Citizen Radio episodes will now be posted at wearecitizenradio.com.

Citizen Radio’s last episode from Australia!

This week, Allison and Jamie discuss Arlen Specter switching to the Democratic party, and why that means the Republican and Democratic parties are more similar than you may think. Also, find out what Arlen Specter has to do with bears and monkeys!

Jamie falls in love with bad television…agai​n!​ Marvel at his ability to take a show about Greek sororities and fraternities seriously.

Next up: Jamie’s possibly life threatening upcoming gig in Boston, tea-baggers, and what Janeane Garofalo said to anger Republicans.

Citizen Radio will be interviewing Noam Chomsky again this month, so stay tuned for more wise words from the man the New York Times calls the most important intellectual alive. Listen to Citizen Radio’s first interview with Mr. Chomsky here.

Citizen Radio airs every Wednesday on BTR. Archived episodes are here. Join us on Facebook!

Citizen Radio discusses the human disaster known as Peggy Noonan, and her comments about not investigating Bush administration war crimes because life needs to remain “mysterious.” Wow.

Jamie talks about getting screamed at by a New Yorker at one of his Australia shows, and why Americans think they’re exceptional.

Jane Harman got busted trying to do AIPAC spies a solid, and she got caught by the very same wiretapping program she championed. Irony with a capital “I.”

Shepard Smith went crazy on FOX again, and Citizen Radio thinks that’s super!

Citizen Radio airs every Wednesday over on BTR, and episodes play 24/7 all week. Archived episodes here. Join us on Facebook!

Mumia Abu Jamal

Listen here: http://www.breakthruradio.com/index.php?show=6692.

After the Unfunny But Totally Real Headlines, Citizen Radio discusses Australia, the cursed liberal media, torture memos, miseducation, prison, and Mumia Abu Jamal.

What’s more gross than grown adults pleasuring themselves to the thought of the U.S. military? When the press does it! Citizen Radio discusses the mainstream media, and how they’re miseducating America.

Next, Jamie talks about dropping out of high school and Allison comments on Noam Chomsky’s “On Miseducation,” a book that explores how institutionalized education encourages ideological domestication.

Upcoming guests include: Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Janeane Garofalo, and Jeremy Scahill.

Citizen Radio aids every Wednesday on BTR. Listen to our archives here. Join us on Facebook!

Citizen Radio discusses Allison’s amazing encounter with former Nixon operative (and prison inmate,) G. Gordon Liddy.

G. Gordon Liddy: Not a fan of Allison.

Next, Allison and Jamie discuss the ongoing Somali pirate standoff, and why the mainstream media is only explaining half the story.

Hope Watch! continues this week with Citizen Radio listing the various Obama promises that our new president has already broken.

Upcoming guests:

* Glenn Greenwald
* Matt Taibbi
* Janeane Garofalo
* Jeremy Scahill

Tell your friends about Citizen Radio!

Join us on Facebook.

Citizen Radio is on BTR every Wednesday. Episodes are archived here.

Citizen Radio

Tariq Ali talks with Citizen Radio about a range of subjects from the true definition of Socialism to his discussions with Malcolm X, and how he thinks atheists and religious people can work together to make the world a better place.

Listen here. Transcript is posted below. Please feel free to repost both the interview and transcript, but please credit Citizen Radio.

Tariq Ali is the author of the new book, The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power.

Citizen Radio airs every Wednesday on BTR. Episodes available 24/7 in our archives.

Jamie Kilstein: Recently, on FOX News – and actually all news stations – we’ve kind of been hearing Obama denounced as a Socialist. They’ll be like, “No one wants socialized healthcare,” or “socialized banks,” and I think, for the first time, there are some people who are like, “Yeah, we do. We kind of do. That sounds really nice.” But Obama didn’t have anyone who represents single-payer healthcare at his health conference, and the banks are getting our money, and we’re not getting anything in return. So first, I wanted you to give the actual definition of Socialism because I think it’s mischaracterized a lot here, and second, why you think decrying Socialism has been such a successful scare tactic in a country where rich-poor divide is so large.

