bund, Victor Alter and Henryk Erlich, who had sought refuge in the USSR after the German invasion, were executed in December 1941 in Moscow on Stalin’s orders.
13. Otto Brenner (1907-1972), president of the German metal workers’ union IG Metall from 1956 to 1972. In 1931 Brenner left the Social-Democratic Party (SPD) which he had joined as a youth to join the Socialist Workers’ Party, founded by Left Socialists and dissident Communists, too late to prevent the seizure of power by Hitler. Brenner became active in the anti-Nazi resistance, was arrested in 1933, sentenced to two years’ prison and kept under police supervision until the end of the war. In 1945 Brenner re-joined the SPD and became active in the reconstruction of the trade union movement. At the head of the IG Metall he played a leading tole in the defense of democratic rights and against rearmament. In 1961, he was elected president of the International Metalworkers’ Federation.
14. Wilhelm Gefeller (1906-1983), president of the German chemical workers’ union IG Chemie from 1949 to 1969, one of the founders of the post-war German trade union movement, active in the SPD. Strong advocate of co-determination in German industry and at international level, and of democratic rights. President of the International Chemical and General Workers’ Unions (ICF) in the late 1960s.
15. James Larkin (Jack) Jones (1913-2009), general secretary of the Transport & General Workers’ Union (UK) from 1968 to 1978. Throughout his career he strove to increase the power and influence of shop stewards. In 1937 he joined the International Brigades in the Spanish civil war and was wounded in 1938. Jones was also Vice-President of the International Transport Workers Federation and, after his retirement, was a campaigner for pensioners’ rights. His autobiography, Union Man, was published in 1986.
16. André Renard (1911-1962), Belgian trade unionist, active in the resistance under Nazi occupation,created an illegal united trade union movement independent of political parties and advocated its extension to the entire country at liberation, but could not overcome the split between socialist and Catholic unions. Deputy General-Secretary of the socialist trade union center FGTB, leader of the six-week general strike in 1960-1961 against the austerity policies of the conservative government. A strong advocate for the autonomy of Wallonia (the French-speaking part of Belgium).
17. ”…revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the old shit and become fitted to found society anew.” Karl Marx: The German Ideology, Part I: Feuerbach. Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlook 1845.

Coates is a member of Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), co-chair of Single Payer New York and a steward in the Public Employees Federation in New York.

Ashley Smith: The right wing has mounted a major offensive against Democrats proposals for health care reform, with all sorts of absurd allegations and distortions. What’s your assessment of the right-wing attacks?

Dr. Andy Coates: At one town hall I attended, a guy had a sign that said, incredibly, “Tsars are not for the USA, Tsars are for the USSR.” Nearby, there was quiet bragging that somebody had a gun in his car. So there is nuttiness, but also potential danger as the right wing mobilizes.

At that meeting, I thought that people for single-payer outnumbered the right wing. Those in favor of some kind of reform far outnumber those against, but the “get the government out of health care” group fought for the mike and fought for attention.

Earlier, I was heckled while speaking in favor of single-payer on a panel in Syracuse convened by a Congressman. The interesting thing to me–besides hearing people holler “socialism!” at the top of their lungs–was that the hecklers listened carefully to every word people said. And I noted their applause when I said that mandating the purchase of health insurance wouldn’t solve anything. At that meeting, a clear majority was for single-payer, but that’s not how the press reported it.

So I think that many people, swayed by Republican arguments, will actually think this through for themselves. For example, someone who’s 59 years old, avoiding the doctor, trying to make it a few more years to Medicare, worried that Medicare won’t be there–and rightly so, for the Republicans keep repeating that it’s “bankrupt,” and the President keeps saying that Medicare and Medicaid is breaking the country.

I believe we can win these people over to single-payer. We shouldn’t let the TV coverage of these meetings distort our view. Poll after poll, and our own experience, attests that the majority of people are on the side of real reform–of Medicare-for-all single-payer health care.

AS: Many people find the debate in Washington completely confusing and exasperating. What do you think is going on?

AC: It is confusing. Just think about it–the Republican Party recently came out foursquare in defense of Medicare, after decades of calling for its abolition. Of course, the Republicans want to protect Medicare Part D, a giveaway to the pharmaceutical industry, and they love Medicare Advantage, a privatization of Medicare that has proven lucrative for private insurance companies.

Meanwhile, we have the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers Association of America, led by former Republican congressman Billy Tauzin. Tauzin was quoted in the Los Angeles Times saying that the White House promised not to negotiate with the pharmaceutical industry–promised to preserve Medicare Part D, and also not to allow the import of drugs from Canada or other countries where they would be cheaper than American prices. In exchange, PhRMA is going to spend $150 million advertising in favor of so-called “reform.”

So PhRMA and the White House and the Republicans all appear to be in alignment, defending Medicare Part D from reform. Perhaps Obama was accurate when he said recently that there was 80 percent agreement on the proposals. Yet we hear “government takeover!” as if someone were actually proposing such a thing.

AS: It seems like both the Republicans and the so-called “blue dogs” in the Democratic Party oppose the idea of government involvement in health care. What’s your view of their argument?

AC: We should set the record straight. The government is deeply involved in medical care. Taxpayers fund at least half of all health care spending in the U.S. The number of people covered by Medicare, Medicaid and military health plans is over 87 million. The idea of getting the government out of health care could be called a utopian fantasy.

Medicare has been an enormously successful program for 44 years. The Veterans Administration is a socialized system where the federal government owns the hospitals and clinics, pays the staff directly, and bargains with the pharmaceutical industry for low drug prices. The Veterans Administration delivers the best quality health care in the country–numerous studies attest to it.

AS: Why has the Obama administration made such a mess of its campaign for health care reform?

AC: No one disputes any longer that our system is in grave trouble. We’re spending twice as much as any other nation on health care, and yet we have a mediocre, dysfunctional system.

The Obama administration’s message has been, again and again: “If you like your insurance, you’ll get to keep it.” They needed to find an argument that would help them earn the support of the health insurance industry. So Democratic Party pollsters “discovered” that people love their health insurance. In the name of reform, ironically, they broadcast the idea that people fear change.

This is at odds with everyday experience and the 2008 election returns, on top of many polls that show popular support for single-payer. I think there is great enthusiasm and great expectation in favor of change–dramatic, fundamental change. And people find the hassles of health insurance ridiculous.

AS: What is the nature of the reform that the Democrats are proposing?

AC: The heart of the reform is a mandate that individuals purchase health insurance–to criminalize the uninsured.

In exchange for accepting some new regulation, the insurance industry will get the government to coerce people into buying their product. Because working people don’t make enough money to buy the product, tax money will be used to subsidize the private insurance premiums. The Los Angeles Times called this “a bonanza” for the health insurance industry.

AS: This is exactly what Massachusetts did. What has been the impact there?

AC: Yes, Massachusetts mandated that everyone buy health insurance. And this hasn’t made premiums affordable. To reduce premiums, policies have things like very high deductibles and large co-pays. In the case of a single person making just over $30,000 a year, if you add up the premiums and deductible, she or he will have to shell out over $5,000 before any insurance kicks in. This simply isn’t affordable.

Massachusetts subsidizes insurance premiums for everyone who makes less than 300 percent of the federal poverty line. This guarantees a constant flow of money into private health insurance companies, while it exacerbates the state’s budget deficit.

And to address the deficit, Massachusetts has cut safety net health care! They have taken hundreds of millions of dollars out of programs that would have helped poor and low-income patients–the very people most need the care and whom the reform should have most helped.

In addition, Massachusetts has a feature like what’s in the proposed federal reform–a brokerage house called the Commonwealth Health Insurance Connector. It’s supposed to help people get private health insurance. But it’s yet another layer of bureaucracy!

The Insurance Connector alone employs more people than the province of Ontario has working for its Medicare program. Medicare in Canada costs 1.3 percent of health spending. The Insurance Connector adds 4.5 percent in administrative cost to each policy it brokers. And the province of Ontario has twice as many people as the state of Massachusetts.

The Massachusetts model doesn’t work. It doesn’t lower costs, and it doesn’t cover everyone. It forces people to buy defective, unaffordable insurance. And when you lose your job in Massachusetts, you still lose your health insurance.

AS: Beyond the idea of mandates, the Democrats have also floated the so-called public option. What do you make this idea?

AC: Let’s look back to the early 1960s. When Medicare was gaining momentum and needed to be enacted by Congress, its opponents put forward a proposal intended to be friendly to the health insurance industry. The idea was that seniors should be able to purchase health insurance from private companies, but also have the choice of a public insurance option.

Medicare passed instead, thank goodness. It seems fair to ask whether today we should support a proposal that was objectionable over 45 years ago.

The idea of the public option was again put forward in 2007, in a briefing paper by Professor Jacob Hacker. He envisioned a very large public program, enrolling all of the uninsured and anyone else who voluntarily wanted to purchase health insurance from a public insurer. The public insurance company, in turn, would have the market share, the clout and the low overhead to compete against private health insurance companies.

Many good-hearted people have latched onto this proposal today because they think that the private health insurance industry is simply too powerful to conquer. These people aren’t against single-payer. They simply lack confidence that we can achieve a Medicare-for-all single-payer system in one step. They’re looking for an incremental route.

In PNHP, some of us like to say, “You can’t jump a chasm in two leaps.” In the insurance marketplace, the winning company keeps the healthy and wealthy customers and avoids or jettisons the sick and the poor.

Would a public option really be able to compete? Wouldn’t it simply end up with the sick patients, whose care is costly, and flounder? Wouldn’t it more likely lead to greater disparities, an official two-tiered system? Is there anyone who really believes that the heavily monopolized U.S. insurance market would even reform–let alone abolish–itself simply because people were given the choice of a public plan?

Even so, what seems surprising so far is that we haven’t seen much of a specific proposal for what this public option would look like. We hear the words “public option,” but the details about how it would be launched and funded, who would be enrolled, and how it would, in fact, impact the market remain murky. If you’re looking for an incremental route, some specific steps might be useful.

Because the Democratic leaders didn’t put forward a specific proposal, the public option really seems like little more than a bargaining chip. It’s a feint, not a punch.

The New York Times editorial the day after his September speech advised the president not to surrender the public option–yet. The advice was to try and trade away the public option for Republican votes. Meanwhile the public option, as a posture, has lured progressives and liberals to support a reform that is a huge giveaway of taxpayer money to insurance companies.

So the Democratic Party leadership now finds itself in a bit of a pickle. A significant part of the liberal community finds the public option utterly compelling. They see in the idea a morally defensible alternative to the insurance industry, whose profits are essentially blood money.

Will the Democratic leaders, even so, abandon the public option? We’ll see. In Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi noted that when Nancy Pelosi was asked if progressives might bring down health care reform over the public option, she laughed out loud and said that there’s no way that progressives would vote against the President, no matter what.

AS: Even if we got the public option, would it deliver the health care reform that we need?

AC: In the best-case scenario, the public option will not cover everyone, improve quality, redress disparities or guarantee the choice of physicians. PNHP founders David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler estimate that the maximum cost savings it would offer would be only 9 percent of what single-payer would offer. It would also add yet another insurance entity to the 1,300 different insurers we have now. And it won’t end the fundamental problem with health care–the profit motive. That’s what lies behind the health care crisis in America.

Let’s be honest–competitive insurance companies successfully shun sick and poor patients, and enroll healthy and wealthy patients instead. Any entity, including a public option, that enters that marketplace, even with the best intentions, has got to compete for the healthy and wealthy patients to survive.

How can a public option get the insurance market to reform itself? It would also require a colossal amount of regulation–active government coercion of the private industry.

Let’s talk about the political feasibility of getting the government to reform the insurance market in a way that all the companies would share the risks, the burden of the sick and poor, with account books open to the public, so everyone can know what resources are going to the care of patients, and see the fairness of the insurance market reform.

That proposal, in my estimation, would actually require much more political organization–a mightier political force–than we need to win single-payer and go ahead and expand and improve Medicare to include everyone. It makes more sense to simply ask the insurance industry, which has failed our country so terribly, to step aside.

AS: How would single-payer solve the health care crisis in the U.S., and how do you respond to those who say it’s unrealistic to challenge the health insurance industry?

AC: I think about the dimensions of health reform as a pentad, with five interrelated points. We need to reign in unaffordable costs, improve the quality of care, lessen disparities, guarantee access and protect the provider-patient relationship. Any proposal for comprehensive reform has got to get at all of these: costs, quality, disparities, access and choice.

When you see it that way, a single-payer program is the most basic foundation that would have the power to deliver comprehensive reform.

It would liberate tremendous resources, hundreds of billions of dollars annually, that are presently squandered in a vast administrative bureaucracy that exists to extract money from the system. This bureaucracy drives health care into a dysfunctional frenzy. Single-payer would not only eliminate that administrative waste but a myriad of perverse monetary incentives.

Under a single-payer system, everyone would have health care–not insurance, but health care. We would be able to build new hospitals and clinics to meet needs in medically underserved communities. This would not only guarantee access, but improve quality and lessen disparities. And this would be also an economic stimulus of gigantic proportions, a very important thing given the current economic crisis.

With everyone in and nobody out, single-payer would guarantee every patient the right to go to any doctor, nurse practitioner or any health care provider they chose. It would be based upon protecting, not eroding, the privacy of the provider and the patient.

As liberating as single-payer can be, without a true people’s movement, we can’t take on the entrenched power of the insurance industry. The insurance companies control hundreds of billions of dollars of health spending through a byzantine, bureaucratic apparatus that exists to extract resources, including profits, from the care of sick people. It has an enormous lobbying apparatus and contributes rivers of money to both Republicans and Democrats. It’s a very, very serious foe.

AS: How can the debate be shifted to put single-payer at the center?

AC: By sticking to the facts. The right likes to say that single-payer can’t happen because we need to have a uniquely American system.

But if we’re going to have an evidence-based debate about the best way to provide a uniquely American system of health care, it would be between the Medicare model, which is socialized health insurance, and the Veterans Administration, a socialized health system in which the federal government owns every hospital and clinic, pays the doctors and nurses directly, bargains with the pharmaceutical industry with bulk purchasing as its leverage, and monitors the quality of care, with excellent results.

The practicality of the single-payer proposal can’t be refuted. The idea is gaining momentum. If we mobilize, it will become unstoppable. If we’re creative and if we don’t back down, we will win this reform.

Remember, Medicare was implemented 45 years ago within one year. The government enrolled and guaranteed benefits for every single person over 65 in an era before personal computers, with typewriters and carbon paper. In the 1990s, the Taiwan government studied health reform and concluded that single-payer, modeled on our Medicare system, was the best way to go. They pushed it through within a few tumultuous months. And the health finance system in Taiwan has been successful and popular ever since.

AS: What should the strategy of single-payer advocates be in the health care debate this fall?

AC: Build the grassroots movement! Look at recent history. Our emerging movement has overcome all sorts of opposition.

Before he was elected, Obama organized living room discussions on health care. PNHP heard from across the country that hundreds of these meetings were actually in favor of single-payer. The Obama campaign’s report, over 100 pages, managed little more than a mention of single-payer. It was dismissive.

When the White House had a meeting on health care that didn’t invite any single-payer advocates, activist doctors threatened a picket line unless Oliver Fein, the president of PNHP, was invited. Within a day, the White House changed course and invited Oliver Fein and John Conyers, who had also been excluded.

Then, the White House held health forums throughout the country, in Michigan and Vermont, Iowa, North Carolina and California. Single-payer people came out in the hundreds to the meetings.

Max Baucus, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, declared single-payer off the table early in 2009. So when the Senate Finance Committee heard testimony, at two sessions, activists, including doctors and nurses, stood up to demand that single-payer be put on the table.

That civil disobedience galvanized our movement. Dr. Margaret Flowers was then invited to testify before the Senate Health, Energy, Labor and Pensions Committee. When the House committees took testimony, single-payer was on the table.

Meanwhile, members of Congress have now heard and heard and heard again from single-payer activists. This spring, Nancy Pelosi was quoted as saying, “It’s single-payer, single-payer, single-payer, everywhere we go.”

Because of this nascent mass movement, it looks like single-payer will now get to the floor of the House of Representatives this fall for the first time. New York Rep. Anthony Weiner managed to get Nancy Pelosi to allow a floor vote on HR 676, the single-payer bill.

In the Energy and Commerce Committee, Weiner and six other representatives proposed an amendment that would substitute the text of HR 3200 with the text of HR 676, the single-payer bill. The committee chair, Henry Waxman, interrupted Weiner to say that if he would withdraw the amendment from committee, the speaker would allow a floor debate and vote.

This shows that single-payer really is on the table. This should give our movement confidence.

AS: What do you think of the Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s proposed amendment that would allow states to pursue single-payer plans on their own? What should single-payer activists say about his state-by-state strategy?

AC: Dennis Kucinich has proposed an amendment to HR 3200, the main House health care reform bill, which would allow states to implement state-based single-payer programs. Because it came through committee–in fact, it passed the House health committee with Republican votes–it won’t have a floor vote. Three committee chairs and the House Speaker will decide whether the Kucinich amendment will be included in the final version of HR 3200.

The Kucinich amendment is an expression of the great energy to establish state-based single-payer health insurance programs in California, Vermont, Pennsylvania, New York and elsewhere. Many activists who argue for such a state-by-state strategy point to the precedent in Canada. There, Saskatchewan was the first province to enact a single-payer health care system, which then spread province by province in Canada.

Yet with 50 different states, it’s hard to imagine a similar process unfolding in the U.S. when we consider the wide disparities across states–say, Louisiana compared with Minnesota.

It’s also difficult to imagine how state-based single-payer reform would work practically. Say that we won state-based single-payer in New York state–how would it affect people from northern New Jersey, southern Connecticut and elsewhere, who use the excellent hospitals in Manhattan? If a small state like Vermont passed single-payer, how would the system defend itself against the onslaught of attacks that would inevitably come from the powerful insurance and pharmaceutical industries? The Kucinich amendment, in a way, highlights these challenges.

Even so, I’m completely in favor of fighting for state-based single-payer reform. It is a legitimate demand and great way to educate. However, we must not lose sight of our goal–national health insurance.

AS: Given that we are going to have some version of the Obama proposal likely passed what will that mean for the single-payer movement?

AC: Back in February, in his first appearance before Congress, the president said that health care reform cannot and will not wait another year. But even if a bill gets passed, the main elements–like the insurance mandate, any kind of public option if it survives and the insurance exchange–won’t begin until 2013. Meanwhile, we face a system where the experience of seeking care is often a hassle and humiliating, and is sometimes deadly.

This fall, health care activists should explain that we have workable reform within our grasp–single-payer health insurance. We should use the deliberations that go on in Washington and the points that come out of them to explain why and how single-payer would be better.

In reality, whatever happens in Washington will not change our lives much for the better. But the election of the president and the call for sweeping reform have raised the nation’s expectations sky-high that there will be meaningful change. Under those conditions, I’m enormously optimistic that we can build the kind of grassroots movement that we need to win single-payer national health insurance.

Ron Jacobs: Hi Sherry. To begin, can you tell the readers about the March for Equality? What is the impetus behind it? Who put out the original call?

Sherry Wolf: David Mixner, who worked as an Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender (LBGT) liaison in the Clinton administration and Cleve Jones, Harvey Milk’s collaborator and who launched the Names Project AIDS Quilt, put out the call for this march back in June. It was met with horror and opposition from many of the more established, corporate financed national LGBT groups. However, with momentum building at the grassroots, organizations such as Human Rights Campaign and NGLTF thankfully came on board, though they do not run the organizing efforts nor are they shaping the program. This march will not be brought to you by Miller Beer or Citibank!

The (mostly) younger activists at the forefront of mobilizing this march online and on campuses and in communities are sick of the gradualist approach that has dominated our movement for years. The single demand for full equality for all LGBT people in all matters governed by civil law really strikes a chord with activists such as myself and this new generation who find the incrementalist—state-by-state, issue-by-issue—strategy of the LGBT establishment to be a failed one.

RJ: I know that in your book Sexuality and Socialism you talk about the corporatization of the Gay Pride movement and its concurrent moving away from an identification with other disenfranchised and oppressed groups in the US. What would you say is the political identity this march hopes to put forth to the people of the United States?

