In the run-up to the demonstrations against the NATO summit in Chicago this month, Ashley Smith interviewed the State Department official-turned-antiwar activist.

Ashley Smith: You had been a career military officer and State Department official. What compelled you to resign and join the antiwar movement?

Ann Wright: I was in the military for 29 years –13 years on active duty and 16 years in the reserves, and then another 16 years while I was in the State Department as a U.S. diplomat. So I was a part of the system under seven different presidents, from Lyndon Johnson all the way to George Bush Jr.

I didn’t believe in, or agree with, all the policies of all these administrations. I disagreed with many of them, but I never resigned. I always found other things I could work on that I felt were not harming people. It was only at the end of my government career that I finally resigned over something, because there were plenty of things I could have resigned over earlier, but I didn’t. I held my nose about them, like most government employees do.

The tipping point for me was the decision of the Bush administration to invade and occupy Iraq. They used the excuse of weapons of mass destruction. I didn’t believe them. We all knew that there had been two no-fly zones over the country over a period of 10 years. There had been quarantine, a blockade around the country, and there had been endless inspections for weapons of mass destruction.

On top of that, the UN inspectors, most of whom were U.S. intelligence agents, didn’t find anything, or the few weapons they found they destroyed. But, in general, the consensus of the international community was that there were no weapons of mass destruction left in the country.

So I just didn’t believe what the Bush administration was saying. When Colin Powell gave that lengthy address to the General Assembly in February 2003, I remember sitting in our embassy in Ulan Bator, Mongolia. I watched it on live TV with all of our staff around, because we all realized that this was a momentous event, and we knew that our lives would again be changing if the U.S. decided to invade and occupy Iraq.

With the buildup of rhetoric that was coming out of Washington in the fall of 2002, I was very, very uneasy, and I had trouble sleeping. I ended up having to be medically evacuated to Singapore because they thought I was suffering symptoms that are often the precursor of a stroke. I was having all sorts of light-headedness, shortness of breath, and I had arrived at the age where you need to watch out for this sort of stuff.

After an intense week of every type of medical exam possible, the doctor said, “Are you under any particular stress?” And I said, “Well, yes, I’m under stress. My nation is about to blast the hell out of another country.”

I continued waking up in the middle of the night, not being able to go back to sleep, and then staying up and just reading and writing out my concerns about what was going on. Every night I was reading materials, underlining passages and writing comments in the margins like, “This is the stupidest thing they could ever think up!” I was piling up pages and pages of writing detailing all my disagreements with Bush’s policy.

When I finally resigned, I ended up writing what I’ve been told was the longest resignation letter in the history of the State Department. It’s about three pages long and it not only talks about the war in Iraq, but other concerns about Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, the Bush administration’s lack of effort to engage North Korea, and its unnecessary curtailing of civil liberties under the Patriot Act.

When I resigned, I got over 400 e-mails from friends and colleagues in the State Department and other agencies saying, “You’re doing the right thing. We wish we could resign, but we’ve got kids in college, mortgages, you know, the whole financial thing.” But there are plenty of people in the government I think that have retired early and with severe cases of ulcers from having had to go through all of the horrors of the Bush administration.

AS: After you resigned, you became an antiwar leader while Bush was in office, but you did not stop when Obama was elected. What’s your assessment of Obama and his policies?

AW:  Everyone was hoping for a real change from what George Bush had dished out during his eight-year reign. But let’s remember that even during the campaign, candidate Obama did tell us that he felt the Afghanistan war was a good war, and he intended to escalate it. On that bad promise he’s delivered, but on many other good ones he has not.

He’s not closed Guantánamo. We still have the military commissions trying a few prisoners in Guantánamo. Virtually nobody has been released during the Obama administration, or even put on trial — these people are in imprisoned with no hope of resolution of their cases.

On the issue of curtailing of civil liberties, it’s worse under the Obama administration. Whistleblowers are getting the worst of the raw deals — six people have now been charged with espionage for revealing classified information that shows government malfeasance and criminal acts.

I’ve been very disappointed and displeased with Obama’s tenure. Like many other people, I have been challenging those policies, and writing and speaking and having endless vigils out in front of the White House. I, like many others, have gone to protest the president at various events, disrupting them over a variety of issues and getting arrested, just as we did under the Bush administration.

How to deal with the Obama administration has been a big debate in the movement. At our recent Veterans for Peace convention, we had a long and good discussion about whether we should call for the impeachment of President Obama as we had called for the impeachment of President Bush. While we were hesitant to come out against the first Black president, after we laid out all the evidence we decided that we had no choice but to call for Obama’s impeachment.

AS: What do you think of Obama’s policies in his Afghanistan?

AW: I think his escalation of the war in Afghanistan is perhaps his worst decision. He’s caused a huge number of civilian casualties, wasted a tremendous amount of money on sweetheart deals for private contractors, and enabled enormous amounts of corruption among Afghan businessmen as well as in the Afghan government itself.

Many of these Afghan corporate and governmental elites are part of the warlord class. We’re training and equipping their militias in the police and army. They will be there to fight not for the country of Afghanistan, but for the warlords to whom they belong.

Obama has decided to extend his patronage of the corrupt Afghan elite with this new 10-year strategic pact. He’s supposedly closing the door in Afghanistan as he supposedly had closed the door in Iraq. This is all, in fact, a public relations ploy. Behind the supposedly closed door, the U.S. is spending billions of dollars in Iraq and there will be billions for the next 10 years in Afghanistan.

AS: What’s your analysis of Obama’s new focus on Asia to contain Chinese power?

AW: Obama sees China as a rising rival, a huge economic powerhouse as well as a regional military power with the largest land army in the world and with an increasingly advanced air force and the navy. As you said, he wants to contain it.

He and the Congress are whipping up anti-Chinese rhetoric here in the U.S. Just recently the administration denounced the Chinese for building their first aircraft carrier. This is pure hypocrisy. The U.S. already has 14 of them. And for the first time, the Chinese have one, and they talk about it as that’s the greatest threat to all of the world.

That’s not to absolve the Chinese government of its problems and its own bad policies. But the U.S. should not be adding them to the “axis of evil.” This pivot to Asia will only push China into a corner and may lead them to do something that will give the excuse for the U.S. to make even more hostile policies.

And the U.S. pivot seems almost designed to provoke China. Obama has increased the military to military relationships with the Philippines. We still have a huge number of soldiers stationed in Okinawa in Japan.

He’s opened a new base for 2,500 Marines in Australia and an airfield that will be dedicated toward big Global Hawk drones that can stay indefinitely in the air for surveillance in Asia. And in South Korea, we still have over 30,000 troops and he’s pushing for a new naval base in a pristine place called Jeju Island. Obama wants that to be the homeport for Asia’s part of America’s worldwide missile defense system.

This last decision is very significant since it will increase tensions with not only the Chinese but also Russians. The missile shield in Europe as well as the new one proposed for Asia is one of the reasons that Putin did not attend the G8 meeting. He wanted to send a signal that he is going to be putting more and more pressure on the U.S. to stop this missile defense system. Otherwise, he’s going to put one in, too, which will not be good for world security.

AS: Why is the U.S. putting an increasing emphasis on drones as a central part of its new strategy?

AW: Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones are an easy, clean way for the U.S. to wage war. You don’t have to have your own military on the ground. These drones are capable of flying long distances, they can be refueled in the air, and they can do the dirty work of the U.S. without any American’s life being risked.

They are automating warfare. Some of these drones are as large as the 727 and can carry payloads that are enormous. They can put big bunker buster bombs under these things and fly them over and just drop wherever they want.

But this new automated military will not, in fact, protect American lives. Just like traditional military actions or missile strikes, drone warfare will inevitably precipitate blowback. We’ve already seen attacks on U.S. embassies and consulates specifically in response to drone attacks. So, the administration’s claim that these are the safest things that we could be using isn’t true.

We’ve already had examples of blowback from Obama’s drone war. Remember the young Pakistani-American guy who had planned to detonate a carload of explosive in Times Square. Luckily a hot-dog vendor thwarted his plot, but afterward when he was asked why he planned the attack, he explained, “Well, it’s the drones. The U.S. is using them to kill families in Pakistan.”

We also have the incident of the Jordanian doctor who was recruited to be an asset of the CIA. The CIA wanted him to infiltrate al-Qaeda and bring back information. But, this agent became horrified by the U.S. drone war. So he went to a CIA base in Afghanistan and blew himself up and killed all eight CIA agents.

Afterward it came out that he left a letter for his wife saying, “I am so horrified about what the U.S. is doing with these drones in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and I refuse to work with them anymore.”

The drone war is even complicating U.S. policy in Afghanistan. Pakistan closed the main supply route for over three months in protest against CIA drone strikes. The U.S. has been forced to bring in equipment into Afghanistan through the northern road network from Latvia, which is extraordinarily expensive. Despite Obama’s hopes, war, including drone war, will never be bloodless and clean.

AS:  A lot of people think that Obama is bringing an end to the wars Bush’s started. What is the real picture of U.S. militarism today?

AW: First of all, we have to be very watchful of what the Obama is doing in Iraq and Afghanistan. The truth is he has not really ended the U.S. domination over either of those countries. The U.S. has hoards of American private contractors in each of those countries, and many of them are private security firms who have every bit as much firepower as the U.S. military.

Beyond that, the U.S. has increased its bases throughout the Middle East. We don’t even know the total number of bases, outposts, runways and landing strips in Yemen, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. We do know that there are CIA and U.S. military bases in Yemen. There’s a huge base in Qatar. There are, I think, seven bases now in Oman.

In Africa, the U.S. has established a military base in Somalia. They are using various alibis to justify increased military presence throughout the continent. The U.S. is sending the military into Ethiopia all the time. We have U.S. military forces in Kenya. And then we have U.S. Special Forces in Uganda to supposedly to go after Kony. Well, you can be sure that once they’re in, they’ll never leave.

Over in Mali and West Africa, the U.S. always has what they call mobile training teams, groups of Special Forces that will come in and do specialized training for militaries. That’s their way to establish relationships between senior leaders of the military, to try to get some sort of compatibility with the military in case the U.S. decides it needs to go in there. So the U.S. has a large number of small groups of military all over Africa.

In Asia, the U.S. pivot against China is ratcheting up tensions throughout the region. We have Special Forces in the Philippines, down in the island of Mindanao that are using drones and have assassinated 11 people already. And there are members of the Philippine government and legislature, their parliament, who are outraged about what’s going on.

Walden Bello, one of the wonderful international activists and member of the Philippine parliament, has already written to his government saying, “What’s going on? These are things you’re doing without any consultation — allowing U.S. military and armies, military operations that are killing Filipino people.”

And then, of course, we have many U.S. military forces in Korea, Japan and Okinawa. We’ve had a large naval base down in Singapore for a long time. We do have military to military relationships now with Vietnam, with Laos, Cambodia. So, the U.S. has its tentacles everywhere and, depending on who gets out of line, the U.S. may put great military as well as economic pressure on that country. And the U.S. will use the global “war on terror” to declare its right to go anywhere, anytime, do anything.

AS: So what do you think the key tasks for the antiwar movement today?

AW: Well, to be vigilant, to be vocal, to be on the streets, to keep after the issues of Iraq and Afghanistan. Don’t let them fade out of view. And one can use a variety of levers on it, because we’ve got to have some hook to make the public aware. In Iraq, we have to call attention to the issue of private contractors and the numbers that are there — who they are and what they’re doing — and also where U.S. oil companies are and what sort of contracts they’ve got there.

And in Afghanistan, we will be seeing war sponsored by the U.S. well after 2014. We have to debunk the idea that U.S. forces will be leaving behind an independent country. I think that the next 10-year period we will see U.S. forces there in large numbers fighting Taliban, conducting night raids and drone strikes, and violating the sovereignty of Pakistan. We should also watch out for U.S. using its power to control pipeline routes in the region as well as exploit the natural resources of Afghanistan.

Pakistan will likely be the most volatile of all of the areas. What the U.S. is doing there just has the potential to be a greater catastrophe than even Afghanistan. The U.S. is killing untold numbers of people with drones and essentially thumbing its nose at the Pakistani government, which has pleaded with us to stop because of the reaction that they are getting from their own people.

I mean it could explode in just so many horrific ways. People are furious with the U.S. The U.S. embassy in Pakistan has already been burned twice over the past decades.

We really have to follow what the U.S. is up to in Asia and the Pacific. We have to be watchful of the rhetoric of the administration and do everything we can to tamp it down, to call the hand of the government.

We also need to keep agitating against the occupation of Palestine. We need all sorts of international citizen activism to highlight the illegal settlements in the West Bank, the apartheid wall, and the treatment of Palestinians within Israel and the blockade of Gaza. I think that campus activists have played a key role doing all sorts of things like building walls to bring home what the apartheid structure of Israel is like.

We have to keep up the international effort to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza. Very soon, we’ll be announcing a new project called Gaza’s Ark. Rather than trying to get boats to break the blockade from outside, we are going to work with Palestinians to break the blockade from the inside. We’re going to help sponsor a Gaza boat building and sailing school. This will provide some much needed jobs for the people of Gaza.

This is an important shift. We all have felt badly about spending so much money on flotillas from the outside that gets a lot of publicity for the issue but they don’t really help the people inside Gaza that much. With this new approach, we can get work for people and help stimulate the economy to a small degree.

Once the boats get built, we’ll solicit people all over the world to order products from Gaza. We’ll put these products on the boat and have them set sail from Gaza to deliver them to the world. Everyone will know that the probability of ever getting this stuff is pretty low, but they can be a part of helping break the blockade and also help the people of Gaza earn money for the beautiful work that they do. It’s an important new step for the continuing struggle to liberate Palestinians from Israeli occupation.

Finally, we need to keep the pressure on the American government and the Israeli government to stop any drive to war against Iran. We really need to pester the hell out of the Obama administration on this rhetoric that they’ve been saying about Iran developing weapons of mass destruction.

I mean we’ve heard all of this before. These same allegations against Iraq lead me to resign my post. Instead we should be encouraging them to talk with Iran. We should be in dialogue, not in military confrontation.

*  This article first appeared at Socialist Worker.

I have and I can say that they’re typically rough workplaces.

At first glance, Amazon’s LV fulfillment center appears benign.

Primary red, yellow, green and blue splashes of color brighten the place, and motivational posters and friendly educational signs that feature cute characters provide guidance. Hundreds, sometimes thousands of workers populate the warehouse at once, diligently taking direction from hand-held scanners or computers, and the place is enormous so it doesn’t appear cramped. Seriously, the place could house a small city.

Physical strength is not a necessary qualification to perform any of their warehouse job functions, and management is ostensibly concerned with worker safety. Just about anyone could staff Amazon’s FC, especially since it only takes a couple of hours to train workers to perform any specific job function. It’s safe to say that anyone laboring in an Amazon FC has fallen into hard times, and many of my former coworkers’ resumes featured distinguished past titles, impressive demonstrations of manual skill and ability, and/or lofty educational attainment.

Many never thought they’d wind up in a warehouse and so, yes, this was all foreign for many. Other workers who staffed other warehouses in the past didn’t know what to make of the place because there is something different about Amazon, something alien.

“Chairman” Bezos once said that Amazon workers don’t need a union because we own the company. “Chairman” Bezos has zero tolerance for union activity and several Amazon unionization attempts were summarily squashed.

After two years on the job an Amazon FC associate is entitled to eight shares of stock. If Amazon is trading at, say, $250 a share, that’s $2,000. Ownership? $250 per share is a generous projection. Seasoned investors are baffled by AMZN’s current overvaluation because of its unhealthy 188:1 (fluctuates, yet always unhealthy) price to earnings ratio, and they’re waiting for the bubble to burst.

I imagined reaching the two-year mark, receiving my payout, and some smiling patriarch saying, “There’s some shopping money sweetheart, have fun.”

Forget about those riff-raff temps, they work for nothing more than an hourly wage, and Amazon relies heavily upon temp labor.

Amazon relies heavily upon labor—period. Yet, we were routinely led to believe that our existence was owed to them, that it was they who paid our bills. Oh yes, and Amazon provides its employees with health benefits, a rare and precious commodity these days. I accepted the best plan, $59 was deducted from my pay every month, and I couldn’t even afford to use my benefits. I visited an in-network clinic for a cold and lost an entire shift’s pay after I forked over the $30 copay and the seemingly arbitrary additional prescription costs.

After taxes and other deductions, $12.75 per hour doesn’t go far. Amazon’s FC associates EARN greater compensation than they currently take home. Problem is, corporate Amazon deliberately keeps its FCs in a constant state of flux and it is practically impossible for Amazon associates to organize from within.

Could a union deliver dignity and quality of life to Amazon’s FC associates? Employment with Amazon is so thoroughly all-consuming and work/life balance is an ideal that this workaholic corporation deems unimportant. Amazon demands unquestioning loyalty and sacrifice from its workers and everything is non-negotiable. Workers’ schedules can be changed with little or no notice to suit management’s needs. Single mothers struggled with this most. Badges are deactivated without notice and a worker could suddenly be out of a job. The only incentive workers are offered to exceed expectations is the diminished risk that they may be let go at any time.

We worked, 10, sometimes 11 hour shifts and received a thirty-minute break for lunch and two, fifteen-minute paid breaks. Managers enforced break times to the minute and we were chained to the floor until the minute break started and expected to be back on the floor the minute break ended. Factor in walking time and getting hung up at security and we were able to sit and eat maybe forty minutes total during a 10 1/2 or 11 1/2 hour span of time.

In training they suggested we eat oats, fruits and vegetables (No, you’re not horses the poster said, but oats are a great way….). Meat, bread, cheese and energy drinks provided sustenance; not my typical fare, but it went the distance and I could stuff it down quickly enough. If we returned from break a minute late, we were “stealing company time.”

Yes, we’re criminals, and Amazon owns time. At any time, an ISS “coach” or Amazon manager could accuse a picker of a “false pick short.” If a picker couldn’t find an item in a bin, reported it missing, and someone checked the bin afterward and found the item there, a write-up was issued.

One write-up and a temp can’t be hired by Amazon, despite stellar performance, and the accusation could not be verified or disputed. If management sees that an employee didn’t scan a product’s bar-code for more than a couple minutes or so, the worker was often called down, scolded for “time-off-task” (even if they were exceeding rate) and possibly written up.

Managers watch numbers on a computer screen like it’s a horse race and workers’ every move is tracked. We were often paranoid, and it is wise for anyone to never feel too secure in Amazon’s most neurotic workplace. This was all too reminiscent of the East German Stasi for my tastes.

Brrr!

I never spoke to family or friends while I worked there and, for all they knew, I could have run off and joined some cult. My sister phoned after a local news station reported that an Amazon employee set fire to a shelving unit while we were working. The building was evacuated and, if we wanted to keep our jobs, we were forced to stand in sub-freezing temperatures for more than two hours wearing only t-shirts and shorts.

My sister was concerned. “What kind of place are you working at?” she asked. “Don’t worry,” I answered. “Call you tomorrow, need sleep, I work another 11-hour shift tonight.”

Our managers told us that we were like Santa’s elves, delivering happiness to children and families. If that’s the case, Santa is a hard driver and his elves must sport super-immunity because I never thought them to be as sick and rundown as the crew staffing Amazon during peak season. I suffered a chronic, dry, hacking cough and my spirits were never so low.

The shoppers want lower prices. The shareholders want greater profitability. Amazon strives to be “the most customer-centric company in the universe” and we must forever give thanks to anyone with money!

Happy holidays.

As a follow-up, Paul Haeder asked Nichole Gracely a few additional questions since her fine essay precipitated a lot of leaping-off points and questions.

PKH: How long did you do this job?
What was the feeling when you were let go?
What do you think Amazon would even think about reading this account? Bezos reading it? Average college grad coming to Amazon reading it?
Do Americans think life is dog-eat-dog existence, since this Amazon model is replicated in so many work places, abroad, and here?

NG: I worked there August 2010-February 2011 and August 2011-February 2012. I was ISS my first run, wanted to get hired by Amazon and was let go after I accumulated too many demerit points for missing work during snowstorms. My contribution to the Morning Call story talks about how they dangled the possibility for FT employment with Amazon in our faces, false promises. I returned in August 2011 as an ISS temp and I, surprisingly, was included in a group of ISS temps who were hired directly by Amazon in October 2011, shortly after the Morning Call expose was published.

Both Peak seasons were different experiences although I am certain that Peak 2011 would have been the same nightmare I encountered Peak 2010 if they would have never been challenged by the bad publicity. Although, again, more FCs were built in the interim so that may be why conditions in our warehouse eased up a bit.

For the sake of simplicity, I talked about conditions, workplace abuses that are still happening today, basic workplace rights and quality of life issues that a union could address. 10-hour shifts are too long and that’s what we were working, their surveillance tactics were in place, time-off task, false pick shorts, etc. Amazon directly hired more people and while I was there the second time around they relied less upon temp labor (I think they may have been scolded by their friends in govt. after the story ran) though nobody ever really felt secure there. In his message to me, Morning Call‘s Soper’s other informant who is still there said they were bringing in more temps. The turnover rate is insane, and Soper could never get concrete employment figures from management. We talked about it and I know he tried. Amazon tried to keep me there this last time around because I’m incredibly productive and I trained people well as an “ambassador” (no incentive, pay increase, etc). This time, they made it difficult for me to point out. I wanted out, though, so I could speak about my experience. All Amazon employees sign a vaguely-worded confidentiality agreement and we’re not allowed to talk to the press. I spoke to Soper before I went back and while I was ISS, temps don’t have to sign anything.

I would hope that Amazon (Bezos) now recognizes its workers’ humanity. It often felt like bad sci-fi, like I was part of some brutalized underclass and that we were being mastered by Tech types who don’t really give a shit for anyone or anything—just numbers, that’s it, numbers.

Yes, I’m a failure as a capitalist, I get it, and myself and my Amazon co-workers are clearly not faring well in this game. Bezos is winning, I get it, he’s smart, he may even be a genius, sheessh! I became really disgusted with him when I read all the Bezos worship headlines while I worked there (Forbes has a serious hard-on for the guy).

CEO worship is sickening. He takes all the credit for Amazon’s success in everything I read about Amazon, he’s like some sort of quasi-spiritual leader, and it was really tacky the way he was being promoted in the wake of Jobs’ death. “Is he the next Steve Jobs?” people were asking. Give me a break. He’s not a self-made man like media lead us to believe. He has gotten to where he’s at because tens of thousands of workers have made tremendous life sacrifices. I try to remember his humanity—it’s hard, though.

Bezos once said that the workweek minimum should be sixty hours and I could not disagree more. We should be working less, not more, and for greater compensation; that is, if we wish to restore any kind of economic equilibrium. I’m not an economist so don’t quote me on that.

The Amazon model seems counter-intuitive to me and they could destroy capitalism as we know it; problem is, we’re going to be longing for the good old days of capitalism if it’s somehow replaced by everything that Amazon embodies. Tech is supposed to liberate, not enslave. I do not place much faith in Tech, especially after working at Amazon and reading about Apple products and how they’re made. My apartment was broken into and my Macbook was stolen while revelations of Apple’s labor abuse were surfacing and I was actually glad to be rid of the thing.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon hired 28,000 additional workers last year and it terrifies me to think that more and more individuals are submitting to corporat(ist) Amazon’s command. I know how they operate and I will never remove them from my sight. And, it became clear to me that the federal government has their hands all over Amazon and I’d like to further investigate my hunch that Amazon has been designated as some social shopping service/government works program.

PKH: As a sort of pun, can you credit all that hard work at the warehouse as something gained by the Amazon way and whip cracking?

NG: I arrived at Amazon with a work ethic that would make Bezos smile. I consistently exceeded rate requirements and there were nights I could have napped a couple of hours or gone home after lunch and I still would have made rate for the night. I wasn’t provided any incentive to exceed rate. It didn’t take long for me to think that Bezos was running some kind of boot camp. I later read that Amazon actively recruits ex-military personnel to manage their warehouses, and that may explain why it was common for our managers to bark and holler and carry on in ways that I’ve never witnessed in any other workplace. I always empathized with management, no matter how badly they behaved, because they’re under tremendous pressure, subjected to endless hostility, and they’re overworked and under-compensated.

PKH: What is Lehigh, Pennsylvania, like, in a nutshell?

NG: Also, the Lehigh Valley is predominantly Pennsylvania German and Hispanic and the two groups don’t mix well. I prefer my Hispanic neighbors and don’t venture far from Bethlehem’s depressed Southside because I’m in conservative country as soon as I step out.

PKH: You mentioned that “alien-like” feeling working at the Amazon Fulfillment Center.

NG: I attempted a subtle segue here, Bezos is alien and at the same time he seemed ever-present in the warehouse once I learned more about him. I said “Chairman Bezos” because there’s something oddly Mao-like about him. Check this Economist link.

What do you make of the photo? My next piece will be about alienation and Amazon. So, everything is alien there, it’s very strange. Most workers never worked for a mega-corporation, a Tech company nonetheless, and so that definitely contributes to the alien quality of the place, the discomforting reality that most warehouse workers could never understand and articulate.

PKH: Okay, what do you think of the title, “Where Santa’s Helpers Work 24/7, 365 Days a Year … ”?

NG: During Peak 2010 they did operate 365 days a year, not Peak 2011. New Fulfillment centers were built in the interim and I think that was why Peak 2011 was slower at the LV FC. And/or maybe the boycott achieved something. And/or maybe disposable incomes are drying up. I handled millions of consumer products there, and I can say that their customers must have disposable income to be making these purchases. Amazon’s 1st quarter earnings report is questionable.

PKH: Then, what about the sub-title to your piece? “Come High Water, Come Fire, Come Exhaustion – The Amazon Way is America’s Way”

NG: Yes, definitely … I’m talking to and overhearing more people, regardless of their job or industry, who complain that their employers are demanding more and more and compensating less. Workers are being squeezed everywhere.

I spoke with Jason about green washing, what the cities of Vancouver, Chicago, Portland, Seattle, and others are attempting to do with architecture and urban design. We discussed how difficult it is to launch into a larger discussion about quicker, more all-encompassing ways to mitigate, plan for and design livability for a world that some like James Hansen calls, a world without ice.

He just spoke at a BALLE (Business Alliance for Local Living Economies), business conference that brought “together independent business owners and innovators, local living economy entrepreneurs, community investors, government economic development professionals and sustainability leaders.” McLennon understands that restlessness folk in various forms of the sustainability movement are displaying. His book’s main title describes the grumbling and undertow some of the deep sustainability folk have just prior to a period of great migration, or change. Certain species display agitation and restlessness — a phenomenon referred to by scientists as “zugunruhe,” which McLennan identifies with, shaped by this current zugunruhe pattern emerging among people yearning for a sustainable future.

“Zugunruhe is a work of creative genius that draws us into an engaging journey of self-discovery, brings the biggest and most frightening issues of our time up close, and invites our engagement,” notes David Korten, “It will leave you envisioning human possibilities you never previously imagined.”

Paul K. Haeder: Why aren’t communities taking charge of sustainability when it comes to cities’ decision?

Jason F. McLennan: “We’ve moved backward as a population on these issues of climate change and sustainability. A large percentage of Americans do not believe it’s real. Cities will have to make more substantial progress. We still have our eyes closed using these old sets of laws, regulations. In every community there are people working on making better, sustainable cities. The problem is the cities – planners, architects, engineers, politicians – can only push sustainability … as far as where society can accept it.”

PKH: Why are we stuck in this incremental change mindset, in planning, in development, in sustainability programs?

JFM: Changes will happen for reasons not in our control. But it’s best to put into place models of what we think success is. We need to continue speaking to the choir. We need as many people in our musical group able to play the sustainability part. Look at us as little conductors with little orchestras. We have to spend time focusing on those that do sustainability and teach them to play, and then pull them into deeper commitments to sustainability. We can’t leave people in a place of shame, hopelessness. We have to envision success and a positive end game. People aren’t wanting to hear about the impending catastrophe … about Kunstler’s ‘long emergency.’”

PKH: What’s your take on LEED-washing?

JFM: LEED can be a powerful tool for powerful change … most of the time. However, it doesn’t get used that way. People are trying to game the system. The larger question is why did that group use LEED? Do I think that LEED is perfect? Absolutely not. No system is perfect. And yes, some criticism is deserved – and needed – to keep improving what has become the most dominant green building program in the world. But there is a big difference in criticism that is intended to make the program stronger – so that it can continue to contribute to lowering environmental impact and changing the building culture – and criticism that is intended to tear down and destroy something that I believe has done a lot of good in the world.¹

PKH: Can planners do more to both encourage sustainability in their work and help designing cities under political constraints to take it on more vigorously?

JFM: It will take investment, large sums of money shifting into deep sustainability. The whole paradigm needs to change. It is going to take a lot of people who made money under the old paradigm — who have profited the most – to create the economic conditions for this new paradigm.

PKH: Sustainability lite or green washing. What do you have to say about those issues?

JFM: “We wish Vancouver was doing more. We feel hamstrung at times when we go in as consultants. How far can that mayor push? Not very far. Until there’s a groundswell from the communities. I will say that if we are serious about cutting greenhouse gas emissions, then we need a World War Two effort to retrofit America’s housing. We’d be cutting greenhouse emissions thirty to fifty percent in two years with the right investment – money – very little time, and significant behavioral change.”

Where Is the Planning Profession on Sustainability and Green Washing?

I spoke with John Robinson, Executive Director, UBC Sustainability Initiative; Professor, Institute of Resources, Environment and Sustainability and in the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia. My biggest concern at the sustainability leadership school was the skirting of social justice and social sustainability throughout the week.

I asked him a question so many others ducked: How can we in this sustainability movement who want net zero waste and living buildings and other sustainability designs to be the way of the future start looking at sustainability on a much more holistic and socially just and deep ecological frame?