Tariq Ali: There are many definitions of Socialism. The simplest way to define it, I guess, would be: the ownership of public utilities and things important to the economy and the land by the state in the interests of the common people. I would go beyond that and say where public utilities are owned by the state, my definition of Socialism would also include the people, who work in these utilities, playing a part in determining how they are run, and not allowing the state to nominate bureaucrats to them. That has never really happened anywhere, but given the crisis into which Socialism fell in the ‘90s, I think you need more and more democracy at every level of functioning.

Read the rest of the interview behind the cut.

So, the second thing I would say on that is Socialism, and Socialist values, are designed to serve the needs of ordinary people, and not to those whose only interest in running the economy is to make profits. We’re now at a time where everyone is attacking greedy bankers, but – you know – attacking greedy bankers is fine, the problem, however, is systemic. It’s not just the bankers. It’s how these banks are produces. It’s which politicians, and which political parties, gave the green light for these guys to do what they could do without any regulation at all. Socialism would not be in favor of any of that. So this idea that there is somehow a totally free market, in which all the players in this market, start at the same starting point is nonsense. It’s the rich who control it. And Socialism challenges that.

I think the old slogan is not such a bad one if you think about it: To each according to his or her need, from each according to his or her ability. I mean, it’s rather a utopian thing now, but what’s wrong with that?

Kilstein: Right.

Ali: And what’s wrong with having a health service where the same quality of service is provided to you as long as you’re a citizen of the country, and regardless of your class? Whether you’re rich or poor, you get the same health service. What’s wrong with that? And if that is Socialism, great. Wonderful.

But I think most people’s idea of Socialism in the United States is of what existed in the Soviet Union and the Communist ___, and people have a very blurred idea of what that was about. Dictatorships, this, that, and the other. Well, that is not what Socialism means or entails.

Kilstein: Do you think that the media is kind of purposefully – because you never hear that side of it, for example. I’m trying to figure out why people keep falling for it. There’s part of me that just thinks that a lot of us are probably smarter than that, and we’re not just getting the right information. When people say you would get free health care. I mean, has this just been going on for so long? Because we weren’t around when Communism and Socialism was a bad thing, so to us, it’s new.

Kilkenny: You mean helping people?

Kilstein: Right, right. Like, sharing? Making sure we’re all good? Do you think they’re purposefully just not showing that side to it?

Ali: Well, I think the way the media functions increasingly is that it is very rare to find dissenting views regularly on the media if you listen to the network news. I don’t even now talk about FOX, which requires a laboratory of it’s own (laughter) to analyze, but-

Kilstein: Yeah, we don’t need to count that

Ali: But let’s take the main network news. It’s virtually the same. And people should be asking themselves: how come these are two supposedly independent companies with no links to each other, how come when they report the news, they have the same priorities? They start with the same item, whatever it is. No one asks that, but people should. And the reason they do is that the values these networks espouse are largely corporate values. They are owned by gigantic Capitalist companies, and they defend the interests of those companies. So putting out ideas, which actually question that and challenge that, is not part of their agenda, which is why they, constantly now, and what is fashionable, the bonuses. Well, it’s true that the bonuses are obscene, but they’re the result of an obscene system. And it’s the latter thing that they will never show. And these bankers are so pathetic. They’ve been made into scapegoats. Not one of them has the guts to say, “Okay, we did it. You let us do it. You encouraged us to do it. Why didn’t you stop us when you could? Why did you wait this long?” Say that to the politicians.

I mean, all these jokers Obama has appointed as his economic advisors are the guys responsible for this.

Kilkenny: I don’t think people understand the history of Pakistan, or the nature of the relationship between the United States and Pakistan. So if you could talk about that relationship, specifically the late Benazir Bhutto and the current president [Zardari], and also how Zardari is seen from within Pakistan.