SW: In a sense, the initiative for this march only underscores the ramifications of my arguments in Sexuality and Socialism. No more crumbs. Enough going hat in hand to Congress and waiting for some tweak in the laws. We want it all!

I got involved in helping to organize this march because I simply find it unendurable that gay politicians like Barney Frank are among the first to argue that demanding equality for LGBT people is the third rail of American politics. This march is about seeking, essentially, to be added to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and have all of our rights respected once and for all.

We will have the NAACP’s Julian Bond, UNITE Here’s John Wilhelm, young, multiracial new activists like Aiyi’nah Ford, transgender militants and myself, an unabashed socialist, speaking at this march. Though Lady Gaga and Cyndi Lauper will be playing and speaking, this is not a Hollywood choreographed affair—it has a shoestring budget and will give expression to this new combative mood and anti-corporate sentiment

RJ: To me, the transformation of much of the Left of the 1960s and ’70s from universal movements into a collection of smaller groups fighting their own particular oppression and for their own piece of the American pie is a big part of why the US Left is where it’s at now — where Democrats are considered socialists. Is this phenomenon (which I consider to ultimately be the result of identity politics gone wild) present in the movement for equality? How should leftists counteract this when it appears?

SW: [The first part of your question is answered above, I believe]

I travel a great deal and speak to small and large audiences from Bellingham, WA to Gainesville, FL and I think that those old school ideas are on the wane—in particular among working-class people and those not attending elite universities. The language of Identity politics persists, in a sense, because a new culture and outlook are still embryonic. But when striking Teamsters (Latino and white, all straight) attended an event in Chicago two weeks ago where Cleve Jones spoke to 250+ people about going to the march, everyone was electrified. The workers gave solidarity to our struggle and the LGBT activists are lending solidarity to their pickets. The May Day protests in many cities this year had LGBT activists carrying rainbow flags—the contingent in Los Angeles where I was that day was very well received by immigrant families.

It’s becoming clearer to more people that the old labor slogan is true: An Injury to One is an Injury to All!

RJ: As you know, I live in North Carolina. Outside of Asheville and a few of the larger cities, there exists a quite obvious homophobia. One sees it on church message boards and bumperstickers and one hears it on the radio and so-called Christian television. This intolerance is quite obvious and, as Beth Sherouse wrote quite articulately in an article that appeared in Counterpunch on August 31, 2009, the fact of this obvious hatred and fear is one reason why LBGT equality must be recognized on a national scale. In her article, she reminds the readers of the federal role in helping end desegregation. Yet, there is another side to that story. The federal government also allowed and encouraged not only segregation, but also fought attempts to roll it back for a long time. I guess my question is — while it is important that federal legislation forbidding discrimination against persons based on their sexuality be passed, how does the equality movement see any such legislation being enforced?

SW: Beth is right and after reading her piece I made it a priority to add more Southern stops on my current speaking tour. If you look at polls one year after the Virginia v. Loving case ended laws preventing Blacks and whites from marrying in 1967, only 20 percent of whites in the U.S. supported biracial marriages. We obviously can’t wait for bigots to come around before passing equal protections for LGBT people. However, it was the ongoing organizing, teach-ins, marches, rallies and even just the posture of Blacks in this country that altered the political climate.

Today, around 80 percent of all Americans—and more than 95 percent of young people—approve of interracial marriages, according to Gallup. A climate of intolerance to anti-gay and anti-trans bigotry can be advanced by students and workers—regardless of their sexual orientation or gender identity. All progressives must bring these issues into organizing efforts beyond the LGBT movement—inject them into union contracts, workplace organizing, budget fightbacks, campus mobilizations and immigrant defense campaigns. After all, most LGBT people ARE workers, immigrants, Black, Brown and all these other identities as well. In other words, lesbians have to pay the rent too.

RJ: In your book you insist on the need for the LBGT rights movement to link up with other oppressed groups in the US and fight for all of these groups’ freedom. I was wondering if in your organizing work for the October 11-12 March on Washington, do you see any attempts by other organizers to expand the call to all oppressed groups? Or is there a tendency to limit the organizing to LBGT people? If so, can you explain why you think this is so?

SW: We made a conscious decision not to create a laundry list of demands, but to have one single demand for equality in all matters covered by civil law in all 50 states. The veteran activists involved, myself included, want to strike while the iron’s hot. There is a spirit of struggle among young LGBT people who came of age thinking AIDS isn’t the mass killer that it is and who are waking up after Prop 8 to the fact that our rights are completely dispensable, where they even exist. We can still be legally fired, or not hired, in most states for our sexual orientation and/or gender identities.

Arizona’s governor, for example, just ditched domestic partner benefits. Ohio’s Representative, Lynn R. Wachtmann, some neanderthal from the 75th District wrote to LGBT activists, “If sexual orientation and gender identity and expression are added as protected classes, all those who do not identify themselves in accordance with this lifestyle choice will be discriminated against.” I have never been a single-issue activist in my life — I’m a socialist after all — but at some point we must unequivocally demand an end to this crap once and for all.

I’m 44, I came of age AFTER Stonewall and before Generation Twitter, I’m from the generation nobody ever bothered to name. I’ve participated in, and in some cases helped lead or initiate divestment campaigns, antiwar, anti-police brutality, pro-abortion, pro-single-payer health care, anti-budget cuts, pro-labor fights, etc. for 26 years. There’s finally a broad fight for LGBT equality and I’d be insane not to leap in with full-force and try to help make it a success.

My greatest hope out of this march is not simply that we win our demand, but that in a poetic reversal of history other struggles take a page from our initiative and mobilize to make demands of the Obama administration. The Stonewall generation had fought for Black civil rights, women’s liberation, against the Vietnam War and, for many, alongside Cesar Chavez for farm laborers for many years before they ever mobilized for their own rights. This time around, it may be possible that through a quirk of history the LGBT struggle could lead the way for others to ratchet up a fight for genuine universal health care, jobs and an end to the wars and occupations abroad.

RJ: I love it — “the generation nobody bothered to name.” Anyhow, any insights on how the organizing is going? How can people get on board and organize in their community?

SW: The Web site for the march www.nationalequalitymarch.com has a dizzying array of downloadable materials. Go to the site, get the facts, post flyers, send out tweets, post it to Facebook, and by all means everyone should get themselves to the march if they can. Obama has shown that without mass pressure he won’t deliver what we need and want. This march punctuates a turning point of sorts for the LGBT struggle—people who miss out on this protest for civil rights will kick themselves afterwards. Don’t kick yourselves, just come.

RJ: Thanks, Sherry.

In part one, Berger discusses his new research into US prison movements of the 1970s, which Berger is researching and writing about for his PhD dissertation at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

In part two, Berger discusses prisoner movements today, particularly in light of the recent ten-year anniversaries of both Critical Resistance and The Jericho Movement.

Dan Berger is a writer and activist living in Philadelphia. He is the author of Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity (AK Press, 2006) and co-editor of Letters From Young Activists: Today’s Rebels Speak Out (Nation Books, 2005). Presently, along with his dissertation about 1970s prison movements, he is editing a book about 1970s-era radicalism, titled Hidden Histories of 1970s Radicalism (forthcoming from Rutgers University Press in Fall, 2010). His writings have also been published in the International Journal of Communication, The Nation, Punishment & Society, WireTap, Z Magazine, and elsewhere.

The grandson of Holocaust survivors, Berger has long been involved in struggles for social justice. From 2000 to 2003, he served as founding co-editor of ONWARD, a now-defunct internationally distributed quarterly anarchist newspaper based in Gainesville, Florida, that emerged out of the global justice movement. Berger has also been involved in an array of organizing efforts against war, racism, and the prison industrial complex. A longtime activist in support of U.S. political prisoners, Berger has published and presented scholarly essays on news images and prison abuse, alternative media and globalization, and race and social movements.

This new video-interview is made by Angola 3 News, which is an official project of The International Coalition to Free the Angola 3. Over 37 years ago in Louisiana, 3 young black men were silenced for trying to expose continued segregation, systematic corruption, and horrific abuse in the biggest prison in the US, an 18,000-acre former slave plantation called Angola. In 1972 and 1973 prison officials charged Herman Wallace, Albert Woodfox, and Robert King (who then became known as the Angola 3) with murders they did not commit and threw them into 6×9 ft. cells in solitary confinement, for over 36 years. Robert was freed in 2001 after 29 years of continuous solitary confinement, but Herman and Albert remain behind bars.

Through our work supporting the Angola 3, we seeks to spotlight the broader issues that are central to their story, like racism, repression, prisons, human rights, solitary confinement as torture, political prisoners, the legacy of the Black Panther Party, and more.

Ron Jacobs: Hi Marc, let me start with what seems to me to be an obvious question. Your newest book, Good Doctor Guillotin, is, among other things, a meditation on capital punishment. I’m guessing that your work opposing this form of punishment is part of what compelled you to write the novel. Yet, the story is about the invention of the guillotine. Can you talk about how these two sentiments (if that’s what they are) coincide and contradict each other?

Marc Estrin: It’s true that I think of this as “my death-penalty book”. As you know, Vermont has been under pressure from the feds to change its no-death-penalty stance to one conforming more to administration positions concerning capital punishment, and federal prosecutors continue to push for death as an option for federal capital crimes (crimes crossing state boundaries) tried in Vermont, trying to habituate Vermont juries to handing out death sentences, and the public to pressure the legislature to change Vermont statutes prohibiting them. I have written a reflection on a recent local capital trial which may be seen here.

Although the public seems to be less enthusiastic about the death penalty in the last two years, it is with us nevertheless (sometimes shockingly so as in the (upcoming) execution of the likely innocent Troy Davis), and the issue still needs work before we belatedly join the vast majority of nations in abolition.

How, then, to do that work? As with Skulk, my attempted end-run around the general censorship of 9/11 truth, The Good Doctor Guillotin is a reaching out beyond-the-choir of abolitionist regulars to a more general fiction reader who may not ever think about the issue. I had to think about the best way to involve such a person.

My hint was a strong reaction by several readers to the Sacco-Vanzetti chapter in Insect Dreams – that plus my own revulsion at a government planning and accomplishing the death of one of its citizens. It seems that detailed recounting of the prelude and countdown to an execution has strong, affective fascination, usually accompanied by a kind of identifying fear and horror often absent when we read reports of executions elsewhere. The end of A Tale of Two Cities is perhaps the supreme example.

That book certainly contributed to my choice of the French Revolution as a setting for an execution, but more than that was the stark theme of good intentions making things worse, humane science evolving into terror. Modern “improvements” in execution techniques — hanging to electric chair to gas to lethal injection – are motivated by far more technical and less revealing considerations, and so Guillotin’s situation was a very rich choice. He was in fact a good man turned into a monster by his ameliorations. So are many of us. But he knew it, too – which is what makes him so interesting a figure.

The downside of this choice is that the book may be mis-read as simply a historical novel about the French Revolution, ho-hum, that was a long time ago. I tried to block off that reception with the inclusion of contemporary essays in my own non-historical voice.

RJ: Similarly, this book also seems to be about the nature of revolution. One might frame the question this way: how do such good intentions — Liberte, equalite, fraternite — end up so horribly? Is it because the forces that are overthrown and have lost their privilege usually attack rather bloodily in an attempt to regain what they have lost or is it merely revenge on the part of the victors that were oppressed by the vanquished? Or is it something else?

ME: Having chosen the French Revolution as a setting, I spent six months reading everything I could about it, from many different authors. Because the story was to end with the first execution, and thus before the Terror, I might have limited my research to those years of preparation. But the beyond-the-novel question of how the hell the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen ended up with mass slaughter seemed so compelling, so contemporary, so relevant to our own murderous march through the world preaching “democracy”, that I spent much time trying to understand that shift.

I’m no historian or real scholar, but it did seem to me that much hinged on the moment when the Revolution went from fighting its external enemies – the royal armies of states threatened by the demise of royalty – to, having successfully defeated them, worrying about the less visible threat of internal ones – those citizens who may be secretly plotting to overthrow, or undermine, or even think about criticism of the Revolution or a return to parts of the past. Who can know what anyone is thinking? Therefore anyone may be a suspect. And any suspect will of course declare innocence. It therefore became life-preserving to speak in a certain way, to use certain words, to wear certain clothing – like wearing an American flag pin – in order to pass. Alertness for counter revolutionaries was high, and among those in power, especially Robespierre, turned into what most would agree as frank paranoia.

“The enemy within” – a most dangerous conception to be floating free in a society. We’ve seen many examples of its destructiveness. I’ve recently written a piece about two of them as a warning concerning the current mental attitude of many Israelis concerning Palestinians. You can see that here. One telltale symptom of this pathology is when a movement starts to “eat its own children.” The struggle between Robespierre and Danton was so rich in this regard, that at least two great artists have seized upon it: Büchner, in his play, Danton’s Death, and Andrej Wajda in his film, Danton. Both treatments, though poetic fiction, have enriched understanding of revolutionary struggle.

Another way good intentions go astray is via an instinct for hyper-protection when an individual, a movement, a revolution, or a nation feels itself particularly vulnerable. Though the event was created, and the fear cynically manipulated, the reaction to 9/11 is a good example. I treated that issue in my novel, Golem Song. The Golem — a central Jewish myth — was a huge clay figure built and given life by a 16th century magician/rabbi to protect the Jewish community in Prague from a likely pogrom. Unlike Frankenstein’s creature, the Golem was built not to understand better the mystery of life, but entirely for protective, potentially punitive purposes. But like the creature, the Golem got out of hand, destroying that not meant to be destroyed. “Golemism,” I call it. I see Golemism as the global marker of our times, hyperprotection leading to hyperdestruction.

RJ: My favorite character in the novel is the hapless Nicholas Pelletier — a man for whom everything he tries ends up badly. Although he is the man for whom the revolution was supposedly fought, he becomes the blade’s first victim. Is this end meant to be just a continuation of his bad luck or is there something deeper involved?

ME: Yes, he was the man for whom the revolution was supposedly fought, but 1) was he? And 2) what else was he?

Remember that except for the year of the Terror, the French Revolution was a bourgeoise one, led primarily by lawyers and rich merchants with the striking assistance of the progressive nobility. They were fighting not for Pelletier, but to wrest power away from the nobility and the clergy. In theory, the revolution declared “the rights of man”, but it was for bourgeois man those rights were proclaimed. Some idealists (Robespierre among them!) kept the Pelletiers in mind as they made their lengthy, highly educated speeches. Some, of course, like Marat, were all about the poor, but Marat and the Père Duchêne were rabble-rousers, and the philosophers of the Enlightenment were not about rousing rabble, but rousing consciousness. Liberty, as here and now, had its limits, equality was hardly reachable, except in theory, and fraternity had its mentally gated communities. The Masonic lodges came closest to a mixing of social levels, but one can scarcely imagine a Pelletier at a Masonic lodge.

No, Pelletier slipped into being a mauvais pauvre — part of pre-industrial class of society that was beneath consideration, beyond repair, and only to be controlled by an ever-expanding police apparatus. He began as a peasant, like most of his countrymen. But consecutive years of drought and freeze destroyed much of France’s agricultural economy, and there was no government help available because the national treasury had been looted to pay for foreign wars (most notably our own revolution, a proxy war against the real enemy, England.) Where have we heard this before? Just as Obama’s rescue packages robs the poor to enrich the rich, so did the realities of the Revolution leave the Pelletiers behind.

I like the little scene where an enlightened doctor offers him the opportunity to transform from a despised criminal to a hero of science by making his detached head wink on signal. I made up this incident up, but it does reflect a grand controversy about whether there was consciousness after decapitation, and whether, therefore the humane rationale for decapitation was warranted. Note the attention to this kind of detail, while the larger question (again raised by Robespierre and only a few others in the National Assembly) of capital punishment went by the boards. Like many things today, national health care, for instance, or stopping the wars, it was considered “not politically feasible.”

RJ: While reading the novel I found myself thinking about the nature of religious faith versus the nature of scientific thought–arguably one of the battles being fought at an intellectual level during the period the novel takes place. This conflict has a revived significance in today’s world what with the rise of religious fundamentalism from Afghanistan to Topeka, Kansas. Yet, underneath the apparent rationality of science there also seems to be an element of irrational belief required for one to take the next step and accept science’s logic. Your first book Insect Dreams touched on this in its portrayal of the scientists working on the Manhattan Project. Care to comment?

ME: One of the most striking things I discovered while filling in my knowledge of the French Revolution was the central role of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy in creating a counter-revolutionary backlash, especially in the western rural areas of Brittany and the Vendée. Those impassioned movements affected my choice of origin for Pelletier and his wife, and infused much of the internal conflict of the curé Pierre Grenier, the only completely invented character. His role in the novel is to illustrate precisely the anguished interactions of faith, doubt, science, revolutionary fervor, and the human heart.

Having been trained as a scientist myself, I both admire its finesse, and loathe its dismissal of the larger, if cloudier, dimensions of the lived world. The chapter, “Death by a Thousand Cuts” in Insect Dreams was my indictment of that limited world view, certainly faith-based, that science is the definitive guide to reality, and arbiter of right action. The scientists of the Manhattan Project, faced with the collapse of their raison d’être, refused to stop before testing their bomb on human beings.

This conflict, this pattern, supplies one of the continuing themes of many of my novels — the Faustian bargain: desire for knowledge and “progress” without considering the cost and consequences. Guillotin’s story is an archetype of this, our ongoing, hubristic, human tragedy.

RJ: Ah yes… the Faustian bargain. I think we’ve all made a few–at least at a personal level–to get a job or maintain a relationship. However, the ones I’m more interested in are those that we make in the political/economic realm as a people. Last November’s election appears to me as a Faustian bargain of this type. Hell, every election is a Faustian bargain of a sort. Anyhow, back to the more general one we make as residents of the United States — we know what our government, its military and the corporate/financial monoliths do to maintain our standard of living… and we support it, if only tacitly. Keeping Nicholas Pelletier in mind, one could argue that it is only the criminals and others — those that Bob Dylan called “the luckless, the abandoned an’ forsaked”–that do not make this bargain. But then, they probably make their own with Mephistopheles in another form. I guess my question is–can any human in our modern society avoid the Faustian deal?

ME: Faustian bargain:

Let’s make some distinctions because not every bargain is a Faustian bargain. The key dynamic in the Faustian bargain is a quest – for knowledge, or power, or the establishment of some ideal – with every attainment receiving some unexpected blowback, usually a just punishment.

I don’t think the US elections represent a Faustian bargain: we certainly don’t learn anything from them, nor do we get any power, nor do we further any ideal. Rather the opposite in each case. So I’m not even sure what “bargain” we, or Pelletier, or any of the forsaked have entered into, much less Faustian ones.

The dynamic there (here) seems to be pure submission to power and exploitation – which is largely the case with voters (excepting the power elite) in the US.

Given that understanding, I would put your question rather differently:

1. Can any human in our modern society get any kind of bargain at all – something symbiotically quid pro quo?

2. Can any human in our modern society find a Faustian bargain on the racks?

The first is a complex question, given the resources spent to create false consciousness. “If you protect me from terrorists, I will give up my civil liberties, and engage in torture.” I suppose that’s a bargain of sorts. Etc.

The second is also complex, though I suspect less so because the group under discussion is smaller. Who are the humans in modern society who are in a position to gain knowledge, power, or their ideals? The elite, who are usually less than knowledgeable about consequences, or worse, impervious to them. “I don’t really give a shit how many Indian farmers die, as long as my net worth goes up.” Well-funded scientists
often discover things, most often of use in keeping the power imbalance intact.

The Mephistophelian dimension to the Faustian Bargain indicates that what is at issue is supernatural power brought to bear on humans who can’t handle it. Given the secularization of modern society, I suppose we have to translate that into the dynamic between the “spiritual” innerworld, and the political/economic realm. Here, I think, bargains can be made, though given the economic/social cost of say, discovering that one should drop out of society, they may often lead to Faustian hell.

RJ: What about the bargains one makes when working for an employer like General Dynamics? Or the bargain one makes by reaping the benefits of that corporation being in the tax base? Or the bargain one makes to have a nice car and pretty skin? The quests involved may be pecuniary and venal, but they are quests.

ME: I think those are “bargains” similar to “I’ll trade my civil liberties (and morality) for your protection.” Bargains in quotes, but not Faustian ones.

RJ: Until next time. Onward.