Robinson was clear: “This is a real issue, but again I am optimistic. I think the social leg of the sustainability stool is much less well developed, but I also think it is coming. In the academic realm, fields like political ecology put it front and centre; on the activist front, and it is getting increasing attention in NGOs like DSF and Pembina (look at the Transition Towns movement in the UK, for example). Business is a bit slower and government the slowest but I believe it is coming, especially at the local level.”

We also talked about green washing.

“As someone remarked in about 1995 ‘the growth industry of the 1990s is green bullshit.’ This is not a new problem,” Robinson says. “But what is sometimes overlooked is that this growth is accompanied by an equivalent or perhaps even faster growth in our ability to measure and monitor sustainability (metrics, indicators, monitoring systems, etc.) In the 1990s at the University of Waterloo, I asked an engineering class to tell me what was better from an environmental point of view: electric hand dryers or paper towels. They couldn’t answer the question because they couldn’t find lifecycle data on the materials involved. Today, you can easily find the relevant data on the web. So green washing is, over time, self-limiting, I think, as we get better and better at measuring and detecting it.”

We toured Robinson’s brainchild, the hallmark of sustainability on any campus, right smack on the UBC campus: The Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability (CIRS). It is being billed as a net positive building, or at least Robinson and others want to see it that way. It will open in Summer 2011. One compelling feature are two by fours turned into ceilings – wood from Alberta’s millions of acres of pine beetle damaged timberland. It is mostly discolored, harvested before it becomes a net positive carbon releaser.

Contrasting views of the planning profession with James Howard Kunstler, John Robinson, Mark Holland (a Vancouver city planner who now manages the Sustainability Office) and Bill Rees (his four-decade career at UBC has been marked by a prolific output of writings, a resume of over 80 pages and the development of the ecological footprint concept, while helping to found numerous organizations such as the David Suzuki Foundation, the Canadian Society for Ecological Economics, and the International Society for Ecological Economics) is revealing.²

Kunstler:

I do not believe the planning profession as we know it will exist institutionally much longer. It rests on assumptions that to me are just not true – for instance, the idea that we can continue living within the current armatures of daily life, including the metroplex city and the suburbs. I believe our big cities will contract severely back to their old centers and waterfronts (if they are lucky enough to have them), and that the process will be very messy, with ethnic conflict, fights over ownership, massive capital losses, and infrastructure that we will be unable to maintain. Hence, I think the “action” will move to our smaller cities and towns, especially places with a meaningful relationship to agriculture. I see our economy becoming much more internally focused (within North America). Since trucking and commercial aviation are toast, the inland waterways will regain importance. It’s unclear whether we will have the capital or the will to reconstruct our regular rail system (forget about High Speed). These represent epochal shifts. Some parts of the USA (e.g. the Southwest, Florida) may become uninhabitable. This is a scenario that does not admit much of a role for conventional bureaucratic planners who sit in air-conditioned offices drawing charts based on reliable metrics.

Robinson:

I think we are the vanguard of the future and the route to real innovation and increased well being, for both the planet and ourselves. We’ll see who is right. The old sustainability agenda is about being less bad, about limits, and about sacrifice. The new sustainability agenda is about innovation, opportunity and improved well-being (the regenerative concept). I think that is an exciting and empowering concept that will catch on and become irresistible.

Holland:

We proceeded with planning according to a paradigm of modernism and no planetary limits during the massive build out of the 20th Century. The planning profession is getting its head around the new 21st Century reality of constraints and change quickly – but the cities we build and the regulations we have in place (mostly engineering regulations not connected to planners) change very slowly, especially in an atmosphere of recession, financial constraints and fear As we change and accept the global stewardship mandate of the 21st Century and change our rules development, our cities will slowly change. They’ll change a lot faster once the plateau of peak oil is over in a few years and the cost of the factors that have caused our 20th Century cities to become unsustainable become less tenable.

Ironically, the entire week of speakers, workshops, site visit and team building ended with one of the gurus of sustainability, as in the ecological footprint, William Rees. His words stirred the participants after a week of hard work, huge learning curves and spiritual bonding.

Rees: “De-growth is going to be the major issue of the century. While the energy crisis will have severe economic impacts, it is not fundamentally about economics. It is about human ecology and the limits of growth.” Rees is the author of Our Ecological Footprint. Rees is also affiliated with UBC’s School of Community and Regional Planning. There is a movement, De-Growth Vancouver, working with Rees and others on what this kind of city might look like.

Rees also is on the advisory board of the Carrying Capacity Network with such notables as Herman Daly (theorist of the steady-state economy) and Thomas Lovejoy (who introduced the concept of biological diversity). This larger push to tie immigration to climate change is part of a population control ploy — greenwashing nativism — which has been written about extensively, recently in a Nation magazine piece by Andrew Ross, a professor of social and cultural analysis at NYU, and author of Nice Work if You Can Get It.

The threat of global warming will increasingly be used to shape immigration policies around a vision of affluent nations or regions as heavily fortified resource islands. Is this mentality already at work? Internationally, the ugly side of the debate about emissions has centered on who has the right to go on polluting and which portions of the world’s population will be sacrificed. Even as cities in affluent countries compete with one another in the sustainability rankings, the same kinds of triage calculations are being made locally, and as resources tighten, the most vulnerable citizens and migrants are cut loose.

Sustain the Sustainable – Where Sustainability Is Going

Here is an interesting contrast in perspective by the leader in sustainability, Gro Harlem Brundtland’s words in the preface of “Our Common Future,” published in 1987, 1999, and then officially 20 years after its publication, 2007:

1987

Many critical survival issues are related to uneven development, poverty, and population growth. They all place unprecedented pressures on the planet’s lands, waters, forests, and other natural resources, not least in the developing countries. The downward spiral of poverty and environmental degradation is a waste of opportunities and of resources. In particular, it is a waste of human resources. These links between poverty, inequality, and environmental degradation formed a major theme in our analysis and recommendations. What is needed now is a new era of economic growth – growth that is forceful and at the same time socially and environmentally sustainable.³

1999

Well, first of all, we should maybe be reminded of the key definition that we formulated: that sustainable development amounts to meeting the demands of the present generations while preserving the rights of future generations to meet their own needs. I think that concept is important to be reminded of, because that illustrates the environmental dimension of sustainable development. In fact, if we misuse nature, and the relationship between man and nature, we will not be in a situation one generation from now, or two generations from now, for them who live then, to have choices and opportunities in life to have a healthy and prosperous future. So, that intergenerational picture and very clear link came forward in that report Our Common Future, and I think that was really what made the strongest impression on people, the other one, the clear links between poverty and environment, which also means between poverty and development. If people are poor, they don’t have choices. They are not empowered, often neither by knowledge, or by health, or by choices in their daily lives, to take care of the future of their children, and the next generations, because the immediate need dominates their lives and their choices. That also made an impression on many people. And the fact that this is not only a national question inside each nation, but also a global challenge, because of the big gaps, both inside countries and between countries. So, the global perspective of being in this together came very strongly forward in 1987 when the report was delivered. And those dimensions are as relevant today as they were in 1987.⁴

2007

We were very clear in 1987 that the responsibility for dealing with these problems building up in the atmosphere, that responsibility belongs to the industrialized world. We have to clean up our problems, and at the same time we have to help the developing world have new technologies to make it possible for them to jump over the polluting stages that we have been through.

We have no time to lose. The data are now clearly presented and have very high confidence levels. There is no question anymore about scientific disagreement. So many things are easily done and lead to improved energy efficiency and a number of other benefits.

Unless we start immediately fulfilling the Kyoto Protocol and then continuing with a broader basis with all countries involved, this is going to get completely out of control and we will not be able to cap carbon dioxide levels. It’s a drama playing itself out in front of us, where we are still able to change a very dangerous scenario but we cannot wait for another 5 or 10 years. We must be active now.⁵

1. Go to, “Defending LEED,” by McLennan.
2. For more on Bill Rees.
3. 1987 – Our Common Future, one small part of Chairwoman’s Foreword, Oslo, 20 March 1987.
4. Interview by Patricia Morales and Ann Ferrara, WHO Report Making a Difference,” 1999.
5. Andrew C. Revkin, “20 Years Later, Again Assigned to Fight Climate Change,” New York Times, May 8, 2007.

Dan Freeman-Maloy: In your book, you describe the determination of Israeli planners to develop closer ties with the European Union. Has Israel’s traditional policy of trying to limit European diplomatic involvement in the Middle East changed?

David Cronin: Yes and no.

In recent years, there has been quite a bit of strategic thinking undertaken by the Israeli foreign ministry. This was particularly the case when Tzipi Livni was in charge of that ministry.

One of the conclusions of that thinking was that Israel should not rely entirely on the US to defend its indefensible actions. There was a realisation that while the US remains the only superpower at the moment, other powers are emerging. The decision to “reach out” more to the EU was taken in that context. Israel is similarly seeking to engage more with China, India and Brazil, particularly with regard to sales of weaponry and surveillance technology.

There is a perception in some circles that European diplomats are hostile to Israel. In the first few months of this year, a series of leaked reports from EU representatives in East Jerusalem and Ramallah expressed frustration with the expansion of Israeli settlements. Yet it’s significant that these reports were drawn up by people who witness the results of Israel’s activities “on the ground”. The EU also has representatives in Tel Aviv and Brussels, who see things very differently and have been beavering away to increase cooperation between Israel and the Union.

We occasionally see newspaper articles in which Israeli ministers accuse the EU of meddling in Israel’s affairs or suggesting that the EU is biased towards the Palestinians. Yet if you dig even a tiny bit beneath the surface, you will see that this apparent tension is at odds with the real picture. The real picture is one where the EU has become so close to Israel that, I would argue, it has become complicit in Israel’s crimes against humanity.

DF: Not long after Operation Cast Lead, then NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer made a cordial visit to Israel (where his hosts drew a parallel between Israeli operations in Gaza and NATO operations in Afghanistan). You report that NATO-Israel relations may be set to deepen.

DC: We should never forget that in 2010, Israel killed eight Turkish citizens and one Turkish-American in international waters, while these activists were taking part in the Gaza Freedom Flotilla. I’m not an expert on these matters but my understanding is that this attack was tantamount to an act of war against Turkey, a member of NATO.

I think it’s fair to say that if Iran had done something comparable, NATO would have reacted forcefully. Yet Israel has a so-called “individual cooperation programme” with NATO since 2006, under which both sides share sensitive information; the scope of the programme was extended in 2008. Israel’s relationship with NATO has remained strong despite how the alliance condemned the flotilla attack. Shortly before Gabi Ashkenazi stepped down as head of the Israeli military last year, he was treated to a farewell dinner by senior NATO officers in Brussels. He also was called in to give NATO advice on how to fight the war in Afghanistan.

And Israel is taking part in a NATO operation in the Mediterranean called Active Endeavour. Originally, this was supposed to be an “anti-terrorism” initiative in response to the 11 September 2001 atrocities. But it has subsequently been broadened to cover immigration. What this means is that Israel is helping Western governments, especially Greece, to prevent vulnerable people fleeing poverty and persecution from reaching Europe’s shores. It’s quite disgusting.

DF: Turning back to the EU specifically, where does the recent Conformity Assessment and Acceptance of Industrial Products (ACAA) agreement fit in the broader struggle around Europe’s preferential trade ties with Israel?

DC: ACAA sounds dull and technical. But it is deeply political.

This is an agreement reached between the EU and Israel, whereby quality checks carried out by the Israeli authorities on manufactured goods would have the same status as similar checks carried out by authorities within the EU. At the moment, it’s limited to pharmaceutical products but it could easily be extended to other goods.

This agreement is a top priority for the Israelis because once it enters into force, Israel would take an important step towards being integrated into the EU’s single market.

To their credit, some members of the European Parliament (MEPs) have been asking difficult questions about ACAA for a few years. And this has meant that the Parliament has not yet approved the agreement. It’s not clear when the Parliament will make a final decision about the matter. There was a discussion at the Parliament’s foreign affairs committee in the past couple of weeks, where it was decided to delay holding a vote on the dossier until legal assurances are provided on the question of whether or not the agreement would apply to Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

It’s significant that the Israelis have hired a top public relations firm, Kreab Gavin Anderson, to help with their efforts to break the deadlock on ACAA. Kreab’s Brussels office is headed by a guy who used to be the chief adviser to MEPs with the Swedish Conservative Party. It cannot be a coincidence that one of the MEPs most vocal in supporting ACAA, Christoffer Fjellner, belongs to that party. He is arguing that if the agreement is not approved, Europeans will have less access to medicines. This is scaremongering, in my view, and is hypocritical because Fjellner is very supportive of the big players in the global pharmaceutical industry, who are actively seeking to use intellectual property issues to prevent the poor in Africa, Asia and Latin America from having access to affordable medicines.

DF: Even people writing for quasi-official EU publications have felt compelled to question ‘the sincerity of repeated declarations encouraging Palestinian unity’ from official spokespeople. How have EU donor and diplomatic policies contributed to fragmenting Palestinian politics?

DC: Those declarations have zero credibility.

The EU always claims that it wishes to promote democracy around the world. In 2006, an election took place in Palestine. The EU’s own observation team found the election to be free and fair and something of a model for the Arab world. And then the EU decided to ignore that election because in its eyes the “wrong” party – namely Hamas – won.

I’m personally not a fan of either Hamas nor Fatah but if Hamas won a democratic mandate, that should be respected.

It’s a classical colonial attitude for an imperial power to show preference for one side in an occupied territory over another. Divide and rule. That’s exactly what’s been happening in recent years. Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president, and Salam Fayyad, the so-called prime minister, lack any democratic mandate. Yet they are treated as real darlings by the EU and US. Why? Because rather than resisting the occupation, they accommodate it.

In particular, they are also happy to pursue the kind of neo-liberal economic policies that are treated as sacrosanct in Brussels and Washington. Salam Fayyad used to work for the International Monetary Fund and has clearly been inculcated with its ideology.

DF: Can you describe the EUPOL COPPS programme and its relationship to the US training of PA forces in the West Bank?

DC: This is another “divide and rule” case.

The EU’s police mission for Palestine (COPPS) was originally supposed to apply to both the West Bank and Gaza. But in practice it only applies to the West Bank because the Union refuses to deal with the Hamas administration in Gaza.

What has happened is that the EU is in charge of training civil police and the US has been charged of training more militarised police units in areas under control of the Palestinian Authority. We are told that this is helping the Palestinian Authority get ready to assume the responsibilities of statehood. This is nonsense. One of the key aims of the these training missions is to boost cooperation between the PA police and Israeli forces. So the EU is really helping Palestinians to police their own occupation.

Worse again, it has been documented that police loyal to Fatah have used brutal methods – including torture – against their political rivals. Even though these police are trained by the EU, the Union says nothing about these human rights abuses. This silence is shameful.

DF: Germany is reportedly in the process of selling Israel a sixth partially subsidized ‘Dolphin’ submarine. What’s the significance of these sales?

DC: I’d put these sales in the context of wider military cooperation between the EU and Israel.

As well as helping to arm Israel, Europe is helping Israel to sell its weaponry abroad. The British Army has been using Israeli unmanned warplanes, or drones as they are generally called, in Afghanistan, for example. The ethical question of using weapons that have been “battle-tested” in an obscene manner isn’t even broached in “polite society”. Drones were used extensively to kill and maim innocent civilians during Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s attack on Gaza in 2008 and 2009.

What’s also significant is that Israeli arms companies are receiving scientific research grants from the Union. These include Elbit and Israel Aerospace Industries, the two suppliers of drones used in Cast Lead. At the moment, Israel is taking part in 800 EU-financed research projects, which have a total value of 4 billion euros. This means that my tax is helping to subsidise Israel’s war industry.

DF: Historically, France has been seen as the European power most likely to challenge the US monopoly on diplomatic initiative in the Middle East. Is this reputation still deserved?

DC: Definitely not.

Jacques Chirac demonstrated occasionally that he could be independent of the US when he was president. But Nicolas Sarkozy has been much more of an “Atlanticist” – for example, he decided that France should participate more fully in NATO than it has for a number of decades.

I’m answering this question a few days before the second round of voting in France’s presidential election. If Francois Hollande wins, then I don’t predict any major changes in terms of France’s policy on Israel-Palestine. I hope, however, that I am proved wrong.

Hollande has been quite happy to pander to the Zionist lobby in France. Both he and Sarkozy turned up at the annual dinner of CRIF, the biggest pro-Israel lobby group in Paris, earlier this year. It was clear that Hollande wasn’t there to denounce Israel’s crimes.

DF: The Greek government brazenly cooperated with Israel in blocking the ‘Freedom Flotilla II’ from challenging the Gaza blockade last summer. You’ve suggested that specific US-Israeli pressure (‘possibly even financial blackmail’) was at work, but that the incident was also a ‘logical consequence of a process that was already underway’.

DC: Yeah. This is quite closely connected to the question you asked about NATO. Greece and Israel have been working together in NATO operations a lot recently.

George Papandreou, the former Greek prime minister, was quite happy to court Israel. When it became clear that relations between Israel and Turkey had soured, Papandreou sniffed an opportunity for Greece to replace Turkey as Israel’s key ally in the Mediterranean.

Even though Greece has been going through an economic nightmare, the Athens authorities have decided to take part in a series of military operations with Israel over the past few years. Let’s not forget that Greece has been spending more on the military as a proportion of national income than most countries in Europe. You can see why the Israeli arms industry would be interested in cultivating stronger links with Greece because, even though Greece is in the doldrums financially, it’s still spending much more than it should be on weapons, while cutting back drastically on essential services like healthcare.

DF: One of your recent articles notes that many of the British officers deployed in post-WWI Palestine were veterans of the Black and Tans, the colonial force infamous for its brutality in Ireland. How has the Irish anti-colonial experience affected Irish politics on the Palestine question?

DC: Among the Irish public, there is a huge amount of sympathy for the Palestinians. The Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign has been described by some Zionist watchdogs as the best organised Palestine solidarity group in the world. That’s very interesting because the IPSC relies almost entirely on volunteers.

The Dublin government is a different story. In the current Irish government, there are at least three strong supporters of Israel. These include the ministers for defence and education.

Last year, a number of Irish activists were abducted by Israel as they tried to sail to Gaza. The response of the Dublin government was extremely weak. The Irish foreign minister, Eamon Gilmore, even attended a ceremony film festival sponsored by the Israeli government soon after that incident. He appears to regard avoiding or minimising tension with Israel as a priority.

Furthermore, it should be borne in mind that it’s Ireland’s representative at the European Commission, Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, who is administering the research grants to Israeli arms companies I mentioned earlier. She won’t even acknowledge that giving money to firms profiting from human rights abuses is problematic.

DF: In 2010, the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights issued a report criticizing EU maintenance of ‘anti-terrorist’ blacklists that effectively function ‘as ideological and political tools for undermining the right to popular resistance and self-determination.’ How do these lists constrain European politics on Palestine, and are there active campaigns to get them overturned?

DC: This is an important issue.

Israel has lobbied successfully over the past decade to have both the political and military wings of Hamas placed on the EU’s “anti-terrorist” blacklist. EU officials and governments have, as a result, been able to say “we don’t talk to terrorists”, even when the “terrorists” have a democratic mandate. I note, however, that there have been press reports lately indicating that Hamas has had some contacts with European governments. So perhaps this is changing a little bit. But in general, there is an enormous double standard, when the EU is happy to embrace Israel, a state that uses violence and intimidation against civilians on a daily basis, yet brands those who resist Israeli oppression as “terrorists”.

DF: Finally, in recent years the gap between European government support for Israel and public opinion has sometimes been so wide that the EU leadership has issued official apologies to Israel for polling results. What opportunities does this gap provide for strategic Palestine solidarity?

DC: The European public is way more critical of Israel than our governments are. This offers real hope.

The Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel was only launched in 2005. And it has made enormous progress. Veolia, the major French corporation, has ignominiously lost a number of major contracts around the world, for example. Why? Because of public outrage at how Veolia is involved in constructing a tramway that would effectively be reserved for Israeli settlers in East Jerusalem. This illustrates how supporting Israeli apartheid can prove bad for business if ordinary people monitor what corporations get up to and protest.

The BDS campaign is often compared to the one undertaken against South Africa. As it happens, the call for boycott was originally made by South African political activists in the 1950s. But it wasn’t until the 1980s that it had a major impact internationally. So the Palestinian BDS campaign has achieved in seven years what it took the South African campaign three decades to achieve.

The challenge now is to maintain the momentum – and intensify the pressure on Israel and its “corporate sponsors”.

1. Cronin maintains a blog.

A.J. Segneri: Provide for the readers your background in politics and activism, plus on ballot access.

Phil Huckelberry: I’ve been involved in the Green Party since 2000.  I was Co-Chair of the Green National Committee from 2007-2009, and I’ve been Chair of the Illinois Green Party since 2008, in addition to a bunch of other committee hats.

The national party established a separate Ballot Access Committee in 2005 and I’ve been one of the two co-chairs of that since its inception.  In that role I’ve also been the Green Party’s member on the board of the Coalition for Free and Open Elections, Richard Winger’s ballot access rights organization.

AJS: Could you explain what ballot access is, and why this is important for political parties, particularly important for third parties?

PH: Ballot access generally refers to the ability to place a candidate on an official election ballot.  It is usually thought of in terms of a party’s ability to run candidates for public office. If a party does not have ballot access in a particular state, that means that it cannot field candidates for office in that state.

Ballot access laws are almost entirely state creations.  There are almost no relevant federal laws, and there usually aren’t relevant local laws either.  The rules vary widely from state to state.  In Mississippi, if you declare you have a party, the state says, okay, you’re a party, and then you can run candidates. In  North Carolina, you have to collect about 95,000 valid signatures from registered voters.  For reference, the Libertarians did this for the 2008 election, but it cost them $200,000 to do it.

There is also a distinction between securing and holding ballot access.  ”Securing” means getting ballot access initially, which usually requires collecting petition signatures.  ”Holding” means that a party in a given state can maintain their ballot access from one election to the next, which usually means that a candidate of the party got a high enough percentage of the vote.  In some states, securing and/or holding are based on partisan registration numbers.

If a party doesn’t have ballot access, it can’t run candidates.  If a party can’t run candidates, it’s essentially not a party at all, just a political club.  Third parties often refer to fighting to achieve lofty ballot access hurdles as a struggle for their very existence. One other point which should be stressed: it is very common for a state-level party to expend more energy just to get on to the ballot than they expend on behalf of their candidates once they’re on the ballot.  It can be such grueling, exhaustive work just to come into legal existence that it will burn out volunteers months before Election Day.

AJS: What is the current status for ballot access for the Green Party?

PH: As of today, we have presidential ballot access in 21 states.  For the beginning of May, that’s actually pretty good. In a lot of states, ballot access is lost and regained with each election cycle, so you wouldn’t expect to be much higher than 20 at this point in the year.

The best the Green Party ever did was 44 ballot lines in 2000.  Our goal is to reach 45 or more line this year.  It takes better advance planning, and it takes the party understanding that you can’t backload all of the work.  It remains to be seen if the party has gotten the memo on this.

AJS: There are law restrictions for third parties to run for office. From your experience, have these laws increased over time or are these laws just reactionary when specific third parties do well in their respective state?

PH: In the late 19th century these kinds of restrictions didn’t really exist at all, so if you look at the big picture, the laws have only gotten worse over time.  One of the ironies is that these laws only started to come into existence in parallel with the emergence of the partisan primary, a Progressive Era reform designed to mitigate the control of the old political machines.  As the primaries emerged, it created a perceived need to define who could or couldn’t have a primary, and so by extension, who would or wouldn’t be legally considered a party.

If you just look across the last decade, you’ll find a mixed bag.  Here in Illinois, the requirements just keep getting worse.  The state is under the firm control of a machine kingpin named Michael Madigan, who has been Speaker of the House for 28 of the last 30 years.  A lot of the changes have been subtle but when there are already absurdly difficult laws on the books, each small change can have a multiplicative effect.

In some states, it’s gotten easier.  Part of this, I think, is just cyclical, and does have to do with the relative strength of third parties in those areas.  Part of it just seems to be random. Often it just takes one person ascending to a role of prominence in the state legislature to generate a lot of legislation which could be good or bad for ballot access.

But on the whole the situation is worse, because of the emergence of the so-called “Top Two” system, which is now in place in Washington and California.  ”Top Two” has been presented as a “reform” which will supposedly tend to lead to more “moderate” candidates on the general election ballot.  In reality “Top Two” is a ploy on the part of moneyed interests to further control the ballot.

Instead of partisan primaries followed by a general election, all candidates are lumped together on a single primary ballot, and the two candidates with the highest vote totals advance to the general election.  A lot of people have been duped by this because they’ve wanted a “blanket primary” where they can vote for whomever they want, but the effective – and intended – result of “Top Two” is to make it so that the most heavily bankrolled candidates have an even bigger primary advantage.

One intention side effect of “Top Two” is that third party candidates almost never make it onto the general election ballot.  It’s telling that even the Democratic and Republican Parties in Washington and California opposed “Top Two”.  Money is so out of control in politics that the state-level corporate parties are often more democratic in their processes than processes which just rely on who can bring in the most money.

AJS: If you were the head of a board of elections, what ideal things would you implement in order to make ballot access more fair for candidates?

PH: A lot of the elections agencies have little control over the laws. That said, what I’d like to see from election agencies all across the country is a dedication to extreme transparency in how they do their jobs.  If you look at the websites of various state election agencies, some have excellent information about what it takes to run for office, and some provide almost no useful information at all.  It shouldn’t be so hard to run for office, and even in a state with draconian laws, elections agencies should be striving to make information as simple and accessible as possible.

AJS:  Do you think there are individuals in the two major parties that are really out to get third parties and independent candidates, or is that more paranoia?

PH: The corporate duopoly by its very nature is out to get third parties and independent candidates.  I don’t think it’s personal most of the time, or at least it’s no more personal than politics would generally be.

2012 is a redistricting year, and Illinois is a prime example of the politics of redistricting.  Illinois lost one congressional seat (from 19 to 18).  In theory this would mean that two incumbents would have to run against one another.  But in practice, the Democrats who control Springfield created a map where every Democratic incumbent was given a safe district, four Republican incumbents were thrown into two districts so two of them would for sure be knocked out in the primary, and a district got invented out of thin air with no incumbent, designed for a new Democrat to take over.  Even two Green Party candidates who ran for Congress in 2010 were drawn four blocks or less outside of their old districts.

Modern politics is largely about eliminating competition.  The Powers That Be in state legislatures are not much different from the robber barons of 110-120 years ago.  Not only do incumbents want to stay incumbents, they don’t even want to have to run against anyone.  They don’t want to have to show up for political forums and be asked tough questions.  A lot of these people have no sense of responsibility to their constituents – they just see their positions as jobs that they were given through friends or family.

AJS:  What have been the more interesting experiences you have had when working with a specific state to get Greens on the ballot?

PH: One of the more puzzling challenges we’ve encountered is that of it being really hard for a state party to get on the ballot, but once they do, it’s astonishingly easy for a random individual to declare themselves to be a Green and become a candidate of the party, even for high-level office.

In 2008, we had an individual widely known to be a neo-Nazi try and run for Congress as a Green.  We had to file an objection against his nominating petitions to get him thrown off the ballot.  He came back around in 2010, and filed in a district he didn’t even live in, and we had to file another objection. The  party had no real say in these situations.  The objections were based on the paperwork, not on the individual not being an actual Green.  Since these were offices where we otherwise hadn’t intended to field candidates, if he had gotten on the ballot, he would have de facto won the primaries, and it could have been extremely embarrassing for us.

One problem which has plagued state Green Parties for a long time is that they become real political parties with legal rights and privileges, but their leadership still thinks primarily in terms of the party being identified by its position on political issues.  In the eyes of most voters, a party is defined by its candidates, not by whatever lengthy platform document it may be able to offer. This means in turn that a state party needs to have people with administrative and legal prowess in particular positions, to help make sure that the party is staying compliant with various legal requirements, and to help make sure that candidates who can properly represent the party get assistance with getting on the ballot, while candidates who have nothing to do with the party don’t get such assistance. For a party like ours, where a lot of people who come to us have an inherent distrust of power, and who often aren’t very good at administrative matters, it can be that much harder to deal with state laws and administrative policies.

AJS: Where can someone learn more about ballot access?

PH: The national Green Party is tracking 2012 presidential ballot access at Green Party of the United States 2012 Presidential Campaign 

Richard Winger maintains an invaluable blog called Ballot Access News:

Yvonne Ridley is a renowned British journalist, war correspondent and TV host. She made the headlines on September 28, 2001 when she was arrested by Taliban members in Afghanistan while working for the Sunday Express. She converted to Islam after she was released by the Taliban on October 9, 2001 and became an outspoken critic of Zionism and the mainstream media’s portrayal of the War on Terror.

She is a member of the National Union of Journalists and the International Federation of Journalists, and  is a devoted philanthropist and humanitarian activist, who has written two books called In the Hands of the Taliban andTicket to Paradise.

Ms. Ridley took part in an interview with me, discussing her viewpoints regarding the prospect of Iran-West relations, the expansionistic policies of the Israeli regime in Occupied Palestine and the popular uprisings of the Arab world widely known as Arab Spring.

Kourosh Ziabari: One of the recent events which stained the already blurred relations between Iran and the UK was Iranian students’ assault on the British embassy in Tehran in the late 2011. Some political analysts say that it was an undiplomatic action and Britain’s response in closing the Iranian embassy in London was natural. However, some others believe that it was an intrinsic consequence of the UK’s hostile policies toward Iran. What’s your viewpoint in this regard?

Yvonne Ridley: As the UK Government found out last year, when students get angry and in a destructive mode nothing will stop them. The Conservative Party headquarters in London was trashed and vandalized by angry students in the UK who felt they had been lied to over the increase in student fees. And they caused much more damage to the Tory Party HQ than the rampaging students in Tehran, yet no one accused the British police of turning a blind eye or encouraging acts of vandalism and violence. The UK Government was, however, outraged but I feel it used the event as an opportunity to accelerate hostile relations between both countries.

