Maude Barlow
Denver, CO
January 27, 2012

available from Alternative Radio

You can listen to Maude Barlow speak for herself here.

Maude Barlow is the National Chairperson of The Council of Canadians, Canada’s largest public advocacy organization, and the co-founder of the Blue Planet Project, working internationally for the right to water. She is the recipient of the Right Livelihood Award, the alternative Nobel Prize and the Citation for Lifetime Achievement, Canada’s highest environmental award. She served as the first Senior Advisor on water issues for the United Nations. She’s the author of many books, including Blue Gold and Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis.

I’m going to talk a little about the global situation and then come back here to the U.S. and to Colorado. And then I’m going to talk about what I think we need to do about the water crisis. If I’m a little negative at first, forgive me. I’ll get positive later. But I think it’s really important, particularly for young people.

Forgive me, because I hate people my age who say to young people, “Oh, my, it’s the end of everything.” Well, it isn’t, of course. We’ve got lots we can do. But I do think it’s important to have the courage to say the truth about the situation that we’re in, so I will spend a little bit of time doing that.

And that is to say this: That back in Grade 6 pretty well everyone in the world learned a lesson that was wrong. Our teachers weren’t lying, but it was wrong. That lesson was that you can’t run out of water; that we have a hydrologic cycle with a limited but finite specific amount of water, and it goes around and around in the cycle, and it can’t go anywhere and you can’t—maybe we started to realize you can pollute it, but that’s really as far as far as we got.

What we know now is that that’s not true. We are a planet running out of water, running out of accessible, clean water. I have a PowerPoint that shows the Earth maybe about this big stripped of its water, and beside it is a little around ball, and that shows all the water in the world to scale. But beside that is a tiny dot you can hardly see, and that’s the available fresh water in our world. What are we doing with it? Where is it going? We’re polluting it, of course. That’s one of the big things. We are putting the equivalent of sewage and toxins into our water systems every year equivalent to all the weight of all 7 billion of us on the planet, every single year. And we are also using water far faster as we become so-called more sophisticated, more urban, more so-called developed. The population is growing, but the use of water is doubling at the rate of population. So it’s not that we don’t have enough water for all. It’s that we don’t have enough water for the uses to which we are putting it.

We are also displacing water massively. We’re extracting our rivers to death to grow inappropriate crops and commodities in deserts and so on. We have a global trade system, and I want to tell you about something called virtual water trade. Virtual water is the water that is used to produce a commodity or to produce computers or cars or whatever. There’s water used in mining and energy, particularly like fracking or the more-difficult-to- get-at energy. All this water, if it’s then either destroyed or is exported out of the watershed with the export, it’s gone permanently from the watershed. One of the reasons that I have opposed these global trade agreements and the whole notion of unlimited growth and exponential free trade, more stuff, more growth, is that we are destroying our water system, because we grow things with it and then ship it away.

Then we’re pumping our groundwater faster than we can replenish it, with technology we did not have 50 years ago. A brand-new study on groundwater taking says that we’re doubling our exponential use and abuse of groundwater every 20 years. Several examples come to mind. The Ogallala Aquifer that runs down the spine of the western U.S. that produces most of the food here is only producing half the food it was producing in the 1970s. And the Ogallala center of the Department of Agriculture here in the U.S. says that it will be in this lifetime that it will actually run out. They say there’s no question about if it will. It absolutely will. It’s a question of when. There’s another study on groundwater takings that said that if the Great Lakes water, for instance, is being pumped as quickly as groundwater around the world, the Great Lakes could be bone dry in 80 years. I think that’s an absolutely stunning statistic.

One of the things that’s happening, then, of course, is that we’re pumping water out of aquifers, out of rivers, out of lakes, and we are sending them to big cities. When we say cities, 5, 10, 20, 30 million people. And if those cities are anywhere near the ocean, we’re dumping that water into the ocean, we’re not returning it to the land. So we are depleting the land of water sources and we are creating desertification in over 100 countries in the world. This same study on groundwater takings said that probably at least a quarter of the cause of rising oceans is not climate change as we have understood it. Rather, it is the shifting of land-based water into the ocean. It’s the dumping of freshwater, which then becomes salinated water. And if you think that desalination is an easy answer, just take it back. It is not. It’s expensive, it’s energy-intensive, and it puts a terrible polluting brine back into the ocean.

So what we’re hearing from scientists is that we’re not just experiencing drought—you will hear the word “drought”—but in fact we’re running out of water in many parts of the world. China has used so much of its water to produce its so-called industrial miracle, to send running shoes and toys all over the world. There are 4,000 cities in China in danger of having to be deserted because of the encroachment of desert. Twenty-two countries in Africa are in crisis. Every single country in the Middle East is slated for the end of water. We’re not talking water shortages. The end of water. Australia, the Murray-Darling, the major river system, no longer reaches the ocean. They had a little bit of a reprieve last year with the floods. But this is a perfect example of this virtual water. Huge industrial farms, great big agribusinesses have built up all along the Murray-Darling, and they suck the water up, they grow cotton, they grow rice, they produce wine, and they ship it all over the world, and it is shipped out of the water system. This very sophisticated, so-called, First World country is absolutely running out of water very quickly. India, Mumbai, is hitting the bottom of its water table.

The image that I want you to have is of a bathtub. There’s lots of water in the bathtub, and there are people around the bathtub and they have blindfolds on and they’ve got straws and they’re sucking the water out of the bathtub. If you could see this coming, one and one and two and two, that would be one thing. But when you have exponential overuse or exponential environmental destruction, you don’t see it coming fast enough. These people around the bathtub are getting lots of water. There’s lots of water for everybody until there’s no water for anybody. This is the image that we need to have in our mind, that we are not replacing this water in the ground.

Mexico City is sinking. They took all the water from underneath the city—it’s called subsidence—and now literally—churches are kind of half falling into the ground. And the U.S. The U.S. Midwest, the U.S. Southwest, you know the story here in Colorado. It’s very important that we understand. The RDC, our Resource Defense Council, says that there are now at least 40 states that face in either the immediate or in the not too distant future a reality of water crisis in this country. I find it astounding, in all of our countries, my country and yours, we still have federal elections in which the word “water” is never mentioned. The discussion of water just doesn’t take place. I think, Why are we talking energy only? Why aren’t we talking about our dwindling water supplies?

What we’re finding, of course, is that with this crisis coming—and, of course, it’s affecting in them different ways around the world—we have a number of conflicts growing. The first, of course, is between those who can afford lots of water for whatever they want and those who cannot. There’s a new study from the World Health Organization that says that in the Global South every three and a half seconds a child dies of waterborne disease. It is simply the biggest killer of children, far more than accidents, HIV-AIDS, and war put together. The lack of clean water, the lack of access to accessible water is the number one killer of children in the world. This is growing as the gap between rich and poor grows.

You might want to know, and I think we need to say, however, that it’s not just in the Global South. Or should I say, the Global South is not just in other countries. It’s right here in North America. A few years ago the City of Detroit cut off the water to 42,000 families in inner-city Detroit. We think the numbers are probably closer to 90,000 families now. They are eking out a water living the way people in villages in the Global South eke out water, having to go and try to find it, buy it, whatever. And social services have come in and taken a number of their children away. So this issue is growing here. As we see a growing gap between rich and poor, growing in Europe, growing in Canada, growing in the U.S., and as we see water getting more and more expensive, which is happening, we are going to see water haves and have-nots in the so-called First World as well.

Then we have nation states looking outside their borders for new supplies of water, just the way they look outside their borders for secure energy supplies. That’s what the whole debate around the Keystone pipeline to the U.S. from Canada is about. I love it when American politicians say, “We need a domestic secure source of energy.” And we say, “Wait a minute. That’s Canadian. Okay, all right, you can have it.” Actually, we give it away in NAFTA, so it’s not really Canadian anymore. Which is funny. We all kind of smile when we hear that this is domestic energy. But it’s all owned by the big energy companies; it has nothing to do with nation states anymore anyway. So countries are looking outside of their own borders.

And one of the things we’re seeing are land and water grabs. There has been land twice the size of the United Kingdom bought up by either investment companies, hedge fund companies, or countries, even countries like China and India, but certainly wealthier countries like Saudi Arabia and so on, buying up land and water for a future time when they don’t have the ability to grow food for their own people and don’t have the water they need for their own needs.

We also have conflict growing between the needs and demands of big cities and rural communities, indigenous communities, and nature. So we’re plundering our wilderness and our rural communities for water to pull into large cities. Mexico City has put pipelines into indigenous lands and just confiscated the water. You’ve got to start thinking of water as gold. That’s why I called my first book on water Blue Gold, because you will see, actually, armed fortresses, armed guards and dogs and guns around these water sources, because they are becoming contested the way gold mines or energy sources are.

But I think the biggest debate that we’re having and the one I’ve been most deeply involved in, is the issue as to whether water is a commodity to be put on the open market, like oil and gas or electricity or running shoes or whatever, and sold to the highest bidder, or is water a commons, a human right, a public trust, is it something that is a shared heritage of humanity and of the Earth, because I don’t think we can separate them. Is water a resource for our convenience and profit, or is water the essential element in the living ecosystem that gives us life? This is a very intense struggle that we’re having.

It takes a number of forms. One of them is around utilities, water services. We’ve had intense fights. Colleagues in Bolivia have got rid of not one but two big transnational water companies. I remember being in a place called Orange Farm in South Africa, poverty as far as you can see, rats in the gutters, kids with no shoes, no water anywhere, and burning garbage. But suddenly the miracle that to every block of these tarpaper shacks is a state-of-the-art pipe bringing beautiful clean water. But between the pipe and the tap is a state-of-the-art water meter. The only way you can get at the water is to get an electronic key charged up, and you have to pay for it. With unemployment at around 80% in that community, nobody can afford it. I can remember standing with one of the activists there, who said, “It gives new meaning to the old saying, ‘Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink.’” So the women take the vases or the containers on their heads and walk the 5 miles to the polluted water source, which is why we see the diseases like cholera coming back.

Then there’s bottled water. We’ve got bottled water fights all over the world. I noticed here in the theatre that only bottled water is allowed in here. So I just want you to know I broke the rule. I have tap water. If you were to take just the single bottles that people drank in the world last year, the little individual ones, the little plastic ones, and put them end to end, they would reach to the moon and back 65 times. It is absolutely insane to be paying for and taking care of source water and have clean, safe water coming out of our taps and have to turn to bottled water. That’s not to say there aren’t parts of the world where you cannot get clean water out of at your tap. I understand that. But that’s not the case here. The bottled water industry and the bottled water struggle is a huge one.

Then we have what are called water markets, or sometimes called water rights. We have the beginning of that here in Colorado. But it can be taken to extremes. In Australia what they did was—they thought this would make everything more efficient—they converted the licenses to these big companies to water rights, and then they said, “You will trade them, but we think, because you’re going to be able to sell them and make money, you will use less water and you will sell the excess and everybody will be happy.” That’s not what happened. The big companies bought out the little companies’ water rights and the small farmers’ water rights. Then the big investors started coming in, and then big foreign investors started coming in. Now the Labour government tried to buy back some of these rights because the Murray-Darling river system was desperate, but they couldn’t afford it. The price of water had risen so high that the government could not afford to bring this water back.

Chile has gone further than any country in the world in privatizing water. This is a direct legacy of the Pinochet regime, because he started this. But you can actually have public water auctions. They have water auctions where mining companies—and I hate to tell you, it’s Canadian, they’re the worst in the world—the Canadian mining companies are there outbidding local first nations or tribal people or communities or farmers or whatever and just buying up that water. So it can go to an extreme and is moving into areas of real private accumulation. T. Boone Pickens, the gazillionaire energy guy in Texas, is buying up huge amounts of the Ogallala Aquifer and holding on to it. I’m not sure what for. I think he’s in his late eighties, so I’m not sure what he’s going to do.

So we have a huge corporate grab. If you look at the chart for the demand—and this is my last stat I’m going to give you—this is a study that was just done by all the major water guzzlers, Coca Cola and Pepsi and Nestlé and the big food companies. They coordinated their research and they said by 2030—that’s not a very long time away—the demand in our world for water will outstrip supply by 40%. It’s an absolutely terrifying statistic. If you look at the chart, the demand goes straight up and the supply is going straight down. The private sector knows that there’s money to be made in water and there’s also power to be held. As one investment banker told a big conference in London, England, last year, “The water crisis provides an opportunity to make buckets and buckets of money.”

Now Colorado. I don’t have to tell you that you have a problem, we have a problem here in this area. The reprieve last year with the snowpacks was just that. It was just a reprieve. And I don’t think it’s going to be matched this year. I sure didn’t see much snow, coming in here today. Lake Meade is perilously near the level at which the Secretary of the Interior may have to declare a water shortage and impose severe water restrictions. There’s a study by the Scripps Institute of Oceanography that says with climate-change models they can say absolutely that the runoff in this area will decline by between 10% and 30% over the next two decades. As I say, the NRDC has come out with a new study. If you go to their website, they actually have a map of the U.S. showing all the areas of drought and coming drought and over that they overlay where the population is growing. It tells a story that is something we need to know.

Here’s something I want to say really strongly to you. We need to think about what we’re doing with our water. One of the things here in the U.S. is that you’re growing a great deal of food in places that don’t have water to grow this food and you’re shipping it away. A third—most Americans don’t know this—a third of your daily water withdrawals, a third, leave not only the watershed but leave the country altogether. You’re a net water exporter through commodity trade. This is things like biofuel, ethanol, and that kind of thing. These are the questions that we’re going to have to grapple with that people don’t particularly want to.

I also want to raise the concern of fracking. And then I’m going to stop telling you about problems and start telling you about what I think we need to do. The worst thing you could do, it seems to me—well, second worst, okay. The first is to build a pipeline over the owing Ogallala Aquifer, that is already dramatically distressed, and send the dirtiest oil in the world through it, this corrosive oil that absolutely, I promise you, will spill and would spill into the Ogallala. Except that the President has made that one very good decision to not allow it. But I guess the second dumbest thing is to allow fracking in a state where the water crisis is as perilous as this one is. There are now 48,000 fracked wells already in Colorado and each well uses between 1 and 5 million gallons. Just try to do the math here, the amount of water.

We’re not just talking here about water that’s used and then put back into the system in a healthy state. As you know, fracking requires the use of chemicals. In one study in New York the EPA there couldn’t get the answer, as you know, from the manufacturers about what chemicals are in the fracking fluid. So they did their own study by fracking sites, and they listed 257 toxins and carcinogens that are in the water in the fracking areas. It takes 10 pages to list what they found in this one study. I am Canadian, but I also chair the board of Food and Water Watch here in the U.S. We’re calling for a full moratorium on fracking. We think that it’s absolutely the most dangerous development.

So what do we do with this very bleak reality? I’m actually hopeful. My husband always says, “Do people willingly come to hear you speak? Why do they do that on a Friday night?” You could go to a movie or out to dinner. But if you take a hard look at it—we have a wonderful writer, Margaret Atwood—you may know her writing—in Canada, and she says, “The world seen clearly is seen through tears,” which I think is gorgeous. Whenever anybody gets weepy over something that they feel passionate about, I always pull that quote out, because I think it’s true.

The world right now—we are in trouble ecologically, from the fish in the sea—90% of the big fish are gone— the hunt for minerals, and it is mineral hunting, as water mining is water hunting. I see this bottled water. In a movie that just came out in Europe—I think I’m probably going to get sued—I called Nestlé “water hunters.” But they are. They’re aggressive, seeking out the last remaining non-fossil, clean fuels and forests and minerals and fish in the sea.

We really have to ask ourselves some hard questions about the whole notion of growth. It’s why I continue to talk about the issue of trade. We continue to get deeply involved in these trade agreements. The U.S. under Obama was going to question trade, he was going to take a revisit to NAFTA. None of that has happened. He’s now aggressively promoting a number of trade agreements, as is my government. We have a very, very right-wing government in Canada right now. They’re actively, aggressively promoting globalization, open markets, deregulation. So I think of Grover Norquist, who was the tax adviser to George Bush, who used to say the appropriate size of government is small enough to put it in a bathtub so that any time you need to pull the plug, you can just do that and down it goes.

So big picture, I think we have to really question this mantra of growth and we’re going to have to come back to more sustainable economies. That doesn’t we’re all going to live like our great grandparents. Nobody is saying that. But something has to change. We need to start asking ourselves some very hard questions. Here in Colorado there are going to be big questions around big corporate farms that export your water away versus more sustainable local farms. There are going to be hard questions around snowmaking and that whole industry. I’ve seen it up front. I was at the Sundance—I know, a different state but same thing—a couple of years ago for a film done on my work. And just the condos they were putting up. Every condo had a dishwasher and a washer and a dryer and shower heads that really poured the water down. This is in a state that doesn’t have water. We need to think really carefully about what we’re doing and about the notion that we continue to grow.

But what to do immediately around this? I think we need to come to some practical guidelines based on some principles. I would offer you these three, and then I’d like to talk with you, not at you. We in our movement have really struggled through a lot of work to try to come to a consensus on these, because we feel it’s very important to take the time to have the principles; otherwise your policies and your laws and your solutions are all over the place and they’re not going to work.

The first principle is that water is a sacred commons and a public trust. We go back to the notion of the commons. The commons is a very well old and yet a very new term again, and I think you’re going to be hearing a lot more about it. The enclosure of the commons in England was during a time when the peasants were allowed to hunt and fish and grow their small crops on nobility land. But it was understood that they had a right to live. Then the laws came in in the 1600s that enclosed the commons, and many people died.

So many of us talk about the modern enclosure of the commons as being this move to privatize absolutely everything. What are carbon markets if it isn’t a way of trading pollution and privatizing the air? What are water markets, if not that? So the modern commons, the language we’re trying to bring back now, is based on the notion that certain national resources, air and water and oceans, are central to our very existence, and therefore the governments have the responsibility to exercise their fiduciary role to make sure that they’re governing in the interests of all of their people, not just a privileged few, and they don’t allow a privileged few to have particular and special access to these waters or these commons.

And the public trust doctrine is basically the legal basis, it’s the legal framework that you use to articulate and to accept and to adopt the notion of the commons. For instance, the notion of a public trust is that shoreline must be open to all. Even though there might be private homes along there, nobody can stop you from walking up and down a shoreline or enjoying the water of a shoreline. So this notion that we have the right to claim certain commons for all of us because if we don’t, many will die while others have privileged access. This is going to be very difficult to move to in Colorado, because you have moved some direction in the area of water rights, and it’s very entrenched in the American West. It’s far less entrenched in the American East, and particularly in New England. But I believe that eventually every state in the U.S. is going to have to come up with a long-term plan, a statewide plan, a watershed-wide plan, that clarifies that the people here are the keepers of the watershed and the sacred water commons and set out priorities for access.

I’ll give you an example. I worked with a government in Vermont. Four years ago they realized that there was a lot of free-for-all taking of their groundwater, particularly bottled-water companies coming in and just helping themselves. So the government, with myself and a few others, drafted legislation, and then it was unanimously adopted, that said that their groundwater is a public trust, belongs to all Vermonters, belongs to the ecosystem and belongs to future generations. Those are the owners of the water. They actually set priorities in time of shortage. One of those priorities is water for local food production rather than for food production for commercial export. As I say, this is tough to do, and they don’t have the big, big agribusiness interests that exist here or in California. But I think it’s a model really worth looking at.

So that’s the first, that water is a sacred commons and a public trust. That doesn’t mean there isn’t an economic use for water or an economic purpose for water. Of course there is. But anyone who uses water—and in Vermont they say if you’re going to access it, you have to have a license and you have to ensure for the owners, the people of Vermont, that you’re not hurting that water. They’ve already used it to challenge a nuclear waste plant. So it’s a law with teeth and it’s a law that’s moving.