Ali: Well, I think people inside the United States should be aware that their country, and its embassy, is a very big player in Pakistani politics. This is a country, which in my opinion, the United States – through misguided policies – has wrecked over the last 60 years. They’ve backed every single military dictatorship. They have prevented the organic development and flow of democracy and democratic values. They did it for one reason during the Cold War period. They’re doing it for another reason now. Very little happens in Pakistan without the approval or green light being given by the United States. That is one thing that should really be understood.

You ask about the current president of Pakistan, Asif Zardari. In my view, the guy’s…I mean, how to describe him? I mean, he’s a dickhead. (laughter) He’s corrupt. He’s heavily into making money. The only reason he’s president is because he was formerly married to Benazir Bhutto. And when she was assassinated, they found a will that she had written, which was disgraceful, really, handing over the party to her son, and saying that until the son comes of age, his father (her husband) will look after the party. I mean, it’s like treating the party as a piece of property.

Kilstein: House sitters do that, yeah.

Ali: Yeah! It’s just crazy. And this is accepted. No one really challenges it. I mean, it’s being challenged now in Pakistan, but it’s accepted, and the United States decided that they were going to work with this Bhutto dynasty in Pakistan, and try and get it to do deals with the army to move them forward. Well, that’s now imploded because having Zardari as president is just crazy, actually. The guy – I mean, you can sort of judge as to what he is – that when he visited the United States, prior to the elections, before the elections took place in the United States, he met Sarah Palin. And he said to her, in public, “You’re absolutely gorgeous.” So, you know, people wondered where this was going to lead to.

And then he met Obama. This was a private meeting. But I have it on very good authority that the three times he addressed Senator Obama (as he was then,) he called him “Senator Osama.” And one of his minders, with Zardari, kept whispering, “It’s not Osama. It’s Obama.” So this is the guy who’s currently the president of Pakistan.

Kilstein: I’m glad Michelle wasn’t in the room.

Ali: He’s wanted for – he’s being charged with – murder. He’s been accused of murdering his brother-in-law, Benazir’s brother, who was killed when she was Prime Minister, and all the circumstantial evidence points in his direction.

He made a fortune when she was Prime Minister last time, and he’s carrying on running the country in exactly the same way. It is sometimes said that the people deserve the government they get, but I promise you that in the case of Pakistan, it isn’t true. The people really deserve something better. This is not what they deserve.

Kilkenny: And as far as the presence of the Taliban, what do you think is a bigger threat: the Taliban or poverty?

Ali: I think poverty is the big threat. I pointed out in my book [The Duel] that the United Nations development figures for Pakistan show that over the last twelve years, 60% of the children born in Pakistan are born severely or moderately stunted because of malnutrition. Now, anyone looking at these figures would be screaming in anguish, saying, “What the hell is going on?” Why is this the case? Do any of the politicians talk about it? No. They really don’t talk about it. Does the United States talk about it? No. They’re worried about the Taliban only because they have occupied Afghanistan. That war is spiraling out of control for them. The spillage from that war is beginning to affect Pakistan.

Kilstein: Right, and you’ve talked about how poverty actually leads to recruitment. Where they will go to these poor people’s doors, and say, “I’ll take your son, and bring him back with an education,” right?

Ali: Yeah. Imagine the United States – let’s say there’s no public education at all—I mean, I know it’s bad in the States (laughter), but it does exist. In Pakistan, there is no public education system worth talking of. So a cleric, a mullah, a priest, comes to the house of a really poor family, looks around, the family’s got five or six kids (three boys, three girls,) whatever. And he says, “Give us a boy.” They rarely take girls. “Give us a boy. We’ll educate him. We’ll clothe him. We’ll feed him. And he’ll return to you a fully formed man.” What they don’t say is, “We’re going to brainwash him. We’re going to…” in some cases, not all cases, “teach him to use weapons.” They don’t say that, and some of course don’t do it. Others do, do it. The family is so relieved that its kid will be fed, clothed, and educated, that they say, “Okay, take our boy.”