Ron Jacobs: I heard you speak about the US war in Afghanistan a couple months ago. You mentioned that you had “embedded” yourself with the Afghan Taliban. Could you tell us how you did so and, more importantly, what you observed?

Anand Gopal: I have some well-placed Taliban contacts and I was offered a chance to come out and see how the insurgents really operate. Since there is so little about this in public domain, it seemed like an excellent opportunity. Passing from Kabul to the rural countryside where the Taliban holds sway was pretty illuminating: all traces of government presence vanish and instead the streets are filled with gun-toting insurgents. The Taliban rule through fear, but they also have a degree of support in the areas in which they exist. In some cases I saw locals coming up and offering them food or shelter.

The insurgents, like most rural Afghans, were uneducated and not very worldly. However, they managed to develop a somewhat sophisticated analysis of the situation in Afghanistan. They felt that they were fighting to free their country from foreign oppression, and they felt that they were fighting to preserve their culture and values.

We shouldn’t read this to mean that they are heroic guerrillas or liberators of the Afghan people. They represent the values and outlook of rural Pashtun life, something that is not applicable to the rest of society, whether that be the urban population or non-Pashtun ethnic groups. This is why, for example, the Taliban has little support among these groups.

RJ: Are the resistance forces getting stronger, like all the generals are saying? Would more US troops change anything in terms of their chances for victory?

AG: The insurgency is certainly getting stronger. The amount of area it controls grows yearly, and in the Pashtun areas it is much stronger than the Afghan government. This trend has occurred despite the yearly increase of troops in the country, so clearly just adding more troops is not enough to stem the insurgents’ growing influence. Whenever new troops enter an area, the insurgents usually melt away or move to a neighboring area. It’s very difficult to stamp out a guerrilla force by pure force of arms.

Undercutting the growth of the insurgency would require bringing development, providing jobs and opportunities for social advancement to rural Pashtuns. It would also require bringing an honest and responsive government.

RJ: Back in July, officials in DC said that the new commander of the occupying forces in Afghanistan, Gen. McChrystal, will order all international forces in Afghanistan to stop starting fights with militants near the homes of Afghan civilians. The troops will still be allowed to return fire if they are “in imminent danger,” but the preferred option will be to withdraw from the area. He also went on record stating that he would reduce the number of US air strikes. From your perspective and knowledge of the situation, has this really happened? Do you actually think this will occur in practice and, if so, will it make any difference in Afghan opinion regarding the presence of foreign troops?

AG: It’s still too early to say what effect McChrystal’s directives will have. The number of civilian casualties do appear to be down from last year, although its very difficult to say with certainly since many such cases are not reported. Moreover, the premise of the new strategic thinking from the U.S. military here is that there is a strict division between civilians and the insurgents. In fact, the dividing line is sometimes hard to draw. In many places where the insurgents operate, for example, they enjoy the active support and protection of the locals. How do you deal with such locals–as accomplices to the insurgents or civilians duped into supporting the guerrillas? It’s one thing to draw this line on paper, but a completely different issue to do it in the heat of battle.

For example, McChrystal’s order to bar international forces from starting fights with militants near the homes of Afghan civilians would mean that very little fighting happens at all, since the Taliban (for example) are rooted in the villages and operate there.

Moreover, McChrystal has made clear that the military component is only part of the strategy to turn things around here–equally if not more important is bringing good governance and economic opportunities. There has been no announcement of a plan to do this, nor is the military capable of doing it, so I suspect that the military will continue fall back on what it does best–fighting. On the same day that McChrystal announced his revamped counterinsurgency doctrine, U.S. forces raided a hospital, for example–a clear violation of international law and the new doctrine.

RJ: Now, to Pakistan. What is going on in the Northwestern territory and other tribal areas?

AG: There has been a very perceptible shift in the last six months in Pakistan, starting this spring. The Pakistani Taliban was close to the height of its power then–they controlled large parts of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and significant swathes of the North West Frontier Province. But they seem to have overplayed their hand on two fronts. First, their rather brutal regime induced a popular backlash–many ordinary Pashtuns in these areas who initially supported the Taliban started to turn against them. Second, they moved close to the province of Punjab, which is the heart of Pakistan and the seat of the ruling establishment. While the Pakistani Taliban grew out of the radicalization surrounding the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, in recent years it turned its sights on the Pakistani state. By this year, things started to destabilize throughout the country, not just in the tribal areas. This induced a backlash by the Pakistani state, who dealt a swift defeat to Taliban forces in Bajaur agency and later moved into Swat and removed Taliban rule there.

The series of setbacks for the Pakistani Taliban have continued into this summer. Their leader Baitullah Mehsud was recently killed by an American drone strike, and he was the glue holding together a very fractured movement. There are dozens of rival commanders, some at war with the Pakistani state, some at peace with Islamabad and at war with the Americans in Afghanistan, and some at war with each other. This has led to some disarray amongst the insurgent forces there, which very visibly affects the fight in Afghanistan. Last fall, for example, NATO and U.S. army supply routes (which comes through Pakistan and into Afghanistan) were in danger because the guerrillas kept attacking them. But this summer we’ve seen very few such attacks, which is a great boon to U.S. forces.

RJ: Can you briefly describe what you see as the differences between the Afghan Taliban and the Pakistani Taliban? Do they coordinate activities at all? Is there shared leadership at any level that you know of?

AG: The Afghan and Pakistani Taliban are distinct entities. The Pakistani Taliban is primarily at war with the Pakistani state, while the Afghan Taliban is entirely focused on fighting the Afghan state and the U.S. presence in Afghanistan. Of course, the differences aren’t entirely this clear cut–there are Pakistani Taliban commanders who don’t fight against Islamabad and focus their energies solely in Afghanistan, for example. But overall the Pakistani Taliban has very little presence in Afghanistan, while the Afghan Taliban don’t fight in Pakistan.

The Afghan Taliban are products of the war-ravaged rural Afghan countryside. The Pakistani Taliban however are as much the product of the gross social and economic inequalities of the Pakistani tribal areas as they are of the events in Afghanistan. This means that the two movements have a very different character. The Pakistani Taliban tend to attack village chiefs and some landowners, creating an almost Robin Hood air about them–one of the reasons for their initial support amongst local populations–whereas the Afghan Taliban do nothing of the sort. The latter are allied with village chiefs and landlords. Moreover, the Pakistani Taliban are a product of the factious nature of tribal politics–the movement is delineated along tribal lines; often if two tribes are at war it means that the Taliban commanders from those tribes will be at war with each other as well. In Afghanistan, however, 30 years of warfare have eroded tribal structures in many parts of the country and we rarely see the Taliban caught up in tribal conflicts.

The two movements are allies and do support each other when possible–for instance, Pakistani Taliban commanders run training camps and send suicide bombers into Afghanistan. But each group is mostly focused on the conflict in its own territory so this sort of coordination isn’t substantial. Most of the Pakistani Taliban commanders have pledged fealty to Mullah Omar, the leader of the Afghan Taliban. But in practice, this means very little, since the Pakistani Taliban have complete operational and political independence.

RJ: In the past couple years I have interviewed and communicated with members of the Labour Party of Pakistan–a left organization in Pakistan. Now, I know the Pakistani Left was decimated in the 1970s, but you mentioned in your talk that there is a Left in Pakistan. Do you think they have the potential to influence Pakistani politics, given the corrupt and autocratic nature of the bourgeois politicians, the authoritarian military, and the influence of Islamist forces?

AG: The Left has shown that it has tremendous potential to influence Pakistani politics–the lawyers movement, which sought to reinstate sacked judges and defend the rule of law in the face of dictatorship–is a prominent example. One of the biggest challenges for the Pakistani left, however, is that its reach is limited in the tribal areas and the North West Frontier Province. This means that there are few credible alternatives for the millions of disillusioned and disaffected Pashtuns in those areas outside of traditional religious structures and extremist movements like the Taliban. And the burden that the Pakistani left bears is especially great considering the fact that there is essentially no left in Afghanistan. As many in the Pakistani left will tell you, a fundamentally transformative solution to the problems in Afghanistan cannot occur without a concomitant push to solve the problems of Pakistan.

RJ: Thanks, Anand. I have a feeling we will be communicating with each other again about this subject.

Arnold August, Montreal author and expert on Cuban democracy, was invited on August 24 by Sylvia Richardson of CJSF Radio to shed light on the June 28 events in Honduras and the revelations surrounding the case which are being exposed over time.

Mr. August noted, a now a known fact, that the aircraft that carried Zelaya the night of his abduction from his home landed at the U.S. military base in Soto Cano in Honduras, before continuing to its final destination of Costa Rica. “Even if one is not a military expert, how can a plane land and to take off again on a military base where you have 600 American soldiers and a lot of military equipment there, without the knowledge, expertise and support of the Americans at that base?” Mr. August asked.

Therefore, the study of the U.S. State Department’s official publications since June 28, which Mr. August has followed closely, show that the strategy of Washington since this military coup has not consisted solely in emphasizing the “mediation” by the President of Costa Rica Oscar Arias, a hoped-for dialogue between what Washington calls “the two parties.”

Sylvia Richardson noted that the United States has invaded or interfered in more than 50 countries in the last century and draws a dark portrait of US interventions, the most recent having occurred in Haiti in 2004 and Venezuela in 2002. The latest demonstration of U.S. hegemonic intent: the agreement between the United States and Colombia to establish seven military bases in this country sharing a border with, amongst others, Ecuador and Venezuela. Colombia is the main geopolitical powerful ally of the United States in the region. Mr. August said that compared to the 60s, the situation has changed drastically. At that time Cuba was isolated by the vast majority of southern governments. All governments in the south now recognize the socialist island. In the entire hemisphere, only the United States refuses to do so.

The coup in Honduras was not only directed against President Manuel Zelaya and the Honduran people, but it especially targeted the nations of Latin America and the Caribbean which had chosen to join ALBA, an economic, social and political alliance as an alternative to U.S. dominated alliances. Mr. August stated: “The military coup d’état that took place in Honduras was sort of a threat, an indication from Washington that even if power has changed hands, even if we have a new face there, the empire still considers Latin America, Central America and the Caribbean to be areas that should be dominated by the United States.”

Mr. Obama, at the August 10 meeting in Mexico with Canada’s Prime Minister Harper and Mexican President Calderon, lost his cool by qualifying as hypocrites those who ask him to intervene strongly in favour of the return of President Zelaya and the Honduran people to power. In this sudden lack of diplomatic tact, Obama has shown the true face of his administration by putting down those who, like Venezuela, demand that Washington takes a firm stand against the coup.

Mr. August said: “What is being demanded that the United States act upon is certainly not an intervention in the internal affairs of Honduras, but Washington should at least withdraw their own ambassador as have already done most countries, and completely stop all military and economic aid to Honduras.” He continues: “What we’re seeing evolving before our very eyes is Washington applying the same imperial policy in Central and Latin America, that is to say a policy of domination and interference in order to control the natural resources of the region and have a stranglehold on the geo-strategic areas.”

Mr. August said the growing and all-encompassing resistance in the south against U.S. policy is now so palpable in the light of the Honduran people occupying the streets of the country by claiming not only the return of their democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya, but also the holding of a Constituent Assembly to reform the Constitution. The growing prestige of countries such as Cuba, Bolivia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Paraguay, and the reputation of their leaders and their social programs, has spawned a growing movement against U.S. domination, the capitalist system and neoliberalism, not considered viable for the peoples of the world.

Education is touted as field where the hardest working and most talented students will rise to the top. Examining this, Robbins with Joe Bishop wrote “Accountability Legerdemain and the Intensification of Inequality.” The writers questioned the supposed meritocracy within education by noting the inequality of conditions among students.

Robbins explores the inequality of conditions further in his book Expelling Hope: The Assault on Youth and the Militarization of Schooling (SUNY: 2008).¹ Robbins raises consciousness over the direction neoliberals and neoconservatives are steering education – a direction that further marginalizes and excludes the poor and people of color.

At the end of George Bush’s term, the economic devastation wrought by the Bush administration’s neoliberal policies grabbed headlines. The 2008 election saw a shift from George Bush, a president of expelling hope, to Barack Obama, a president who audaciously encourages hope. I interviewed Robbins by email about what this means for the policy of zero tolerance within education.

Kim Petersen: In your article “Accountability Legerdemain and the Intensification of Inequality,” you wrote of the illusion of a meritocracy and the unfairness of standardized tests. One solution you looked at was an educational handicapping index. Within this index was a proposed teacher quality index. I wonder how this could be objective? Do not teachers have different conditions under which they became teachers and under which they operate as teachers? So shouldn’t there also be a handicapping index in the determination of a teacher’s quality?

Christopher Robbins: My co-author and I provided the idea of a handicapping index as only a slight attempt at showing one type of mechanism by which the standardization process and the push for national outcomes could be made moderately fairer, given the wildly different community contexts in which schools operate, teachers (attempt to) teach, and students (attempt to) learn. Notice I said “fairer,” not “objective.” At some level, none of the processes and practices associated with “accountability” can be objective because the proposed or intended outcomes, and the motivations driving the definition of certain outcomes, that “accountability” processes are to meet are patently non-objective. These outcomes are defined largely by players outside of public schools, and these players–for instance, groups like the Business Roundtable, National School Boards Association, and the National Governors’ Association and other hardly social justice-minded groups that have come out in early support of national standards –have vested and more often than not concentrated interests in defining, solidifying, and legitimating outcomes that narrowly serve their interests in producing numerate and minimally literate workers who will be compliant, or in Foucault’s terms “docile,” having basic skills and dispositions amenable to being shaped and sharpened by employers. It is quite possible that teachers, students, parents, and their wider communities might have some interests in the definition and achievement of some outcomes that overlap with those preferred by the corporate or government communities. Yet, this is something we cannot really know since teachers, students, parents, or even researchers, who work with teachers, students, and parents, haven’t typically been prominent contributors to National Governors’ Association or Business Roundtable meetings. The increased emphases on technical, as opposed to critical, literacy and math, and the woefully inadequate, if not non-existent, emphasis put on civic education and the social sciences that have been attendant to No Child Left Behind (the current avatar of the accountability movement) were not incidental or “unintended” consequences of recent accountability efforts. Further, since these groups often operate on crass cost-efficiency models, outcomes and the processes involved in meeting them must be both easily manipulated and measurable in “objective” or “scientific” ways that rely on the least amount of labor as possible. It is costly and difficult to measure students’ interpretations of and engagement with political events or their ability to use “traditional” academic skills to address pressing community problems of interest to them. But beyond being costly and difficult to measure, these sorts of possible educational outcomes are simply anathema to the interests of the various groups that are behind the “accountability” movement. What’s more, as scholars as varied as Paul Street, Alex Molnar, Kenneth Saltman, and David Berliner and Bruce Biddle have pointed out in various ways, the accountability movement and the processes associated with it are really not about achieving objectivity and transparency in formal education; they are about controlling formal education for arbitrary ends, when they are not about undermining the public school system.

I realize that I have talked around your question. The simple answer is that producing a handicapping index for teacher quality and teacher training, much like the handicapping index for measuring student “achievement,” would not be objective. It could give the illusion of objectivity. Because of having apprehensions about the value of such a positivist understanding of objectivity and the potential mis/uses to which it could be put, we would be wary of applying this handicapping index to teacher quality. And, really, the larger points we were making in that short paper concerned two things: the civic purposes of public schools and the longstanding existence of social inequality. How can, and how does, “accountability” account for these things?

Yet, there is another issue involved here. My co-author and I also used the handicapping index example as a way to point to the absurdity and waste of these standardization attempts. To do standardization in even a remotely fair way would cost incredible amounts of money and take considerable amounts of intellectual and social energy, and this would achieve what? One of the effects of these processes would be the further delimiting or closing of educational and social possibilities. Paulo Freire, Roger Simon, and Henry Giroux have written eloquently and prolifically about education being about possibility. If education is not about the opening of self- and social possibilities and alternative ways of being in the world, then what is it about? In a different vein, John Dewey talked about democracy as being creative democracy, one that is continually unfinished, open to new questions, capable of responding to adversity and rapid change in ways that are fair and allow for people to have as much control as possible over the basic affairs that govern their everyday lives. He was also steadfast in his beliefs about pedagogical practices being produced and elaborated in ways that would allow for such a democracy to come into being by providing agents, or citizens, with opportunities to practice and develop the skills and produce relationships capable of supporting such a democracy. Such a view puts a high premium on capacious educational practices—inside and outside of schools. If most, if not all, of the outcomes of and questions about formal education are given, heteronomously, in advance, possibility is significantly reduced. If our energies and relationships are diverted to controlling, rather than opening, educational practices and getting lost in the euphoria of statistical orgies that will allegedly represent our efforts in “objective” ways, then defining, articulating, and working toward other possibilities will become extremely difficult.

KP: You wrote Expelling Hope: The Assault on Youth and the Militarization of Schooling while George Bush was president. In this book you wrote that a culture of punishment attendant to zero tolerance society was denying a section of American youth the right to an education, especially poor youth and youth of color. Now that Barack Obama, a president of color, sits in the Whitehouse, do you see any indications of change in the zero tolerance policy?

CR: Yes, I see the policy and its attendant practices possibly becoming further normalized. What with all the subterfuge about both his candidacy and presidency being evidence about the existence of colorblindness in the U.S., a racial state from top to bottom, people might have more reason to say, “Black kids are disproportionately kicked out of school because they are dangerous or disruptive. This is not about racism. We have a Black president after all, don’t we?” and then tautologically point to the exclusion rates as proof rather than have impetus to point to a racial logic built into the policy of zero tolerance, the culture of schooling, and the structure of U.S. society. When zero tolerance was passed as part of the Gun Free Schools Act (1994), government officials (and their constituents) readily supported it because it was seen as a response to an “urban” (read: Black) problem that was threatening suburban whites. We would do well to remember that more than 1 in 2 whites who voted casted their votes for someone other than Obama. Many of these people work in or for schools, or they have children in schools, or they sit on school boards. Why or how would Obama being president immediately or automatically change the ways these people interpret the behaviors of certain children and youth?

We would also do well to look at his appointment to the position of Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan. Duncan was the CEO of Chicago Public Schools (CPS) at a time when racial disproportionality in both school exclusions and the criminalization and militarization of schools in CPS did not decrease, but stayed the same or increased. As I pointed out in a footnote in my book, “zero tolerance” could be seen as the logic that underpinned Bush’s unprecedented foreign policy of pre-emptive strikes; under the current administration, warfare has increased, not decreased, in places that are coded as racially other, perpetuating a war that A. Sivanandan has defined as a “xeno-racist” war, a war that is framed and conducted in ways that vacillate between xenophobic and racist motivations and appeals. If we see evidence of “zero tolerance” at play in the highest reaches of foreign policy and obviously costly military affairs, why would we see a waning of zero tolerance at lower levels of society? What’s more, if we look at the issue of zero tolerance in wider terms, we might see connections between ongoing militarization and zero tolerance in public schools. Study after study shows that zero tolerance is most frequently applied to non-violent social behaviors in schools and districts that are, in policyspeak, “economically distressed.” Many authors point to larger class sizes, lack of curricular resources, and under-qualified teachers as factors involved in the disproportionate use of zero tolerance in schools serving communities marginalized by class and color. As we continue to allocate roughly ten times more to defense spending than we do to education spending, it becomes increasingly difficult to undo the underlying conditions that either inform disruptive behavior or encourage teachers and school officials to almost automatically resort to zero tolerance as the solution to the symptoms of deep social and economic problems in their schools and communities. Combine these factors with the renewal of NCLB and its hyper-focus on testing and “annual yearly progress,” something on which certain groups or types of students have been perceived as a drag, and we will continue to see the corrosive effects of zero tolerance in the disproportionate exclusion of poor students and students of color from public schools.