The second is that water is a fundamental human right. You might say that’s a motherhood and I would say, I would have agreed with you, but I’ve been involved in the fight too long to know that actually not a motherhood. We have had a very, very intense struggle over this issue. Up against us were big corporations, the bottled-water companies, the big utilities like Suez and Veolia, the World Bank, wealthy countries. My country has consistently opposed the right to water. Part of it is that the U.S., Canada, Great Britain, Australia have this notion that they don’t want to extend the concept of rights to second and third generations, so more community-based and so on, so they just resist any new human right. But it’s been a terrible uphill battle.

We thought it was going to be another 20 years at the UN. A couple of years ago I had the honor of serving as the senior adviser on water to the 63rd president of the General Assembly, Father Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann from Nicaragua. He and I and the ambassador from Bolivia, Pablo Solon, came together to promote the right to water at the UN. Ambassador Solon, had the courage in the summer of 2010 to put a resolution to the General Assembly, which was adopted. I was there the day it got adopted. They had to vote on it because many countries were opposed. When you’re at the UN and they’re voting, they do it from their chairs. It’s all electronic, up on a big board. I was convinced we were going to lose. I was holding hands with my staff and saying, “Don’t worry. We’ll come back another time. We’ll win another time,” blah, blah, blah. Anyway, we won. And it was joyous and wonderful. And no country, even the U.S., not even my country, voted against. Forty-one abstained but 122 voted for it and it was adopted. And then only months later the Human Rights Council also adopted a similar resolution but spelled out the obligations on governments.

We had a test case within a couple of months. The Kalahari Bushmen of Botswana have been treated horribly by their government, which considers them an embarrassing anachronism because they still live the way their ancestors did. The government wants turn the Kalahari into an eco-theme park, and they found diamonds and De Beers wants in. So they started removing the people and making them live off the desert. The Bushmen kept coming back, so they smashed their water bore wells. In a series of court cases they won the right to go back to the desert but not to their water. But what was so lovely is when these two resolutions were adopted, the Kalahari Bushmen went back to the Supreme Court of Botswana and said, “We are armed with these two resolutions. We want the right to our water recognized.” The Supreme Court unanimously said, yes, you do, and forced government to allow them to go back to provide water, to reopen that bore well, and to pay them for never, ever all of the suffering that they’ve incurred but some of it. So it’s just a tremendous victory for us.

So that’s the second, that water is a human right. By the way, I’ve written a guide for the Great Lakes called “Our Great Lakes Commons: A People’s Guide for Saving Great Lakes.” What we want to do is have the Great Lakes named a common, as a human right, a public trust and a protected bioregion. So if you want to go to our website, canadians.org. and get a model of what this might look like, I think this could work for any watershed.

The third, then, that the sacred water commons has rights, too. The water itself and watersheds themselves and other species have rights beyond their use to us. Most human—and I would exempt indigenous peoples or first people’s in many places—but most “modern” humans, in the West particularly, have seen nature, and in this case water, as a resource for us, for our use, for our convenience, for our profit. It’s time to put that behind us. When you see nature that way, then you’re going to take the hard path, to high technology, desalinizanation, big dams, and so on. If you take the soft path, you’re going to go water restoration, you’re going to take the path of conservation, of protection of source water. Martin Luther King said, “Legislation may not change the heart, but it will restrain the heartless.” Infrastructure investment, cutting our virtual export imprint, local, sustainable food production, and so on. There are ways and there are plans that we can build to conserve water and share. There’s another water for all if we treat it very differently. If we protect it and then we share it more equitably among us, we can save the world’s water. Many of us are challenging the whole notion of the marketization of nature, the commodification of nature.

When the UN gathers in Rio in June—this is the Rio+20—you’re going to hear a lot about something called “the green economy.” At first blush you’re going to think that must be good, it’s good for the economy and it’s green. But the image that the powers that be are bringing to this green-economy discussion is basically continued free trade, continued deregulation, continued unlimited growth, continued marketization and commodification of nature, but with friendly technology. “Oh, let’s trade that technology and let’s make lots of money on it.” I’m sorry to say this, but I think we’re going to have to build a fight against this notion, as it’s being promoted by the World Bank and others, of this green technology.

So we need instead a body of law that regulates human behavior in order to protect the integrity of the Earth and other species. Our human rights must be balanced against those of ecosystems and the Earth itself. What would it look like if the Gulf could sue BP? Think of it. At the moment, you know who can sue BP? Only those individual families and businesses that can prove that they lost property in the spill. Nobody can sue on behalf of the ecosystem or the aquatic life there or the future, the inability of people to live there in the future or just the general damage done to the local population.

We came together after the failure of the climate summit in Copenhagen two years ago in Bolivia and we came out of it with something called the Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth. We are deeply hoping that one day it will take its place alongside the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as the manifesto for our time. I do believe every now and then humans take an evolutionary step forward, and this is one in which I think this is happening.

So I’m just going to finish the formal part of this with two quotes, and then I would like to talk with you. The first is from a man named Cormac Cullinan. Cormac is the person who wrote the first draft of the Universal Declaration. He’s a lawyer from South Africa, an environmental and human rights lawyer. And he says this about the rights of nature:

The day will come when the failure of our laws to recognize the right of a river to flow, to prohibit acts that destabilize the Earth’s climate, or to impose a duty to respect the intrinsic value and right to exist of all life will be as reprehensible as allowing people to be bought and sold. We will only flourish by challenging these systems and claiming our identity as well as assuming our responsibilities as members of the Earth community.

The other quote I want to leave you with is from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. I loved it before the films, but I did love the films. It’s Gandalf, and he’s facing that night when all evil may triumph over all good. He’s talking about being a steward. I’m speaking to all of you who have come here tonight because you wouldn’t be here if you weren’t stewards. I want to share this with you. I’ve kind of got Tolkien on the brain because not long ago we took a group of journalists and people up to the tar sands in northern Alberta. We took a bus and we toured and we took them up in a helicopter. I came back to Edmonton and we held a press conference. And I called the tar sands Canada’s Mordor from the Lord of the Rings. So the next day in the Edmonton Journal, front page, it had my quote, and then it had a photo of Mordor from the film and a photo of the Syncrude site in the tar sands. So help me, you wouldn’t know which was which. There were just no Hobbits in the Syncrude site. Anyway, one of the energy poobahs said—he should have said, “There’s no such thing, and that’s a terrible thing to say.” What he said was, “It’s not as bad as Mordor,” which I thought was not the smartest thing to say. Anyway, here is Gandalf speaking as a steward that night, because much, of course, of The Lord of the Rings is about an assault on nature.

He says,

The rule of no realm is mine…. But all worthy things that are in peril as the world now stands, those are my care. And for my part, I shall not wholly fail of my task…if anything passes through this night that can still grow fair or bear fruit and flower again in days to come. For I also am a steward. Did you not know?

Thank you.

Q&A

The a question is about information. It’s easier to let water flow than get the information out. It’s been hard with the mainstream media. There are exceptions. I would say The New York Times has done a good job of telling the water crisis story. And I’ve seen some good reports here in Colorado as well. The questions that don’t get asked, though, are the deeper ones, the ones that get to the heart of what the problem is. So we have drought, so too many people chasing too little water, and leave it at that. Instead of saying, Why do some get access to so much? Why is it that the computer companies get to have—and this is in certain states—access to cheaper water than what residents pay? This is very common. If a state wants to lure industry, it will do it by lowering standards or lowering taxes for that industry or whatever, and in this case by saying, “We’ll give you water at a cheaper rate if you come and locate here.” Because they’re desperate to bring jobs. Those are the deeper questions about where is the water going.

I go back to this again and again. As we have built a global food trade so that food that could be grown a half a mile down the road and you could be using is shipped away and you’re buying stuff from halfway around the world, it’s insane. There’s nothing wrong with trade as long as it’s based on some common sense. There was a study done a couple years ago, and they compared the number of livestock from England that were shipped to Europe for slaughter for food and then the number of livestock from Europe to Great Britain. And it was about the same. So what’s the point? It’s terrible for the environment, it’s terrible for the animals. It doesn’t make any sense except if you’re trying to get the prices down, if you’re trying to make the farmers in Europe competitive against the farmers in Great Britain. Those are the kinds of questions we haven’t heard asked.

When you read about the Horn of Africa and you read about the terrible drought there and you hear about the suffering and the death, everybody just about has the same analysis: Too many people, drought, too few resources, and corruption. That’s what you’re going to hear over and over again. What you don’t hear is that the North American and European hedge funds and investment funds and wealthy countries have come in and bought up the best land and have access to the best water. And they help themselves to water, which is used to grow food for export, and the people there get left with none. That’s the stuff you’re not going to read, maybe, in The New York Times. I shouldn’t say. I don’t read it enough that I can say for sure. But I can sure speak about the Canadian media. You’re not going to read that in our mainstream newspapers.

That’s why we have to support ways of getting this information out. I would urge you to go to the website of Food and Water Watch, foodandwaterwatch.org, here in the U.S., because it has tremendous information on fracking, on the situation here, on food, who’s growing what food, who’s got privileged access.

We live in a world of haves and have-nots. And we have to look at the depletion in our resources in connection with the growing inequality in our world. We cannot separate them. That’s why in our movement we are trying to pull together environmentalists and scientists and those who are warning about the crisis over here, because they’ve been working in isolation, with those working on the human rights development issue over here. We’ve got to put it together. If the answer is, let’s find more money to dig more wells, but you’re running out of groundwater, that’s not the answer. If the answer is, we’ll ask those people to take care of their water, but they don’t have any sanitation and they’re desperately poor and they have to use the rivers to defecate in, that’s not the answer. You can’t have one without the other. So it’s not that you’re not reading that there is a water crisis. If you want to read it, it’s around there, it really is.

It’s the deeper political set of questions. And I find in all of our countries—I’m not just saying this for the U.S.—I’m finding the level of debate at the political level inane. I don’t have another word for it. It’s inane. I don’t mean there aren’t smart people running for office. It’s just that we’re not going to the deeper level of these questions. It’s as if people are afraid to tackle the underlying questions.

I know it’s a long answer, but I deeply agree with you. I think the information flow is very important, and that’s why this event is so important. And you go home and you talk to people and you share information. That’s how we build a movement.

The question is about here you have first in time, first in right. We have it in Alberta as well. You have it in most Western states in the U.S., whereas in the Eastern states they have more of a public trust kind of law. It’s going to be very controversial here, but I don’t think you’re going to be able to do anything else. I think it’s only going to be a matter of time before California and Colorado and Arizona and every single state is going to have to take a different approach to water. If they continue to allow water to be privatized, water rights to be entrenched to those who got there first, water to be traded and sold as a property, what you’re going to go find with time is that water is cut off to people, people who can’t afford it. The way it is in communities and villages in the Global South. It is not impossible to think of in North America or in Europe poor people not having access to basic water. Look, in Greece, where they’ve plummeted in their standard of living with these austerity measures and so on, there are people going hungry, there are people begging on the streets. It’s not impossible in the so-called First World to think of this.

We never had poor people in Canada. We had a very strong set of social safety nets. We still have public Medicare for all, health care for all, but we’ve lost a lot of others. We used to look like a big egg, with a large middle class and a fairly small population of poor, well served by a social security net and a fairly small group of wealthy. We’ve totally changed shape. We bought all the neoliberal, market-based ideals. And now we have a really entrenched wealthy group at the top and we look like a pear, with more and more of us falling out at the bottom. That’s the demographic shift that’s happening in our countries, and it’s happening dramatically. We’re either going to allow the continuation of this privatization and we’re going to see all the small farms go down and we’re going to see people without water access or we’re going to come to a fair way to allocate water. This first in time, first in right made sense when they did it, and it doesn’t make any sense anymore.

I read a bunch of stuff coming here, just to bring my mind up to date on Colorado. And I saw statements from a lot of officials who said some things fairly similar to what I’ve said tonight, that we’ve got to stop living the way we’ve been living, that we have to start living more fairly and justly, that we’ve got to bring a more just economic system to the water allocation here. I saw some statements that made me happy to see, because I thought it was the beginning of real soul searching. If you’re left, right, or center, if the people who are voting for you don’t have access to water, you’re going to be held responsible. So I do think there’s a sea change.

What I would like, and this is what I would hope would come out of this gathering here, is the nugget, the beginning of a movement to start to say, Let’s put out the alternative. Let’s not just say, These are the problems, and you, government, go fix it. No, no. We’re going to articulate the principles that would work here. We’ve done this, as I say, for the Great Lakes. A man named Jim Olson—some of you may know his name—is a lawyer in Traverse City, Michigan, who fought the case against a big bottled-water company in their community, Ice Mountain, but it’s owned by Nestlé. He’s a wonderful man and he’s done huge work on public trust. He and I presented to the International Joint Commission just before Christmas—this is the Canada-U.S. commission that oversees joint waters, all the binational waters, particularly the Great Lakes.

We said to them, Okay, there’s this agreement and there’s that agreement and, yes, there have been improvements in Lake Erie, although they’re going back now, and, yes, the eagles came back because you took away DDT. But, but, but, but. We’ve got fracking, we’ve got this tar-sands oil, we’ve got mining, we’ve got multipoint pollution, we’ve got more invasive species, we’ve got over-extraction. We’re losing the battle. We’re losing the battle because we don’t have a common language. We want the common language to be that these lakes belong to the people who live on them and love them. We want the common language that nobody has the right to hurt them in any way, no one has prior or preferential access, anybody using them for a commercial purpose has to answer to those who own the lakes, the people who live around them and on them. That aquatic life and other species have a right to live and thrive, that the lakes themselves have rights. We put this message.

And let me tell you, there were some left-wingers and some right-wingers in this group, and they loved it. Because it gave them a handle on a concept that they could start to put together to move forward with in terms of what would be an alternative. If we don’t put alternatives out, if we’re not articulating what could be different and why our vision is different, then I don’t think that we’re going to succeed fast enough. Because I am very worried about catching this crisis. I think it’s catchable, and I believe that hope is a moral imperative. But I also think that we’re up against time. I think it would be wonderful if out of this gathering came that desire to start to articulate this kind of language here. It will be met with skepticism. But to hell with it. They’re wrong.

Other AR Maude Barlow programs:

• Peak Water
• The Global Water Crisis
• Liquid Assets: Water for the Highest Bidder

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

Glenn Greenwald
Socialism 2012
Rosemont, IL
June 28, 2012

available from Alternative Radio

You can listen to Glenn Greenwald speak for himself here.

Glenn Greenwald is an attorney and the author of How Would a Patriot Act?, Great American Hypocrites, and Liberty and Justice for Some. He is the recipient of the Izzy Award from the Park Center for Independent Media for his “pathbreaking journalistic courage and persistence in confronting conventional wisdom, official deception, and controversial issues.” He also received an Online Journalism Award for Best Commentary for his coverage of U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning. Greenwald is a columnist and blogger at Salon.com and his articles appear in various newspapers and magazines.

The surveillance state hovers over any attempts to meaningfully challenge state or corporate power. It doesn’t just hover over it. It impedes it and deters it and chills it. That’s its intent; it does that by design. So understanding what the surveillance state is, how it operates and, most importantly, figuring out how to challenge it and undermine it and subvert it really is an absolute prerequisite to any sort of meaningful activism, to developing strategies and tactics for how to challenge state and corporate power.

To start this discussion, I want to begin with a little story that I think is illustrative and significant in lots of ways. The story begins in the mid-1970s, when there were scandals that were arising out of the Watergate investigation and the Nixon administration, and there were scandals surrounding the fact that, as it turned out, the Nixon administration and various law enforcement officials in the federal government were misusing their eavesdropping power. They were listening in on people who were political opponents, and they were doing so purely out of political self-interest, having nothing to do with legal factors or the business of the nation. This created a scandal.

Unlike today, the scandal 40 years ago, in the mid-1970s, resulted in at least some relatively significant reactions. In particular, a committee was formed in the Senate, and it was headed by Frank Church. He was a Democrat from Idaho and had been in the Senate as of this time for 20 years or so, was one of the most widely regarded senators, and was chosen because of that. He led the investigation into these eavesdropping abuses and to try to get to the bottom of the scandal.

One of the things he discovered was that these eavesdropping abuses were radically more pervasive and egregious than anything that had been known at the start of the investigation. It was by no means confined to the Nixon administration. In fact, it went all the way back to the 1920s, when the government first began developing the technological capability to eavesdrop on American citizens and heightened as the power heightened, through the 1940s, when World War II justified it, into the 1950s, when the Cold War did, and into the 1960s, when the social unrest justified surveillance. What Senator Church found was that literally every single administration, under both Democratic and Republican presidents, had seriously abused this power, not in isolated ways but systematically. This committee documented all the ways in which that was true. And the realization quickly emerged that allowing government officials to eavesdrop on citizens, without constraints or oversight, to do so in the dark, is a power that vests so much authority and leverage in those in power that it is virtually impossible for human beings to resist abusing that power. That’s how potent of a power it is.

But the second thing that he realized beyond just the general realization that this power has been systematically abused was that there was an agency that was at the heart of this abuse, and it was the National Security Agency. What was really amazing about the National Security Agency was that it had been formed 25 years before, back in 1949, by President Truman, and it was formed as part of the Defense Department, and was so covert that literally for two decades almost nobody in the government even knew that it existed, let alone knew what it did, including key senators like Frank Church. Part of his investigation—and it was actually a fairly radical investigation, fairly aggressive, even looking at it through cynical eyes and realizing that the ultimate impact wasn’t particularly grand, but the investigation itself was pretty impressive—was that he forced his way into the National Security Agency and found at as much as he possibly could about it.

After the investigation concluded, he issued all sorts of warnings about the surveillance state and how it was emerging and the urgency of only allowing government officials to eavesdrop or surveil citizens if they had all kinds of layers of oversight with courts and Congress. But he issued a specific warning about the National Security Agency that is really remarkable in terms of what he said. This is what he said, and you can find this anywhere online, in The New York Times, everywhere. He said it as part of a written report and then in an interview.

The National Security Agency’s capability could be turned around at any time on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter.

He continued,

There would be no place to hide. If a dictator ever took over the United States, the NSA could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back.

There are several things that I find extraordinary about that statement. For one, the language that he uses. This is not somebody who is a speaker at the Socialism 2012 conference saying these things. This was literally one of the people who was one of the most established institutional figures in American politics. He was in the liberal wing of the Democratic Party but very much in its mainstream for many years. He chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. And here he is warning the country about the dangers not just of the U.S. government but specifically about the national security state and using words like dictator and total tyranny and warning of the way in which this power could be abused such that essentially it would be irreversible. That once the government is able to monitor everything we do and everything we say, there’s no way to fight back because fighting back requires doing it away from their prying eyes.

If you look now, 30 years later, to where we are, not only would you never, ever hear a U.S. Senator stand up and insinuate that the national security state poses this grave danger or use words like tyranny and dictator to describe the United States the way that Frank Church did only 30 years ago, but now it’s virtually a religious obligation to talk about the national security state and its close cousin, the surveillance state, with nothing short of veneration.

Chris Hayes, who is an MSNBC host on the weekends, used the opportunity of Memorial Day to express the view, in a very tortured, careful, and pre-apologetic way, that maybe it’s the case that not ever single person who has ever served as an American soldier or enlisted in the American military is a hero. Maybe we can think about them in ways short of that. And this incredible controversy erupted. Condemnation poured down on him from Democrats, Republicans, conservatives, liberals alike, and he was forced in multiple venues over the course of the next week to issue one increasingly sheepish apology after another. That’s how radically our discourse has changed, so that you cannot talk about the national security state or the surveillance state in these kinds of nefarious terms the way that Frank Church, who probably knew more about it, did just a few decades ago.