Now, the only way to stop this is by creating a strong state, public education system, funded by the state to build five or six large teachers’ training universities in the country, teach people how to be teachers. I’ve been arguing this until I’ve been blue in the face. People just don’t listen. And the notion that the way you deal with the situation is by killing people is crazy. You have to have a long-term alternative.

Kilstein: I was wondering what you thought of the Pakistani government conceding to the Taliban, and letting them carry out Sharia law in the Swat valley. And then before, would you be able to describe the Swat valley because I think a lot of people just kind of assume it’s always been this terrorist cave force – similar to the border of Afghanistan – but it wasn’t that, right?

(image from warchat.org)

Ali: No, the Swat valley, I know it well. I’ve been there, stayed there, it’s one of the most beautiful parts in the country. The people who live there are incredibly poor. They are peasants. Some belong to tribal groups. For a long time, it was ruled by a hereditary ruler, who had complete power, when the British ruled that part of the world. Now, it’s more democratic. But the fact is that these armed religious gangs have been allowed – by successive governments in Pakistan – to become too strong. They haven’t been challenged when they should have been. I’m totally opposed to going and bombing people and killing innocents. Don’t get me wrong on that. I’m really opposed to that and it makes me very angry. But Pakistan has had governments which have been incapable of defending their own people, either against armed religious gangs inside the country, or against United States drones and stuff like that. A government in a state that cannot defend its own people is in very serious trouble, and I think they could have handled the situation in Swat very differently. If they had helped people and organized them to defend themselves – the idea that most people want to be ruled by this small group of Taliban in Swat is totally wrong.

Kilstein: There was a huge – there was an exile – or people just fled, right?

Ali: A lot of people fled because they didn’t want to be ruled by these people. It’s a tiny part of the country, but it’s symbolic.

Kilkenny: The excuse for expanding the covert operation within Pakistan now is that we can’t let the Taliban get a nuclear weapon. Do you agree with that?

Ali: No. I think this is one of the stupidest, fear mongering things which is said on western television networks. It goes like this: Pakistan is a nuclear state, it has Jihadi extremists inside that state, and the big threat is a Jihadi finger on the nuclear trigger. And the Israelis, who are a nuclear state themselves, push this line endlessly.

Now, look at the situation. It is true Pakistan is a nuclear state. It is also true that the Pakistani military is half a million strong, that these nuclear facilities are amongst the most heavily guarded facilities in the country, just like they are in the United States, in Israel, in India, in China, in Russia now. So the notion that any armed group of extremists could even get near these facilities is a joke.

But let’s suppose they do. All the nuclear weapons require codes to be fired. These codes are now imbedded in all these weapons. There’s a handful of top military people who know what these codes are. There are also rumors, by the way, that the United States defense intelligence agency has its own personnel in there. This has been denied, but it wouldn’t totally surprise me if it were true.

So there is no problem on that front unless the Pakistani military splits. Were it to split, then all bets are off. And the only reason it would split is if the United States expanded the war into Pakistan, making it extremely difficult for lots of nationalist-minded military officers to go along with this. Because there is that current and they say, “Well, it is our country. Why is the United States using our military bases to bomb our own people?”

What I am saying to you is now news to the administration. There are intelligent people behind Obama, who know all this. And that is why its puzzling as to why they trying to destabilize the country.

Kilstein: Do you think that’s the reason that you wrote – I think you wrote this in the Guardian – after comparing Dick Cheney to Dr. Strangelove, (laughter) you wrote that even he was skeptical about going in. And with Pakistan, it has all of the American trigger words to go in: Middle East, extremists, and so forth. Do you think that’s the reason Cheney, and some of the more hawkish figures didn’t want to go in, that they just knew it wasn’t a threat?

Ali: A) They knew it wasn’t a threat, and B) They knew that it would destabilize that country, and it might spiral out of control. And that’s what would happen if the Pakistani military split, which is why it’s really difficult to fathom what are Obama’s aims in that region. Why is he escalating the war in Afghanistan? What could they possibly get out of it?

