by Naomi Klein, the author of Shock Doctrine, currently working on a book about climate change. Her article originally appeared in The Nation.

What the right gets–and the left doesn’t–about the revolutionary power of climate change. This is the most powerful article I’ve seen on explaining what’s really going on.

Responding to climate change requires that we break every rule in the free-market playbook and that we do so with great urgency. We will need to rebuild the public sphere, reverse privatizations, relocalize large parts of economies, scale back overconsumption, bring back long-term planning, heavily regulate and tax corporations, maybe even nationalize some of them, cut military spending and recognize our debts to the global South. Of course, none of this has a hope in hell of happening unless it is accompanied by a massive, broad-based effort to radically reduce the influence that corporations have over the political process. That means, at a minimum, publicly funded elections and stripping corporations of their status as “people” under the law. In short, climate change supercharges the pre-existing case for virtually every progressive demand on the books, binding them into a coherent agenda based on a clear scientific imperative.

There is a question from a gentleman in the fourth row.

He introduces himself as Richard Rothschild. He tells the crowd that he ran for county commissioner in Maryland’s Carroll County because he had come to the conclusion that policies to combat global warming were actually “an attack on middle-class American capitalism.” His question for the panelists, gathered in a Washington, DC, Marriott Hotel in late June, is this: “To what extent is this entire movement simply a green Trojan horse, whose belly is full with red Marxist socioeconomic doctrine?”

Here at the Heartland Institute’s Sixth International Conference on Climate Change, the premier gathering for those dedicated to denying the overwhelming scientific consensus that human activity is warming the planet, this qualifies as a rhetorical question. Like asking a meeting of German central bankers if Greeks are untrustworthy. Still, the panelists aren’t going to pass up an opportunity to tell the questioner just how right he is.

Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute who specializes in harassing climate scientists with nuisance lawsuits and Freedom of Information fishing expeditions, angles the table mic over to his mouth. “You can believe this is about the climate,” he says darkly, “and many people do, but it’s not a reasonable belief.” Horner, whose prematurely silver hair makes him look like a right-wing Anderson Cooper, likes to invoke Saul Alinsky: “The issue isn’t the issue.” The issue, apparently, is that “no free society would do to itself what this agenda requires…. The first step to that is to remove these nagging freedoms that keep getting in the way.”

Claiming that climate change is a plot to steal American freedom is rather tame by Heartland standards. Over the course of this two-day conference, I will learn that Obama’s campaign promise to support locally owned biofuels refineries was really about “green communitarianism,” akin to the “Maoist” scheme to put “a pig iron furnace in everybody’s backyard” (the Cato Institute’s Patrick Michaels). That climate change is “a stalking horse for National Socialism” (former Republican senator and retired astronaut Harrison Schmitt). And that environmentalists are like Aztec priests, sacrificing countless people to appease the gods and change the weather (Marc Morano, editor of the denialists’ go-to website, ClimateDepot.com).

Most of all, however, I will hear versions of the opinion expressed by the county commissioner in the fourth row: that climate change is a Trojan horse designed to abolish capitalism and replace it with some kind of eco-socialism. As conference speaker Larry Bell succinctly puts it in his new book Climate of Corruption, climate change “has little to do with the state of the environment and much to do with shackling capitalism and transforming the American way of life in the interests of global wealth redistribution.”

Yes, sure, there is a pretense that the delegates’ rejection of climate science is rooted in serious disagreement about the data. And the organizers go to some lengths to mimic credible scientific conferences, calling the gathering “Restoring the Scientific Method” and even adopting the organizational acronym ICCC, a mere one letter off from the world’s leading authority on climate change, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But the scientific theories presented here are old and long discredited. And no attempt is made to explain why each speaker seems to contradict the next. (Is there no warming, or is there warming but it’s not a problem? And if there is no warming, then what’s all this talk about sunspots causing temperatures to rise?)

In truth, several members of the mostly elderly audience seem to doze off while the temperature graphs are projected. They come to life only when the rock stars of the movement take the stage—not the C-team scientists but the A-team ideological warriors like Morano and Horner. This is the true purpose of the gathering: providing a forum for die-hard denialists to collect the rhetorical baseball bats with which they will club environmentalists and climate scientists in the weeks and months to come. The talking points first tested here will jam the comment sections beneath every article and YouTube video that contains the phrase “climate change” or “global warming.” They will also exit the mouths of hundreds of right-wing commentators and politicians—from Republican presidential candidates like Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann all the way down to county commissioners like Richard Rothschild. In an interview outside the sessions, Joseph Bast, president of the Heartland Institute, proudly takes credit for “thousands of articles and op-eds and speeches…that were informed by or motivated by somebody attending one of these conferences.”

The Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based think tank devoted to “promoting free-market solutions,” has been holding these confabs since 2008, sometimes twice a year. And the strategy appears to be working. At the end of day one, Morano—whose claim to fame is having broken the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth story that sank John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign—leads the gathering through a series of victory laps. Cap and trade: dead! Obama at the Copenhagen summit: failure! The climate movement: suicidal! He even projects a couple of quotes from climate activists beating up on themselves (as progressives do so well) and exhorts the audience to “celebrate!”

There were no balloons or confetti descending from the rafters, but there may as well have been.

* * *

When public opinion on the big social and political issues changes, the trends tend to be relatively gradual. Abrupt shifts, when they come, are usually precipitated by dramatic events. Which is why pollsters are so surprised by what has happened to perceptions about climate change over a span of just four years. A 2007 Harris poll found that 71 percent of Americans believed that the continued burning of fossil fuels would cause the climate to change. By 2009 the figure had dropped to 51 percent. In June 2011 the number of Americans who agreed was down to 44 percent—well under half the population. According to Scott Keeter, director of survey research at the Pew Research Center for People and the Press, this is “among the largest shifts over a short period of time seen in recent public opinion history.”

Even more striking, this shift has occurred almost entirely at one end of the political spectrum. As recently as 2008 (the year Newt Gingrich did a climate change TV spot with Nancy Pelosi) the issue still had a veneer of bipartisan support in the United States. Those days are decidedly over. Today, 70–75 percent of self-identified Democrats and liberals believe humans are changing the climate—a level that has remained stable or risen slightly over the past decade. In sharp contrast, Republicans, particularly Tea Party members, have overwhelmingly chosen to reject the scientific consensus. In some regions, only about 20 percent of self-identified Republicans accept the science.

Equally significant has been a shift in emotional intensity. Climate change used to be something most everyone said they cared about—just not all that much. When Americans were asked to rank their political concerns in order of priority, climate change would reliably come in last.

But now there is a significant cohort of Republicans who care passionately, even obsessively, about climate change—though what they care about is exposing it as a “hoax” being perpetrated by liberals to force them to change their light bulbs, live in Soviet-style tenements and surrender their SUVs. For these right-wingers, opposition to climate change has become as central to their worldview as low taxes, gun ownership and opposition to abortion. Many climate scientists report receiving death threats, as do authors of articles on subjects as seemingly innocuous as energy conservation. (As one letter writer put it to Stan Cox, author of a book critical of air-conditioning, “You can pry my thermostat out of my cold dead hands.”)

This culture-war intensity is the worst news of all, because when you challenge a person’s position on an issue core to his or her identity, facts and arguments are seen as little more than further attacks, easily deflected. (The deniers have even found a way to dismiss a new study confirming the reality of global warming that was partially funded by the Koch brothers, and led by a scientist sympathetic to the “skeptic” position.)

The effects of this emotional intensity have been on full display in the race to lead the Republican Party. Days into his presidential campaign, with his home state literally burning up with wildfires, Texas Governor Rick Perry delighted the base by declaring that climate scientists were manipulating data “so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects.” Meanwhile, the only candidate to consistently defend climate science, Jon Huntsman, was dead on arrival. And part of what has rescued Mitt Romney’s campaign has been his flight from earlier statements supporting the scientific consensus on climate change.

But the effects of the right-wing climate conspiracies reach far beyond the Republican Party. The Democrats have mostly gone mute on the subject, not wanting to alienate independents. And the media and culture industries have followed suit. Five years ago, celebrities were showing up at the Academy Awards in hybrids, Vanity Fair launched an annual green issue and, in 2007, the three major US networks ran 147 stories on climate change. No longer. In 2010 the networks ran just thirty-two climate change stories; limos are back in style at the Academy Awards; and the “annual” Vanity Fair green issue hasn’t been seen since 2008.

This uneasy silence has persisted through the end of the hottest decade in recorded history and yet another summer of freak natural disasters and record-breaking heat worldwide. Meanwhile, the fossil fuel industry is rushing to make multibillion-dollar investments in new infrastructure to extract oil, natural gas and coal from some of the dirtiest and highest-risk sources on the continent (the $7 billion Keystone XL pipeline being only the highest-profile example). In the Alberta tar sands, in the Beaufort Sea, in the gas fields of Pennsylvania and the coalfields of Wyoming and Montana, the industry is betting big that the climate movement is as good as dead.

If the carbon these projects are poised to suck out is released into the atmosphere, the chance of triggering catastrophic climate change will increase dramatically (mining the oil in the Alberta tar sands alone, says NASA’s James Hansen, would be “essentially game over” for the climate).

All of this means that the climate movement needs to have one hell of a comeback. For this to happen, the left is going to have to learn from the right. Denialists gained traction by making climate about economics: action will destroy capitalism, they have claimed, killing jobs and sending prices soaring. But at a time when a growing number of people agree with the protesters at Occupy Wall Street, many of whom argue that capitalism-as-usual is itself the cause of lost jobs and debt slavery, there is a unique opportunity to seize the economic terrain from the right. This would require making a persuasive case that the real solutions to the climate crisis are also our best hope of building a much more enlightened economic system—one that closes deep inequalities, strengthens and transforms the public sphere, generates plentiful, dignified work and radically reins in corporate power. It would also require a shift away from the notion that climate action is just one issue on a laundry list of worthy causes vying for progressive attention. Just as climate denialism has become a core identity issue on the right, utterly entwined with defending current systems of power and wealth, the scientific reality of climate change must, for progressives, occupy a central place in a coherent narrative about the perils of unrestrained greed and the need for real alternatives.

Building such a transformative movement may not be as hard as it first appears. Indeed, if you ask the Heartlanders, climate change makes some kind of left-wing revolution virtually inevitable, which is precisely why they are so determined to deny its reality. Perhaps we should listen to their theories more closely—they might just understand something the left still doesn’t get.

* * *

The deniers did not decide that climate change is a left-wing conspiracy by uncovering some covert socialist plot. They arrived at this analysis by taking a hard look at what it would take to lower global emissions as drastically and as rapidly as climate science demands. They have concluded that this can be done only by radically reordering our economic and political systems in ways antithetical to their “free market” belief system. As British blogger and Heartland regular James Delingpole has pointed out, “Modern environmentalism successfully advances many of the causes dear to the left: redistribution of wealth, higher taxes, greater government intervention, regulation.” Heartland’s Bast puts it even more bluntly: For the left, “Climate change is the perfect thing…. It’s the reason why we should do everything [the left] wanted to do anyway.”

Here’s my inconvenient truth: they aren’t wrong. Before I go any further, let me be absolutely clear: as 97 percent of the world’s climate scientists attest, the Heartlanders are completely wrong about the science. The heat-trapping gases released into the atmosphere through the burning of fossil fuels are already causing temperatures to increase. If we are not on a radically different energy path by the end of this decade, we are in for a world of pain.

But when it comes to the real-world consequences of those scientific findings, specifically the kind of deep changes required not just to our energy consumption but to the underlying logic of our economic system, the crowd gathered at the Marriott Hotel may be in considerably less denial than a lot of professional environmentalists, the ones who paint a picture of global warming Armageddon, then assure us that we can avert catastrophe by buying “green” products and creating clever markets in pollution.

The fact that the earth’s atmosphere cannot safely absorb the amount of carbon we are pumping into it is a symptom of a much larger crisis, one born of the central fiction on which our economic model is based: that nature is limitless, that we will always be able to find more of what we need, and that if something runs out it can be seamlessly replaced by another resource that we can endlessly extract. But it is not just the atmosphere that we have exploited beyond its capacity to recover—we are doing the same to the oceans, to freshwater, to topsoil and to biodiversity. The expansionist, extractive mindset, which has so long governed our relationship to nature, is what the climate crisis calls into question so fundamentally. The abundance of scientific research showing we have pushed nature beyond its limits does not just demand green products and market-based solutions; it demands a new civilizational paradigm, one grounded not in dominance over nature but in respect for natural cycles of renewal—and acutely sensitive to natural limits, including the limits of human intelligence.

So in a way, Chris Horner was right when he told his fellow Heartlanders that climate change isn’t “the issue.” In fact, it isn’t an issue at all. Climate change is a message, one that is telling us that many of our culture’s most cherished ideas are no longer viable. These are profoundly challenging revelations for all of us raised on Enlightenment ideals of progress, unaccustomed to having our ambitions confined by natural boundaries. And this is true for the statist left as well as the neoliberal right.

While Heartlanders like to invoke the specter of communism to terrify Americans about climate action (Czech President Vaclav Klaus, a Heartland conference favorite, says that attempts to prevent global warming are akin to “the ambitions of communist central planners to control the entire society”), the reality is that Soviet-era state socialism was a disaster for the climate. It devoured resources with as much enthusiasm as capitalism, and spewed waste just as recklessly: before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Czechs and Russians had even higher carbon footprints per capita than their counterparts in Britain, Canada and Australia. And while some point to the dizzying expansion of China’s renewable energy programs to argue that only centrally controlled regimes can get the green job done, China’s command-and-control economy continues to be harnessed to wage an all-out war with nature, through massively disruptive mega-dams, superhighways and extraction-based energy projects, particularly coal.

It is true that responding to the climate threat requires strong government action at all levels. But real climate solutions are ones that steer these interventions to systematically disperse and devolve power and control to the community level, whether through community-controlled renewable energy, local organic agriculture or transit systems genuinely accountable to their users.

Here is where the Heartlanders have good reason to be afraid: arriving at these new systems is going to require shredding the free-market ideology that has dominated the global economy for more than three decades. What follows is a quick-and-dirty look at what a serious climate agenda would mean in the following six arenas: public infrastructure, economic planning, corporate regulation, international trade, consumption and taxation. For hard-right ideologues like those gathered at the Heartland conference, the results are nothing short of intellectually cataclysmic.

1. Reviving and Reinventing the Public Sphere

After years of recycling, carbon offsetting and light bulb changing, it is obvious that individual action will never be an adequate response to the climate crisis. Climate change is a collective problem, and it demands collective action. One of the key areas in which this collective action must take place is big-ticket investments designed to reduce our emissions on a mass scale. That means subways, streetcars and light-rail systems that are not only everywhere but affordable to everyone; energy-efficient affordable housing along those transit lines; smart electrical grids carrying renewable energy; and a massive research effort to ensure that we are using the best methods possible.

The private sector is ill suited to providing most of these services because they require large up-front investments and, if they are to be genuinely accessible to all, some very well may not be profitable. They are, however, decidedly in the public interest, which is why they should come from the public sector.

Traditionally, battles to protect the public sphere are cast as conflicts between irresponsible leftists who want to spend without limit and practical realists who understand that we are living beyond our economic means. But the gravity of the climate crisis cries out for a radically new conception of realism, as well as a very different understanding of limits. Government budget deficits are not nearly as dangerous as the deficits we have created in vital and complex natural systems. Changing our culture to respect those limits will require all of our collective muscle—to get ourselves off fossil fuels and to shore up communal infrastructure for the coming storms.

2. Remembering How to Plan

In addition to reversing the thirty-year privatization trend, a serious response to the climate threat involves recovering an art that has been relentlessly vilified during these decades of market fundamentalism: planning. Lots and lots of planning. And not just at the national and international levels. Every community in the world needs a plan for how it is going to transition away from fossil fuels, what the Transition Town movement calls an “energy descent action plan.” In the cities and towns that have taken this responsibility seriously, the process has opened rare spaces for participatory democracy, with neighbors packing consultation meetings at city halls to share ideas about how to reorganize their communities to lower emissions and build in resilience for tough times ahead.

Climate change demands other forms of planning as well—particularly for workers whose jobs will become obsolete as we wean ourselves off fossil fuels. A few “green jobs” trainings aren’t enough. These workers need to know that real jobs will be waiting for them on the other side. That means bringing back the idea of planning our economies based on collective priorities rather than corporate profitability—giving laid-off employees of car plants and coal mines the tools and resources to create jobs, for example, with Cleveland’s worker-run green co-ops serving as a model.

Agriculture, too, will have to see a revival in planning if we are to address the triple crisis of soil erosion, extreme weather and dependence on fossil fuel inputs. Wes Jackson, the visionary founder of the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, has been calling for “a fifty-year farm bill.” That’s the length of time he and his collaborators Wendell Berry and Fred Kirschenmann estimate it will take to conduct the research and put the infrastructure in place to replace many soil-depleting annual grain crops, grown in monocultures, with perennial crops, grown in polycultures. Since perennials don’t need to be replanted every year, their long roots do a much better job of storing scarce water, holding soil in place and sequestering carbon. Polycultures are also less vulnerable to pests and to being wiped out by extreme weather. Another bonus: this type of farming is much more labor intensive than industrial agriculture, which means that farming can once again be a substantial source of employment.

Outside the Heartland conference and like-minded gatherings, the return of planning is nothing to fear. We are not talking about a return to authoritarian socialism, after all, but a turn toward real democracy. The thirty-odd-year experiment in deregulated, Wild West economics is failing the vast majority of people around the world. These systemic failures are precisely why so many are in open revolt against their elites, demanding living wages and an end to corruption. Climate change doesn’t conflict with demands for a new kind of economy. Rather, it adds to them an existential imperative.

3. Reining in Corporations

A key piece of the planning we must undertake involves the rapid re-regulation of the corporate sector. Much can be done with incentives: subsidies for renewable energy and responsible land stewardship, for instance. But we are also going to have to get back into the habit of barring outright dangerous and destructive behavior. That means getting in the way of corporations on multiple fronts, from imposing strict caps on the amount of carbon corporations can emit, to banning new coal-fired power plants, to cracking down on industrial feedlots, to shutting down dirty-energy extraction projects like the Alberta tar sands (starting with pipelines like Keystone XL that lock in expansion plans).

Only a very small sector of the population sees any restriction on corporate or consumer choice as leading down Hayek’s road to serfdom—and, not coincidentally, it is precisely this sector of the population that is at the forefront of climate change denial.

4. Relocalizing Production

If strictly regulating corporations to respond to climate change sounds somewhat radical it’s because, since the beginning of the 1980s, it has been an article of faith that the role of government is to get out of the way of the corporate sector—and nowhere more so than in the realm of international trade. The devastating impacts of free trade on manufacturing, local business and farming are well known. But perhaps the atmosphere has taken the hardest hit of all. The cargo ships, jumbo jets and heavy trucks that haul raw resources and finished products across the globe devour fossil fuels and spew greenhouse gases. And the cheap goods being produced—made to be replaced, almost never fixed—are consuming a huge range of other nonrenewable resources while producing far more waste than can be safely absorbed.