At the same time, there is much more to the picture. GFSA (1994) was/is defined in relatively inane ways. This, the federal version of zero tolerance, was/is defined in fairly straightforward terms that merely inscribed in law policies that most, if not all, schools had had in place for years: students cannot possess firearms, weapons (or drugs) in school or on school transports, without being met with exclusion. The problem is that because public schooling is defined as a states’ rights issue, states crafted policies that not only maintained, by legal fiat, the language of the federal policy, but they also expanded on the language. The process then occurred again at the district/school level, which was then only propounded by educational officials’ mis/comprehension of the local/state/federal policy and their varying interpretations of student behaviors. Zero tolerance is applied with almost as much zeal to weapons possession as it is to asthma inhalers, midriff shirts, and do-rags in many districts. So, on this level, Obama is really ancillary at best to efforts at reducing the power and pervasiveness of zero tolerance in public schools. Zero tolerance has become routinized in particular ways at the level of culture and everyday school politics. This is where work on zero tolerance needs to take place.

KP: Do you see any change in the policy of color blindness?

CR: Unfortunately, my hopes in this regard are tempered. On the one hand, the image of a president of color in a racial state is promising. If anything, it is potential evidence of possible subterranean shifting at work in culture and politics. On the other hand, a president of color in a racial state is faced with practical political challenges. How does such a president advance progressive policy, which ostensibly would help communities of color, without being tagged for advancing the interests of his “race?” Just because the U.S. has a president of color, does that mean, despite the whiff of transformative interests found in his rhetoric, he or his administration is actually progressive? Did voters and do citizens have concrete, substantive evidence that this is the case, that this administration is explicitly concerned with addressing very significant problems that have been exacerbated by color blind discourse, problems like wildly disproportionate incarceration rates, drastically different infant mortality rates across racial lines, divergent employment rates, segregated schooling…?

Yet, we must be clear about how color blindness operates. Color blindness is a slippery and, in many ways now, a strong discourse. It is slippery, as Eduardo Bonilla-Silva has pointed out, because it operates in a “now you see it, now you don’t” way. A few years ago, I wrote a piece for Dissident Voice on the racial politics that ensued after Michael Richards’s (aka “Kramer’s”) racist outburst at the Laugh Factory, where he unleashed a tirade of racist vitriol reminiscent of the Jim Crow South. While such behavior is obviously reprehensible, it is not entirely unpredictable, even if it is currently infrequently seen in public spaces. However, the media’s response to this incident ignored all of the social, cultural, political, and economic evidence of a very color-conscious society and government. Somehow, the Katrina tragedy, only a year before Richards’s outburst, produced questions about whether race actually still mattered in the U.S. but, if one had taken the media’s response to Richards at face value, one would have been encouraged to think that racism was merely the aberration of a minority of deranged individuals rather than a deeply-rooted system of advantage and disadvantage built into the state, the market, and civil society. We continued to see this sort of slipperiness at play in the nomination of Sotomayor to the Supreme Court and in the confirmation hearing s that followed. After how many years of having predominantly white men sit on the court, who presumably were chosen because of their political and philosophical orientations which, in part, are the products of their cultural (and racial) capital, mainstream and reactionary media suddenly had concerns about racial ideology seeping into law because of Sotomayor’s ethnicity! So, strangely enough, this response was seen as “color blind” when pundits were obviously seeing “race” as a possible determining variable in Sotomayor’s potential deliberations. Many seemed so concerned with maintaining (the illusion of) color blindness that they felt it was necessary to focus debate about Sotomayor’s nomination on race. See, there is race, and we are concerned with it, but we’re really talking about law, not race. “Now you see it, now you don’t.”

Color blindness can be seen as a strong discourse because of the predominance it holds over public discourse on race. What’s the alternative to color blindness? Color consciousness? After almost a solid 30 years of being browbeaten with the idea that we are color blind, how fashionable or politically viable is it to be color conscious, even if some of the most pressing social, political, and economic problems in the U.S. are underpinned by racial politics? Just think, given contemporary discourse and politics surrounding race, how surreal it would seem if a candidate of any race were to run on a racial justice platform. And, when we refer back to the “concerns” about race involved in the nomination of Sotomayor, this is really a peculiar and disturbing discourse. The Supreme Court is seen as the penultimate symbol of justice in the U.S. The strength of color blind discourse in this case is its ability to frame color consciousness, one element of many involved in producing more justice in a racialized society, as something that is unfair, unjust or, seemingly in this case, worse—“un-American.”

KP: If the educational opportunities of some individuals or groups continue to be denied, what are the future ramifications for those denied and society?

CR: I recently had a conversation with a military official where this concern emerged in reference to the (disproportionate) militarization of poor and urban public schools through things like the JROTC. My concerns with exclusion, criminalization, and militarization in public schools are all informed by similar assumptions. Given the inordinate commercialization of society and the corporate stranglehold over information at this point in time, public schools, more than ever, need to be struggled over, as Ken Saltman and Henry Giroux argue, as “sites and stakes” in democracy and democratic public life. The vitality and future of democratic public life and political culture in the U.S. are seriously threatened when children and youth are denied opportunities to develop the skills, languages, and relationships central to democracy. This threat is only propounded when the skills, languages, relationships, and conditions for developing civic agency are so unevenly distributed among groups in society. I am not solipsistic about these ideas or ideals. Public schools never effectively or concertedly operated in the interests of a strong, creative, or radical democracy. However, they nonetheless always had a weak charge given to them to provide the basic skills required for participation in political processes. This was a charge given to public schools by Horace Mann, considered the founding architect of U.S. mass public schooling and hardly a radical. We can say with some certainty that Disney, TimeWarner/Aol, Viacom, NewsCorps, and GE/NBC won’t provide the ingredients fundamental to democracy. So, given the current institutional arrangements in society, where else beside in schools, operating in coordination with grassroots and advocacy groups, can concerned educators begin to develop the relationships, and struggle over the wider conditions, that make democracy possible?

We are already seeing the evidence of the disproportionate provision of educational opportunity. We can look to statistics on military enlistment rates and from what social classes enlistees came, how much education they had upon when enlisting, and their motivations for enlisting. We can also look at our massive prison-industrial complex, the indisputable world leader of such complexes. Our prison population nearly tripled between 1990 and 2002, largely as a consequence to the then newly crafted drug laws and sentencing policies, petty, non-violent crime, and laws surrounding social behaviors. A large percentage of people sentenced for crimes during this time period were un- or under-employed in the year before they were arrested for their alleged crimes. Many, too, had comparatively lower amounts of education. Clearly, all of the education in the world will not get people jobs if the jobs do not exist, but education is certainly helpful in allowing one to compete for existing jobs.

Further, various studies have pointed out that schooling plays at least an indirect role in various life chances, choices, and outcomes: where/if one will go to college, what fields one will pursue, one’s political orientation, and even people’s marriage choices or choices of life partners. Education also plays an indirect role in where one might live, which other recent studies have shown to be correlated with life expectancy. Unevenly allocating educational opportunity can only create uneven outcomes in these and various other areas. Such unevenness on these socio-economic indicators threatens democracy in a couple of ways. It reduces the range of choices and resources available to people, and it does so, as Pierre Bourdieu argued in the 1970s, through “objective” means and, being “objective,” make it very difficult for people to legitimately contest unequal outcomes, if they were to be so audacious to contest “objective” processes and practices in the first place. It also creates the conditions in which different groups of people are educated in fundamentally different ways, if at all, about civic life. It’s interesting to read Horace Mann’s “Report No. 12 to the Massachusetts School Board” from 1848 and see the consequences he predicted would result from failing to produce a coherent schooling system that focused on political education: the rich and poor inhabiting distinctly different social, political, and even moral universes; the installation of feudalism under a different name; seething, if not mass, social tension and possible unrest; inclination to resort to violence as opposed to politics; and a dysfunctional government, among many other things. Sadly, these imagined consequences hardly seem like rhetorical excess 160 years later.

KP: You see “a critical, educated hope” as a necessary “guiding force” toward “reconstituting the democratic legacy of public schooling and the promise of a democratic future.” Obama took the mantle of the presidential candidate of hope. Do you see a “critical, educated hope” present?

CR: Given the available evidence to date, I see a narrowly, that is, ideologically-driven, pragmatic hope, which is a contradiction of terms. Pragmatism alleges to be non-ideological. Its currently vogue version goes kind of like the following: Let’s take some of the evidence we can put our fingertips on (e.g., in the healthcare hearings in the Senate finance committee, no supporters of the single-payer option were invited to the table), look at the very immediate situation, see what tools we have at our disposal, apply those tools in the least “partisan” (which seems to translate into the most market-friendly) way, and hope they will get us through this or that situation, and we will come happily out on the other side as post-partisan and post-political drones. But, how is this not ideological, or how can it avoid becoming ideological? Isn’t it ideological to say we are moving beyond politics to being “practical” and “pragmatic?” Isn’t democratic politics a vehicle that can allow us to address “practical” but albeit sometimes complex and messy social and economic questions? More importantly, how is such a pusillanimously pragmatic hope not short-sighted? Doesn’t hope require social and political vision, something that allows us to imagine and practice into being a future that does not repeat the present, one that Ernst Bloch said would always be not-yet?

It also seems that questions and questioning would play central roles in a critical, educated hope. Questions, especially needling ones about things that we would prefer not to talk about or ones that others unremittingly try to convince us are “just the ways things are,” perform critical work in bringing a more humane future into being by drawing attention to strategic silences in political discourse and denaturalizing the socially produced phenomena that the powerful would wish to be seen as the consequences of the mere unfolding of the natural order. Questioning, as Cornelius Castoriadis and Zygmunt Bauman have argued, is central to not only hope but also justice: A democratic society is one that is able to continually question not only its existing institutions, but also the assumptions involved in the construction and maintenance of those institutions. A democratic society is one that never asks enough questions about justice, justice already produced, and justice that could be produced. In Zygmunt Bauman’s words, a democratic society is never “just enough.” A society that can no longer or that does not any longer question itself stops being a democratic society. Justice and hope seem to be connected, in this regard, by a culture of critical questioning. Our ability to produce more justice and hope for more justice relies, in part, on our capacities to question the basic values informing, and institutions legitimating, our social relationships.

In my estimation, I don’t see enough questioning, or at least appropriate questioning, by people properly situated, about the basic assumptions and relationships organizing our society, for there to be a critical, educated hope. Just think about the questions that have animated government responses to the financial meltdown. Politicians have made exhaustive attempts to repeatedly assure us (and their constituents in the business community) that government interventions are aimed to recuperate the “free market “ and the “enterprising spirit” that “so marks America,” as if these were the assurances many of us wanted to hear. See, these responses are the result of an inability to ask questions about given institutional arrangements; the only questions that could be publicly asked so far are of the following sort, “Given the existing crisis, how can we recuperate a free market order, or at least one that is favorable to concentrated corporate interest?” The assumption is that the “free market” philosophy and its attendant institutions were not the problem; it was the excesses of a few bad apples. We have heard this rationale before, haven’t we? Or, we can look at the limited public conversations and debates about contemporary education policy. These debates typically operate on the assumption that all that we have is all that can be achieved; we just need to do some tweaking or twittering here and there on accountability issues. When Duncan first announced interests in national standards, for instance, he obviously assumed that NCLB and the philosophy and sociology that drove it are generally sound; in his words, “There are some problems in the policy…”, not that the policy itself was/is a problem.

All of this, however, is not a rallying cry for hopelessness. I retain hope that people are more complex and complicated than politicians assume them to be. I also retain hope that people, being human, are unfinished, much like the circumstances in which they find themselves and, in part, help produce. The pedagogical question here, one that Paulo Freire asked a long time ago and others have asked since, is, how do we create conditions in which people can recognize their unfinished-ness and how can such a recognition be used to mobilize efforts to create and support social relationships and institutions that open us to a more democratic future rather than foreclose it from us, reduce social suffering rather than exacerbate it, expand justice rather than unevenly apply it.

1. See review

Many components of NAFTA favored US corporate interests at the expense of Mexico’s general population, but the Zapatistas were particularly opposed to NAFTA’s rewriting of the Mexican Constitution, in order to eliminate the population’s biggest victory won during the Mexican Revolution fought years before, at the time of World War One. “The Mexican Revolution wrote into the national constitution the opportunity for a village to hold its land communally, in an ejido, so that no individual could alienate any portion of it,” writes Staughton Lynd,¹ co-author of the new book Wobblies and Zapatistas: Conversations on Anarchism, Marxism and Radical History. Both Lynd (a Marxist from the US) and his co-author Andrej Grubacic² (an anarchist from the Balkans) are public supporters of the Zapatistas, who they argue have set a powerful example of revolutionary organizing that should influence anti-capitalists around the world. Much like the historical traditions of the Haymarket Martyrs and the ‘Wobblies’ (the Industrial Workers of the World) in the United States, Lynd and Grubacic argue that the Zapatistas have synthesized the best aspects of both the Marxist and anarchist traditions.

Based upon his research and his personal travels to the Zapatista communities in Chiapas where he met with historian Teresa Ortiz, Staughton Lynd identifies three key “sources of Zapatismo.” First, is the issue of land. Before NAFTA, the communal lands called ejidos made up more than half of Mexico’s land. The day of the 1994 uprising, the Zapatistas occupied formerly communal lands that had been appropriated. Directly citing the legacy of the Mexican Revolution, the Zapatistas named themselves after Emiliano Zapata, an anarchist revolutionary who was a key figure in the Mexican Revolution, and whose popular slogan “Land and Liberty” is still heard today.

Second, Lynd identifies a form of Liberation Theology that is influenced by both Christian and Native American spirituality, with Bishop Samuel Ruiz being a key figure.

“The final and most intriguing component of Zapatismo, according to Teresa Ortiz was the Mayan tradition of mandar obediciendo, ‘to lead by obeying’…When representatives thus chosen are asked to take part in regional gatherings, they will be instructed delegates. If new questions arise, the delegates will be obliged to return to their constituents. Thus, in the midst of the negotiations mediated by Bishop Ruiz in early 1994, the Zapatista delegates said they would have to interrupt the talks to consult the villages to which they were accountable, a process that took several weeks. The heart of the political process remains the gathered residents of each village, the asemblea,” writes Lynd.

This anti-authoritarian tradition of mandar obediciendo was central to the Zapatista’s decision not to see themselves as a revolutionary vanguard. Lynd explains that “beginning in early 1994, Marcos said explicitly, over and over again: We don’t see ourselves as a vanguard and we don’t want to take power.” To support his argument, Lynd cites a variety of statements from Marcos, including his August 1994 statement at the National Democratic Convention in the Lacandon Jungle. Here, Marcos proclaimed that the Zapatistas had decided “not to impose our point of view,” and that they had rejected “the doubtful honor of being the historical vanguard of the multiple vanguards that plague us…Yes, the moment has come to say to everyone that we neither want, nor are we able, to occupy the place that some hope we will occupy, the place from which all opinions will come, all the answers, all the routes, all the truth. We are not going to do that.”

Lynd, coming from the Marxist perspective, harshly criticizes the influence of vanguard politics on Marxist revolutionary movements, whereby these movements have adopted authoritarian and anti-democratic practices, with these abuses of power being justified by the argument that their particular group is the vanguard of the revolution, and is therefore entitled to lead the revolution as it sees fit. Lynd sees the Zapatista’s rejection of vanguard politics as representing a “fresh synthesis of what is best in the Marxist and anarchist traditions.” The Zapatistas, Lynd writes, “have given us a new hypothesis. It combines Marxist analysis of the dynamics of capitalism with a traditional spirituality, whether Native American or Christian, or a combination of the two. It rejects the goal of taking state power and sets forth the objective of building a horizontal network of centers of self-activity. Above all the Zapatistas have encouraged young people all over the earth to affirm: We must have a qualitatively different society! Another world is possible! Let us begin to create it, here and now!”

Wobblies and Zapatistas is highly recommended to both the seasoned fan of books about radical history and theory, and the reader who is just now becoming interested in radical politics. While rooted in the inspirational examples of both the Wobblies and the Zapatistas, this book uses refreshing language and an informal conversational format of Grubacic interviewing Lynd. Their dialogue provides a big picture of global struggles against capitalism, and all forms of oppression. I myself learned for the first time that in the US, both the Haymarket anarchists of the late 1800s, and the anarchist Wobblies of the early 1900s were heavily influenced by Marxism. I also learned that many Marxists, such as Rosa Luxemburg from Germany, were themselves very critical of the anti-democratic and elitist consequences of the vanguard strategy of organizing that has been embraced by so many Marxists.

Lynd and Grubacic’s exploration of the relationship between Marxism and anarchism is played out through their examination of so many fascinating stories of popular rebellion throughout world history. Many of these stories are about workers’ rebellions, but Lynd emphasizes that while the role of workers in making revolution is very important, workers are only part of the big picture, and workers should not be prioritized over other parts of society, including prisoners, students, women, and racially oppressed groups. Lynd summarizes his theory for best making revolutionary change: “We are all leaders, not just as a collection of individuals, but as persons embedded in different kinds of institutions and communities of struggle. The framework with within which all these aspirations must be lodged is the collective action, not of taking state power, but of building down below a horizontal network of groups and persons that is strong enough to command the attention of whoever is in government office.”

To accompany this book review, I interviewed co-author Staughton Lynd, asking him these four questions below.

Hans Bennett: This decade in Latin America has seen so many successful poor people’s movements. Are you particularly inspired by any of these victories? How do these embody those traits that you spotlight as so positive regarding the Zapatista movement?

Staughton Lynd: As your question suggests, the most hopeful part of the earth during this past decade has been Latin America. The Zapatista movement seems the most significant effort, but I believe it is organically connected to movements in other countries that have elected Leftist governments. The Zapatistas speak of governing in obedience to those below, “mandar obediciendo.” The Zapatistas interpret these words to direct them not to try to take state power, but instead to create a horizontal network of self-governing communities sufficiently strong that the national government will have to pay attention to “the below” and be accountable to it. However, in Bolivia when Evo Morales became president, he said in his inaugural speech that he intended to “mandar obediciendo”: that is, he accepted the Zapatista formulation as to how it should be between elected officials and the electorate, and in his capacity as an elected official, he intended to try to live up to it.

HB: How can US organizers adopt the Zapatista’s approach?

SL: The fundamental problem is that unlike the Zapatistas we do not have communities that have existed for centuries, that make decisions by consensus, that designate many persons to undertake small tasks or “cargos” for the community, that understand the first obligation of an elected representative to be listening, not talking. Instead, “organizing” in the United States is invariably quasi-Alinskyan, that is, inspired by the methods of Saul Alinsky, who in turn modeled his work on trade union organizing in the 1930s. I was one of four original teachers at Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation Training Institute founded in 1968-1969, and am an historian of the labor movement in the 1930s, so I think I know whereof I speak. The Alinsky approach assumes that people are motivated by individual, short-term, primarily economic self-interest. “Solidarity unionism” instead encourages people to take small steps in the interest of the group as a whole: for example, in a layoff to share the pain equally rather than strictly applying seniority.

HB: Given that we’re living in the “belly of the beast,” how do you think we in the US can best support Latin America poor people’s struggles that are resisting both their local ruling class, and US influence/dominance?

SL: Support for radical or revolutionary movements in other countries is a tricky undertaking. The Left in the United States has over and over again fallen into the error of romanticizing foreign movements and regimes. Examples are: the Soviet Union, revolutionary Cuba, the National Liberation Front in Vietnam, Nicaragua under the Sandinistas, and perhaps now, the Zapatistas. I believe what is helpful is to say, ‘The United States should cease to intervene in Country X,’ but not, ‘We unreservedly favor whatever insurgent movement exists there.’ We should have learned this from the period of the Vietnam war. As soon as the Vietnamese had driven out the United States they created “re-education camps” against which I, at least, felt obligated to protest. Similarly, when the Sandinista government was voted out of office in 1990, Margaret Randall exposed the fact that a handful of men had run everything, including AMNLAE, which presented itself as a women’s organization. So we in the US are better off when we support the withdrawal of US troops, closing of US military bases, the nationalization of US private investments, but do not try to control what happens next.

HB: Given today’s “global economy,” do you know of any examples of any US workers being involved with cross-border working class organizing?

SL: Cross-border organizing has been timid and bureaucratic. I would like to see, for example, General Motors workers in Mexico, Canada and the United States strike together. The demands of each national group of workers would be somewhat different, but so what? Instead, even reform movements in American trade unions acquiesce in chauvinism. Thus Teamsters for a Democratic Union tries to keep Mexican truck drivers from entering the United States, even though (a) NAFTA requires their admission, (b) simple solidarity would suggest that if Iowa corn farmers can take advantage of NAFTA to destroy the livelihoods of countless Mexican campesinos by exporting corn to Mexico without import duties, then truck drivers in the United States should meet with their Mexican counterparts and seek solutions that benefit all workers involved.