KZ: Tensions between Iran and the West have been mounting in recent months, especially since IAEA released its latest report on Iran’s nuclear program. What’s your prediction for the future of Iran-West relations? Do you foresee any chances of reconciliation and restoration?

YR: The tensions are predictable and there is a weary feeling of deja vu among anti war activists who fear the worst between Iran and the West having witnessed a similar build up of hostilities over non-existed WMD in Iraq during Saddam’s rule.

KZ: Israel, the U.S. and their European allies have repeatedly threatened Iran against a pre-emptive military strike. Are these war threats realistic or merely media propaganda aimed at intimidating the Iranians? Why doesn’t the UN take any decisive action against the states who propagate such threats and spread fear?

YR: The UN is weak and in the sway and influence of America but I doubt if there will be a military strike, for several different reasons. The USA is struggling in Afghanistan against the Taliban, a bunch of ill-equipped fighters in flip flops and shalwa khameez so there is no way it would tackle Iran which has a strong army, is armed and will retaliate. Furthermore, there are tens of thousands of U.S. and other western civilians, oil workers, missionaries and NGOs in Iraq and if one single strike touched Iranian soil, there is a very real danger 10 million or so Shiite in neighboring Iraq will rise up against westerners. This could manifest itself in another disastrous hostage situation similar to the one in Iran from which the USA has still not psychologically recovered.

KZ: The U.S. and its European allies are persuasively lobbying around the world to convince the economic partners of Iran to join the global sanctions, especially the newly proposed oil embargo against Iran. Will these sanctions bear fruit for the U.S. or will it backfire? Will the economic pressures finally bring Iran to its knees?

YR: Iran is not marginalized or as isolated as the U.S. and UK would want. Several countries in the Euro-zone rely on Iran for cheap oil while Russia, China, Brazil, Venezuela and other countries in South America have expressed solidarity with Iran.

KZ: President Barack Obama had promised during his presidential campaign that he would pursue a policy of detente and tension-easing with the Muslim world, especially Iran, and follow the path of diplomacy and “change” to resolve Iran’s nuclear controversy. But we saw that he followed the path of his predecessor and even talked of the option of a nuclear strike against Iran. What’s your idea about his approach toward the Middle East in general, and Iran in particular? Has he fulfilled his promise of change?

YR: This latest U.S. president, given a Nobel peace Prize because he was not George W. Bush, is a one-term president. He made many promises on the road to the White House and broke more than 60 percent of them. He is, sadly, a man who promised to deliver so much and failed. He escalated the war in Afghanistan, was forced to retreat from Iraq – make no mistake the departure of American troops in Iraq was reluctantly done and the soldiers left in one of the quietest U.S. exits in history.

KZ: What has been in your view, the main stimulus behind the revolutions of the Arab world? We know that corrupt regimes had existed in countries such as Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain and Yemen for many decades, but the nations of the region revolted against their rulers all at once. What’s the reason in your view?

YR: The people lost their fear in the tyrants, most installed and supported by the West; and as they grew stronger they began to rediscover their Faith in God and as they got closer to their Faith they became stronger as they held on tight to the Rope of Allah.

KZ: Will the chained revolutions of the Arab world, especially the revolution in Egypt, weaken the status of Israel in the Middle East? What about the U.S.? Political commentators believe that if the revolutionaries in Bahrain and Yemen achieve their goal, the United States will lose two of its strategic allies in the region. What’s your take on that?

YR: The U.S. was caught out by the Arab Spring, but since the CIA missed the fall of the Berlin Wall it is hardly surprising that there was a huge intelligence failure in this area. Israel is unusually mute because it is very concerned over what is going to manifest from the revolutions and it can no longer rely on the USA to crack the whip and make the tyrants pull their people into line. The U.S. has already lost its control in the region and should Yemen and Bahrain succumb to the will of the majority then it will lose strategic allies.

KZ: It seems that the United States will not lift its unconditional support for Israel, at least in the foreseeable future, and Israel will be able to continue its repressive policies in the occupied lands and with regards to the subjugated people of the West Bank and Gaza Strip like before. What’s your assessment regarding the current state of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Will the Arab League supported initiative for peace help solve the crisis?

YR: My belief in this solution has been the same for more than three decades, much longer than I’ve been a Muslim. The Palestinian people will be victorious because they have time and patience on their side. In 50 years time their children will ask: “Was there really a state called Israel?” Israel is on a permanent war footing and not one single country can survive in that situation forever. I’ll give the Zionist another decade before it implodes.

KZ: Israel is the sole possessor of nuclear weapons in the Middle East and it’s not a signatory to Non-Proliferation Treaty, as well. The United States has not allowed a comprehensive investigation of the nuclear facilities of Israel so far, and Tel Aviv regime is continuing to develop nuclear bombs in its underground installations. Isn’t the nuclear program of Israel a threat to international peace and security?

YR: What nuclear weapons? Israel says it has no nukes! Pf course the world knows they are lying thanks to the heroic Christian convert Mordechai Vanunu who is still being persecuted for telling the world about the Zionist State’s deadly arsenal of nuclear weapons. The poor man has served his sentence but he is still not allowed to leave Israel where he is under continuous surveillance. The vindictiveness of the state knows no bounds when it comes to this man.

KZ: And, finally, let me ask your idea about the Occupy Wall Street movement. Why has such a revolutionary movement taken shape in the U.S.? What are the major grievances of the protesters? What’s your idea regarding the government’s treatment of the protestors?

YR: A number of American people have woken up to the injustices of capitalism and what is being done in their name by the U.S. Government – this wonderful movement has captured the imagination of many and while they are taking their fight to the streets of the USA and the West there is another army that the USA should really be concerned about … Anonymous. They are leading the battle in cyber-warfare and are showing that when the people rise up and they begin to lead the leaders become increasingly irrelevant. Watch this space.

What should unnerve us about Friedman is the acclaim he receives in political and professional circles. Friedman’s New York Times column appears twice a week on the most prestigious op/ed page in the United States; he has won three Pulitzer Prizes; his books are best-sellers; he’s a darling of the producers of television news shows; and he fills lecture halls for a speaking fee as high as $75,000.

Although his work is stunningly shallow and narcissistic, Friedman is celebrated as a big thinker.

MSNBC’s Chris Matthews was so excited after a 2005 Hardball interview with Friedman that he proclaimed: “You have a global brain, my friend. You’re amazing. You amaze me every time you write a book.”

How does a journalist with a track record of bad predictions and a penchant for superficial analysis — a person paid to reflect about the world yet who seems to lack the capacity for critical self-reflection — end up being treated as an oracle?

The answer is simple: Friedman tells the privileged, and those who aspire to privilege, what they want to hear in a way that makes them feel smart; his trumpeting of U.S. affluence and power are sprinkled with pithy-though-empty anecdotes, padded with glib turns of phrases. He’s the perfect oracle for a management-focused, advertising-saturated, dumbed-down imperial culture that doesn’t want to come to terms with the systemic and structural reasons for its decline.

In Friedman’s world, we’re always one clichéd big idea away from the grand plan that will allow us to continue to pretend to be the shining city upon the hill that we have always imagined we were/are/will be again.

As a reporter, columnist, author, or speaker, Friedman’s secret to success is in avoiding the journalistic ideals of “speaking truth to power” or “afflicting the comfortable.” Those ideals are too rarely met in mainstream journalism, but Friedman never goes very far beyond parroting the powerful and comforting the comfortable. Friedman sees the world from the point of view of the privileged, adopting in his own words the view of “a tourist with an attitude” when reporting on the rest of the world.

Here’s the problem with that mindset: Around the world, American tourists routinely are experienced as boorish and smug. Around the world, people smile at American tourists and take their money, all the while despising their arrogance and ignorance. Tourists never quite catch on, wondering why the “natives” don’t appreciate them.

In her examination of Friedman’s work, Belén Fernández explains the danger in America’s affection for its number one Tourist Journalist. Her book, The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work,¹ is as much about the cultural and political crises in the United States as it is about Friedman’s flaws. This larger focus transforms what could have been a sarcastic hit-piece that took easy shots at Friedman’s most mangled prose into a thoughtful meditation from a young journalist willing to state the obvious: the emperor’s messenger has no clothes.

After graduating from Columbia University with a political science degree in 2003, Fernández traveled throughout the Middle East, Latin America, and Europe. Eventually her travel notes turned into journalism, as her accounts of people she met and interviewed became stories for web publications. Frustrated by the gap between what she knew from her education and reporting, and Friedman’s version of international affairs, she wrote a few short critiques of the Times columnist in 2009. Then she undertook the systematic review of all his columns since 1995, selections from his writing as a reporter, and his books that led to The Imperial Messenger. In an email interview, she explained how that happened and why.

Robert Jensen: What sparks a relatively unknown journalist with no establishment credentials to research a book that argues one of the country’s most well-known journalists is, to put it bluntly, a fool and a fraud? That isn’t going to put you in the fast lane for a well-paying job in mainstream journalism.

Belén Fernández: Prior to 2009, my familiarity with the work of Thomas Friedman was basically limited to his notion that France should have been removed from the U.N. Security Council for refusing to support the Iraq war. When I began reading him more extensively, I couldn’t believe that no one had debunked him in book form and took it upon myself to do so — naively assuming that it would be an enjoyable and relatively simple task. This assumption proved unfounded, as I realized that a book of any real value had to consist of something more serious than 150 pages of making fun of Friedman’s blunders and general foolishness.

What kept me going throughout the months of reading and re-reading decades worth of Friedman’s drivel was anger — at his warmongering jingoism, his blatant racism vis-à-vis large sectors of the world’s population, and the fact that someone unable to keep track of his own arguments and to refrain from continually contradicting himself had risen to a position of such prominence in the U.S. media.

RJ: What word or phrase would you use to describe Friedman’s analytical framework, his way of understanding the world?

BF: Perhaps Friedman’s own decree: “Many big bad things happen in the world without America, but not a lot of big good things.”

RJ: Good journalists inevitably have to simplify the complex events they report about. You suggest Friedman’s work is reductionist. What’s the difference between the two?

BF: It’s one thing to simplify events and phenomena so that audiences can more easily understand them; it’s quite another to brand Palestinians as “gripped by a collective madness” and to whitewash war crimes such as collective punishment.

Recall Friedman’s justification [on the Charlie Rose Show] in 2003 for the Iraq war: A “terrorism bubble” had emerged in “that part of the world” and had made itself known on 9/11. In order to burst the bubble, U.S. troops needed to go “house to house, from Basra to Baghdad,” wielding a “very big stick” and instructing Iraqis to “Suck. On. This.” No matter that Friedman himself acknowledged that there was absolutely no link between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.

Or recall Friedman’s reductionist Tilt Theory of History, which applies to situations in which “you take a country, a culture, or a region that has been tilted in the wrong direction and tilt it in the right direction.” Again, “right” and “wrong” as conceived of by Friedman and the U.S. military are passed off as universal truths.

Then we, of course, have the Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention, which posits that no two countries that host McDonald’s establishments have gone to war with each other since each acquired its McDonald’s. This delightful discovery regarding the harmonious effects of American fast food and U.S. corporate dominance is cast into doubt when, shortly after the theory’s birth, 19 McDonald’s-possessing NATO countries go to war with McDonald’s-possessing Yugoslavia.

Around this same time, Friedman’s reductionist assessment that “America truly is the ultimate benign hegemon” is contradicted by such things as his simultaneous entreaties for “sustained,” “unreasonable,” and “less than surgical bombing” of Serbia.

His economic reductions meanwhile rarely withstand the test of reality. Friedman exulted over the Irish economic model in 2005, threatening Germany and France that they had better follow the “leprechaun way” — by, inter alia, making it easier to fire workers — in order to avert economic decadence. The leprechaun way merits no further mention following the collapse of the Irish economy.

RJ: Friedman seems to defy easy political categorization. He doesn’t fit into the categories of liberal or conservative typically used in mainstream politics in the United States. What word or phrase would you use to sum up Friedman’s politics?

BF: Schizophrenic? For example, he advertised the Iraq war as “the most radical-liberal revolutionary war the U.S. has ever launched” while simultaneously defining himself as “a liberal on every issue other than this war” and the war as part of a “neocon strategy.” During an encounter with Haaretz journalist Ari Shavit in 2003, Friedman described the alleged war for democracy in Iraq as not a war that the American masses demanded but rather a war of an elite.

Friedman’s consistent championing of policies benefiting the corporate elite — most recently in his campaign to slash corporate taxes and entitlements in the aftermath of the financial recession — would locate him on the right of the ideological spectrum, though he intermittently endeavors to disguise himself as a “Social Safety Netter” or a “radical centrist.” According to Friedman, the current key to establishing a “party of the radical center” is a bizarre entity called Americans Elect, which will field a third presidential ticket in 2012 elected via “internet convention” and which Friedman acknowledges is funded with “some serious hedge-fund money” courtesy of investor Peter Ackerman. Centrism indeed.

At a presentation at a university in Istanbul in 2010, Friedman classified himself politically as neither a Democrat nor a Republican but rather a disciple of billionaire investor Warren Buffett’s theory that “everything I got in life was because I was born in this country, America, at this time, with these opportunities and these institutions.” Friedman reiterated his duty to pass on a similar situation to his children. As I say in my book, foreign audiences and non-billionaires might be forgiven for a lack of complete sympathy.

RJ: You decided to focus on three subjects in the book: “America,” “the Arab/Muslim world,” and the United States’ “special relationship” with Israel. Why did you pick those?

BF: No book on Friedman would have been complete without a section on his grating patriotic obsession with the United States and his view of the country as a global role model and civilizing force. Given that the Arab/Muslim world is so often on the receiving end of the U.S. military’s civilizing endeavors, I decided it was also crucial to devote a section to Friedman’s unabashed Orientalism and his dehumanizing and patronizing contempt for Arabs and Muslims, which he naturally attempts to disguise as concern for their freedom.

The “special relationship” with Israel is more a reference to Friedman’s own function as an apologist for crimes committed by the Jewish state. He purports to be a serious critic of Israel, but his criticism is largely restricted to the issue of settlements, which he criticizes because he views them as jeopardizing the perpetuation of ethnocracy and Israel’s ability to continue denying Palestinians equal rights in a single multi-ethnic democracy. Right-wing Zionists are increasingly condemning Friedman as anti-Israeli and a pro-Palestinian militant, which raises a question — with enemies like Friedman, who needs friends?

RJ: Your own political views are clearly at odds with Friedman’s. How would you answer critics who might suggest your book is just a polemic about those issues, not about Friedman?

BF: One of the most fundamental problems I have with Friedman is that he uses his elevated position to belittle human suffering and to encourage the slaughter of civilians, as he did during Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in Gaza (2008-09), when he invoked Israel’s “logical” mass targeting of civilians in Lebanon in 2006 as an optimistic precedent.

I don’t think it’s possible to reduce this to a clash between political views. As I point out in the book, it is not up to Friedman to decide that the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibiting collective punishment and targeting of civilians in wartime is illogical. Given his influential position in foreign policy circles, I don’t classify his promotion of the notion that some human beings are inherently inferior and more expendable than others, and that corporate profit supersedes human life in importance, as merely politically misguided. I classify it as criminal, and I consider him to be personally responsible and not just a product of the system in which he flourishes.

RJ: After this rather unorthodox start to your publishing career, what comes next?

BF: For the moment my plan is to travel to Peru and Bolivia and see what happens, and hopefully to not encounter anyone who has ever heard of Thomas Friedman.

1. Published by Verso in its new series Counterblasts, dedicated to “challenging the apologists of Empire and Capital.”

When I returned to Geogia, I wrote a friend in the UK about my hope to interview McKinney. My friend related a story about the Dignity ship, carrying food and medical supplies to Palestine, in 2008, rammed by the Israeli Navy in international waters. McKinney was on that ship, and when it was rammed, she turned to my friend’s brother and said, “David, I can’t swim.” Nothing I had ever heard about McKinney revealed her character more succinctly. This is a woman willing to put her life on the line in support of her principles. Missing from the Mainstream Media depictions were the human and humane aspects of her character. The MSM has too-often portrayed the struggle for justice as irrational, or even fanatical. I needed to know more.—Gary Corseri

Gary Corseri: Let’s start with a big one… about the day that changed everything—9/11.

[And, for a sense of the very sharp way McKinney performed her duties--and the People’s business--in the US House of Representatives, while on the Budget Committee, I recommend checking out this 9-minute 2006 YouTube video of her grilling Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, General Meyers, and Tina Jonas about 9/11 and related matters.]

In 2004, you signed the 9/11 Truth Movement statement, calling for new investigations of “unexplained aspects of the 9/11 events.” More than 7 years have passed since then. What would you say are some of the more egregious “unexplained events”?

Cynthia McKinney: … How is it that the people of the United States can invest trillions of dollars in the military and Intelligence infrastructure—and it failed four times in one day? … That singular question has never been answered.

GC: Staying with 9/11. … Distorted as they have been by the Mainstream Media, your views have caused uninformed Americans to question your patriotism. In 2005, you held Congressional briefings on the official 9/11 Commission Report—

CM: Yeah. … the only official briefing on that subject held on Capitol Hill, period!

GC: Well… The Atlanta-Journal Constitution editorialized that—

CM: Oh… you mean, The Urinal-in-Constipation!

[General laughter in the room. …]

GC: … They editorialized that—

CM: You call them legitimate? I won’t even legitimize them with a response! Whatever they say is bogus! You got another quote from somebody?

GC: No… well, hear me out. …

CM: I’m not going to respond to anything they say!

GC: Well… you did, in fact, respond to an editorial they wrote when they editorialized that the briefings you were holding were to determine whether the Bush administration had prior knowledge of the attacks. That was their editorial! You replied…, but they refused to publish your response. … So, how did you respond? Can you tell us now?

CM: Oh, I can’t even remember back that far…, but, I think the record now reflects what Bush knew… and I’m sure that part of what I said is that I would never try to go inside George Bush’s brain to see what’s there!

GC: Too many maggots?

[Laughter. …]

GC: So, your main question is: Where was our air force, why didn’t they prevent it—

CM: We know where they were. … The question is, Why didn’t they follow standard operating procedures?

GC: And the other questions about buildings free-falling into their footprints… Building 7—

CM: Look, I spent last September 11 in the home of a woman who is afflicted with cancer… because she lived near the World Trade center. And all of that dust came into her apartment… and she had to clean it up. … She will never figure into any of the statistics about who has been affected—her situation will never count… but it counts to me, and to all of the other memebers of the 911 Truth Community.

GC: Let’s explore another controversial issue linked to you. … Ms. McKinney, what does the number “88794” signify for you?

CM: That was the number that was assigned to me by the Israeli prison system when—on my second attempt to get into Gaza—I was kidnapped on the high seas in international waters and taken against my will to Israel and put in prison. … David Halpin, the UK physician, and I sat next to each other because the volunteers—the activists that were on the boat—were international and spoke different languages… so I sat next to the English doctor… and he railed, he railed, he railed as the warship came close to us…, then backed off…, then approached us again—very quickly and very quietly–in this cat-and-mouse game. … And he cursed my government… because it was with the assistance of the United States that those engines had been provided to the Israeli military so that they could do what they were doing to us. …

GC: Did you join him in the cursing?

CM: No. … In fact…, I do a lot of apologizing! I can say this: In the struggle for human rights, I consider prisoner # 88794 a badge of honor that I’ve acquired as a result of what I have chosen to do to assert my own right to recognize the human rights and the dignity of other people. …

GC: Let’s continue with this theme of recognizing other people’s human rights. … More recently, this past year, you were in Tripoli when NATO bombed Libya. What were you doing there… and can you describe that experience?

CM: I voluntarily went to Libya. … Any time the War Machine rolls—I have to oppose that! Libya was a special case, a personal case… because I had just been to Libya. … I had taken a delegation of independent journalists to go to Libya… because I did not believe the explanation that was given to the public about the necessity to bomb Tripoli and other cities in Libya. … While we were there… we experienced what “shock and awe” is all about. The individual who went to the UN with allegations of thousands dying at the hands of Colonel Gaddhafi and the Libyan government—when he was pressed to substantiate his claims, he couldn’t.

GC:That reminds me of the allegations made against the Iraqis in Kuwait, back in 1990–that they were taking babies out of incubators and throwing them on the floor!

CM: It’s also a situation similar to that of the Cuban-American community congregated down in Miami… right after the Cuban Revolution in 1959 where we had a community of expatriates who were willing to unleash terror on their own country… and, a similar thing was happening in Libya… with the United States providing financing for these individuals willing to lie about what was happening.

This information is available on the Internet. Julien Teil interviewed the individual making these false claims at the UN. The interview can be found at www.laguerrehumanitaire.fr. …It’s on YouTube, as well. Julien also interviewed the woman at Amnesty International who had claimed that “African mercenaries” were supporting Gaddafi’s repression of his people; but, when challenged—and this was all after the devastation—she admitted that it was “just a rumor.”

My colleague, David Josue, and I had been in Libya to attend a conference for Africans on the continent as well as Africans in the diaspora. And what the Jamahariya government had devised was a call to Africans in the diaspora who were unhappy with their treatment at the hands of white Americans or white Europeans, etc.—to come back home to Africa and to help Libya rebuild Africa and rebuild itself.

[Interviewer’s NOTE: (from Wikipedia): “Jamahiriya” is a term coined by Gaddafi, usually translated as “state of the masses.”]

… That was the purpose of this conference I had attended. … And it was at that conference that the Jamahiriya committed 90 billion dollars to help in the creation of The United States of Africa. … That would also include a million-person army for continental Africa to drive back the attempts of AFRICOM and others to occupy the African continent. … That was in addition to the proposal for a gold-backed dinar for all of Africa. … The daughter of Kwame Nkruma was at that conference; the son of Patrice Lumumba was at that conference… the grandson of Malcom X was there. … The atmosphere was electric with the idea of the re-building, the re-kindling of the movement that these African leaders—or their forebears—represented. Well… that was all put to an end by NATO’s bombing. …

[Interviewer’s NOTE (from Wikipedia): The United States Africa Command (AFRICOM) is one of nine United Combatant Commands of the United States Armed Forces.]

The attack on Libya was an attack on Africa! It was an attack on my aspirations as a person of African descent to have a free and independent Africa. That’s what was attacked!

GC: I’ve never had as complete a picture of that. … I’d heard that Gaddafi wanted to set up a gold-backed dinar. … In fact, people like Ron Paul even talk about using gold-backed currency… so I’ve heard that as a rationale for what we were doing there—trying to prevent any challenge to the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency. … But…, nobody has described the situation as completely as you have.

My final question on Libya is this: You have praised Colonel Gaddafi’s Green Book and the kind of “direct democracy” advocated therein. Can you give us a brief lesson as to how that “direct democracy” differs from our “representative democracy”?

CM: Our “democracy” is neither democratic nor representative! But… let’s start with what the Jamahiriya means to me. … The only stake that I have is that I want to see a free and independent Africa…, but the type of government that Libya has should be determined by the Libyan people. I don’t really have a say in that. … And I shouldn’t have a say in how they dispose of their governmental form. … Therefore, it’s inexcusable to ask another country to bomb your fellow countrymen if you really care about your country!

The Jamahiriya–which had the highest living standard in all of Africa–had free education up through the Ph.D. level; free health care; free utilities, subsidized—and free, if you were poor—housing; subsidized food; subsidized transportaion, including car expenses… and so, the necessities of life were paid for by the direct democracy known as the Jamahiriya.

Can you imagine…? I have a cousin who is $120,000 in student debt in the U.S. She has a Master’s degree as a social worker. Now, if she had been born in Libya—she would have no such debt. … I went to a university outside of Tripoli and asked the students about their tuition fees… and the word didn’t translate. I asked them about what they paid to attend the university. … It was $9.00 per year!

When I was in Congress, one of my allies was Senator Mike Gravel… and Senator Gravel’s initiative is about “direct democracy.” He had been to Libya… and he supported the establishment of the revolutionary committees which was the way Libyans determined how they would use their oil money.

A question under discussion when I attended the conference there was whether the subsidies for gas/petrol or the subsidies for education would be increased! (In the US, under “austerity” measures, people are being told which programs will be eliminated or eviscerated; in Libya, they were voting on which programs would get increased subsidization!)

What I have said publicly is that what we have been seeing is the Israelization of US policy. You know… the only reason the Libyans took any interest in me was that someone in Libya, looking at their television, saw me having all these problems trying to get into Gaza… and they said, “We want to know her!” That’s why I was invited to attend this conference on The Green Book—to explain what I was trying to do in Gaza. And what I observed in Libya was the same kind of collective punishment I observed in Gaza. People supporting their own governments were being punished by outsiders who opposed those governments!

This is the kind of thing that happens in the absence of ethics in jouralism. … Because… we don’t have journalists in the Mainstream—I call it the Special Interests Press–to educate and provide information to citizens so they can make a critical analysis of issues. That is absent. … We need ethics in scholarship; ethics in journalism, as well. …The journalistic community has gone along with the kind of death and destruction that has been visited upon Libya… and so many other countries. We’re setting up drone bases all over Africa… and people here don’t even know… don’t begin to understand. …

GC: You’ve mentioned many potent issues, including the “Israelization of US policy.” I’d like to explore that, and also explore the theme of alliances—even unlikely alliances. …

In the 2002 election to the House of Representatives, people like your father and the editor and commentator Alexander Cockburn alleged that your defeat by Denise Majette was a consequence of out-of-state Jewish organizations and Jewish money working against you—

CM: That’s not an allegation—that’s a fact! I was informed that I had been targeted by the pro-Israel lobby by the media. … I read about it in the papers! … and the evidence is readily available. …So, the fact of being targeted by the number-one special interest lobby in the United States means that there is an engagement in every aspect of one’s political life. …

GC: Well, ah, let’s tackle this head-on: Are you anti-Semitic?

CM: Well, I’m, ah… I’m no more anti-Semitic than than any of the anti-Zionist Jews who I work with on an almost-daily basis to correct US policy. And, I would suggest that the real Semites are the Palestinians. And, therefore, I would suggest that I’m not anti-Semitic, but that there are people who are anti-human rights, and there are some people who are anti-peace, and there are some people who are pro-war… and no matter who they are, I will always be against that… because I. … You see what my… my button says?

(She points to a button she is wearing on her blouse). My button says, “I’m a peace-keeper” And, this one says, “War is a crime!”

GC: “Blessed are the peace-keepers. …”

CM: When I was in Congress, I organized a Press Conference with organizations like “Jewish Workers for Peace,” “Not in My Name, Women in Black [www.womeninblack.org]—we had about ten organizations at that press conference… and it was fantastic. …

That night, the Atlanta news criticized me for associating with “fringe Jewish elements”! Now… what’s a “fringe Jewish element”? It was the Anti-Defamation League that was casting this aspersion!

Now, the Anti-Defamation League that I knew about is supposed to be a Civil Rights organization. But… the Anti-Defamation League, in practice, filed an amicus brief with five white racists to dismantle the district—my district!–that provided an opportunity for black people in the black belt of Georgia to have representation! Those are the people who sent me to Congress to represent them! … I stand on their shoulders, and I did my darnedest to represent them—and I was rewarded by the Anti-Defamation League filing an amicus brief and a lawsuit to dismantle that district and take representation away from those poor, black people.

GC: I can certainly understand your indignation. And I don’t want to hammer this issue. … But, this is on Wikipedia… and, as one researches you—this is what one comes across:

About that election with Majette, your father, a former state representative in Georgia, stated that “Jews have bought everybody… And then he spelled it, “J-E-W-S. …” Now…, personally, I always make a distinction between Jews and Zionists—and you just did. … I try to distinguish between people who follow a religious tradition and those who assert a political-nationalist ideology. … And, ah… I think writers like Gilad Atzmon, for example, have been very clear about making that distinction in his recent work like The Wandering Who?. …

CM: I haven’t read that, but—

GC: I haven’t read it, but I’ve read about it—

CM: Gilad is coming to Atlanta this month—

GC: Is he? I’d like to meet him. …

CM: Yes. … You must come—

GC: I will! But, ah, anyway… do you think, in retrospect, you might recommend changing the terminology a bit– just to broaden the dialogue and widen the base of opposition to inhumane practices?

CM: Well… let me tell you something. … I want to talk to you about. … The first time my daddy got into trouble was when he said, “racist Jew.” And, I had a Jewish friend who was trying to smooth things over. And I asked her, “Is Jew a bad word? I didn’t know “Zionist”—I didn’t even know that word at the time… because… here’s the thing: the Anti-Defamation League says that they represent all Jews—that’s what they tell us. AIPAC, also. So… I didn’t know that there was a word called “Zionist” until I became involved with the Betrand Russell tribunal on Palestine. … And there was a famous Jewish lawyer who was one of the leaders in that tribunal, and I went to him and I said, “Daniel, how does your family feel about your being in this tribunal?” and he said, “My family are anti-Zionist Jews.” And I said, “I don’t know what that is!” I was 50-something years old, and I’d never heard the language! Now, of course, I’ve been exposed… and I’m more sensitive that there’s a difference. … Now… I have marvelous Jewish friends… and I understand the difference between Judaism and Zionism. Whoever prays to whatever God is fine with me…, but, a political ideology is quite different. … I know I have a lot to learn when it comes to Zionism and Judaism. … I’m not very religious… but I am spiritual… and I’m very interested in people’s beliefs… but, I’m more interested in the way people behave. … So, I would always say, Judge me on what I do more than on what I say. … And, I acknowledge that I can be wrong about what I say. … And, my father can be wrong about what he said. …

GC: Thank you very much. … I think you’ve clarified that for a lot of people. …

Now… this idea of building alliances. … I’d like to discuss current events, namely, the Presidential election

CM: Um-ha. …

GC: First, a re-cap: In 2008, disgusted with the Democratic Party, you were the Green Party candidate for president. That same year, you joined a press conference held by 3rd party and independent candidates, including Ralph Nader and Ron Paul. The participants agreed on 4 basic principles:

1. An early end to the Iraq War, and an end to threats of war against other countries, including Iran.

2. Safeguarding privacy and civil liberties, including repeal of the Patriot Act, the Military Commisions Act and FISA legislation.