The second remarkable aspect of Church’s quote to me is that the outcome of that investigation was a series of laws that were grounded in the principle that, as I said earlier, we cannot allow government officials to eavesdrop on American citizens or in any way to engage in surveillance without all kinds of oversights and checks, the most illustrative of which was the FISA law, that said that no government official can eavesdrop on our communications without first going to a court and proving to a court that we’re actually doing something wrong and getting the court’s permission before they can eavesdrop.

There was a similar controversy in the mid-2000s, in 2005, when The New York Times revealed that the Bush administration had been using the NSA to do exactly what Frank Church warned against, which is spying on the communications of American citizens. The outcome of that was not new laws or new safeguards to constrain these sorts of abuses; it was exactly the opposite. In 2008, the Democratic-led Congress, with the support of President Obama and most of the supporters of his in the Democratic Party, as well as almost all Republicans, basically gutted that law, repealed it in its core, and made it much, much easier for the government to eavesdrop on American citizens without constraints, and then immunized the nation’s telecoms that had participated in that illegal program. So you see the radically different attitudes that the U.S. has to surveillance just from 30 years ago, when abuses result in a whole variety of weak but still meaningful legal constraints, versus what we do now when we find out that the government is lawlessly spying on us, which is to act as quickly as possible to make it legal.

But the third part of why I think Frank Church’s statement is so remarkable is also the most important. If you look at what he said, he phrased his warning in a conditional sense. He said if A happens, then B. A was, if the NSA starts using its eavesdropping capabilities and not directing them at foreign nationals whom we suspect of spying but instead at the American people, then B will happen, B being we’ll essentially live under a dictatorship, there will be total tyranny, where the American people will be unable to fight back because this net of surveillance will cover what we do. What’s really remarkable is that that conditional that he warned against, the apparatus of the NSA being directed domestically and inwardly rather than outwardly, has absolutely come to pass. That is the current situation, that is the current circumstance of the United States.

The NSA, beginning in 2001 under George Bush, was secretly ordered to spy domestically on the communications of American citizens. It has escalated in all sorts of lawless, and now lawful, ways such that it is now a normal part of what that agency does. Even more significantly, the technology that it has developed is now shared by a whole variety of agencies, including the FBI, so that this surveillance net that Frank Church warned so stridently about in a way that if you stood up now, you would be immediately branded as sort of a shrill, self- marginalized radical, has come to be in all sorts of entrenched and legal ways.

There are a few ways to think about the surveillance state and to try to understand its scope and magnitude. I think the most effective way to do that is just to look at a couple of numbers and to use the most mainstream sources to do that as to where we are in terms of the American surveillance state. In 2010, the Washington Post published a three-part series called “Top Secret America,” written by their Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter, Dana Priest, and William Arkin. The first installment in that series looked at the national security state and the surveillance state and how it functions in the U.S. One of the sentences that appeared in this article—listen to this—said,

Every day collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion emails, phone calls and other types of communication.

That’s every day they intercept and store, they keep for as long as they want, 1.7 billion emails and other forms of telephonic communications.

William Binney was a fairly high-ranking NSA official for several decades. He resigned in the wake of 9/11 because he was so outraged that the NSA was starting to be turned against the American people. Recently he’s begun to speak out about the NSA’s abuses. He gave an interview on Democracy Now! three weeks ago, and this is what he said about surveillance under the Obama administration:

Surveillance has increased every year since 9/11. In fact, I would suggest that they have assembled on the order of 20 trillion transactions about U.S. citizens with other U.S. citizens.

Twenty trillion transactions have been assembled by the NSA and its related agencies about U.S. citizens interacting with other U.S. citizens. He then went on to add that that’s only emails and telephone calls, and not things like financial transactions or other forms of video surveillance. So that pretty much tracks what the Washington Post reported as well. If you’re storing 1.7 billion emails and telephone calls each and every day, it’s likely that you will fairly quickly reach the 20 trillion level that William Binney identified.

The most amazing thing about the surveillance state, given how incredibly ubiquitous it is and how incredibly menacing it is, is that we actually know very little about it. We’re almost back to the mid-1970s, when nobody even knew what the NSA was. The big joke in Washington, whenever anyone would mention the NSA, was that NSA stood for No Such Agency. It was just something that you were not permitted to talk about, even in government. No one knew what it did. We’re basically at that point. We get little snippets of information, like the two statistics that I just described, that give us a sense of just how sprawling and all-encompassing the surveillance state is, but we don’t know very much about who runs it, how it’s operated, at whom it’s directed, and who makes those decisions.

In fact, so clear is that lack of knowledge that there is an amazing controversy right now about the PATRIOT Act. You may remember in the aftermath of 9/11 the PATRIOT Act used to be something that was really controversial. In September-October of 2001, Congress enacted this law, and everyone ran around warning that it was this massive expansion of surveillance that was unlike anything we had ever seen before. It became the symbol of Bush-Cheney radicalism. Now the PATRIOT Act is completely uncontroversial. It gets renewed without any notice every 3 years, with zero reforms, no matter which party is in control.

There are two Democratic senators who are mainstream, loyal Democratic Party supporters. They’re President Obama supporters. They’re like Frank Church but even a little bit more mainstream within the Democratic Party. One is Ron Wyden of Oregon and the other is Mark Udall of Colorado. What these two Democratic Party senators have been doing for the last 3 years is running around warning that the PATRIOT Act is so much worse than anything that any of us thought all that time when we were objecting to it. And the reason it’s so much worse is because the U.S. Government has secretly interpreted what the PATRIOT Act permits it to do in terms of surveillance on American citizens in a way that’s completely unrelated to what the law actually says, and it’s something that almost nobody knows.

Just listen to these two quotes that they gave The New York Times a month ago. Senator Widen said,

I want to deliver a warning this afternoon. When the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the PATRIOT Act, they will be stunned and they will be angry.

Now, he’s talking about a different American people than the one that I know, but the point that he’s making is that if you were paying attention and cared about these things the way you should, you would be stunned and angry to learn about what the government is doing, even under this already broad act. Senator Udall said,

Americans would be alarmed if they knew how this law is being carried out.

They are two, as I said, establishment Democrats warning that the Democratic-controlled executive branch is massively abusing this already incredibly broad PATRIOT Act.

One of the things that they’re trying to do is to extract some basic information from the NSA about what it is that they’re doing in terms of the surveillance aimed at American people, because even though they’re on the Intelligence Committee, the committee that the Church committee created to oversee the intelligence community, they say they don’t even know the most basic information about what the NSA does, including even how many Americans have had their emails read or telephone calls intercepted by the NSA. So one of the things they did a couple months ago was they wrote a demand to the NSA saying, We don’t want you to tell us anything sensitive. We just need to know the basic information about what it is that you’re doing. For example, the thing we really want to know is, how many Americans citizens on U.S. soil have had their emails read by you and their telephone calls listened to by you? That’s what we want to know most of all.

The NSA responded 2 weeks ago by saying—and I’m not exaggerating, I’m not saying this to be humorous, I’m not being ironic, I’m not snippeting out a part of it to distort it—their answer was, Look, we can’t tell you how many millions of Americans are having their emails read by us and their telephone calls listened in on by us, because for us to tell you that would violate the privacy of American citizens. Just so you believe me, because if I were you, I would be thinking, Oh, that’s ridiculous, whatever he’s saying can’t be true, I just want to read to you from the letter that the head of the NSA wrote to the Senate Intelligence Committee. They said,

The NSA Inspector General and NSA leadership both agree that a review of the sort you are suggesting would itself violate the privacy of U.S. persons.

I think the important thing to realize is how little we know about what it is that they’re doing. But the little that we do know is extraordinarily alarming in exactly the way that Frank Church described.

I just want to make a couple other points about the surveillance state that don’t get enough attention but that really are necessary for completing the picture about what it really is and what it does. We talk a lot about things like the NSA and federal government agencies like the FBI, but it actually expands well beyond that. We really live in a culture of surveillance. If you even go into any normal American city or even, increasingly, small and mid-sized towns, there are all kinds of instruments of surveillance everywhere that you probably don’t even notice. If you wake up in the morning and drive to your local convenience store, you’ve undoubtedly been photographed by all sorts of surveillance cameras on the street. If you go to the ATM to take out money to buy things, that will be then recorded. If you go into a convenience store to buy the things you want to buy, you have your photograph taken and it will be recorded.

An article in Popular Mechanics in 2004 reported on a study of American surveillance, and this is what it said:

There are an estimated 30 million surveillance cameras now deployed in the United States, shooting 4 billion hours of footage a week. Americans are being watched, all of us, almost everywhere.

There’s a study in 2006 that estimated that that number would quadruple to 100 million surveillance cameras in the U.S. within 5 years, largely because of the bonanza of post-9/11 surveillance money.

And it’s not just the government that is engaged in surveillance but, just as menacingly, private corporations engage in a huge amount of surveillance on us. They give us cell phones that track every moment where we are physically and then provide that to law enforcement agencies without so much as a search warrant.

Obviously, credit-card and banking transactions are recorded and tell anyone who wants to know everything that we do. When we talk about the scandal of the Bush eavesdropping program, that was not really a government eavesdropping program so much as it was a private-industry eavesdropping program. It was done with the direct and full cooperation of AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, and the other telecom giants. In fact, when you talk about the American surveillance state, what you’re really talking about is no longer public government agencies. What you’re talking about is a full-scale merger between the federal government and industry. That is what the surveillance state is. They are equally important parts of what the surveillance state does.

I think the most interesting and probably revealing example that I can give you about where we are in terms of surveillance in the U.S. was a really ironic and unintentionally amusing series of events that took place in mid-2011. What happened in mid-2011 was that the governments of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which, as we know, are very, very oppressive and hate freedom, said that what they were going to do was to ban the use of BlackBerrys and similar devices on their soil. The reason was that the corporation that produces BlackBerrys was either unable or unwilling to guarantee that Saudi and UAE intelligence agencies would be able to intercept all communications. The governments of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were horrified by the prospect that people might be able to communicate on their soil without their being able to intercept and surveil that communication, and in response they banned BlackBerrys.

This created huge amounts of condemnation in the Western world. Every American newspaper editorialized about how this showed how much these governments were the enemies of freedom. The Obama administration issued a stinging denunciation of both governments, saying that they were engaged in the kinds of oppression that we couldn’t tolerate. And yet 6 weeks later The New York Times reported that the Obama administration was preparing legislation to mandate that

all services that enable communications, including encrypted email transmitters like BlackBerry, social networking Web sites like Facebook, and software that allows direct peer-to-peer messaging like Skype, be designed to ensure government surveillance.

It was exactly the same principle that everybody condemned the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia for—the principle being that there can be no human interaction, especially no human communication, not just from foreign nationals and between foreign nationals but by American citizens, on American soil, that is beyond the reach of the U.S. Government.

This was the mindset that in 2002 led the Bush administration to dredge up John Poindexter from wherever it was that he was—he was actually working for defense contractors—to start the program that they called the Total Information Awareness program. The logo, which I actually looked at in the last couple of weeks, which you should go and look at just because you won’t believe how creepy it is, has a pyramid with this huge eye hovering over it, this eye that was going to be theawaall- seeing eye. [You can see it here.]

The only problem with the Total Information Awareness program was that they put a name on it that was too honest about what it was, and it freaked everybody out. So they had to pretend that they weren’t going to go forward with it. But, of course, what they did was they’ve incrementally and in very clear ways recreated the Total Information Awareness program under a whole variety of different legislative initiatives.

This idea that every single form of technological communication by law must be constructed to permit government backdoor interception and surveillance is an expression of what this surveillance state mindset is—that there can be no such thing as any form of privacy from the U.S. Government. That is the mindset that has led the surveillance state to be the sprawling, vast, ubiquitous, and always expanding instrument that state and corporate power users employ in order to safeguard their power.

The one other point that’s worth making about how the surveillance state works and how powers exercise through it—and this, I think, is probably the most pernicious part—is what I refer to as the government’s one-way mirror. At exactly the same time—this is really so remarkable to me—that the government has been massively expanding its ability to know everything that we’re doing, it has simultaneously erected a wall of secrecy around it that prevents us from knowing anything that they’re doing.

There was this amazing controversy when the documents from WikiLeaks were disclosed, and the American media had to rush to assure everybody simultaneously (1) that this was both a completely meaningless act and (2) that it was a completely horrible act. So the two claims that were made were, this horrible, traitorous organization of WikiLeaks has severely damaged American national security, but at the same time we want you to know, there’s nothing new in anything that they’ve disclosed, there’s nothing worth knowing. Those were literally the two claims that were made, and nobody ever bothered to reconcile those.

But what was true is that of the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of pages that WikiLeaks disclosed—it’s actually in excess of a million now—the vast bulk of it contained very banal content. It was stuff that really wasn’t particularly interesting, that didn’t reveal very much about anything that was worth knowing. And what was actually so scandalous about that was that very fact, because every single page that WikiLeaks disclosed was stamped “Classified,” which made it a crime to disclose any of it, even though so much of it was banal and revealed nothing worth knowing. What that reflected was that the U.S. Government reflexively labels everything that it does of any conceivable significance as classified and secret.

The government keeps everything that it does from us at the very same time that it knows more and more about what we’re doing. And if you think about what a radical reversal of how things are supposed to work, it’s really startling. The idea is supposed to be—and this is just basic political science, basic design of the founding of the country—that there’s supposed to be transparency for government. We’re supposed to know virtually everything that they do. Individuals, on the other hand, are supposed to live in a sphere of privacy: Nobody is supposed to know what we’re doing unless there’s a demonstrated good reason to invade that wall of privacy. We’ve completely reversed that so that the government now operates with complete secrecy and we have none.

The reason this is so disturbing is, you just look at the famous aphorism typically attributed to Francis Bacon that

knowledge is power.

If I’m able to know everything about you—what you do, what you think, what you fear, where you go, what your aspirations are, the bad things you do, the bad things you think about—and you know nothing about me, I have immense leverage over you in all kinds of ways. I can think about how to control you, I can blackmail you, I can figure out what your weaknesses are. I can manipulate you in all sorts of ways. That is the state of affairs that this surveillance state, combined with the wall of secrecy, has brought about.

I just want to talk a little bit about the mechanisms by which this has been done and the reasons why this loss of privacy matters so much in relationship to the government, and the corporate component of the surveillance state.

If you look at the way in which the “war on terror” functioned in the first, say, 5 to 7 years after it was declared and the civil liberties abuses that it ushered in, predictably and inevitably, you will find that almost without exception—there are a few exceptions but almost without exception they were directed toward foreign nationals, not American citizens but foreign nationals, who were on foreign soil, not on U.S. soil. The reason for that is that governments, when they want to give themselves abusive and radical powers, typically first target people whom they think their citizens won’t care very much about because they’ll think they’re not affected by it. That’s pretty much what happened. We detained without charges and without trials a bunch of Muslims who remain nameless, whom we picked up in places that nobody really knew about or cared much about. We sent drones to assassinate them. All of these powers were directed at foreign others.

But what has happened over last 3 to 4 years is a radical change in the war on terror. The war on terror has now been imported into U.S. policy. It is now directed at American citizens on American soil. So rather than simply sending drones to assassinate foreign nationals, we are now sending drones to target and kill American citizens without charges or trial. Rather than indefinitely detaining foreign nationals at Guantánamo, Congress last year enacted and President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act, that permits the detention without trial indefinitely of American citizens on U.S. soil. Rather than sending drones only over Yemen and Somalia and Pakistan, drones are now being approved at an alarming rate, not just surveillance drones but increasingly possibly weaponized drones that will fly over American soil watching everything that we do, in ways that, say, police helicopters could never possibly accomplish.

Even when President Obama promised to close Guantánamo—and lots of his defenders will say, not inaccurately, that he was prevented from doing so because Congress blocked the closure—the plan that he had was not to close Guantánamo and eliminate the system of indefinite detention that made it so controversial. The plan was to take that system of indefinite detention, close Guantánamo, because it had become an upsetting symbol, and import it, move it onto American soil in Thomson, Illinois. That was the plan that the Obama administration had for indefinite detention.

So what you see is the gradual importation of all of the abuses of the war on terror so that now they are entrenched and not just aimed at foreign nationals but U.S. citizens on U.S. soil as well. That’s the mechanism by which this is being done. If you listen to U.S. intelligence and defense officials talk about terrorism, what they emphasize now is not al-Qaeda in Pakistan, which they will largely acknowledge has been eliminated, or even al-Qaeda in Yemen, which isn’t really much of a threat to anybody. What they will talk about is the threat of home-grown terrorism. This is now the grave menace that American terrorism officials will warn needs to be restrained. And the solution to that has been the gradual transference, importation, of all of these abuses that we let take root because they weren’t happening to us but were happening to people over there, into domestic powers.

The reason that that’s being done is not very difficult to see. American policymakers know that the financial unraveling that took place in 2008, that’s even more visible in European states like Spain and Portugal and Greece, has never really been rectified, and it can’t be rectified because these are structural problems. The way in which oligarchs in the U.S. monopolize wealth and then use that wealth to control our political processes ensures that this is not going to change, it’s only going to worsen. Mass unemployment, mass foreclosure, all of these income-inequality pathologies are here to stay. The future that American policy makers see is visible if you look at what happened in London for a brief period of time, what happens all the time in Athens, what is happening with increasing frequency in Spain. Huge amounts of social unrest. You see lots of that happening. I think that’s what the Occupy movement in many ways is. And the elite in the U.S., both corporate and government, are petrified about that type of unrest.

What people in power always do when they fear unrest is they start consolidating power in order to constrain it, in order to suppress it. This is what this surveillance state is designed to do. It’s justified in the name of terrorism, of course. That’s the packaging in which it’s wrapped. But it’s been used extremely and in all sorts of ways since 9/11 for domestic application. That’s happening even more. It’s happening in terms of the Occupy movement and the infiltration that federal officials were able to accomplish using PATRIOT Act authorities. It’s happened with pro-Palestinian activists in the U.S. and all other dissident groups that have themselves been targeted with surveillance and law enforcement, using what was originally these war-on-terror powers.

I want talk about why I think this matters, because the attitude that you will typically encounter—and it’s not a very easy mindset to address or to refute, and it’s one that government has sold continuously and peddled—is, privacy in the abstract, I can understand why it’s something to value, but ultimately, if I’m not really doing anything wrong, if I’m not one of the terrorists, if I’m not plotting to bomb a bridge, I don’t really have much reason to care if people are invading my sphere of privacy and watching and learning what it is that I’m doing. So I think it’s worth talking about the reasons why that is such an ill- advised way to think, why it absolutely matters that privacy is being invaded in these systematic ways.

One obvious answer is that any kind of social movement needs to be able to organize in private, away from the targets of the organization. So if you look at the revolutionary movements in the Arab world, one of the greatest challenges that they had was that the governments sought all sorts of ways to prevent them from communicating with one another, either at all or in privacy. The fact that the Internet was not nearly as pervasive in those countries actually turned out to be a blessing, because it enabled them to organize in more organic ways. But if the government is able to learn what we speak about and know who we’re talking to and know what it is that we’re planning, it makes any kind of activism extremely difficult, because secrecy and privacy are prerequisites to effective activism.

But I think the more difficult value of privacy, the one that’s a lot harder to think about, is also the one that’s much more important than just the one I described. And that is that it is in the private realm exclusively where things like dissent and creativity and challenges to orthodoxy reside. Only when you know that you can explore without external judgment or you can experiment without eyes being cast upon you is the opportunity for creating new paths possible.