1. Staughton Lynd taught American history at Spelman College and Yale University. He was director of Freedom Schools in the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer. An early leader of the movement against the Vietnam War, he was blacklisted and unable to continue as an academic. He then became a lawyer, and in this capacity has assisted rank-and-file workers and prisoners for the past thirty years. He has written, edited, or co-edited with his wife Alice Lynd more than a dozen books.
2. Andrej Grubacic is a dissident from the Balkans. A radical historian and sociologist, he is the author of Globalization and Refusal and the forthcoming titles: Hidden History of American Democracy and The Staughton Lynd Reader. A fellow traveler of Zapatista-inspired direct action movements, in particular Peoples’ Global Action, and a co-founder of Global Balkans Network and Balkan Z Magazine, he is a visiting professor of sociology at the University of San Francisco.

Chomsky is also a founder of the North Shore Colombia Solidarity Committee, which has been working since 2002 with Colombian labor and popular movements, especially those affected by the foreign-owned mining sector. She just returned from the Witness for Peace delegation (May 28 – June 6) that traveled to two regions devastated by coal mining: the state of Kentucky and to northern Colombia. The Kentucky segment was sponsored by Kentuckians For The Commonwealth (KFTC), where participants witnessed the impact of Mountain Top Removal mining and Valley Fills on local communities. In Colombia the delegation met with human rights activists, trade unionists, members of Afro-Colombian and indigenous communities, and others affected by coal production in Colombia.

Hans Bennett: Having just returned from the Witness for Peace delegation’s trip to Kentucky and Colombia, can you please tell us about your visit to Kentucky, and about the group ‘Kentuckians For The Commonwealth’ (KFTC)?

Aviva Chomsky: KFTC is a community organization working on social justice issues, one of them being local resistance to mountaintop removal coal mining that is destroying lands and communities in Appalachia. I’ve been working with them since last summer, when four people from that organization came with us on our delegation to the Colombian coal region. The connections they made between the two regions were amazing. In both, big companies run roughshod over some of the poorest and most marginalized people. People are losing their land, their water, their right to clean air, and their homes to the coal mines. The Kentuckians felt a real link with the Colombian communities, that they were part of the same struggle. Last fall, we worked with KFTC to organize a tour for two Colombian coal union leaders. They spent a week in Kentucky, seeing for themselves the results of mountaintop removal, and speaking to different audiences there. The Colombians were also incredibly moved by the destruction of land and lives in Kentucky. They couldn’t believe that this was happening in the First World. We decided we’d really like to organize a delegation that would visit both regions — and that’s what we did this summer. We spent three days in the Kentucky coal region, and then went to Colombia. We also had five people from Appalachia, all involved in different aspects of the movement against mountaintop removal, with us on the Colombian part of the delegation.

HB: What did members of the group share with the delegation?

AC: One thing that really struck me was the ways that people in both the Colombian and the Kentuckian coal regions talked about the land. I’m from the city, and have lived a pretty cosmopolitan life. For people in eastern Kentucky, like those in northern Colombia, the land is tied to the essence of their identity. People have generations-long ties to the land, they farm the land, they feel personally connected to the mountains, to the rivers, to the farms. Also, in both regions, people are aware that they are seen as expendable, not only by the coal companies, but by the centers of power. Both regions suffer from a lack of state services, and have been really politically marginalized. But also in both regions, there is a really powerful sense of collective identity that I think has contributed to the strength of the social struggles there.

In one interview a few years ago, a Colombian indigenous leader explained to us that for his people, the earth was “la madre tierra,” mother earth. “It hurts us to see the earth damaged,” he said, pointing to the gaping hole of the mine. People in eastern Kentucky talked the same way about their mountains.

HB: What has been the impact of the coal mining industry, Mountain Top Removal mining and Valley Fills on the local communities?

AC: The impact has been devastating. I’ve never been anywhere else in the United States where you can’t drink the water! But the tap water smells so sulfurous that I was even wondering if it was safe to shower in. People in the region complain of the same kinds of illnesses and reactions that we’ve seen in Colombia — respiratory ailments, rashes and skin diseases, eye diseases — reactions to coal particles in the air and in the water. Rivers that used to run crystal clear have turned into toxic sludge. People’s homes are being surrounded by the various impacts. A mountainous region is being flattened. A way of life and a people are being forced into extinction.

After visiting Kentucky, the Colombian union leaders told us they were shocked by how “irrational” the mining was there. I didn’t really understand what they meant until I saw it myself. In Colombia, there are huge seven-foot seams of coal. The mines there are giant operations that have opened up many-mile long areas. In Kentucky, whole mountains are being felled for little seams that are only a few inches wide! And believe it or not, there seem to be more serious reclamation efforts going on in Colombia than in Kentucky.

HB: After visiting Kentucky, the delegation flew to Colombia, which your flyer explains is “the largest recipient of U.S. military aid in the hemisphere, and also the country with the highest levels of official and paramilitary violence, including forced displacement, killings of journalists, trade unionists, and human rights activists.” The flyer asserts that, “foreign corporations are some of the major beneficiaries of this situation.” How do the corporations benefit from this? How does US financial and diplomatic support for the Colombian government influence the situation?

AC: Colombia is the poster child for neoliberalism in Latin America. Since the 1970s the United States — and the international financial institutions that it plays a leading role in, like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund — have been pushing a development model on Latin America that calls, essentially, for governments to act in the interests of multinational capital. Governments are supposed to invite in foreign investment, and provide it with low taxes, low wages, and low regulation. They are supposed to cut back on social spending, and offer state enterprises up to the private sector. And, they’re supposed to quash any popular protest against these policies, using force if necessary. These policies have gone by names such as structural adjustment, the Washington Consensus, the Chicago Boys prescriptions (referring to the role of Milton Friedman and other economists from the University of Chicago), or neoliberalism. The United States has played a key role in the implementation of these policies — from working for the overthrow of elected socialist president Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973, and their implementation there, to Plan Colombia today, by which the United States provides military and economic aid that goes directly to implementing this economic model and crushing protest.

Union leaders have been some of the most visible victims. In the U.S.-owned Drummond mine in northern Colombia, three union leaders were assassinated in 2001. The company is currently facing a lawsuit in the United States for allegedly paying a paramilitary force to carry out the murders. Another U.S. company, Chiquita Brands, admitted to making payments for years to the paramilitaries. They claimed that they made the payments to protect their workers, but banana workers — and especially union activists—were the main victims among the hundreds murdered by paramilitaries during the 1990s and early 2000s.

HB: Before we talk about the delegation’s visit to Colombia this month, I’d like to first refer back to our 2007 interview in Z Magazine titled “Colombia Solidarity Work,” and ask you to please give an update about what has been going on since then, during this two year period since then.

AC: When we visited the Cerrejón mine in the summer and late fall of 2006, the company had taken the stance that it would not recognize or negotiate with the displaced Afro-Colombian community of Tabaco. It also insisted that community issues and union issues be kept completely separate. The union had included a demand about the rights of the communities in its 2006 bargaining proposal, and the company absolutely refused to include this in the contract — although they did agree to a side letter inviting the union to participate in the company’s social programs.

In the summer of 2007, Cerrejón announced that it was forming a Social Review Panel to evaluate its relations with the communities and provide recommendations. The Panel concluded that the displacement of Tabaco was a festering wound, and that the company simply had to rectify this if it wanted to develop any kind of working relationship with the local communities. The company agreed, finally, to engage in collective negotiations with former Tabaco residents, aimed at a resettlement of the community. This was a struggle that had been going on for ten years! In December of 2008, the company signed an agreement with the community defining the terms of the relocation and for compensation for the people who had been displaced. This was a huge victory.

Still, in some ways we were struck with how much has not changed. Although the agreement was signed with Tabaco, the relocation process has not yet begun—so people are still displaced. In the other communities we work with, the company has been engaging in collective negotiations for relocation — but they are still desperately poor, landless, and living in the shadows of the world’s largest open-pit coal mine.

In the Cesar Department, where the U.S.-owned Drummond mine operates, things are even worse. Union leaders there live in daily fear for their safety and lives. We had hoped to return to one community that we visited last summer, Mechoacán — but it had been wiped off the map. We met with the communities of Boquerón, El Hatillo, and Plan Bonito, that are slowly being strangled by the mine. Drummond, unlike Cerrejón, still refuses to recognize any right to collective relocation for these communities, and is simply trying to starve people out in hopes that they will leave.

HB: Okay, now let’s talk about your recent visit to Colombia. Who did you meet with and what did they talk about? What were the key issues addressed?

AC: The main issues we’ve been working on, with our partners in Colombia, are labor rights and community rights, in the areas where the multinational coal mines operate. The coal region in Colombia is in the north, close to the Caribbean coast, in the Cesar and La Guajira Departments. The people who have lived there for decades, in some cases centuries, are mostly Afro-Colombian and indigenous peasants who have survived by farming, hunting, fishing, and day labor on ranches owned by large landholders in the area.

Multinational mining came to La Guajira in the 1980s, to Cesar in the 1990s. These mines are almost unbelievably gigantic operations — Cerrejón claims to be the largest open-pit coal mine in the world, and Drummond is currently undergoing expansion that it says will make it overtake even Cerrejón’s size. Each one employs thousands of workers, some directly, and some through subcontractors.

The main people we spent time with there were the unions at the two mines—including the Injured Workers Association at the Drummond mine — and the communities that have been displaced, or are in the process of displacement. Everyone we met with there seemed to share the belief that getting their stories out to the U.S. public was essential to protecting their lives and their livelihoods. Drummond is a U.S. company, and much of the coal produced by both mines is imported by U.S. power plants. People in Colombia are also acutely aware at the huge influence that the United States has on their country’s policies. Mostly, they want us to tell their stories here in the United States, so that people here will pressure Drummond, the companies that buy the coal, and the U.S. government, to make sure that workers and communities in the coal region have the same rights that we here enjoy — the right to personal safety, the right to clean water, to education, to safe working conditions, to form unions, to be able to provide for their children, to not live in fear of their government or of the companies that operate in their midst.

HB: How does the union organizing in Colombia compare to the organizing in Kentucky, and the US in general?

AC: We were shocked to learn that there are no unionized mines left in eastern Kentucky. Not even in Harlan County. Yet despite a high level of disillusionment with the United Mineworkers among many of the people we met with in Kentucky — because of its weak or non-existent critique of surface mining, and because of the capitulations it has made to industry that people believe are responsible for its demise in the region — people there have an incredibly high level of union consciousness. Nearly everybody we met talked to us about how their fathers, their uncles, their grandfathers, had fought and in some cases shed blood, to bring in the union.

Unions in Colombia — especially those in the coal mines — are extremely militant, and have a strong current of leftist analysis and environmental consciousness that are pretty uncommon among unions in the U.S. today. The union leaders we met with talk about foreign mining companies raping the land and the people, looting their country’s natural resources, lining the pockets of shareholders with coal produced with the blood and the land of Colombians.

In both the U.S. and Colombia, union density has been falling. In Colombia, the main cause has been violence against unions; in the U.S., deindustrialization has played a big role. The AFL-CIO has a checkered history in Colombia, as it does in the rest of Latin America. Historically, the federation has been closely linked to U.S. foreign policy goals through the American Institute for Free Labor Development or AIFLD. I think the AFL-CIO is trying to overcome this past, and the suspicion it has generated in Latin America. Yet it is also struggling with internal conflicts, and now the accelerating economic crisis, and I think it has not made as much progress as it could in the area of trying to develop real international solidarity.

HB: How does the coal mining trade fit into the current global energy crisis and fossil fuels’ effects on the environment, including global warming?

AC: We had an interesting conversation about this during one of our meetings in Colombia. One of our delegates works with the Move America Beyond Coal campaign, and she asked Jairo Quiroz, the president of the Sintracarbón union that represents workers in the Cerrejón coal mine, more or less the same question: don’t we just have to stop mining and burning coal altogether, given its environmental impact? Jairo’s response really challenged all of us, I think. “There is no clean source of energy,” he said. “You in the United States are the ones who use most of the world’s energy resources. What do you propose to use, if we stop mining coal? Petroleum and natural gas are no better for the environment than coal is, and both contribute to global climate change. Nuclear energy also requires mining, and creates waste products even more dangerous than coal’s. Solar energy and wind energy are only viable where those resources are sufficiently available, and they also require production, transmission and storage techniques and equipment that depend on mining (for turbines, batteries, solar panels, etc.) and the use of toxins. So-called biofuels are the worst of all, because they expand the agro-industrial model which has profound environmental effects — from deforestation to desertification to overuse of pesticides and fertilizers — and it also disrupts the whole food chain by channeling agricultural land to the production of fuel instead of food.” Basically, his point was that rather than pointing the finger at coal, we needed to think about the underlying causes of environmental destruction — like our overuse of energy. “As long as you want to keep using that much energy,” he said, “we’re going to keep mining coal.”

There’s always a challenge, in a campaign for social and political change, to choose a target that’s narrow enough that you can effectively organize around it, but making sure that you don’t get distracted from the larger goals by the narrow target. In Salem, we have a coal-fired power plant. Some people argue, from an environmental perspective, that we should shut down the plant. But what are the larger implications of that argument? Unless we are planning to stop using electricity altogether, it just means that we’ll be getting it from another plant somewhere else. It can turn into a kind of NIMBYism [i.e., “not in my back yard”] — we don’t want to have to see the impact of our standard of living, we want to displace it onto somebody else. That’s how our system works—and that’s how we’re encouraged to think. We need to think more profoundly about the causes of global warming and environmental destruction if we really want to address them.

This may seem only peripherally related, but one of the communities we visited, in the Cesar Department, was located right next to the trash dump for the city of La Loma. Trash is blowing around, and it smells awful. Also, many of the communities we work with have no running water — thus no real latrines. These issues made me think about the multiplications of our privileges in the First World. We don’t have to see where our energy comes from, and we don’t have to see where our waste goes — we just live in this bubble of plenty and our waste is invisibly whisked away — all of which encourage us to continue abusing and wasting the earth’s resources!

HB: How has the recent election of several leftist and ‘left of center’ Presidents throughout Latin America (most recently in El Salvador) changed US power and influence? How do you think the US is reacting to this? What role with Colombia play in US strategy given that it is one of the last remaining right-wing governments?

AC: The United States is clearly counting on Colombia to play a major role in maintaining and promoting what they call “U.S. interests” — which generally means the interests of U.S. corporations — in Latin America. Ecuador’s new government recently announced that it is not renewing the U.S. lease on its military base in Manta, Ecuador. So among other things, it looks like Colombia will be the site of the new base that will replace Manta.

There are really two things that a leftist government in Latin American needs to accomplish — neither one of them simple. One is to redistribute their countries’ resources internally, to address the region’s devastating social and economic inequalities. The other is to reformulate Latin America’s relationship with the rest of the world, to break out of the pattern established after 1492, in which Latin America provides cheap labor, and cheap resources, for the benefit of Europe and later the United States. These are monumental problems, and the United States government has shown itself pretty committed to keeping the status quo, even if doing so requires violence, murder, invasions, or coups.

Many of the people I spoke with on this trip seemed to feel a lot of hope that we’re entering a new era, in which the United States will choose — or be forced — to accept major structural changes in Latin America. Despite Obama’s diplomatic language, he’s already shown that he’s quite ready to use military methods to further what the U.S. defines as its interests in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But other factors — the swing to the left in Latin America, the work towards alternative regional economic integration, the economic crisis, and the growing global awareness of the environmental crisis and the planet’s limited resources — could contribute to some real changes.

HB: How can readers best help support the current work of the North Shore Colombia Solidarity Committee, Witness for Peace, and those in Colombia who you recently visited?

AC: We’re hoping to bring one or two community leaders from the Colombian coal region to the U.S. on speaking tours this fall. We are also planning another delegation for next summer. And, we do occasional “urgent action” requests in support of the work our Colombian partners are doing. You can join the Witness for Peace or NSCSC e-lists to get updated information about all of these activities, or write to us directly at nscolombia@comcast.net if you want to get more involved in the planning.

* This interview was first published at UpsideDownWorld.org on June 15, 2009.

Founded in a rural region of Maryland dominated by the poultry industry, the sanctuary provides a haven for hens, roosters and ducks who have escaped or been rescued from the meat and egg industries or other abusive circumstances, such as cockfighting. Not surprisingly, pattrice and company take things further than your average sanctuary. “We work within an ecofeminist understanding of the interconnection of all life and the intersection of all forms of oppression,” she explains. “Thus we welcome and work to facilitate alliances among animal, environmental, and social justice activists.”

As the sanctuary begins a move from Maryland to Springfield, Vermont, I thought it would be the perfect time ask pattrice a few questions, via e-mail:

Mickey Z.: What led you to such work? Why hens, roosters, and ducks?

pattrice jones: We found a chicken in a ditch. Seriously. Miriam Jones and I (then partners, and still family) were both experienced social justice activists when we inadvertently landed in poultry country, having moved “back to the land” with Green Acres dreams of going off grid. At the time, it was not uncommon for birds to flee to freedom by jumping from transport trucks, and “growers” for the poultry industry would sometimes let us rescue birds they were supposed to cull (the industry has since tightened its transport and security procedures.) One bird became two then five then thirty-five… within six months of finding the first bird, we incorporated the sanctuary.

MZ: Fortunately, there are many animal sanctuaries but I’m curious to know more about what you call the ‘gendered form of animal exploitation.”

pj: That first chicken was a rooster we originally mistook for a hen. I had to work hard to feel the same way about him once I knew he was a rooster. He was the same tenderly friendly bird he’d always been, but all of those “rooster” ideas — cocky, aggressive, etc. — were interfering with my ability to see him clearly. That got me thinking about the ways that people project gender stereotypes on animals and then read them back as evidence that traditional sex roles are natural, a process I have come to call the social construction of gender by way of animals. So, when we got an urgent call about 24 roosters who had been living together peacefully but all other sanctuaries had turned away under the theory that so many roosters cannot possibly get along, we said yes. Besides livening up the place, that colorful crew inspired us to try to figure out a way to rehabilitate roosters used in cockfighting, which we have done.

MZ: What do you mean when you say “rehabilitate roosters”?

pj: Roosters confiscated from cockfighting operations used to be automatically euthanized, on the presumption that they were too aggressive to ever live peacefully with other birds. But that’s the propaganda of cockfighting enthusiasts, who argue that they are just watching roosters doing what comes naturally. In fact, chickens — like the wild jungle fowl from which they descended and to whom the birds used in cockfighting are very nearly genetically identical — naturally live in flocks in which multiple roosters coexist peacefully. Roosters in the wild fight to the death only against predators, not against each other! They sometimes will have highly stylized fights with each other, but these are not the pitched battles to the death that we see in cockfighting.

MZ: Why do fighting roosters fight?

pj: Raised in isolation and constant frustration, they never learn the social signals by which roosters resolve their conflicts and figure out their places in flocks. Prior to cockfighting bouts, they are often injected with testosterone and methamphetamines. In the bouts, they face opponents who, like themselves, have had their combs shaved (so they look more like a hawk than another chicken) and their spurs augmented by sharp blades. It’s kill or be killed. What we do is give former fighters the chance to learn, by observation and gradual participation, the social skills they need to coexist peacefully with other birds. We give them a safe space from which to do this and, over time, recover from the trauma to which they have been subjected.

MZ: Your approach with the roosters sounds like a logical, compassionate strategy for any living thing that has undergone trauma.

pj: Right. We all — or at least all social species — need the same things when we’ve been traumatized, including safety or sanctuary and the chance to restore the relationships (with others and within ourselves) that have been strained or severed by trauma. I talk about that, for people, in my book Aftershock. In relation to animals, I’m happy to be working with Gay Bradshaw of the Kerulos Center and other members of the new International Association for Animal Trauma and Recovery; we’ve all been thinking hard about how to apply what we know about trauma and recovery among people to the task of helping animals who have suffered human-engendered trauma.

MZ: So now you’re bringing this approach to a new location?

pj: Our move to a larger property in Vermont, a small state with 33 factory farms serving the dairy industry and adjacent to Maine (the home of the infamous DeCoster egg factory) will allow us to expand our bird rescue capacities and also expand our activism to include dairy, which — like cockfighting — is a gendered form of animal exploitation.