3. No increase in the National Debt.

4. A thorough investigation, evaluation and audit of the Federal Reserve System.

My question is this: If these different elements of Independent thought could come together on these 4 basic principles in 2008, why can’t they unite behind the same principles in 2012?

CM: They can. …

GC: Isn’t it possible to conceive a party that speaks for the majority of Independents, that unites Independents? The 4 principles that united Independents then are still very much with us—and in many ways the dangers are greater—the possibility of war with Iran looms larger now, and there’s the National Defense Authorization Act, as well as the other intrusions on privacy and civil liberties. More Americans classify themselves as “Independents” than as Republicans or Democrats. How can the varied strands of Independents work together to defeat the Republicrats?

CM: The answer to that question goes to the core of the kind of change we hope to initiate on a policy basis. … So… how do we do that? I think the first thing is that we have to be willing to talk to each other. We have to recognize that there’s commonality despite difference. So… the thing that allowed Nader and me and Paul to come together is that we were at least willing to see areas of commonality. We should be able to do that across the political spectrum. And, in fact, when I was in the Congress, I was forced to do that. … As a Southerner, I—and as someone who had to get votes—not lose them—I needed the endorsement of a leader in the community… and he was a Klan member… and I had no choice. … I asked him for his support—and I got it! (After I sat there for over an hour and he described to me how “confused” the people were because of the way they judged the Ku Klux Klan to be racist!)

[Here, CM gives a strong, hearty guffaw!]

And… I sat there and found a place where we could have a meeting of the minds—and I did it!

GC: Related question then: I’ve been criticized because I wrote an article, about a month ago–“The Lion and the Ox”–praising Ron Paul’s stance on ending the wars, ending the Empire, auditing the Fed. I also think his views on our antiquated, absurd and minority-punishing drug laws are far more enlightened than anyone else’s—with the exception of 2012 Green Party candidate, Jill Stein’s. Paul makes a distinction between Capitalism and Corporatism—an important distinction. Now, I’m not a Libertarian; I don’t agree with “unregulated” Capitalism to the extent Paul and Libertarians do. But, I wonder: Given various points of convergence, how can the Green Party and Libertarians work together to overturn what we have in America today—basically, a one-party system, a Corporate Party system, abetted by corporate media?

CM: Well, one thing is that the Libertarians and the Greens could join forces—kind of a united front. So… I’d like to see if those kinds of talks could get anywhere.

GC: A friend of mine suggested a Paul-McKinney ticket. …

CM: That was your friend, huh?

GC: Well, you know… when I first heard that, I thought, “That’s crazy!” But… I thought about it, and I thought, “Why not? We live in crazy times. …”

CM: Yeah… we do. …

GC: I mean… look what we have to choose from: Santorum, Michelle Bachman, Hermain Cain, Gingrich, Romney–all these crazy people. …

CM: Every time there’s a vote, it gets more outrageous, doesn’t it?

GC: It does! Well… what do you think about Paul-McKinney?

CM: Well… we’re not there yet, so I don’t have to think about it at all!

GC: Well. …

CM: Let me put it this way. … We do have overlapping constituencies. … So… it would be wonderful if the two circles could expand beyond their points of intersection. …And I’m not just talking about Paul. … I’m talking about people on the Left in general. … Because, there’s no more Left and Right. It’s only Right and Wrong now… and the old “Right” is Wrong… and the old “Left” needs to be more Right… does that make sense?

GC: Yes. …

CM: Yeah, because the Left is being co-opted. … So, the Left needs to be more Left!

GC: There needs to be a convergence where the Greens and the Libertarians can meet—

CM: And the militia! You know… I have to deal with the militia, too. I’m from Georgia, right? They participate in the political system—to the extent that they do—and somebody needs to be talking to’em… because, ultimately, they’re a part of the 99%. … And that’s the gift that the Occupy Movement has given to us—they’ve given us a way to self-identify. Now we know—it’s not about color, race, religion, gender, sexual orientation—all of those things. At the end of the day—if you’re part of the 99%, you’re part of us… and if you’re part of the 1%–you’re part of them!

GC: Related question: Okay…also about Current Events: this is about the Occupy Movement, then. …

CM: Okay. …

GC: We live in a Surveilance State. Our license plate numbers are routinely recorded; we’re finger-printed for jobs, our Social Security numbers serve as National I.D.’s, our e-mails are monitored for “code” words or phrases, our homes are surveiled by satellite mapping systems of Google, Yahoo, etc. Those who protest, as in the Occupy Wall Street movement, are arrested, booked, and more closely watched. Now they have “records” that affect their employment. … My question is: how do we battle this pervasive system? Do you get discouraged? What do you do when you are discouraged? Who are your “heroes”? To whom do you turn for inspiration?

CM: Do I get discouraged? Yes! What do I do when I’m discouraged? … find other people who are not yet discouraged!

Who are my heroes? Everybody! Everybody who has a tough row to hoe in life! Those are my heroes. Those are the people who give the most! When I was running for Congress back in 1992–for the first time–I was running to represent the second poorest district in Georgia… and, what I learned was that the poor people gave the most! The people who had… didn’t give as generously as the people who didn’t have! So… my first campaign theme was, “Warriors don’t wear medals, they wear scars!” So… my heroes are the community and neighborhood warriors who have a whole lof of scars, a whole lot of dignity.

GC: I’d like you to talk specifically about what used to be called the Black Liberation Struggle. As a young, white man, I was inspired by the works of black writers like Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Leroi Jones (now called Baraka), Eldridge Cleaver, W.E.B. DuBois, and poets like Langston Hughes. Martin Luther King and Malcom X were inspirational leaders for all people; Rosa Parks was a woman of quiet, dignified courage. But, now, with the election of Obama, and with the prominence of people like Bill Cosby first, and Oprah Winfrey, the billionairess—the great struggles of the past almost seem quaint. What’s your take on this? Who are the great black leaders today? What is the struggle about today?

[Note:There are 7 million Americans now under “correctional observation.” More African-Americans’ lives intersect with our prison-industrial-surveillance complex than there were African-American slaves in 1850!]

CM: You asked me who are my heroes. … One of my heroes is Glen Ford, who writes for The Black Agenda Report. I view him as the most astute political observer of our times.

There’s a whole lot of pundits who are in our faces every Sunday morning who think they are political observers…, but they are not astute! And they’re also not independent. Glen Ford is independent, he’s been through the wars and he has no special interests to kow-tow to. … He just wrote a piece… “Can the Proud African-American Progressive Legacy Survive Another Four Years of Cowing to the Corporate Servant in the White House?” That’s strong stuff…, but right on point!

We have a situation now… it was the Black struggle that really defined morality in the United States. It defined the moral imperative. And the character of the country was measured by how well it answered the call of Black people for justice. But what happens when Black people stop asking for justice? I think you get exactly what we’ve got now—a President who is dropping bombs on Africa… which is un-thought-of; I mean, it would have been un-thought-of four years ago that Africa would be bombed—routinely! But it’s a routine matter now that the United States Africa Command [AFRICOM] would actively establish itself and militarize the US relationship with Africa. AFRICOM represents a kind of US imperial occupation of the continent that we haven’t seen since the days of outright colonialism of the Europeans. We are being told about issues that are “important”…, but we’re ignoring the real issues that are important! Henry Kissinger said that he couldn’t believe the amount of good will that was embodied in this president! But… what people like Kissinger don’t “get” is that this president sits on top of the historic Black struggle that characterized the United States to the world! People around the world thought that Barack Obama characterized the New United States! But… far from it! A lot of people got tricked and fooled and now… as philosopher Michel Foucault has observed—the every-day actions of ordinary people actually entrap them in “powerlessness”. … So, to break out of your powerlessness, you’ve got to break out of your existing paradigm. So, as long as Barack Obama is representative of the existing paradigm, this is what we’re going to get… because the existing paradigm is war and more war!

GC: How do we “break out”? How do we fight the Mainstream Media that’s constantly projecting that paradigm and hammering it into our brains?

CM: The literature suggests that people have to be confronted with a “disorienting dilemma” that causes them to reflect on what they’ve just experienced. …

GC: Cognitive dissonance?

CM: That’s right. … Reflect on what you always assumed… and what you’ve been confronted with that contradicts your assumptions. … For some people, it was the murder of JFK; for others, it was the murder of Malcom; for others, it was the murder of MLK; for a whole bunch of others, it was the murder of RFK; and for some people who began to look and pay attention like me… it was the murder of all of them and then add onto it the murder of the members of the Black Panther Party—who were attacked by our own government. …

You could say that for me, my first “disorienting dilemma” was when I realized that I was black. I realized that the world around me was not like me, and that it didn’t value my black skin! That, for me was when I began to pay attention and wake up!

GC: How old were you?

CM: Seven or eight. …You know… for some people it’s religion, it’s race, it’s gender, it’s, maybe, sexual orientation. … Everyone has their moment of reckoning.

I think, ultimately… it’s about the love we have for humanity and how we see something is wrong and we have to stop it!

So… by the time I got to Congress… I had had my “reckoning,” and I had had my “break-out” moments, and I guess this gave me strength and vibrancy… and there were people who didn’t like it. I wore my hair differently, I dressed differently from the other people in Congress. There was even a segment of the Capitol Hill police that didn’t like that. …

GC: What year was that?

CM: 1993. …

GC: Wasn’t there a much more recent incident with the Capitol Hill police?

CM: No, no, no. … It happened for twelve years! … Twelve years of harrassment from the Capitol Hill police! They considered it a “sport” to harass me! … It’s available on the Internet… if you go to YouTube and you put in “The Last Plantation.”

GC: The infamous incident is when you apparently struck back at the officer who was harassing you. … Is that correct?

CM: The officer had no business putting his hands on me! … And I reacted like any normal person would react when being attacked by some great big, huge guy from behind! … This was a “hit.” It was a “hit”–a “sport”–for the white officers. You’ll see if you go to that “Last Plantation” site that I had been targeted because I had written a letter of support for the Black Capitol Hill police officers.

GC: And this most infamous incident… that was the same day as House Majority Leader Tom DeLay was indicted?

CM: That’s right. … The Mainstream Media didn’t want to lead with that indictment, did they? It was much more sensational and distracting to lead with the story of a black Congresswoman attacking a Capitol Hill police officer!

[Laughter]

GC: You’re a pretty brave woman, aren’t you?

CM: Everybody can be brave… they just need that break-out moment of recognition. … I’ve stood on some big shoulders. … As I said before–my campaign theme: “Warriors don’t wear medals… they wear scars.”

This week, O’Connor launches a California book tour, beginning in the San Francisco Bay Area. On Monday, O’Connor sat down for a video interview with Prison Radio, where he discusses aspects of this story not addressed in this text interview. Marking the book release, Prison Radio has recorded a special message from Kevin Cooper himself. To learn more about Cooper’s case and what you can do to help, visit his website.

Prison Radio:  How did you get involved in Kevin Cooper’s case?

J. Patrick O’Connor:  During the fall of 2008, I was in the Bay Area on a book tour for The Framing of Mumia Abu-Jamal.  During the tour, supporters of Kevin’s approached me at various venues and asked me to consider writing a book on Kevin’s case.

PR:  How did you go about writing this book?

JPO:  I took on this project with no preconceived notions of Kevin’s guilt or innocence. Each case is different, radically so.

My first step was to read and notate the trial transcripts, documents of over 8,000 pages.  I then read all the police reports, witness interviews, and various newspaper accounts. I reviewed the most shocking crime scene and autopsy photos I’ve ever seen — and those I will never forget.  The autopsy reports on the four victims spoke of an incredibly frenzied killing field inside the Ryens’ master bedroom.

Finally, I read all of the appeals and the judicial rulings.  By this time I was ready to begin interviewing various people involved in Kevin’s trial and his subsequent appeals.

PR:  What’s the main obstacle to researching a case that is 25 years old?

JPO:  The biggest problem is that a number of key people involved in the investigation and trial have died, have retired, or have simply forgotten important factual details.

Another obstacle is that because Kevin technically still has appeals open to him, the San Bernardino County D.A.’s Office refused to discuss the case with me.  Nonetheless, I was able to interview Kevin’s trial attorney, his investigator, and the lead prosecutor at his trial as well as many other people familiar with Kevin’s trial and appeals.  For important background on the Ryens, I was able to interview Peggy Ryen’s half-sister and Doug Ryen’s sister.

PR:  Did you ever interview Kevin Cooper?

JPO:  I visited with Kevin for nearly three hours at San Quentin in the summer of 2009.  During this intense interrogation — I was in the process of deciding whether to take on this book possibility — I could sense Kevin felt a number of my questions were intrusive, if not insensitive.  There were things about his past and about his stay at the hideout house, and his fleeing to Mexico that I simply had to know to be able to go forward.

By the end of the interview I was taken with his equanimity and his resolve to prove he was wrongfully convicted of the gruesome Chino Hills murders. Over the next two years, I was able to pose many other questions to Kevin in written form, through his defense team at the Orrick law firm.

PR:  What convinced you that Kevin was innocent of these crimes?

JPO:  A lot of different things. To just cite one here: The prosecution and the police withheld and destroyed evidence that would have exonerated Kevin — evidence that was so exculpatory to him that had it been revealed Kevin would not have even been on trial for these murders.

PR:  Can you provide some background on Kevin Cooper’s case?

JPO:  Kevin Cooper was convicted of the brutal murders of a Chino Hills, California family and a young houseguest in 1985, and has been on death row at San Quentin since then. Scapegoat: The Chino Hills Murders and The Framing of Kevin Cooper, shows how the sheriff’s office and the district attorney’s office of San Bernardino County framed Cooper for these horrific murders and how the justice system has failed him at almost every turn in his long, drawn-out appeal process.

If it were not for a court-ordered moratorium on executions in California over the lethal injection controversy, Cooper – with no appeals remaining – would have been executed by now. It is expected the moratorium will not be lifted until at least 2013.

Two days before the murders of Doug and Peggy Ryen, their 10-year-old daughter, Jessica, and 11-year-old Christopher Hughes, Cooper escaped from a nearby prison and holed up in a vacant house 125 yards below the murdered family’s hilltop house.  Two days after the San Bernardino sheriff’s department established that Cooper had hid out there, it locked in on him as the lone assailant despite numerous eye witness reports that implicated three, young white men as the perpetrators.

From that day forward, four days after the murders were discovered, the sheriff’s department discarded information that pointed at other perpetrators, destroyed evidence that exculpated Cooper, and planted evidence that implicated him.

PR:  What eyewitness testimony is there pointing to other perpetrators?

JPO:  The only survivor of the attack, 8 1/2-year-old Josh Ryen, told ER personnel and a sheriff’s deputy that his assailants were three white men. Cooper is black.

Around midnight on the night of the murders, a couple, attempting to exit a driveway in their truck, saw three, young white men driving rapidly down the only road that leads away from the Ryens’ house in a station wagon that it turned out was stolen from the murdered family.

Shortly after that sighting, two women in a nearby bar saw two young white men, one wearing coveralls, with blood splatter on their faces and clothing.

Four days after the murders, another woman turned into the sheriff’s office bloody coveralls her boyfriend, a convicted murderer, had left on the floor of her closet.  The woman stated she had other information that implicated her boyfriend in the murders but wanted to be interviewed by homicide detectives.  She would have told them that her boyfriend’s hatchet was missing and that he no longer had the tan T-shirt he wore the Saturday of the murders.

PR: What aspects of the crime scene challenge the case against Cooper?

JPO:  The murders were committed with at least three, and probably four, weapons: a hatchet, an ice pick and one or two knifes. The theory that one perpetrator could or would use three or four weapons, is fundamentally counterintuitive.  At trial the prosecutor argued that Cooper was ambidextrous, which he is not.

Nor could one person control two able-bodied adults and three children running around the house, one of whom, Jessica, made it outside the house during the attack. The adult victims were each fit, 41-year-old chiropractors and both were mobile during the onslaught and fought hard for their lives, sustaining numerous defensive wounds to their hands and arms.

The crime scene evidence, according to the medical examiner, showed that the mother was cradling the daughter before the mother died, which meant one of the attackers had brought Jessica back into the house.  More than anything else, this meant there had to be more than one assailant because each parent kept a loaded gun in the master bedroom where the assault occurred.

There was an uncommon viciousness to the attack as though the killers meant not only to murder but to send a message of payback or retribution.  The medical examiner counted 144 wounds on the four murder victims, including 28 fractures and two amputations.  While Cooper’s trial was in progress, an inmate in a California prison told prison authorities and a San Bernardino County Sheriff’s detective that his cellmate had confessed to the Chino Hills murders, stating it was an Aryan Brotherhood hit but the three killers had gone to the wrong house.

PR:  What about the destroyed evidence you cited earlier?

JPO:  During Cooper’s preliminary hearing, the sheriff’s office destroyed the bloody coveralls.  The sheriff’s office claimed it never conducted any tests of the coveralls and admitted it never sent homicide detectives around to interview the woman who had turned them in.

The sheriff’s office also destroyed a bloody blue T-shirt discarded not far from the bar. Coupled with a tan T-shirt found the next day near the bar, the two bloody T-shirts were strong proof that at least two assailants had murdered the Ryens and Chris Hughes.  Testing of the tan T-shirt showed the blood on it matched the blood profile of Doug Ryen and no one else.

PR:  You also said that evidence was planted?

JPO:  Years later, in 2002, as Cooper was attempting to prove his innocence with DNA testing now afforded death row inmates by the California Legislature, his blood was now found on the tan T-shirt. To Cooper and his appeal attorneys, this showed rank tampering and planting of evidence, a belief that was greatly reinforced when it was revealed in 2004 that the vial containing Cooper’s blood, taken from him when he was arrested and kept all those years in the crime lab, was discovered now to contain the DNA of at least one other person.

A hatchet sheath and a bloody green button from a prison jacket were found at the hideout house a day after two detectives had searched the house and found nothing of evidentiary value.  Under oath one of the detectives denied looking in the bedroom but crime scene technicians lifted his fingerprints from the door of the closet where Cooper slept.  It would be established at Cooper’s trial that when Cooper escaped he was wearing a brown jacket, not a green one.

PR:  In 2004, Cooper came within hours of being executed before an extremely rare en banc ruling by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals stayed his execution and granted him a successive habeas corpus hearing in federal district court in San Diego. Can you explain more about this 2004 ruling?

JPO:  In particular, the Ninth Circuit ordered the district court to conduct DNA testing on the numerous blonde or light brown hairs found clutched in Jessica’s hand and other similar hairs deposited on other victims.

The Ninth also ordered EDTA testing to determine if Cooper’s blood had been planted on the tan T-shirt.  EDTA is an anti-clotting substance used in crime labs to preserve blood in vials, to prevent it from coagulating and breaking down. If tests conducted showed high levels of EDTA on the blood attributed to Cooper on the T-shirt, it would establish tampering.  If tampering were established, it would call into question all the forensic evidence the prosecution used to link Cooper to the crime scene.

It seemed that Cooper, after nineteen years of asserting his innocence from death row, would be vindicated.  At a minimum, the district court would have had to order a new trial or exonerate him outright.

Federal District Court Judge Marilyn Huff was not going to let that happen.  She had turned down both of Cooper’s previous habeas appeals, finding evidence of his guilt “overwhelming.”

PR:  How did Judge Marilyn Huff treat Cooper’s third habeas appeal?

JPO:  Over a period of a year, Judge Huff periodically held evidentiary hearings.  As she did, she methodically thwarted Cooper’s attorneys at every turn, refusing to allow Cooper’s experts to participate in the EDTA testing.  When the private lab the court hired to test Cooper’s blood on the T-shirt found elevated levels of EDTA, Judge Huff allowed the lab to retract its findings three weeks later on the grounds the lab itself was contaminated with EDTA during the testing.

Judge Huff dispensed with any further EDTA testing by ruling that the EDTA testing of the tan T-shirt conducted was not conclusive and that EDTA testing in general was an unproven science and of no value.  She was wrong on both counts:  both Cooper’s expert and the private lab found high levels on EDTA on the samples tested from the tan T-shirt and EDTA testing is a proven science.

The extreme bias against Cooper that Judge Huff displayed with impunity throughout the evidentiary hearings was at its most obvious when it came to the DNA testing of the hair clutched in various victims’ hands ordered by the en banc Ninth Circuit.  When a portion of those hairs had been tested in 2002, they were found to have no antigen roots, denoting that the hairs had fallen out rather than been yanked out during the assault.  Those hairs, the tests showed, were either from the victims themselves or were dog hairs.

There could be no purpose in retesting those hairs. However, over half of the hairs in the victims’ hands or adhered to their bodies had not been tested in 2002 and may well have contained antigen roots.    If the mitochondrial testing of those hairs resulted in a DNA that excluded all the victims and Cooper, there would be proof positive that someone other than Cooper was a perpetrator.  Judge Huff, incredibly, ordered testing only of the already tested hairs.

PR:  Did anything new come out at this point?

JPO:  During the evidentiary hearings, Cooper’s lawyers inadvertently learned for the first time about the bloody blue T-shirt found not far from the bar.  How could Judge Huff get around the implications of a bloody blue and a bloody tan T-shirt found one day apart near the bar?

In addition, the prosecution’s not disclosing the blue T-shirt to the defense was a major Brady violation that was so exculpatory to Cooper on its own that it mandated a new trial.

Judge Huff’s way around this inconvenient hurdle was to find that the blue T-shirt was in reality the tan T-shirt, even though the blue shirt was found the day before the tan shirt in a different location from the bar and the woman who found the bloody blue shirt testified at the hearing that the shirt she found was blue.

Judge Huff’s handling of Cooper’s habeas proceedings led Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge William Fletcher to write, “There’s no way to say this politely. The district court failed to provide Cooper a fair hearing and flouted our direction to perform the two tests.”

PR:  Judge Fletcher also made a strong statement about Cooper’s case, as a guest speaker at Gonzaga University School of Law on April 12, 2010.

JPO:  Yes, Judge Fletcher delivered a lecture on the subject of the death penalty, holding that the problems with the administration of it are widespread and endemic rather than merely regional or local.

To illustrate he cited the Kevin Cooper case, stating “The case I am about to describe is horrible in many ways.  The murders were horrible.  Kevin Cooper, the man now sitting on death row, may well be – and in my view probably is – innocent.  And he is on death row because the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department framed him.”

Judge Fletcher, a Rhodes Scholar who roomed with Bill Clinton at Oxford University, said what happened in the Cooper case “is a familiar story.  It is by no means the usual story.  But it happens often enough to be familiar.  The police are under heavy pressure to solve a high profile crime.  They know, or think they know, who did the crime.  And they plant evidence to help their case along.”

PR:  A closing thought?

JPO:  Kevin Cooper has now spent half of his life on death row for a crime he had nothing to do with.  He is, in a word, a scapegoat.

In her book, Nelson writes that “the Party’s focus on health care was both practical and ideological.” On a practical level, the BPP provided free community health care services, including preventative education. Simultaneously, the BPP railed against the medical-industrial complex, declaring that health care was “a right and not a privilege.” Ronald “Doc” Satchel, the minister of health for the Chicago BPP, wrote in the BPP newspaper that “the medical profession within this capitalist society…is composed generally of people working for their own benefit and advancement rather than the humane aspects of medical care.” A newsletter published by the Southern California chapter argued that “poor people in general and black people in particular are not given the best care available. Our people are treated like animals, experimented on and made to wait long hours in waiting rooms.”

By 1970, People’s Free Medical Clinics had become a requirement for every BPP chapter. In 1972, the BPP revised point six of the founding ten-point-platform, adding a demand for “completely free healthcare for all black and oppressed people…We believe that the government must provide, free of charge, for the people, health facilities which will not only treat our illnesses, most of which have come about as a result of our oppression, but which will also develop preventative medical programs to guarantee our future survival. We believe that mass health education and research programs must be developed to give Black and oppressed people access to advanced scientific and medical information, so we may provide ourselves with proper medical attention and care.”

While citing Martin Luther King’s 1966 declaration that “of all forms of inequality, injustice in healthcare is the most shocking and inhumane,” one chapter provides an important historical context for the BPP’s health activism by detailing what Nelson calls “the long medical civil rights movement,” that began long before the BPP. “Mobilized in response to the distinctly hazardous risks posed by segregated medical facilities, professions, societies, and schools; deficient or nonexistent healthcare services; medical maltreatment; and scientific racism, activism challenges to medical discrimination have been an important focal point for African American protest efforts and organizations. The Panthers were heirs to health activism that directly reflected tactics drawn from this tradition,” writes Nelson.

Nelson says the central focus of her scholarly work is on “the intersections of science, technology, medicine and inequality.” She has co-edited Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life (2001) and Genetics and the Unsettled Past: The Collision of DNA, Race, and History (scheduled to be released in March, 2012). To learn more, please visit Alondra’s web site.)

Angola 3 News: In our recent interview with Billy X Jennings from It’s About Time BPP, one theme explored was how, with rare exception, the mainstream media has misrepresented the BPP. However, it seems that even the radical and anti-capitalist media has generally underreported the health activism that is the focus if your book. How did the BPP’s health activism relate to their better-known stances against white supremacy, capitalism, and police violence?

Alondra Nelson: Yes, it’s true. The Black Panthers’ health activism has been under-reported across the ideological spectrum. Their critics obviously did not want to cast them in a positive light. And, as your question suggests, even the Party’s supporters said little about this important aspect of the BPP’s work. I think it’s plausible to say that many on the Right and some of us on the Left — in very different ways and for completely opposite reasons — were captivated by a vision of the Party that did not include its health politics. Depictions of African Americans working in their neighborhoods, wearing white medical coats, was unspectacular compared to images of Black radicals wearing leather jackets and carrying guns.

It is ironic that our collective memory of the Panthers remains so incomplete because their health activism — from their political writing about medical issues in The Black Panther newspaper to their practice of DIY healthcare — exemplified the anti-racist, anti-capitalist stance for which they are known. In fact, the reality of health inequality brought the BPP’s political perspective into sharper relief because it offered stark and specific examples of how economic and racial oppression literally damaged bodies, families and communities.

As you know, the BPP was originally the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, a name that reflected that protecting communities from police brutality was a primary motivation for the group’s founding. The BPP exposed the misuse of power whether it was at the hands of police officers or physicians. So, it’s also useful to think of the Panthers as being engaged in medical self-defense.

In Los Angeles, Party members Ericka Huggins and Elaine Brown, nursing professor Marie Branch, Dr. Terry Kupers, and others established that chapter’s People’s Free Medical Clinic. But, like all of the BPP’s health activism, this work extended beyond the clinic, including in this case, confronting police brutality. (Branch shared meeting notes with me from the 1970s from her personal archive where the formation of BPP health programs and prisoners’ protection from medical discrimination were seamlessly discussed). The LA Panthers advocated for, and provided health care for, incarcerated persons; some of these men and women needed medical attention because they had been abused while in police custody.

A3N: How does the story of the BPP’s health activism, as presented in your book, contribute to and challenge the traditional presentations of the BPP by both the mainstream and alternative media?

AN: Body and Soul offers an account of the BPP that moves away from the narrow confines of the so-called “culture wars,” in which the Party can only ever be a positive force or a negative element. Paying attention to the Party’s health activism calls into question the inaccurate stereotype of the activists as aimless thugs.

We also gain a different perspective on things we thought we already knew about the BPP; like the fact that the Panthers were avid followers of Fanon, Che and Mao, whose writings were required reading for all members. Through the prism of health, one can see very clearly the influence of Fanon’s dissection of colonial medicine in Algeria on the Panthers’ understanding of medical discrimination in the U.S. We can take seriously the fact that Fanon and Che were physicians as well as political thinkers. We can appreciate that Mao, who established the “barefoot doctors” lay health worker program, made available to the Party not only broad revolutionary principles, but also specific ideas about health care as political practice.

A3N: What do you think were the most successful tactics employed by the BPP as part of its health activism? Strategically speaking, what lessons from the BPP’s health activism do you think are most applicable for today’s activists to learn from?

AN: In addition to setting up their own clinics, they used legal approaches not dissimilar from the NAACP to voice their opposition to problematic biomedical research. The Party leadership realized early on that “policing the police” would not be the only method they used in their effort to topple racism and capitalism. The Panthers were pretty flexible tacticians.

One of the lessons that the BPP offers today’s activists is that they should be more loyal to the desired outcome than to the tactic. The sit-in came to be associated with the southern civil rights movement just as the mic check is now emblematic of the Occupy movement. But these groups also used other tactics: marching, occupying, sermons, etc. Social movements are dynamic phenomena; circumstances are constantly changing. So too should tactics.

One of the BPP’s more fascinating tactics was what I call, after sociologist Lily Hoffman, the “politics of knowledge.” Working in this vein, the Panthers engaged and reinterpreted scientific ideas about race and disease. They reinterpreted scientific theories about the causes of sickle cell anemia, for example, by placing the prevalence of the disease in the context of the history of the transatlantic slave trade, the medical-industrial complex and contemporary racism.

The Panthers’ use of this tactic — the politics of knowledge — should remind today’s activists that “framing” matters. It is important to be able to translate political arguments — health-related ones and other ones — into language, into stories, really, that resonate with the broader public. The Party could be expert at this.

The Nixon administration and mainstream philanthropies would ultimately co-opt the issue of sickle cell anemia. But the BPP played a key role in raising awareness about the disease and in situating it in a powerful political language that could mobilize communities.