There are all kinds of fascinating studies that prove this to be the case. There are psychological studies where people have sat down at their dinner table with family members or friends and they are talking for a long time in a very informal way, and then suddenly one of them pulls out a tape recorder and puts it on the table and says,

I’m going to tape-record our conversation, just for my own interest. I promise I’m not going to tell anybody, I’m not going to show it to anybody, no one is ever going to hear it. I’m just going to tape-record it because I want to go over all the wisdom that you’ve given me.

It’s an experiment psychologically to assess what the impact of that is. Invariably what happens is the people who are now being recorded radically change their behavior. They speak in stilted sentences, they try and talk about much more high-minded topics, they’re much stiffer in their expression of things, because they now feel like they’re being monitored.

There was a pilot program in Los Angeles 6 or 7 years ago that was in response to a couple of exaggerated news stories about rambunctious elementary-age schoolchildren on buses who had apparently been bullying and abusing other students. And the solution that they came up with was that they were going to install surveillance cameras in every single public school bus in Los Angeles County, which is the second or third largest county in the U.S. The response, when it was ultimately disclosed was, Well, this is going to be extraordinarily expensive. How can you have tens of thousands of working surveillance cameras with people monitoring them or recording them every single day for every school bus in Los Angeles County?

The answer that they gave was, Oh, no, we’re not going to have working cameras in these buses. There may be a few buses that have working cameras, just so nobody knows which buses have those. We’re going to have faux cameras, because we know that if we put cameras up, even though they’re not working, that will radically change the behavior of students. In other words, we are training our young citizens to live in a culture where they expect that they are always being watched. And we want them to be chilled and we want them to be deterred. We want them not to ever challenge orthodoxy or to explore limits or to engage in creativity of any kind. This type of surveillance by design breeds conformism. That’s its purpose. And that’s what makes this surveillance so pernicious.

One of the things about the surveillance state, one of the things that happens is that the way in which it affects how people think and behave is typically insidious. It’s something that’s very potent, and yet it’s very easy to avoid understanding or realizing, even as it affects you. Sometimes people do know about the effects of the surveillance state and the climate of fear it creates, and it affects them. I went on a book tour last October and early November, and I went to 15 different cities. In each of the cities I really didn’t care honestly about the book events; I was much more interested in going to the Occupy encampments in each city and spending time there. It was much more enlightening and energizing. Literally almost the entirety of my book tour was taken up by talking about the Occupy movement. It was what everyone was thinking about, I had written about it many times, and I thought it was by far the most significant political development in many years. And I still think that.

And everywhere I would go that I would talk about the Occupy movement, literally all the time I would get people who would say things like—and I would be on radio shows and people would call in and say this— “Look, I’m really supportive of the Occupy movement. I want to go down there and be a participant in it. But I’m a woman who has a small baby,” or “I’m a man who has a bad leg.” And “given all the police abuse that’s taking place there, and all the infiltration, I’m just afraid of going and participating in these movements.” That was definitely part of the effect that this infiltration and the police abuse had. It created this climate of fear and a way that people knew.

I spent a lot of time with American Muslims and in American Muslim communities because of what I do and the work that I do and where I go and speak. One of the things that emboldens me and keeps me very energized and engaged about these issues is, if you go and speak to communities of American Muslims, what you will find is an incredibly pervasive climate of fear. The reason is that they know that they are always being watched. They know that they have FBI informants who are attempting to infiltrate their communities. They know that they have people next to them, their neighbors, their fellow mosque goers, who have been manipulated by the FBI to be informants. They know that they are being eavesdropped on when they speak on the telephone, they know that they are having their emails read, that they are eavesdropped on when they speak or communicate to anybody. What they will say all the time is that it has created this extreme suspicion within their own communities, within their own mosques, to the point that they’re even afraid to talk to any new people about anything significant, because they fear, quite rightly, that this is all being done as part of a government effort to watch them. And it doesn’t really matter whether it’s true in a particular case or it isn’t true. This climate of fear creates limits around the behavior in which they’re willing to engage in very damaging ways.

But I think what this surveillance state really does, more than making people consciously aware of the limits—in those two examples that I just described, people not wanting to go to Occupy movements and people in Muslim communities being very guarded—is it makes people believe that they’re free even though they’ve been subtly convinced that there are things that they shouldn’t do that they might want to do.

I always use dog examples. I have 11 dogs, so it’s one of the things that I know best. I know you probably think I’m crazy, and maybe I am, but they’re all rescue dogs. It’s just one of the things that we do. I know dog behavior really well, so I draw lessons a lot from dogs. One of the things that’s really amazing about dog behavior is, if you don’t want dogs to go into a certain place because it’s dangerous for them, one of the things that you can do is put a fence around the area where you want to confine them. But eventually you can remove the fence and you don’t need the fence anymore, because they will have been trained that the entirety of their world is within the boundaries that you first set for them. So even once you remove the fence, they won’t venture beyond it. They’ve been trained that that’s the only world that they want or are interested in or know.

There are studies in what was formerly East Germany, which was probably one of the most notorious surveillance states of the last 50 years, where even once their boundaries were removed, once the Stasi no longer existed, once the wall fell, the psychological effects on the East German people endure until today, because the way in which they’ve been trained for decades to understand that there are limits to their lives, even once you remove the limits, they’ve been trained that those are not limits they want to transgress.

That’s one of the things that constantly surveilling people and constantly communicating to them that they’re powerless before this omnipotent government/corporate institution does to people, it convinces them that the tiny little box in which they live is really the only box in which they want to live, so they no longer even realize they’re being imprisoned. Rosa Luxemburg put that best. She said,

He who does not move does not notice his chains.

You can acculturate people to believe that tyranny is freedom, that their limits are actually emancipation. That is what this surveillance state most insidiously does: By training people to accept their own conformity, believing that they are actually free, they no longer even realize the ways in which they’re being limited.

There are just a few quick points that I want to make about that. One is that you can do things that remove yourself from the surveillance matrix, not completely but to the best extent you can. There are people who only engage in transactions using cash. As inconvenient as that is, it at least removes that level of surveillance. There are ways to communicate on the Internet using very effective forms of anonymity, which I will talk about in a minute. There are ways of educating yourself about how to engage in interaction and activism beyond the prying eye of the U.S. Government, to stay, in essence, a step ahead.

There are important ways to educate yourself about the rights you have when directly interacting with government agents. So much of what the government learns is because people let them learn that without having any legal obligation to do so. Much of government searches or government questioning is done under the manipulative pretext of consent, where people thought they had to consent or didn’t know they had the right not to, and give up information they didn’t need to give up. And you can educate yourself about what your rights are by going to the Center for Constitutional Rights Web site or the National Coalition to Protect Civil Freedoms or the ACLU. Lots of places online will tell you how to do that.

A very important means of subverting this one-way mirror that I’ve described is forcible radical transparency. It’s one of the reasons that I support so enthusiastically and unqualifiedly groups like Anonymous and WikiLeaks. I want holes to be blown in the wall of secrecy, because the way in which this ends up operating effectively is only because they’re able to conceal what they do. That’s why they consider these unauthorized means of transparency so threatening.

A final point I want to make about things that can be done is that there are groups that are pursuing very interesting and effective forms of anonymity on the Internet. There’s things like the Tor Project and other groups which enable people to use the Internet without any detection from government authorities, that has the effect of preventing regimes that actually bar their citizens from using the Internet from doing so, since you can no longer trace the origins of the Internet user. But it also protects people who live in countries like ours, in which the government is constantly trying to monitor what we do, by sending our communications through multiple proxies around the world in a way that can’t be invaded.

There’s really a war taking place, an arms race, where the government and these groups are attempting to stay one technological step ahead of the other in terms of technological ability to shield Internet communications from the government and the government’s ability to invade them. Participating in this war in ways that are supportive of the good side are really critical, as is availing yourself of the technology that exists to make what you do as private as possible.

I really don’t think there are many more important fronts of battle, if there are any, than combating the surveillance state. That’s why I’m so interested in the topic and why I’m so happy to be able to speak with you about it. Thanks very much.

Q&A

Let me just address a few of those questions. The comment about Bradley Manning is one that really resonates for me, because one of the things that I’ve been able to do in this work is get to know Daniel Ellsberg pretty well, who, before Bradley Manning, was probably one of my greatest political heroes. He knowingly risked his liberty and even potentially his life just out of the conscience of needing to do something that he could to stop the Vietnam War.

One of the amazing things about Daniel Ellsberg is that if you stand up, even in mainstream Democratic liberal venues, and you mention the name Daniel Ellsberg, people will stand up and cheer, and they treat him like he’s a hero. It’s just like part of the dogma of being an American progressive or whatever that you’re supposed to cheer for Daniel Ellsberg. If you mention the name Bradley Manning in those same venues, there will be dead silence. And if you call for his prosecution and even his execution, that’s the far more likely way that you will get cheers in those kinds of places.

The thing that is so disturbing about that is that Manning is every bit the hero that Daniel Ellsberg was, if he did what he’s accused of. If you read the chat logs that are purportedly his, what he says about why he did what he is accused of doing is that he was horrified by the extent of the evil that his own government was doing, something that he never knew when he went to Iraq, and it wasn’t just in Iraq but the way in which his country and its allies operate in the world, and that he felt it was urgent that this information be liberated because he thought that that would lead to reforms. He even talked about the way in which he was willing to sacrifice his life and go to prison for a long time in order to achieve that end. That to me is the classic definition of hero.

And yet not just conservatives but even most mainstream progressives view him as a villain. Part of that is because it’s the Obama administration rather than the Republican administration prosecuting him. But I think the much bigger part of it is that we’ve really changed how we think, not just about surveillance, as I talked about earlier, but even authority, and the idea that you can challenge authority by nicely going into the voting booth and picking one of the two little holes that they’ve given you, but that anything more disruptive than that is inherently illegitimate. It’s not just that surveillance is more accepted, but so, too, is the idea that those who challenge authority in a meaningful way should be punished.

Just the last point I want to make is the two excellent comments that we just heard about the virtue and power of mass movements to defeat this. I certainly didn’t mean to stand up—and I actually said this last year—you can go into a room like this and you can talk about all the sort of forces that you face and you can just produce this kind of horrible gloominess, this defeatism. Oh, my God, I just listened to this guy for an hour and a half. He talked about all these horrible things. I think I want to go jump off a bridge or take a bunch of Xanax and play video games for the rest of my life or whatever. I definitely don’t want to suggest to anybody that this surveillance state is something that anyone should fear in the sense of driving you into inaction. But the reason why I didn’t emphasize that is that I assume that anybody, by virtue of your attendance here, is somebody who has already decided that you don’t the fear that. But, yes, absolutely overwhelming the surveillance state by just having too many people engage in too much prohibited conduct is definitely their vulnerability.

And the reason why they want to collect more and more is not because they want to read it all or they can read it all. They can’t. And the more they collect, in some senses, as this gentleman alluded to, the harder it is for them to find what they’re looking for. But the reason they want to cover and blanket everything with surveillance is because of what I talked about earlier. It’s that knowledge that the Los Angeles County had that if you make people think they’re being watched, that in and of itself will change behavior, even if you’re not really able to monitor what they do.

But I’m not here to discourage anybody from engaging in disruptions and mass movements. Quite the opposite. I just think it’s important to be aware of what these challenges are, not to hide under your bed in fear of them but to figure out how to defeat them.

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by John Cusack

From Truthout

Tuesday, September 4, 2012

I wrote this a while back after Romney got the nom. In light of the blizzard of bullshit coming at us in the next few months I thought I would put it out now.
______________

Now that the Republican primary circus is over, I started to think about what it would mean to vote for Obama…

Since mostly we hear from the daily hypocrisies of Mitt and friends, I thought we should examine “our guy” on a few issues with a bit more scrutiny than we hear from the “progressive left”, which seems to be little or none at all.

Instead of scrutiny, the usual arguments in favor of another Obama presidency are made: We must stop fanatics; it would be better than the fanatics—he’s the last line of defense from the corporate barbarians—and of course the Supreme Court. It all makes a terrible kind of sense and I agree completely with Garry Wills who described the Republican primaries as

a revolting combination of con men & fanatics, the current primary race has become a demonstration that the Republican party does not deserve serious consideration for public office.

True enough. But yet…

… there are certain Rubicon lines, as constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley calls them, that Obama has crossed.

All political questions are not equal no matter how much you pivot. When people die or lose their physical freedom to feed certain economic sectors or ideologies, it becomes a zero sum game for me.

This is not an exercise in bemoaning regrettable policy choices or cheering favorable ones but to ask fundamentally: Who are we? What are we voting for? And what does it mean?

Three markers — the Nobel Prize acceptance speech, the escalation speech at West Point, and the recent speech by Eric Holder — crossed that Rubicon line for me…

Mr. Obama, the Christian president with the Muslim-sounding name, would heed the admonitions of neither religion’s prophets about making war and do what no empire or leader, including Alexander the Great, could do: he would, he assured us “get the job done in Afghanistan.” And so we have our democratic president receiving the Nobel Peace Prize as he sends 30,000 more troops to a ten-year-old conflict in a country that’s been war-torn for 5,000 years.

Why? We’ll never fully know. Instead, we got a speech that was stone bullshit and an insult to the very idea of peace.

We can’t have it both ways. Hope means endless war? Obama has metaphorically pushed all in with the usual international and institutional killers; and in the case of war and peace, literally.
To sum it up: more war. So thousands die or are maimed; generations of families and veterans are damaged beyond imagination; sons and daughters come home in rubber bags. But he and his satellites get their four more years.

The AfPak War is more H. G. Wells than Orwell, with people blindly letting each other get fed to the barons of Wall Street and the Pentagon, themselves playing the part of the Pashtuns. The paradox is simple: he got elected on his anti-war stance during a perfect storm of the economic meltdown and McCain saying the worst thing at the worst time as we stared into the abyss. Obama beat Clinton on “I’m against the war and she is for it.” It was simple then, when he needed it to be.

Under Obama do we continue to call the thousands of mercenaries in Afghanistan “general contractors” now that Bush is gone? No, we don’t talk about them… not a story anymore.
Do we prosecute felonies like torture or spying on Americans? No, time to “move on”…

Now chaos is the norm and though the chaos is complicated, the answer is still simple. We can’t afford this morally, financially, or physically. Or in a language the financial community can digest: the wars are ideologically and spiritually bankrupt. No need to get a score from the CBO.
Drones bomb Pakistani villages across the border at an unprecedented rate. Is it legal? Does anyone care? “It begs the question,” as Daniel Berrigan asks us,

is this one a “good war” or a “dumb war”? But the question betrays the bias: it is all the same. It’s all madness.

One is forced to asked the question: Is the President just another Ivy League Asshole shredding civil liberties and due process and sending people to die in some shithole for purely political reasons?

There will be a historical record. “Change we can believe in” is not using the other guys’ mob to clean up your own tracks while continuing to feed at the trough. Human nature is human nature, and when people find out they’re being hustled, they will seek revenge, sooner or later, and it will be ugly and savage.

In a country with desperation growing everywhere, everyday — despite the “Oh, things are getting better” press releases — how could one think otherwise?

Just think about the economic crisis we are in as a country. It could never happen, they said. The American middle class was rock solid. The American dream, home ownership, education, the opportunity to get a good job if you applied yourself… and on and on. Yeah, what happened to that? It’s gone.

The next question must be: “What happened to our civil liberties, to our due process, which are the foundation of any notion of real democracy?” The chickens haven’t come home to roost for the majority but the foundation has been set and the Constitution gutted.

Brian McFadden’s cartoon says it all.

Here’s the transcript of the telephone interview I conducted with Turley.

JONATHAN TURLEY: Hi John.

CUSACK: Hello. Okay, hey I was just thinking about all this stuff and thought maybe we’d see what we can do to bring civil liberties and these issues back into the debate for the next couple of months …

TURLEY: I think that’s great.

CUSACK: So, I don’t know how you can believe in the Constitution and violate it that much.

TURLEY: Yeah.

CUSACK: I would just love to know your take as an expert on these things. And then maybe we can speak to whatever you think his motivations would be, and not speak to them in the way that we want to armchair-quarterback like the pundits do about “the game inside the game,” but only do it because it would speak to the arguments that are being used by the left to excuse it. For example, maybe their argument that there are things you can’t know, and it’s a dangerous world out there, or why do you think a constitutional law professor would throw out due process?

TURLEY: Well, there’s a misconception about Barack Obama as a former constitutional law professor. First of all, there are plenty of professors who are “legal relativists.” They tend to view legal principles as relative to whatever they’re trying to achieve. I would certainly put President Obama in the relativist category. Ironically, he shares that distinction with George W. Bush. They both tended to view the law as a means to a particular end — as opposed to the end itself. That’s the fundamental distinction among law professors. Law professors like Obama tend to view the law as one means to an end, and others, like myself, tend to view it as the end itself.

Truth be known, President Obama has never been particularly driven by principle. Right after his election, I wrote a column in a few days warning people that even though I voted for Obama, he was not what people were describing him to be. I saw him in the Senate. I saw him in Chicago.

CUSACK: Yeah, so did I.

TURLEY: He was never motivated that much by principle. What he’s motivated by are programs. And to that extent, I like his programs more than Bush’s programs, but Bush and Obama are very much alike when it comes to principles. They simply do not fight for the abstract principles and view them as something quite relative to what they’re trying to accomplish. Thus privacy yields to immunity for telecommunications companies and due process yields to tribunals for terrorism suspects.

CUSACK: Churchill said,

The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers, is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist.

That wasn’t Eugene Debs speaking — that was Winston Churchill.

And if he takes an oath before God to uphold the Constitution, and yet he decides it’s not politically expedient for him to deal with due process or spying on citizens and has his Attorney General justify murdering US citizens — and then adds a signing statement saying, “Well, I’m not going to do anything with this stuff because I’m a good guy.”– one would think we would have to define this as a much graver threat than good or bad policy choices- correct?

TURLEY: Well, first of all, there’s a great desire of many people to relieve themselves of the obligation to vote on principle. It’s a classic rationalization that liberals have been known to use recently, but not just liberals. The Republican and Democratic parties have accomplished an amazing feat with the red state/blue state paradigm. They’ve convinced everyone that regardless of how bad they are, the other guy is worse. So even with 11 percent of the public supporting Congress most incumbents will be returned to Congress. They have so structured and defined the question that people no longer look at the actual principles and instead vote on this false dichotomy.

Now, belief in human rights law and civil liberties leads one to the uncomfortable conclusion that President Obama has violated his oath to uphold the Constitution. But that’s not the primary question for voters. It is less about him than it is them. They have an obligation to cast their vote in a principled fashion. It is, in my opinion, no excuse to vote for someone who has violated core constitutional rights and civil liberties simply because you believe the other side is no better. You cannot pretend that your vote does not constitute at least a tacit approval of the policies of the candidate.
This is nothing new, of course for civil libertarians who have always been left behind at the altar in elections. We’ve always been the bridesmaid, never the bride. We’re used to politicians lying to us. And President Obama lied to us. There’s no way around that. He promised various things and promptly abandoned those principles.

So the argument that Romney is no better or worse does not excuse the obligation of a voter. With President Obama they have a president who went to the CIA soon after he was elected and promised CIA employees that they would not be investigated or prosecuted for torture, even though he admitted that waterboarding was torture.

CUSACK: I remember when we were working with Arianna at The Huffington Post and we thought, well, has anyone asked whether waterboarding is torture? Has anyone asked Eric Holder that? And so Arianna had Sam Seder ask him that at a press conference, and then he had to admit that it was. And then the next question, of course, was, well, if it is a crime, are you going to prosecute the law? But, of course, it wasn’t politically expedient to do so, right? That’s inherent in their non-answer and inaction?