This model is so wasteful, in fact, that it cancels out the modest gains that have been made in reducing emissions many times over. For instance, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences recently published a study of the emissions from industrialized countries that signed the Kyoto Protocol. It found that while they had stabilized, that was partly because international trade had allowed these countries to move their dirty production to places like China. The researchers concluded that the rise in emissions from goods produced in developing countries but consumed in industrialized ones was six times greater than the emissions savings of industrialized countries.

In an economy organized to respect natural limits, the use of energy-intensive long-haul transport would need to be rationed—reserved for those cases where goods cannot be produced locally or where local production is more carbon-intensive. (For example, growing food in greenhouses in cold parts of the United States is often more energy-intensive than growing it in the South and shipping it by light rail.)

Climate change does not demand an end to trade. But it does demand an end to the reckless form of “free trade” that governs every bilateral trade agreement as well as the World Trade Organization. This is more good news —for unemployed workers, for farmers unable to compete with cheap imports, for communities that have seen their manufacturers move offshore and their local businesses replaced with big boxes. But the challenge this poses to the capitalist project should not be underestimated: it represents the reversal of the thirty-year trend of removing every possible limit on corporate power.

5. Ending the Cult of Shopping

The past three decades of free trade, deregulation and privatization were not only the result of greedy people wanting greater corporate profits. They were also a response to the “stagflation” of the 1970s, which created intense pressure to find new avenues for rapid economic growth. The threat was real: within our current economic model, a drop in production is by definition a crisis—a recession or, if deep enough, a depression, with all the desperation and hardship that these words imply.

This growth imperative is why conventional economists reliably approach the climate crisis by asking the question, How can we reduce emissions while maintaining robust GDP growth? The usual answer is “decoupling”—the idea that renewable energy and greater efficiencies will allow us to sever economic growth from its environmental impact. And “green growth” advocates like Thomas Friedman tell us that the process of developing new green technologies and installing green infrastructure can provide a huge economic boost, sending GDP soaring and generating the wealth needed to “make America healthier, richer, more innovative, more productive, and more secure.”

But here is where things get complicated. There is a growing body of economic research on the conflict between economic growth and sound climate policy, led by ecological economist Herman Daly at the University of Maryland, as well as Peter Victor at York University, Tim Jackson of the University of Surrey and environmental law and policy expert Gus Speth. All raise serious questions about the feasibility of industrialized countries meeting the deep emissions cuts demanded by science (at least 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050) while continuing to grow their economies at even today’s sluggish rates. As Victor and Jackson argue, greater efficiencies simply cannot keep up with the pace of growth, in part because greater efficiency is almost always accompanied by more consumption, reducing or even canceling out the gains (often called the “Jevons Paradox”). And so long as the savings resulting from greater energy and material efficiencies are simply plowed back into further exponential expansion of the economy, reduction in total emissions will be thwarted. As Jackson argues in Prosperity Without Growth, “Those who promote decoupling as an escape route from the dilemma of growth need to take a closer look at the historical evidence—and at the basic arithmetic of growth.”

The bottom line is that an ecological crisis that has its roots in the overconsumption of natural resources must be addressed not just by improving the efficiency of our economies but by reducing the amount of material stuff we produce and consume. Yet that idea is anathema to the large corporations that dominate the global economy, which are controlled by footloose investors who demand ever greater profits year after year. We are therefore caught in the untenable bind of, as Jackson puts it, “trash the system or crash the planet.”

The way out is to embrace a managed transition to another economic paradigm, using all the tools of planning discussed above. Growth would be reserved for parts of the world still pulling themselves out of poverty. Meanwhile, in the industrialized world, those sectors that are not governed by the drive for increased yearly profit (the public sector, co-ops, local businesses, nonprofits) would expand their share of overall economic activity, as would those sectors with minimal ecological impacts (such as the caregiving professions). A great many jobs could be created this way. But the role of the corporate sector, with its structural demand for increased sales and profits, would have to contract.

So when the Heartlanders react to evidence of human-induced climate change as if capitalism itself were coming under threat, it’s not because they are paranoid. It’s because they are paying attention.

6. Taxing the Rich and Filthy

About now a sensible reader would be asking, How on earth are we going to pay for all this? The old answer would have been easy: we’ll grow our way out of it. Indeed, one of the major benefits of a growth-based economy for elites is that it allows them to constantly defer demands for social justice, claiming that if we keep growing the pie, eventually there will be enough for everyone. That was always a lie, as the current inequality crisis reveals, but in a world hitting multiple ecological limits, it is a nonstarter. So the only way to finance a meaningful response to the ecological crisis is to go where the money is.

That means taxing carbon, as well as financial speculation. It means increasing taxes on corporations and the wealthy, cutting bloated military budgets and eliminating absurd subsidies to the fossil fuel industry. And governments will have to coordinate their responses so that corporations will have nowhere to hide (this kind of robust international regulatory architecture is what Heartlanders mean when they warn that climate change will usher in a sinister “world government”).

Most of all, however, we need to go after the profits of the corporations most responsible for getting us into this mess. The top five oil companies made $900 billion in profits in the past decade; ExxonMobil alone can clear $10 billion in profits in a single quarter. For years, these companies have pledged to use their profits to invest in a shift to renewable energy (BP’s “Beyond Petroleum” rebranding being the highest-profile example). But according to a study by the Center for American Progress, just 4 percent of the big five’s $100 billion in combined 2008 profits went to “renewable and alternative energy ventures.” Instead, they continue to pour their profits into shareholder pockets, outrageous executive pay and new technologies designed to extract even dirtier and more dangerous fossil fuels. Plenty of money has also gone to paying lobbyists to beat back every piece of climate legislation that has reared its head, and to fund the denier movement gathered at the Marriott Hotel.

Just as tobacco companies have been obliged to pay the costs of helping people to quit smoking, and BP has had to pay for the cleanup in the Gulf of Mexico, it is high time for the “polluter pays” principle to be applied to climate change. Beyond higher taxes on polluters, governments will have to negotiate much higher royalty rates so that less fossil fuel extraction would raise more public revenue to pay for the shift to our postcarbon future (as well as the steep costs of climate change already upon us). Since corporations can be counted on to resist any new rules that cut into their profits, nationalization—the greatest free-market taboo of all—cannot be off the table.

When Heartlanders claim, as they so often do, that climate change is a plot to “redistribute wealth” and wage class war, these are the types of policies they most fear. They also understand that, once the reality of climate change is recognized, wealth will have to be transferred not just within wealthy countries but also from the rich countries whose emissions created the crisis to poorer ones that are on the front lines of its effects. Indeed, what makes conservatives (and plenty of liberals) so eager to bury the UN climate negotiations is that they have revived a postcolonial courage in parts of the developing world that many thought was gone for good. Armed with irrefutable scientific facts about who is responsible for global warming and who is suffering its effects first and worst, countries like Bolivia and Ecuador are attempting to shed the mantle of “debtor” thrust upon them by decades of International Monetary Fund and World Bank loans and are declaring themselves creditors—owed not just money and technology to cope with climate change but “atmospheric space” in which to develop.

* * *

So let’s summarize. Responding to climate change requires that we break every rule in the free-market playbook and that we do so with great urgency. We will need to rebuild the public sphere, reverse privatizations, relocalize large parts of economies, scale back overconsumption, bring back long-term planning, heavily regulate and tax corporations, maybe even nationalize some of them, cut military spending and recognize our debts to the global South. Of course, none of this has a hope in hell of happening unless it is accompanied by a massive, broad-based effort to radically reduce the influence that corporations have over the political process. That means, at a minimum, publicly funded elections and stripping corporations of their status as “people” under the law. In short, climate change supercharges the pre-existing case for virtually every progressive demand on the books, binding them into a coherent agenda based on a clear scientific imperative.

More than that, climate change implies the biggest political “I told you so” since Keynes predicted German backlash from the Treaty of Versailles. Marx wrote about capitalism’s “irreparable rift” with “the natural laws of life itself,” and many on the left have argued that an economic system built on unleashing the voracious appetites of capital would overwhelm the natural systems on which life depends. And of course indigenous peoples were issuing warnings about the dangers of disrespecting “Mother Earth” long before that. The fact that the airborne waste of industrial capitalism is causing the planet to warm, with potentially cataclysmic results, means that, well, the naysayers were right. And the people who said, “Hey, let’s get rid of all the rules and watch the magic happen” were disastrously, catastrophically wrong.

There is no joy in being right about something so terrifying. But for progressives, there is responsibility in it, because it means that our ideas—informed by indigenous teachings as well as by the failures of industrial state socialism—are more important than ever. It means that a green-left worldview, which rejects mere reformism and challenges the centrality of profit in our economy, offers humanity’s best hope of overcoming these overlapping crises.

But imagine, for a moment, how all of this looks to a guy like Heartland president Bast, who studied economics at the University of Chicago and described his personal calling to me as “freeing people from the tyranny of other people.” It looks like the end of the world. It’s not, of course. But it is, for all intents and purposes, the end of his world. Climate change detonates the ideological scaffolding on which contemporary conservatism rests. There is simply no way to square a belief system that vilifies collective action and venerates total market freedom with a problem that demands collective action on an unprecedented scale and a dramatic reining in of the market forces that created and are deepening the crisis.

* * *

At the Heartland conference—where everyone from the Ayn Rand Institute to the Heritage Foundation has a table hawking books and pamphlets—these anxieties are close to the surface. Bast is forthcoming about the fact that Heartland’s campaign against climate science grew out of fear about the policies that the science would require. “When we look at this issue, we say, This is a recipe for massive increase in government…. Before we take this step, let’s take another look at the science. So conservative and libertarian groups, I think, stopped and said, Let’s not simply accept this as an article of faith; let’s actually do our own research.” This is a crucial point to understand: it is not opposition to the scientific facts of climate change that drives denialists but rather opposition to the real-world implications of those facts.

What Bast is describing—albeit inadvertently—is a phenomenon receiving a great deal of attention these days from a growing subset of social scientists trying to explain the dramatic shifts in belief about climate change. Researchers with Yale’s Cultural Cognition Project have found that political/cultural worldview explains “individuals’ beliefs about global warming more powerfully than any other individual characteristic.”

Those with strong “egalitarian” and “communitarian” worldviews (marked by an inclination toward collective action and social justice, concern about inequality and suspicion of corporate power) overwhelmingly accept the scientific consensus on climate change. On the other hand, those with strong “hierarchical” and “individualistic” worldviews (marked by opposition to government assistance for the poor and minorities, strong support for industry and a belief that we all get what we deserve) overwhelmingly reject the scientific consensus.

For example, among the segment of the US population that displays the strongest “hierarchical” views, only 11 percent rate climate change as a “high risk,” compared with 69 percent of the segment displaying the strongest “egalitarian” views. Yale law professor Dan Kahan, the lead author on this study, attributes this tight correlation between “worldview” and acceptance of climate science to “cultural cognition.” This refers to the process by which all of us—regardless of political leanings—filter new information in ways designed to protect our “preferred vision of the good society.” As Kahan explained in Nature, “People find it disconcerting to believe that behaviour that they find noble is nevertheless detrimental to society, and behaviour that they find base is beneficial to it. Because accepting such a claim could drive a wedge between them and their peers, they have a strong emotional predisposition to reject it.” In other words, it is always easier to deny reality than to watch your worldview get shattered, a fact that was as true of die-hard Stalinists at the height of the purges as it is of libertarian climate deniers today.

When powerful ideologies are challenged by hard evidence from the real world, they rarely die off completely. Rather, they become cultlike and marginal. A few true believers always remain to tell one another that the problem wasn’t with the ideology; it was the weakness of leaders who did not apply the rules with sufficient rigor. We have these types on the Stalinist left, and they exist as well on the neo-Nazi right. By this point in history, free-market fundamentalists should be exiled to a similarly marginal status, left to fondle their copies of Free to Choose and Atlas Shrugged in obscurity. They are saved from this fate only because their ideas about minimal government, no matter how demonstrably at war with reality, remain so profitable to the world’s billionaires that they are kept fed and clothed in think tanks by the likes of Charles and David Koch, and ExxonMobil.

This points to the limits of theories like “cultural cognition.” The deniers are doing more than protecting their cultural worldview—they are protecting powerful interests that stand to gain from muddying the waters of the climate debate. The ties between the deniers and those interests are well known and well documented. Heartland has received more than $1 million from ExxonMobil together with foundations linked to the Koch brothers and Richard Mellon Scaife (possibly much more, but the think tank has stopped publishing its donors’ names, claiming the information was distracting from the “merits of our positions”).

And scientists who present at Heartland climate conferences are almost all so steeped in fossil fuel dollars that you can practically smell the fumes. To cite just two examples, the Cato Institute’s Patrick Michaels, who gave the conference keynote, once told CNN that 40 percent of his consulting company’s income comes from oil companies, and who knows how much of the rest comes from coal. A Greenpeace investigation into another one of the conference speakers, astrophysicist Willie Soon, found that since 2002, 100 percent of his new research grants had come from fossil fuel interests. And fossil fuel companies are not the only economic interests strongly motivated to undermine climate science. If solving this crisis requires the kinds of profound changes to the economic order that I have outlined, then every major corporation benefiting from loose regulation, free trade and low taxes has reason to fear.

With so much at stake, it should come as little surprise that climate deniers are, on the whole, those most invested in our highly unequal and dysfunctional economic status quo. One of the most interesting findings of the studies on climate perceptions is the clear connection between a refusal to accept the science of climate change and social and economic privilege. Overwhelmingly, climate deniers are not only conservative but also white and male, a group with higher than average incomes. And they are more likely than other adults to be highly confident in their views, no matter how demonstrably false. A much-discussed paper on this topic by Aaron McCright and Riley Dunlap (memorably titled “Cool Dudes”) found that confident conservative white men, as a group, were almost six times as likely to believe climate change “will never happen” than the rest of the adults surveyed. McCright and Dunlap offer a simple explanation for this discrepancy: “Conservative white males have disproportionately occupied positions of power within our economic system. Given the expansive challenge that climate change poses to the industrial capitalist economic system, it should not be surprising that conservative white males’ strong system-justifying attitudes would be triggered to deny climate change.”

But deniers’ relative economic and social privilege doesn’t just give them more to lose from a new economic order; it gives them reason to be more sanguine about the risks of climate change in the first place. This occurred to me as I listened to yet another speaker at the Heartland conference display what can only be described as an utter absence of empathy for the victims of climate change. Larry Bell, whose bio describes him as a “space architect,” drew plenty of laughs when he told the crowd that a little heat isn’t so bad: “I moved to Houston intentionally!” (Houston was, at that time, in the midst of what would turn out to be the state’s worst single-year drought on record.) Australian geologist Bob Carter offered that “the world actually does better from our human perspective in warmer times.” And Patrick Michaels said people worried about climate change should do what the French did after a devastating 2003 heat wave killed 14,000 of their people: “they discovered Walmart and air-conditioning.”

Listening to these zingers as an estimated 13 million people in the Horn of Africa face starvation on parched land was deeply unsettling. What makes this callousness possible is the firm belief that if the deniers are wrong about climate change, a few degrees of warming isn’t something wealthy people in industrialized countries have to worry about. (“When it rains, we find shelter. When it’s hot, we find shade,” Texas Congressman Joe Barton explained at an energy and environment subcommittee hearing.)

As for everyone else, well, they should stop looking for handouts and busy themselves getting unpoor. When I asked Michaels whether rich countries have a responsibility to help poor ones pay for costly adaptations to a warmer climate, he scoffed that there is no reason to give money to countries “because, for some reason, their political system is incapable of adapting.” The real solution, he claimed, was more free trade.

* * *

This is where the intersection between hard-right ideology and climate denial gets truly dangerous. It’s not simply that these “cool dudes” deny climate science because it threatens to upend their dominance-based worldview. It is that their dominance-based worldview provides them with the intellectual tools to write off huge swaths of humanity in the developing world. Recognizing the threat posed by this empathy-exterminating mindset is a matter of great urgency, because climate change will test our moral character like little before. The US Chamber of Commerce, in its bid to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating carbon emissions, argued in a petition that in the event of global warming, “populations can acclimatize to warmer climates via a range of behavioral, physiological, and technological adaptations.” These adaptations are what I worry about most.

How will we adapt to the people made homeless and jobless by increasingly intense and frequent natural disasters? How will we treat the climate refugees who arrive on our shores in leaky boats? Will we open our borders, recognizing that we created the crisis from which they are fleeing? Or will we build ever more high-tech fortresses and adopt ever more draconian antiimmigration laws? How will we deal with resource scarcity?

We know the answers already. The corporate quest for scarce resources will become more rapacious, more violent. Arable land in Africa will continue to be grabbed to provide food and fuel to wealthier nations. Drought and famine will continue to be used as a pretext to push genetically modified seeds, driving farmers further into debt. We will attempt to transcend peak oil and gas by using increasingly risky technologies to extract the last drops, turning ever larger swaths of our globe into sacrifice zones. We will fortress our borders and intervene in foreign conflicts over resources, or start those conflicts ourselves. “Free-market climate solutions,” as they are called, will be a magnet for speculation, fraud and crony capitalism, as we are already seeing with carbon trading and the use of forests as carbon offsets. And as climate change begins to affect not just the poor but the wealthy as well, we will increasingly look for techno-fixes to turn down the temperature, with massive and unknowable risks.

As the world warms, the reigning ideology that tells us it’s everyone for themselves, that victims deserve their fate, that we can master nature, will take us to a very cold place indeed. And it will only get colder, as theories of racial superiority, barely under the surface in parts of the denial movement, make a raging comeback. These theories are not optional: they are necessary to justify the hardening of hearts to the largely blameless victims of climate change in the global South, and in predominately African-American cities like New Orleans.

In The Shock Doctrine, I explore how the right has systematically used crises—real and trumped up—to push through a brutal ideological agenda designed not to solve the problems that created the crises but rather to enrich elites. As the climate crisis begins to bite, it will be no exception. This is entirely predictable. Finding new ways to privatize the commons and to profit from disaster are what our current system is built to do. The process is already well under way.

The only wild card is whether some countervailing popular movement will step up to provide a viable alternative to this grim future. That means not just an alternative set of policy proposals but an alternative worldview to rival the one at the heart of the ecological crisis—this time, embedded in interdependence rather than hyper-individualism, reciprocity rather than dominance and cooperation rather than hierarchy.