MZ: How can readers help and get involved?

pj: Because we were founded in one rural agricultural area and are now moving to another, we depend entirely on support from afar to fund our programs. Because we are a small and chronically underfunded sanctuary, even small donations make a big difference. And we fall all over ourselves with gratitude for those who can afford to give more and do. Folks can find donation information on our website.

If you live in a big city, another way to help out with money is to hold a vegan pot luck fundraiser at your house. Eat, watch a movie like Peaceable Kingdom or Chicken Run, and then pass the hat for the sanctuary.

In terms of volunteering, folks who live near our new location in Springfield, Vermont might want to pitch in on coop cleaning and grounds maintenance. We need folks in our original locale, on the Delmarva Peninsula, to occasionally help out by driving local birds to sanctuaries in Maryland and Virginia. As we expand our rooster rehab program, we’ll be needing folks up and down the east coast to sign up to sometimes drive birds to us from wherever they might be confiscated by authorities after a cockfighting bust.

We need everybody to have a look at the information and ideas on our website and then subscribe to our blog so that they will receive action alerts as we continue and expand our efforts to fundamentally reform food and agriculture while building bridges among social justice, environmental, and animal liberation activists. We’re going to be coordinating a new, explicitly feminist, campaign concerning dairy later this year. Watch for it!

You can e-mail pattrice at: sanctuary@bravebirds.org.

Website: http://www.bravebirds.org

Countless books and articles have been written about the life of the great physicist and thinker Albert Einstein, and since his death in 1955, a near consensus has existed that Einstein was a staunch supporter of the state of Israel.

Veteran journalist Fred Jerome uses hundreds of pages of Einstein’s own letters, articles and interviews — many published for the first time — to refute this thesis.

It is well known that Einstein, a German Jew, witnessed European anti-Semitism firsthand and spoke out against both prejudice and Nazism. These experiences convinced Einstein to support Zionism and a Jewish homeland. After gaining immense fame for his scientific breakthroughs, he was offered the presidency of Israel in 1952 after the death of the country’s first president, Chaim Weizmann.

In reality, while Einstein was sympathetic to the Zionist cause, he repeatedly warned that a “narrow nationalism” may arise if a Jewish-only state was founded and peaceful co-existence with the Palestinians was not achieved. Instead, Einstein advocated Cultural Zionism — the creation of Jewish cultural and educational centers within a bi-national state with equal rights for both Arabs and Jews.

When Einstein was offered the Israeli presidency, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion stated, “I’ve had to offer him the post because it was impossible not to, but if he accepts we are in for trouble.” In a letter written in the same year, Einstein compared the Zionists’ project with that of the Pilgrims, noting, “how tyrannical, intolerant and aggressive [they] became after a short while.” And in Einstein’s last media interview, which ran in the New York Post a month before his death, he stated “We had great hopes for Israel at first. We thought it might be better than other nations, but it is no better.”

Jerome has authored two previous books about Einstein; The Einstein File: J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret War Against the World’s Most Famous Scientist and Einstein on Race and Racism, co-authored with Rodger Taylor. These books are essential to understanding Einstein, a self-described “revolutionary,” who publicly stated that he would use his fame and celebrity status to bring attention to the causes important to him. For example, Einstein on Race and Racism details for the first time Einstein’s 20-year friendship with Paul Robeson. While the first two books were aimed at filling a large gap in the knowledge about Einstein’s radical beliefs and political activism, Einstein on Zionism and Israel seeks to debunk the myth that Einstein was a supporter of Israel.

In the process, Jerome reveals much about the nature of mainstream propaganda. Einstein’s opposition to Israel was widely known and reported on during his life. In fact, the myth of Einstein’s support of Israel was born the day after Einstein’s death in his obituary in the New York Times, which shamelessly wrote that he “championed” the establishment of the Jewish state. This contradicted decades of reporting from the “Paper of Record.” Jerome provides some examples, including a 1930 article headlined “Einstein attacks British Zion Policy,” a 1938 article stating Einstein was “Against Palestine State” and a 1946 article stating Einstein “Bars Jewish State.”

The book ends with a quote from author and intellectual Gore Vidal, “The only question that really matters: Why?” Jerome follows with, “Why have we not known?”

In an interview, Fred Jerome discusses why Albert Einstein is remembered for his physics and not his politics.

Jaisal Noor: Why did you decide to write this book on Einstein and his views on Israel and Zionism?

Fred Jerome: When Einstein met Paul Robeson in 1952, Einstein had just turned down the offer to be president of Israel. According to Lloyd Brown [who was present at that meeting] Einstein told Robeson why he had turned down the invitation: He didn’t agree with Israel, with the nationalism, the establishment of the state of Israel, and so on. In both my previous books, there was a brief discussion about Israel. In addition, it is so clearly one of the central issues of today’s world. We cannot ignore this issue and pretend to be concerned about the world or people in the world. It seemed logical to me that if I was going to be concerned about what was happening in Israel, particularly the Israeli oppression of the Palestinians … it would be a logical step to write more on what Einstein had to say. I contacted the Einstein Archives in Jerusalem, and they actually thought it would be a good idea and encouraged me and said that they could provide information that probably had never been published before.

JN: You started with the Einstein Archive in Jerusalem — where else did you go?

FJ: Einstein gave all his papers to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem because he actually helped to found the Hebrew University. As a Cultural Zionist, he was in favor of cultural centers, like universities, but opposed to a Jewish state or nation. I also tried to talk to as many people as possible who talked to Einstein, knew Einstein, who remember Einstein. The most important was [eminent Egyptian journalist] Mohammed Heikel in Cairo. I included this interview, which was certainly never mentioned in any of the more than 100 books on Einstein.

JN: Could you describe the reaction the press had to your previous works on Einstein and the reaction you expect from this one?

FJ: The press’s reaction to the first book, The Einstein File [2002], was one of very significant interest, maybe because J. Edgar Hoover had fallen out of favor with the media in the past 20 years. And so you have a bad guy versus a good guy, Einstein being the good guy. He had just been named Person of the Century by Time Magazine in the year 2000 when I was working on the first book, and I had come up with this file that no one else had — the entire file. So it was a combination of new information and kind of a sexy theme. Then the New York Times devoted a full page of its science section when the book first came out — that helped get the book covered by lots of other media outlets.

When the book Einstein on Race and Racism [2006] came out, there was virtually no coverage in the mainstream media. There was some coverage in the Black press, including the Amsterdam News, some of the websites and so on. Publisher’s Weekly did a review in which they said that it was a good book, was well written, well researched, no complaints, no criticisms. Einstein was a race man, but so what? Six months after the book came out the New York Times finally did do a review of the book, a very favorable review of the book, and published it only in the New Jersey edition, which has very few readers compared to their other editions.

So the contrast was striking. I think primarily because the mainstream media in America really don’t want to write about racism in America and certainly don’t want to identify Einstein with an antiracist position. The other reason the media have ignored this book is that part of the book is Einstein’s friendship with Paul Robeson and while they finally did put Paul Robeson on a postage stamp, after much struggle and protest, clearly the mainstream media and the corporate interests they represent are still afraid of Paul Robeson’s leftism, his socialism, activism, the resistance to them he represented. Outside of the mainstream media it has gotten a very positive reaction. [Co-author] Rodger Taylor and I are still getting invited to speak, five years after the book was published, by students and other groups around the country. But the media reaction was clearly “don’t touch it.”

And my anticipation for this book is that most of the mainstream media will have the same reaction to this book, because I think that their attitude on Israel-Palestine for the most part is well over 150 percent support for Washington’s total backing of the Israeli government. They have been saying in the mainstream media that Einstein was a big supporter of Israel, and they have been saying that since the day he died, over 60 years ago. They never said it while he was alive.

Armenia

Mickey Z: This April, President Barack Obama broke campaign promise #511, namely to explicitly acknowledge the Armenian genocide as U.S. President. What happened on his recent visit to Turkey? What are the ramifications of his breaking this promise?

David Boyajian: President Obama visited Turkey from April 6 to 7, where he did not use the word “genocide” when referring to the 1.5 million murders committed by the Turkish Ottoman Empire against its Armenian citizens from 1915-1923. As a candidate, Obama had promised several times to do so. His statement in Turkey that he had “not changed his views”–implying he still believes it was genocide–was still a clear breach of his promise to use the “G word.” It was a case study in verbal gymnastics and political duplicity and should be studied in political science courses. Obama’s broken promise obviously eroded his credibility. The same holds true for Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who, as senators, supported the Armenian genocide resolution. They’ve since fallen disgracefully silent. Dr. Samantha Power should also be embarrassed. She’s the National Security Council’s genocide expert and a Pulitzer Prize winning author. As a campaign advisor to Obama, she made a video telling Armenian Americans that as president, Obama would definitely acknowledge their genocide. “Take my word for it,” she said.

Appeasement of a genocide-denying country such as Turkey is bad policy because its message is that genocides can be committed without consequence. Appeasement also erodes U.S. credibility on human rights and its stated desire to be a leader in genocide prevention. Unlike what lobbyists for Turkey would have us believe, Armenian genocide affirmation by America would not harm U.S. national interests. Turkey depends on the U.S. for weapons systems, support for billions in loans from the International Monetary Fund, security guarantees through NATO, advocacy for Turkish membership in the European Union, and more. Some 20 countries, including Canada, France, and Switzerland, as well as the parliaments of the EU and the Council of Europe, have acknowledged the Armenian genocide. None has ever experienced much more than a Turkish temper tantrum in retaliation.

MZ: Two days prior to Armenian Genocide Remembrance day — which annually falls on April 24 –Turkey and Armenia announced that they had agreed to a “roadmap” to normalize relations. What was the significance of this timing? What does the “roadmap” contain?

DB: Behind the scenes, the U.S. State Department had long been twisting Armenia’s arm to agree to a so-called “roadmap” with Turkey before President Obama issued what has become a customary “April 24 statement” by U.S. presidents marking Armenian genocide memorial day. The “roadmap,” announced on April 22, provided political cover for Obama to not use the “G word” on April 24. That is, since there was now supposedly a roadmap for normalization of relations — no matter how vague and hurriedly slapped together — Obama could say that he did not want to upset Turkey and the touted-as-highly-delicate Turkish-Armenian negotiations by using the “G word.” Notice that Obama did not consult with Armenian-Americans or Armenia about this. So much for promises and moral principles. It’s disgraceful that Obama, simply to help Turkey save face, not only broke his promise, but showed blatant disregard for the activists — not just Armenians — who labored so hard for many years for the cause of recognizing all genocides.

Armenia has always said that it was ready to normalize relations with Turkey — which would include Turkey’s re-opening its border with Armenia-without pre-conditions. Suddenly, however, Armenia has had pre-conditions imposed on it in this “roadmap.” According to the Turkish press, the “roadmap” allegedly contains pre-conditions such as: Armenia’s agreeing to a joint commission to examine the veracity of the Armenian genocide — yes, you heard right, Armenia’s formal recognition of current Turkish boundaries — which contain the Armenian homeland, and, possibly, Armenia’s accepting Turkish mediation in the conflict between Armenians and Azerbaijan over the disputed Armenian region of Karabagh — which is absurd since Azerbaijan and Turkey are allies. It appears that Armenia’s president, whose electoral legitimacy is in question, has been worn down in these negotiations by Turkey, the West, and possibly even Russia. And because the Armenian president is grappling with his legitimacy, he is not heeding the cautions being voiced by the people of his own nation about the “roadmap.”

MZ: The U.S. administration and mainstream media would have us believe that Turkey is seeking to “reconcile” with Armenia. Is “reconciliation” really a possibility, or have we misunderstood what’s going on?

DB: The word “reconciliation” in relation to Armenian-Turkish relations is largely an invention of U.S. policymakers, their emissaries, and the mainstream media who take their cues from them. What the U.S. and Europe would like to see is a more stable Caucasus — that is, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia — with open borders. Open borders, you see, would facilitate laying more oil and gas pipelines that would originate in the Caspian Sea region and proceed west to Turkey and then to energy-hungry Europe and Israel. The U.S. and Europe don’t want to put it quite that crudely — no pun intended — so they try to depict Armenia and Turkey as possibly “reconciling” and thus resolving all their differences. Turkey closed its border with Armenia in 1993 out of sympathy with its ally Azerbaijan, which was in a war with the Armenians of Karabagh, a historically Armenian-populated autonomous area within Azerbaijan that Stalin handed to Azerbaijan. Turkey has also been infuriated that Armenia and Armenians worldwide have been demanding that Turkey acknowledge the genocide it committed against Armenians.

Turkey has to acknowledge the genocide or there will never be peace between it and Armenia. And although the Armenian government has not put forth any claims for reparations arising out of the genocide, or for territory, many Armenians do have these goals. They cite the Treaty of Sèvres of 1920, which provided for Armenian sovereignty over Armenian lands upon which Turkey committed the genocide, and which have since been incorporated into what is now eastern Turkey.

MZ: The countries of the Caucasus are Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan. Most Americans, including the mainstream media, could not find these small countries on a map. Why are Russia and the U.S. — the latter being thousands of miles from the region — so interested in these three small countries?

DB: The Caucasus is truly Ground Zero in Cold War II, the ongoing conflict between the U.S. and Russia. The U.S. — along with Europe and the NATO military alliance — regard Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan as middlemen between the West and the gas and oil-rich regions around the Caspian Sea. The West has already laid gas and oil pipelines from Azerbaijan through Georgia and then on to Turkey and the west. The U.S. wanted those and future pipelines to bypass Russia and Iran because those two countries could shut such pipelines to pressure the U.S. and others. The only possible pipelines routes, therefore, are through Georgia or Armenia. But Turkey shut its border with Armenia in 1993, and Azerbaijan closed its border with Armenia even earlier due to the conflict between it and the de-facto Armenian region of Karabagh. That left Georgia as the only place for these Western pipelines. After the Russian-Georgian was last year, however, opening an alternative route has become more urgent. That largely explains the West’s renewed interest in Armenia. Conversely, Russia sees the Caucasus as within its traditional sphere of influence, and regards U.S. and European interest in the region as hostile acts.

Simultaneously, NATO has been pushing into the region. Georgia, Azerbaijan, and to some extent even the ex-Soviet republics on the other side of the Caspian Sea, are on the path to joining NATO. Russia was already upset that, following the Cold War, NATO had absorbed the former Warsaw Pact nations of Eastern Europe. NATO is now attempting, in effect, to do the same thing on Russia’s southern border. Russia fears that it will eventually be virtually surrounded by NATO. As a result, we have Cold War II: The U.S. and NATO are trying to push into the Caucasus and Central Asia, while Russia is trying to keep them out.

MZ: Why is Israel interested in the Caucasus, and what role is that country playing? Why are Israel and the pro-Israel lobby dead set against recognition of the Armenian genocide by the U.S. Congress?

DB: Israel is interested in getting some of the oil and gas that flow out of the Caspian Sea region. That is, from countries such as Azerbaijan, oil and gas flow west through Georgia, and then on to Turkey and other countries, possibly including Israel. After all, the U.S. and Turkey, which are important players in these pipelines, are obviously also very friendly with Israel. Israel also welcomes all non-Arab supplies of energy since they would make its Western allies less dependent on Arab oil and gas. And Israel has long had what it calls its Periphery Policy. Historically, Israel has not had good relations with its Arab neighbors. Therefore, to serve as counterweights, Israel befriends those countries further away, especially Muslim countries that aren’t necessarily sympathetic to Israel’s Arab neighbors or Palestinians. Azerbaijan, the only Muslim nation in the Caucasus, and some Muslim nations to the east, such as Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, are such countries. Fortuitously for Israel, they also possess significant deposits of gas and oil.

For decades, Israel and Turkey have had very good relations, mainly because they have a common ally, the U.S., and common adversaries, namely Arab nations. In the 1990’s, Israel and Turkey signed a number of military, economic, and political agreements that solidified their relationship. Even before that, but particularly after that, Turkey felt that it did not have sufficient lobbying muscle in Washington. So the Turks asked Israel to convince some of the pro-Israel lobby — the Anti-Defamation League, American Jewish Committee and others — to serve as advocates for Turkey. The Jewish lobby groups agreed. So these groups, as part of their deal with Turkey, deny or call into question the Armenian genocide and work to prevent U.S. acknowledgement of that genocide. These groups won’t tolerate anyone questioning of the Holocaust, and yet hypocritically work against acknowledgment of the Armenian genocide. Interestingly, for the last 2 years, Armenian Americans have exposed the ADL’s hypocrisy. In Massachusetts, for example, fourteen cities severed ties with an anti-bias program sponsored by the ADL because of the latter’s hypocritical and anti-Armenian stance (see NoPlaceForDenial.com). Armenians are determined to challenge genocide denial whenever it occurs.

MZ: Is there a problem with the way the mainstream media has been covering Armenian issues?

DB: Yes. The mainstream media have several problems. First, they know very little about the Caucasus or Armenians. Reporters tend, therefore, to copy each other and repeat clichés and falsehoods — such as that Armenia and Turkey are on the verge of a historic “reconciliation.” Media also tend to accept at face value the propaganda issued by Western governments whose interest in the Caucasus is — let’s be frank — not “reconciliation,” democracy, or human rights, but rather self-interested economic, political, and military political penetration of the Caucasus.

Turkey has about 30 times more people and territory, and 50 times more Gross Domestic Product, than Armenia. The power differential is enormous. Turkey has infinitely more allies in Western media, governments, think tanks, and multi-national corporations-and knows how to use them. Commentators who have a vested interest in touting Turkey for their own political and even financial reasons have particularly come out of the woodwork to deride legitimate Armenian demands. But we rarely hear commentators speak of how a small country that has been the victim of genocide, that has had most of its territory stripped from it, and that has been blockaded by the denier of that genocide — Turkey — is being threatened by that very same unrepentant denier. Mainstream media largely fail to appreciate the foregoing facts. Hopefully, Mickey, this interview will help the media and your readers understand the issues and the region a bit better.

Despite the fact that Washington’s imperial adventures in both of these nations are far from over, there has been very little protest in the home country. Indeed, one national antiwar network–United for Peace and Justice–is suffering from financial problems and is losing one of its national coordinators. There is one organization however, that is planning to forge ahead. They are the National Assembly to End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupations. This group was formed in 2008 by a group of antiwar activists unaffiliated to any party. The group’s founding conference was held in Cleveland and was attended by several hundred individuals, including members of both national antiwar networks and several other organizations including Veterans for Peace, several political organizations and a number of labor and religious groups. I recently received word from one of the group’s founders that the Assembly was holding its second conference this July. What follows is an email exchange he and I had.

Ron Jacob: Hi Jerry. To begin, would you mind introducing yourself and explain your role in the National Assembly to End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupations? Also, can you give the readers a little of your history in the antiwar movement?

Jerry Gordon: My name is Jerry Gordon and I am the secretary of the National Assembly to End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupations. I have been actively involved in struggles against U.S. wars, occupations and interventions starting with the Korean War (1950-53) and including Vietnam (as a National Co-Coordinator of the National Peace Action Coalition), Central America, Yugoslavia, the first Iraq War in 1991, and the current war.

RJ: I’ve provided the readers with a brief history of the founding of the National Assembly in the introduction to this interview. Is there anything you would like to add to that description?

JG: Yes, I would add that the founding conference featured spirited discussion and debate regarding what the antiwar movement should do in the period ahead. The conference was unique in that it was open on a non-exclusionary basis to all activists wishing to attend. Over 400 people did so, reflecting widely different points of views on all kinds of questions. Decisions were made on the basis of one person, one vote.

RJ: Since the inauguration of Barack Obama as president, I’ve noticed a decrease in antiwar activity among even many of the most involved antiwar activists. While it is safe to say that this decrease began well before January 2009, the virtual lack of protest around the occupations and wars seems to indicate a major change of heart among many protesters. Do you agree? If so, to what would attribute this? If not, why?

JG: I don’t believe there has been a major change of heart among the antiwar majority in this country, although the turnout at recent demonstrations has unquestionably been smaller than at previous ones. I believe there are several factors at work here.

Let’s go back to the largest action against the Iraq War which was held September 24, 2005 in Washington D.C., which drew some 700,000 people. Unfortunately, two things of a distinctly negative character happened in the aftermath of that action.