TURLEY: That’s right.

CUSACK: Have you ever heard a more specious argument than “It’s time for us all to move on?” When did the Attorney General or the President have the option to enforce the law?

TURLEY: Well, that’s the key question that nobody wants to ask. We have a treaty, actually a number of treaties, that obligate us to investigate and prosecute torture. We pushed through those treaties because we wanted to make clear that no matter what the expediency of the moment, no matter whether it was convenient or inconvenient, all nations had to agree to investigate and prosecute torture and other war crimes.

And the whole reason for putting this in the treaties was to do precisely the opposite of what the Obama administration has done. That is, in these treaties they say that it is not a defense that prosecution would be inconvenient or unpopular. But that’s exactly what President Obama said when he announced, “I won’t allow the prosecution of torture because I want us to look to the future and not the past.” That is simply a rhetorical flourish to hide the obvious point: “I don’t want the inconvenience and the unpopularity that would come with enforcing this treaty.”

CUSACK: Right. So, in that sense, the Bush administration had set the precedent that the state can do anything it likes in the name of terror, and not only has Obama let that cement harden, but he’s actually expanded the power of the executive branch to do whatever it wants, or he’s lowered the bar — he’s lowered the law — to meet his convenience. He’s lowered the law to meet his personal political convenience rather than leaving it as something that, as Mario Cuomo said, the law is supposed to be better than us.

TURLEY: That’s exactly right. In fact, President Obama has not only maintained the position of George W. Bush in the area of national securities and in civil liberties, he’s actually expanded on those positions. He is actually worse than George Bush in some areas.

CUSACK: Can you speak to which ones?

TURLEY: Well, a good example of it is that President Bush ordered the killing of an American citizen when he approved a drone strike on a car in Yemen that he knew contained an American citizen as a passenger. Many of us at the time said, “You just effectively ordered the death of an American citizen in order to kill someone else, and where exactly do you have that authority?” But they made an argument that because the citizen wasn’t the primary target, he was just collateral damage. And there are many that believe that that is a plausible argument.

CUSACK: By the way, we’re forgetting to kill even a foreign citizen is against the law. I hate to be so quaint…

TURLEY: Well, President Obama outdid President Bush. He ordered the killing of two US citizens as the primary targets and has then gone forward and put out a policy that allows him to kill any American citizen when he unilaterally determines them to be a terrorist threat. Where President Bush had a citizen killed as collateral damage, President Obama has actually a formal policy allowing him to kill any US citizen.

CUSACK: But yet the speech that Eric Holder gave was greeted generally, by those others than civil libertarians and a few people on the left with some intellectual honesty, with polite applause and a stunning silence and then more cocktail parties and state dinners and dignitaries, back the Republican Hypocrisy Hour on the evening feed — and he basically gave a speech saying that the executive can assassinate US citizens.

TURLEY: That was the truly other-worldly moment of the speech. He went to, Northwestern Law School (my alma mater), and stood there and articulated the most authoritarian policy that a government can have: the right to unilaterally kill its citizens without any court order or review. The response from the audience was applause. Citizens applauding an Attorney General who just described how the President was claiming the right to kill any of them on his sole inherent authority.

CUSACK: Does that order have to come directly from Obama, or can his underlings carry that out on his behalf as part of a generalized understanding? Or does he have to personally say, “You can get that guy and that guy?”

TURLEY: Well, he has delegated the authority to the so-called death panel, which is, of course, hilarious, since the Republicans keep talking about a nonexistent death panel in national healthcare. We actually do have a death panel, and it’s killing people who are healthy.

CUSACK: I think you just gave me the idea for my next film. And the tone will be, of course, Kafkaesque.

TURLEY: It really is.

CUSACK: You’re at the bottom of the barrel when the Attorney General is saying that not only can you hold people in prison for no charge without due process, but we can kill the citizens that “we” deem terrorists. But “we” won’t do it cause we’re the good guys remember?

TURLEY: Well, the way that this works is you have this unseen panel. Of course, their proceedings are completely secret. The people who are put on the hit list are not informed, obviously.

CUSACK: That’s just not polite, is it?

TURLEY: No, it’s not. The first time you’re informed that you’re on this list is when your car explodes, and that doesn’t allow much time for due process. But the thing about the Obama administration is that it is far more premeditated and sophisticated in claiming authoritarian powers. Bush tended to shoot from the hip — he tended to do these things largely on the edges. In contrast, Obama has openly embraced these powers and created formal measures, an actual process for killing US citizens. He has used the terminology of the law to seek to legitimate an extrajudicial killing.

CUSACK: Yeah, bringing the law down to meet his political realism, his constitutional realism, which is that the Constitution is just a means to an end politically for him, so if it’s inconvenient for him to deal with due process or if it’s inconvenient for him to deal with torture, well, then why should he do that? He’s a busy man. The Constitution is just another document to be used in a political fashion, right?

TURLEY: Indeed. I heard from people in the administration after I wrote a column a couple weeks ago about the assassination policy. And they basically said, “Look, you’re not giving us our due. Holder said in the speech that we are following a constitutional analysis. And we have standards that we apply.” It is an incredibly seductive argument, but there is an incredible intellectual disconnect. Whatever they are doing, it can’t be called a constitutional process.

Obama has asserted the right to kill any citizen that he believes is a terrorist. He is not bound by this panel that only exists as an extension of his claimed inherent absolute authority. He can ignore them. He can circumvent them. In the end, with or without a panel, a president is unilaterally killing a US citizen. This is exactly what the framers of the Constitution told us not to do.

CUSACK: The framers didn’t say, “In special cases, do what you like. When there are things the public cannot know for their own good, when it’s extra-specially a dangerous world… do whatever you want.” The framers of the Constitution always knew there would be extraordinary circumstances, and they were accounted for in the Constitution. The Constitution does not allow for the executive to redefine the Constitution when it will be politically easier for him to get things done.

TURLEY: No. And it’s preposterous to argue that.

CUSACK: When does it become — criminal?

TURLEY: Well, the framers knew what it was like to have sovereigns kill citizens without due process. They did it all the time back in the 18th century. They wrote a constitution specifically to bar unilateral authority.
James Madison is often quoted for his observation that if all men were angels, no government would be necessary. And what he was saying is that you have to create a system of law that has checks and balances so that even imperfect human beings are restrained from doing much harm. Madison and other framers did not want to rely on the promises of good motivations or good intents from the government. They created a system where no branch had enough authority to govern alone — a system of shared and balanced powers.

So what Obama’s doing is to rewrite the most fundamental principle of the US Constitution. The whole point of the Holder speech was that we’re really good guys who take this seriously, and you can trust us. That’s exactly the argument the framers rejected, the “trust me” principle of government. You’ll notice when Romney was asked about this, he said, “I would’ve signed the same law, because I trust Obama to do the right thing.” They’re both using the very argument that the framers warned citizens never to accept from their government.

CUSACK: So basically, it comes down to, again, just political expediency and aesthetics. So as long as we have friendly aesthetics and likable people, we can do whatever we want. Who cares what the policy is or the implications for the future.

TURLEY: The greatest problem is what it has done to us and what our relative silence signifies. Liberals and civil libertarians have lost their own credibility, their own moral standing, with the support of President Obama. For many civil libertarians it is impossible to vote for someone who has blocked the prosecution of war crimes. That’s where you cross the Rubicon for most civil libertarians. That was a turning point for many who simply cannot to vote for someone who is accused of that type of violation.

Under international law, shielding people from war-crime prosecutions is itself a form of war crime. They’re both violations of international law. Notably, when the Spanish moved to investigate our torture program, we now know that the Obama administration threatened the Spanish courts and the Spanish government that they better not enforce the treaty against the U.S. This was a real threat to the Administration because these treaties allow other nations to step forward when another nation refuses to uphold the treaty. If a government does not investigate and prosecute its own accused war criminals, then other countries have the right to do so. That rule was, again, of our own creation. With other leading national we have long asserted the right to prosecute people in other countries who are shielded or protected by their own countries.

CUSACK: Didn’t Spain pull somebody out of Chile under that?

TURLEY: Yeah, Pinochet.

CUSACK: Yeah, also our guy…

TURLEY: The great irony of all this is that we’re the architect of that international process. We’re the one that always pushed for the position that no government could block war crimes prosecution.

But that’s not all. The Obama administration has also outdone the Bush administration in other areas. For example, one of the most important international principles to come out of World War II was the rejection of the “just following orders” defense. We were the country that led the world in saying that defendants brought before Nuremberg could not base their defense on the fact that they were just following orders. After Nuremberg, there were decades of development of this principle. It’s a very important point, because that defense, if it is allowed, would shield most people accused of torture and war crime. So when the Obama administration –

CUSACK: That also parallels into the idea that the National Defense Authorization Act is using its powers not only to put a chilling effect on whistleblowers, but to also make it illegal for whistleblowers to bring the truth out. Am I right on that, or is that an overstatement?

TURLEY: Well, the biggest problem is that when the administration was fishing around for some way to justify not doing the right thing and not prosecuting torture, they finally released a document that said that CIA personnel and even some DOJ lawyers were “just following orders,” but particularly CIA personnel.

The reason Obama promised them that none of them would be prosecuted is he said that they were just following the orders of higher authority in the government. That position gutted Nuremberg. Many lawyers around the world are upset because the US under the Obama administration has torn the heart out of Nuremberg. Just think of the implications: other countries that are accused of torture can shield their people and say, “Yeah, this guy was a torturer. This guy ordered a war crime. But they were all just following orders. And the guy that gave them the order, he’s dead.” It is the classic defense of war criminals. Now it is a viable defense again because of the Obama administration.

CUSACK: Yeah.

TURLEY: Certainly part of the problem is how the news media –

CUSACK: Oscar Wilde said most journalists would fall under the category of those who couldn’t tell the difference between a bicycle accident and the end of civilization. But why is it that all the journalists that you see mostly on MSNBC or most of the progressives, or so-called progressives, who believe that under Bush and Cheney and Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzalez these were great and grave constitutional crises, the wars were an ongoing moral fiasco — but now, since we have a friendly face in the White House, someone with kind of pleasing aesthetics and some new policies we like, now all of a sudden these aren’t crimes, there’s no crisis. Because he’s our guy? Go, team, go?

TURLEY: Some in the media have certainly fallen into this cult of personality.

CUSACK: What would you say to those people? I always thought the duty of a citizen, and even more so as a journalist, had greatly to do with the idea that intellectual honesty was much more important than political loyalty. How would you compare Alberto Gonzalez to Eric Holder?

TURLEY: Oh, Eric Holder is smarter than Gonzalez, but I see no other difference in terms of how they’ve conducted themselves. Both of these men are highly political. Holder was accused of being improperly political during his time in the Clinton administration. When he was up for Attorney General, he had to promise the Senate that he would not repeat some of the mistakes he made in the Clinton administration over things like the pardon scandal, where he was accused of being more politically than legally motivated.

In this town, Holder is viewed as much more of a political than a legal figure, and the same thing with Gonzalez. Bush and Obama both selected Attorney Generals who would do what they wanted them to do, who would enable them by saying that no principles stood in the way of what they wanted to do. More importantly, that there were no principles requiring them to do something they didn’t want to do, like investigate torture.

CUSACK: So would you say this assassination issue, or the speech and the clause in the NDAA and this signing statement that was attached, was equivalent to John Yoo’s torture document?

TURLEY: Oh, I think it’s amazing. It is astonishing the dishonesty that preceded and followed its passage. Before passage, the administration told the public that the president was upset about the lack of an exception for citizens and that he was ready to veto the bill if there was a lack of such an exception. Then, in an unguarded moment, Senator Levin was speaking to another Democratic senator who was objecting to the fact that citizens could be assassinated under this provision, and Levin said, “I don’t know if my colleague is aware that the exception language was removed at the request of the White House.” Many of us just fell out of our chairs. It was a relatively rare moment on the Senate floor, unguarded and unscripted.

CUSACK: And finally simple.

TURLEY: Yes. So we were basically lied to. I think that the administration was really caught unprepared by that rare moment of honesty, and that led ultimately to his pledge not to use the power to assassinate against citizens. But that pledge is meaningless. Having a president say, “I won’t use a power given to me” is the most dangerous of assurances, because a promise is not worth anything.

CUSACK: Yeah, I would say it’s the coldest comfort there is.

TURLEY: Yes. This brings us back to the media and the failure to strip away the rhetoric around these policies. It was certainly easier in the Bush administration, because you had more clown-like figures like Alberto Gonzalez. The problem is that the media has tended to get thinner and thinner in terms of analysis. The best example is that about the use of the term “coerced or enhanced interrogation.” I often stop reporters when they use these terms in questions. I say, “I’m not too sure what you mean, because waterboarding is not enhanced interrogation.” That was a myth put out by the Bush administration. Virtually no one in the field used that term, because courts in the United States and around the world consistently said that waterboarding’s torture. Holder admitted that waterboarding’s torture. Obama admitted that waterboarding is torture. Even members of the Bush administration ultimately admitted that waterboarding’s torture. The Bush Administration pushed this term to get reporters to drop the word torture and it worked. They are still using the term.

Look at the articles and the coverage. They uniformly say “enhanced interrogation.” Why? Because it’s easier. They want to avoid the controversy. Because if they say “torture,” it makes the story much more difficult. If you say, “Today the Senate was looking into a program to torture detainees,” there’s a requirement that you get a little more into the fact that we’re not supposed to be torturing people.

CUSACK: So, from a civil liberties perspective, ravens are circling the White House, even though there’s a friendly man in it.

TURLEY: Yeah.

CUSACK: I hate to speak too much to motivation, but why do you think MSNBC and other so-called centrist or left outlets won’t bring up any of these things? These issues were broadcast and reported on nightly when John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzalez and Bush were in office.

TURLEY: Well, there is no question that some at MSNBC have backed away from these issues, although occasionally you’ll see people talk about –

CUSACK: I think that’s being kind, don’t you? More like “abandoned.”

TURLEY: Yeah. The civil liberties perspective is rarely given more than a passing reference while national security concerns are explored in depth. Fox is viewed as protective of Bush while MSNBC is viewed as protective of Obama. But both presidents are guilty of the same violations. There are relatively few journalists willing to pursue these questions aggressively and objectively, particularly on television. And so the result is that the public is hearing a script written by the government that downplays these principles. They don’t hear the word “torture.”

They hear “enhanced interrogation.” They don’t hear much about the treaties. They don’t hear about the international condemnation of the United States. Most Americans are unaware of how far we have moved away from Nuremberg and core principles of international law.

CUSACK: So the surreal Holder speech — how could it be that no one would be reporting on that? How could it be that has gone by with not a bang but a whimper?

TURLEY: Well, you know, part of it, John, I think, is that this administration is very clever. First of all, they clearly made the decision right after the election to tack heavily to the right on national security issues. We know that by the people they put on the National Security Council. They went and got very hardcore folks — people who are quite unpopular with civil libertarians. Not surprisingly we almost immediately started to hear things like the pledge not to prosecute CIA officials and other Bush policies being continued.

Many reporters buy into these escape clauses that the administration gives them, this is where I think the administration is quite clever. From a legal perspective, the Holder speech should have been exposed as perfect nonsense. If you’re a constitutional scholar, what he was talking about is facially ridiculous, because he was saying that we do have a constitutional process–it’s just self-imposed, and we’re the only ones who can review it. They created a process of their own and then pledged to remain faithful to it.

While that should be a transparent and absurd position, it gave an out for journalists to say, “Well, you know, the administration’s promising that there is a process, it’s just not the court process.” That’s what is so clever, and why the Obama administration has been far more successful than the Bush administration in rolling back core rights. The Bush administration would basically say, “We just vaporized a citizen in a car with a terrorist, and we’re not sorry for it.”

CUSACK: Well, yeah, the Bush administration basically said, “We may have committed a crime, but we’re the government, so what the fuck are you going to do about it?” Right? —and the Obama administration is saying, “We’re going to set this all in cement, expand the power of the executive, and pass the buck to the next guy.” Is that it?

TURLEY: It’s the same type of argument when people used to say when they caught a criminal and hung him from a tree after a perfunctory five-minute trial. In those days, there was an attempt to pretend that they are really not a lynch mob, they were following a legal process of their making and their satisfaction. It’s just… it’s expedited. Well, in some ways, the administration is arguing the same thing. They’re saying, “Yes, we do believe that we can kill any US citizen, but we’re going to talk amongst ourselves about this, and we’re not going to do it until we’re satisfied that this guy is guilty.”

CUSACK: Me and the nameless death panel.

TURLEY: Again, the death panel is ludicrous. The power that they’ve defined derives from the president’s role as Commander in Chief. So this panel –

CUSACK: They’re falling back on executive privilege, the same as Nixon and
Bush.

TURLEY: Right, it’s an extension of the president. He could just ignore it. It’s not like they have any power that exceeds his own.

CUSACK: So the death panel serves at the pleasure of the king, is what you’re saying.

TURLEY: Yes, and it gives him cover so that they can claim that they’re doing something legal when they’re doing something extra-legal.

CUSACK: Well, illegal, right?

TURLEY: Right. Outside the law.

CUSACK: So when does it get to a point where if you abdicate duty, it is in and of itself a crime? Obama is essentially creating a constitutional crisis not by committing crimes but by abdicating his oath that he swore before God — is that not a crime?

TURLEY: Well, he is violating international law over things like his promise to protect CIA officials from any prosecution for torture. That’s a direct violation, which makes our country as a whole doubly guilty for alleged war crimes. I know many of the people in the administration. Some of us were quite close. And they’re very smart people. I think that they also realize how far outside the lines they are. That’s the reason they are trying to draft up these policies to give the appearance of the law. It’s like a Potemkin village constructed as a façade for people to pass through –

CUSACK: They want to have a legal patina.

TURLEY: Right, and so they create this Potemkin village using names. You certainly can put the name “due process” on a drone missile, but it’s not delivering due process.

CUSACK: Yeah. And what about — well, we haven’t even gotten into the expansion of the privatization movement of the military “contractors” under George Bush or the escalation of drone strikes. I mean, who are they killing? Is it legal? Does anyone care — have we just given up as a country, saying that the Congress can declare war?

TURLEY: We appear to be in a sort of a free-fall. We have what used to be called an “imperial presidency.”

CUSACK: Obama is far more of an imperial president than Bush in many ways, wouldn’t you say?

TURLEY: Oh, President Obama has created an imperial presidency that would have made Richard Nixon blush. It is unbelievable.

CUSACK: And to say these things, most of the liberal community or the progressive community would say, “Turley and Cusack have lost their minds. What do they want? They want Mitt Romney to come in?”

TURLEY: The question is, “What has all of your relativistic voting and support done for you?” That is, certainly there are many people who believe –

CUSACK: Well, some of the people will say the bread-and-butter issues, “I got healthcare coverage, I got expanded healthcare coverage.”

TURLEY: See, that’s what I find really interesting. When I talk to people who support the administration, they usually agree with me that torture is a war crime and that the administration has blocked the investigation of alleged war crimes.

Then I ask them, “Then, morally, are you comfortable with saying, ‘I know the administration is concealing war crimes, but they’re really good on healthcare?'” That is what it comes down to.

The question for people to struggle with is how we ever hope to regain our moral standing and our high ground unless citizens are prepared to say, “Enough.” And this is really the election where that might actually carry some weight — if people said, “Enough. We’re not going to blindly support the president and be played anymore according to this blue state/red state paradigm. We’re going to reconstruct instead of replicate. It might not even be a reinvented Democratic Party in the end that is a viable option. Civil libertarians are going to stand apart so that people like Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama and others know that there are certain Rubicon issues that you cannot cross, and one of them happens to be civil liberty.