If the idea behind it is to have a friendly government in Afghanistan, which would permit the United States to keep military bases there forever, that’s never going to happen. You have the Secretary General of NATO, not a very intelligent guy, called Jaap Scheffer, whose publically been saying that the reason we’re in Afghanistan is nothing to do with Afghanistan. It’s a country on the border with China, and China is going to be an important rival of the west, and so we have to have military bases there. He actually said it! Assuming that the Chinese are blind, or deaf, or they can’t see what’s going on under their noses. (laughter)

Kilstein: I wanted to ask you an atheism question. When I first lost my faith and started reading up on it, it was actually right around the time (probably because I’m very impressionable) when Dawkins, and Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens really made a move to kind of counter all of the Bush, religious-right extremism. Sam Harris, who’s a New York Times bestseller, and one of the most prominent atheists, one of his main arguments against religion was – he used September 11th as an example – where he said if you look at the hijackers of September 11th, they were middle class, they were well-educated, and the one thing they all had in common was religion. Therefore, it was 100% religion that led to the attacks. It was nothing socio-economic.

Ali: I honestly think that that’s such a load of nonsense. The motives of these bombers were not religious. They were political. They were determined to hit the United States. After all, what were the motives in most of the guys who carried out these hits? They, and their leaders, were fighting with the United States twenty years previously against the Russians in Afghanistan. They weren’t religious motives then. They were political motives. And they were political motives when they decided to hit the United States.

A very intelligent American, Chalmers Johnson, wrote a book called Blowback, published a year before the 9/11 hits in which he pointed out that we’ve been doing such horrible things to the rest of the world, do not be too surprised if one day some of the people we’ve been mistreating come here and have a go. He actually wrote that! And the book was denounces, where it wasn’t even mentioned in reviews: “Oh, here’s another nutty, west coast professor.” Well, this nutty west coast professor isn’t just a professor. He used to be a very senior CIA consultant in the ‘50s. Immediately after 9/11, his book really shot to the bestseller list because they said, “God, this guy knew.” But you know, he’s a bright guy, but it didn’t require too much intelligence to know that if you carry on doing what the U.S. has been doing…I mean, it’s what Martin Luther King said, “The greatest purveyor of violence in the world is my own country.” And he was knocked off soon afterwards, but people know that.

So to come back to your question, the guys who carried out the hits of 9/11, the biggest motive was political. The thing about them, and even that I don’t think is religious, is that they were prepared to sacrifice their own lives to be successful. Now, suicide terrorists, or suicide bombers, in most cases are not religious. The Tamils [Tamil Tigers] in Sri Lanka, who had been fighting against the Sri Lankan government, and whose specialized in suicide attacks, did it for political reasons. The Palestinians do it for political reasons. So to try and say that the reason one is opposed to religion is because religion pushes people into carrying out these attack, the obvious answer to that this is a tiny, infinitesimal minority within a particular religion, which is stated. They, themselves, say they’ve done it for political reasons. I mean, they use a religious rhetoric, but lots of people do that. Born again groups here do that. But essentially the motivation is political.

There are good reasons to be an atheist, but using 9/11, or similar events, to justify atheism is slightly ridiculous.

Kilstein: Do you think that we should be focusing on 100% denouncing other religions (again, for that balance,) or – Allison and I just went to Riverside Church where we saw Desmond Tutu speak out against the death penalty, and that’s where King also gave his Beyond Vietnam Speech – and it was wonderful. Even in the opening remarks, they said, “We welcome people of all faiths, we’re 100% here to work for social justice.” Do you think there should be more of a teaming up effort between these progressive churches that work for social justice and the secular movement?