Shifting cultural values is, admittedly, a tall order. It calls for the kind of ambitious vision that movements used to fight for a century ago, before everything was broken into single “issues” to be tackled by the appropriate sector of business-minded NGOs. Climate change is, in the words of the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, “the greatest example of market failure we have ever seen.” By all rights, this reality should be filling progressive sails with conviction, breathing new life and urgency into longstanding fights against everything from free trade to financial speculation to industrial agriculture to third-world debt, while elegantly weaving all these struggles into a coherent narrative about how to protect life on earth.

But that isn’t happening, at least not so far. It is a painful irony that while the Heartlanders are busily calling climate change a left-wing plot, most leftists have yet to realize that climate science has handed them the most powerful argument against capitalism since William Blake’s “dark Satanic Mills” (and, of course, those mills were the beginning of climate change). When demonstrators are cursing out the corruption of their governments and corporate elites in Athens, Madrid, Cairo, Madison and New York, climate change is often little more than a footnote, when it should be the coup de grâce.

Half of the problem is that progressives—their hands full with soaring unemployment and multiple wars—tend to assume that the big green groups have the climate issue covered. The other half is that many of those big green groups have avoided, with phobic precision, any serious debate on the blindingly obvious roots of the climate crisis: globalization, deregulation and contemporary capitalism’s quest for perpetual growth (the same forces that are responsible for the destruction of the rest of the economy). The result is that those taking on the failures of capitalism and those fighting for climate action remain two solitudes, with the small but valiant climate justice movement—drawing the connections between racism, inequality and environmental vulnerability—stringing up a few swaying bridges between them.

The right, meanwhile, has had a free hand to exploit the global economic crisis to cast climate action as a recipe for economic Armageddon, a surefire way to spike household costs and to block new, much-needed jobs drilling for oil and laying new pipelines. With virtually no loud voices offering a competing vision of how a new economic paradigm could provide a way out of both the economic and ecological crises, this fearmongering has had a ready audience.

Far from learning from past mistakes, a powerful faction in the environmental movement is pushing to go even further down the same disastrous road, arguing that the way to win on climate is to make the cause more palatable to conservative values. This can be heard from the studiously centrist Breakthrough Institute, which is calling for the movement to embrace industrial agriculture and nuclear power instead of organic farming and decentralized renewables. It can also be heard from several of the researchers studying the rise in climate denial. Some, like Yale’s Kahan, point out that while those who poll as highly “hierarchical” and “individualist” bridle at any mention of regulation, they tend to like big, centralized technologies that confirm their belief that humans can dominate nature. So, he and others argue, environmentalists should start emphasizing responses such as nuclear power and geoengineering (deliberately intervening in the climate system to counteract global warming), as well as playing up concerns about national security.

The first problem with this strategy is that it doesn’t work. For years, big green groups have framed climate action as a way to assert “energy security,” while “free-market solutions” are virtually the only ones on the table in the United States. Meanwhile, denialism has soared. The more troubling problem with this approach, however, is that rather than challenging the warped values motivating denialism, it reinforces them. Nuclear power and geoengineering are not solutions to the ecological crisis; they are a doubling down on exactly the kind of short-term hubristic thinking that got us into this mess.

It is not the job of a transformative social movement to reassure members of a panicked, megalomaniacal elite that they are still masters of the universe—nor is it necessary. According to McCright, co-author of the “Cool Dudes” study, the most extreme, intractable climate deniers (many of them conservative white men) are a small minority of the US population—roughly 10 percent. True, this demographic is massively overrepresented in positions of power. But the solution to that problem is not for the majority of people to change their ideas and values. It is to attempt to change the culture so that this small but disproportionately influential minority—and the reckless worldview it represents—wields significantly less power.

* * *

Some in the climate camp are pushing back hard against the appeasement strategy. Tim DeChristopher, serving a two-year jail sentence in Utah for disrupting a compromised auction of oil and gas leases, commented in May on the right-wing claim that climate action will upend the economy. “I believe we should embrace the charges,” he told an interviewer. “No, we are not trying to disrupt the economy, but yes, we do want to turn it upside down. We should not try and hide our vision about what we want to change—of the healthy, just world that we wish to create. We are not looking for small shifts: we want a radical overhaul of our economy and society.” He added, “I think once we start talking about it, we will find more allies than we expect.”

When DeChristopher articulated this vision for a climate movement fused with one demanding deep economic transformation, it surely sounded to most like a pipe dream. But just five months later, with Occupy Wall Street chapters seizing squares and parks in hundreds of cities, it sounds prophetic. It turns out that a great many Americans had been hungering for this kind of transformation on many fronts, from the practical to the spiritual.

Though climate change was something of an afterthought in the movement’s early texts, an ecological consciousness was woven into OWS from the start—from the sophisticated “gray water” filtration system that uses dishwater to irrigate plants at Zuccotti Park, to the scrappy community garden planted at Occupy Portland. Occupy Boston’s laptops and cellphones are powered by bicycle generators, and Occupy DC has installed solar panels. Meanwhile, the ultimate symbol of OWS—the human microphone—is nothing if not a postcarbon solution.

And new political connections are being made. The Rainforest Action Network, which has been targeting Bank of America for financing the coal industry, has made common cause with OWS activists taking aim at the bank over foreclosures. Anti-fracking activists have pointed out that the same economic model that is blasting the bedrock of the earth to keep the gas flowing is blasting the social bedrock to keep the profits flowing. And then there is the historic movement against the Keystone XL pipeline, which this fall has decisively yanked the climate movement out of the lobbyists’ offices and into the streets (and jail cells). Anti-Keystone campaigners have noted that anyone concerned about the corporate takeover of democracy need look no further than the corrupt process that led the State Department to conclude that a pipeline carrying dirty tar sands oil across some of the most sensitive land in the country would have “limited adverse environmental impacts.” As 350.org’s Phil Aroneanu put it, “If Wall Street is occupying President Obama’s State Department and the halls of Congress, it’s time for the people to occupy Wall Street.”

But these connections go beyond a shared critique of corporate power. As Occupiers ask themselves what kind of economy should be built to displace the one crashing all around us, many are finding inspiration in the network of green economic alternatives that has taken root over the past decade—in community-controlled renewable energy projects, in community-supported agriculture and farmers’ markets, in economic localization initiatives that have brought main streets back to life, and in the co-op sector. Already a group at OWS is cooking up plans to launch the movement’s first green workers’ co-op (a printing press); local food activists have made the call to “Occupy the Food System!”; and November 20 is “Occupy Rooftops”—a coordinated effort to use crowd-sourcing to buy solar panels for community buildings.

Not only do these economic models create jobs and revive communities while reducing emissions; they do so in a way that systematically disperses power—the antithesis of an economy by and for the 1 percent. Omar Freilla, one of the founders of Green Worker Cooperatives in the South Bronx, told me that the experience in direct democracy that thousands are having in plazas and parks has been, for many, “like flexing a muscle you didn’t know you had.” And, he says, now they want more democracy—not just at a meeting but also in their community planning and in their workplaces.

In other words, culture is rapidly shifting. And this is what truly sets the OWS moment apart. The Occupiers—holding signs that said Greed Is Gross and I Care About You—decided early on not to confine their protests to narrow policy demands. Instead, they took aim at the underlying values of rampant greed and individualism that created the economic crisis, while embodying—in highly visible ways—radically different ways to treat one another and relate to the natural world.

This deliberate attempt to shift cultural values is not a distraction from the “real” struggles. In the rocky future we have already made inevitable, an unshakable belief in the equal rights of all people, and a capacity for deep compassion, will be the only things standing between humanity and barbarism. Climate change, by putting us on a firm deadline, can serve as the catalyst for precisely this profound social and ecological transformation.

Culture, after all, is fluid. It can change. It happens all the time. The delegates at the Heartland conference know this, which is why they are so determined to suppress the mountain of evidence proving that their worldview is a threat to life on earth. The task for the rest of us is to believe, based on that same evidence, that a very different worldview can be our salvation.

by Richard Wolff
Interviewed by David Barsamian
Santa Fe, NM
September 12, 2011

available from Alternative Radio

Richard Wolff is Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and currently a visiting professor at the New School in New York. He is the author of numerous books on economics, including Capitalism Hits the Fan.

You write that “we had a remarkable 150 years during which workers enjoyed a steadily rising standard of living.” When and why did that stop?

The remarkable thing about American history that distinguishes it in many ways from almost every other experiment in capitalist systems is that in this country, from 1820 to 1970, the reality is, as best we can tell from the statistics we have, that every decade the real wage, that is, the amount of money an average worker got for an average hour of work kept rising, decade over decade. Real wage simply means the money you get, adjusted for the prices you have to pay. That’s remarkable. There’s probably no other capitalism that delivered to its working class that kind of 150-year history that produced in the U.S. this sense that every generation will live better than the one before, that if you work real hard, you will make it, that you can imagining an American dream that not only you can enjoy but you can deliver, if anything, even better to your kids and so on.

Before I answer your question about why it stopped, just think with me for a moment about the trauma that it must represent to a population of Americans to have become used to this, to think you live in a charmed land that delivers such a wonderful, rising standard of well- being for American working people—try to imagine the trauma if in the 1970s that stops, never to resume since. It is the end of a world, the end of a set of expectations, the end of a notion of a good future that will come as the reward for hard work that you do. And imagine with me that the trauma is all the worse if there’s no discussion of it, if there’s no way to share the experience of being in that kind of situation with other people because there’s a need in the population to literally believe it hasn’t happened.

So now let me answer your question. Why did it happen? As all major phenomena in human history, it has many reasons, many causes. But I’m going to select four of them that I think were key. The first two have to do with the offering of jobs. That is, in our system we depend for jobs on the decisions of private employers as to whether or not it is profitable for them to hire people. In the 1970s American employers did two things that made them need and want fewer employees.

The first one was a technological breakthrough called the computer, which made it possible for employer after employer to reduce the number of people he hired, because he didn’t need so many since the computer did it for him. The simplest example is to remember that once upon a time supermarkets needed an army of workers to keep track of how many boxes of cereal, how many rolls of toilet paper were leaving the shelves. With a computer, as we all now know, you have a scanner at the checkout counter, and nobody needs to keep track of it. There’s one man or woman sitting at a computer somewhere in the middle of nowhere who can tell you exactly how many new boxes have to be ordered, in which supermarket, in what town, because it’s all done automatically and you don’t need an army of inventory replacers.

The second thing that happened in the 1970s besides the computer coming in to replace jobs, was the recognition and the decision of American employers that the wage level of the U.S., which had been rising for all these years, was now way ahead of the wage level in many other parts of the world, and it would be more profitable to move production to those parts of the world and to therefore make more money. Between the computer replacing people and the jobs being moved out of the U.S., the demand for labor in the U.S. shrank. In the 1970s this really heated up as a phenomenon.

At the same time, two other phenomena—that’s why I said there were four basic reasons—two other phenomena also contributed. The first was the movement of American adult women out of their homes, out of the role of mother and housewife into the role of mother, housewife, and paid employee in the work force. Millions of American women started in the 1970s to look for work. At the same time, we had the latest in our endless series of in-migrations of foreign folks looking for a life and a job, this time from Latin America. So you had at the same time in the 1970s a reduction in the demand for jobs by employers and an increase in the number of people looking for work—women and immigrants. The combination meant that for the first time in American history, there was no labor shortage. We had a system that was successful as a capitalism. Employers were making money, wanted to grow their businesses, and were hiring. But there was always a shortage. That’s why we had to bring immigrants here.

In the 1970s, capitalists in America discovered that it was no longer necessary to raise wages: they had less need for workers and more workers looking. And every capitalist in America, not just on Wall Street but on Main Street, realized that now what they had learned at M.B.A. school could be put into effect, namely, the great lesson, if you’re an employer and you don’t have to raise the wages of your workers, don’t do it. You will make more money. Since the 1970s that’s what American employers have enjoyed—a record period of time, now more than 30 years, during which the real wage did not have to be raised. So here’s a fundamental statistic. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics in Washington, which keeps these records, the average wage earned by an American worker in 2011 is about what it was in 1978. We’ve had 30-plus years in which the real wage, on average, hasn’t changed in the U.S. That is a sea change in our history.

Something also is going on parallel to wages flattening out. I believe American workers work more hours than any other work force in the world. Is that right?

That’s right. According to the OECD, an important data- gathering service for industrialized countries, Americans do more hours of paid labor per year than any other working class in any advanced industrial country. That is because one reaction of American working people to the end of rising wages—if you don’t get more per hour, one way you try to keep up with the American dream, with the hope of delivering a better life to your family and your children, is by doing more hours of work. So Americans have been driving themselves. Men who had a job took a second job. The women, I’ve already mentioned, leave the home and take a full-time job if they had a part-time job before. We have retired people coming out of retirement to help the family. We have teenagers working on weekends. The whole modern story of the American family committed to a life of an incredible number of hours per household of work trying to hold on, after the 1970s, to this thing they had gotten used to in the whole history of America before that, which is a rising standard of living. Let’s remember, all this time Americans are being bombarded by advertising from every corner telling them that if you’re a success in America, you have a better house, a better car, a better vacation, you have a college education for your children. The barrage of what it was to define you as a successful American, which you could no longer afford to do with your wages. So you had to work crazy hours.

And, of course, the other great thing the American working class did, a kind of pioneer of a new sort, is, starting in the 1970s, to undertake debt. The way to keep your consumption rising, your standard of living rising, when your wages don’t go up and when adding a few hours a week is not enough, is to borrow. Starting in the 1970s American working people borrowed money on a scale that has never been seen before in any country, including our own. We had to develop in America whole new mechanisms for providing credit to the mass of people.

For example, before the 1970s, the only people who carried a plastic credit card in their wallets were businessmen working off an expense account, traveling around the country. The only company that was into that was American Express. But in the 1970s all that changed. We began pumping credit cards into everybody’s hands as fast as we could. We developed new companies—MasterCard, Visa, and all the rest—to make mass credit available to people because there was such a hungry need on the part of our working class to cope with the pressures of success in America when your wages could not longer afford it for you. So at this time you have wages flattening out, hours and productivity soaring, and huge individual debt accumulating, as if the banks are saying, “No problem, we’ll lend to you, easy credit,” and then they charge usurious rates.

The amazing thing about the last 30 years is the degree to which there was a kind of collective self-delusion in the U.S. You cannot keep borrowing money, as American working people did, if the bottom line of your ability to pay it back is a level of wages that isn’t going up. In other words, you don’t need a Ph.D. and it’s not rocket science to know that if your wages aren’t going up, then the basis upon which you’re ever going to go pay back these loans you keep accumulating isn’t there.

At a certain point—we call that 2007—the American working class had accumulated a level of debt under this system that was not sustainable, that they could not make the payments. Then we had the end of this bubble. You can kind of think of it as a crisis that really began in the 1970s, when the wages stopped going up, that was postponed for a generation, for 30 years, by debt, until that couldn’t last anymore, that couldn’t be expanded anymore. And then comes 2007, and this entire mass of the American people is literally exhausted—exhausted physically by all that work; exhausted psychologically because the family, that had held people’s lives together, had been blown apart because mother, father, grandpa, and teenager were all working crazy hours.

Women had held the emotional life of our families together. When you move the women out of the house into the workplace, for all kinds of reasons, good and bad, the bottom line is the tensions in the family become unmanageable. There’s a reason why the sitcom of the 1950s and 1960s was the happy family, the Nelsons, whereas the sitcom of today is the dysfunctional family that doesn’t work. So I think that when 2007 comes, the American working class is physically exhausted, psychologically stressed. Let me remind people that we are 5% of the world’s population; we consume 65% of the world’s psychotropic drugs, tranquilizers, mood enhancers. We are not a drugged people; we are a people under unbelievable stress.

And then in 2007 the final straw. Can’t pay back the debt. The anxiety of being a person or a family that cannot meet its obligations to its creditors blows the system up. One of the reasons our crisis today is so severe and is lasting so long and is defying the ability and efforts of the U.S. government to cope is because it isn’t a typical business cycle. This is the culmination of a 30-year postponement of what it means in a society when 150 years of wage increases comes to an end.

Apropos of that, there have been a series of busts and recessions and depressions throughout the history of capitalism in the U.S. Is this one different? And if so, in what way?

I think this one is different. First let me comment on your good point about capitalism being an inherently unstable system. And there’s no polite word for that. I like to make my students sometimes giggle, in a classroom that is full of information that’s sometimes hard to take, by saying to them something like this: If you lived with a roommate as unstable as this economic system, you would have moved out long ago or demanded that your roommate get professional help. We, however, live in a capitalist system making neither kind of demand, even though the reasons to do so are pretty much the same. Capitalism is notorious for its upper and downs. We have a whole vocabulary in English to refer to that: booms and busts, recessions and prosperities and depressions and upturns and downturns. You know, the reason people have a lot of words for the same thing is because it’s a very important phenomenon in their lives, and they need a rich vocabulary to articulate it, so we have that.

You would expect that a population that lives in a capitalist system would know this about its history and would therefore not believe that it was over; that somehow we had managed in some magical way to escape the instability. But the truth of the matter is that over the last 30-40 years, just the time I’ve been talking about, we have been a society unable and unwilling to think critically about capitalism. And it shows. We thought we weren’t going to have any more of these crises like we had, for example, in the 1930s, 10 years of depression, or that the Japanese have had, which is 20 years of depression since 1990. We kind of imagined in some fanciful, wishful thinking that these kinds of things had no longer relevance to our modern life. So we were, of course, unprepared for what we have. Nothing shows our unpreparedness better than the inability of either President Bush or President Obama to basically deal with this problem. We are as suffering here in the autumn of 2011 with the risks and dilemmas of this economy as we were last year and the year before and the year before that. This is a sign of a society that hasn’t come to terms with capitalism in general. So that’s part of the reason why this one is so much different: it’s coming at the end of a long period of denial about all of this.

Let me give you one illustrative example. When I began my work as graduate student getting a Ph.D. in economics, the typical department’s curriculum had a course called The Business Cycle, where students were at least introduced for a semester a history of the ups and downs of capitalism in their own country and other countries with a sense of what some of the causes were, what was done to try to cope with them. So at least you would come through your education with some sense of this. Nowadays, in 2011, if you do a survey of curricula in graduate programs in economics, you will find the vast majority of schools have no course in the business cycle at all. It fell away. It became no longer necessary. We had overcome that, we had out grown it, we had learned to master this problem of capitalism.

It was never true. It should have never happened. But it helps explain and illustrate the kind of euphoria of the last 30 years, that we were in a new economic system, that it was a mature capitalism, that we now had all the mechanisms to control the system. The irony is, it left us unprepared to see it coming, although we should have, and it has left a generation of economists unprepared to manage it, which you can see in terms of the inability of the advisers both of President Bush and of President Obama to come up with a reasonable plan to deal with this situation.

So I think the answer is, we have a very severe economic downturn because not only is capitalism always unstable, but this one comes at the end of a 30-year program of denial, of substituting credit for a working economy that grows and allows people to have higher wages. We never helped our people understand any of this, so now it’s like a tsunami of economic proportions has hit us as a nation. And we look really badly equipped as well as unprepared to deal with it.