A3N: Along with chapters focusing on the BPP’s free medical clinics and the campaign to educate the Black community about, and test for, Sickle Cell Anemia, another chapter focuses on the BPP’s involvement with a diverse coalition that successfully organized against the formation of the Center for the Study and Reduction of Violence at UCLA in 1973. You write that BPP felt that the Center’s “biologization of violence” line of research would ultimately “craft a narrative of Black and Latino violent pathology” that would serve to “make already marginalized populations more vulnerable to medicine as a tool of social control,” and “effect the further criminalization of social groups—black males, the incarcerated—and in turn justify calls for increased surveillance and social control.”

While writing that the defeat of the Center was a “notable triumph,” you note further that it “was somewhat of a Pyrrhic victory for Newton and his allies, as blocking resources to the center as an entity would not prevent individual researchers from pursuing other sources of support for their investigations.” With this in mind, how has biologization of violence research progressed since the 1970s? How much influence has it had on public policy?

AN: Attempts to attribute the causes of violence to biology (and closely related to this, criminality) are a very old story. In the late 19th century, the influential Italian criminologist, Lombroso, claimed that new methods (e.g., phrenology) and theories (e.g., social Darwinism) showed that the tendency toward criminal behavior was inherited.

More than one hundred years later, similar ideas persist. In the 1990s, during the first Bush presidency, Louis Sullivan, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, set-up a “violence initiative” to explore the biological models of social unrest in urban settings. Your readers may recall that around the same time another Bush official, referencing studies on violence among non-human primates, said that disproportionately black and brown “inner cities” were like “jungles.” (The initiative and controversial commentary around it would recall the heated debate the Panthers were engaged in over plans to form a “violence center” at UCLA in the 1970s that may have had an especially harmful impact on black and Latino youth and men).

Recently behavioral researchers have aimed to link the presence of what has been called the “warrior gene” to violent, criminal behavior. At a time when we are learning even more about the complexities of genetic inheritance, about the epigenome and the systems biology, it simply does not make sense that one single genetic marker could have such a dramatic, determinative effect.

A3N: What role has biologization of violence research played in justifying the mass incarceration explosion that began in the 1970s, increasing the prison population from 300,000 to 2.4 million today, giving the US the highest incarceration rate and the largest total prisoner population in the world?

AN: To the extent that the longstanding efforts that I have just described have kept in circulation the fallacy that there is a definitive link between human biology and violence, theses ideas have indeed served as a justification for the expansion of the carceral system.

This is where the policy implications of the biologization of violence come to the fore: If violence is “in your genes” or “in your blood,” then one can justify policies that lock people away because these people are “lost causes.”

And, in turn, the idea that there is a innate predisposition to violence contributes to the decline of support for rehabilitation and reparative justice programs.

A3N: Since the 1970s, has the US come any closer to realizing the BPP’s public health goals? If BPP co-founder Huey P Newton were alive today, what do you think he would say about President Obama’s “Affordable Care Act?”

AN: The revised ten-point platform was prescient in capturing one side of the recent debates about widening health inequality in the U.S. and what to do about it. If I had to venture a guess, I would say that Newton and the Party would have appreciated the historic nature of what President Obama accomplished — a feat that many administrations before his had variously tried to accomplish and failed to do. Perhaps Newton would have even observed that the Affordable Care Act is a very small step in the right direction.

However, some journalists and pundits have noted the similarity between President Obama’s historic Affordable Care Act and the national insurance plan that former President Nixon backed unsuccessfully. Given the animus between the Party and Nixon, and the way this administration and its agents worked to destroy the BPP, it is hard to imagine that Newton would have been in strong support of recent healthcare reform legislation. There would have certainly been opposition to the fact that President Obama’s plan is a boon for insurance companies because the Panthers demanded, “healthcare for the people, not for profit.”

Angie Tibbs:  Dr. Ezzat, let’s start at the beginning.  In January 2011 hundreds of thousands of Egyptians began their Tahrir Square occupation; you were on the ground there as a journalist and as a medical doctor. Would you recreate the mood of the demonstrators, and, in fact, of the country?

Ashraf Ezzat:  Egyptians still refer to those 18 days (January 25- February 11) as the glorious days of the revolution. Those days will undoubtedly carve their place in the modern history of Egypt. And contrary to what the mainstream media concluded, the Tahrir Square saga that captured the world may have been called for by some activists using the internet social media, but it was mainly fueled and triggered by years of political corruption and oppression. The build-up for this uprising has been brewing for years and specifically after Mubarak made it clear he was bequeathing the presidency for his son, Gamal.

Hence, the general mood of the Egyptians was a blend of dissatisfaction, anger and a potent urge for change. It is funny but it seems that the Egyptians had a clear-cut idea what they wanted from the first day they took to the streets. I joined the protests from the second day; the people on the streets were not divided about their demands.  You could see it in their eyes and hear it as they chanted “Bread, freedom and social justice” … and those three demands are what the “Tahrir Square” is still fighting for.

Dr. Ashraf Ezzat in Tahrir Square

AT:  One of the demands of the protesters was for President Mubarak to step down, effectively ending his 30 year authoritarian rule.  This he did on February 11, at which time the military council took over the country, promising to bring about democracy and to respect the wishes of the people. Did this happen, and did anyone expect it would happen?

AE: The military council of armed forces (SCAF), whose generals are Mubarak’s handpicked appointees, did nothing in the last ten months to promote democracy in the country; on the contrary, the generals, and through their ineptness or unwillingness actually to restore security on the street, have helped to bolster the tide of the counter-revolution.

And hadn’t it been for the thousands who lately returned to Tahrir Square to denounce the military rule and ask for a hand-over of power to a civilian salvation government, the revolution would have been done with and declared dead.

The majority of the Egyptian people kind of hoped the military would lead them out of these difficult times but while most of Egyptians didn’t doubt the capability of SCAF to do so, a lot of activists and political analysts suspected that the way SCAF has been handling things would eventually put the country on the road to democracy.

AT: Are you saying that there were those who believed that in time the SCAF would have, if left in power, brought about democracy?

AE: No, I meant to say that the downfall of Mubarak was so abrupt that nobody actually had seen it coming, not even the military which is part and parcel of the despotic old regime. And while stunned by the uprising’s rapid pace, military generals were following how this people vs. regime uprising was going to end, and they decided not to take sides until this whole thing was almost settled.

And when it was obvious, despite the White House’s pro-Mubarak stance, that the people were gaining the upper hand in this uprising the military, only at that moment, decided to side with the people and this is when the protesters in Tahrir square chanted “ The people and military are joined hand in hand”

But not everybody was fooled by this “wait and see” approach by the military. A lot of activists and political analysts knew that the self-serving generals would try to somehow steer this transitional period in their favor. And that is exactly what they did when they proposed a new draft for a constitution that would shield the military from parliamentary scrutiny and which declares the military the guardian of “constitutional legitimacy,” suggesting the armed forces could have the final word on major policies.

AT:  How did Egyptians feel about the military and the police from the commencement of the Mubarak regime up to the demonstrations of January 2011?

AE: Actually Mubarak’s regime was just a police regime. A giant police apparatus that stifled dissent by violent means and that only served and protected the corrupt elite and the president. The citizen/police relation has been quite tense over years of coercion and misconduct. Throughout most of Mubarak’s rule Egyptians feared and somehow distrusted the police.

But in the last couple of years and prior to his ouster they began to loathe the corruption that swept across the whole security apparatus that turned the policeman into a thug with a badge, placed him above the law and allowed him to get away with almost anything … even crimes.

The famous case of the killing of Khalid Saeed, young Egyptian man from Alexandria, who was beaten to death by security forces after he was indicted on framed charges, has incited unprecedented anger and helped trigger the revolution in January. 

While the majority of Egyptians had negative feelings for the police they honored and respected the military for its patriotic role of protecting the sovereignty of the state and for the long and heroic confrontation with Israel especially after the 1973 war.

But I hope that Egyptians will make the necessary and fair distinction between the military forces or the army as a whole and the generals in the military council when they come to judge the conduct of SCAF in the transitional period that followed January 25 revolution.

AT:  In the months since the occupation of Tahrir Square ended, have there been any changes meaningful to Egyptians?

AE: Though a lot of things have remained the same if not for the worse, I would say that the only thing that really changed in the life of Egyptians is their ability to say NO to anything and anyone. And also to vote freely, as we all have witnessed the huge turnout for the first post-Mubarak parliamentary elections.

The Egyptian people broke the fear barrier and this, for people who have been enduring under tyranny for centuries, is quite an achievement. Moreover, I truly believe that once placed on the path of real democracy, the whole world will witness a new and amazingly different Egypt.

AT: Since the demonstrations ended in February, thousands of people have been arrested and tried before military tribunals, yet throughout the occupation of Tahrir Square there appeared to be good relations between the protesters and the security forces.  What caused these widespread arrests and are they continuing?

AE: As I mentioned before, many of the Tahrir activists viewed the stance of the military with suspicion and as days went by it became obvious that the generals were trying to give the old regime a comeback chance. The scenario of chaos and sectarian violence that Mubarak threatened would engulf the country if he was to step down was beginning to be unleashed.

Shortly after the toppling of Mubarak, Egypt began to witness months of unrest, economic plunge, lack of security forces on the street, sectarian violence and a series of churches attacks which culminated in the lethal clashes with a Coptic rally on October 9 that left 27 killed by the military forces in what is now known as the Maspero massacre.

But this was not what the revolutionary youths and activists demanded when they initiated the January uprising. This was not why people got killed in the protests. The people didn’t topple Mubarak to have a military dictatorship instead.

So this is why the honeymoon with the military didn’t last and it wasn’t long before many activists began to point the finger at SCAF for all the scenarios aimed at thwarting the revolution tide. And it wasn’t long either before the thousands – almost 15,000 according to Human Rights Watch – were thrown behind bars and tried before military tribunals until this very day.

AT:  Protesters have again taken to the streets of Cairo and elsewhere in Egypt, and the police are responding, thus far killing over 30 people. What has prompted this, and what do you anticipate happening as a result?

AE:   According to the counter-revolution plan, which the United States fully backed, the military was supposed to grab the power permanently. To set the stage for such scenario, the military in the last ten months has done everything possible not only to thwart the advance of the revolution but to turn the Egyptians against the idea itself as the plan augmented the sense of vulnerability and insecurity of the average Egyptian citizen and cunningly linked it to the revolution.

And just when the generals thought they had managed to hijack the revolution, they were in for a big surprise.

Emboldened by the power they’ve got and by the American support, the generals dared to propose a new draft for a constitution that could only pave the way for a military fascism and this is where they went wrong.  This blatant exploitation on part of the military council triggered the pouring of thousands into Tahrir Square once again in what is now dubbed “the second revolution”.

AT:  The military council is now promising presidential elections before July of 2012.  Is this a satisfactory response to the current uprising? Will the Egyptian people accept this or will they view it as an attempt by the military to divert world attention from its ongoing crackdown? Furthermore, do Egyptians accept the military as a caretaker government? 

AE: Egyptians didn’t flock back to Tahrir Square to demand elections. The protesters in Tahrir Square have made it clear that they don’t want the military council as a caretaker and moreover they insist that the council should step aside and hand over power to a civilian salvation government. In January the protesters in Tahrir Square wanted Mubarak to step down, and in November they wanted the military to step aside.

AT:  Were you surprised to hear the US State Department initially praising the “exercise of self-restraint and professionalism” of the Egyptian security forces with respect to the present demonstrations?

AE:  There seems to be a growing number of people in and around the Tahrir Square angry at being fired on by weapons supplied from countries like the US, making nice noises about democracy and restraint in Egypt. The US government and its weapon companies continue to supply tools of repression, usually for profit, to those who they well know will use them to violate human rights and repress their own citizens.

So once again the unexpected course of the Egyptian revolution – and contrary to the conspiracy theorists who view the Arab revolutions as orchestrated by the CIA & the neo-cons – has exposed the flagrant American double standards in the Middle East and especially in regard to the Arab spring.

The mere fact that protesters refused to meet Mrs. Clinton, the American secretary of state, on her first visit to Cairo after the ouster of Mubarak should tell us how the revolutionary youths of Egypt view the United States’ stance on their revolution.

AT: Do you see a connection between the Egyptian military and possible US and Israel future plans for Egypt?    

AE: I doubt the Egyptian military would undertake any move that could jeopardize its patriotic history, but I would certainly be relieved if this current top command of Egypt military could be replaced soon.  No matter how we look at it, those generals of Egypt military council are part of the old regime.

Indeed our reading into the current turmoil and change gripping Egypt and the rest of the Arab world is bound to open our eyes to a brand new Arab world in the making right now – but not the Condoleezza Rice’s new Middle East. New forces are emerging and the United States will soon have to relinquish its old diplomacy in Middle East that relied mainly on the so called strong allies/dictators and try to prepare for the rise of a new political front – most probably of Islamists – that will rule in Tunisia, Libya, and Cairo and maybe Syria.

AT:  What is happening in Egypt today, and what is the mood of the people?

AE: The parliamentary polls opened amid escalating protests that reject the newly appointed prime minister and a build-up of public opinion that demands the generals must go back to their barracks. The general mood is split between the youths who seem determined to take the revolution to the farthest limit and the older generation who believe that stability and compromise is what the country needs right now.  It is split between the conservative front who thinks it is time we gave our support for the Muslim Brotherhood (the longtime outlawed Islamist political group) and the liberal groups who, despite their modest preliminary showing in the parliamentary polls, believe that we should separate the mosque from the state.

In that sense, you could say the current struggle is between the old and the new or the past and future; in other words, between the conservatives and the liberals. But I don’t think Egypt, the land of moderate Islam and the liberal hub of the Arab world, will get lost as long as the Tahrir Square spirit remains with us.

Peter Bohmer has been an organizer and participant in the struggle for social and economic justice since the 1960s. In recent years, his political activities have taken him to Venezuela, Cuba, Greece and a number of US cities. He teaches political economy and has been a faculty member at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA since 1987.

Peter and I go back over twenty years. The conversation that follows is but one of many we have had since we met. We share it as a springboard for thought and discussion. At the same time, we do not claim any special knowledge and pretend to no higher wisdom. We hope that the dialogue is received in the spirit of revolutionary camaraderie.

Ron Jacobs: Do you remember last spring you said in an email (during the Arab Spring stuff before NATO and Libya) that this could have the same impact as 1968? Can you briefly explain that perception?

Peter Bohmer: I was very inspired by the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt beginning at the end of last year and early this year, 2011. The growing numbers in the face of murderous repression, the courage, the participatory democratic process of the occupiers, and the call in their statements and in the actual occupation for democracy and economic and social justice really resonated with me and captivated me.

Movements and uprisings tend to spread within and between nations as people begin to feel that there are alternatives to resignation to the status quo and the sense of powerlessness that so many people feel. When I said that I hoped 2011 would also be a world historic year, I thought it was somewhat likely these movements and upsurges would burst forth first in countries where there was growing economic inequality and poverty, where austerity programs were in place and where the majority of the population had no power over the direction and policies of their country. I thought of places as ripe for major rebellion such as Greece which I had visited in September 2010 where the IMF and the European Union was increasingly calling the shots and particularly in other nations in North Africa and the Middle East where the people were following what was happening in the region’s largest country.

Although the resistance to budget cuts in Washington Stare where I live was somewhat limited, I also thought it possible that the examples of the occupation in Egypt and the labor led protests in Madison against their Tea Party Governor, Scott Walker’s frontal attack on State workers and their unions would spread throughout the U.S.

RJ: And now we have the occupy movement, which seems to be inspired by the events in Tahrir Square. Despite it’s indecisiveness in its agenda, it has captured the hopes of many and the wrath of most of the corporate right wing. I have concerns about what I consider a lack of focus but at the same time there is a part of me that understands that the current political understanding of people in the US would reject something more directed. In fact there are those in the occupy movement that lump unions right up there with corporations. What this says to me is that they are confusing union leadership with the rank and file and misunderstanding the role of unions in a capitalist economy, not to mention an unawareness of that history. Nonetheless these types of political misconceptions exist. Is the movement a step forward?

PB: As a result of observation and participation in the still-growing “Occupy Movement”, an alternative to the pervasive feelings of powerlessness and resignation are emerging. There has been for quite some time in the United States widespread opposition to the growing inequality of income and wealth, to total corporate control over all parts of our life, to global warming, to a government that tortures and is totally beholden to Wall Street, to homelessness and losing our homes, to unemployment and underemployment, to growing debt and poverty, to the imprisonment of over two million people, to militarism and endless wars, and this list is incomplete. At the same time, resistance although greater than reported in the mainstream media has been somewhat limited and ineffective. The importance of this movement is that active resistance is increasingly being seen as valid and the right thing to do. There is a growing feeling beyond the occupiers that hopelessness and escape or maybe voting for the lesser of two evils are not the only options.

Common to the growth of powerful social movements have been people who are willing to resist the status quo and take a stand who by their bold actions strike a chord with much larger numbers of people. This causes them to then change for at least a period of time the organization and activities of their lives and also change their values and ideology towards a less self-centered and me first system of belief and towards solidarity and cooperation, and towards a commitment to economic and social justice. This is happening right now, something is in the air.

Having a physical space which people occupy makes this movement visible and also possible for new people to join it. In Olympia, Washington, it is creating dialog and community between homeless people, young people, anarchists and other activists, retired people, etc (many people belong to more than one category). Although in Olympia and in many other places there are no visible demands and somewhat limited discussion of what kind of society we want and how to get there or what we want in the short and medium run, occupiers needs for food, shelter and increasingly health care are being addressed and increasingly met as is the question of self-government. So to say, this occupation is not political is a very narrow definition of political.

RJ: If the occupy movement is at the forefront of left-oriented popular struggle, how do we move forward? What might forward look like?

I’ve been in a few occupation/liberation actions over the years, as have you. In fact, I think we were involved in two or three together. Anyhow, whether it was Peoples Park in 1979, a campus building sometime in the past few decades or the Occupy encampments in our respective towns, the fact is these actions usually end. Many of the ones I was involved with ended with some kind of compromise agreement between the bureaucrats involved and the occupiers. Peoples Park ended with a temporary truce and the park still a park. As I involve myself and observe the Occupy movement, I am also doing what I can to make it into something beyond the occupations. However, I am not sure what. We saw one possibility at the end of the Oakland Strike day when folks took over the foreclosed Travelers Aid building in Oakland’s downtown. Although the timing was obviously wrong (it’s not a good idea to occupy a building while the cops are down the street ready to kick ass), the impetus behind the action makes a lot of sense. In fact, I have been a part of discussions about squatting foreclosed buildings here in Vermont and also with folks online in other parts of the world.

A sidebar to this is how long can the occupations remain meaningful before they become like so much graffiti in the minds of the supportive observer?

PB: As of today, November 7, 2011, most of the occupations are maintaining their momentum. This is a very positive accomplishment. For example, in Olympia, many people in Occupy Olympia are looking ahead to November 28, 2011, to confront the Washington State Legislature when it is being called back into a special session by the Governor Gregoire, a Democrat, in order to make further cuts in a State budget that has already severely reduced needed spending for health care, for education at all levels and for poor people. Occupy Olympia is committed to maintaining the occupation of a downtown park at least until the legislative session and possibly beyond.

Nonetheless, as Michael Albert pointed out in his ZNet article, “Occupy to Self-Manage,” occupations and the related general assemblies, the decision-making group for most occupations, tend to decline over time in numbers and enthusiasm. So it is key to bring in new people and create an atmosphere that is welcoming of new people so that we do not wither away. Let us not unconsciously exclude people who have not been part of the left or activist communities. It is also important that we use our occupied sites as a base to for actions and education outside of our sites.

We need to consciously make movement building one of our goals of this phase of the Occupy Movement. This means developing organizations, institutions, and people who have a deepening analysis and critique of capitalism, with growing capacity and skills to confront this system, and to put forward and win non-reformist reforms. Hopefully this will last beyond these set of occupations. By non-reformist reforms, I mean reforms that meet people’s expressed needs, that build our understanding of the limits of capitalist reform, and that also build our capacity to struggle for and win more fundamental and radical transformation of this oppressive and unsustainable society.

For example, Occupy Olympia is trying to develop a set of tents where there would be free medical care, traditional and non-traditional, on-site. This would meet an important need and also point towards a system of free and universal health care as a basic human right. A next step could be to demand and/or occupy indoor and permanent space that could be used a free health clinic, to provide quality health care and also does popular education in the broader community that healthcare should not be a commodity.

I like the idea of creating housing by squatting in unoccupied buildings as you suggested in Oakland. Whatever we do must be done in a way that large numbers of people beyond the occupation understand and support our actions. That will increase the likelihood that if there is police and government repression our movement will grow rather than become isolated.

Overcoming defeatism and resignation and furthering community and beliefs in the importance of collective action is happening, that is a great start. We do not have the power during this period of the “Occupy Movement” to create a participatory socialist society nor even to seriously reduce the obscene inequality of income and wealth in this country. Hopefully some limited short-term goals will be won.

It is a long struggle. Building healthy networks, institutions, organizations within and between communities and cities; that create the basis for a more conscious, powerful and visionary and radical occupy movement in the not too distant future is a goal. It will make this current movement worth the time and effort and commitment of so many people throughout this country and beyond. Most of the specific occupations of space may come to a close in the not so distant future but the movement can and should continue.

RJ: There are those that say part of the reason the movement of the 1960s and early 1970s was able to be as effective as it was is because the establishment media covered it. Most the time, the coverage was negative, but the coverage itself spread the word and highlighted injustice. Since then, most of the movements against capitalism and its symptoms (war, poverty, environmental degradation, etc.) have been mostly ignored by that press. Occupy seems to be changing that. Perhaps it is because there are so many young middle class people involved, but nonetheless, the coverage is there. Consequently, the numbers may not be as big, but the message is reaching further, at least for now. Meanwhile, there are the new Internet social media. What’s your take on the role that these various media play today?

PB: Certainly in the 1960’s and early 1970’s, the mass media coverage of the protests, Black Freedom, anti-Vietnam war and the TV images of the U.S. war against Vietnam, and of the women’s liberation movement contributed to the growth of these movements. Probably even more important was a vibrant “underground” and radical press such as the Black Panther Party newspaper which was national, the Guardian which was also a national weekly newspaper and papers in many, many cities such as the Berkeley Tribe, the Old Mole (Cambridge, MA), the San Diego Street Journal and OB Rag (San Diego), and the Fifth Estate (Detroit). There were also important papers by the women’s liberation movement such as Off Our Backs, and the GI movement and a news service that provided news and graphics for these papers, Liberation News Service. These papers had significant circulation. They were an integral part of the new left and other movements of that period. Today these types of movement papers are few and far between although for example in Olympia, Works in Progress, plays that role to some extent. On the other hand, social media, particularly Facebook and Twitter, play an important role in spreading the word about actions although providing less context and analysis than the “underground” papers of the 60’s and early 70’s. Democracy Now today plays a very important and positive role in providing an alternative analysis to the mainstream media and in covering social movements such as the Occupy movement. So do websites such as Dissident Voice, Counterpunch, ZNet, and Alternews (among others). They lack some of the boldness and creativity of that earlier “underground press” but are very valuable. We need to tell our own stories.

The mainstream media has given a lot of coverage to Occupy Wall Street and the growing national movement. Although much of it is negative, it does as you say spread the word and has helped publicize the obscene economic inequality in the United States. I am not sure why it has gotten so much coverage. Its novelty may be a factor.

RJ: These last several months of worldwide anger organized against the neoliberal capitalist economy reminds me of a number of historical events. 1968 is but one. The Occupy movement is somewhat reminiscent of the IWW’s free speech crusade when their insistence on exercising their free speech rights by setting up soapboxes on street corners throughout the US West and the subsequent arrests and harassment by police exposed the myth of free speech in the US. Could this be that spectre that Karl Marx wrote about? Immanuel Wallerstein wrote in his book Antisystemic Movements about the years 1848 and 1968 as failed revolutions that ultimately changed the world’s consciousness in greater ways than the revolutions that preceded them (France 1789 and Russia 1917). “The fact that they were both unplanned and therefore in a profound sense spontaneous explains both facts,” he writes. “The fact that they failed and the fact that they transformed the world.” Perhaps the events of the past year and a half–from Greece to Egypt to Tunisia to Britain to Europe and North and South America–will be perceived similarly. I think it is much too early to tell. In the meantime, there is a growing surge of calls to converge for a number of actions in the spring.

PB: I think we are at the beginning of a huge upsurge, the beginning of a transformative social movement not just a movement that made a big splash for two months and then fades quickly. There will be setbacks. From what I saw and read, the demonstration in New York, today November 17th, was huge and powerful. The occupation of land may be winding down because of repression, the weather and fatigue but hopefully the Occupy movement will find new forms and really blossom in this coming spring. The high unemployment and poverty rates in the United States are not going to improve and may get worse. They are going to worsen in Greece, Italy, Portugal, Ireland, Spain and many other countries. The causes for action are not going to go way nor is the anger nor is the growing understanding of the need for collective action. We are part of a global movement. That capitalism is being named as the problem by many of the participants, not just the banks, is very exciting. Also necessary and beginning to happen although clearly a lot more needs to is a slowly growing awareness that anti-racism and the need for all forms of equality, economic, gender, racial, LGBT, is central both inside the movement and in the greater society.

The coordinated repression of many of the occupations, e.g., NY, Portland, Oakland, is clearly connected to the fear that much of the economic and political elites have of the potential power of this movement. Because of the widespread anger and the resonance this movement has with growing numbers of people, police brutality has rather than scared people increased participation. Bold and creative actions need to continue and grow. So does popular education of participants in these occupations and of the rest of the 99% in the causes of the economic and social crisis and of all forms of oppression. Equally important is further discussion of what kind of society we want and how to get there in the short, medium and long run. We need to consciously build organizations and institutions that can improve people’s lives now, particularly those suffering the most, while also building the capacity to revolutionize this society.

The movement is much bigger than those who have been occupying various sparks and sites. It includes those who have in ways big and small contributed to it, e.g., bringing food down to the occupiers, discussed and supported it at union meeting. One challenge here in Olympia and the Pacific Northwest more generally is to be more inclusive, to welcome and listen to and reach out and include more people who identify with the goals of the Occupy Movement but do not feel comfortable at the sites or the marches or direct actions.

It is a very exciting time to be alive. There is something in the air that I haven’t felt for a long time. In spring, 2013 I intend to co-teach a full time program at the Evergreen State College comparing and contrasting the liberation and social movements of 1968 to 2011 in the U.S. and globally. There will be a lot to examine for 2011 and we still have six weeks to go. I am confident 2012 will be hotter than 2011.

Power to the People!

RJ: I myself think it’s a bit early to tell if this is the spectre that Karl wrote about or if Wallerstein is correct. The underlying politics of the movement are too muddy right now. As far as I have seen, the relationship between the US wars and occupations and the 1% has only begun to become part of the conversation. This relationship needs to be addressed and brought to the forefront of the movement.

There are those in the movement who are anti-leftist (and I don’t mean the various non-left anarchists) and many more that haven’t consciously considered left politics. However, I can’t help but agree with you when you say it is an exciting time to be alive. This is especially the case after the events of N17 in New York, Portland, Oregon, Los Angeles and elsewhere. Indeed, although the numbers were smaller here in Burlington, VT., the spirit of resistance and hope present across the nation and in Greece and Italy on N17 permeated the march and teach-in here, as well. I concur: Power to the People!

An example: During a meeting of environmentalists about shaping the public conversation on our most pressing ecological crises, folks were wrestling with how to present an honest analysis in accessible language — how to talk about the bad news and the need for radical responses, without turning people off. During the discussion about the effects of climate change, Wright offered a simple suggestion for a slogan: “No more water, the fire next time.”

Those words from a black spiritual, made famous by James Baldwin’s borrowing for his 1963 book The Fire Next Time, are usually invoked metaphorically. Wright was suggesting that we might want to consider the phrase literally. After a summer of drought and forest fires in Texas where I live, Wright’s comment reminded me that climate disruption isn’t part of some science-fiction future, but is unfolding around us in ways that are both complex and hard to predict, but devastating simple: We’re in deep trouble, ecologically and culturally, as we try to face up to unprecedented planetary problems in a society in denial.

Wright is one of our most astute observers of these troubles. His willingness to face these issues, and his ability to grasp the interplay of complex systems, is no surprise to readers of his book The Death of Ramon Gonzalez: The Modern Agricultural Dilemma, first published in 1990 and revised for a 2005 edition. Looking at one region in Mexico, Wright explains how political and economic power, combined with the arrogance of experts who believe they have all the answers, have radically changed people, communities, and land — mostly for the worse.

Though Wright speaks bluntly about these grim realities, he hasn’t given up trying to change the trajectory of a society that so often denies or minimizes the threat. A retired professor of environmental studies at California State University, Sacramento, Wright is the chair of the board of The Land Institute, which is committed to the research and organizing necessary for a truly sustainable agriculture. His writing also focuses on those issues — he is co-author of To Inherit the Earth: The Landless Movement in the Struggle for a New Brazil (with Wendy Wolford) and Nature’s Matrix: Linking Agriculture, Conservation, and Food Sovereignty (with Ivette Perfecto and John Vandermeer).

Because Wright has a knack for presenting complex ideas in plain language, I asked him to respond to some crucial questions about how to understand our predicament and options. Can we face reality honestly without feeling overwhelmed? Wright suggests we can.

Robert Jensen: Your invocation of “the fire next time,” with its Biblical roots, suggests a moral warning and the potential catastrophe if we are not up to the moral task. Before we get to questions of politics and science, what do you think is the right moral framework for understanding the ecological crises?

Angus Wright: There certainly is a moral question, but I think we in the environmental movement have wasted a lot of time dealing with it at the wrong level. I get frustrated with the deep tendency of so many Americans to be more worried about the task of saving their souls rather than solving the problem. I am not as interested in the purity of intention or personal practice as I am concerned about correctly identifying the nature of problems and getting to work in an organized way to solve them.