CUSACK: Yeah, because most people reading this will sort of say, “Okay, this is all fine and good, but I’ve got to get to work and I’ve got stuff to do and I don’t know what these fucking guys are talking about. I don’t really care.”

So let’s paint a scenario. My nephew, Miles, decides that he wants to grow dreadlocks, and he also decides he’s falling in love with the religion of Islam. And he changes his name. Instead of his name being Miles, he changes his name to a Muslim-sounding name.

He goes to Washington, and he goes to the wrong organization or meeting, let’s say, and he goes to an Occupy Washington protest. He’s out there next to someone with a speaker, and a car bomb explodes. He didn’t set it off, and he didn’t do anything. The government can throw him in prison and never try him, right?

TURLEY: Well, first of all, that’s a very good question.

CUSACK: How do we illustrate the danger to normal people of these massive overreaches and radical changes to the Constitution that started under bush and have expanded under Obama?

TURLEY: I mean, first of all, I know Miles, and –

CUSACK: Yes.

TURLEY: –and he is a little dangerous.

CUSACK: Yes.

TURLEY: I played basketball with him and you and I would describe him as a clear and present danger.

CUSACK: I mean, and I know Eric Holder and Obama won’t throw him in prison because they’re nice guys, but let’s say that they’re out of office.

TURLEY: Right, and the problem is that there is no guarantee. It has become almost Fellini-esque. Holder made the announcement a couple of years ago that they would try some defendants in a federal court while reserving military tribunals for others. The speech started out on the high ground, saying, “We have to believe in our federal courts and our Constitution. We’ve tried terrorists before, and therefore we’re transferring these individuals to federal court.”

Then he said, “But we’re going to transfer these other individuals to Guantanamo Bay.” What was missing was any type of principle. You have Obama doing the same thing that George Bush did — sitting there like Caesar and saying, “You get a real trial and you get a fake trial.” He sent Zacarias Moussaoui to a federal court and then he threw Jose Padilla, who happened to be a US citizen, into the Navy brig and held him without trial.

Yet, Obama and Holder publicly assert that they’re somehow making a civil liberties point, and say, “We’re very proud of the fact that we have the courage to hold these people for a real trial, except for those people. Those people are going to get a tribunal.” And what happened after that was remarkable. If you read the press accounts, the press actually credits the administration with doing the right thing. Most of them pushed into the last paragraph the fact that all they did was split the people on the table, and half got a real trial and half got a fake trial.

CUSACK: In the same way, the demonization, whether rightful demonization, of Osama Bin Laden was so intense that people were thrilled that he was assassinated instead of brought to trial and tried. And I thought, if the Nuremberg principles were right, the idea would be that you’d want to take this guy and put him on trial in front of the entire world, and, actually, if you were going to put him to death, you’d put him to death by lethal injection.

TURLEY: You’ll recall reports came out that the Seals were told to kill Osama, and then reports came out to say that Osama might not have been armed when the Seals came in. The strong indication was that this was a hit.

CUSACK: Yeah.

TURLEY: The accounts suggest that this was an assassination from the beginning to the end, and that was largely brushed over in the media. There was never really any discussion of whether it was appropriate or even a good idea not to capture this guy and to bring him to justice.

The other thing that was not discussed in most newspapers and programs was the fact that we violated international law. Pakistan insisted that they never approved our going into Pakistan. Think about it — if the government of Mexico sent in Mexican special forces into San Diego and captured a Mexican national, or maybe even an American citizen, and then killed him, could you imagine what the outcry would be?

CUSACK: Or somebody from a Middle Eastern country who had their kids blown up by Mr. Cheney’s and Bush’s wars came in and decided they were going to take out Cheney–not take him back to try him, but actually just come in and assassinate him.

TURLEY: Yet we didn’t even have that debate. And I think that goes to your point, John, about where’s the media?

CUSACK: But, see, that’s a very tough principle to take, because everybody feels so rightfully loathsome about Bin Laden, right? But principles are not meant to be convenient, right? The Constitution is not meant to be convenient. If they can catch Adolf Eichmann and put him on trial, why not bin Laden? The principles are what separate us from the beasts.

I think the best answer I ever heard about this stuff, besides sitting around a kitchen table with you and your father and my father, was I heard somebody, they asked Mario Cuomo, “You don’t support the death penalty…? Would you for someone who raped your wife?” And Cuomo blinked, and he looked at him, and he said, “What would I do? Well, I’d take a baseball bat and I’d bash his skull in… But I don’t matter. The law is better than me. The law is supposed to be better than me. That’s the whole point.”

TURLEY: Right. It is one thing if the president argued that there was no opportunity to capture bin Laden because he was in a moving car, for example. And then some people could say, “Well, they took him out because there was no way they could use anything but a missile.” What’s missing in the debate is that it was quickly brushed over whether we had the ability to capture bin Laden.

CUSACK: Well, it gets to [the late] Raiders owner Al Davis’ justice, which is basically, “Just win, baby.” And that’s where we are. The Constitution was framed by Al Davis. I never knew that.

And the sad part for me is that all the conversations and these interpretations and these conveniences, if they had followed the Constitution, and if they had been strict in terms of their interpretations, it wouldn’t matter one bit in effectively handling the war on terror or protecting Americans, because there wasn’t anything extra accomplished materially in taking these extra leaps, other than to make it easier for them to play cowboy and not cede national security to the Republicans politically. Bin Laden was basically ineffective. And our overseas intel people were already all over these guys.

It doesn’t really matter. The only thing that’s been hurt here has been us and the Constitution and any moral high ground we used to have. Because Obama and Holder are good guys, it’s okay. But what happens when the not-so-good guys come in, does MSNBC really want to cede and grandfather these powers to Gingrich or Romney or Ryan or Santorum or whomever — and then we’re sitting around looking at each other, like how did this happen? — the same way we look around now and say, “How the hell did the middle of America lose the American dream? How is all of this stuff happening at the same time?” And it gets back to lack of principle.

TURLEY: I think that’s right. Remember the articles during the torture debate? I kept on getting calls from reporters saying, “Well, you know, the administration has come out with an interesting statement. They said that it appears that they might’ve gotten something positive from torturing these people.” Yet you’ve had other officials say that they got garbage, which is what you often get from torture…

CUSACK: So the argument being that if we can get good information, we should torture?

TURLEY: Exactly. Yeah, that’s what I ask them. I say, “So, first of all, let’s remember, torture is a war crime. So what you’re saying is — ”

CUSACK: Well, war crimes… war crimes are effective.

TURLEY: The thing that amazes me is that you have smart people like reporters who buy so readily into this. I truly believe that they’re earnest when they say this.

Of course you ask them “Well, does that mean that the Nuremberg principles don’t apply as long as you can show some productive use?” We have treaty provisions that expressly rule out justifying torture on the basis that it was used to gain useful information.

CUSACK: Look, I mean, enforced slave labor has some productive use. You get great productivity, you get great output from that shit. You’re not measuring the principle against the potential outcome; that’s a bad business model. “Just win, baby” — we’re supposed to be above that.

TURLEY: But, you know, I’ll give you an example. I had one of the leading investigative journalists email me after one of my columns blasting the administration on the assassin list, and this is someone I deeply respect. He’s one of the true great investigative reporters. He objected to the fact that my column said that under the Obama policy he could kill US citizens not just abroad, but could kill them in the United States. And he said, “You know, I agree with everything in your column except that.” He said, “You know, they’ve never said that they could kill someone in the United States. I think that you are exaggerating.”

Yet, if you look at how they define the power, it is based on the mere perceived practicality and necessity of legal process by the president. They say the President has unilateral power to assassinate a citizen that he believes is a terrorist. Now, is the limiting principle? They argue that they do this “constitutional analysis,” and they only kill a citizen when it’s not practical to arrest the person.

CUSACK: Is that with the death panel?

TURLEY: Well, yeah, he’s talking about the death panel. Yet, he can ignore the death panel. But, more importantly, what does practicality mean? It all comes down to an unchecked presidential power.

CUSACK: By the way, the death panel — that room can’t be a fun room to go into, just make the decision on your own. You know, it’s probably a gloomy place, the death panel room, so the argument from the reporter was, “Look, they can… if they kill people in England or Paris that’s okay, but they — ”

TURLEY: I also don’t understand, why would it make sense that you could kill a US citizen on the streets of London but you might not be able to kill them on the streets of Las Vegas? The question is where the limiting principle comes from or is that just simply one more of these self-imposed rules? And that’s what they really are saying: we have these self-imposed rules that we’re only going to do this when we think we have to.

CUSACK: So, if somebody can use the contra-Nuremberg argument — that principle’s now been flipped, that they were only following orders — does that mean that the person that issued the order through Obama, or the President himself, is responsible and can be brought up on a war crime charge?

TURLEY: Well, under international law, Obama is subject to international law in terms of ordering any defined war crime.

CUSACK: Would he have to give his Nobel Peace Prize back?

TURLEY: I don’t think that thing’s going back. I’ve got to tell you… and given the amount of authority he’s claimed, I don’t know if anyone would have the guts to ask for it back.

CUSACK: And the argument people are going to use is,”Look, Obama and Holder are good guys. They’re not going to use this power.” But the point is, what about after them? What about the apparatchiks? You’ve unleashed the beast. And precedent is everything constitutionally, isn’t it?

TURLEY: I think that’s right. Basically what they’re arguing is, “We’re angels,” and that’s exactly what Madison warned against. As we discussed, he said if all men were angels you wouldn’t need government. And what the administration is saying is, “We’re angels, so trust us.”

I think that what is really telling is the disconnect between what people say about our country and what our country has become. What we’ve lost under Bush and Obama is clarity. In the “war on terror” what we’ve lost is what we need the most in fighting terrorism: clarity. We need the clarity of being better than the people that we are fighting against. Instead, we’ve given propagandists in Al Qaeda or the Taliban an endless supply of material — allowing them to denounce us as hypocrites.

Soon after 9/11 we started government officials talk about how the US Constitution is making us weaker, how we can’t function by giving people due process. And it was perfectly ridiculous.

CUSACK: Feels more grotesque than ridiculous.

TURLEY: Yeah, all the reports that came out after 9/11 showed that 9/11 could’ve been avoided. For years people argued that we should have locked reinforced cockpit doors. For years people talked about the gaps in security at airports. We had the intelligence services that had the intelligence that they needed to move against this ring, and they didn’t share the information. So we have this long list of failures by US agencies, and the result was that we increased their budget and gave them more unchecked authority.

In the end, we have to be as good as we claim. We can’t just talk a good game. If you look at this country in terms of what we’ve done, we have violated the Nuremberg principles, we have violated international treaties, we have refused to accept–

CUSACK: And you’re not just talking about in the Bush administration. You’re talking about –

TURLEY: The Obama administration.

CUSACK: You’re talking about right now.

TURLEY: We have refused to accept the jurisdictional authority of sovereign countries. We now routinely kill in other countries. It is American exceptionalism – the rules apply to other countries.

CUSACK: Well, these drone attacks in Pakistan, are they legal? Does anyone care? Who are we killing? Do they deserve due process?

TURLEY: When we cross the border, Americans disregard the fact that Pakistan is a sovereign nation, let alone an ally, and they insist that they have not agreed to these operations. They have accused us of repeatedly killing people in their country by violating their sovereign airspace. And we just disregard it. Again, its American exceptionalism, that we –

CUSACK: Get out of our way or we’ll pulverize you.

TURLEY: The rules apply to everyone else. So the treaties against torture and war crimes, sovereign integrity –

CUSACK: And this also speaks to the question that nobody even bothers to ask: what exactly are we doing in Afghanistan now? Why are we there?

TURLEY: Oh, yeah, that’s the real tragedy.

CUSACK: It has the highest recorded suicide rate among veterans in history and no one even bothers to state a pretense of a definable mission or goal. It appears we’re there because it’s not convenient for him to really get out before the election. So in that sense he’s another guy who’s letting people die in some shithole for purely political reasons. I mean, it is what it is.

TURLEY: I’m afraid, it is a political calculation. What I find amazing is that we’re supporting an unbelievably corrupt government in the Karzai administration.

Karzai himself, just two days ago, called Americans “demons.” He previously said that he wished he had gone with the Taliban rather than the Americans. And, more importantly, his government recently announced that women are worth less than men, and he has started to implement these religious edicts that are subjugating women. So he has American women who are protecting his life while he’s on television telling people that women are worth less than men, and we’re funding –

CUSACK: What are they, about three-fifths?

TURLEY: Yeah, he wasn’t very specific on that point. So we’re spending hundreds of billions of dollars. More importantly, we’re losing all these lives because it was simply politically inconvenient to be able to pull out of Afghanistan and Iraq.

CUSACK: Yeah. And, I mean, we haven’t even touched on the whole privatization of the military and what that means. What does it mean for the state to be funding at-cost-plus private mercenary armies and private mercenary security forces like Blackwater, or now their names are Xe, or whatever they’ve been rebranded as?

TURLEY: Well, the United States has barred various international rules because they would allow for the prosecution of war crimes by both military and private forces. The US barred those new rules because we didn’t want the ability of other countries to prosecute our people for war crimes. One of the things I teach in my constitutional class is that there is a need for what’s called a bright-line rule. That is, the value for bright-line rules is that they structure relations between the branches, between the government and citizens. Bright-line rules protect freedom and liberty. Those people that try to eliminate bright-line rules quickly find themselves on a slippery slope. The Obama administration, with the Bush administration, began by denying rights to people at Guantanamo Bay.

And then they started to deny rights of foreigners who they accused of being terrorists. And eventually, just recently, they started denying rights to citizens and saying that they could kill citizens without any court order or review. It is the fulfillment of what is the nightmare of civil liberties. They crossed that bright line. Now they’re bringing these same abuses to US citizens and changing how we relate to our government. In the end, we have this huge apparatus of the legal system, this huge court system, and all of it has become discretionary because the president can go ahead and kill US citizens if he feels that it’s simply inconvenient or impractical to bring them to justice.

CUSACK: Or if the great O, decides that he wants to be lenient and just throw them in jail for the rest of their life without trial, he can do that, right?

TURLEY: Well, you’ve got Guantanamo Bay if you’re accused of being an enemy combatant. There is the concept in law that the lesser is included in the greater.

So if the president can kill me when I’m in London, then the lesser of that greater is that he could also hold me, presumably, without having any court involvement. It’d be a little bizarre that he could kill me but if he held me he’d have to turn me over to the court system.

CUSACK: Yeah. We’re getting into kind of Kafka territory. You know, with Bush I always felt like you were at one of those rides in an amusement park where the floor kept dropping and you kept kind of falling. But I think what Obama’s done is we’ve really hit the bottom as far as civil liberties go.

TURLEY: Yet people have greeted this erosion of civil liberties with this collective yawn.

CUSACK: Yeah, yeah. And so then it gets down to the question, “Well, are you going to vote for Obama?” And I say, “Well, I don’t really know. I couldn’t really vote for Hillary Clinton because of her Iraq War vote.” Because I felt like that was a line, a Rubicon line –

TURLEY: Right.

CUSACK: — a Rubicon line that I couldn’t cross, right? I don’t know how to bring myself to vote for a constitutional law professor, or even a constitutional realist, who throws away due process and claims the authority that the executive branch can assassinate American citizens. I just don’t know if I can bring myself to do it.

If you want to make a protest vote against Romney, go ahead, but I would think we’d be better putting our energies into local and state politics — occupy Wall Street and organizations and movements outside the system, not national politics, not personalities. Not stadium rock politics. Not brands. That’s the only thing I can think of. What would you say?

TURLEY: Well, the question, I think, that people have got to ask themselves when they get into that booth is not what Obama has become, but what have we become? That is, what’s left of our values if we vote for a person that we believe has shielded war crimes or violated due process or implemented authoritarian powers. It’s not enough to say, “Yeah, he did all those things, but I really like what he did with the National Park System.”

CUSACK: Yeah, or that he did a good job with the auto bailout.

TURLEY: Right. I think that people have to accept that they own this decision, that they can walk away. I realize that this is a tough decision for people but maybe, if enough people walked away, we could finally galvanize people into action to make serious changes. We have to recognize that our political system is fundamentally broken, it’s unresponsive. Only 11 percent of the public supports Congress, and yet nothing is changing — and so the question becomes, how do you jumpstart that system? How do you create an alternative? What we have learned from past elections is that you don’t create an alternative by yielding to this false dichotomy that only reinforces their monopoly on power.

CUSACK: I think that even Howard Zinn/Chomsky progressives, would admit that there will be a difference in domestic policy between Obama and a Romney presidency.

But DUE PROCESS….I think about how we own it. We own it. Everybody’s sort of let it slip. There’s no immediacy in the day-to-day on and it’s just one of those things that unless they… when they start pulling kids off the street, like they did in Argentina a few years ago and other places, all of a sudden, it’s like, “How the hell did that happen?” I say, “Look, you’re not helping Obama by enabling him. If you want to help him, hold his feet to the fire.”

TURLEY: Exactly.

CUSACK: The problem is, as I see it, is that regardless of goodwill and intent and people being tired of the status quo and everything else, the information outlets and the powers that be reconstruct or construct the government narrative only as an election game of ‘us versus them,’ Obama versus Romney, and if you do anything that will compromise that equation, you are picking one side versus the other. Because don’t you realize that’s going to hurt Obama? Don’t you know that’s going to help Obama? Don’t you know… and they’re not thinking through their own sort of self-interest or the community’s interest in just changing the way that this whole thing works to the benefit of the majority. We used to have some lines we wouldn’t cross–some people who said this is not what this country does …we don’t do this shit, you had to do the right thing. So it’s going to be a tough process getting our rights back, but you know Frankie’s Law? Whoever stops fighting first – loses.

TURLEY: Right.

This interview first appeared on Alaska journalist Shannyn Moore’s blog.

Also see Jason Leopold’s December 2011 report: Obama’s “Twisted Version of American Exceptionalism” Laid Bare

This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license.

John Cusack makes films.

© 2012 Truthout

One of the weapons Holmes used to shoot up the Aurora theatre

by Jay Wenk, World War II veteran, member Veterans for Peace> A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

What part of “regulated” isn’t understood by the people who want their guns pried from their cold, dead fingers?

Who thinks that an 18th century’s “well regulated militia” is not today’s National Guard?

Who thinks it’s all right that anyone can decide to stock up on lots of deadly weapons?

Who thinks that it’s not guns that kill and maim men, women, and children; that it’s “people” who do?

Who thinks that it’s OK for ammunition clips that hold 100 bullets to be sold legally?

Who thinks that it’s fine that automatic weapons of death and destruction are available over the counter?

Who thinks it’s part of the American dream that munitions are sold online?

Do these self-styled “patriots” consider themselves to be the Minutemen of today’s world?

How long will the selfish and violent members of the National Rifle Association and their supporters hold all of us hostage, literally?

How long will presidential contenders tremble before the votes of those who support the means to wreak lifelong grief and despair on the survivors of what happens as a result of their belief?

How long will the population listen to and accept the so-called “righteousness” of politicians wringing their hands over murders like Aurora, and at the same time consent to continuing support for the evil being committed overseas on innocent children and adults by drones and the other “toys” used by these politicians with crocodile tears?

“It’s horrible,” Obama says to Aurora. Then he swivels his chair around to push the buttons again.

If the Second Amendment can’t or won’t be enforced to mean what it’s clearly intended to be, then scrap it.

Slavery used to be Constitutional. We got rid of that, after buckets of blood and unknown numbers of lives were taken.

And what about the munitions makers? Should they be shut down and the workers fired? I say yes in order to save the lives of innocents.