Ali: I think there should be. As you probably know, I’ve been an atheist since a very young age, but that never stops me from working with some religious groups who are doing good. Just a few days ago, I was in Long Island, speaking at a Unitarian congregation on Afghanistan, telling them what was going on. I do the same with other groups, including Muslim groups, Jewish groups. We live in a world where people do believe. So simply becoming atheist, or secular fundamentalists, and saying, “Unless you agree with us on God, we’re not going to do anything together,” is slightly crazy. It’s sort of behaving like religious people. I think that’s dangerous.

You talk about Desmond Tutu and Martin Luther King. You know, great guys. I can tell you that the guy, who really helped me understand what the United States was, was also a religious guy: Malcolm X. I was very young – 20, 21 – and I was at Oxford, studying, when Malcolm came to give a speech. It was quite funny, after the speech, he got a standing ovation from all of us, and he came and sat next to me, and said, “Was that okay?” and I said, “Was that okay?! (laughter) See what the response is…”

Kilstein: It’s always the good ones that ask that, I realized.

Ali: He came to me because of my name, which is a Muslim name. And he said, “Hello, brother. Brother Tariq,” and I said, “Malcolm, I have to be straight with you. I’m not a believer at all,” and I said, “I come from that culture, but many of us are not believers,” and he laughed and said, “I know, I’ve just come from that world. (laughter) Lots of people have said that to me.” But you know, we sat and talked, and he explained to me how the United States functioned. I’ve written about this in one of my books. We talked for two or three hours, and then as I was getting up to go, I just said, “Okay, Malcolm. Great meeting you, and I hope we meet again.” And he said, “I don’t think we will.” And I said, “Excuse me?” And he said, “You know. I think they’re going to kill me.” I said, “Who is going to kill you, Malcolm?” And you know, a thought went through my head, saying either this is a very great man, or a hustler. You know, who talks like that? And I sat down, and I said, “Who is going to kill you?” He said, “Well, there are a number of possibilities: the Nation of Islam, or the state or a combination.” I said, “But why?” And he said, “Didn’t you hear the speech I made? I’m now talking about black and white people uniting with each other to fight against the system. And that’s too dangerous for them, so they won’t let me live.” Look, I understood what he was saying. I didn’t really believe it, and this was – I think – October or November, and the next February I was – I told lots of friends at university that – we picked up a copy of the Guardian, and there on the front page was Malcolm X Assassinated. I tell you, I just wept. Lots of my friends wept. And I said, “God, he was right.”

So, he was religious. I think this idea that religion per say – I mean, it’s a right of people to believe in what they believe, and when they do things that are unacceptable, then you argue with them, you criticize them, you fight them, and the same applies to people who are atheists.

The Russian leadership were atheists and did lots of horrible things. So one could argue if you exactly the same sort of argument as these guys are using, saying that Stalin was an atheist, and he ordered the death of lots of people, and this is a problem with Atheism. It’s just nonsense.

Kilkenny: Do you think a one state solution is realistic with Israel and Palestine, or that a one state solution would inevitably lead to bloodshed?

Ali: I think, sooner or later, there will have to be a one state solution. The Israelis have destroyed every single chance of two states, and a two state solution. So then what else can we do? We have to go for a single state solution. That will only come if the Israeli population decides that they do not want to be part of an ethnic state in which being a Jew gives you privileges. I mean, that is a form of apartheid.

A few weeks ago, I was speaking with a South African member of Mandela’s first government, who was minister for defense and intelligence, Ronnie Kasrils, who is a Jew. He said publicly, at this meeting, “Look, we know what apartheid is. We fought it. And when I took a whole group of activists: black, and white, activists from South Africa to Palestine, they same back stunned, saying this is much worse than what we experienced.” So I think that campaign has to start. Until it succeeds, you won’t get a single state, so you can’t impose this state by force. Nobody can. I just hope that the generations to come will see that ultimately it’s the only way for people to live. And so you have a joint Israel-Palestine for Jews, Muslims, Christians, non-believers, Atheists, whoever.

Kilstein: Just because you brought up Malcolm X, I wanted to ask you – with Obama, you always hear the question about what Martin Luther King Jr. would think of an Obama presidency, but you’ve never really heard what would Malcolm X think? What do you think he would think of that, or would he just look at him as another president that you have to hold accountable?