To what extent do the mainstream media contribute to this lack of understanding as to what has happened?

I think the blame is spread around a lot, so I’m about to answer your question but I don’t want it to be understood that I single them out particularly. But certainly they contributed. First of all, the mainstream media have been not intellectually alive as critics of the system, able to evaluate its strengths but also its weaknesses. I would describe the media much as I would describe my own profession of economics—I’ve been a professor of economics all my adult life—as being less analytic and more cheerleaders. We were cheerleaders for capitalism. It was efficient, it was a growth engine, it would make everybody happy. Capitalism delivers the goods. The courses, the students, the training, the whole experience of economics as a discipline produced a generation in this country, maybe even two generations, who thought that what economics was about was celebrating capitalism’s greatness instead of a balanced assessments of its strengths and weaknesses that might have contributed to a national discussion.

Capitalism is an institution. It’s like your public school system, it’s like your health delivery system. We as a nation think it’s appropriate to question and debate whether our schools are working adequately, meeting our needs, whether our health system is. Why in the world has it been taboo to ask, is the capitalist system, the way we organize the production and distribution of goods and services, working to meet our needs or not?

But we’ve had a taboo on that topic. The Cold War and many other things made it impossible to question, let alone criticize, capitalism. Instead of that being a normal exercise of a democratic society evaluating its institutions, it turns out to be an act of disloyalty or something we shouldn’t have. It gets squelched, it gets marginalized. And I’m afraid the mass media in the U.S. went right along with that plan and that program and denied the American people what they needed, which was a critical sense of its flaws, so that when a big breakdown happened, as happened in 2007 and 2008, we would be prepared, not so surprised, and able to bring to bear the good sense of the American people to cope with it.

There’s a certain kind of market fundamentalism. Capitalism is equated with freedom—we’re all for freedom, of course—the free market, the free enterprise system. In some respects it’s almost taken on a theistic, theological dimension. To question it becomes equivalent to heresy.

Again, let me give examples to underscore your point. In the 1970s, employers were free, in this free system, to stop raising the wages of the mass of their workers. That’s a freedom that the free enterprise system gives them. But their freedom, their exercise of that freedom, deprived the mass of Americans of a rising standard of living based on their continuing rising productivity. That is, workers after the 1970s were increasingly productive, as they had been before, but now their increasing productivity, instead of making it possible for their wages to go up, their wages were stagnant. They were kept stagnant because of the free choice of employers, who therefore got all the benefits of the productivity increase for themselves in rising profits. So the freedom of one part of our population deprived another part of the population of its freedom.

Freedom is not a universal good that only has happy news as a result. An honest person says, “Okay, if I give this group freedom, what is the impact of their freedom on the freedoms of others?” If you ask that question, you discover that freedom is a complicated matter: if you enhance the freedom of some, it often involves depriving others of their freedom. To face that would require a much more critical notion of freedom and democracy than the kind of happy, cheerleader mentality we have, in which we imagine, because it saves us from difficult thinking, that enhancing freedom of somebody is always good for everybody else. It isn’t.

How do you talk about freedom to the mass of Americans who have no job now, numbering in the 20 to 30 million? Are they free? They’re not free. They’ve been denied the freedom that comes from having a decent job, and through no fault of their own.

Something didn’t go wrong with 20 million Americans who suddenly can’t get jobs or can’t get the jobs they want in a way that they used to. That isn’t a problem of individuals, that’s a problem of an economic system that isn’t delivering the goods.

So I think that you’re right, that this debate and discussion of freedom has been like so much in our culture for 30 years: very carefully abstracted from the hard economic realities that were unfolding over that time and that were, in fact, depriving huge numbers of our people, a majority, of freedoms that they had enjoyed for a long time before but were no longer available.

One of the salient characteristics about the Great Recession is long-term, chronic unemployment. Is this something that distinguishes this economic crisis from previous ones?

The statistics are startling. The proportion of unemployed that have been unemployed more than a year, which is a standard statistic that economists use, is greater than what we have seen in any economic downturn for many, many, many years. So there’s no question that one of the ways this crisis is more severe than any we’ve seen basically since the Great Depression of the 1930s is in the longevity of unemployment.

But there are plenty of other markers, too, that indicate. This is the fifth year of this crisis. It basically begins in the middle of 2007. So do the math. We’re now well beyond the middle of 2011, and consequently we’re in the fifth year, number one.

Number two, other economic downturns like this in the U.S. have had a “recovery” at least for a while, even if it falls down again. But the reality in the U.S. is, while there has been much discussion of recovery, roughly from the spring of 2009 to the spring of 2011, that recovery didn’t affect the vast majority of Americans. If I can spend a moment on that. We did have a recovery from early 2009 to early 2011, but only for banks, insurance companies, large corporations, and the stock market. Those are important parts of our economy, heaven knows, but they only affect a relative minority of the people. For the vast majority of Americans, there has been no recovery. It’s not appropriate to talk about a double dip as if there’s a second downturn, because they never had the upturn to make this downturn the second one. If you look at the unemployment statistics simply, or the number of people who have been out of work for a long time, or the number of people losing their homes through foreclosure, or the number of people whose benefits, even if their wages haven’t been cut, their benefits have been cut, sick days, pensions, and all the rest of it, then the mass of the American people have had a crisis in their lives, economically speaking, for a good four years now.

To talk about recovery to these people, as the mass media did, is cruel. What it does is it makes each individual American, who isn’t participating in this recovery, feel as though it’s somehow his or her personal fault or failing: Everybody else is recovering. I’m not. That’s cruel. That’s adding a psychic punishment to people who are not responsible for this crisis in the first place and who should not have been told about a recovery as if it were general when it never was general. That would have helped them to avoid feeling angry and betrayed. Nothing shows the anger and sense of betrayal of the American people more than the political turns in our society over the last few years, whether it’s anger in the Tea Party movement or anger elsewhere that’s building. And part of the reason for that is the peculiar way we couldn’t debate our capitalist system beforehand, we wouldn’t prepare ourselves to deal with its ups and downs. We now reap the whirlwind that results from such an incapacity to debate your own economic system and face its problems.

The conventional chronology of the economic crash actually is dating from, I believe, the summer of 2008, when Lehman Brothers goes belly up. What happens in 2007 that you identify as triggering this?

The real shift shows up first in the sector of our economy that has in many ways been the epicenter, if you might use the metaphor, of a hurricane or a storm, the epicenter of the problem. That industry is called housing. It’s the building of homes, the furnishing of homes, the redesign of communities, to facilitate housing construction. And that was in an unsustainable boom basically from 2001.

Why do you say it was unsustainable?

Because what it was based on was credit. The only reason we had a boom in housing, in building housing, in construction jobs—and by the way, this affects all parts of American culture. The boom in our housing construction enabled a vast flood of Mexican young men and women to come and work in the construction industry, legal and illegal. So if you’re interested, for example, in the immigration problem and all that, it’s itself a derivative of the housing boom. It was created in the aftermath of 2001 because we had a very bad crash of the stock market early in the year 2000. That whole period of time from the crash of the market early in 2000 until the 9/11 events at the end of 2001 put the American economy in a very, very bad position, with a major economic recession bearing down on us.

The response of the government at that time was to drop interest rates. Over a year period, the Federal Reserve reduced interest rates faster and further than had ever happened in American history. It suddenly reduced the cost of borrowing money—that’s what it means if you drop interest rates—on an unprecedented scale. If you remember what I mentioned to you before, that we had a 25-year history prior to that of Americans becoming more and more debt-dependent, what you were doing was fueling an addiction with more of the drug. You were saying to an American population that was already borrowing too much, Here, borrow even more, and we’ll make it cheaper for you.

So Americans did. They started in 2002 and 2003 in using their houses as a kind of cash machine, refinancing their homes, going and borrowing more money against their homes, which the banks were eager to lend to them at very low interest rates. And so you had an artificially boosted housing boom. Everybody built a new addition on their home. Young people were able to borrow huge sums of money with very little money you had to put down, at very low interest rates, so houses were built like crazy. So we had a kind of explosion of building that went up until—and here’s the answer to your question—the middle of 2007.

Then it started going down. Then suddenly it became clear that many of those people who had borrowed vast amounts of money at low interest rates didn’t have the jobs that would allow them to raise enough money to sustain those debts. They couldn’t pay. They couldn’t pay off their mortgages. And many middle-class who had bought a second home because it was so cheap to borrow the money, now couldn’t sustain that. They were beginning to lose their jobs, they were beginning to suffer from the cutback of benefits, they were beginning to have medical expenses—all kinds of pressures that made it impossible for them to keep up the payments.

It showed up first in the housing industry, as people were defaulting, beginning to default on their loans to pay for the houses. Houses were beginning to be foreclosed and put back on the market, so that potential buyers were now no longer needing to build a house, to engage a builder to make a house, because there were so many houses being dumped on the market by people who couldn’t pay for them. So suddenly the builders of houses saw their market collapse. That begins in the middle of 2007, and it drags the whole economy down, partly because the whole economy had been built up on this credit bubble fueling the housing industry. So when that stopped, the whole system began to implode. So by a year later, late summer of 2008, it became a wholesale collapse.

The reason for that is important. In the 30 years since the 1970s, as wages were stagnant, the other side of the coin was that productivity kept rising. That is, workers didn’t get paid more by their employer, but they kept producing more for the employer, because of the computer that they had to work with, because they were working harder and longer hours, because they had better training, because there were more and better machines. In other words, what we had had before the 1970s continued after the 1970s in terms of worker productivity. American workers are productive and continued to become more so after the 1970s.

Now let’s put the two together. If what the employer pays the worker since the 1970s is flat, doesn’t go up, but what the worker gives the employer for every hour of his or her work keeps going up—that’s what rising productivity means—then, again, look at what the results are. Basically, it’s been the best 30 years that employers in this country have ever had. Rising stuff being produced for you by your employees, but you don’t have to pay them any more. You keep all the benefits of rising productivity for yourself—precisely what you could not do before the 1970s, because the labor shortage meant you had to keep paying workers more, which is why we had that wonderful history from 1820 to 1970. So after the 1970s profits go crazy. Employers are in the wonderful position to get more and more from their workers—rising productivity—but not paying them any more. And what employers did was to begin to get really excited about the profits. Most of our history over the last 30 years is about this, if you think about it.

Let me give you a couple of examples. What I find charming, because I don’t want to cry and laughing is an alternative—what I find charming is one of the first things the business community did, noticing that the profits were wonderful, they didn’t have to raise their workers’ wages but they got more and more per hour from each worker with rising productivity, this is what you dream of if you’re a businessman or -woman. This is what the master’s of business administration teaches you is the best of all possible worlds. They were enjoying it. But they didn’t give the explanation I just did. They didn’t understand that they were getting the benefit of stagnant wages and rising productivity. They probably knew it, but they didn’t think about that. They told a completely different story. The story they told was a kind of folklore mythology. That the reasons the profits are so big in the 1980s and the 1990s and so on because our executives are geniuses. We began to develop new folk heroes: Lee Iacocca of Chrysler, Jack Welch, the leading executive of GE. They had books written about them as if they were icons of some magical, mystical productivity that accounted for the profits.

Well, let me tell you, as an economist, it’s embarrassing to read. I know and every other economist who looks at the numbers knows where the profits came from. You stopped raising your workers’ wages, you kept getting more and more out of them. There it is. No mystery here. They didn’t suddenly become genius executives, implying, by the way, that before that they were dumb executives. That’s kind of silly. But it’s what was done. Of course, there was method in this madness because if the reason the company’s profits are going crazy is the genius of their top executives, then it becomes reasonable for the top executives to say, “Hey, you should be paying me since I’m so important to these profits.” It’s in the 1970s when the U.S. begins to pay its top executives out-of-whack sums of money. And I say out- of-whack because nothing like that happened in Europe, nothing like that happened in Japan. It didn’t happen in other capitalisms that weren’t experiencing this the way we were. Suddenly we began paying multimillion-dollar bonuses at the end of the year, huge salaries, huge stock options. So there is a reason to tell a story of the genius of an executive, because it became the rationale.

Americans in the last couple years have gotten angry when they’ve read stories about Goldman Sachs or somebody else getting big bonuses as executives. I’m glad the American people have woken up, are angry. But they’re about 30 years late. Because this has been going on with the money created by workers’ productivity that they didn’t get in higher wages. The money was made available for astronomical salaries for top executives, who, in turn, used some of that money to enhance the dividends they paid to shareholders, who used that money to hire professionals, including economists like me, at very lofty salaries, etc.

It helps us to understand why the last 30 years exhibits yet another problem of our economic system—a widening in the disparity between rich and poor. If the mass of workers have wages that are flat for 30 years, whereas all the increases in profitability and productivity accrue to the top, the employers, then the people who become rich, shareholders in these companies making big profits, top executives of the companies making big profits, top professional employees of the companies making big profits, then you’re taking 5 or 10% of the people and giving them an enormous boost in income and everybody else is stagnant. Thirty years ago the U.S. was one of the least unequal societies in terms of the disparity between rich and poor. Now, 30 years later, 2011, we are the most unequal of all the advanced industrial countries.

That, by the way, is the root explanation for why this crisis is lasting so long. We have put the mass of American people in an impossible situation, so they are not spending money. Those that are unemployed obviously cannot, but everybody else is so frightened by the prospect of reduced benefits, of an insecure job, of unemployment that may hit you, of the value of your house going down as the housing market tanks that they’re holding back. They’re paying off their debts, if they can, they’re saving a little money, if they can. So they’re not buying stuff. American corporations are reacting by saying, Okay, we’ll serve the rest of the world. We’re more interested in selling abroad, because the American market is exhausted. That’s the way this mistaken way of developing our country for 30 years is coming back to haunt us now, to perpetuate this crisis, and to make it so difficult for the government to figure a way out.

Income inequality is well documented and is hardly a controversial issue. There’s another factor at work here as well, and that’s wealth inequality, which is a whole different set of indices.

Yes, although I do think they have a common root. The wealth inequality in the U.S. has basically occurred by an explosion in the value not so much of high income, but in the stock market—all those people who could hold a portion of their wealth in a form that could participate in this boom in profits. The way you hold wealth that can participate in the boom in profits I’ve just described is if you own shares of stock in the companies enjoying these profits. The vast majority of Americans either have no stocks or a trivial amount of them. That’s a tiny proportion of our people, therefore, that can participate as shareholders. And that’s where the big growth has come. The reason the rich have become richer is because they’re shareholders. We might like to think about the occasional basketball star who gets a huge salary or the actor or actress who gets one. They’re there, but that’s not the statistical reality. For that you need to understand that the stock market is the place to be to really participate in the boom of the last 30 years.

Here’s another way to put it. Most Americans have no appreciable wealth. That is, they live on their income. They depend on that job and that check. Those Americans in large numbers that have any property have it in one form—the home. The home, the house, the apartment, the co-op, whatever it is, is the single most important form of wealth that the mass of Americans have. And houses have dropped in value by 25% to 35% across the U.S. over the last four years of this crisis. That has made the inequality of wealth greater. The so-called recovery from 2009 to 2011 in the stock market recouped for those who have significant amounts of stocks some of their losses. But for those whose only wealth is their home, they’re now 33%, roughly, behind what they were. Their job is not more secure, their wages have not gone up, the risk of losing their job is greater, their benefits have been reduced, and the only piece of wealth they have has dropped by 33%. Of course, wealth inequality is even more grievous than the income inequality I spoke about, and is a serious problem in terms of getting out of this crisis anytime soon.

The great Canadian singer/songwriter Leonard Cohen has a song where he says, “The poor stay poor, the rich get rich/ That’s how it goes/ Everybody knows.” It’s intriguing to me, particularly that last line. I do a lot of public speaking and media work these days. And I can tell you, I think everybody knows what’s going on. But the taboos in this country—it’s a little bit like, if I could be allowed, the metaphor of sex. We kind of all know what that’s about, but there’s a taboo about discussing it or talking about it in a straightforward way. We all know that our economic system is broken, is not working, is causing us grief, pain, anxiety, you name it. But there still remains—less than the past but there still remains—a large amount of taboo about facing this reality, about admitting that it’s happening, and that therefore we have to develop some new, different ways of thinking and coping or else this is going to continue. People want to believe that it’s going to be over next week.

I know every president says it, but it hasn’t been true. And, by the way, every single president since Roosevelt has been in office when the economy turned down. Not as bad as today, and not as bad as the 1930s was, but they’ve had downturns. And every president comes up, therefore, with a set of policies. And every president makes an announcement of his policies and says, “These policies are not only to the get us out of this crisis but, even more important, my fellow Americans, it will prevent future downturns like this.” By that standard every president has been a liar, because he hasn’t delivered on that. We have a big crisis that proves that getting rid of the future of crises has not been anything that any president has yet accomplished.

I think we now face a situation that we’re looking at the potential for a 10- or 20-year downturn of the sort that Japan is now suffering if we don’t stop and face the music of a long-overdue discussion and debate about the particular system we have called capitalism, which is now not working for the majority of people and either needs to be changed in a significant way or we have to move to some other system that works better. Not on the grounds of some abstract ideological commitment, but on the very practical grounds of making our economic system work for us in the way that we want our schools, our health system, our transportation system, and our other basic institutions to work for us.

One of the factors you failed to include in this potpourri of things that have been going on over the last decades has been the decline of the union movement, of organized labor, which acted as a check against the rapacious appetites of some of the capitalist owners. What’s happened to the union movement?

You’re absolutely right. Your criticism is well taken. I think, to put a different twist on it, that my own relative neglect of that part of the story is itself a symptom of what has happened. The trade union movement in the U.S. is now at the end of a 50-year period of decline. Year after year the number of Americans who are represented by a union, who are in any meaningful sense union members has shrunk, despite all kinds of efforts by the union movement to change that situation.

Think of the statistics today. Seven percent of workers in the private sector of the U.S., which is our major sector, are in a union. Ninety-three percent of people working do not have the protection of a union contract or a union organization to make sure they get treated properly, to avoid arbitrary firings, and all the rest. But the thing is that the current attack of governors in a number of states—Wisconsin is the most famous but there are many other states that are experiencing this—is focused on the public-sector employees. So we have not only a weak trade union movement but one that is under special attack of a politically sustained, coordinated nature across many states in the U.S., so that is the prognosis for the trade union movement is not only not good right now but even more of this dismal story.

I think it’s been very important that the union movement has declined. Let me give you an illustration of why that’s the case. In the 1930s, the last time we had a crisis of the proportions we have now, even worse than what we have now but of these proportions, we saw a president who had been elected—I’m talking about Franklin Roosevelt—on a balanced-budget, kind of conservative platform radically change his attitude after two or three years in office. He realized, the story goes, that the crisis was severe, that it was lasting a long time, that it was resisting the hopes and measures, weak as they were, taken by the government. In other words, he was in a situation quite like Obama’s. But he then did something that Obama, at least has not yet done, which is he radically changed his direction.