The unending violence this nation exhibits comes home to roost every time someone goes out to kill and terrorize.

“The greatest purveyor of violence in the world : My own government, I can not be silent.” –Martin Luther King, Jr., April 1967. Still true, even under Obomba.

Morris Berman
Elliot Bay Bookstore
Seattle, WA
November 4, 2011

available from Alternative Radio

You can listen to Morris Berman speak for himself here.

From the boarded-up storefronts to foreclosed homes to the homeless and unemployed, the signs of decay in the U.S. are all too apparent. The political class pretending to care about the 99% have little to offer beyond boilerplate rhetoric. We hear about the virtues of hard work. If only there was work to be had. From the White House to the state house, citizens are treated to a smorgasbord of slogans all capped with “God Bless America.” Abroad, the imperial war machine grinds on. State-of-the-art warships rule the seven seas. An air force, second to none, commands the skies. Meanwhile, back in the homeland, there are signs that the servants are getting increasingly restless. Occupy Wall Street might rock the structures of power sufficiently to generate the radical change so urgently needed.

Morris Berman is a cultural historian and critic. He has taught at universities in North America and Europe. He is an award-winning author. Among his many books are Twlight America Failed, Dark Ages America, and Why America Failed.

Despite the great pressure to conform in the U.S., to celebrate the U.S. as the best system in the world, the nation does not lack for critics. The last two decades have seen numerous works criticizing U.S. foreign policy, U.S. domestic policy, in particular the economy, the American educational system, the court system, the military/media/corporate influence over American life, and so on. I’ve learned lot from reading these books. But two things in particular, at least in my view, are lacking and have a very hard time making it into the public eye—partly because Americans are not trained to think in a holistic or synthetic fashion, and partly because the sort of analysis I have in mind is too close to the bone, it’s too difficult for Americans to hear. It’s not a question of IQ; it’s on a kind of an ontological basis. It’s primal.

The first thing that these works lack is an integration of the various factors that are tearing the nation apart. In other words, these studies are institution-specific. You can read works on how the educational system doesn’t work, problems with the military, the economy, and so on. All that’s typical. The second thing I find lacking is a relationship to the culture at large, that is, to the values and behaviors of Americans on a daily basis. As a result, for me, these critiques are rather superficial; they don’t really go to the root of the problem.

The avoidance involved enables the work to be optimistic, and that places them, in fact, in the American mainstream. The authors often conclude their studies with practical recommendations as to how the particular institutional dysfunctions can be rectified. As a result, they’re not much of a threat. It’s usually a mechanical analysis with a mechanical solution. If the authors were to realize that these problems don’t exist in a vacuum but are related to all the other problems and are finally rooted in the nature of American culture itself—in its DNA, so to speak—the prognosis would not be so rosy, I don’t think.

Two examples for me. There are many one could take, but two examples for me are Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky. I admire them greatly. They’ve done a lot to raise domestic awareness in the U.S. of what’s going on to show that foreign and domestic policy are both wrong-headed and headed in the wrong direction, dead ends, whatever. But both of these writers assume that the problem is coming from the top—in other words, from the Pentagon and the corporations. That’s basically the assumption they have. That’s partly true, of course. I don’t deny that. But the problem for me is that it rests on a theory of false consciousness. In other words, the belief is that these institutions have pulled the wool over the eyes of the average American, that basically the average citizen is ultimately rational and well intentioned.

I don’t know who they’ve been talking to. Maybe they haven’t been talking to anybody and that’s the problem. I don’t know. The idea is if you pull the wool off the eyes of these deluded individuals, the citizenry will spontaneously awaken, it will commit itself to some sort of populist, in the case of Moore, or, in the case of Chomsky, democratic socialist vision. Is that happening with Occupy Wall Street? That’s something we might want to discuss. What is going on and what is the significance of that?

But my question is, what if it turns out that the wool is the eyes? The so-called average citizen, as far as I can make out, in the U.S. really does, want, to quote Janis Joplin, a Mercedes-Benz—that’s the great American dream—and is probably grateful to corporations for supplying us with the oceans of consumer goods, to the Pentagon for protecting us from those awful Arabs lurking in the Middle East. So then, if you see that, then the possibilities of fundamental change appear to be quite small, because what would be called for in that case is a completely different set of institutions and a very different type of culture. And I doubt there’s much chance of that occurring. Even in the case of the Wall Street protests—we have to say—what’s the aim of that? America is what it is.

Surveying that critical scene, then, I find very few writers who see things synthetically or as an integrated whole and who further relate this to the nature of American culture itself. That being said, there are a few. I’m thinking of Sacvan Bercovitch, who wrote The Puritan Origins of the American Self, or Chris Hedges, War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, or Walter Hixson, The Myth of American Diplomacy. The titles, I think, are very revealing. It’s also the case that a few eminent historians come to mind. C. Vann Woodward, William Appleman Williams, David Potter, Jackson Lears. There are those who are radical, in the sense of going down to the root of things. There are not many, but they do exist.

Bercovitch, for example, is a Canadian who taught American studies for decades at Harvard. He argues that as early as 1630 the colonists remained imbued with the idea that they were establishing a new nation under the direction of Providence and reenacting the drama of the Exodus in the Old Testament. So crossing the Atlantic was equivalent to crossing the River Jordan. They were entering the new world, Canaan, flowing with milk and honey. They rejected the decadence of England and Europe in general—that is, ancient Egypt. And they established a new order, the new Jerusalem. And all of this in accordance with God’s will.

Walter Hixson, a historian at the University of Akron, claims that American identity originally coalesced around the idea of the Other, whoever it was, as being savage, and thus that our identity has always been based on war. We never really negotiated anything with anyone, as other nations found out, usually too late. Chris Hedges amplifies this notion by arguing that war gives Americans a reason for being, a meaning to their lives.

All of this, to me, is much more sophisticated than some theory of false consciousness, some belief that Americans are fundamentally well intentioned and rational, and it’s just a question of removing the wool from their eyes. Instead, it essentially argues that we are, and have been since our earliest days, hopelessly neurotic, and that the belief that we can pursue a truly different path at this stage in the game is quite deluded and would require yanking out the American psyche by its roots. Ain’t gonna happen.

I like that think that I fall in this latter category of historians, only because I think that it’s this version of American history that’s faithful to reality. There are a number of themes we could get into at this point, and I have examined some of them in the trilogy I wrote on the American empire. But you don’t want me speaking for 12 or 14 hours, I’m sure, so let me just take one idea and elaborate on that.

There’s an essay in this collection, A Question of Values, called “Locating the Enemy.” In that essay I take an idea from Hegel, that of negative identity, by which Hegel did not mean a bad identity, he meant reactive. That is to say, a negative identity is one that’s formed in opposition to something or someone else. It enables you to develop very strong ego boundaries, always pushing against an enemy. But since it’s formed against opposition, says Hegel, it has no real content. It’s just basically form. As a result, it looks strong, but it’s actually weak because its self-definition is relational. “What would a master be,” says Hegel, in a very famous passage in his work, “What would a master be without a slave?” Take away the slave, the masters would have nothing to define themselves by.

So what I argue is that this concept of negative identity applies particularly well to the history of the American continent. Opposition, in whatever form, provided the colonists with a guiding narrative that enabled them to make sense of their lives. And since, as Bercovitch easily demonstrates, this was a religious narrative, as we just talked about from the Exodus, it didn’t take much to turn that into a Manichaean one, in which the enemy, whoever he was, was the darkest of the dark. The target of this self-righteous hatred has metamorphosed over time, but the form, that of Manichaean opposition, has remained the same. So native Americans were quickly seen as little more than savages, an obstacle to “civilization,” and treated accordingly. Every Thanksgiving, we all sit down, carve up a turkey, and celebrate the genocide and near extinction of an entire indigenous people. Pass the squash.

The next target was the British, which surfaced during the American Revolution, although this was already present, obviously, when the Pilgrims left for America in 1620. Britain was decadent and corrupt, in the view of the colonists, hierarchical, while we, citizens of the future, the United States, were essentially not British, not European, but republican—that is to say, antimonarchical. The terror and brutality that was visited upon the loyalists, which you should know was nearly a half a million people at that time, that is, roughly 30% of the population on the continent, those who did not go along with the simplistic black-and-white agenda, almost never gets discussed in American history books. It does in Canadian ones, it does in British ones, but never in American ones, or rarely. But it has been recorded. Constant intimidation, tarring and feathering, confiscation or burning of property, being driven from their homes, frequently murdered as “traitors.”

The most recent study and probably the most comprehensive is called Liberty’s Exiles. It’s by Maya Jasanoff, and probably they have it somewhere upstairs. There are very few American books in this genre, because they violate the myth of American innocence, which is very important for Americans in their own minds.

Moving right along, we come to Mexico, in 1846-48. This involved provoking a phony war and then stealing more than half of the entire country. Remember the Alamo. As in the case of the American Indians, it was convenient to cast the Mexican people as ignorant and undeveloped, as savages of some sort, lacking the go-go energy of U.S. capitalism. And, frankly, that stereotype persists down to the present day. Just read the American papers about drug crimes and all that sort of stuff. It’s like 10% of what’s going on in Mexico, if that. But that’s the way that the U.S. likes to see Mexico. As in the case of the Native Americans, Mexicans were seen as being in the way of “progress”—and I use that word in quotes—of American manifest destiny, again, ordained by God.

The truth is that the Mexican government was quite aware of who they were dealing with. In the late 1820s, a Mexican commission wrote a secret report saying that Americans were

an ambitious people, always ready to encroach upon their neighbors, without a spark of good faith.

We have that now. It’s not classified anymore. Even without WikiLeaks I was able to get this and tell you about it. It’s actually quoted in a book by Robert Kagan called Dangerous Nation. Virtually everybody viewed the U.S. in this way, including the Spanish, the French, the Russians, and the British. French diplomats called the American populace “warlike” and “restless.”

Shortly after, that same framework was applied by the North to the American South. It was a lazy, do-nothing society sitting in the way of progress. As I discuss in a chapter in Why America Failed, it was not northern opposition to slavery that triggered the Civil War. Later on, obviously, it became an important unifying theme or rallying cry.

(I’m sure that critics of the book will say I’m pro-slavery or something. I can see it now, really. But these people are not that bright, and they’re not into nuance. It’s not their thing.)

But it could well be argued that without the Civil War slavery would have continued for several decades more. Probably that’s the case, although some historians have argued that it’s not true. But the more fundamental conflict was a clash of cultures. It was the slow, easy way of the South as opposed to the restless economic expansion of the North. Each side regarded the other as the devil incarnate. And the result was the loss of 625,000 lives and a massive destruction of the South, epitomized by Sherman’s march to the sea, which was violent beyond belief. Those scars still exist. As far as the South goes, the war is not really over. You just have to travel through the South to see that. The resentment runs very deep. And it’s because their way of life was never acknowledged as having any validity at all.

The Germans were next, although that’s an opposition that seems thoroughly justified. We got that one right.

And then the godless communists, of course. The conversion of the Russians from ally to enemy occurred almost overnight. And it isn’t difficult to see why. With the Axis powers out of the picture, there had to be an enemy in place to fill the resulting vacuum. And although the USSR as a regime was quite repressive—we all know that—it did not, as George Kennan was later to argue, have to be cast as the ultimate enemy, because its real goal was in securing its borders. That was really it. KGB files that came open after the fall of the Soviet Union revealed that Russia’s real fear was not of the U.S., but of a rearmed Germany. That was really the major thing in their minds that they were scared about. However, there was no attempt to negotiate anything with Russia. As Stalin pointed out as early as 1946, for the Americans negotiation actually meant capitulation. That was the American idea of negotiation, that the other side simply lie down, roll over.

In any case, the Cold War kept the U.S. busy for decades. And the so-called perimeter defense, which held that any disturbance in the world was a cause for U.S. military action, led to the disasters of Iran, Guatemala, Vietnam, Chile, and so on. A long and unhappy list, well documented by Stephen Kinzer in his book Overthrow and William Blum in his book Killing Hope.

Of course, the psychological structure of negative identity led to a crisis when Soviet Union finally collapsed. Suddenly we had no one to define ourselves against. The Gulf War of 1991 helped fill the gap for a time, but the Clinton years were largely meaningless. Without an enemy, we had no idea who we were, so we filled the space with O. J. Simpson and Monica Lewinsky, and that sort of kept us busy for several years.

Finally, the Islamic world did us the greatest favor imaginable: It attacked us. Overnight, terrorism replaced communism as the crucial buzzword. Bush Jr., like Reagan in characterizing the Soviet Union, said this is ultimate evil, it’s a contest between good and evil, it’s a crusade, not a good word to use if you’re talking to the Arab world.

There was no possible discussion of American foreign policy in the Middle East as having played a role in these events. In fact, the notion was tantamount to treason. Susan Sontag, who said it in The New Yorker shortly after, lost her job. Even today, you can’t talk in those terms. These people are evil and insane, end of discussion. They’re savages.

To this day, under the Obama administration, you should be aware, your tax dollars pay for workshops that teach the police and the military that Islam is an evil religion out to destroy America, and which must therefore be destroyed first. I don’t know if you’re aware of this. But if you don’t believe me, go to truthdig.com, Chris Hedges’s column of May 9 [2011], in which he names names: who are giving these workshops, how much they’re receiving, to whom they are giving these workshops, the funding. It’s all there. Once again, civilization and the savages. That’s the model.

Kennan tried to warn the American government that making a monolith out of communism was a big mistake, that there were huge conflicts, for example, between Russia and China. But since Manichaeanism requires cardboard figures, American presidents, from Truman on, paid no attention to his advice.

A similar thing now exists with respect to Islam. It turns out that only about 10% of American Muslims are religious. In this sense they’re like the Jews: It’s basically social. You go to the mosque, you meet people. That’s really what it’s about. Of the 10% who are religious, the tiniest minority are jihadists. But when your identity is a negative one in the Hegelian sense, this type of nuance has to be kept out of everyone’s consciousness.

For example, Americans tend to regard Pakistan as a dark and awful place, the country that hid Osama bin Laden and protected him from American troops and so on or that harbors al- Qaeda operatives—hence our drone strikes in that country that mostly kill civilians, making the president really a war criminal, basically—or that it’s in league with the Taliban and so on.

What would Americans say if they read in the newspapers—and you can’t in American newspapers. Just last June I happened to be in London and I picked up a copy of The Guardian. There was an article about a very popular TV show in Pakistan that’s run by a sort of Jon Stewart-type comedian. He pokes fun at the government and at Muslim fundamentalism. One would not think that. He hosts groups—there’s one group that has a song called “Burqa Woman,” which is based on Roy Orbison’s song, “Pretty Woman.” It’s the same music. So that song goes, “Burqa woman, walking down the street/Burqa woman, with your sexy feet,” because that’s all you can see. This did not get picked up by the American press, because basically it complicates the picture. Then the enemy is the not totally black, you see. It would open up a questioning of who we are beyond a nation in opposition to something, and that means the game would be up. So we don’t want that.

Marshal McLuhan once wrote that

all forms of violence are quests for identity.

I love that line. “All forms of violence are quests for identity.” More recently, David Shulman, who is a professor of humanities at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, wrote,

There is nothing more precious than an enemy, especially one whom you have largely created by your own acts and who plays some necessary role in the inner drama of your soul.

Boy, does that characterize an awful lot of what’s going on.

What is the American soul? Do we actually have one? It’s an interesting question. Beyond opposition, what defines the U.S.? This emptiness at the center makes our quest for identity especially violent, especially acute. The policy we pursue is always one of scorched earth, of shock and awe. That’s how we handle things. That means, at least to me, that in the fullness of time, it was we who proved to be the savages, not the savages. It’s interesting that the theme of Paul Auster’s novels, if you’ve read any of his work, is that American society is incoherent, that it lacks a true identity, and that it’s nothing more than a hall of mirrors. He’s been saying that for decades, and by and large Americans don’t know who Paul Auster is and they don’t read him. Auster is tremendously popular in Europe. He’s been translated into more than 20 languages. Those are the bulk of his sales. Americans are not interested in this kind of perception.

Criticism is not possible in a Manichaean world, of course, and the U.S. is very good at marginalizing writers who attempt to write a critique of the country in a fundamental way. Overt censorship, as a result, is not really necessary. I get this question all the time when I talk in Latin America. Aren’t your works censored? I said, there’s no need for it, the flood of information is so huge, how am I even going to get noticed? It would be like a sledgehammer to kill a fly. Why would they even bother? Famous last words.

The result is what you see in the famous Goya painting—which, if you go to Madrid, go to the Prado—Saturn Devouring His Son, Saturno devorando a su hijo. It’s really powerful. 1818. It’s really a horrifying painting. You have to see this. The U.S. is now imploding; it’s now eating itself alive. That’s what’s been going on. I argued this in Dark Ages America, in 2006.

The data for this that have accumulated since then are quite enormous. There is not a single American institution that is not seriously corrupt. I could document this for hours, but, again, you’ve got other things to do. Let me just cite a few examples.

1. First, Ronald Dworkin, one of America’s leading intellectuals, did an essay a few months ago in The New York Review of Books showing that the Supreme Court has become a court of men and not of laws. In the case of five out of the nine justices, he says, decisions are made in advance in a right-wing political direction, and then the justification for the decisions is trotted out after the fact, even though it often violates the Constitution. What kind of a court is this? It’s a kangaroo court.
2. In the book Academically Adrift, sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa report that after 2 years of college 45% of American students haven’t learned anything, and after 4 years 36% haven’t learned anything. Included in what they didn’t learn is any kind of critical, analytical reasoning ability, skills. They don’t have it. They don’t know what the difference is between an argument and an opinion, and they don’t know what evidence is. They literally have no idea. Most of the students, when asked, defined their college experience as social rather than academic or intellectual. That was what they were there for: to meet people, make friends, drink a lot of alcohol, and so on and so forth. Half the students in the study said they hadn’t taken a single course in the previous semester that required more than 20 pages of writing. A third said they hadn’t taken a course requiring more than 40 pages of reading. What were they doing? Watching videos? A Marist Poll released July 4 of this year showed that 42% of American adults are unaware that the U.S. declared its independence in 1776. Forty two percent. And when you go to the below-30 age group, it rises to 69%. Twenty-five percent of Americans don’t know from which country the U.S. seceded. Bulgaria? Ghana? A recent Newsweek poll revealed that 73% of Americans can’t give the official version of why we fought the Cold War, let alone the real version. But they can’t give the official version. And 44% are unable to say what the Bill of Rights is. A poll taken in the Oklahoma public school system—this is just a few months ago—turned up the fact that 77% of the students didn’t know who George Washington was. Seventy-seven percent. In a number of cities libraries have closed for lack of funding, but I also think it’s probably for lack of interest. Who wants to bother with books?

The new high school curriculum in American history in Texas does not have any units on Washington, Adams, or Thomas Jefferson, but it does have a study unit on Estée Lauder. It was like reading The Onion. When I first read that, I said, Oh, this is a joke. But satire has become reality in the U.S. I saw it, I think, in Common Dreams. I looked more closely. That article appeared in The Austin Statesman. It really is true. And I’ve been thinking of writing a letter to the Board of Education in Texas suggesting that they eliminate the unit on Franklin Delano Roosevelt, which I’m sure they don’t have anyway, and put in a major unit on Kim Kardashian. You laugh, but it’s only a couple of years away. Satire becomes reality in the U.S. Why not? You go to cnn.com and there articles about Kim’s rear end, her psoriasis, her wedding, her divorce. Why not? If Estée Lauder can make, I don’t see why Kim should be excluded.