One was the swing against mass action by big chunks of the movement, who advocated electoral politics as the central strategy. The focus was on electing a Democratic Party majority in both Houses of Congress as the way to end the Iraq War. Well, the Democrats got control of both the Senate and House of Representatives as a result of the 2006 elections but the war continued and even escalated. And the Democrats continued voting to fund it.

The other negative development was the split in the antiwar movement. Instead of parlaying the success of the 2005 mobilization, which was co-sponsored by United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ) and the ANSWER Coalition, and concentrating on organizing even larger united actions, the movement fractured, with UFPJ leaders declaring they would have no further collaboration with ANSWER. This severely weakened the movement and it remains a continuing and festering problem.

The current period has ushered in major developments that profoundly affect the antiwar movement. The first, of course, is the very severe economic crisis. For tens of millions of people in this country, the central issue today is survival. Ending the wars and occupations is no longer the priority it once was, especially since U.S. casualties are much less than they were in the previous period. Today we are witnessing increasing numbers of protest actions against budget cuts, denial of essential social services, assaults on workers’ living standard and their right to organize and bargain collectively, mass unemployment, housing foreclosures, lack of health care coverage, breakdown of the infrastructure, environmental issues, etc. In short, American society faces a deep crisis of epidemic proportions which grows worse by the day. The antiwar movement is struggling to connect its issues to the fightback on other fronts and to demonstrate its relevance by arguing, among other things, that the choice is guns or butter, because we can’t have both. So our greatest challenge is to make that connection and that is an ongoing process.

The other major development is the election of Barack Obama to the White House. Elected as an antiwar candidate, Obama has already dashed the hopes of millions by escalating in Afghanistan, which he continues to argue is the “good war,” and by intensifying the drone bombings in Pakistan. At the same time, he says he will not pull out all U.S. troops from Iraq until 2011.That’s much too long for many in the antiwar movement but since the casualties are down and the direction appears to be to get out, large numbers are prepared to give Obama the benefit of the doubt and no longer feel the same compulsion to take to the streets to demand “Out Now!”

As long as Obama’s maintains his credibility and popularity in the conduct of foreign policy, and as long as illusions persist that the Iraq War is winding down and that the U.S. will indeed withdraw all of its forces, and as long as the rationale for continuing the war against Afghanistan and Pakistan is not challenged more assertively, the antiwar movement will not likely draw the kind of crowds it did in the past. But everything changes and that will certainly be the case here as the economic meltdown accelerates, the number of casualties in Afghanistan climbs, and new flareups and conflicts erupt in Iraq. The National Assembly believes that these and other developments will result in our antiwar message resonating more broadly, as we proceed and persist in the struggle to strengthen, rebuild and unite the antiwar movement.

RJ: The National Assembly is having a national conference in Pittsburgh on July 10th and 11th this year. Can you tell us why the conference is being held now? What are your hopes for this conference?

JG: The conference has been called primarily to assess the current situation and to plan actions in the period ahead. The antiwar movement critically needs continuity, meaning it has to constantly stay active planning and organizing periodic mobilizations in the streets – however large or small – to build the movement, win new activists to its ranks, demonstrate visibility, and educate masses of people. Reflecting this last priority, we look to the Pittsburgh conference to combine an educational/activist program which will revitalize the movement and make it a more powerful force in the struggle to end the wars and occupations. We are convinced that the best way to arrive at such a program is by convening a national conference open to all peace activists who will have the opportunity to share their ideas and proposals.

We also hope that the Pittsburgh conference will further promote the cause of unity of the antiwar movement. There are a number of positive signs reflecting broad and growing support for the National Assembly’s unity campaign. Top leaders of the movement – such as Michael T. McPhearson, UFPJ’s Co-Chair and Executive Director of Veterans for Peace, and Brian Becker, ANSWER’s National Coordinator — are scheduled to address the conference and this bodes well. All of us in the movement need each other and it is high time to put aside past grievances and move forward together. This would certainly be in the interest of the larger struggle to end the wars and occupations, and the tens of millions of people subjected to foreign occupations and the killing and destruction that goes with it would enthusiastically welcome such a development. Our responsibility is to help make that happen.

RJ: The National Assembly has been against the occupation and war in Afghanistan since the Assembly was formed. Other national antiwar networks have been less pointed on this matter, focusing mostly on the situation in Iraq instead. Why has the National Assembly been as opposed to the war in Afghanistan as it is to the occupation (and war) in Iraq?

JG: One of the highlights of the June 2008 conference was the proposal from the floor that the National Assembly expand its agenda to include the demand for immediate withdrawal of U.S. military forces from Afghanistan. Proponents of this proposal argued convincingly that the same government waging war and occupying Iraq was doing the same thing in Afghanistan. The proposal was debated and approved by a majority. In retrospect, it is clear to all of us that we arrived at the correct decision. This was a classic example of democracy in action as practiced by the National Assembly.

The war against Afghanistan violates the right of self-determination; is resulting in more and more deaths and casualties of Afghanis, Americans, and other nationals; is unwinnable; and is costing taxpayers a fortune that is needed to feed, clothe and house people, not slaughter them. These are all good reasons to oppose the war’s continuation.

RJ: Back to Obama for a minute. What do you think it will take to get him to withdraw US troops from Iraq before 2011? When I look at his record so far, especially in regards to his action (or lack thereof) on the use of torture, illegal eavesdropping and the closing of Gitmo and other torture chambers, I am less hopeful than I was in January. What kind of strategy do you hope to see develop that will end these occupations and the accompanying activities?

JG: We believe in the strategy of mass action as the principal way to end the wars and occupations. What is critical to achieving success in this struggle is not who is sitting in the White House but who is marching in the streets. After all, the Vietnam War was ended during the Nixon and Ford Republican administrations, not under the Democrats. Electoral politics and other forms of protest all have a role, but masses of people in motion are what brings about fundamental change. This includes forcing changes in government as shown by the ouster of the Shah of Iran in 1979 and the overthrow of dictator Ferdinand Marcos seven years later in the Philippines, despite the history of his being propped up by Washington.

RJ: I read recently that there are tens of thousands of security contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan in addition to the troops. How does one go about insuring their withdrawal as well?

JG: The presence of so many private contractors in Iraq is undoubtedly a gigantic problem. They play a mercenary role and do a lot of the occupying power’s dirty work, which, as we now know, includes torturing prisoners and detainees. Private contractors outnumber U.S. troops in Iraq, and more than 180,000 civilians, including Americans, foreigners and Iraqis, are under U.S. contracts. All must be sent packing and when we call for “Out Now!” we include contractors with an exclamation point. The same mass movement that will sooner or later force Washington to withdraw U.S. troops and equipment from Iraq and Afghanistan and shut down U.S. military bases in both countries is the same movement that must insure that the contractors leave as well.

RJ: Thanks. Anything else?

JG: Yes, we urge readers of this article and other antiwar activists to register for and attend the July 10-12 conference. It will be held at La Roche College in Pittsburgh. Please visit our website at www.natassembly.org or call 216-736-4704 or email natassembly@aol.com for more information. You can register online or via regular mail. We will be glad to send you upon request a brochure containing a registration form. Write National Assembly, P.O. Box 21008, Cleveland, OH 44121.

Jeff Gore: Seeing as you’re coming to Athens to speak at the Human Rights Festival, do you see any big human rights issues now that are as pressing as the ones that you and many others were involved with over forty years ago?

Bill Ayers: I do. First of all, I think the human rights framework continues to be vital and enlivening in a thousand different ways. I think if you go back and read the [United Nations’] Universal Declaration on Human Rights, it still – I actually carry it around in my back pocket, I have for years, I’m just reaching for it – literally you open it up and there are things like Article 1: “All human beings are born free and equal with dignity and rights.” That still has very important implications. Or, here’s one: “Everyone has the right to a nationality. No one should be arbitrarily deprived of nationality.”

Here’s another one: “Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution.” That’s part of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That’s not some, you know, crazy radical idea that a bunch of gay people have imposed on us; it’s right there from 1948. So one of the overarching human rights issues of right now for us here in the United States is the full recognition and full civil rights of GLBTQ people…that’s a huge issue.

Another human rights issue is the issue of torture…incidentally, torture not only [by] the US abroad, but torture, for example, in Chicago, where – you may not know this – the suspension of the death penalty in Chicago several years ago was based on torture cases. That is, innocent men were tortured into confessions that put them on death row.

So we’ve slipped in a terrible, terrible way in this country…you have the Attorney General of the Justice Department writing memos just a couple years ago explaining why waterboarding is not torture, even though [after WWII,] Japanese officials were tried for war crimes, one of [which] was waterboarding. But here you have the Department of Justice issuing an opinion that waterboarding is not torture, because as soon as you remove the gag from the person’s mouth, his mental suffering ends – well that’s just insane.

Then of course, another human rights issue that’s overarching and quite relevant is the issue of war and peace. People have a right to a peaceful existence, and war destroys all human rights, yet we are a nation that is pretty much in a perpetual state of war; we’re fighting at least two wars now – some would argue three or four…

JG: Speaking of war, it seems like Obama put the antiwar movement in an awkward position. He’s going to supposedly end the war in Iraq and pursue the “good war” in Afghanistan. What do you see the antiwar movement doing, or what do you hope that it could do during an Obama presidency?

BA: Well I don’t think anyone should be deluded, I think that we have lots and lots of historical examples, for example Lyndon Johnson, the most effective politician of this generation and the man who passed, and really was responsible in many ways for, the most far-reaching civil rights legislation in the history of the country.

But there’s two things to remember about that. One is that Lyndon Johnson was never a member of the Black Freedom movement; that the civil rights movement brought the agenda to Johnson – it wasn’t the other way around. Or another way of saying that is: the civil rights movement provided the force and the energy and the moral framework for Johnson to do the right thing. So Johnson didn’t save the civil rights movement – the civil rights movement, in many ways, saved Johnson.

There’s a lesson there for us today, which is, all the hope that Barack Obama will somehow do the right thing for us is misguided. With any luck, the peace movement, the justice movement can save his presidency, but it doesn’t work the other way around – we don’t have kings to save us, that’s not how it works. So to me the injunction is to get busy and build a movement.

But secondly, Johnson burned up his presidency in war. All the effective things he might have done were destroyed in the furnace of Vietnam. That was his responsibility and that then, is his legacy. So none of us who are anti-war in temperament or activism should be resting easy at this moment. All of us should be naming this moment as a moment of rising expectations and real possibilities, but also a moment of danger and dread. And we should get busy and rebuild the antiwar movement – which we can, and we must.

JG: In a Democracy Now! interview, you suggested that our educational system should try to “educate for initiative and courage,” as well as “imagination and hope and possibility.” Could you put that in more concrete terms – or for example, could you propose something that President Obama could do right now to improve our public education system?

BA: Absolutely. The one thing he could do immediately is to work against No Child Left Behind. No Child Left Behind should be left behind. That’s something that the Obama administration should do.

Another thing it should do is it should spend that stimulus money to rebuild the educational infrastructure in places like Chicago and places like rural Georgia. Why is that? Well because we have in this democracy, where we assume that all people are equal, and we build social policy around that assumption. We have – for example, in Chicago – school systems that educate kids at the rate 30-40 thousand dollars per kid per year, and schools standing just a few miles down the road that spend less than five thousand dollars per kid per year. That’s a savage inequality in a country that thinks of itself as a democracy. So that’s a second thing that he could do right away.

A third thing that he could do is to stop spending any money at all on test prep. In other words, he should dry up that beast…test preparation is not an education, and the kids who need access to the arts, sports, to clubs and games and after-school – those kids have had those things stripped away from them in the last eight years, and those should be restored.

OK, and I’m going on until you stop me – you should get the military out of the schools. Education is a civilian, and not a military undertaking. And the idea that Chicago, the most militarized school system in the country, has whole schools designated “military schools” – public high schools that are called “military schools” are an outrage in a democratic society. The fact that JROTC is proliferating like mad, and not to make any mistake about it: the Department of Defense has JROTC and military high schools in its recruitment budget. So when they say “Well, it’s not really about recruitment,” they’re lying. It’s completely about recruitment.

…Notice where these military schools are. They’re in poor communities. No one would dare put a military school in Winnetka – the rich Chicago suburb – there’s no way. But in the Chicago public schools, who’s going to resist?

And parents are bought into because they’re led to believe there is no alternative, or the argument is made again and again that kids will learn to be disciplined and learn to be orderly. But what could teach you more discipline than playing in an orchestra? Or being in a theater group? These require enormous discipline. But of course the only discipline that counts, in the mentality of the military, is military discipline. In other words: obedience, conformity, uniformity – and these are not the qualities we need in a democracy. You know, I could go on for hours, I’d better stop right there.

JG: As you know, Students for a Democratic Society reformed in 2006. Have you been able to talk to the students involved with this, and perhaps gauge if they’re headed in the right direction?

BA: Yes, I know the SDS kids in the Chicago area…I know a lot of the SDS chapters and I’ve spoken at their campuses. I’m a huge supporter of multi-issue radical political organizing. In other words, organizing that connects the war with [global] warming, for example, or that connects civil rights with GLBTQ issues, or that connects GLBTQ issues with the right to universal health care. And on and on. So I like multi-issue organizing, SDS does a lot of that.

But the other thing that I feel very strongly about is that none of us should be so dogmatic or so certain that we know this is good organizing and this isn’t; we should have an attitude of experimentalness, and we should have an attitude of generosity. So I look at the formation of SDS as a hopeful sign.

…The one thing I would say is that the movement we need today is a movement of organizers, not just a movement of people who feel that they take the right position. People who go out and talk to strangers, knock on doors, find ways to get into the public square in unique and new ways, not in old, tired ways….engage the public in a conversation about the direction of the country. This is the moment of real opportunity, because the rising expectations people are experiencing everywhere are coming into deep collision with the realities of the environmental crisis, the economic crisis, and more, so I think that this is a moment when organizing is what we must do.

JG: Back in the ‘60s and ‘70s, SDS and the Weathermen described America as being tainted by white and male privilege. Almost forty years later, many on the left still consider that sentiment a pretty good description of the society we live in today. Would you agree with them?

BA: Well look, I think the election of Obama was a significant blow to white supremacy – and an important blow to white supremacy. I don’t think it was a fatal blow. And if you think white supremacy has kind of gone [by the wayside], I think you have to look again. You have to look at the poverty rates, for example. Children born into poverty: overwhelmingly children of color. Or people arrested, and people who are involved in the criminal justice system: overwhelmingly people of color.

So yeah, I think white supremacy still exists. I think a lot of indicators still show that it exists, and the system of white supremacy is what has to be done away with, not this particular individual with a biased attitude, but it’s the system that privileges people because of their race, their background, their gender, and this does still go on, absolutely. Not uniformly, not universally – it never did. But I think that white supremacy is one of the founding principles of this country and it is not dead yet.

JG: What about male supremacy?

BA: Similarly, women still make significantly less than men for the same jobs, and that’s astonishing forty years after the modern feminist movement got underway. So that’s one way to measure male supremacy: access, recognition, and so on.

But there are other measures as well. One of the things that all of these identity movements have to come to terms with – and the women’s movement is such a classic example of this – is the question of access versus transformation. Is the goal of the women’s movement, for example, historically, is it to have access so they can be as fully equal in the society that has injustice built right into it? Is the goal, that if we had a woman president or a woman CEO of General Motors, would that be proof that women had made it?

Or is hope of the women’s movement [to] create a society based on certain feminist principles like cooperation, mutual recognition?

Same with the question of the gay movement. Is the idea that gays should be equal to everyone else in terms of rights? Well that’s part of it. But some people would argue – and I think convincingly, persuasively – that the real promise of the gay movement isn’t that you get to fight in the U.S. Army and go kill people, or that you get to enter into this moribund institution called marriage, but rather that we create a society in which being queer is not something considered horrible or an anathema, but as something that we build a society where the recognition of people in their wild range of diversity is acceptable, and that we don’t have problems with it. That’s a different vision.

JG: I don’t know if I heard you correctly, did you call marriage a morbid or a moribund institution?

BA: Moribund. M-o-r-i-b-u-n-d. A dead institution. An institution that ought to be killed off…think about it, if you’re married, you get 1500 rights that if you’re not married, you don’t get. One of my favorites, for example, is in Montana – you can pass your hunting license onto your spouse, so if you’re not married you don’t have that right. I know that’s silly, isn’t it?

But what’s the point of that? Why don’t we say instead: “We want universal health care, we want every human being to have the right to name who their heirs are. We need every human being to have a right to name the people they want at their bedside if they’re in a serious crisis or in a life-threatening situation…”

The point is: why are these things tied to marriage? What’s marriage got to do with it? Now if you want to get married and you belong to a temple or a church or an ashram or neighborhood or community of friends, go for it. Knock yourself out.

…At this point, since we do have civil marriages, everyone oughta have a right to marry anyone they want. But if we did away with civil marriage altogether, did away with marriage – then you could get married in your religion or your cult or your neighborhood and nobody’d give a shit. A group of friends could come together and toss you up and down on a trampoline and throw rose petals at you, and God bless you all…

…I mean, people can make all kind of decisions. Why marriage should be privileged above all others just strikes me as inhuman.

JG: But you’re married, aren’t you?

BA: Absolutely. All those rights, all those privileges that you get for married…and I don’t know if you know the circumstance of my getting married. Do you know?

JG: I don’t.

BA: …I had three kids, my wife [fellow Weather Underground member Bernadine Dohrn] was called before a grand jury to testify, she refused, she was put in prison. And at that moment, we had three kids and we’d been together for years and years and years….but at that point, we were vulnerable and fragile in front of the law. So we got her a furlough for two days to get married – so that we could provide some protection for her and me if she were to go off to prison.

But why should we have to do that? Why shouldn’t I have the right to visit her and so on and so on without the nonsense of marriage?

JG: Even beyond marriage, I recall that the Weathermen had a slogan of “Smash Monogamy…”

BA: It’s a great slogan.

JG: [Laughs] But you’ve been with the same woman for what, thirty years now?

BA: Forty.

JG: Forty! So would that be proof that you’ve…gotten over that slogan?

BA: No, I’ve never gotten over it. I think that…[laughs] You know, I mean it was a silly, outrageous, theater of the absurd kind of political theater kind of slogan. It had no literal meaning. But the metaphoric meaning is right.

And that is, the idea that — well first of all, smash marriage — but even the idea of this institutionalized deadening kind of relationship where you become a habit rather than a choice. Rather than saying we’re together for forty years and every morning I get up and say “Gee, I wonder if we should be together today? Yes, I think we should.” That’s a choice. The other way of doing it is a habit: “Ah shit, gotta be here, because: what the hell.” You know? So the metaphor is a good one and the metaphor is a challenge to the idea that human relationships naturally fall into these boundaries of exclusivity.

JG: Why, in the Weather Underground documentary, were you carrying a baseball bat on the streets of Chicago when you were retelling the story of the Days of Rage?

BA: Because the filmmaker handed it to me. He brought it and handed to me, and I hadn’t taken my meds that morning…nah I’m just kidding, I don’t take meds – he handed it to me, he thought it would be cute…I wasn’t thinking about it much. He said “Would you mind walking around with this baseball bat?” and I said “Nah, I don’t mind.” So I think he thought it was cute, and what do I care?

JG: Well here’s this event that was out of control– you know, rioting – and here you are as an adult, talking about learning from your mistakes…and yet you’ve got a baseball bat in your hand walking down the same street you smashed up forty years ago. I just found that funny.

BA: Yeah, it was ironic and I think that’s how the [filmmakers] meant it.

But you know, the truth is that that was a militant demonstration at a certain moment in time. Nobody should be controlled [by] or living in the nostalgia of the 60s – for good or bad. We’re in a new era; the 60s is mostly myth and symbol, it didn’t happen the way the kind of perceived wisdom tells us it happened. It was both more complicated, more layered, more contradictory than any single narrative can tell you.

So I think that it’s kind of one of the great problems for young activists: living in the shadow of this mythological 60s. When mythologically, we had the best music, the best demonstrations, the best sex…it’s not true. It’s so flatly not true that it still astonishes me that people take that narrative seriously.