Let me give you one example. In 1934 he goes on the radio to the American people and he says, in effect, If the private sector either cannot or will not hire tens of millions of Americans who want a job, then there is no alternative but for me as the president to do that. Between 1934 and 1940, the federal government under Roosevelt created and filled 11 million jobs. This was a direct way to use the government to put people back to work: to give them a job, to make them feel like useful citizens, to give them a decent income, to allow them to maintain their mortgage payments so they didn’t lose their homes, therefore not a destroying of the housing market. Why did Roosevelt do it? The story is often, he saw the problem. Yes, but there’s a missing part of this story. One of the things that Roosevelt did was to say to the wealthy in America, By the way, you’re going to pay for this. I’m going to raise taxes on your companies and I’m going to raise your taxes, rich people. That’s where the money is going to come from for me to hire all these unemployed. Wow! What we say in this country is unthinkable and undoable was thinkable and doable and got done then. Why? Here comes the role of the trade union movement. We had in the middle of the 1930s the most dynamic, the most powerful, sweeping growth of the union movement we’ve ever had in American history before or since. It was called the Congress of Industrial Organizations, the CIO, the future partner with the AFL, of the AFL-CIO, which swept across basic industries—steel, auto, rubber, chemical, and so on—to organize millions of workers in a very short period of time. Those unions demanded that something be done about unemployment—or else, that something be done about the suffering of people—or else. And next to them there were two other organizations that were strong in the 1930s, the Socialist Party and the Communist Party. They, too, were mounting demonstrations in the streets involving large numbers of people.

That gave Mr. Roosevelt a card to play that is crucial for us to understand. When he went to the corporations and the rich, he said to them, I’m going to put people back to work, and they’re going to have an income and then they’re going to buy your products. You’re not hiring them. I’ll take care of it. But you’re going to pay for it, because you’re going to benefit from it. And here’s the trump card. If you don’t do this with me, behind me are coming the unions, the socialists and the communists, and you’re not going to get anywhere so good a deal if they take over. There was enough fear that that might happen— remember, there’s also the Soviet Union across the ocean—that this gave a card to Roosevelt, which he played and which allowed him to get the rich and the corporations to pay big time compared to what they pay now.

When people tell you it can’t be done, or if you advocate taxing corporations and the rich to give jobs to unemployed people, you’re talking socialism, communism, no, you’re not. You’re talking about a chapter in which a president of this country, facing conditions rather like today, was pushed and enabled by a powerful trade union movement to take a radically different course that changed the history of this country.

The sadness today is, we have a weak trade union movement, not a strong one, and the socialists and communists have basically disappeared from our political life. So we don’t have the social force that might persuade or convince the president today, whether it’s Obama or anyone else, to do what happened in our last bout with a serious crisis. And while many people may be happy that the trade union movement is weak and the socialists and communists are very weak—the reality is, it may get us a depression that hurts more and lasts longer than the last one.

The militancy of workers in that period was noteworthy. The threat of strikes and actual strikes, sit-down strikes, general strikes. There was muscle in the streets. And today, except for a few examples—would you consider the demonstrations in Madison, Wisconsin, and the like equivalent or not. I don’t think they’re equivalent. I don’t think anyone thinks that yet. But they are straws in the wind, and I think they are therefore very worthwhile focusing on. I think what happened in Wisconsin was dramatic. It showed that the American people have a left wing, if you like, of people who are committed to the trade union movement, who do not want workers to be deprived of their rights of collective bargaining, etc., who will not sit idly by and watch these long and hard-won gains for working people to be erased by a Republican governor or, for that matter, a Democratic governor. So I think, yes, it’s a very important sign in the wind.

I see many such signs in the wind. I think Americans need to pay attention. There were riots recently in London and many other British cities of people very angry about the suffering caused to masses of working people by the crisis in England, which, by the way, is very severe and being handled by their government even more severely than is happening here in this country. But that’s a straw in the wind, too. And in countries like Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy we’ve had general strikes, a rising militancy of the working class the likes of which we haven’t seen in half a century. It’s all about this economic crisis and all about the ineffective government attempt to cope with it and the injustice of it all. And to imagine that the U.S. is going to in some magical way not have these problems coming here, even as this crisis deepens, is naïve and counter to the history of the world.

My guess is we’re going to be rudely awakened one day when we see the other side of the coin, when the other shoe drops. We’re going to see an American working class whose ideas of what’s going on are not only that it’s unjust and not only that it’s intolerable, but that the solution does not involve pandering more to business than we already have, sort of the Tea Party approach, but is rather a different push from the other side of the political spectrum. It takes longer in America because we don’t have the trade union, socialist, and communist organizations that they have in Europe. That’s why they’ve been able to mobilize a left alternative anti- austerity program. What we lack here are the organizations we allowed to disappear over the last 50 years that we just discussed. But Americans will be resourceful. The point of view is well represented in this country. So they will either resuscitate those old organizations or they will build new ones, because the basic problems in Europe are the same as those that exist here.

Warren Buffet, one of the wealthiest Americans, says, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” Why isn’t there more discussion about class?

I think that’s part of the taboo of the last 30 years. We had to believe in America that we don’t have classes. I like to point out to my students that the U.S. and the Soviet Union, the two adversaries of the Cold War, had one thing in common. Each side had its government and its intellectuals constantly telling the mass of people that they were a classless society. The leaders of the Soviet Union said it from their perspective, and the leaders of the U.S. said it from theirs. It wasn’t true there, and it wasn’t true here either. We can’t discuss class. It’s an explosive issue. Again, to use the metaphor, it’s a little bit like sex or religion or something: you’re not supposed to think about it or talk about it, even though everyone knows that we are thinking and talking about it.

So I think it’s one of those horrible lapses of a culture. When it can’t talk about something, all that that does is make that issue even bigger in people’s minds, even more powerful, even more influential, even to the point of becoming dangerous, because it’s this tabooed thing. It’s like a child. “You mustn’t ever go in that room” makes that room really interesting. So I think we will come to rue the day that we excluded discussions of capitalism or of class in the U.S.

There is one discussion of class here, and that is the magical, mystical middle class.

Right. I always love this notion of the middle class. Everybody in America, when answering a question, says he or she is in the middle class—very wealthy people, very poor people. They all agree. I think that was just an American way of magically wishing oneself in a society that didn’t have the differences that are so scary. But we, of course, had them. Now we have them in spades. So we can’t afford anymore the make-believe world in which we’re all in the middle. We’re not.

The economy is full of signs that the middle has disappeared. For example, the stores in America who serve the middle—Sears Roebuck, dozens of them like that—they’re all gone or disappearing. There is no middle. You don’t buy your clothes at Sears Roebuck. You buy them at discount places like Marshalls or TJ Maxx, where they sell stuff real cheap. Or even more, Target or Wal- Mart, the stores for the mass of the people who can’t afford any more. Or you’re at the other end. You shop in a lovely boutique, in a lovely part of town, and you pay five times what everybody else pays for more or less similar stuff. It’s an economy that’s splitting into the haves and the don’t-haves, with the think-they-haves in the middle, and that’s a shrinking part of our population.

I think another way to get at this is to talk about Warren Buffet’s important remark. He at least is the first, the kind of vanguard of the rich class. There are always people among the wealthy and among the capitalists who are not trapped in make-believe land, who want to face the reality, because they’re afraid of what might happen if you don’t. Mr. Buffet is very clear. He says, Look, I did a survey—if you read his whole article—of the 20-odd people who work in my office as secretaries, clerks, and assistants. He said, I pay a lower tax rate on my income, which is thousands of times larger than theirs, than they do. In my office I paid the lowest rate of taxation of anybody. He said, I’m the richest person there. That’s crazy. The hidden message—and it wasn’t much hidden in his statement—was, they’re going to get angry about this one day, and I’d be a lot smarter and so would the fellow members of my rich class if we understood that and took steps to deal with it than to put our heads in the sand and wait for that anger to overtake us all.

Let me show you how correct Mr. Buffet is. I’m going to give you two examples. The first comes from the relationship between taxing corporations and taxing individuals. If you go back to the end of World War II, here’s the relationship. For every dollar that Washington got from the taxpayers of America as individuals, it got $1.50 from corporations. That is, the corporate income tax, tax on profits, brought in 50% more money to Washington than the total tax on individuals. What’s the relationship today? Well, I’ll tell you. In 2011, for every dollar that the federal government gets in revenue from taxing individuals, it gets 25 cents from corporations. Corporations have shifted the burden of income tax from their income, which is called profits, on to our income, which is called wages and salaries and so on. That’s a tremendous shift. But that’s what class warfare means. They have warred against people, corporations have, by pushing the tax on them.

Now my second example. If you look at the individual income tax, let’s start with the 1950s and 1960s, not that long ago, heaven knows, in the 1950s and 1960s the top income tax bracket of an individual was 91%. Here’s what that means. For every dollar over the maximum—let’s just say roughly $100,000—for every declare over $100,000 that a rich man or woman got, they had to give Uncle Sam 91 cents and they got to keep 9. Even in the 1970s it was still 70%. So every dollar over $100,000 you got in the 1970s, you had to give Uncle Sam 70 cents, you kept 30. What is the rate for the richest Americans today? Thirty-five percent. Think of it: a drop in the tax for the richest Americans from 91% to 35%. That’s a tax cut. Nothing remotely like that has been enjoyed by the vast majority of Americans.

So over the last 40 or 50 years, here’s what we can say about taxes. They have been shifted from corporations on to individuals and from the richest individuals on to the rest of us. So when you’re angry at the government and you’re angry at the taxes and you’re angry at the situation, at least it’s important to be well informed rather than to celebrate the middle class and capitalism. The fact of the matter, as Buffet knows, is there’s been a class warfare and most Americans have been on the losing side of it.

Is this crisis of capitalism systemic?

There’s no other way I could possibly imagine describing it, although I am surrounded, I must say, by my fellow economists. An awful lot of them still don’t want to face the systemic nature of this, still want to look for a bad guy. The media join in. If you’re one kind of persuasion, you think the bad guys are the bankers, if you’re another kind of persuasion, you think the bad guys are the people who took out subprime loans and can’t make their payments. You blame the poor, you blame the rich. We’re beyond that. Everybody who contributed to this crisis did his or her part. The bankers did what bankers do, the working people did what working people do, each one trying to make it in this system.

When a system has everybody playing by its rules, more or less, and you get the level of dysfunction we now have, it’s time to stop looking for scapegoats and understand that the problem is a system that isn’t working, that is driving all of its parts—corporations, individuals, banks, a business on Main Street making ladders, whatever it is—to do things that don’t work together for the economy as a whole. That’s what a systemic crisis means. That’s why in my conversation with you I stress, look, here was a situation where workers couldn’t pay back their debts, for understandable reasons. Here’s reasons why employers stopped raising wages, because that was the system’s way for them to function. Everybody is doing their part, but the results don’t work. That’s when the system has to change.

It’s a little bit liking calling the repairman or -woman into your home to fix that damn refrigerator that has been on the fritz for a while. After a while, after the repairman putters around with the motor and with the condenser and with the this and the that, he stops and he looks at you and says, “Look, I can fix this. It’s going to cost you $50 for me to do this, and $47 for that and $50 for that. But I got to tell you, this is a refrigerator that has had it. And you can pump money in and you can blame the condenser and you can blame the motor, but you’ve gotten 20 years out of this. It’s time to move on and think about a new and different way to manage the refrigeration problems you want to solve in your home.”

I think we’re at that stage with capitalism as a system, and I think the American people have the Cold War far enough out of our lives, we have gone beyond that, we’re mature now. We’ve got a crisis in this system. It is systemic. Let’s finally have the long-postponed national conversation about capitalism, its strengths and weaknesses, how much it has to be changed or whether we need a new refrigerator.

What immediate steps would you recommend?

There are two things that I think would be the things I would focus on. One you might call a short-term or an immediate step that ought to be taken and one intermediate step, because I know it will be harder to do.

Let me deal with the easy one first. We ought to have a national jobs program. What we need in this country is to put our unemployed people back to work, and we ought to do it. We ought to stop the plan that has now failed for four and a half years. That’s the plan of Mr. Bush and that’s the plan of Mr. Obama, namely, to provide incentives, inducements, etc., so that the private sector can hire people. That’s been the mantra, that’s been the policy. And that has failed. We have as high unemployment now as we did one, two, even three years ago, or worse than those times. Therefore, we have a failed arrangement here. It is unconscionable and unethical to stay with a policy of proven failure.

Two and a half years ago, President Obama had a stimulus program that was supposed to put people back to work. It was over roughly $800 billion, it was passed by the Congress. It didn’t solve the problem. Then, in September of 2011, the same President Obama goes on television again, proposes yet another stimulus, when the situation is worse than it was then. Only this stimulus is half the size of the one before. You do not need an advanced degree to understand, this cannot solve the problem, even if it were a direct program, and it isn’t. It is once again incentives of various kinds: tax cuts, subsidies, government orders that hopefully will lead the private sector to hire more people.

The solution is, do it directly. Do what Roosevelt did after 1934 and do it properly. Use every dollar of the program you’re going to use to hire people. Not to provide orders, some of which will end up in the hands of executives or in the corporation’s profits. No, no, no. You want people to go to work? Hire them, pay them a decent salary.

And by the way, have them to do what? Have them do all kinds of useful things in this country. Daycare centers, because we have a very sad condition for daycare, that people really need. Programs for the elderly. Our population is getting older every year, relatively. There should be ways to give old people an important way of contributing to this society, and we ought to have the people around to do that. Green our society, improve the ecological relationship with the environment which we’ve neglected, whether that be insulating homes or building a proper public transportation system that will save the use of the car, that is such a polluter of our environment. Just as in the 1930s what workers hired by the government did: building national parks, conservation, constructing levees in flood-prone areas, and so on. It turned out to be useful for generations. So could be what we do now.

It is unconscionable to have in the U.S. today millions of people idle who want to work, side by side with one- quarter of our productive capacity sitting idle. That’s a government statistic. That measures the amount of floor space in factories, machines, tools not being used, gathering rust and dust. Instead of what? Being worked on by workers who want to work, who could produce with those available resources wealth that would solve many of our problems that we’re losing out on. Because we have side by side unemployed workers who want to work, unused materials, raw materials, and tools to work with, and therefore we’re losing out. This is nonsense. So a jobs program is what ought to exist right away. And it’s a copy of something done by another American president in comparable circumstances.

But more important than that, I would stress, is something else. A bit more far-reaching but, again, part of what we have to face up to. We need to democratize our enterprises. We need to stop an economic system in which all the enterprises that produce the goods and services we depend on are organized in the following way. The vast majority of people come to work Monday through Friday, 9:00 to 5:00. They arrive and they use their brains and muscles to work with equipment provided by the employer to produce an output, a good or a service. At the end of the day they go home. They take with them their brain and their body, but they leave behind what they’ve produced, and the employer takes it and sells it and makes as much money as he can.

All the decisions in this arrangement are made by whom? A tiny group of people. In most companies in this country that are organized as corporations, that group is called the board of directors, 15 to 20 people who decide what to produce, how to produce, where to produce, and what to do with the profits. And who selects these people? The major shareholders. Another tiny group of 15 to 20 people. They make all the decisions. The vast majority of working people make no decisions. If the company decides to close down here and go somewhere else, what does that mean? It means that a small group of people, board of directors and major shareholders, are moving the factory from Ohio to Canton, China. Okay. All the people who work there are going to lose their jobs. All the people in the community who depended on that employer are now going to suffer 10 ways to Sunday. Their children are going to have a harder time in school. You know the story. We permit that decision to be made by a minority. We do not accept democracy, that the majority of people who have to live with the consequences of a decision ought to participate in making it. I think that’s a key root of our problems.

Those corporations made all kinds of decisions of the sort I talked to you about. For example, in the 1970s they decided to stop raising wages, even though they could do it because the workers’ productivity rose up. If workers themselves ran these enterprises, if they were run by the workers as a whole—and how would that work, by the way? Monday through Thursday you come and do the job the way you always did. Friday you come to work, you don’t do your usual job. You sit around all day in meetings with the other workers and you make decisions democratically, together. You decide what to produce, how to produce, where to produce, and what to do with the profits.

If we had had that, let’s review over what might have happened over the last 30 years. First, in the 1970s the workers would not have stopped raising their wages. There was no need to do it, and they wouldn’t have been persuaded by the great opportunity of the labor market to stick to it workers by not raising their wages anymore. So the whole basis of the borrowing frenzy, the credit card, all of that could have been avoided if we had had a different system. Number two, would those workers destroy their own jobs by moving production out of the country? Highly unlikely. Would those workers employ a dangerous technology, one that pollutes the environment? I don’t think so, because they live there, because their children live there and their families there. They’re not going to want, even if it makes a bit more money, to risk the health of themselves and their families in the way that a board of directors located many miles away might be and has been traditionally quite willing to do. Would they have used the profits to speculate in dangerous derivatives? I doubt it. Would they have used the extra profits they made in good times to allow some managers to get astronomical salaries while the rest of the people didn’t? I do you tell it. In fact, every part of our economic history over the last 30 years would have been radically different, and I think in much preferred directions, had we had a different way of organizing our enterprises. Not the top-down, undemocratic, hierarchical and bureaucratic arrangement of corporations today, but a much more cooperative, collective, community-focused way that is democratic at its core.

For a country that prides itself on its commitment to democracy, to letting the people have a real, ongoing participation in the decisions that affect their lives, there has always been a terrible gap. The most important activity of an adult’s life in this country is work. It’s what we do five days out of every seven, what we get up in the morning and brush our teeth to be able to do, what we travel to and from for. That’s what we’re doing most of our adult lives between childhood and death. If democracy belongs anywhere, it belongs in that major portion of our lives. Yet we accept, as if it were given by nature, that we are supposed to enter the threshold of our store, of our factory, of our office, and give up all of our democratic commitments, all of our democratic rights. If it at least delivered us a rising standard of living, it might make sense that people would accept it. But now we have an economic system that imposes an undemocratic way of work and doesn’t deliver us a decent economic result either. The time has come to question and debate what has been taboo, at our cost, for 30 years.

Where do you get your politics? Who and what have inspired you?

It’s a little bit of everything. I was the child of immigrants, born in Youngstown, Ohio. At the time, my father was pushing a wheelbarrow in the Youngstown Sheet & Tube Company, a famous steel company that no longer exists. He was in that position because he was an immigrant, and his life in Europe—he came from France—didn’t count for much when he came here. But I was the first child, so it was important for me and my family to succeed. So I went to Harvard as an undergraduate, and then I went to Stanford and got my master’s degree, and I finished my education at Yale, which is where I got my Ph.D. in economics. So by most American standards I’m a bit of a poster boy for elite education. And I’m grateful for the education, and I was trained in conventional economics, the very kind of economics that I have been criticizing in this conversation.