3. In the aftermath of the crash of 2008, the very people who promulgated the ideology that led to the crash got appointed the President’s economic advisers. The fox now guards the henhouse. Lawrence Summers, Tim Geithner, Ben Bernanke, the whole crowd. Not a single Wall Street financial leader has faced jail. Major corporate figures who brought the economy down were, in fact, awarded huge bonuses. Some secured prestigious appointments at places such as Johns Hopkins University and the Brookings Institution. I couldn’t get a job as a janitor at the Brookings Institution. Let’s be clear about that. Meanwhile, the very practices that led to the crash, such as derivatives, credit default swaps, and all that sort of stuff, are now being pursued with more vigor than they were prior to the crash. It’s not that they say, “Oh, we can’t do this.” No, no. It’s more of the same. Paul Krugman asks, somewhat rhetorically,

   How is it that in the wake of the obvious failure of casino capitalism and neoliberalism, the blame for the crash is not put on the banks, which received, finally, bailouts of roughly $19 trillion, and the corporations, but on the public sector.

So you have the crash because of the private sector and all the blame directed to the government.

4. Between 1987 and 2007 the number of Americans that are so disabled by mental disorders that they qualified for supplementary security income or Social Security disability insurance increased 2.5 times, so that one out of every six Americans now falls into this category. For children the increase is 35 times during the same period. That’s our future. Mental illness is now the leading cause of disability among the child population of the United States. A survey of American adults conducted by the National Institute of Mental Health over 2001-2003 found that 46% of them met the criteria of the American Psychiatric Association for being mentally ill. Ten percent of Americans over the age of 6 now take antidepressants. Actually, it stretches back to at least age 4 now. Toddlers are taking Prozac. And I read elsewhere that in the global market, in terms of volume of sales, American consumption of antidepressants is two-thirds of the entire world’s consumption. So here’s a country with less than 5% of the world’s population taking 67% of the antidepressant drugs. This has got to tell you something about the U.S. Some time ago a friend of mine in England, an art consultant, lived for many years in New York City. She bought a plaque when she was there. There’s no Woolworth’s, but it was a store like Woolworth’s. The plaque says, Evenings at 7:00 in the Parish Hall. That’s the title. And underneath it it says,

Monday, alcoholics;
Tuesday, abused spouses,
Wednesday; eating disorders;
Thursday, drug addiction;
Friday, teen suicide;
Saturday, soup kitchen;
and then finally, the Sunday sermon at 9:00 a.m., “America’s Joyous Future.”

Yes, we have some joyous future coming up.

5. The infrastructure in the U.S. is crumbling, and there’s no money to fix it. Also, in some cases, ideological opposition to fixing it is very strong. Apparently the levies of New Orleans are in the same shape now that they were before Katrina. I read an article some time ago about the attempt to address this. I don’t know whether it was on the municipal level of New Orleans or the state level. I can’t remember exactly. And I didn’t save the article. But the councilmen stated that they did not want to move on it because it would require a cooperative effort, and this, they said, meant socialism. So apparently working together is equivalent to socialism, and it’s better to risk another Katrina than to have that. It doesn’t get dumber than that.
6. The national debt now stands at more than $14 trillion. The official figure for poverty and hunger is 45 million citizens, but in fact that’s based on criteria that are pretty much obsolete. In fact, something like 200 million Americans live from paycheck to paycheck, if they can get a job. As far as that goes, don’t believe those figures about 9% unemployment. It’s close to 20% in real figures. This is verified by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. If you go to the Web site of the U.S. Department of Labor, you will find it. It’s like 18%, which means that one out of five Americans is out of work, and economists say there’s little chance they’re going to find it for another 10 years. Not a rosy prospect.
7. The President now has the right, although it violates the Geneva Accords, to designate any American citizen or, actually, anyone on the planet an enemy and have him or her assassinated. In fact, that recently happened on September 30 [2011]. Obama had two American citizens, Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan, murdered. And one can say, “Well, they were al-Qaeda supporters,” and so on. First of all, that’s not proven. And the second thing is, so what if they were? The Constitution says you have a right to have your day in court, not a right to get rubbed out. There’s no worry about that on the part of the government. And furthermore, American citizens don’t care. It doesn’t make any difference to them. In an essay entitled America’s Disappeared, Chris Hedges writes,

Torture, prolonged detention without trial, sexual humiliation, rape, disappearance, extortion, looting, random murder, and abuse have become, as in Argentina during the Dirty War, part of our own subterranean world of detention sites and torture centers…. We know of at least 100 detainees who died during interrogation at our “black sites.”

There are probably many, many more whose fate has never been made public. Tens of thousands of Muslim men have passed through our clandestine detention centers without due process.General Barry McCaffrey admitted:

We tortured people unmercifully. We probably murdered dozens of them…, both the armed forces and the C.I.A.

So tens of thousands of Americans are being held in super-maximum security prisons now, where they’re deprived of contact with anyone and psychologically destroyed. Undocumented workers are rounded up and they vanish from their families for weeks or months. Militarized police units break down the doors of some 40,000 Americans every year and haul them away in the dead of night as though they were enemy combatants. And, of course, as you know, habeas corpus no longer exists.

Once again, Philip Green comments on this.

A people that accepts as a normal course of events the bombing of civilians, torture, kidnapping, indefinite detention, assassinations, secret governments at home and covert wars abroad has lost touch with the moral basis of civil society.

A good description of us today, I think.

8. The U.S. military, which soaks up 50% of the discretionary budget, is apparently unable to win two wars in two small countries. In fact, it has not had a serious victory since World War II, after which it decided to play it safe and stick to tinpot dictators and minor nations.

9. A U.S. intelligence report released in 2007 called “Global Trends 2025”—you can download it on the Web—predicts a steady decline in American dominance over the coming decades, with U.S. leadership eroding

   at an accelerating pace in political, economic, and cultural arenas.

To my knowledge, the President has never mentioned this report, nor has anyone in public office.

10. On July 19 of 2010, the Washington Post reported that 854,000 people work for the National Security Agency, the NSA, in 33 building complexes amounting to 17 million square feet of space in the D.C. metro area. Every day collection systems at the NSA intercept and store 1.7 billion emails and phone calls of American citizens in what amounts to a vast domestic spy system. Writing in The New Yorker on May 23 of this year, Jane Mayer reported that the NSA has three times the budget of the CIA and has the capacity to download every 6 hours electronic communications equivalent to the entire contents of the Library of Congress. Every 6 hours. They also developed a program called Thin Thread that enables computers to scan the material for key words, and they collect the billing records and the dialed phone numbers of everyone in the country. In violation of communications laws, AT&T, Verizon, and Bell South were only too happy to open their electronic records to the government. I have to say that at the height of its insanity, the Stasi in East Germany—you know that Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others)—was spying on one out of every seven citizens. The U.S. is now spying on seven out of every seven citizens. Everybody in this room, your emails, your phone calls, it’s all recorded.
11. You can now go to jail in the U.S. simply for speaking. In the late July of 2011, environmental activist Tim DeChristopher was sentenced to 2 years in prison for his repeated declaration that environmental protection required civil, that is to say, nonviolent, disobedience. One wonders if the same judge, Dee Benson, would have also put Rosa Parks and Mahatma Gandhi in jail had he been around during their lifetimes.
12. This is my favorite. This was also in July of 2011. Somehow this was symbolic, it seemed to me, of what’s happened to America in the last 60 years. Police in Georgia shut down a lemonade stand being run by three girls aged 10 to 14 who were trying to save up money for a trip to a local water park. The police said that they didn’t know what was in the lemonade and, in addition, that the girls needed a business license, a peddler’s permit, and a food permit in order to run the stand. It turns out that the permits cost $50 a day. Kind of counterproductive as far as the girls were concerned.

13. And finally, baker’s dozen, number thirteen, the deepest locus of corruption, it seems to me, is the American soul. I have to say again, it’s a question of macrocosm and microcosm. On page 56 of Why America Failed, I wrote,

    As George Walden writes in his aptly titled study, God Won’t Save America: Psychosis of a Nation, “The peculiarities of nations, good and bad, tend to reflect the temperaments and qualities of their peoples. As Plato remarked, ‘Where else would they have come from?’”

At that point, when my editor, several months ago was working over the manuscript, at this point he wrote in the margin, “This is the turning point of the book.” This is it: this is the hinge point of the whole thing.

So as far as evidence for that goes, Jonathan Sheldon, in an article in The Nation, October 17, [2011,] talking about some of the meetings for Republican candidates, Ron Paul had apparently said something like he would recommend that anybody who got sick and didn’t have health insurance, it’s his risk, after all. And Wolf Blitzer asked him, “So he should just die?” That was the implication. And there were cheers from the crowd at this point. They roared in approval. They also applauded enthusiastically when Rick Perry reported that the state of Texas had murdered, 235 criminals on death row. That also brought enthusiastic cheers.

There is so much of this material now. Most recently, there was an article in The New York Times about a law firm, Steven J. Baum, located near Buffalo, New York. It’s commonly referred to as a foreclosure mill firm. It does the dirty work for banks in evicting people and so on. A year ago, Halloween 2010, they had a Halloween party and the staff showed up with their costumes being
homeless people. They dressed as the people that they themselves evicted. Here are the pictures. So the people dirtied their faces and they had signs, “Will Work for Food.” This was funny to them. Of course, the firm immediately denied it, but the pictures are online. Deny away.

Although he doesn’t get into the issue of negative identity per se, the French writer Denis Duclos, who is a director of the CNRS, the research institute in Paris, pegged the problem of the obsession with having an enemy and the violence that results from that in his book of 1994, Le Complexe du loup-garou (The Werewolf Complex). In his epilogue to the 2005 edition, Duclos writes that

America is always dependent on a werewolf figure, a dark, savage beast that’s out to destroy it. The beast changes in content, but the form is always the same. At the center of this is a terrible fear that Americans have of emptiness, which is an anxiety of not existing, and they disguise this with a hyperactive optimism.

Have a nice day.

“A curious society,” he writes,

a people who don’t know who they really are. Like the Romans, they see themselves under siege…. This could finally trigger a fascist populism [which, of course, we’re seeing with the Tea Party]. The American fear of the monster has always marked its history, whether this exists on the inside or the outside. This leads to isolating the country in a sort of collective psychosis that can only contribute to international instability.

In fact, that’s how most of the world sees us. A few years ago there was an international poll that asked the question, “Which nation do you believe is the greatest threat to world peace?” The United States and Israel said Iran, and everybody else said the United States. Writing in Der Spiegel last August, the German journalist Jakob Augstein argues that the U.S. is basically a failed state; it’s not part of the West anymore, and that Europe needs to keep its distance from what is a very different and apparently, his word, “insane” political culture. There is, he concludes, no deliverance in sight for the U.S.

What does mental health mean in an individual case? It’s at least this: That a person knows his or her personal narrative and is able to see it from the outside and, as a result of this transparency, at least try to do something about it. Perhaps the same thing is true of a nation or a civilization. I don’t know. But what I know is that there is very little understanding in the U.S. as to what the underlying narrative is, or even the fact that there is an underlying narrative. This seems to escape most Americans, almost all.

There’s also very little interest in thinking about national identity or lack of same in anything more than a superficial way, which is provided, for example, by The New York Times. In such a situation, change is simply not possible. The odds that we’re going continue on this unconscious path are overwhelming. We saw it with the tenth anniversary of 9/11. It was still a repeat of, This happened from the outside. We didn’t do anything. We never overthrew the regime of Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953 in Iran that led to this endless Islamic resentment of us. Oh, no, that had nothing to do with it.

In that sense, my work is indeed pointless. I’m a writer and social critic. I can’t stop the plane from crashing. Nobody can. But I’m rather like the engineer who surveys the wreckage and locates the black box and takes it apart and writes up the report, the postmortem. And that, I believe, does have some small value, because finally we need to know why America failed.

Q&A

The question is, we tend to vilify the enemy, whoever that is. Is there something special about the U.S. that creates that pattern? And I would say yes, for the reason that Marshall McLuhan gave, that violence reflects a search for identity. We don’t know who we are. We never did. And the notion that we were republican or anti- monarchical, those ideals of the 18th century really blew away like dandelion spores by the time the war of independence was over. The U.S. has always been—this is the theme of Why America Failed—a hustling culture. Basically, if your goal in life is more, then you have no goal. Because once you have more, then there’s always more. It never ends. So who are we and what are we doing? And once you have that kind of emptiness at the center, you’re going to be quite violent. De Tocqueville talked about this in Democracy in America. He said Americans are really strange. They live in a perpetual state of self-adoration; they’re always saying how fabulous they are. And he said, if you challenge that, they get very fierce, very quickly. This is 1831. Not too bad. Not too shabby an assessment.

The question is, I must have some observations about how we’re going to get out of this mess. I get letters on my blog regularly, especially from young people, what should I do? And I say, “What do you think is waiting for you 30 to 40 years down the line, when there’s no Social Security, no Medicare, no social safety net whatsoever and we are making yet another war on some verkakte country on the other side of the planet and spending trillions of dollars to do that? And if we run out of countries, we’re going to invade Antarctica and clean up those communistic penguins that are creating problems for the U.S.”

There’s no end to this. We don’t know how to do anything else. And the chances that we have, quite honestly, of turning this around are roughly the chances that we would have of turning around an aircraft carrier in a bathtub. So, quite frankly, not only is there no way out, but I would recommend you get out.

Things will only get worse in the U.S. And frankly, they could get very ugly. They could get quite nasty. And I think that it’s not very unusual to think that maybe 10-15 years from now a book like this couldn’t be sold, couldn’t be published. So as time goes on, who knows what’s going to happen? The Occupy Wall Street movement is an interesting thing to concern, but the general tendency in the U.S. as far as revolution goes is that it would occur from the right, not from the left. I don’t think that’s too far-fetched. It makes me edgy, I have to say. But I don’t have a crystal ball.

The question is not everybody can leave the U.S. What do you do if you’re trapped here? There are three possibilities. One is that you could change the country, turn it totally upside down. That’s not a possibility. The second is that you leave. The third is, if you can’t, you have to do a kind of inner emigration. And that’s what the monastic option was about. In other words, you have to find on a local basis, which I never was able to do, communities, groups, grass-roots organizations, study groups, whatever it is, that enable you to work toward the preservation of what’s good in the culture, and then you take your chances in terms of what’s going to happen. It’s obviously an important question. But that’s what I would recommend, fully undertaking the monastic option. You can live in a certain way, you can try to influence the people around you, you can organize in a local sense. What else do you have? But on a local level there are some possibilities. I never found it myself, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

I’ve always admired, for example, the Scandinavian countries in terms of how they’ve arranged their economy, but I am impressed by the fact that those countries are uniformly white, and so there’s a homogeneity that makes it easier to get along. We don’t have that luxury in the U.S., if that’s a luxury. They’ve arranged their economy a certain way. It certainly is a deeply embedded psychological trait. The only thing is that there also have been deliberate cultivations of not doing that. And the U.S., as far as I know, is not interested in that at all. You would think they could do it, because we don’t lack for a class of intelligent people in the U.S. But somehow those voices’ getting heard is very difficult.

The question is, what about our conquering Hitler and fighting World War II and that we triumphed and that was important. All that’s true. But the problem is that that was an unusual war. And what the right wing in the U.S. has convinced the rest of the country is that every war we get into is like that. So Ho Chi Minh was Hitler and Saddam Hussein was Hitler. They’re all Hitler. That becomes the model of war. When in fact there was only one Hitler and one war like that. That’s why I said, in the case of our opposition to Germany, that’s the one case that I think we were justified, that it really was the darkest of evil and that we had to defeat it. I doubt I would be here without that.

So that’s fine, that’s great. The only trouble is that it is not representative of the wars we have fought since 1945, even though every time Chamberlain, appeasement, Hitler are trotted out as reasons for us to go and kick the crap out of whatever—Grenada or something. Whatever it is we’re going to do, it’s Hitler redux, and we’re going to repeat the same story.

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©2012

by Paul Buchheit
Appearing in Hudson Valley Activist Newsletter
Reprinted from CounterPunch.

Paul Buchheit teaches Economic Inequality at DePaul University. He is the founder and developer of social justice and educational websites (Us Against Greed, Pay Up Now, and Rapping History) and the editor and main author of American Wars: Illusions and Realities (Clarity Press). He can be reached at paul@UsAgainstGreed.org.

Studying inequality in America reveals some facts that are truly hard to believe. Amidst all the absurdity a few stand out.

1. U.S. companies in total pay a smaller percentage of taxes than the lowest-income 20% of Americans. Total corporate profits for 2011 were $1.97 trillion. Corporations paid $181 billion in federal taxes (9%) and $40 billion in state taxes (2%), for a total tax burden of 11%. The poorest 20% of American citizens pay 17.4% in federal, state, and local taxes.
2. The high-profit, tax-avoiding tech industry was built on publicly-funded research. The technology sector has been more dependent on government research and development than any other industry. The U.S. government provided about half of the funding for basic research in technology and communications well into the 1980s. Even today, federal grants support about 60% of research performed at universities.

IBM was founded in 1911, Hewlett-Packard in 1947, Intel in 1968, Microsoft in 1975, Apple and Oracle in 1977, Cisco in 1984. All relied on government and military innovations. The more recently incorporated Google, which started in 1996, grew out of the Defense Department’s ARPANET system and the National Science Foundation’s Digital Library Initiative.

The combined 2011 federal tax payment for the eight companies was just 10.6%.

3. The sales tax on a quadrillion dollars of financial sales is ZERO. The Bank for International Settlements reported in 2008 that total annual derivatives trades were $1.14 quadrillion. The same year, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange reported a trading volume of $1.2 quadrillion.

A quadrillion dollars is the entire world economy, 12 times over. It’s enough to give 3 million dollars to every person in the United States. But in a sense it’s not real money. Most of it is high-volume nanosecond computer trading, the type that almost crashed our economy. So it’s a good candidate for a tiny sales tax. But there is no sales tax.

Go out and buy shoes or an iPhone and you pay up to a 10% sales tax. But walk over to Wall Street and buy a million dollar high-risk credit default swap and pay 0%.

4. Many Americans get just a penny on the dollar.
5. For every dollar of NON-HOME wealth owned by white families, people of color have only one cent.
6. For every dollar the richest .1% earned in 1980, they’ve added three more dollars. The poorest 90% have added one cent.
7. For every dollar of financial securities (e.g., bonds) in the U.S., the bottom 90% of Americans have a penny and a half’s worth.
8. For every dollar of 2008-2010 profits from Boeing, DuPont, Wells Fargo, Verizon, General Electric, and Dow Chemicals, the American public got a penny in taxes.
9. Our society allows one man or one family to possess enough money to feed every hungry person on earth. The United Nations estimates that $30 billion is needed to eradicate hunger. Several individuals have more than this amount in personal wealth.

There are 925 million people in the world with insufficient food. According to the World Food Program, it takes about $100 a year to feed a human being. That’s $92 billion, about equal to the fortune of the six Wal-Mart heirs.

One Final Outrage…

In 2007 a hedge fund manager (John Paulson) conspired with a financial company (Goldman Sachs) to create packages of risky subprime mortgages, so that in anticipation of a housing crash he could use other people’s money to bet against his personally designed sure-to-fail financial instruments. His successful gamble paid him $3.7 billion. Three years later he made another $5 billion, which in the real world would have been enough to pay the salaries of 100,000 health care workers.

As an added insult to middle-class taxpayers, the tax rate on most of Paulson’s income was just 15%. As a double insult, he may have paid no tax at all, since hedge fund profits can be deferred indefinitely. As a triple insult, some of his payoff came from the middle-class taxpayers themselves, who bailed out the company (AIG) that had to pay off his bets.

And the people we elect to protect our interests are unable or unwilling to do anything about it.