Or the other side of the narrative is: “Oh, they were out of control, they were domestic terrorists, they were crazy, they were horrible.” That’s also not true. So I think that people have to get over the 60s and move on to some sense that we have to reinvent – right here, right now – a movement for social change and social justice and peace that doesn’t rely on the mythology of the 60s…we have to make the movement right now.

And just one example is that, you know, the peace movement – we became a majority movement over time. But the majority of Americans today want peace also, and are against the wars that we’re waging. So it’s not so different than it was back then. There is difference in terms of street mobilization, but let’s not romanticize that either – because remember, we didn’t end the war. That’s very important to remember: that we did not have the power to stop it. And the war dragged on for seven years after the majority of the American people opposed it. And it dragged on in a vicious way – six thousand people a week being murdered – so the idea that the anti-war movement then was remarkably successful whereas the anti-war movement today is not is just a myth. It’s just untrue.

Now, we have to find a new rhetoric of resistance; we have to find new ways to mobilize…that’s all true. But it’s not true that we should measure it against what happened forty or fifty years ago.

Goldman Sachs is attempting to shut down a dissident blogger who is extremely critical of the investment bank, its board members and its practices. The bank has instructed Wall Street law firm Chadbourne & Parke to pursue blogger Mike Morgan, warning him in a recent cease-and-desist letter that he may face legal action if he does not close down his website.

According to Chadbourne & Parke’s letter, dated April 8, the bank is rattled because the site “violates several of Goldman Sachs’ intellectual property rights” and also “implies a relationship” with the bank itself.

Unsurprisingly for a man who has conjoined the bank’s name with the Number of the Beast — although he jokingly points out that 666 was also the S&P500’s bear-market bottom — Mr. Morgan is unlikely to go down without a fight. He claims he has followed all legal requirements to own and operate the website — and that the header of the site clearly states that the content has not been approved by the bank.

On a special section of his blog entitled “Goldman Sachs vs Mike Morgan” he predicts that the fight will probably end up in court.

“It’s just another example of how a bully like Goldman Sachs tries to throw their weight around,” he writes.

Morgan agreed to answer a few questions about Goldman Sachs, the TARP and the ongoing financial crisis.

Mike Whitney: Is Goldman Sachs trying to shut down your web site?

Mike Morgan: Yes

MW: Why?

Morgan: The legal answer to that would be . . . you need to ask them the question. I would think it is because we are exposing the truth . . . and the truth hurts.

MW: Have you libeled them or published privileged information?

Mike Morgan: No.

MW: Could you tell us something about yourself so that readers can trust your criticism of G-Sax?

Morgan: I am 53 years old and believe all of the answers for how we should live are in the Bible . . . . God gave David the choice of paying the consequences at the hands of David’s enemies or at the hand of God. David chose God’s consequences. Hank Paulson and the thousands of wicked men like him deserve the wrath of the millions of lives they have destroyed. We must go after the crooks and make them pay the consequences for their greed and the total disregard for anyone other than themselves. We need to start with Hank Paulson, who as CEO of Goldman Sachs, was more responsible than any 10 men combined, for the violent Depression we are about to enter.

MW: Why was G-Sax given $10 billion out of the TARP funds before federal regulators checked their books to see if they were solvent?

Morgan: Because King Henry (Henry Paulson) said so. As former CEO of Goldman Sachs, the last thing he wanted to see was a collapse of Goldman Sachs. And as Treasury Secretary with a big stick, he could do whatever he pleased . . . and he did.

MW: It was widely believed that most of the five biggest investment banks were leveraged 30-to-1. If that’s the case, then G-Sax probably would not have survived the downturn in the market without government assistance. Do you agree with this analysis?

Morgan: I agree.

MW: After Bear Stearns and Lehman Bros. defaulted, Merrill Lynch quickly sold out to Bank of America.

Morgan: Merrill was being run by John Thain, the former Goldman Sachs executive that helped Hank Paulson force out Jon Corzine who at the time was c-CEO with Paulson.

MW: That left Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley as the next likely candidates to be taken down by short sellers.

Morgan: Short sellers are not the issue. If short sellers drive down a stock below market value, then it becomes an opportunity for anyone that thinks the stock is a buy to bury the shorts.

MW: This is when SEC chief Christopher Cox — who had never intervened in the market prior to this — put emergency rules in place to stop the short selling of financial institutions. What was Cox’s action all about?

Morgan: The SEC is toothless and I still don’t know why Cox is not in jail. He not only looked the other way on the Madoff issue, but since he left, the SEC has gone after more than a dozen scams. Are you going to tell me everything was fine three months ago on Chrissy Cox’s watch? No, but I can tell you there is much more to this story….As for the SEC and short sellers, that was King Henry. Period. Full Stop.

MW: Was this mainly an attempt by Washington elites to pull G-Sax’s bacon out of the fire?

Morgan: Goldman Sachs and other companies affiliated with Goldman Sachs. Kinda like the old MCI Friends and Family Program.

MW: Recently it was revealed that G-Sax had been paid more than $12 billion for credit default swaps (CDS) it held with insurance giant AIG. Financial institutions that buy these CDS know that they are accepting additional risk because they are unregulated and outside government oversight. That said, Treasury’s payoff to G-Sax on these CDS was equivalent to paying off a gambler’s losses at the racetrack. Why was G-Sax compensated for their CDS? Why was it kept secret; and who authorized it?

Morgan: King Henry and his loyal lieutenant Neil Kashkari. Most people don’t realize, Neil Kashkari was King Henry’s lieutenant at Goldman Sachs. Neil is 35 years old with little experience other than being a very private executive assistant to King Henry when he was CEO of Goldman. Let’s ask ourselves . . . why exactly is Kashkari still on the job? Easy answer . . . because our President and Chris Dodd were both bought with Goldman Sachs’ money. These two men have received more money from Wall Street than any politician in the history of the United States. By the way, Obama was only around for two years, while Dodd was there for more than a decade. Obama received more money from Wall Street in two years than Dodd did in a decade.

MW: What is the nature of the relationship between G-Sax and the political establishment in Washington?

Morgan: If I answered that question I would need to increase the thickness of my Kevlar body suit.

MW: Why is Treasury a revolving door for investment bankers that are tied to Wall Street?

Morgan: Because the American public allows it. Benjamin Franklin said . . . Well done is better than well said. Too many Americans gripe and moan, but when it comes time to doing anything . . . they sit back on the couch with a bag of chips and the TV. We think it is cute to use the TV to amuse our toddlers. Do you think it is any different for 75 per cent of the American public?

MW: Are special interest groups dictating policy in the Obama White House?

Morgan: I can’t count that high. But if you just look at Wall Street and where the money came from, you will realize that Barack Hussein Obama is nothing more than a puppet of Wall Street.

MW: In an article that appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, a former chief economist of the IMF, Simon Johnson, had this to say:

“The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States… recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression we’re running out of time.”

Do you agree with Johnson that banks have a stranglehold on the political process and that “we are running out of time”? If so, how do we go about removing these people from office and replacing them with people who will operate in the public’s interest?

Morgan: First, I think guys like Simon Johnson are the guys that should be running the show. Simon along with William Black, Elizabeth Warren and Ron Paul. There are more, but if we had that trio at the helm, we’d be moving to a world of light, instead of a world of deep, violent darkness.

As to your question about how to remove these people from office, I believe it will be very violent . . . and very well deserved. We are two Biblical generations removed from the Great Depression of 1929. In 1969 we had race riots. We lost a true leader when we lost Martin Luther King, and the country paid the consequences. Here we are 40 years later . . . a Biblical generation, as we enter what I believe will be a period of violence beginning this summer. When you can’t feed your kids, and the folks at Goldman Sachs are sitting around the pool sipping cocktails and munching on snacks . . . that’s when those without go after those with.

The problem now is very simply . . . companies like Goldman Sachs created a financial system that was double stacked. One, they skimmed trillions of dollars out of our pension fund and other fiduciary money under their management. Two, like drug dealers they provided very creative financing to hundreds of millions of people around the world . . . which those folks can no longer afford to pay back. But the boys and girls and Goldman Sachs have already walked off with the money, leaving the people that bought the debt with little more than a piece of paper . . . and those that owe the debt, with the inability to ever pay it back.

MW: Will you fight Goldman in court?

Morgan: Yes. I’m prepared to fight them with several attorneys and law professors that are anxious to take this one on. I hope they do press the issue in court, but I kinda doubt it.

He has the help of a citizens group called ABA Publishing headed by Arminda and Bob Alexander with Jude Morford. The all-volunteer group recently sent Bugliosi’s cover letter and book to 2,200 local prosecutors across the country.

Bugliosi is offended by the prominence of proposed torture charges to the exclusion of what he argues is the much larger charge: murder.

Prof. Jonathan Turley of the George Washington University School of Law was asked what charges were the most likely if there’s ever a serious investigation into Bush administration criminal activities. Turley noted:

“The two most obvious crimes in this administration are the torture program and the unlawful surveillance program. Despite the effort to pretend that there is some ambiguity or uncertainty on these crimes, the law is quite clear.” (Blog of Legal Times, Dec. 23, 2008)

Torture and illegal wiretapping are important concerns to Bugliosi.

But murder is by far the larger crime with a much stronger case, Bugliosi argues.

The former top prosecutor demands justice for the deaths of 4,200 U.S. citizens, soldiers who gave their lives in a war based on calculated lies by the Bush administration. Their loss is the basis for his murder charge. While Bugliosi couldn’t find a way to attach the 1.2 million dead Iraqi civilians to the indictment, those deaths are part of the larger record of Bush crimes Bugliosi stated with passion.

I interviewed Vincent Bugliosi about his book, The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder in August 2008. He outlined his case in detail and the challenges he’d faced in getting the word out after the corporate media blacked out advertising and interviews on his groundbreaking book.

Recently, I contacted Mr. Bugliosi to explore his reaction to President Obama’s position on prosecuting Bush and others members of the regime and his opinion of the focus on a Bush prosecution for torture instead of the much more serious murder indictment.

Interview with Vincent Bugliosi
Conducted by Michael Collins
March 29, 2009

Michael Collins: Do you think that President Obama is reluctant to investigate and, presuming the findings we’d expect, prosecute Bush and others in his administration for their alleged crimes.

Vincent Bugliosi: President Obama was on the ABC news program This Week With George Stephanopoulos, and the issue came up about the prosecutions of the Bush administration, potential prosecutions, and he said words — I can give you his exact words. He said that he was of “a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.” (ABC News, Jan. 11, 2009) Now, the interpretation that has been placed on these words, and I agree with that interpretation, is that he does not intend to pursue George Bush or his administration for any crimes they may have committed.

This is in contradistinction to what he said months ago before he became president. He said words to the effect that if he became president, he would have his attorney general investigate the Bush administration to see if things that they had done involved crimes or just merely bad policy. He said if they involved crimes, he said no man is above the law, and the implication was that he would ask his attorney general to proceed forward, so he’s changed his position.

I was mentioning the interpretation on his words. The article in The New York Times that quoted him: “President-elect Barack Obama signaled in an interview broadcast Sunday that he was unlikely to authorize a broad inquiry into Bush administration programs like domestic eavesdropping or the treatment of terrorism suspects.” (New York Times, Jan. 12, 2009)

I have to say that I’m disappointed in the president on his apparent position that he doesn’t want the Department of Justice to conduct a criminal investigation.

MC: What would you say to the president if you had the opportunity?

VB: If I were to speak to President Obama, I would inform him of one thing and advise him of a couple of other things. I’d inform him, and I guess this sounds a little sarcastic, but I would inform him that when he talks about only looking forward and not backwards, I agree that most of his efforts have to be towards the future. I’m not quarreling with him on that, but you can’t forget the past.

When he says that he intends to give Bush a free pass simply because whatever crime Bush may have committed was in the past, I would inform him of something he already knows: that all criminal prosecutions, without exception and by definition, have to deal, obviously, with past criminal behavior. Obviously we cannot prosecute someone for a crime that they may commit in the future.

And if we prosecute for even petty theft in America, what do we do with Bush, who I’m very convinced took this nation to war under false pretenses and has caused incalculable death, horror, and suffering?

I would advise him of two things, kind of using his words against him. If indeed Obama’s sole emphasis seems to be the future, I don’t think anything could improve our image around the world more, restore our credibility more than prosecuting George Bush for his monumental crimes. We would be telling the world’s people that what George Bush did in taking this nation to war on a lie against a sovereign nation like Iraq, without any provocation whatsoever, was not the real America. That was only George Bush’s America. The real America would never do something like that. And then in the real America, no man is so high he is above the law, and even presidents have to be accountable for their crimes. So talking about the future, using President Obama’s own emphasis, I think it would be very advisable to bring Bush to justice if, in fact, he’s guilty, as I say he is.

Talking about the future, if we want to deter future presidents from taking this nation to another war under false pretenses, some president in the future that gets a funny thought, I think that deterrence would increase immeasurably if he knew what America did to George Bush, put him on trial for murder, and if he was convicted, of course, the punishment would either be life imprisonment or the imposition of the death penalty.

I gave you a long answer to the question, but I had always suspected that if there was going to be a prosecution in this place, it would be at the local level. The ideal venue is, in fact, the Department of Justice.

MC: Ultimately, isn’t it the responsibility of the attorney general to determine the crimes that are investigated and what aren’t? For example, if Obama called up Holder and said, “Lay off any prosecutions against the Bush crew,” Holder may take that advice or he may not. But wouldn’t he have to ignore the request?

VB: Well, there’s no question that independent of Obama, Holder has the authority to bring criminal charges against Bush, no question about it. There’s also no question that each of the 93 U.S. attorneys around the country have the power and the authority to do so, but let’s jump from there to reality. The reality is if there’s some U.S. attorney in Chicago that wants to do it, it’s possible, but he’s not going to do it without checking with his boss. You don’t take on the biggest most important murder case in American history without letting your boss know about it, you know — that is, not if you want to remain a U.S. attorney; and likewise with Holder. He has the authority and he has the power to completely ignore Obama, but the reality is what do you do? If Obama indicated that he was opposed to it, it would take quite a man to overrule the president.

MC: Where does that leave the cause of justice for those who died?

Since Obama’s not going to do anything and the International Criminal Court has no jurisdiction, the reality is that the only game in town is what took place several weeks ago up in Seattle when Bob Alexander, just a regular citizen, but an American patriot, sent out with volunteers, copies of my book, The Prosecution of George Bush for Murder, to DAs all over the country, with a cover letter from me, asking the DAs to read the book, and, if they agreed that the evidence of guilt was clear and that there’s jurisdiction to proceed against him, I offered to help out in any way that I could, any way that they deemed — any way that they wanted me to, which would range all the way from being a consultant up to and including being appointed as special prosecutor.

MC: I’ve followed Professor Jonathon Turley of George Washington University, and he’s come out and said there are two clear crimes to prosecute Bush for. One is torture, which Bush has essentially admitted, and the other is under the statutes against illegal surveillance. I’m trying to understand why Turley doesn’t — and I don’t know if you’ve talked to him or not –

VB: No, no.

MC: I’m trying to understand where the murder charge is.

VB: I told you that I was disappointed with Obama. I have to take it a step further and say I am offended. I am offended by this movement by those who want to get, quote, even with Bush to just talk about torture. I find it very offensive. And I’ll tell you why. I’m not saying that Bush and his people should not be prosecuted for torture, but I want to get into that in depth in a while. But it should only be at most a footnote to going after him for murder. It should only be a footnote.

The New York Times said in an editorial a month and a half or so ago that there were two dozen verifiable cases of torture at Abu Ghraib. Let’s assume that that number is very conservative, very conservative. Let’s say there’s 100 cases; let’s say there’s 200 cases of torture that can be verified.

How do you compare 200 cases of torturing Iraqis with the unlawful death, if what I say is correct, of one million Iraqis and 4,200 American soldiers? How do you compare these two? Again, is there something that I don’t know? Is there something that I have to be told? How do you compare the two?

They can’t be compared, obviously, and yet all I hear is torture, torture, torture, torture, and I’m offended by that, not because I’m not saying that Bush shouldn’t be prosecuted for torture, but because what’s wrong with these people? To give Bush a free pass on taking this nation to war on a lie. The majority of American people believe that Bush took this nation to war on a lie, and I can’t tell you the number of times there’s been TV and radio shows and articles about the lies of the Bush administration in taking this nation to war. Now all of a sudden they want to forget all about that, these people, and just talk about torture, torture, torture, torture.

There was a cover story in, I think it was Harper’s Magazine about two months ago, about prosecuting Bush. Obviously, I bought the magazine, and I opened it up to the prosecution. What was it all about? Torture. The New York Times had a pro and con in the op-ed section about two months ago, pro prosecution to Bush, anti prosecution to Bush. So I looked at what the prosecution was about — torture. I’m offended by this.

Who’s fighting to bring about justice for the perhaps one million innocent Iraqi men, women, and children and babies in their graves? Actually, I shouldn’t say I’m going to bring about justice for them, or try to, because I was unable to establish jurisdiction to go after Bush for the deaths of the Iraqi citizens. I did establish jurisdiction to go after him for the deaths of the 4,200 American soldiers. In any event, it would be a symbolic effort to bring about justice for the million people in their graves. Let’s say that number’s high. In my book I say over 100,000. Certainly there’s over 100,000 innocent Iraqi men, women, children and babies who died as a result of Bush’s war. Some numbers put it in excess of one million, and we know there’s 4,200 American soldiers.

Who’s fighting to bring about justice for those in their graves, decomposing in their cold graves right now as I’m talking to you, Michael? Who’s doing that out there?

MC: Right.

VB: No one seems to be interested in that. It’s all torture, torture, torture, torture, so apparently torturing 24 or 200 Iraqi citizens or Iraqi insurgents or what have you is more important than bringing about justice, let’s say, for 4,200 American soldiers who died in Bush’s war. So you can see where I am offended about that.

I’m not saying that Bush should not be prosecuted for torture.

Let’s talk about why it’s even more offensive to me than I’ve already told you. I’ve given you the main reason why I’m offended by it, that that’s all they talk about, as opposed to saying let’s go after him for taking this nation to war under false pretenses, and then let’s also add a count to the indictment for torture. Do you follow?

MC: Yes I do. Where does torture fit into the larger picture?

VB: I’m not saying he shouldn’t be prosecuted if he’s guilty of torture. I just don’t think it should be all that people are talking about. But let’s take it to another level. Who are these people who were tortured? Well, I guess virtually all of them were insurgents. There never should have been a war in Iraq. Iraq — there were no terrorists in Iraq, and when you go to war, a war against terror, you go against the terrorists, and there were no terrorists in Iraq, but we’re acting on a set stage here, so in Bush’s — in the Bush administration’s mind, once they were in custody there, they viewed — the Bush administration viewed these insurgents as enemies. So that’s their state of mind. If these insurgents are enemies, why would the Bush administration be authorizing torture? Well, to coerce from them intelligence information that would be helpful to America?

MC: Right.

VB: Which does not eliminate the legal liability but diminishes the moral culpability.

But there was no justification whatsoever under the moon that was helpful to America in invading Iraq, nothing, zero, cipher. Hussein had nothing at all to do with 9/11. He was not an imminent threat to the security of this country. Bush and his people lied to convince the American people on both of those things, that he was an imminent threat and that he had been involved in 9/11. So that diminishes the torture thing even further.

The main guy we’ve got to go after, and there would be many named in the indictment, of course, many others, at least Rice and Cheney, of course, but I believe Rove; the main guy is George Bush. Why is he the main guy? Because he’s the one that authorized it. If he didn’t authorize it, none of these things would ever have happened. I don’t care who influenced him, if anyone at all. He said, yes, let’s do it.

MC: Since we last spoke, there have been more revelations on the outrages of the Iraq War, all a direct result of the lies Bush and Cheney used to sell the war.. How do those revelations build your case?

VB: While all of these revelations are very good, you have to know, Michael, they don’t mean anything at all unless we do something about it. The revelations by themselves, by definition, don’t go anywhere. And that’s why when people hear these revelations, you know, they’re prompted to ask, “What now? Where do we go from here?”

MC: Right.

VB: And, again, not boasting, it’s just a fact that The Prosecution of George Bush for Murder is the what now, where do we go from here book, the only book, out of the probably over 100 out there attacking Bush, that provides a legal blueprint for bringing George Bush to justice.