I learned to criticize in part from the very economics I was taught, because I was taught by my teachers, in part, to ask tough questions. I did what I shouldn’t, which is I turned those questions on the very system I was being taught to revere and I found it wanting. Once I saw that capitalism was producing results I could not justify, for example, the coexistence at the same time, as I mentioned earlier, of unemployed people who want to work, unutilized means of production that are sitting there rusting, and unmet social needs that could be met if these people who wanted to work would be put together, it seemed to me that an economic system that couldn’t solve this problem, couldn’t put the people in the jobs they want, with the equipment they could use to produce the wealth that would make all of us better, that such a system didn’t deserve my unquestioned loyalty. It might deserve my loyalty, but not without big questions.

Once I began to ask the questions, then I discovered, like I think a lot of folks do, that I’m not the first one, that there have been lots of people who have asked these questions about capitalism and have come to a variety of conclusions—some of whom said it needs to be badly changed, some of whom said it’s no good, we can doing better than capitalism, and here are some ways we might do that. And I found that literature very interesting.

I was influenced by the people who designed and developed modern economics, which celebrates capitalism, but on my own I made sure to supplement that education with an exposure to a whole list of critical thinkers.

It’s a little bit like, if you wanted to understand a family. Let’s imagine a family with mother, father, and two children—and you happen to know that one of the two children thought that they lived in the greatest family ever invented and the other one was extremely critical of mother and father and felt the family wasn’t effective. If you want to understand that family, do you just talk to the child who thinks it was the greatest thing or do you talk to both of them? My feeling is, if you want to understand capitalism, you need to talk to the people who think it’s wonderful, by all means, but you also need to think and talk and expose yourself to the arguments of those who don’t think it’s so wonderful, who think we could do better.

I don’t shy away from saying, the single most developed tradition of critical thought about capitalism is called Marxism. It was begun by Karl Marx, even though he built his work on many people who went before him. It’s not the only solution to our problems, it has its own shortcomings and failures. But if you want to think critically about capitalism, you sooner or later are going to have to encounter the Marxian theoretical tradition, because it is the most developed, it has had contributions from every country on Earth, from a thousand struggles against business and governments supporting capitalism. It’s a repository, a rich resource that ought to be made use of by anyone who wants to have a balanced brain when it comes to dealing with the real problems.

Your answer triggered one last question. One hears constantly from Democrats and Republicans that the government is like a family, that it must balance its budget. Which on the surface seems very reasonable. We all want to live within our means. Is there anything wrong with that argument?

There are so many things wrong I’m a little overwhelmed as to where to start. First of all, the very people saying it, Republicans and Democrats, are on record for the last 50 years of consistently voting for unbalanced budgets, which have been passed under Republican and Democratic presidents alike, under Republican- and Democratic- controlled Senates and Houses of Representatives alike. So I don’t know who it is that is supposed to believe these characters when they give these little homilies about what the government ought to do. But in their actions, in their votes as our representatives, they ignore that.

Let me give you one example. The summer of 2011 we witnessed an astonishing political theatre in Washington in which Republicans and Democrats yelled at each other in front of the cameras about the need to do something about the debt: The government should not live beyond its means, all that stuff. Here’s what the reality was. In the year 2011 the government is running a budget as follows: It is scheduled to spend roughly $3 1/2 trillion. It is scheduled to take in in taxes on individuals and companies roughly $2 trillion. That means it is a budget, which was voted into office by Republicans and Democrats alike the year earlier, that requires the government to borrow the difference between what it takes in in taxes and what it spends, which is $1 1/2 trillion or, to say the same thing another way, $1,500 billion.

So what were the Republicans and Democrats debating this summer? Here’s what they were debating. The Republicans wanted there to be something done about the deficit and began with a very bold plan to cut the government’s deficit by $100 billion. Ryan and Cantor, the leaders in the Congress of the Republican Party, pushed that. Let me remind everyone, the size of the deficit this year is $1,500 billion, and the Republican drastic proposal was to cut $100 billion. That’s nothing, out of $1,500 billion. But then they modified their demands, the Republicans, and came down to $60 billion. The Democrats didn’t want to cut that much, so they counterproposed $30 billion.

They finally, after much yelling at each other and much invocation of the importance of dealing with the deficit, reached a compromise to cut $38 billion. What’s the size of the deficit this year? $1,500 billion. They reached a compromise to cut that by $38 billion. That’s silly. That’s not dealing with our deficit problem. That is an avoidance of dealing with it. But it was portrayed by the politicians and the media as a grand historical struggle.

The truth of it was, both sides agreed that in this situation of a crisis the government has to help the economy by spending huge amounts of money. Why? Precisely because corporations, above all else, are not spending that money. They don’t have any confidence in the American economy. They’re not going to risk hiring workers and buying materials and putting people to work, because they don’t think they can sell that stuff, neither here nor abroad, so they’re not doing it. So the government has to spend the money that they are not, or else we’re in real hot soup.

So the discussion about the deficit is phony. There is no other way to discuss it. It’s a way of saying to the Americans, We want to deal with the problem in a serious way, the way your family would if it was unable to meet its debts. But what your family faces is a problem they don’t think they have. By the way, they do have it. The deficit will cause all kinds of problems in America, not the ones they tell us about, a different set. But they are not credible. They are not dealing with the deficit. Over the last five years, over the last 10 years, whatever you look, the deficits in America have gotten steadily worse because both parties vote for them over and over again. And they simply try to cover their tracks by these speeches to Americans about what the government ought to do, but when it comes to their vote, there is no reality and no truth to what they’re doing. It’s a pretty unpleasant picture, because, if I use harsher terms, it would be words like liars and fakers and cheats.

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

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©2010

by Fred Nagel

Most US citizens don’t know whether to cheer the assassination of US citizen and cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki, or not. Apart from the fact that he was a Muslim and wore religious garb, we just don’t know too much about him.

What did he say or write that brought on the death penalty? There was a time in our nation’s history when free speech was protected. In fact, it says in the First Amendment of our Constitution that our government will never “abridge the freedom of speech.” But Awlaki got blown up for what he said. When did things change?

The Fifth Amendment talks about something else, due process. That means charges, trails and legal proceedings before the state can murder its own. The Sixth Amendment guarantees a citizen’s right to a “public trial by an impartial jury.” Muslims don’t get these rights now?

The US media credits President Obama with “authorizing the request” to kill Awlaki. Who requested this murder? Where in our Constitution does it allow some agency or committee to “request” the assassination of a US citizen? Does that secret request go straight to our Commander in Chief? And what would our founding fathers have had to say about a President who gives his OK to cold blooded murder without charges, without a trail, without anything really.

Was there a law passed making our President a judge, jury and executioner all in one? And is there anything left of our Constitutional rule of law?

The following is an excerpt from War Is a Lie by David Swanson, who served as press secretary for Dennis Kucinich’s 2004 presidential campaign. He is the cofounder of WarIsACrime.org (formerly AfterDownStreet.org) and was instrumental in exposing the Downing Street Minutes and other evidence of Iraq War lies. He is also the author of Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union. He holds a master’s degree in philosophy from the University of Virginia.

Most supporters of war admit that war is hell. But most human beings like to believe that all is fundamentally right with the world, that everything is for the best, that all actions have a divine purpose. Even those who lack religion tend, when discussing something horribly sad or tragic, not to exclaim “How sad and awful!” but to express–and not just under shock but even years later–their inability to “understand” or “believe” or “comprehend” it, as though pain and suffering were not as clearly comprehensible facts as joy and happiness are. We want to pretend with Dr. Pangloss that all is for the best, and the way we do this with war is to imagine that our side is battling against evil for the sake of good, and that war is the only way such a battle can be waged.

If we have the means with which to wage such battles, we must expect to use them. Consider what Senator Albert J. Beveridge (R-IN) offered the Senate at the turn of the twentieth century as his own divinely guided rationale for war on the Philippines:

God has not been preparing the English-speaking and Teutonic peoples for a thousand years for nothing but vain and idle self-contemplation and self-admiration. No! He has made us the master organizers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns.

During our Vietnam travesty, Senator William Fulbright (D-AR) explained the phenomenon for using the power we have this way:

Power tends to confuse itself with virtue, and a great nation is peculiarly susceptible to the idea that its power is a sign of God’s favor, conferring upon it a special responsibility for other nations–to make them richer and happier and wiser, to remake them, that is, in its own shining image.

Madeline Albright, Secretary of State when Bill Clinton was president, was more concise:

What’s the point of having this superb military that you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?

The belief in a divine right to wage war seems to only grow stronger when great military power runs up against resistance too strong for military power to overcome. In 2008 a U.S. journalist wrote about General David Petraeus, then commander in Iraq,

God has apparently seen fit to give the U.S. Army a great general in this time of need.

[Andrew Bacevich, Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010), p. 205.]

On August 6, 1945, President Harry S Truman announced:

Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese Army base. That bomb had more power that 20,000 tons of TNT. It had more than two thousand times the blast power of the British “Grand Slam,” which is the largest bomb ever yet used in the history of warfare.

When Truman lied to America that Hiroshima was a military base rather than a city full of civilians, people no doubt wanted to believe him. Who would want the shame of belonging to the nation that commits a whole new kind of atrocity? (Will naming lower Manhattan “Ground Zero” erase the guilt?) And when we learned the truth, we wanted and still want desperately to believe that war is peace, that violence is salvation, that our government dropped nuclear bombs in order to save lives, or at least to save American lives.

We tell each other that the bombs shortened the war and saved more lives than the some 200,000 they took away. And yet, weeks before the first bomb was dropped, on July 13, 1945, Japan sent a telegram to the Soviet Union expressing its desire to surrender and end the war. The United States had broken Japan’s codes and read the telegram. Truman referred in his diary to “the telegram from Jap Emperor asking for peace.” Truman had been informed through Swiss and Portuguese channels of Japanese peace overtures as early as three months before Hiroshima. Japan objected only to surrendering unconditionally and giving up its emperor, but the United States insisted on those terms until after the bombs fell, at which point it allowed Japan to keep its emperor.

Presidential advisor James Byrnes had told Truman that dropping the bombs would allow the United States to “dictate the terms of ending the war.” Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal wrote in his diary that Byrnes was “most anxious to get the Japanese affair over with before the Russians got in.” Truman wrote in his diary that the Soviets were preparing to march against Japan and “Fini Japs when that comes about.” Truman ordered the bomb dropped on Hiroshima on August 6th and another type of bomb, a plutonium bomb, which the military also wanted to test and demonstrate, on Nagasaki on August 9th.

Also on August 9th, the Soviets attacked the Japanese. During the next two weeks, the Soviets killed 84,000 Japanese while losing 12,000 of their own soldiers, and the United States continued bombing Japan with non-nuclear weapons. Then the Japanese surrendered.

The United States Strategic Bombing Survey concluded that,

… certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.

One dissenter who had expressed this same view to the Secretary of War prior to the bombings was General Dwight Eisenhower. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral William D. Leahy agreed:

The use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender.

[Howard Zinn, The Bomb (San Francisco City Lights Books, 2010)]

Whatever dropping the bombs might possibly have contributed to ending the war, it is curious that the approach of threatening to drop them, the approach used during a half-century of Cold War to follow, was never tried. An explanation may perhaps be found in Truman’s comments suggesting the motive of revenge:

Having found the bomb, we have used it. We have used it against those who attacked us without warning at Pearl Harbor, against those who have starved and beaten and executed American prisoners of war, and against those who have abandoned all pretense of obeying international laws of warfare.

[Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, “Were the Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki Justified?” in Bombing Civilians: A Twentieth Century History, ed. Yuki Tanaka and Marilyn B. Young (New York: The New Press, 2009), p. 127]

Truman could not, incidentally, have chosen Tokyo as a target–not because it was a city, but because we had already reduced it to rubble.

The nuclear catastrophe may have been, not the ending of a World War, but the theoretical opening of the Cold War, aimed at sending a message to the Soviets. Many low and high ranking officials in the U.S. military, including commanders in chief, have been tempted to nuke more cities ever since, beginning with Truman threatening to nuke China in 1950. The myth developed, in fact, that Eisenhower’s enthusiasm for nuking China led to the rapid conclusion of the Korean War. Belief in the myth led President Richard Nixon, decades later, to imagine he could end the Vietnam War by pretending to be crazy enough to use nuclear bombs. Even more disturbingly, he actually was crazy enough:

The nuclear bomb, does that bother you?… I just want you to think big, Henry, for Christsakes,

Nixon said to Henry Kissinger in discussing options for Vietnam.

President George W. Bush oversaw the development of smaller nuclear weapons that might be used more readily, as well as much larger non-nuclear bombs, blurring the line between the two. President Barack Obama established in 2010 that the United States might strike first with nuclear weapons, but only against Iran and North Korea. The United States alleged, without evidence, that Iran was not complying with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), even though the clearest violation of that treaty is the United States’ own failure to work on disarmament and the United States’ Mutual Defense Agreement with the United Kingdom, by which the two countries share nuclear weapons in violation of Article 1 of the NPT, and even though the United States’ first-strike nuclear weapons policy violates yet another treaty: the UN Charter.

Americans may never admit what was done in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but our country had been in some measure prepared for it. After Germany had invaded Poland, Britain and France had declared war on Germany. Britain in 1940 had broken an agreement with Germany not to bomb civilians, before Germany retaliated in the same manner against England–although Germany had itself bombed Guernica, Spain, in 1937, and Warsaw, Poland, in 1939, and Japan meanwhile was bombing civilians in China. Then, for years, Britain and Germany had bombed each other’s cities before the United States joined in, bombing German and Japanese cities in a spree of destruction unlike anything ever previously witnessed.

When we were firebombing Japanese cities, Life magazine printed a photo of a Japanese person burning to death and commented “This is the only way.” By the time of the Vietnam War, such images were highly controversial. By the time of the 2003 War on Iraq, such images were not shown, just as enemy bodies were no longer counted. That development, arguably a form of progress, still leaves us far from the day when atrocities will be displayed with the caption “There has to be another way.”

For more on the myth of the nuke attacks on Japan saving lives, see

• Hiroshima: New facts and old myths
• and Atomic coverup: The hidden story.

by Jodie Evans
Interviewed by David Barsamian
Boulder, CO
August 7, 2011

available from Alternative Radio

Jodie Evans is a veteran activist with more than 30 years experience in organizing for social change. She cofounded Code Pink with Medea Benjamin. They’ve also edited the book Stop The Next War Now: Effective Responses to Violence and Terrorism. She was Executive Producer of the documentaries The Most Dangerous Man in America and The People Speak. She is the boardchair of the Women’s Media Center.

What kindled your activism?

In1970 I was a maid in one of the big hotels in Las Vegas, and we got organized to march for a living wage. Jane Fonda came and marched with us. In that process I found my power. And we won. To this day maids get a living wage in Las Vegas. They can buy a house. Years later, I made a documentary, Stripped and Teased: Voices of Las Vegas Women. It was about a woman who raised her 11 children on a maid’s salary. Her husband had died. She became the president of the union. She led the six-year strike against the Frontier Hotel and won.

And then I was an antiwar activist. As my friends from high school started to go off to war, I became an antiwar activist and used a lot of the skills I got from being organized as a maid. And then I joined the McGovern campaign, and turned 18 a month before. I got to be one of the first 18-year-olds to vote. I still remember how powerful that was and how much I wanted to use my vote.

What was the spark that launched CODEPINK?

About May of 2002, about 35 of us who were activists got together, and we called ourselves The Unreasonable Women for the Earth. And Caroline Casey called us Code Hot Pink, with the idea that we should get together and save the earth and do some radical activism. We started a hunger strike to keep India from changing the [Bhopal] crime, [the 1984 Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal in which thousands died], to a misdemeanor. Diane Wilson, who had called us The Unreasonables, did the hunger strike, and people from all over the world joined her. And at the end of August we won. The pressure on the court prevented it from changing the felony down to a misdemeanor.

So that’s the end of the summer 2002. Then we get into September, and they started selling the Iraq war.

Remember, you don’t sell things during the summer? At the time, Bush was trying to frighten us with Code Orange and Code Red and Code Yellow. Then one day Medea and Diane and I got on the phone, and the resolution was going through Congress, and the Democrats had put something forth and Bush had said no. And we said, “Okay, we’ve got to get to Washington.” We found out through another girlfriend that he was going to have all the members of Congress in the Rose Garden the next morning and he was going to give them the resolution and it was just going to go through Congress like lightning.

We got together that night and we said, “We’re going to call ourselves Code Hot Pink.” But the problem was, when you went to the Internet, it was a porn site. So we changed the name to Code Pink. And the next day we were at the White House and hung a big banner on the White House that said “No War in Iraq.”

And Diane got up on the pole and she wouldn’t come down. And media from the Rose Garden came running out, and it was on all the morning news. But as soon as they found out she was an antiwar activist and not a terrorist, it was gone. The story disappeared.

We then went to the steps of the Capitol at lunchtime. We had painted pink doves of peace and put them on our bras and took our shirts off. And on our bellies we wrote

Read My Tits. No War in Iraq.

And members of Congress stopped and talked to us. We were the first people in the hearing and we had our banners. And because we had taken our shirts off, all the cameras in the congressional hearing were on us. We disrupted the Hyde hearing.
And the funny story out of that day was that Medea had to go to New York to help Amy Goodman at a fundraiser, so she said, “I can’t get arrested. So I’ll sit over here, and when you get up, I’ll be over here supporting you.” We got up in the middle and we held the banner and we were screaming out everything that we heard wrong in the hearing. And Medea clapped over where she was. They were dragging us out, and Hyde said, “And her too.”

Cynthia McKinney said, “When did it become illegal to clap in a hearing room?” And he said, “She’s bothering me.” Cynthia McKinney said, “She’s not bothering me.”

And he looked over at her and said, “Well, your skin is thicker than mine.” It was gross. So Medea got arrested. And he turned around, and she was still there, and she got arrested and we didn’t. So we had Medea and Diane in jail for the first day.

Code Pink has pretty much been that since the beginning, that we’re in the face of power, wherever it is. We were at the White House, the steps of Congress, and inside a hearing screaming out when madness was happening, which is literally what that hearing was like. No one knew what they were talking about, and they were all telling stories that were totally false and driving us to war.

Since those early days, how many members do you have and chapters, and how many men are part of Code Pink?

Men have been part of Code Pink since the beginning. Medea and I had been involved as activists our entire lives, so it was really wonderful to have all the men who were running all these major organizations show up and say, “What can we do for you?” John Passacantando from Greenpeace. John Sellers from Ruckus. And Mike Brune from Rainforest Action Network. They were just, like, “How do we help you? It’s very important that it’s a women-led, women-initiated organization that wants to end war.” It was great, because in the beginning we felt very appreciated.