The emphasis, for example, on whether individuals are hypocritical when their personal consumption is out of sync with their political/ecological views has been a diversion. It undermines effective organization and helps to maintain the myth that it is personal rather than collective action that really matters. When we think we are saving ourselves, we tend to become self-righteous in ways that separate us from the other people we need to work with in order to effect societal change. The important moral question is social, not individual. How do we collectively figure out ways to live that don’t require that we destroy the planet’s capacity to sustain life?

RJ: What are the two or three most important things we need to understand about humans, psychologically and politically, if we are to avoid that destruction?

AW: Humans are capable of immense creativity and sacrifice, which has been demonstrated in crisis situations such as wars, famines, migrations, and in the building and defense of homes and communities. In my work, I have been frequently reminded of the incredible sacrifices Mexican immigrants make to earn a little money to send back to their families over years, sacrifices that have both an individual and a community aspect. Many of us know how hard and how creatively our parents and ancestors worked to provide us with the lives we now take for granted. Of course, such effort can have negative as well as positive aspects — for example, the creation of the majority European culture of the Americas at the expense of Native Americans and Africans. People are also capable of stunning complacency, greed, and divisiveness.

The secret we seek is what inspires humans to act positively and creatively in the face of huge challenges. As humanity faces the environmental crisis, this is its greatest challenge: How do we elicit the kind of collective and individual action and creativity that will be needed? I think previous experience implies that it cannot be fear alone, nor opportunity alone, nor persuasion alone, nor organization alone, but a blend of these elements, with much else. We have been able to lump these things together successfully in the past in something called patriotism — a powerful force for good and ill — and now we need something like a planetary patriotism. But no planetary patriotism can be built without acknowledging and dealing with the major things that divide us as well as the challenge that must unite us. Putting on a happy face won’t cut it.

RJ: If we have a considerable body of knowledge concerning the seriousness of the ecological crises and we have the capacity to respond to threats, what are the key impediments to change? Is the problem in the political leadership of recent decades? The economic system? Something we can’t yet identify?

AW: One problem is an economic system that impels each company within it to pursue growth — each company must seek new investment funds by demonstrating greater growth potential than its competitors. Another problem is a political system that is so heavily corrupted by corporate cash, exacerbated by the absurd legal fiction that a corporation is a person with constitutional rights to free speech. Without those problems, we could have the kind of largely publicly funded campaigns adopted by other countries. I also think that for all its virtues, the constitutional checks and balances built into our system have brought us to gridlock — we really might want to consider the advantages of a parliamentary system in which the executive branch is headed by the leader of the majority party, as in England and many other parliamentary democracies.

We have to be enlightened enough to take aggressive and expensive actions primarily for the benefit of our children and grandchildren. While individuals and families have been able to do this throughout history, it has proven very difficult for whole societies to do so. All these barriers are so daunting that we become overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of it all. Here we face fundamental philosophical and psychological problems at both the individual and collective levels.

RJ: You said the solutions aren’t going to be individual. But how do you evaluate the efforts of people who focus on their everyday lives? That can range from being diligent about recycling, to buying “green,” to biking to work, to planting a vegetable garden. If we don’t naively believe those things can solve all our problems, are they worth doing?

AW: Our most important problems can only be solved by collective action — new policies and laws taken by government. That requires that we act, above all, as citizens. I have watched over the past 40 years as nearly every important institution in our society has gradually shifted to encouraging us to see ourselves as individuals and consumers as opposed to group participants and citizens. We are all aware of this in advertising, but it has also become a powerful trend in education and in government itself. We are encouraged to believe that we can bring the changes we need by exercising our “consumer vote” in the marketplace more effectively than by exercising our citizenship — not just in voting, but also in public debate, in participating in political parties, in the exercise of our professional judgment, in educating our children, in participation in labor unions and professional associations, in speaking out in our communities. Our “vote” through marketplace purchases can only bring about very limited change, and by thinking of ourselves more as consumers than as citizens we diminish our very dignity as human beings. We become a mouth that eats rather than a voice that speaks.

That said, I am all for making the changes at the individual level that can help to create a culture of frugality, help us realize that we don’t really need the great quantity of junk our civilization produces, help us understand that we can make major social changes while actually improving our lives. Most of us want sociability and conviviality more than we want consumer goods. We can set a good example for others by showing that we can live more happily by consuming less. All of this can also help us live within a discipline of conscious choice rather than of allowing advertising to manipulate us.

RJ: In my experience, academics tend to focus on narrow questions they think they can answer. You seem to gravitate toward big questions that defy definitive conclusions. I wonder if that’s because of your training and teaching — you’re a historian who taught environmental studies. We might say that the object of your inquiry has been everything that happened before today, and the interconnectedness of everything happening today. What lessons have you learned about intellectual life from your career?

AW: When Wes Jackson (president of The Land Institute) recruited me to help him create an environmental studies program at Cal State-Sacramento, I was the all-purpose humanities and social science person in a small core faculty. I learned all I could from Wes about biology and genetics, and from other colleagues about oil and mineral depletion, nuclear power, city and regional planning, environmental law. It was a wonderful kind of second graduate school experience that lasted through an entire career.

I had always been attracted academically to what might be called the “pan-disciplines” such as geography, anthropology, and history, disciplines that can reasonably take on almost any topic in human affairs. Salina, our small Kansas city, was known nationally for having one of the best public libraries of its size, and I spent a lot of time camped out in its stacks. My parents — intensely intellectual people who were too poor to go to college — assumed that any reasonable and moral person would be interested in nearly everything, and they hadn’t been beaten into submission by professors to think differently. They were good models who were eager for knowledge of all kinds. They were looking for clear words and straightforward thinking, and they assumed that good thinking led to social responsibility and political action, to which they were dedicated.

RJ: Thinking about that need for clarity, one last question. As an environmentalist, you can’t ignore the stark reality of the data about our ecological crises. As a historian, you can’t ignore the record of human successes and failures. When you weigh all that up, what advice do you have for how we should face the future? Many people find it hard to face the changes that are likely coming, which I once heard you describe as “dramatic and potentially highly unpleasant.” Are we facing “the fire next time”? Is there a way out of the trap we’ve set for ourselves?

AW: I don’t know if there is a way out, but we have to try. My own expectations are pessimistic because I don’t see enough people having sufficient awareness, understanding, and determination to bring about the major changes we need.

And of course, contradicting what I just said, we don’t really have to try. We only really have to try if we want to maintain our self-respect. If we want to stumble forward drunk while whistling in the dark, we could choose that. I maintain a certain faith that many people are going to make the right choices, and we can hope that is enough. I think Gramsci had it right when he said that he lived with “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” And you have to take that seriously from a guy who wrote while in prison for his political beliefs.

Denmark elected a staunch right winger as prime minister. Denmark joined in military attacks with imperialist states against weaker states. I turned to journalist Ron Ridenour, who lives in Denmark, to give a first-hand voice to what is taking place.

I support revolution against occupation, oppression, exploitation; however, I hold that the long-term viability of a revolution must be rooted in the people — not in a personality. Therefore, I have reservations about “leaders” — for example, Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez — who (besides implementing socialism for the masses) seemingly covet the esteem, if not the perks, of governmental office. Ridenour speaks Spanish, has lived in Cuba, written many books about the revolution there, so he is an informed go-to person for reflections on the revolution there and elsewhere.

Ridenour, notably, has also given voice to the very marginalized plight of the Tamils in Sri Lanka, has long been active in journalism, has his own website, and in his own words, “Besides using words in an effort to eradicate racism, inequality and wars, I have been an activist against wars, racism, chauvinism and for socialist solidarity.”

This week, I interviewed Ridenour about Denmark, Cuba, and the leaderless revolutionary stirrings against the financial elitists.

Kim Petersen: Denmark is supposed to be a peace-loving state with an envious social safety net. You pointed out in a recent article that the Danish political landscape has slanted rightwards? What caused this? And how can progressivist politics become predominant?

Ron Ridenour: The causes are several, both historical and contemporary. Leftist parties and unionists in Denmark, like people in most of the world, lost faith and hope in socialist-communist solutions due to the atrocities and corruption of Communist parties in power, and then with the fall of those governments in eastern Europe. Even those governments still calling themselves communists base their economies on capitalism today.

One of the main problems of nearly all leftist parties and governments is that they do not believe that the mass—unionists, unemployed, family farmers, students—are actually capable of ruling “sensibly.” One of the best of benevolent “dictators,” Fidel Castro, does not believe such either. Most leaders believe in themselves and not the mass. So, in fact, real socialism has yet to be attempted. No party in power has ever really begun the process of educating workers+ to use political power and then turning over power to the working class, as our ideology calls for.

Another factor, especially Danish, is a national inferiority complex. That is, “We’re just a little country, you know,” so we can’t expect to run things ourselves. This was actually a folksy saying of one of Denmark’s best known politicians, Erhard Jacobsen. For decades, Denmark relied upon Germany and since WWII it relies on the US, first for its economic Marshall Plan and since for its military might. And today Denmark is not a peace-loving state. It is involved in four wars alongside its Big Daddy.

Then there is the national complex of indifference, or “ligegladhed.” There has been a lot of charitable giving of money to the poor abroad but little engagement or true solidarity. Even the left-ish parliamentary party, Unity List (Enhedslisten), opposes support for opponents of the terrorist terror laws, or for armed resistance by the invaded of US-NATO wars.

One can never answer fully what causes policy without taking the economy into account. Danes still live comfortably economically, almost all, in relationship with others even European neighbors. I think that the left parties rely on parliamentarian politics because of this. They do not believe that significant numbers of people will actually support grass roots radical struggles. And the unions long ago aligned themselves with capitalist reformism and oppose extra-parliamentary struggles, including sustaining strikes, of any consequence. Why risk being arrested, losing your job and then your mortgage, your car or one of them simply to do the “right thing”?

How can progressive (?) politics become predominant? Well, if progressive means pushing for reformist policies within capitalism that is becoming dominant now for the two Danish so-called socialist parties in parliament. (Unity List and People’s Party/SF), and it has been so for the major Social Democratic party for decades. But if progressive means radical, then the economy has to collapse, or when it is in deep crises as it is now, then grass roots groups have to take to the streets and stay there just as is possibly happening with Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Uproar, perhaps in Spain and Greece. We have to kick the parliamentary-based politics out of our movements. We have to feel the power in ourselves and push the politicians out.

Yes, there must also be strong unions and workers must strike and/or join Occupy Wall Street. Radical-revolutionary political parties must educate and protest with sensible and morally just programs. They should not act against the more autonomous oriented grass roots groups but in parallel.

KP: This touches on the previous questions, in many countries, people scoffed that Americans could “elect” a born-again, foot-in-mouth, right-winger such as George W. Bush as president. Yet Canadians soon found themselves with Prime Minister Stephen Harper (a man to the right of Bush), and Danes wound up with Anders Fogh Rasmussen as prime minister (also a hawkish right-winger). Why do you think this is happening in much of the western world?

RR: Precisely because the left gave up actually being left. It was too difficult and most got too comfortable within the capitalist system. The left adopted the bourgeois democratic premise of making policy within parliaments whose role is to protect finance power. In Copenhagen, Wall Street is Børsen and its building is literally next door to parliament and the executive government.

When finance crises occur, you only have two sources to acquire money to pay for it: from the workers-pensioners-students or from the owners of capital and industry. The latter approach would mean that the rich will refuse to pay for their crises and so, you must nationalize their “private” property, that is, the production centers where wealth originates and the banks that manipulate the wealth for a few. But that takes guts, struggle, sacrifice.

PM Fogh Rasmussen was awarded the greater job of being the commander of NATO. He is loved by the warmongers on Wall Street and the Pentagon, and hated by the peoples who are invaded, but all the parliamentary parties here congratulated him. He should have been ostracized as well as the biggest of capitalists here, AP Møller-Mærsk, the world’s biggest shipper and a major warmonger. Instead his supermarkets, which take in half the food sales, are much of the left’s favorite stores because they are cheap.

We have to find that indignation that many Arabs have found, that some Spanish and Greeks are finding, that is part of OWS, and that us oldies had in the 60s-70s. We have to practice what we preach. Boycott the worst companies (like Mærsk and Coca-Cola…). Go on strike. Refuse to do the system’s bidding. Find our inner strength and alternative life styles. Act in solidarity with the oppressed-exploited-invaded.

KP: The progressivist image of Denmark is further diminished now with its participation in the NATO (currently headed by Fogh Rasmussen) invasion of a sovereign state. There are reports of Danish troops engaging in torture and massacres. How do you read this playing out on the streets in Denmark?

RR: Unfortunately, nothing is happening regarding these atrocities. There is one small group of pacifists who conduct a vigil in front of parliament daily since the beginning of the war against Afghanistan. But it is more of a curiosity than a threat. The anti-war movement died, in part because the Unity party dropped out of protesting because its leaders wanted “influence” with lucrative jobs in parliament. And the climate movement has so far refused to take up wars as part of their anti-pollution protests albeit wars are a major cause of pollution and adverse climate changes. I think they are just too scared of being accused of being outsiders or radicals….

KP: You hinted at a “shaky future” for the Cuban revolution. Do you see Cuba falling further away from the socialism won through the revolution? Who will stand to benefit (or lose) from Cuba’s opening to capitalism?

RR: Yes, I am afraid that what I foresaw in that piece nearly a year ago it occurring rapidly now. More and more openings for capitalism have been adopted even before the Communist party national conference body has met and decided on precise policies to propose to the state. Raul Castro as both leader of the state and the party, following his brother, has already decided. Now, private property (housing) can be bought and sold; cars can be bought in hard currency at big prices, which very few Cubans can acquire legitimately; small enterprises are encouraged to employ workers, and thereby opening up officially for exploitation of labor.

Who will benefit is a new class of small capitalists and real estate hustlers, and speculation will become widespread. Relatives of Cubans in Miami and Spain will be even more privileged than those Cubans without such remittances. Wall Street will benefit in the end, because the blockade against Cuba will be lifted in the not distant future. Other Wall Streets in the world already benefit.

KP: In a summer article on the state of the revolution in Cuba, you defined ethics partially as “We act so that no one person, race or ethnic group is either over or under another.” You added, “We struggle to create equality for all.” If, indeed, the revolution is a revolution of the people and not about a personality or personalities, what does the unbroken political “leadership” of Fidel Castro from 1959 to 2008 speak to such ethics?

You also quoted from Che that “one must have a great deal of humanity and a strong sense of justice and truth in order not to fall into extreme dogmatism and cold scholasticism, into an isolation from the masses.”

In general I support much of what Fidel Castro has helped to bring about in Cuba, but I find that his one-man leadership of the revolution is dangerous in that it embeds the revolution in a person (in this case in a family) rather than in the people. Is Fidel Castro the only person besides his brother fit to “lead” (and do the people require a leader?) the revolution for Cubans?

RR: The points you quote from my piece and your question are part of dialogue, both fraternal and violently hostile, the non/anti-capitalist left has had for more than a century. In my own view, after half a century of struggle and thought that also embraces these points, my conclusion is NO to your question. And that, of course, holds true for Hugo Chavez (and all other leaders), albeit most of the left in Venezuela, as well as a large sector of the general population, believes Chavez is unique and most be their one and only leader for, perhaps, a lifetime. That was also the case with the Cuban people and Fidel for the first decade or so. Well, that is what the Arab uproar wants to end, albeit those gruesome dictators cannot be compared to the kind-hearted Fidel.

The main problem with one leader syndrome is that it saps the vision, inspiration and energy from the mass. I have seen this happening before my eyes during the eight years I worked in Cuba and lived with the people. They lost hope that socialism could actually be the best solution when they always had to wait for answers/permission/resources/materials from above. The same happened in Russia and Eastern Europe.

Now it has come to past that most Cubans, I think, really don’t believe socialism is worthwhile and they want a chance to try supply-demand marketing. This will split the people into classes and further antagonize the true solidarity amongst themselves and with other peoples that they had assiduously built. And that is the essence of what Che meant in the cited quotation—the state and the party have become isolated from the mass and they see no other way out than capitalism with some bourgeois democratic-oriented reforms, such as what the big powers are endeavoring to impose on the Arab rebellion.

Another major mistake that Cuban leaders made is not separating some powers between the state and the Communist party. As the unity strategy goes in Cuba when the state makes a policy for short-term economic benefit or for some diplomatic reason—such as backing the genocidal, brutal governments of Sri Lanka against the entire Tamil population—the party is disallowed from criticizing this or for showing solidarity with, for instance, the much discriminated-against Tamils.

KP: There is growing dissent in the United States, but it is marginalized and propagandized in the corporate media (nothing surprising there). The Occupy Wall Street movement in the US seems to be gathering momentum, having staying power, and perhaps causing ripples in the system. If the grassroots activism proves influential in the US, how do you think this might affect Europe?

RR: I see that 66% of the people Gallop polled in the US want the rich to be appropriately taxed, and 54% want all politicians out of a job. It is that spirit that has to take root, and that is growing in Europe too.

The most important and radical elements in these protests are that they are 1) anti-capitalist, 2) not led by self-interest seeking persons or parties. In fact, OWS is more radical than what we created in the 60s-70s, because it is primarily aimed at the true enemy: capitalism, which is the main cause for adverse climate changes and aggressive wars.

The first solidarity demos with OWS in Denmark are taking place Saturday (October 15) alongside hundreds other cities in scores of lands. This initiative was taken by the indignados in Spain. There, and in other countries on the verge of bankruptcy such as Greece, there is greater potential for sustained radical movements than there is right now in Scandinavia and Germany. But this economic crisis will not just melt any time soon—a spell of anger is mounting. I think in a few European countries protests will arise and continue sporadically, at least.
I see it as a positive development, in fact, that in the recent Danish election, the so-called red block won and with it the Unity party and SF have dropped key programmatic elements of any socialist nature. I think the Unity Party/SF sellout will help create a backlash that could become a true protest movement. But we must also recognize that too few people are really hurting enough economically here to cause them to develop a real sustained fight. I hope I’m wrong.

In Denmark, we must not go to a demo to hear jazz music and a handful of “leaders” speak and then go home to TV or to a cafe for beer and wine. We must find that inner indignation and with it empower ourselves. We must develop leadership in all of us. We must take over tactical areas and stay there. We have one big problem, even greater than the might of police brutality, and that is the weather. Already temperatures are falling to freezing in the evenings in some of Europe and in NYC it is getting cold too. We might have to postpone our staying power over the cold, raining, snowy winter months and return in even greater numbers and strength in the spring.

I close with a quote from Naomi Klein’s talk at Wall Street, October 6. “We have picked a fight with the most powerful economic and political forces on the planet. That’s frightening… Always be aware that there will be a temptation to shift to smaller targets… Don’t give in to that temptation… Let’s treat this beautiful movement as if it is the most important thing in the world.” “It is!” and she points to her favorite sign: “I care about you!”

Further south in the Americas, civil society organization over the past decade brought social movement leaders to state power and marginalized peoples’ rights to national agendas. In this interview, Uruguayan intellectual and journalist, Raúl Zibechi, gives us a South American perspective of the momentous changes taking place globally, through a focus on the inaugural mobilizations in the Middle East. As the Occupy Wall Street protests gain ground, U.S. activists may well engage with such locally rooted yet transnational conversations aimed at the transformation of globalized power structures.

Raúl Zibechi is one of the foremost political theorists writing on, and working with, social movements in Latin America. His work combines acute, generative and ethical analyses of socio-political developments in Latin America with collaborative efforts to support grassroots transformation in the region. He is international section editor of the acclaimed Uruguayan weekly Brecha, lecturer and researcher with the Multiversidad Fransiscana de América Latina and a regular contributor to the Americas Policy Program and to La Jornada in Mexico. His recent books include Dispersing Power (2006, English translation 2010) and Territorios en Resistencia (2008). In order to contextualize the following interview with Zibechi in his wider body of work, our conversation is interspersed with selected translations from some of his essays previously available only in Spanish.

From “The Revolutions of Ordinary People”

(First published in La Jornada, 03 June 2011. Translation of entire article available here.)

The inherited and still hegemonic conception of revolution must be revised, and, in fact, is being revised by current events. Revolution as exclusively focused on the capture of state power is being replaced by another concept of revolution, more complex and integral, which does not exclude a state-centred strategy but supersedes and goes beyond it. In any case, the conquest of state power is a bend in a far longer trajectory, one which seeks something that cannot be achieved from within state institutions: to create a new world.

Traditional politics – anchored in forms of representation that replace collective subjects with managerial professionals, professionals of deception – are of little use in the creation of a new world. Instead, a new world that is different from the current one implies rehearsing and experimenting with horizontal social relations, in sovereign, self-controlled and autonomous spaces, in which no one imposes on or directs the collective…

Beyond their diverse circumstances, the Tahrir Square and Puerta del Sol movements in Cairo and in Madrid, form part of the genealogy of “All of them must go!” declared in the 2001 Argentinian revolt, the 2000 Cochabamba Water War, the 2003 and 2005 Bolivian Gas Wars and the 2006 Oaxaca commune, to mention only the urban cases. These movements all share two characteristics: the curbing of those in power and the opening of spaces for direct democracy and collective participation without representatives.

Cristina Cielo: Is such a concept of revolution based on horizontal relations similar to Hardt and Negri’s concept of the multitude? What is the difference between their multitude and your idea of dispersed power?

Raúl Zibechi: Hardt and Negri’s multitude is linked to post-Fordism and to non-material work in cognitive capitalism. This mode of production is still in the minority in Latin America and I believe in the Arab world as well. So while it is interesting, their idea of multitude cannot be employed to understand what is happening here. My take on the collective is quite different. We live in societies that are “variegated”, an interesting concept developed by the Bolivian René Zavaleta Mercado to describe social relations in his country. These are societies in which many different types of traditional and modern social relations co-exist.

The best example of this is the Andean market, or the urban market in the peripheries of cities like Buenos Aires. These are spaces in which many families live together in a small area, with various businesses that combine production and sales in different fields, with diverse modes of employment – familial, salaried, in kind, commissioned – that is, a “variegated” mode that implies diverse and complex social relations that are interwoven and combined. In this way, if one of these relationships is modified, the rest are as well…

My proposal of “dispersing power” is rooted in communities in movement, non-formal communities, which, once set into motion, can disperse state power. How? Simply because they are composed of mobile powers… These cannot confront the state frontally, because they are annihilated. They surround it, embrace it, paralyse it, penetrate it subtly. That is what we saw in Tahrir when protesters slept under tanks, when women approached soldiers.

CC: Reports on Tunisia and Egypt’s uprisings emphasized the use of Facebook, Twitter and the internet as media for the horizontal organization of the protests. Your own work has focused on the territorial character of Latin American social movements. What are the implications of the differences between the virtual spaces of Arab mobilizations and the physical territories of the Latin American movements?

RZ: I don’t believe in virtual spaces. Spaces are always material as well as symbolic. It’s another matter to speak of virtual media of communication among people in movement…. For me, territories are those places in which life is lived in an integral sense, they are settlements, as we say in Latin America. These have existed for a long time in rural areas: indigenous communities or settlements of Brazil’s Landless Movement, ancestral lands or lands recuperated in the struggle.

What was new in the 1970s onward was the proliferation of urban land occupations. In some cities, more that 70% of urban land, and therefore of households, are illegal yet legitimate occupations. In some cases, this marks the beginning of another type of social organization, in which semi-craftwork production – including urban gardens – is combined with popular markets and informal modes of distribution. In the decisive moments of struggles against the State or at times of profound crisis, these territories become “resistor territories,” that is, spaces that are in some senses liberated from state power and from which challenges to the system may be launched.

CC: What is the importance of urban spaces in popular mobilizations?

RZ: There is a double use of spaces. One is the daily spaces of the neighbourhoods, the markets, all the spaces of daily socialization. The other is the space of protest, the mega-space such as Tahrir Square in Cairo or the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires. These spaces are occupied for a time, sometimes for longer periods such as the Puerta del Sol in Madrid, but they are not permanent spaces in which people live their daily lives, because they have to go to work, go home to sleep, etc.

It seems to me necessary to make this distinction and at the same time to establish links between both kinds of urban spaces. I agree with James Scott’s point that people tend to “rehearse” their public actions in spaces that are distant from power, spaces that they can control and in which they feel secure. In contemporary cities, those spaces are the markets, the churches or mosques, social or cultural clubs, youth gangs. It is important to understand what is happening in those spaces, because it is from there that people come out to take Tahrir Square. It is in those spaces that powerful rebellions are spun, that is why they are so important. And, of course, the family. The changes in family, the role of women, of children, the number of children, all of these are indications of what is to come. I don’t believe that great popular uprisings can take place without some shift in the role of patriarchy in the home.

From “This is No Time to be Given to Distraction”

(First published in La Jornada, 25 February 2011. Translation of entire article available here)

With the Arab revolts, the global systemic crisis enters a new phase, more unpredictable and increasingly beyond control. Until now, the main actors have been the financial oligarchs, the powerful multinationals and the leading governments, particularly the United States and China, followed at some distance by institutions such as the G-20. Now, as popular sectors around the world enter the scene, a momentous shift has taken place. It implies a deepening and speeding up of the global transformations taking place…

The activation of popular sectors modifies our analytic axes, and above all, imposes ethical choices. The scenarios of inter-state relations will increasingly collide with the scenarios of emancipatory struggles…

We are entering into a period of systemic chaos that at some moment will shed light on a new order, perhaps better, perhaps worse than the capitalist order. That system was born with the demographic catastrophe of the Black Plague, which killed a third of the European population over the span of a few years. It will not surrender on tiptoes and with fine manners, but rather in the midst of chaos and barbarity, as with Gaddafi’s regime.

From “The Arab Revolts and Strategic Thinking”

(First published in America Latina en movimiento, 4 February 2011. Translation of entire article available here)

It is a matter of understanding the lines of force, the relations of power, the strong and weak points in international relations understood as a system. It is like understanding that the bricks on a wall are what sustains the structure; if these bricks are removed or affected, the whole building – despite its appearance of stability – may tumble….

To say we are traversing a systemic crisis, however, is not to say that the capitalist system is in a terminal crisis. The point, rather, is that the international system will not continue to function as it has since its last great re-structuring, which took place more or less in 1945, at the end of the Second World War. While systemic analyses do not pretend to specify exact dates for such profound changes, they do indicate stages characterized by important tendencies. For example: the crisis of U.S. hegemony. [Some of these systemic shifts include] not only the decline of U.S. power, but also the growth of the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China, to which South Africa has now been added). Turkey’s geopolitical shifts have also been noted, as it has slowly abandoned Washington’s sphere of influence. But the Arab revolts constitute a pronounced turn of the screw.

CC: Why has the coverage of events in the Middle East portrayed these as ‘revolts’, ‘rebellions’ or ‘uprisings’ rather than as social movements, as popular mobilizations in Latin America tend to be portrayed?

RZ: Social movement is a Eurocentric concept that has been useful in describing what happens in homogeneous societies that revolve around the capitalist market in which there is one basic form of social relations. In Latin America, the concept has and is used by academic intellectuals whose perspective is external to popular sector organization. If they were on the inside, they would see that, in fact, there are two societies: the official one, of the upper and middle-upper classes, and the other society, the informal one, of use values and of the popular sectors. When I say that there are two societies, I mean to say that each of these is shaped by different types of social relations, and as such, by diverse relationships of power. That is why when the alternative, popular society sets itself into action, it makes more sense to speak of societies in movement, or alternative societies in movement, rather than of social movements. The difference is critical.

In any case, I suspect that in the Arab case the international media has not spoken of social movements because of issues of racism, of colonialism, as if it takes some level of modernity – which they don’t consider the Middle Eastern people to have achieved – to have a so-called civil society, which is also a Eurocentric construction. I prefer to speak, along with Partha Chaterjee, of political society, because it is only by doing politics that it can exist.

CC: If socio-political transformations in different regions point to a global systemic crisis, how do particular events in one region influence the processes or possibilities in other regions? That is, are there ways in which such diverse and disperse forces can transform each other, or transform into something else?

RZ: Fundamental processes and situational junctures respond to different logics and views. There is no mechanical relation between the two; rather, we must focus our attention on the longer processes, and insert events into those, as Braudel taught us. The fundamental tendency is: a crisis of the centre-periphery relationship, a crisis of U.S. domination and of the unipolar world, and now, also, a crisis in Western hegemony. In this transition, which has been taking place over the last four decades, we must insert current processes.

What I mean to say is that the Arab and Latin American revolts disrupt previous equilibriums, or better said, they accelerate the processes of the crises of older structures. And when there are cracks in the imperial Occidental construction, emergent tendencies are strengthened: for example, China, India, Brazil. At the same time, we can register changes in micro structures such as the family, school, health system, the city itself; that is, in spaces of discipline that are undergoing very powerful transformations. Macro and micro transformations must be jointly examined, included within the same description. If we do that, we see a world in movement, one that enters into situations of systemic chaos at particular moments, such as the present one. We do not know what will come, but we are sure that it will be very different. All the cards say: Asia, multipolarity, emergent nations. I hope that some of the cards also say emancipation, but nothing is certain.

From “Everything Solid Melts into the Street”

(First published in America Latina en movimiento, 15 February 2011. Translation of entire article available here)

The people in the street are a spanner in the works in the accumulation of capital, which is why one of the first “measures” taken by the military after Mubarak left was to demand that citizens abandon the street and return to work. But if those in power cannot co-exist with the streets and occupied squares, those below – who have learned to topple Pharaohs – have not yet learned how to jam the flows and movements of capital. Something much more complex is needed than blocking tanks or dispersing anti-riot police. In contrast to state apparatuses, capital flows without territory, so it is impossible to pin down and confront. Still further: it traverses us, it models our bodies and behaviours, it is part of our everyday lives and, as Foucault pointed out, it shares our beds and our dreams. Although there is an outside to the State and its institutions, it is difficult to imagine an outside to capital. Neither barricades nor revolts will suffice to fight it.