Right now we have about 200,000 people who get our e-mails each week. We send out an Action Alert, because we believe that if you’re in action, you won’t feel as powerless. So we use the Action Alert to educate, inspire, and then, hopefully, activate. We have a small staff of five.

We feel that we’re just the container to give people the tools for activism, and then it’s really the locals that create the color and the intelligence and the vibrancy that is Code Pink.

And how many local chapters?

About 100.

Your comments on the debt deal that Obama struck and its impact on women.

Women and children will suffer the most. It’s devastating what they’ve done. And what’s hardest for us is that we’ve been out there saying bring the war dollars home since we started. Code Pink’s purpose is to end war and bring those resources back to the life-sustaining needs of our community. To watch that happen, and, again, on the backs of women. In every way they will be suffering from
this debt deal, which could have been solved by ending the wars and bringing the troops home.
And also, just recently 30 American troops died in Afghanistan, a few weeks before that 12 in Afghanistan and Iraq. Nobody even talks about the cost in lives—the costs that we’re incurring by how insanely we are operating in Afghanistan.

And even now, even after the Taliban hit that Chinook helicopter and killed everyone on board, the generals are like, Now we’re even more out to win. To win what? Nobody even asks the questions of why we’re there anymore. Osama bin Laden is not the argument anymore. It’s quite devastating to watch this happen.

Those metrics can be measured. What about the moral costs?

That’s the part that’s just mind-boggling. Back in World War I, 10% were civilian casualties. In Iraq it was 90% civilian casualties. With these drones it’s 99%. They are so inaccurate, who knows what they’re hitting?

Not only that, the drones they’re using are operated out of Las Vegas. We do vigils and actions outside of Creech Air Force Base all the time. It’s so inhuman. It’s just mind-bogglingly inhuman what the drones are.

Or that Obama can say that what’s happening in Libya isn’t a war because Americans aren’t getting killed. How does somebody say something like that? I don’t know.

These generals that could say something like, Now we’re just even more revved up to get the Taliban. It wasn’t even the issue. Haven’t we learned after Vietnam and now Iraq that you can’t win anything with insurgencies?

The other moral question is, how much money we have spent on these wars and how we have destroyed countries. They say we’re in Afghanistan for the women. They’ve done nothing for the women. It is less safe for the women. That level of violence creates the power with the violent.
I spoke to some of the women in Afghanistan. They’re not training police; they’re training soldiers. They said,

We don’t need more soldiers. Our fears are civil wars. We don’t need soldiers. We need police.

We have not trained any police; we’re training soldiers. You look at the violence and the number of American soldiers that are dying in Afghanistan, it’s usually, recently, from soldiers that we’ve trained. The Taliban even said that the missile, the way that they got the helicopter, was the way the U.S. trained them to go after the Russians. They always trained them to hit a helicopter that’s carrying troops because it’s the best use of a missile. So we’ve created the disaster that is destroying our country.

That’s the Afghan Mujahideen in the 1980s. And later, elements from the Mujahideen morphed into what is now called the Taliban.

I remember the Indian writer and activist Arundhati Roy saying at the time of the Afghan invasion that, This may be the first time in history that the U.S. Marine Corps claims to be a feminist organization.

It’s devastating to think, even that they say they’re helping these women. You can’t imagine what life is like for these women in Afghanistan. To help them would have been to educate them, would have been to restore their country, would have been to create structures. Everything is in shambles. The only place that’s safe is in Kabul, but anything outside of that isn’t safe. But the only people that anyone speaks to are the people and the women inside of Kabul. Of course, they feel safe, so they want American soldiers to stay. So it becomes a very complex issue, even for women’s organizations.

So you were able to get out into the countryside?

We were not able to get out into the countryside. But a lot of friends and some other Code Pinkers who have traveled there have been.

What do you think of RAWA, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan?

I’m in awe of it and the courage of the women. As a matter of fact, before I help start Code Pink, I raised enough money to build them a hospital in Pakistan in one of their education camps, which is still there. And when Malalai Joya tours the U.S., Code Pink is always involved in organizing events. The last time she was in L.A., we raised $12,000 so she could buy a new car, because it was very dangerous for her to be driving and her car breaking down in Afghanistan, because there’s a price on her head.

I’m concerned with how hard it is for RAWA to operate, because it’s dangerous for them. They do have a lot of courage, because of what she’s been able to say in the parliament. She’s been able to say what no one says and talks to the warlords as warlords instead of pretending that they’re parliamentarians and upstanding members of society. What she does takes more courage than anyone I know.

She later was expelled from parliament. And she has been subjected to death threats.

It’s 10 years of the war on terror, now rebranded by Obama to an innocuous-sounding “overseas contingency operation.” Where are we 10 years on?

We’ve created a more dangerous world. We’ve created more violence. We’ve unraveled the fabric of our own society. At Code Pink we’ve been thinking about what do we do with the 10-year anniversary coming up in October. And watching the antiwar movement slowly just evaporate with Obama coming in and putting everyone to sleep.

Also, you remember back in 2006 it was the antiwar movement that shifted the whole political spectrum, and all these amazing people got elected. But then they got there, and then they still voted for war. When people see that happening, they quit going in the streets and quit being active, because we’ve done this and we’ve done this and we’ve done this, and it’s gotten worse and worse. We pay more taxes that go to war than ever in our history, both percentage-wise and number-wise. So I really was grappling with this. We’ve watched everything get worse. We’ve watched countries be destroyed and we’ve watched war become the answer to every question. Libya happened, and our diplomats are the ones saying to go to war, which is the opposite of what their job is. So it just becomes the answer. Everyone has just gotten super lazy. And the Pentagon has become a behemoth. It’s crazy. I call it crack cocaine. I have no idea what they think over there, because it isn’t about people.

So what we’re doing, with a coalition of other organizations, is something called Ten Years and Counting. It’s about creating, not hate. So it’s called Create Not Hate. Because it was a way of getting back in communities and saying, Through your art, your theater, your music, your cultural center, what would you say these last 10 years have cost you, have cost your community, have cost our country, have cost the world? Because I’m afraid it’s so overwhelming that people don’t even feel about it anymore. And unless you can feel about it, you can’t be active about it. If you don’t want to write about what has the cost been, create about what would have been a different response to 9/11 than going to war on two countries.

It’s another way of just getting into new communities, because for the last year our campaign has been called Bring the War Dollars Home, and we’ve been working in many communities on city resolutions.

We organized the resolution at the mayors’ conference, which won, which shocked everyone, which was really great. You could see where the media was on the issue, because they wrote the story better than I could have. They said “U.S. Mayors Vote for Antiwar Resolution, First Time Since Vietnam,” which really tells the story about what the mayors were willing to stand up and do. And we were trying to leverage the mayors to then go to Congress and go to Obama and say, “You’ve got to stop these wars and bring the war dollars home.” And they did. Los Angeles Mayor Villaraigosa has it high on his list of what his job is as the head of the mayors.

And still Obama’s withdrawal was only 10,000 soldiers out of Afghanistan, even when he had the opportunity after the death of Osama bin Laden. I have no idea what goes through these people’s minds.

There is an embedded assumption in your argument that if those wars were stopped immediately, then, as Code Pink states on its website, the monies would then be redirected “into healthcare, education, green jobs, and other life-affirming activities.” Okay, great. But will the ruling class go along with that?

Obviously not, given what we’ve seen, that the fight in Washington has just degraded down to romper room, that has nothing to do with the needs of the people. And I just want to say that the mayors knew when they were signing the resolution that it wouldn’t come home to them. They know that. They know it’s not really money they’re going to get back in their cities.

But what was great about the mayors doing it was they knew that us being at war was wrong. And it was great that they were willing to lead on it. Not that it came from the cities. That was a good way to pull Obama’s chain. But at least the mayors know it’s wrong and that it’s destroying not only our country but the world.

Our chains are being pulled by a well-organized right-wing faction that must be just bent on destroying the country. Because why would they be unraveling the whole fabric of our society?

That doesn’t make sense. They live in the country. Why would they be bent on destroying it?

Nothing they’re doing makes sense. And they are bent on destroying it. They are taking the spoils. What do the Koch brothers think that they’re doing? Don’t they think that they live in the fabric of the society?

For example, I grew up in Vegas. It was run by mobsters. Vegas had the best education. There was no violence. Why? Because they lived in Las Vegas, and they made it a model community. When they left, it became quite horrible, I have to say, when that structure of power left.

And I wonder who these people are that don’t understand—even the mobsters understood—that your families are growing up in this city. You have to take care of it. What do they think they’re creating? I think they must be crazy, stupid. Because how can you live in a country where you’re not educating the people or taking care of them or taking care of those in the greatest need? How do you even live with yourself? I don’t understand where those choices come from.

They’re sending their kids to private school.

Yes, but haven’t they been to other countries where the difference between rich and poor creates an untenable situation? I think of Brazil, when I went in the 1992 to the Earth Summit. They were really grappling with that problem, and it went to the edge. While we were there, I was at a person’s house having dinner, and they said,

Well, we’re just taking 10,000 street kids and we’re just going to kill them all.

They got to an insane place. And we stopped it from happening.

But what person thinks that they can kill someone because they want to be safe? It’s just an insane notion. Fortunately, Brazil has been changing since then, and there have been enough leaders to come in that understood that they were destroying the country, that it became unlivable for everyone.

And who was able to stop it?

It happened from the streets. It happened from grass-roots activism, people like Sebastião Salgado and the Movimiento Sin Tierra, the landless people’s movement. So many, many forms of activism in the street changed it. And that changed the leadership. And they have really exciting leadership now, too.

Maureen Dowd of The New York Times quipped recently that Obama’s “Yes, we can!” slogan has devolved into “Hey, we might.” You were an early supporter of the president, and you’ve met with him on at least one occasion. What do you think happened in that transition from candidate to president-elect, and then to President Obama? And I’ll just remind you that such people as Norman Solomon and Cornel West are using the word “betrayal” to describe what Obama has done.

I was way ahead of them. In 2007, when he started to run, I wanted to support a black man for president, I wanted to support an antiwar activist for president. Everybody else who was running was for war. So the reason I was supporting him were those two issues. I thought it would be amazing while we were at war with Iraq and Afghanistan to have someone leading the country who said he was against war. By the general election he had started talking about Afghanistan as “the good war,” and I had pulled back. As a matter of fact, when I did go to events, because my husband continued to support him, I confronted him and I said, “There is no such thing as a good war,” and I got in arguments with Obama. I took the opportunity to really get under his skin and make him uncomfortable. Then at the inaugural Code Pink was the only organization—as a matter of fact, Amy Goodman wrote about it—that was out there against Obama. We had our little pink ribbons on our fingers. Remember your promises for peace? And then we did can-cans outside of all the balls. “Yes, we can-can end war.” We already knew that it was going in the wrong direction.

We were in Washington constantly. We have not stopped pushing and having the courage to speak out against him, which has been hard, because people are, like, “Oh, give him a chance.” Why do you give him a chance? You can already see. The writing is already on the wall. And also, watching everybody see it and turn dumb, turn quiet, dumb in the sense of quiet. It was so shocking for people. That place of betrayal happened very early, but it quieted everyone. They didn’t know what to do with it. And it was really complex for them, I think. We call it, like, a blanket over the antiwar movement. Nobody knew what to do with it.

People are, like, “Well, he’s trying.” No, he’s not trying. He’s giving in constantly. There is no leadership there. They continue to give him excuses. And you saw it early on. There is no leadership. He compromises before he’s at the table. The Republicans are even shocked at what they get from him. They thought it was going to be way over here, and he’s past what they thought they were going to get.

He’s giving away the structures of the country that have held it together. He’s giving away the heart, the beauty, the thing that can actually hold us together. And to have that happening at the same time that you have billionaires funding also the unraveling of the social structure of our country, it’s quite shocking. There’s no one that’s upholding the value and importance of the social structures that bind the country together. Talk about insecurity. It’s here in our country. We see it here already. There aren’t the social structures that are needed. It will continue to show up in very ugly ways.

You come out of the Democratic Party. You worked for Governor Jerry Brown of California in his first administration. What about breaking this two-party duopoly, which enables and buttresses the existing structures and the oligarchy?

I would love to. I ran Jerry Brown’s presidential campaign in 1992, which was the campaign around campaign finance reform. It was our only issue, that if we didn’t change campaign finance, that it didn’t matter what you believed in or what you worked for, the corporations would fund the opposite. And that’s what we’ve seen. After I ran that campaign, I left the Democratic Party, because I thought it was part of the problem. I’ve been a Nader supporter, I have been in the Green Party.

There are some interesting things happening right now that will start to reveal themselves. There is a Digital Party. I don’t know that I believe in the structure anymore. I feel like it needs a revolution, not another party. The structure is so corroded that we’re saying words that are meaningless and pretending they exist, like “democracy” and “freedom.” There are all these words that get thrown around, and they don’t exist. I think we need a new politics and a new economy. That’s more interesting for me.

Where are the fissures in the power structure that you see vulnerable that could be cracked into and widened?

First of all, I think that in the same way Obama gives everything away, I think the people give everything away. One of our hopes is that after organizing all these cultural events for people to feel into what they’ve lost, that isn’t just from war, but to feel into what we’re really living inside of and then meet in Freedom Square in Washington and really make power nervous.

Because here’s what hasn’t happened. We haven’t actually made power uncomfortable. We actually make it very comfortable. We allow it to do all of this. We allowed 2000 to happen [Bush v. Gore], then we allowed the war to happen. Really, the people have just continued to allow the madness to happen. Until we turn the heat up and make them uncomfortable and make them feel like there is something out there that’s going to hold them accountable, they will continue.

There is no fissure until the people stand up and say, “No more!” Because right now it’s crack cocaine for the military, for the people in Congress, for the people in the White House. They’re in a delusional madness, and taking us down with them. And until people get in the streets and start telling the truth about what’s happening, and start screaming it and yelling it, there’s nothing that’s going to happen. It’s got to happen in the streets.

Did you see some of that in Wisconsin?

Yes. And look at it. It was impressive. I think Wisconsin is what started to wake up activists again. You can really feel it now. And you can feel it not happening in a corporate way.

There was that period of time where there were organizations happening in Washington. But they weren’t change organizations; they were organizations kind of feeding on money. It’s one of the things that happened around Obama.

He has this Wednesday Morning Club or whatever, which is the 40 biggest progressive organizations that somebody from the White House has breakfast with every Wednesday. In anthropology what you learn is that if a culture doesn’t have a negative feedback loop, it dies. I think that’s part of Obama’s problem. There is no negative feedback loop. He’s off the cliff. It’s that thing that’s supposed to be rising up and saying, “No, you’re taking us off a cliff, and we’re not going to participate anymore,” isn’t happening.

I think the Arab Spring was part of the inspiration to Wisconsin, and I think Wisconsin is waking up the people in a different way. Instead of these corporate democratic structures and giving the power away to yet another stupid, powerful force, it’s people really taking it into their own hands and coming up with ideas and being a citizens’ brigade of some sort that’s self-organized, it’s open-source, it’s inspiring, it’s not controlled at the top. It’s in that way vibrant because it isn’t some structure. It’s coming out of a passion and a set of values.

Can we use the master’s tools, like elections, to dismantle the master’s house?

Not while they’re being stolen by corporations and funded by corporations. Not after Citizens United. It’s going to get worse. Again, if you don’t hold power accountable, which is what the Founding Fathers understood, that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. It’s out of control. So the corporations are just owning the elections and they’re manipulating the masses. And God knows, maybe another election is stolen that we don’t even know about at some level of our voting system that’s corrupt, our courts that are corrupt. State houses. Congress, even with the good intentions of some people is corrupt. We have to come up with a new system, because this one is broken.

But it’s a deeply entrenched pattern: imperialist foreign policy and rapacious capitalism at home.
That’s why I work very hard to create new patterns. Code Pink itself and why we’ve kept Code Pink different from other NGOs, is constantly rethinking itself, it’s constantly in response to what’s happening.

There isn’t something, one thing, that we do. We’re in relationship with the organism, and we’re trying to find ways to disrupt it and to put up a mirror to it so it can see how ugly it is or in humorous ways to be able to show the elephant in the room.

You look at the photos of Code Pink that go around, they’re the ones that say what everybody knows is true but nobody wants to say. That’s what we live inside of. Nobody is telling the truth.

And the truth tellers are put in jail. Bradley Manning. WikiLeaks. What are we afraid of? We’re afraid of the truth, because it’s going to crack the insanity that we live inside of. If the truth gets told, the inmates are going to start rattling the prison bars. We’re living in all forms of prison and pretending that it’s democracy and pretending we’re free and telling stories like they’re jealous of our freedoms. We’re the most frightened people, that live in this abundance. Then we pretend that we’re poor, and then we take that out of the backs of the poor. The insanity that we live inside of and the stories that we tell each other, they’re so false.

Bradley Manning being the soldier who’s allegedly leaked classified documents to WikiLeaks.

Code Pink was very active early finding him in Quantico, going and doing actions there. The guys in Code Pink went naked outside the State Department and outside the Justice Department. And just weeks later he was moved to Leavenworth, which is a bit friendlier and easier place. And he’s not in solitary confinement, held naked at night anymore as he was in Quantico for almost a year.

During the Bush administration, people were righteously indignant about Alberto Gonzales, the attorney general. And, again, with the election of Obama there was thought to be, with Eric Holder, a bright new day in the system of justice. But it turns out that whistleblowers are being prosecuted more aggressively under the Obama Justice Department than under Bush.

There have never been as many whistle blowers in jail in the history of the U.S. than under Obama. We have a whole campaign called Truth Set Free working to also educate—our first job around Bradley has been just to let the public know that he exists and how he’s been treated and to create some kind of understanding of what’s happening and what it means to Americans. That somebody who tells us the truth, who exposes what we’re doing is being treated this way is barbaric. And, question: Why are we so afraid of the truth, and why do people think the only way the world works is to tell each other lies? Where has that gotten us?

A lot of what we’ve been doing at Code Pink is around our war criminals campaign. The first book that came out was Karl Rove’s, and I disrupted his first two book events. He had to totally transform his book tour. He could no longer speak to audiences. They were full of security. He really was afraid of us. Because they got off scot-free.

We have a card deck that we have of 52 war criminals out there walking around, doing jobs, being seen as experts. John Yoo, we are outside of his house every day, we disrupt his classroom. Judge Bybee, whenever he sits, there’s a Code Pinker that disrupts the courtroom.

These are the two former Bush Justice Department officials who okayed torture.

They created the whole excuse for the torture that occurred under the Bush administration. So now we have Cheney’s book about to come out. And we’re always trying to find ways to engage people, to stay engaged, to stay activists. If we aren’t activists as citizens, this is what we get: We get this devastating place that we are. So we’re always trying to find ways that we can disturb power. If we can’t put them in jail, at least we can tell them someone’s watching and that we know they’re war criminals. With all the books—even Bush had to cancel his whole book tour because of us.

We have bookmarks that you can print out on your printer. And you put them in the book and you move the book to the crime section. And when somebody buys the book, inside it is that this person who wrote the book is a war criminal and what they did.

So we find every way we can to educate the public and to keep power nervous.

What accounts for the Obama Justice Department being so aggressive in prosecuting whistleblowers?

What’s interesting is it didn’t start out as bad as it’s becoming, and it becomes worse, I think, by the week. I am also on the board of Drug Policy Alliance. And the Obama administration started out understanding that issue, and now it’s constantly gotten worse. We confront Eric Holder all the time.

What does he say?

On Bradley Manning, we ask him question after question. He won’t talk. He turns the other way and won’t answer our questions.

The multiple uprisings in the Arab Middle East were quite startling, and how the great have fallen. I’m reminded of Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias,” about the pharaoh Ramses the Great. There was Mubarak and his sons in the dock. So if Egypt can get its criminals at least in court, that might be an inspiration to people here.

I think it has been.

That’s what I was saying earlier. I think the Arab Spring has started to wake people up from the sleep they went into from the betrayal they felt from Obama and reminded them of the power of their voice and of being engaged and their own responsibility. That really we’re in agreement with what’s happening by not getting up and finding a way to change it.

It’s more complicated in the U.S., because we don’t have a dictator that we can dethrone. It’s a whole system that is corrupt, and the whole system isn’t holding anyone accountable. There is a collusion between everyone when they get into power that we’re not going to hold each other accountable so we can all get away with something. If we don’t prosecute these war criminals, what’s the next horrible thing they can do?

As anyone knows, if you’re not held accountable, you think you can get away with it and it becomes okay. It just becomes like you’re not awakened from whatever delusion you’re in that allows you to do horrible things. Because I think that it’s a delusional place that you’re in. And if somebody doesn’t say, “No, you can’t do that,” you will just keep doing
worse.

In terms of the Arab Middle East, what has been the role of women in these multiple revolts?

Women have been amazing. Look at just in Egypt. That woman who did the YouTube that said “Don’t leave the square.” One of the great feminists is Nawal El Saadawi. This is an example of how all our work is important every day. She has been doing feminist work in Egypt for years, sometimes getting kicked out of the country, sometimes being put in jail. But that seeding of the revolutionary spirit of the feminine and seeding these young women: We do need to use our voice, we do need to stand up, we do need to work together.

Esra’a Al Shafei is a terrific Bahraini woman who has the Middle East youth websites. She has about 20 of them. She’s brilliant, and on no money has created tons of activism in Bahrain and around the Middle East. What she does is organize artists and activists to create videos to educate and inspire and activate the youth community in the Middle East.

One of Code Pink’s campaigns involves Ahava. You call it “Stolen Beauty: Expose the Ugly Secrets from the Dead Sea.” What is the ugly secret of this Israeli beauty products company?

We’ve been going to Gaza for two years, since the Israeli invasion. And we’ve taken almost 500 people to see what happened, because the story wasn’t getting out. We’ve been a group that’s been able to get in. And what we’ve been trying do is, like, how do we get peace in the Middle East? We want to hear from the Palestinians, how can we help them, how can we be of service here. They said, You could be of service by joining our Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement.

We had to find, how would we join that. We found this company, Ahava, where the product is created in the occupied territories on the Dead Sea, which is a violation of international law. So it’s a very clear violation, because you’re not allowed to steal the resources of an occupied country, or an occupied territory, because the Palestine is not a country. So this company Ahava violates the law. And ahava means love in Hebrew. We say there is nothing loving about occupation. So it’s stolen beauty: they’re stealing the beauty of this community. So it becomes a very easy way to identify the problem. It’s not like we think we’ll ever close down Ahava. But by highlighting what Ahava is doing in communities, especially Jewish communities, you let the argument start to happen and the conversation start to happen, so that it
actually educates everyone in that community about what’s happening. Because they’re not.

We found that out when we took people to Gaza. The people who were Jewish that we took to Gaza came back and they couldn’t talk for a month. They felt so betrayed. They couldn’t quite grapple with all the lies that they had been fed. And to see what it is to be Jewish, this goes against everything they believe in. And it’s not a story that’s told.

It’s not only our Stolen Beauty campaign but our Move Over, AIPAC campaign. Every year, when AIPAC has their annual convention in Washington, we’re out there challenging what AIPAC is doing.

Have you noticed a change in the country, not in official Washington, in terms of talking about Israel?
Oh, yes. First of all, when you do something at the edge, it’s very uncomfortable. So when we first started on this issue, it was very uncomfortable for people. Some didn’t want to go there, they didn’t want to talk about it, and it frightened them. And what I found is that much more of the conversation can happen, because all these people that went to Gaza, they came back and did reports to their synagogues, they gave talks in their communities, they got on the radio, they told their stories. It started to kind of loosen up the conversation. And I think by having J Street, that’s also changed the conversation. More than 50% of American Jews don’t agree with AIPAC, but it was the only voice out there. So there are many American Jews that feel that there’s somebody who is more aligned with their values.

We’re a little further over than J Street, but activism is all about continuing to move the story over and moving the person closest to you. So it’s a movement. And definitely in many communities you can see that you can talk about the issues in the Middle East much easier.

What about the state of patriarchy and misogyny? How has that evolved since the early days of the women’s movement?

It’s still alive and well. But the women’s movement has—I’m so excited by women right now, not just in America but globally. Women really are coming into their own. We’re standing on the shoulders of 40 years of hard work and messy work. And it’s really coming to the place of the deep understanding of where it’s not just to become a better patriarch when you get to leadership positions. It’s really women standing on their own power and their own voice and supporting each other. I’m quite excited by it.

But that doesn’t meant the patriarchy isn’t alive and well, and we’re fully functioning under that structure. I’m the chair of the Women’s Media Center. It was started by Gloria Steinem and Jane Fonda and Robin Morgan to make the female half of the population visible. And why I say that is that 3% of the media that we get, the decision making is by a woman. So that means 97% of media is created by men. And look at the faces. Since we started six years ago, you’ve seen the faces change. As a matter of fact, Rachel Maddow credits us with getting her her job.

We just ran a campaign against Ed Schultz, when he called Laura Ingraham a “slut,” which was a great opportunity for him to get up and do a beautiful apology. If you ever want to see something where he articulates the issue in his apology and what’s wrong with degrading women and why that made him embarrassed in front of his wife and his children. It really was an opportunity to say, look at what we’re doing and what that means to women.
Then we had a meeting with MSNBC, and we were able to take them and show them, you don’t have enough women, and it’s not okay to have one token woman. So the next week Obama did his first press conference in a long time, and they had three women on Ed Schultz’s show responding instead of three men, which it usually is.

So there is a lot of work to be done, but globally women are doing amazing things and being inspired and activated and supported. I think the problem with the women’s movement still is it’s a little too northern, white, and rich. And where the most exciting things are happening are more the low-resourced, southern. It’s a constant work to shift that balance. But I really feel like right now we have so much more to stand on and so much more leadership that’s been able to really ground itself and mentor other women.

One of the hard-earned victories was reproductive rights. That is under severe attack. It is being constantly constrained as state after state passes new legislation limiting it.

Another example of where Obama has been watching that dynamic with women’s groups, the same as with Congress voting for war. When the issue came up in the health care fight, the Democrats were going to throw abortion funding under the bus to get the votes. Reproductive rights was, like, a taboo. This was something you never touched. You didn’t get elected, it had to be on your platform. But they were willing to throw this under the bus. And because the heads of NOW and Planned Parenthood, didn’t want to lose their seat at the table at the White House, they didn’t quite fight that one hard enough.

This is the thing. If we don’t fight, and constantly fight, our rights will be taken away. Something happened when

Obama got elected, and the fight left a lot of people. I don’t know why. I said, “Why are we not screaming in the streets?” And their attitude was, “Well, because, you know, we don’t want to lose those invitations to the White House.”
The seduction of access.

Yes. I was running the Women’s Media Center, and I said, “Look, I’m going to do something, then.” And I started something called Not Under the Bus so that there was at least some activism happening that created kind of a cover for all the other women’s organizations.

But too many organizations that represent progressive values have become enamored with power. It happened to the Democratic Party a long time ago, and now it’s happening to the progressive organizations. What you watch is that we are responsible, the progressive movement, for what’s happening, because we haven’t stood up, we haven’t fought.

One of the things I say to Code Pink activists is, you have to be willing to give up as much as those who go to war are willing to give up to create peace. A lot of people aren’t willing to give up their safe and happy lives. These things that we have were hard-earned.

There was just an amazing documentary made about the Freedom Riders. I want everybody to see that, because they were willing to give up their lives for what we are willing to give up. It’s sad, it’s tragic. But until we understand that this stuff is real, until it really hits home—and it’s hitting home to everybody. Ten million people had their homes foreclosed on, the unemployment rate that we have, and for youth, it’s 28% for youths. That’s a crime.

What is that to come into? And that we’re allowing that to happen and that we’re not raising our voices, that we’re not in the streets fighting? I want to see everybody in the streets on October 6.

What’s happening on October 6?

That’s the tenth anniversary of the Afghanistan war. We want to all gather in Freedom Square in Washington, D.C. But I want you to find a freedom square in your city and say, “No, I’ve had enough.” That they’re eroding what’s beautiful and what’s going to hold our culture together, and that we need to come up with new solutions, be creating them.

I know wonderful people are creating—there are Businesses Allied for Local Economies and there are all kinds of things that have been sprouting up. If we really exposed all these other alternatives that are life-sustaining and life-giving and life-enhancing. They are what we really care about. They’re what we all really care about—Democrat, Republican, Independent, Iraqi, Afghan, Egyptian, Bahraini. We want to live life. We want to be related to each other. We want to raise our children. We want to be able to obtain the potential that is our life.

And that’s just being eroded away by us not being engaged as citizens and by us thinking that power is what we want, when really what we want is just to live a safe and happy life where everyone is respected and everyone has equal opportunity.

How do you talk to those who are diametrically opposite you in terms of the political spectrum? What approach do you find effective?

It would depend on what the situation is. I’ll tell you, I’m just coming back from a retreat here in the mountains of Colorado. And when the gathering started, there was a very right-wing Republican in the room, and everybody couldn’t wait to see what it was going to look like when Jodie and this guy got together. And actually, by the end we were friends, because we respected each other and we understand exactly what I just said to you, that we value life and being able to live a beautiful life. And he was able, actually, to hear everything I had to say and why I do the work I do. And he thought I was going to be a scary monster person, like on Glenn Beck’s blackboard, but he actually listened and he kind of liked what I had to say.

Usually what I try to do is be as disarming as possible, to really be in relationship with them and listen to them and listen to why they believe what they do, and then from that place try to have a conversation.

But if I’m in a hearing in Congress, I take the opportunity to tell the truth and to say the elephant in the room or the thing that nobody is willing to say to them because they’re powerful. I think that’s the advantage that we have as Code Pink, that we have no access to power and we have no desire to have access to power. Lots of people run inside-outside games. And I don’t know that you can. Because if you’re trying to play an inside game, having that power and that access is something that you will compromise to get. We’re really just an outside game.

The funny thing about that is in being an outside game, members of Congress call us and tell us where a weak link is or where there is an opening. When Netanyahu was speaking to Congress, a congressperson called and gave us their ticket so that they could make sure there was a Code Pink disruption. Because they get the value that they’re living inside of a hall of mirrors, and they really appreciate when we can come in and disrupt that hall of mirrors. So it’s really funny that we’re the outside organization, with some members of Congress really valuing our work.

One of the outstanding international issues is Kashmir. A rebellion began there in 1989. Seventy thousand people have been killed, 8,000 have disappeared. There is a huge Indian army presence there. It’s one of the most densely occupied areas on Earth, with something like 700,000 Indian security forces. Does Code Pink have a position on Kashmir?

We don’t have a position on Kashmir. I actually just met a woman from there at the Nobel women’s Peace Prize winners conference. She told us the horrible story. We tend to have positions on things that the U.S. government can affect. So, yes, it’s horrible and a disaster. But can we do anything about it but make a statement? We don’t have a statement on the website. I know what the statement would be. But because there’s so much happening, and you can only make something happen if you really focus, we tend to focus on what we can do to affect the U.S. government and what it’s doing in the world.

Then how about Pakistan, which has been receiving billions of dollars in U.S. aid?

We’ve definitely been out there fighting against that and against the drone attacks there. So, yes, in Pakistan we have. And we’ve been trying to stop the money that’s going to Israel also.

What actions have given you the most satisfaction and have yielded concrete results?

I think the recent winning of that resolution with the mayors was beyond our expectations. I haven’t felt that happy and satisfied in a really long time. Even though it didn’t have the result that I would hope, which would be Obama would do something really courageous and pull the troops home from Afghanistan, I loved how many people it affected. How many city council members stood up. How many people participated locally, because you have to make change locally and engage people in that way. I was happy about that.

There are so many things. Taking people to Gaza is huge, where I can really see the effects of it. That just makes me want to cry I know what it was like before we started. Alice Walker wrote a book out of it, Overcoming Speechlessness. I’ve seen how it’s changed those people’s lives. And just working inside a complexity like that and being willing to take people into a complex place and show what it is and have them come back and tell stories and have their community change, that’s huge.

I think another one of my favorite things is Mother’s Day. Because Mother’s Day, the call from Julia Ward Howe was for women to come together and end war. Every Mother’s Day we are 24 hours outside of the White House. One of my favorite things we did was, for the month leading up to it, we had women and men around the world send us 5-by-5 knitted squares of green and pink. Because war is not green, it’s one of our favorite colors. And we for 24 hours sewed them together outside the White House, listening to women from war zones tell us their stories. When we finished, it read, “We will not raise our children to kill another mother’s child.” It spanned the fence in front of the White House.

You’re clearly energized by your activism, you’re inspired by it, and you inspire others. But a lot of people are facing dire economic times: they’ve lost their homes, their savings, their jobs, and have, as a result of watching the shenanigans in Washington, become deeply cynical and apathetic. How do you overcome those things?

By giving them a container to feel powerful. They’re feeling powerless, so to find a way that they can find their own power again. That was Wisconsin for a lot of people, not only those engaged in it but those not engaged in it. With Code Pink in this issue, it’s been understanding that we partner with a lot of organizations. Our Bring Our War Dollars Home campaign and organizing locally and then taking it to the mayors was lot of that, and having a city council pass a resolution, because it was about bringing the money home to their community, it was about getting engaged in saying, “I have a voice, I can use it.”

I go around and speak. And having been a maid, it’s an issue I work a lot on in L.A. I work with maids trying to get them a living wage. So I use the opportunity to go and speak to them and remind them that the power is within them and that being in a community, finding a community to be engaged with is crucial. It’s not going to help them to fall down into the blackness. That the only way that they can actually make change is to pick something that they can do, something small, something local, something immediate, something that will change their lives and to get engaged in it.

The wonderful thing is that once they start to do that, they come up with tons of ideas. They can actually come up with ideas that are needed in their community. Then they feel useful and they feel hopeful. There’s one guy I met who’s found more meaning in his life from doing that than he had from the job that he lost and the house that he lost.

Solidarity is a big part of it.

It really is. We also try to help create those opportunities for people. I think a lot of what organizing is is keeping people together, creating that community. Because you don’t know when you’re going to need the community. That’s what I sense this Ten Years and Counting will do. Asking the community the question of what has this 10 years cost you. Having them feel that. And who knows what will come out of that? What’s beautiful is the experience of creating art together, the experience of singing together or dancing together or creating theater together. That’s enriching. It gives you something juicy back. And then out of that who knows what happens?

But they win if the devastation that they created turns us all into blackness. That’s what they want. They want everybody to fall asleep and be depressed and not be educated. And they win.

How do you respond to criticisms of Code Pink tactics at public events particularly in Congress where you shout slogans and unfurl banners and are hauled off as being mere publicity stunts? Is there anything substantive after the soundbite or photo, if you even get one?

Not sure why people would think putting ourselves on the line is for publicity. But the photos that do circulate are because we have stood in the face of power and said what everyone knows and no one says. Desiree Fairooz’s red hands around Condi Rice’s face while saying you have the blood of the Iraq children on your hands. Or the images that are used in hearings where our signs say what isn’t being said in the hearings. They are appreciated by members of Congress, the media and the public. They are effective at making people pay attention, or not think they are getting away with everything. It seems most people will allow power to get away with anything these days and Code Pink is in the halls of Congress at least reminding them some of us are watching.

These actions are so successful that many other groups have come to us for support and training, including Dan Choi who was successful in ending Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.

The Internet is full of vitriolic attacks against you. Have you been threatened?

Yes, I have. I report all threats. But women around the world take far greater risks than I in fighting for peace and justice. To protect myself I stay visible and engaged.

The worst thing that happened to me was when one soldier’s mother claimed that I had told her that her son deserved to die in Iraq. I’ve lost a child and could never say such a thing. It turns out I wasn’t where she was, but the reporter just ran what she said without even checking with me.

We assume sometimes when they get very vitriolic that we must be getting more effective than they are comfortable with. They hated us when we got Bush and Rove to have to change their book tours.

Do you think if Code Pink were mostly a male organization, the nature of the venom directed toward you and the group would be different?

The men of Code Pink do not get attacked like the women. Most of the remarks are sexist and attempt to denigrate us because we are women.

I hate to say it but if Code Pink were a male organization, it would have been taken far more seriously. Left and right aren’t quite sure what to do with us. I think because we have no attachment to power we confuse them both. We are interested in being effective and ending war and bringing the money home to our communities. Most of the organizations they are dealing with want power. We want to use our power as creatively and effectively as we can. Sometimes we cross the line and miss, but we feel it is more important to try than to play it safe.

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

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by Fred Nagel, Rhinebeck, NY
in a letter to the Woodstock Times
September 22, 2011

Even for a politician who has made his career out of serving the rich and well connected, these must seem like dismal times. Back in Chicago, all Obama had to do was to obey the corrupt Democratic machine. And he did it well, running against progressive black candidates for the city council. Once elected, he simply followed what the monied interests told him to do, despite his rhetorical flourishes about peace and social justice.

That must seem like long ago. Now as president, Obama has come to be the whipping boy of just about every powerful interest in the country. Look at the beating he took from the Israel lobby, despite the fact that he has consistently promoted the interests of right-wing Zionists over America’s need to bring peace to the Middle East.

The same has been true of the huge corporate behemoths. Obama has sold his soul for big oil’s right to drill without worrying about the environment. He has given away his health “reform” to the big insurance and pharmaceutical companies. He has devastated the rights of working people, even cut Social Security and Medicare, all to give more tax cuts to the corporations and the very rich who own them. Yet, all these elites can do is badmouth him, and make him grovel even more.

Cowardly sellouts have never gotten much respect, no matter which side they secretly worked for. Can all this abuse and disdain be worth the millions he will make after he is president?