Despite these limitations, the hunger revolts that became anti-authoritarian revolts are a depth charge to the most important equilibriums of the world system. These will not remain unscathed by the destabilization in the Middle East… We are entering into a period of uncertainty and increasing disorder. In South America, the emergent power of Brazil has assembled a regional architecture as an alternative to the one that has begun to collapse. Everything suggests, however, that things will be far more complicated in the Middle East, given the enormous political and social polarization in the region, the ferocious interstate competition and because both the United States and Israel believe that their future depends on sustaining realities that can, in fact, no longer be propped up.

The Middle East brings together some of the most brutal contradictions of the contemporary world. Firstly, there are determined efforts to sustain an outdated unilateralism. Secondly, it is the region where the principal tendency of the contemporary world is most visible: the brutal concentration of power and wealth…. It is possible that the Arab revolts may open a fissure in the colossal concentration of power [which] has been manifest in the region since the Second World War.

Only time will tell if what is brewing is a tsunami so powerful that not even the Pentagon will be able to surf its waves. But we mustn’t forget that tsunamis make no distinctions: they sweep up rights and lefts, the just and the sinners, the rebels and the conservatives. Nevertheless, they are in many ways similar to revolutions: they leave nothing in their place and they provoke enormous suffering before things return to some kind of normalcy, better perhaps than before, or maybe just less bad.

Recently I interviewed Christine about her new book, which details the plight of an Alaska Eskimo community struggling to save their land that is disappearing as a result of climate change.

Joshua Frank: Christine, what prompted you to investigate what is happening to the people of Kivalina?

Christine Shearer:  A few things. In 2007, I was part of this interdisciplinary research project at UC Santa Barbara, assessing the biggest “human impacts” to marine ecosystems. To do this we collected data from over a hundred scientists. And it really started to hit me how severe climate change is, particularly how quickly it is happening.

Also, I recently remembered this: we also went to get data from indigenous fishers, to include their traditional knowledge. So I went to a Native American reservation in the state of Washington and handed one of the fishers there this really complicated survey tool we had developed, and he was just kind of like, ‘What is this?’ And rather than fill it out, he walked me to the shoreline and showed me how the water was lapping at one of their buildings and said, ‘This is the biggest problem.’ He was talking about sea level rise.

And so one night I was in an environmental law class, and the teacher read a news headline about this lawsuit, this tiny Alaska Native village suing fossil fuel companies for damaging their homeland and creating a false debate about climate change, and I just knew I had to write about it.

JF: So you traveled up to visit these people? Can you tell us a little about their culture and history?

CS: They are Inupiat, tracing their ancestry to the northwest Arctic back thousands of years. They are fishers and whalers and live mainly off subsistence, and are pretty cued into the land and its rhythms, because they rely on it for their needs. So the changes in the Arctic have been pretty hard on them – making traveling and hunting more dangerous because the ice is thinning – let alone now that the small barrier island they are located on is eroding away.

I did not know much about the area before going, so I did a lot of reading in the Kivalina school library of their oral histories while there, and also asked questions. I was probably annoying, but they were always incredibly open and friendly, inviting me into their homes, happy to talk and share. When you think about how they live and have lived, it’s pretty amazing, and you can see how the strong social and community bonds would help them survive. The Arctic is not for wimps.

JF: You write about Kivalina’s grievances against ExxonMobil. What prompted it and where does the fight currently stand?

CS: Yeah, the reason the island is eroding is because of warming Arctic temperatures — sea ice now forms later and later in the year, leaving the shoreline vulnerable to erosion from storms. In 1992, Kivalina residents voted to move, and in 2003 and 2006, U.S. government reports said Kivalina had to be relocated within the next ten to fifteen years, due to erosion from warming temperatures.

Around the time of the government reports an environmental justice lawyer – Luke Cole – was working with Kivalina residents because their water was being polluted by a nearby mine. And that began the conversation about filing the climate change lawsuit, because Luke saw that the island was eroding, and the people had been trying to relocate for over a decade with little success or public attention.

So in 2008, Kivalina filed a public nuisance claim against ExxonMobil and 23 other large fossil fuel companies for their relocation costs. They also charged a smaller subset with conspiracy and concert of action for creating a false debate around climate change — Kivalina’s representation includes some lawyers that had been involved in both sides of the tobacco lawsuits.

In 2009 a judge dismissed Kivalina’s claim as a “political question” for the executive and legislative branches, and unsuitable for the judicial branch. The judge also denied Kivalina legal standing to bring the lawsuit. This meant that the secondary claims — which had to do with the climate change misinformation campaign — were thrown out without being commented on. The decision is being appealed, and Kivalina is waiting on that. In the meantime, they are still trying to relocate themselves.

JF: So who is actually to blame for what’s transpired in Kivalina? With the lawsuit against ExxonMobil, will you explain why are they being targeted here?

CS: Under public nuisance law, you can hold people or companies accountable that make a “meaningful” or “substantial” contribution to a harm. The 24 fossil fuel companies were chosen for being among the world’s top greenhouse gas emitters, while a smaller subset face claims of conspiracy and concert of action for going — in Luke Cole’s words — “above and beyond” in their efforts to try and mislead people about the science on climate change.

So, following the logic of the lawsuit: the companies are substantial contributors to the harm now facing Kivalina, and many of the companies knew of the harm they were creating, and tried to deal with it not by cutting back on emissions, but by misleading people to protect their business. Kivalina is therefore seeking damages – the cost of their needed relocation.

JF: Who is helping Kivalina relocate? What options do they have at this time to preserve their culture and integrity?

CS: There is no formal relocation policy in the U.S., and no U.S. government agency specifically tasked with helping communities relocate. So a lot of the efforts involved in trying to relocate have fallen on the people of Kivalina themselves, and they are working with different agencies at the federal, state, borough, and tribal levels to try and coordinate a relocation. Many government workers are doing what they can for Kivalina, like building a seawall, but they can only act within their prescribed roles and boundaries, which are becoming outdated with climate change.

The Government Accountability Office has recommended that a U.S. government agency be tasked with relocation — I think that would help Kivalina out immensely. But now you have Congressional representatives who don’t “believe” in climate change and are trying to cut funding for adaptation and even disaster management, which is incredibly dangerous.

JF: Is the Kivalina situation an anomaly, or is this something that is happening in other locations of the world as well, where people may also be displaced as a consequence of global warming?

CS: I think Kivalina is an anomaly in the sense that most of the discussion around the biggest impacts of climate change are usually focused on the Global South. Kivalina offers an example of how Alaska Natives in the U.S. are being heavily impacted as well, and also face inadequate resources and assistance.

But, yes, people around the world face displacement. There seems to be two types of impacts from climate change. One is the steady threat of displacement, like the people of Kivalina and other Alaska Natives facing erosion and flooding, and the small island states — although I used to think of the threat of erosion as slow, but now realize it can be quick and sudden, putting people in danger. The other type of impact is the increase in the number and severity of “extreme” weather events, like increased droughts, fires, and flooding, which may also make previously inhabited places unlivable, and cause migrations.

JF: What would you tell those who want to get involved in the issue? How can people reach out to the folks in Kivalina?

CS: Yeah, a reduction on greenhouse gas emissions — mitigation — is still very important, but communities like Kivalina show we also need to focus on adaptation policies.

I think the most important thing for Kivalina is that a government agency is tasked with relocation, and a relocation policy is put into place. This will give the people of Kivalina a blueprint for what to do and what they can do. The groups Native American Rights Fund and Three Degrees Warmer are trying to streamline the process of relocation, while human rights lawyer Robin Bronen is trying to institute a relocation policy at the international level grounded in human rights law – climigration. There might be more efforts out there. These groups could use help and support.

Also, we need to communicate to our political representatives that cuts in disaster management and adaptation — which are currently being debated — are unacceptable. The answer is smart policy, not none at all. Climate change is here, and we have to deal with it.

Banned in Vermont
By Rosemarie Jackowski
Publisher: Shire Press
Manchester, VT (2010)
Paperback, 251 pages
ISBN: 978-1-60571-100-3

Kim Petersen: The title Banned in Vermont refers to antiwar protest being banned in the state?

Rosemarie Jackowski: That and more. I really am talking about the whole issue of freedom of access to information. The problem is that when something is banned — people don’t know that it exists. When a candidate for elected office is banned from debates and forums the voters are unaware of it. This happens during every election in Vermont. Candidates are arrested if they try to participate — unless they are members of the Democratic or Republican Party. Ironically, when copies of BANNED IN VERMONT were donated to the public library, the library banned the book. In my view, that makes it more worthy of being read.

KP: Patriotism. You make a distinction between blind patriotism and informed patriotism. Yet even if people were informed about the great crimes committed by their government, wouldn’t that negate any patriotic sentiment? How can a person love a country that exists because of a genocidal past? I submit that people have to get past loving a geopolitical entity and love people wherever in the world they may live.

RJ: I agree with your thought behind this question. Maybe one can’t love a country with a genocidal past… but in that case, the highest form of patriotism might be in working toward reparations for those who have been victims. An immoral or unjust act cannot be forgiven until amends are made. This is important for the victims but also for the victimizers. I like your point about getting past loving a geopolitical entity and loving ALL people. I often make that point in the book when I say that no one should be given any privilege because of the location of his mother at the time of his birth.

KP: “Any candidate who participates in a forum, which excludes others on the ballot, shows contempt for voters and the democratic process.” What you write is sound insofar as respect for the democratic process; however, for there to be a democratic process, there should be a democracy. Do you consider the United States a democracy?

RJ: No, the United States was never a Democracy. That word gets thrown around a lot. I do believe that there could be a ‘democratic’ process. It would be very hard to achieve, and there would be the issue of the influence of group-think and the pecking order in any attempt at getting to a democratic process.

KP: You consider the topic of justice often and deeply in your book. Have you ever considered that capitalist society has utter contempt for justice, that justice is just a slogan to be wielded for the ends of those who hold power?

RJ: I love this question. I don’t know if there can ever be any justice in a capitalistic society. But, the concept of justice is very important to me… maybe more important than anything else because it encompasses everything. Justice for everyone is even more important than love for all of our fellow beings. Love is an emotion that may or may not result in humanitarian acts. Working for justice for all is a very concrete concept. Working toward justice for all is the ultimate moral dedication of anyone’s life… an important matter of conscience. That is why the back cover of the book states: “Where there is no Justice, nothing else matters. War is the ultimate injustice, because it imposes Capital Punishment on those who have not been Tried or Convicted. Therefore, every Officer of the Court should be openly and actively opposed to war.” There will never be a completely just society, but we surely can do better than what we have now.

KP: What do you mean by your “profound respect for the rule of law”?

RJ: I have respect for some Libertarian and also some Anarchist philosophy. Because people are aware of that, it seemed important to state that I do have “profound respect for the rule of law”. Boundaries on human conduct are necessary because without them we would have rule by ‘the pecking order’. The rich and powerful would have no limits. That is sort of what we now have because the ‘system’ is used as a tool of those in the upper economic class. I have a lot of respect for the rule of law and almost no respect for the legal system as it is. If we had a just legal system, everything would be different. War criminals would be prosecuted. The economic system would be fair – because if it wasn’t, there would be legal recourse.

KP: The reason I asked that question is because law is usually written by those who hold power, not by the unempowered. Therefore, laws can be written to protect the interests of the powerful against the unempowered.

RJ: I see your point. To me the Rule of Law implies Justice — not always the law as it is written. An unjust law would be trumped by the concept of fairness and what is just. Nullification is required when the law is unjust, unethical, or in violation of human rights.

KP: You often mention 1492, yet you wrote, “our government will not regain its legal and moral authority until it gives up its life of international Crime…” Do you believe that the government of the United States ever had legal and moral authority? Given that the country is situated on land gained by the murder and dispossession of its Original Peoples, it seems the only moral and legal action would be to pay reparations and return whatever has been stolen to its rightful owners.

RJ: The legal part is a hazy area. Laws change. Laws are written by whoever happens to be in power at the time. Slavery was legal. Original Peoples have a moral right to reparations. This creates a conundrum. How far back should we go historically? Actually, this is an issue that I think about often because of the suffering of the Palestinians, the Chagossians, and many others. Maybe there is a somewhat fair way to look at this… a formula… mathematically decreasing the reparations over long periods of time. That would mean that land confiscated 50 years ago would deserve greater compensation than land confiscated many, many centuries ago. The bottom line is that it is impossible to undo an immoral or unjust act.

KP: A few things struck me from your answer. First, with all due respect, I submit the bottom line is that morals and human decency demand people of conscience to, as far as possible, atone for the immoral acts of forebears that the descendants are benefitting from now. Living on, and from, that dispossessed from others would seem to fit that bill. Furthermore, there is no statute of limitations for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide under international law. So if how to atone is based in “profound respect for the rule of law” (and I have little respect for laws created by plutocrats, national or international) then surely justice should be carried out according to the law. Second, your formulation posits the longer a people have suffered dispossessions, the lower the reparations would be. Is that not a formula that encourages the dispossessors to draw out the dispossession as long as possible and profit to the maximum before international justice, if it does at all, enforces its tardy laws? Third, and this overlaps somewhat, but your question “How far back should we go historically?” is dangerous because it might encourage the creation of long-term facts on the ground, something Israel is often accused of (and it seems to be a successful strategy for Zionists because few people talk about the legally [which does not imply morally] recognized 1948 borders anymore but refer to the 1967 borders gained through aggression (which is, I submit, a sop to the “supreme international crime”).

RJ: I agree with what you say. My thought was that, for example, justice would require us to place some value on the fact that the land that the USA now occupies was owned by others in 1492. Simply returning all of the land now to the previous owners would punish those who had no responsibility for the original crime. After many generations have passed, that fact has to be considered relevant. On the other hand, the descendants of slaves are closer in generation and still suffering some of the harm of slavery, while others are enjoying some of the benefit. Therefore reparations for slavery would be higher up on the scale. You mention the Zionists and the 1948/1967 borders. What would you say to those who say Israel has the right to land there because they had been there thousands of years ago? Maybe a claim that goes back thousands of years is diluted by time???? How would you answer those who suggest that the nation of Israel should have been located in Europe? Holocaust survivors deserve compensation, but why from the Palestinians? Why not from the Europeans? This topic always reenforces my belief that all religions should be respected. This is currently not a popular view. Many of my friends are absolutely opposed to all religions. They are Evangelical Atheists. I understand their view, but do not agree with it. My view is that actions should be judged, not religious systems. Borders changed through aggression should not be recognized by the international community.

KP: With all due respect, your sentence that vegans “have reached a higher moral plane than the rest of us” sounds hyperbolic to me. For example, what should humans living in Arctic regions subsist on to reach the higher plane?

RJ: You got me with this one. I do believe that vegans have reached a higher moral plane, but I also believe that respect for human life takes precedence for those who have no access to other food. I have had discussions about the morality or immorality of using antibacterial soap, or taking antibiotic medicine. Great topic for philosophical debate, but I come down on the side of human life when forced to choose whether or not to protect the life of a microbe.

KP: You wrote, “The main challenge to 9/11 conspiracy theorists comes from Osama Bin Laden. He explained why the attack occurred.” I do not understand the logic presented since you later call into question the government’s story. Also, how does someone’s view on the reason underlying an attack connect to how the attack was carried out? Why do you label those who question the government’s version of what happened on 9-11 as “conspiracy theorists”?

RJ: I do not believe that the government directly planned and caused 9/11. I refer to 9/11 as ‘the goose that laid the golden grenade’ because the US used it as an excuse for unending war. The government has a long history of lying and is not above sacrificing US citizens. It just seems to me that Blowback is the more likely cause. I am often confronted on this issue by those who disagree with me. Actually, on this issue I am sort of agnostic. The more important question is: “Would it make any difference if someone came forward with absolute proof that 9/11 was a government act?” Probably not — it is on the public record that the USA has killed 500,000 Iraqi children, that 45,000 US citizens die every year from lack of access to health care, that WikiLeaks has exposed government secret plots… on and on. I am convinced that most citizen/voters have very little interest in what the government does and hardly notice. If someone came forward with absolute proof of a government connection to 9/11, it would make the headlines for a day or two and then public interest would be refocused on the latest football scores or which celebrity is sleeping with someone else’s spouse.

KP: I wished you had asked John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, in your interview why it took so long for him to figure out he was a gangster for capitalists. It seems he knew a long time before he gave up the perks he received from his part in the gangsterism.

RJ: That would have been a good question. In a way, maybe many of us share that with Perkins. Living under Capitalism gives the illusion of ‘perks’ to all of us. The pressure from society to ‘fit in’ is a very powerful force. Speaking out against the system is very hazardous and anyone who does it pays a high price. It takes a long time to overcome the toxic misinformation that comes to us from the culture. This makes me think about how many are ‘for peace’ but unwilling to actively oppose war. To oppose war it is necessary to oppose the entire war machine – that includes those who finance the weapons, manufacture the weapon systems, and also those who use the weapons to kill. As a former flag-waver, I do not exonerate myself. Now I finally ‘get it’ and understand the influence of the culture and the school system. There was a time when I believed what the textbooks and teachers taught me. As I say in the book — in the town where I grew up, the only heroes were the ones in military uniforms. Those who are selected as heroes in any culture can have a powerful influence on a young person. Sad to say, now there are uniformed troops going into elementary school classrooms. This is done to honor the troops as role models and instill patriotism in the young student.

KP: Finally, what do you feel is the moral responsibility of judges who rule on laws that they know are immoral and unjust?

RJ: Actually [former New Jersey Superior Court] Judge Andrew Napolitano talks about this often. He talks about Natural Law. In my view this is not even a close call. Morals and justice come first. Maybe that is why I would not be a good lawyer.

In response to the hunger strike, Assembly member Tom Ammiano and the Public Safety Committee in the State Assembly of California will hold an informational hearing on August 23 regarding conditions and policies of the Security Housing Units at Pelican Bay. Activists have initiated a statewide mobilization around this hearing, in order to pressure state legislators and the CDCR to make substantial changes.

A statement written by the Short Corridor Collective, composed of some Pelican Bay hunger strike leaders, explains that on July 1:

A collective group of PBSP-SHU inmates composed of all races began an indefinite hunger strike as a means of peacefully protesting 20-40 years of human rights violations…. The decision to strike was not made on a whim. It came about in response to years of subjection to progressively more primitive conditions and decades of isolation, sensory deprivation and total lack of normal human contact, with no end in sight. This reality, coupled with our prior ineffective collective filing of thousands of inmate grievances and hundreds of court actions to challenge such blatantly illegal policies and practices (as more fully detailed and supported by case law, in our formal complaint available online here) led to our conclusion that a peaceful protest via hunger strike was our only available avenue to expose what’s really been going on here in CDCR-SHU prisons and to force meaningful change…. We ended the hunger strike the evening of July 20, 2011, on the basis of CDCR’s top level administrators’ interactions with our team of mediators, as well as with us directly, wherein they agreed to accede to a few small requests immediately, as a tangible good faith gesture in support of their assurance that all of our other issues will receive real attention, with meaningful changes being implemented over time.

On August 3, the Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity Coalition announced that it had just received a letter from the hunger strike leaders at Pelican Bay, dated July 24, explaining that strikers have given the California Department of Corrections and Reform (CDCR) a deadline of two to three weeks from July 20 to come up with some substantive changes in response to their five core demands. Todd Ashker, one of the leaders of the hunger strike, explains that if the CDCR does not follow through, prisoners at Pelican Bay plan to go back on hunger strike:

It’s very important that our supporters know where we stand, and that CDCR knows that we’re not going to go for any B.S. We remain as serious about our stand now as we were at the start, and mean what we said regarding an indefinite hunger strike peaceful protest until our demands are met. I repeat − we’re simply giving CDCR a brief grace period in response to their request for the opportunity to get [it] right in a timely fashion!

Hugo Pinell, one of the hunger strikers at Pelican Bay State Prison, has now been held in continuous solitary confinement for over 40 years—longer than any other US prisoner known to date. In a letter written during the strike to journalist Kiilu Nyasha, Pinell explained why he was fasting:

I have to get with it because it’s for a great cause and if good changes come about, I could get a break too. At this point, a move to a mainline would be great, being that my keepers are determined to keep me until I die. On a mainline, we could have contact visits again! It’s been too long since I’ve touched my Mom and all of my loved ones…I wasn’t prepared for a hunger strike, so I don’t know how well or how long I can hold on, but I had to participate…I don’t even think in terms of doing or saying something wrong, for that would strike against everything I live for: freedom, becoming a new man and the New World. So, Sis, this hunger strike provides me with an opportunity for change while also allowing me to be in concert with, and in support of, all those willing to risk their precious and valuable health.

Our previous interview with Solitary Watch about the Pelican Bay hunger strike examined the broader issue of solitary confinement in prisons throughout the US. In this follow-up report, we place the strike in context, alongside a statewide grassroots movement calling for cuts in prison spending to address California’s budget crisis, and a recent US Supreme Court ruling that calls for the reduction of California state prisoners by at least 30,000, in response to overcrowding.

We interviewed Isaac Ontiveros for an inside look from within California’s anti-prison movement. Ontiveros is the Communications Director for Critical Resistance, a national organization that is working to abolish the prison-industrial complex and is a member of the Californians United for a Responsible Budget (CURB) alliance and the Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity Coalition.

Angola 3 News:  What is the latest news from the hunger strikers?

Isaac Ontiveros: As far as we know, the leaders of the strike at Pelican Bay’s Security Housing Unit have called an end to the strike—based on what they see as some movement on the part of the CDCR beginning to address some of their demands.

At the peak of the strike at least 6,600 prisoners across at least a third of California’s 33 prisons participated.  These are official CDCR numbers, so we can confidently assume actual numbers were higher.  Right now, our struggle is to determine how many other prisoners, in what prisons, are continuing to strike.  Given how isolated prisoners are throughout the system, this is a challenge, to say the least.

A3N: Why have the Pelican Bay hunger strikers declared victory?

IO: The prisoners made very important, historic gains.  That the strikers were able to move the CDCR at all was no small feat, especially when working under some the most horrendous conditions possible.  The fact that they were able to coordinate among themselves despite extreme isolation is also impressive.  Furthermore, solidarity was able to spread throughout the California system. This solidarity crossed the racial and geographic lines that we are taught are uncrossable; and strike leaders were able to incite strong support of people outside of prison on an international level. This is all very important when we think about victories, especially if we understand victories as being stepping-stones to further and greater victories.

As far as the specific concessions made by the prison administration, the details are still coming, but it seems that CDCR has moved a bit on the prisoners demands around providing and expanding some of the privileges and programs they have access to in the SHU.  These gains—for example, some around cold weather clothing and access to calendars—may seem modest, but for people in such extremely oppressive conditions, these things take on a different weight.   Also, it seems like there could be some movement on some of their other demands, perhaps some review of the “debriefing” process.

A3N: How can our readers support the next phase of this struggle?

IO: The next phase is to hold the CDCR to good faith negotiations, and to continue our push for all of the strikers’ demands to get met.  It is very important for supporters to continue their solidarity work on the outside, with particular attention toward defending strike leaders from retaliation from the prison administration.

Many people are coordinating actions all over the US and in other parts of the world.  A potentially important legislative hearing on conditions in Pelican Bay’s SHU is happening on August 23rd in Sacramento—there is lots of talk about that being a big point of mobilization.

Folks should stay tuned to the Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity web site for more information.

A3N: In recent months, CURB has organized statewide mass protests against California prison politics. In response to the use of California’s budget crisis as an excuse to cut state programs serving low-income residents, CURB presented a “Budget for Humanity” that called for dramatic reductions in prison spending and the number of prisoners. How does this campaign support the recent hunger strike?

IO:  I think CURB’s fight is absolutely related to the strike because more prisons mean more torture, more SHUs, more people be locked up, more communities devastated economically and socially—all of it.

The demands of the strikers were particular to the conditions of Pelican Bay’s SHU, and the SHU has a very specific function, but the fact that solidarity spread throughout the California system also speaks to how common the conditions the strike leaders were talking about are to all prisoners—deadly lack of health care, poor food, torture, overcrowding, breaking up of political organizing, and more.  These conditions are also connected to those on the outside, primarily in Black and Brown communities.

Right now CURB’s main platform, as outlined in the Budget for Humanity, is demanding an end to all prison and jail construction; an immediate reduction of prison and jail overcrowding; the releasing of tax dollars from the grip of imprisonment; and an end to cuts to the most vital services, along with a reprioritization of  how California uses it resources to create what and for whom.  These demands feed and are fed by each other.  Ending prison and jail construction frees tens of thousands of people along with billions of dollars.  Ending the attack on basic resources like education, health care, meaningful employment, creates strong communities for people to come home to and to thrive in.

We also have to understand that this is not just a matter of fiscal sense-making and balancing the budget. This is also about political power. This is about capitalism and white supremacy. We need to understand that SHUs, the prison system in general, and police are tools of repression used to thwart peoples’ efforts and abilities to fight back, build up their communities, and build self-determination.

This also links CURB’s work with prisoner strike solidarity, along with community struggles against gang injunctions, police violence, ICE raids, and more. So I think CURB’s work—along with the work of so many other organizations and coalitions—is a step toward building larger and stronger grassroots movements that will make larger, stronger, and more thoroughgoing economic and social changes.

A3N: Can you give a history of California’s “budget crisis”? How far back does this go? How does it relate, if at all, to the accelerated incarceration rates in the US that began in the 1970s, where the number of prisoners increased from 300,000 to over 2 million today?

IO: The best answer to this question is the wonderful and very important book “Golden Gulag” by Ruth Wilson Gilmore.  The book explores these questions in great detail and I really can’t recommend it enough.

But, roughly, we can understand that in the late 60s and early 70s, the powers-that-be in the US responded to social uprisings against racism, social and economic inequality, and other forms of oppression in the US — linked to anti-imperialist struggles happening all over the planet at the time — by making war primarily on communities of color in a variety ways, including the expansion and further militarization of policing and the expansion of imprisonment.  This is intertwined with a crisis in the capitalist system occurring at the same time.  So we saw an assault on organized labor and social services and programs that was basically the rise of neoliberal economic models—creating a deepening in the divide between the haves and have-nots (already pretty deep for those marginalized to begin with).

Into the 1980s we saw the war on drugs—which we should understand as a war on Black and Brown communities—go into full gear with the passing of thousands of laws, tougher and longer sentences, and the activation of all sorts of media stories and images that aggressively criminalize and dehumanize poor people and people of color, especially Black people.

Even though the so-called crime rate started dropping steadily in the early 80s, the economy, this fear-mongering, increased policing, mixed with the proliferation of anti-social ideas that social services are a waste, created the perfect storm for a gigantic increase in imprisonment.  And the cycle perpetuated itself from there with harsher probation and parole conditions that made it easier to deny essential services and to land more people back in cages for longer amounts of time. Tying it back to the 60s and 70s, this cycle makes it more difficult for social movements to change the oppressive social and economic relationships the system is predicated on.

So California, with one of the largest economies in the world, is situated in this history.  The gutting of social services, the attack on labor, the loss of jobs, tax revolts, the abandonment of certain industries, financial speculation, the disuse of farmland, housing bubbles, energy speculation, “dot-com bubbles”, the criminalization of people of color, anti-immigrant hysteria, the passage of the three strikes law, etc., leads to one the largest prison expansions in world history.

Between 1982 and 2000, California’s prison population grew 500%.  Between 1984 and 2005, at least 20 prisons were built. In this period, only one university was built.  And right now, these prisons are close to 200% of their holding capacity.

Obviously this history is cursory, simplistic, and leaves out a lot, but in engaging with any crisis there are questions we need ask, patterns we need to identify, and actions we need to take. In thinking about budget crisis, we need to ask ourselves: why does everything (education, health care and services, wages, jobs, etc.) except corrections get cut?  What does this mean for the health of our communities? How does this relate to further economic crisis?  How are we prepared to organize around this crisis?  What are our opportunities?

A3N: Have there been any examples of other states reducing their prison populations as a response to budget issues?

IO: Yes,  even right now, states are reducing prison spending, closing facilities and releasing people in response to the economic havoc caused by prisons.   Now to be clear, much of this reduction is not based on progressive or humanitarian politics, or even an opposition to imprisonment.  But, in the past year, New York, Kentucky, Ohio, Oklahoma, Florida, and Connecticut have all implemented a variety of schemes to shrink imprisonment.  Some of them have to do with sentencing reforms and parole and probation reforms, some schemes involve outright prison closure.

I think the key here is for organizations and individuals that want to see longer-term and deeper changes to organize around making these shrinkages permanent, and then to battle to have funds no longer wasted on prison spending be put towards repairing and building up the communities imprisonment has devastated—so that people coming home can stay home.

A3N: Further influencing California prison politics is a recent US Supreme Court ruling that calls for the reduction of California state prisoners by at least 30,000, in response to overcrowding. How significant is this ruling?

IO: This ruling is very significant.  It says even the Supreme Court—which is far from a politically progressive entity—recognizes that the California prison system is scandalous, devastating, and deadly.  It says change needs to happen immediately.

The Supreme Court decision gives us a chance to address the human rights crisis in California prisons, and to change the system itself, hopefully so that we can avoid further crisis.

Acting strongly here also positions us to take steps to address human rights crises happening outside the prisons, in the communities from which these thousands and thousands of prisoners are taken.

A3N: Since the CDCR released their proposal responding to the US Supreme Court ruling (that has been criticized by CURB in an open letter to Gov Brown) has there been any response from the state government?

IO: Unfortunately, but maybe not surprisingly, Gov. Brown and the CDCR’s plan is to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic.  They came up with a scheme called realignment where, rather than let people out of cages, reforming parole conditions, and using the tens of millions of dollars that would free up to support these prisoners return to their communities. they have decided to shift these 33-40,000 prisoners to the county level; ie., jails.  Brown and the CDCR are responding to one crisis by creating the conditions for 58 crises.

For example, Los Angeles County is 33% of the entire California prison system.  Its jails are already overcrowded and have been the subject of human and civil rights abuse scandals.  Brown and CDCR’s realignment scheme would add at least an extra 11,000 to that system.  Their scheme does nothing to address sentencing guidelines, and there seems to be a not-so-hidden construction scheme bubbling away on the side burner already.  So, they propose more disaster.

What’s hopeful is that, luckily, people all over the state are more imaginative and humane than Brown and Co. and are ready for some serious changes.  A recent poll shows a vast majority of Californians oppose cutting key state services and increasing taxes to pay for more prisons and jails: 80% of Californians favor paroling people who are terminally ill or medically incapacitated, and 60% support reducing life sentences for third strike prisoners.

People are ready for changes, and I’d wager they are ready to think about even greater changes.  If Brown and the CDCR want to shift the burden to the county level, then, with some strong organizing, residents, organization, and coalitions like CURB can meet them on their own turf, and say, “the only solution is to bring our friends, family members, and neighbors all the way home.”  And we can move forward from there.

• This article was first published in Alternet.

He is an Honorary Fellow of the University of Cambridge’s European Trust Society and he was the first Jarvis Doctorow Fellow at St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford.

His latest book, A Metahistory of the Clash of Civilisations: Us and Them Beyond Orientalism was published in 2011 by Hurst & Co. and Columbia University Press.

As described by Amazon.com:

Adib-Moghaddam’s investigation explains the conceptual genesis of the clash of civilizations and the influence of western and Islamic representations of the other. He highlights the discontinuities between Islamism and the canon of Islamic philosophy, which distinguishes between Avicennian and Qutbian discourses of Islam, and he reveals how violence became inscribed in western ideas, especially during the Enlightenment. Expanding critical theory to include Islamic philosophy and poetry, this metahistory refuses to treat Muslims and Europeans, Americans and Arabs, and the Orient and the Occident as separate entities.

He joined me in an in-depth interview and answered my questions regarding the continued controversy over Iran’s nuclear program, the Western media’s black propaganda against Iran, the future of Iran-West relations and the prospect of Iran’s Green Movement.

Kourosh Ziabari: Over the past years, the United States and its European allies imposed several rounds of UN-authorized and non-authorized sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program. The general policy of the West towards Iran brings to mind several questions. First of all, I would like to ask you, as a political scientist, why is Iran singled out over its nuclear program? Who has put forward reliable evidence that Iran is developing nuclear weapons, or has the intention to do so? Does the West’s hostility toward Iran simply emanate from Iran’s nuclear program? If so, then why did the former U.S. President George W. Bush label Iran as part of an Axis of Evil under President Khatami who was a reformist and an open-minded politician?

Arshin Adib-Moghaddam: You are right, and one has to stress that on every occasion, lest the lies that led to the invasion of Iraq will be repeated: There is no evidence that Iran is building a nuclear weapon. No IAEA report, not even national intelligence agencies hostile to the Iranian state such as the CIA and the Mossad in Israel have provided any evidence to that end. So the nuclear weapons allegation is a political mirage, a tactical manoeuvre to outflank Iran on other matters.

I think Chomsky is right when he says that it is Iran’s insistence on an independent foreign policy that is being punished. The allegation that Iran is developing nuclear weapons is a Trojan horse to legitimise the comprehensive sanctions regime and to contain Iran’s regional power. Having said that, I don’t believe that Iran is facing a coherent ‘western’ block. Even in the United States, where the image of Iran is professionally manufactured by anti-Iranian lobbying groups, there are differences of opinion on how to engage the country. There is a difference between Barak Obama and George W. Bush. In Europe too, we have been engaged in fostering a different kind of approach to Iran, one that is not reliant on myths, but the reality on the ground.

The fact remains that Iran is a regional superpower with influence in all the hotspots of the region. The sanctions policy, the policy of containment, has largely failed. It has not changed Iranian behaviour on strategic matters. If anything, the politics of aggression has emboldened the rather more hawkish elements in the Iranian state, because it is them who thrive on the rhetoric of confrontation. You mention the axis-of-evil speech of George W. Bush. It came after the reformist President Mohammad Khatami made major concessions, offering support for the war against the Taliban in the aftermath of the terror attacks on 9/11. President Khatami went out of his way to offer medical support to US pilots who would be downed on Iranian territory, a major confidence building step. It was reciprocated with the axis of evil speech, one of the most disastrous and murderous foreign policy speeches in the history of the United States.

It should also be noted that Khatami suspended the enrichment of uranium in response to a deal with the European Union. But the EU, under the sway of Tony Blair and others, did not adhere to their side of the bargain. This was a major diplomatic blunder. Khatami was left with nothing. The right-wing in Iran was quick to capitalise on the situation. It was then when the Ahmadinejad faction accused the reformers of selling out the national interest of the country. With nothing to present, Khatami was robbed of a counter-case. Here he was talking about a dialogue amongst civilisation, condemning calls for the death of America in Iran, suspending the enrichment of uranium, supporting the campaign against al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, reaching out to the American people on CNN, only to be demonised and placed along Saddam Hussein and Kim-Jong Il in the axis of evil.

But there is no time to reminisce or to be apathetic. The apostles of war are preaching again and they are taking their orders from Netanyahu. It is an ongoing battle. They are inventing myth in order to advocate military aggression. We are working on the truth. They wield sword and sceptre above our heads. We stick to the pen and the lectern. Theirs is a case of hate and destruction. Ours is geared to peace and reconciliation. Their conscious is pragmatic, ours is principled. We resist, they exercise power.

KZ: Israel is the sole possessor of nuclear weapons in the Middle East. Several international organizations, including the Federation of American Scientists, have confirmed this fact. Why doesn’t the international community, especially the United States and its European friends, take action to legalize Israel’s nuclear program and investigate its atomic arsenal? Why doesn’t Israel comply with the UNSC resolution 487 which called on Tel Aviv to put its nuclear facilities under the IAEA safeguards?

AA: From a legal perspective, there is a nuance, of course. Israel, like Pakistan and India, never signed the Non Proliferation Treaty. But let’s leave that aside for a moment, for it doesn’t really answer why the Israeli state is treated different than the Iranian government. It is ironic that Israel has done everything Iran is accused of: Iran is accused of terrorism; Israel openly admits that it pursues a policy of assassination all over the world. Iran is accused of meddling in the affairs of Arab countries; Israel has launched two invasions against them in the past five years killing thousands of civilians in Gaza and Lebanon. Iran has been accused and sanctioned for developing nuclear weapons without any evidence; Israel has nuclear weapons and boasts of close trade ties with the United States and the European Union. Moreover, Israel is the only country in the world that colonises territory in clear violation of international law and under the auspices of the ‘international community.’ This is called the ‘settlement policy’ in the official jargon of the Netanyahu administration. Not even the condemnation of President Obama, important in its own right, changed the situation. So Israel is what Iran is punished for. It should be said that there are many dissidents in Israel itself that disagree with the policies of Netanyahu and the strategy of colonisation of Palestinian territory.

So far Israel has been shielded from international law by successive US administrations. It is the veto of the US that prevents any serious UNSC resolution against Israel. When it comes to Israel, and consequently western Asia and North Africa, the United States continues to be hostage to the pro-Israeli lobby in the country. However, the tide is turning. There are signs of a progressive counter-discourse gaining ground. Obama and Netanyahu are at odds, let there be no doubt about this. And there is resistance to the influence of the Israeli right-wing on US domestic politics and foreign affairs. But for the moment the political elites in the US are not sufficiently independent to think in terms of their national interest in western Asia and North Africa.

I have argued in A Metahistory of the Clash of Civilisations that justice in world politics is the surface effect of a series of constellations that can be manipulated towards particular ends. So justice is a product of politics and diplomacy rather than an objective value that is universally applicable. At the same time I reject the notion that world politics has to be anarchic, that the Hobbesian idea of a war of all against all is inevitable. It was Europe and then the United States that constructed and supervised this unjust order. It is not due to some kind of natural law. So it can be changed. The Israeli nuclear programme must be seen within this larger context of an unjust world order that continues to produce hypocrisies on major issues facing human kind. I mean, it is not as if we could detach from all of this. Politics affects everything we do, from birth to death, cereal to nightgown. The reform of the international institutions must do away with the hierarchy inscribed in them. One way of dealing with this would be to turn the UNSC into a rather more representative body that would reflect the emerging non-western world order.

KZ: The sanctions of the United States and European Union against Iran have targeted Iran’s medical sector, oil and gas industry, energy sector and even automobile and food industries. Ordinary Iranians are deprived of having access to the most rudimentary necessities of their daily life as a result of these crippling sanctions. Tens of patients suffering from chronic disorders die each year because the foreign firms don’t allow their products to be exported to Iran. Even the reformist leaders Mehdi Karroubi and Mirhossein Mousavi have condemned the crippling sanctions of the West against Iran. What’s your idea? Aren’t these sanctions some kind of violation of human rights?

AA: There are two assumptions in the question that I would like to challenge. First, I think the Iranian economy is doing well if we take into consideration that the country has been under international sanctions for three decades now and that it is absorbing the ‘baby boom’ generation after the revolution. There are many problems, of course, unemployment, inflation, economic mismanagement, etc, but the macroeconomic indicators of Iran – economic growth, foreign direct investment – are sound. Recent reports by the World Bank, UNCTAD and the IMF indicate these positive economic trends quite clearly.

After all, Iran continues to be an affluent country. From my own experience in Iran there is no shortage of medical provision and the country continues to have an intricate and wide ranging social welfare system with several foundations and institutions that are dedicated to the plight of the poor. They continue to function against all odds. To my mind the sanctions policy has largely failed. A country like Iran with the second largest gas reserves in the world and the second highest production of crude oil cannot be effectively isolated. But I take your point that economic sanctions hurt civilians rather than the state. Especially in the aviation industry the sanctions policy is killing Iranians. In that sense, it is true that they violate human dignity.

Yet I don’t think that the sanctions have in any way ‘crippled’ Iran as Hillary Clinton and others put it. The term “crippling” is very discriminatory and distasteful by the way, given that many US soldiers come back disabled from the many wars that the US is engaged in. It is even more disrespectful than the so called ‘carrot and stick’ policy applied to Iran, a phrase that is used for donkeys. Terms and phrases like that indicate the discursive violence enveloping Iranian-American relations. It is equally prevalent in Iran, of course, for instance the calls of death to America. To my mind, progressive independence, independence that is not only material, but psychological too, begets that Iran does away with slogans demonising or praising any country.

As for the second part of the question: In fact, the Iranian opposition is by far more hawkish on the issue of nuclear negotiations, for they do not hold the responsibility of power. As you know I have never accepted the discourse of human rights as a part of the foreign policy of the state. Human rights are the prerogative of civil society. The state is merely there to execute our demands in that regard. I don’t think any of us need Nicolas Sarkozy to enlighten us about human rights. But it should be said in the same breath that the human rights situation in Iran is problematic.

Again, why would we look at the representations by the ‘west’ in order to assess how we treat each other? Isn’t this a form of dependency? And does it not invite the other side into Iranian affairs? What we need is a transparent, legally grounded policy of human rights that defines the dignity of Iranians and their rights within the context of the social, religious, cultural and ethnic realities of contemporary Iran. An autonomous human rights shura, if you want, not in order to present Iran as a particularly tolerant country to the outside that would be an automatic side effect, but in order to assess why there are so many complaints about the human rights situation in Iran by Iranians living in the country itself.

The weakness of the system in this regard has serious national and international repercussions. The national security of a country starts with the nation— the citizenry which is the most precious commodity for the security of a country. The revolution was quite clear on this aspect, the centrality of the “tudeh”, “mardom”, the “ummah”. Surely, we are not saying that other countries are responsible for the dignity of the Iranian people?

There is a splendid excursus by Ali Shariati on this matter, on the differences between “bashariyat” and “insaniyat” between being human in biological terms and humaneness. “Insaniyat” or humaneness requires caring for the plight of the ‘other’, the hamsay-e or neighbour with whom we literally share our shadow, “ham – saye”. I have used this differentiation of Shariati to criticise the inhumane treatment of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq by the US army. I don’t mean to sound too dramatic but I believe that we need the discourse of insaniyat in Iran today, probably more than ever.

KZ: Your articles and commentaries have appeared on several mainstream media outlets and you have been in close contact with a number of them. Don’t you believe that all of these media outlets have an anti-Iranian approach which prevents them from maintaining impartiality and objectivity? Don’t you trace the footsteps of a concerted anti-Iranian propaganda in these media? Why don’t they ever write anything of Iran’s rich and sophisticated culture? Why don’t they ever write anything about Iran’s scientific progresses? Why don’t they ever write about Iranian artists, scholars and scientists and the richness of Persian culture and literature? What we read of Iran in these media is simply confined to Iran’s alleged sponsorship of terrorism, nuclear program and violation of human rights. Why is it so?

AA: No, I don’t think so. I certainly don’t see a concert of anti-Iranian propaganda. It is more of a cacophony. By that I mean that there is no government or agency that could control every aspect of the international media, otherwise the demand for some of my writings would not penetrate the mainstream as you put it. So I don’t think there is some kind of a conductor when it comes to the media concert on Iran. There is no monolithic coherence or a consensus that is all-encompassing. There is a real difference between Fox News and CNN, and there is a difference between The Sun and The Guardian of London. But it is true to say that there are many people shouting, and that the megaphones are readily available. It is surely easier to get published with a story that is anti-Iranian, rather than one that aspires to objectivity.

But the reason for that is not an all-encompassing conspiracy, but the composition of the mainstream media in the ‘west’ itself. At the margins there is room for dissent, but the bulk of the news stories have become a part of what Theodor Adorno aptly called a ‘culture industry’ decades ago. This culture industry reacts to market forces by far more than it reacts to the truth. As a current example: Here, in the UK the government of Prime Minister Cameron is currently grappling with a major corruption case involving several newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch’s company News Corporation. There have been arrests; Murdoch and his son had to appear in front of a parliamentary commission and so on. The allegations range from bribery of police officers who leaked information to journalists to the illegal hacking of phones and computers. It is a right mess. Murdoch co-owns Fox News together with the Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal. Murdoch also owns The Sunday Times, The Times, and several tabloid papers. So there is a concentration of power here that creates its own political economy of truth. This is unhealthy for a democracy and it is unhelpful to understand complex countries such as Iran.

But, again, from a critical perspective, and in this case it means self-criticism, one has to ask why it is so easy to write nonsense about Iran and why it is that Iran’s image is so far removed from the reality? I don’t think that the power of the mainstream media is analytically possible without the absence of a functioning counter-discourse. Why is the international media not flooded with experts from Iran itself? How many of Iran’s cultural attaches in the embassies do their job properly? How many conferences do they organise on the media representation of Iran? How much outreach is there? And what about the media landscape in Iran in terms of its international appeal? An image can only be manipulated if the resistance to that manipulation is not sophisticated enough. To put it in simple terms: Iranians in Iran are the best authors of their narrative, highly educated, internet-savvy, most of them truly brilliant, it is just a matter of disseminating their message, so that there is a second opinion on the country.

KZ: The critics of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad believe that he isolated Iran in the international community with his harsh policies and uncompromising stance, especially with regards to the nuclear issue. They say that Iran has other important priorities than its nuclear program and should not sacrifice its position and prestige in the international level by insisting on enriching uranium which is a sensitive issue for the Westerners. What’s your take on that?

AA: Success in international diplomacy is not merely dependent on the demand, in this case enriching uranium on Iranian soil, but on the way that demand is packaged. It is not what is in the package that is determining the reaction, but the way it is enveloped.

President Ahmadinejad stands accused of using the wrong wrapping paper. His rhetoric, his demeanour, his overall discourse has been largely anti-diplomatic and confrontational. The Supreme Leader was quite aware of this at an early stage of the Presidency which is why he nominated a foreign policy council to oversee his performance. In that sense President Ahmadinejad is quite comparable to George W. Bush who was equally inept to articulate the national interest of the United States, which is why he plunged the country into a political and economic mess.

Having said that, Iran is not isolated, per se. Iran continues to be supported by those countries who are preparing for a new world order that will be distinctively multi-polar and non-western. The initiative of Turkey and Brazil is indicative of the future, the emergence of China as a global player is probably the most important factor, and the Arab revolts are very consequential too.

The puppets are falling and the puppet-master is running out of characters. The shah, Ben-Ali, Mubarak, their primary sin was that they were considered to be subservient to external demands. It was their colonial mindset, the notion that they simply can’t do it on their own that sealed their fate. The Iranian revolution has to be seen as a step in the direction of a multi-polar world order because it offered an alternative to superpower politics. In fact, the Cold War in Iran ended with the revolution.

KZ: The United States and Israel have long advocated a regime change in Iran and used every opportunity to sabotage Iran’s security by supporting terrorist groups such as PJAK and MKO or assassinating Iranian scientists and high-profile politicians. Don’t you believe that those Iranians living in Diaspora who support these American-Israeli efforts are betraying the cause of their compatriots living in Iran?

AA: To my mind, those fanatical opposition activists who cheer everything that is going wrong in Iran are delusional. They deserve compassion, not vitriol. Exile has a strange effect on the mind. It creates a dangerous duality. In terms of their mental habitat, many exiles continue to live in Iran. Yet because they are not there, everything that happens there appears in slow motion to them. They can’t keep up. You can take the individual from Iran, but you can’t take Iran out of the individual. Iran is like a magnetic nodal point that draws you in. It is really difficult to escape the lure of the country. Now if the duality of the exiled mind is not tempered with a good dose of reason, it creates a split personality, cultural schizophrenia in Dariush Shayegan’s words.

The idea that “they” have taken away “my” country from “me” turns into the idea that I have the right to take it back now. Iran is traded as a commodity that can be owned, rather than a bond that we all have to invest in, in order to yield results that are non-discriminatory. I don’t think, however, that any Iranian condones the murder of innocent scientists in their homeland.

There aren’t many of those delusional opposition activists left really, apart from the handful who have set up their satellite TV stations in their basement and who don’t really have serious influence on anything that is being said and written about Iran. But, ideally, even they would be included in an extended parenthesis behind the meaning of contemporary Iran which would safeguard the right to contribute to the future of the country. Such a vast parenthesis would encompass all of those who identify themselves as Iranian, irrespective of political orientation, ethnic background, religious loyalties, etc.

You are an Iranian if you say so. Who am I to deny you the right to be one? Such an understanding of Iran as an open ended idea has a central function: It turns the politics of the country, including the dialectic between the Diaspora and Iranians living in Iran, from an antagonistic mode to an agonistic process of mutual acceptance, from the zero-sum politics of today, to the positive-sum policies of tomorrow, from the vilification of the political enemy to the acceptance of him/her as a legitimate competitor. The Iranian self, the “khodi”, has always been cosmopolitan and politically promiscuous. Unless this reality is accepted, the politics of the country will be decided on a limited ground that does not encompass the transnational vastness of the meaning of Iran. After all, Iran transcends. That much we can all agree upon. Hence, a politics of transcendence, the maximal autonomisation of the meaning of Iran is merited.

KZ: The European Union has recently taken the name of MKO off its list of terrorist organizations. Moreover, MKO was legalized in the United Kingdom on 24 June 2008, six months after winning a court battle over its legality. The U.S. congressmen are also making efforts to persuade the government to remove MKO from its terror list. What’s your estimation of this action? Isn’t it contrary to the claims of the American and European politicians who usually boast of their loyalty to the Iranian people and their support for the freedom and democracy movement in the country?

AA: Of course, it is. The MKO is a terrorist sect with rigid organisational structures that would make any fascist rise in applause. But why is the case against Iran easier to build than the case against other countries; for instance, Brazil, Venezuela, Bolivia or Nicaragua, states that are allied to Iran? This is the real question that the political elites in Iran need to address. And then there is a second responsibility for what is happening: The primary reason why the MKO can act is the vacuum left behind by Iranian diplomacy in the last years. We can’t start the analysis with the effect. We have to look at the causes. Where are the cultural attaches protesting against the activities of the MKO? Where are their outlines for concerted PR campaigns that would reveal the atrocities that the MKO committed? How many international conferences have been organised on the links between the MKO and Saddam Hussein? Why is this little organisation an issue in the first place?

What is needed in order to safeguard Iran’s national interest is a politics of friendship and reconciliation that stretches as far as possible to the realms of international diplomacy: state to state, state to society, and most importantly civil society to civil society. The dialogue between societies encapsulates the true essence of the term dawat that was so central to the libertarian aspects of the Islamic revolution. Inviting the ‘Other’ to listen is a virtue. Obviously an invitation requires a language that is empathetic rather than confrontational. As a Persian proverb has it: betamarg, beshin and befarma all mean sit down, but the polite befarma will probably yield the best reaction.

KZ: And my final question is about the prospect of the Green Movement in Iran. I strongly believe that the United States and European countries betrayed the Green Movement by explicitly supporting it and giving the hardliners an excuse to associate this reformist movement with the U.S. and Israel. The Western mainstream media also played their own role in this betrayal by portraying Mirhossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi as opposition leaders, while they were simply reformist candidates who wanted to implement soft reforms within Iran’s current political establishment, not opposition leaders who wanted to subvert the regime. What’s your idea?

AA: I don’t see the causal link between western policies and/or media representations and events in Iran. The politics of the country has its own dynamics. There is too much focus on what the media in the ‘west’ says, as if a journalist in New York has more power to decide the future of Iran than a university student in Tehran. Here, I disagree with post-colonial theorists and the Radical Left who keep telling us that imperial power is all-encompassing. To believe that, is not only analytically flawed but it creates a dangerous self-fulfilling prophecy. As for the Green Movement: it is the reincarnation of previous reform outfits such as the Second Khordad movement named after the date Mohammad Khatami was elected President.

It is the surface effect of the demands of Iranian civil society which will continue to be articulated beyond personalities such as Mousavi and Karroubi who, themselves, are merely the effects of those demands for reform. And you are right to say that these are calls for reforms to the Islamic Republic and not for a fundamentally new order. At the height of the demonstrations I wrote that they did not amount to a revolution. Most people disagreed. When it comes to the Iran story the degree of hypocrisy and opportunism is staggering. Sometimes it is depressing. But one shouldn’t feel helpless in the face of the colossal lies that are being printed about Iran. There is room to resist and to fight for the truth. To my mind, this is primarily an intellectual jihad which requires research, patience and a good dose of cross-cultural empathy. It is not enough to speak truth to power from the outside any anymore. It is necessary to perfect resistance strategies that penetrate power from within. And isn’t this what the brave activists from Tahrir Square in Cairo to Syntagma Square in Athens are demanding as we speak?

In his debut book, Green Is the New Red: An Insider’s Account of a Social Movement under Siege, independent journalist Will Potter  details one such assault on freedom and democracy, the targeting of environmental and animal-rights activists. In recent decades, corporations whose profits depend on degrading the ecosphere started to worry that those activists posed a real threat to their operations. Politicians and law-enforcement agencies responded with laws and tactics targeting not only the illegal actions of some of those groups but also the constitutionally protected speech and association of a wider range of groups. The fear-and-smear campaigns take their toll on the activists.

In a book that alternates between reporting and reflection, Potter not only details the strategy and tactics of corporations and the state, but also gives readers a feel for the human costs for the activists. In an interview, I asked Potter to explain the threat posed by these campaigns.

[Full disclosure: Potter was a student in two of my classes at the University of Texas at Austin. Since his graduation, I have followed his work and now think of him as a colleague rather than a former student.]

Robert Jensen: Let’s start with what you don’t mean by the title, Green is the New Red. You say in the book that you aren’t suggesting the environmental/animal-rights movements are directly analogous to the left/radical/socialist/communist movements that were targeted in the Red Scares of the 20^th century in the United States. If the scope of those Red movements was wider and the repression faced much more severe, what is the title intended to communicate?

Will Potter: Although I make clear that what’s going on now is not the same or worse than the Red Scare (nor is it the same or worse than what Arab and Muslim people have experienced since September 11), these current events need to be understood in a historical context. Coordinated campaigns to target and repress dissident voices have taken place throughout U.S. history, and foremost among them is the Red Scare. For most Americans, of all political stripes, that term is synonymous with using fear to push a political agenda — it is a dark era of U.S. history where lives were ruined, and freedoms chilled, in the name of national security. Beyond those big-picture similarities, though, there are eerie parallels between the Red Scare and this Green Scare, in terms of the specific tactics used by corporations and politicians to instill fear and silence dissent.

RJ: Whatever the size or current influence of these radical environmental movements, you write that they are challenging core notions of what it means to be a human being. Based on your experience as an activist and your reporting, how do you assess these movements?

WP: These movements, like all social justice movements, have diverse components. Although it has become fashionable to “go green,” the true nature of the environmental and animal rights movements goes much deeper than promoting hybrid cars and energy-saving light bulbs. They are about more than promoting a quick-fix or advocating environmentalism through consumerism.

These movements are challenging deeply held religious and cultural beliefs that the interests of human beings are always paramount, and that we have the right to use the earth and other species in whatever ways we see fit, costs be damned. These movements recognize that behaving as if human beings are the only species on the planet is destructive, but their critique is more than an appeal to self-interest. It is about critically examining our relationship with the natural world, and all other species on the planet, and questioning what it means to be a human being.

RJ: Do you think that is the reason those movements are being targeted, because people in power in government and corporations understand how fundamental that challenge is, and want to suppress it?

WP: Absolutely. In fact, that’s how the threat is often described by these individuals themselves in Congressional hearings, internal corporate documents, FBI memos, Homeland Security reports, and in the media. At first I dismissed much of this as political theater — exaggerating the threat in order to justify the crackdown. For instance, it was hard not to laugh when the CEO of Yum Foods (KFC’s parent company) testified before Congress that PETA represents the threat of a “vegetarian world.” He called them “corporate terrorists.” But this culture war rhetoric stops being funny when you see how it plays out in real life. PETA, along with other mainstream groups like the Humane Society of the United States, have been attacked as “terrorists” by corporations and politicians, and investigated by the FBI. The only way we can explain that groups like the Humane Society are being investigated as terrorists alongside the Animal Liberation Front is that all of it — the aboveground and the underground, the mainstream and the radical — represents a cultural threat.

RJ: Let’s go back to your reference to the specific tactics used, by both government and corporations, in this campaign. What are some of the most common tactics, and what is the strategy behind them?

WP: The comparison of today’s political climate to the Red Scare was particularly useful in identifying and classifying the tactics used in this campaign. The tactics, then and now, can be grouped into three main areas: legal, legislative, and a third I would call extra-legal, or scare-mongering. The courts have been used to push the limits of what constitutes “terrorism,” and to hit activists with disproportionate penalties and prison sentences. In this realm the word terrorist is used early, and used often, to skew public opinion against defendants before they ever set foot in a courtroom. At some point these legal tactics have limitations, though, and so corporations and politicians have lobbied for new laws that go even further. Federal laws like the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, coupled with state-level legislation, are being used to single out activists based on their political beliefs. The intention with these legislative efforts is not only to enact new laws, but to use Congressional hearings and political theater to shift cultural perceptions of these movements. The final element is perhaps the most dangerous of them all. During the Red Scare, court cases and legislation sent people to prison, but scare-mongering tactics (PR campaigns, press conferences, ads, reckless use of language to demonize people) leveraged the weight of fear and incarcerated many more.

The strategy behind these tactics is fragmentation. In discussing this, I think it’s helpful to visualize social movements as having a “horizontal” and “vertical” component. The intention is to separate these movements horizontally, and create rifts between them and the broader left. Animal rights activists and environmentalists are therefore depicted as ideological extremists who, if they have their way, will stop you from eating meat and driving cars and having pets. There are, of course, already tensions between these movements and the more traditional left, but campaigns by corporations and politicians intend to exacerbate them. If these movements are not seen as part of a broader social justice struggle, it is easier for other leftist and progressive groups to turn their backs on their repression.

Similarly, there is a campaign to fragment these movements vertically. Aboveground lawful groups are told that they must condemn underground groups, and if they do not, they will also be treated as terrorists. This two-prong strategy — breaking these movements away from other social movements, and breaking the aboveground away from the underground — isolates those who are being targeted and intensifies the repression.

RJ:  Whatever one thinks of the specific analyses or tactics of groups such as the Earth Liberation Front, the accelerating pace of ecological collapse suggests their call to consciousness about the larger living world is more important than ever. After your investigation into the Green Scare, what is your assessment of the likelihood the culture will listen?

WP: As the scale of the ecological crisis we are facing becomes more apparent, and as the backlash against social movements that are challenging our self-destructive culture intensifies, it is difficult to not feel dark, to feel helpless. I certainly feel that way quite often — not just because of the content of my own work, but from the near-blackout in the mainstream press. Unfortunately, I do not see any of this changing anytime soon. As the ecological crisis accelerates, the accompanying crackdown by corporations and people in power will intensify as well. The people who have the most to lose will cling desperately to that culture as it is threatened, and this includes not just CEOs but much of the overwhelmingly privileged United States and so-called First World.

After all of that, this will probably sound quite odd, but in the face of this I would argue that there are reasons to be inspired. Through my work, and in particular through book and media tours, I have been fortunate to meet people all over the country from diverse backgrounds. What has been striking to me is that, even if people are unfamiliar with the Green Scare or the targeting of political activists, they are rarely surprised. People may not know the specifics, but they know that corporations have more power than people. They know the scope of ecological destruction is increasing. They know we have no choice but to change but that people in power will not change willingly. I’m not convinced that the question at hand is whether or not the culture will listen, because I think that so many people already feel this. I think the question is: Will we find the courage to be heard?