Ali: I don’t know. These are very difficult questions to answer. I think both Martin Luther King and Malcolm would have been very surprised that a person of color has been elected president of the United States. That would have given them a shock, but they would have been pleased about that, and then would have said, “Okay, we’ve crossed that particular barrier, now let’s talk politics.” And you judge a person, as they always said, not on the basis of his or her color, but on the basis of what they actually do. And not by what they say. I think they would have then turned a very clinical gaze – both of them in their very different ways – and judged Obama by what he was doing, and not doing.

I think it’s obvious, even though he’s only been in power a short time, he’s been very disappointing both on the level of the economy – I mean, to hire these guys responsible for creating the mess when –even within his own Democratic party framework – he could have hired Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, who have at least come up with a few new ideas for them to implement. And carrying on Bush’s war in Afghanistan, escalating it, destabilizing Pakistan, talking like a hawk, half threatening Iran, half cajoling it, it doesn’t make sense. It means they really came to power without any clear ideas of what they were going to do. They just thought they’d stumble on. Most of his appointments are very disappointing.

You know, there’s a big economic crisis right now, and he’s got a big chance to turn everything around. It’s very rare that a political leader is given a chance to look at the vistas before him and say, “I’m going to change all that,” and actually do it. People now are ready for change in the United States. They don’t like how the system is functioning, but I don’t think these guys are going to do it. It’s the Wall Street system they keep defending.

Kilkenny: You’ve already talked about this, but you were very active in the activism community. Why do you think – in regards to what we’ve just been talking about with the economy, with the political situation – that there isn’t more activism especially with younger people on campuses?

Ali: It’s a very difficult one. People are scared. They know that when they leave campuses, they need to get jobs. They don’t want to take risks.

But just leave the people in the campuses to themselves, it does amaze me that the American population at large isn’t getting more angry; that groups aren’t being set up in different towns and different states, saying enough is enough, this is what we want. You know, we want a public transport system, we want a free health service, we want more money on education, we want money spent on public utilities, not on wars or bailing out fat cats. That is a bit surprising, that this isn’t picking up. Maybe it will because the big changes we’re seeing in South America came because of giant social movements from below, pushing their leaders and throwing up new leaders. That isn’t happening here, but I guess it will.

It’s a sign of how atrophied politics in the United States have become over the last 25-30 years, people are quite alienated from the system, but not in an active way. In a despairing way, saying, “Oh God, they’re just politicians. What else do you expect?” It’s a sentiment I understand, but it’s very negatives in a way.

Kilstein: Do you think one of the reasons might be that the – all right, for example AIG and the bankers. You actually had a lot of Republicans vote to tax their bonuses, or to tax 90% of their bonuses, because there was such public outrage. And it worked. They didn’t want to do it. And the Republicans were decrying it years ago, saying, “Do you want the government to say how much you make? Do you want them writing your checks?” I know, years ago, when I was looking for reasons to be lazy and apathetic, I would always just say that the protests don’t work. Do you think if they got more coverage from the media – I feel like when the media shows protests, they just try to find the craziest protester-

Ali: They do.

Kilstein: and they show that to try and make the whole thing look silly. When the conflict in Gaza was happening, we went, and there were tens of thousands of people that shut down traffic in New York, and it got no coverage. It got a little local coverage. But do you think if we actually saw what was happening, and saw even these protests of eight people in hearings where people are getting arrested, and there was more coverage, that might inspire people to be more active?

Ali: I think it would. I think the media is a big problem. But at the same time, we now have computers, and we have cyberspace, and we have the web, and we’re all told about the big role Moveon.org played in funding Obama, even though it was a tiny percentage of the money he actually did get. But what that shows is one does have to use new methods to mobilize people. One can’t depend on the media. You’re right. They don’t show anything. If they’d really shown what was happening in Gaza, there would have been an outcry in this country. People would have said, “Enough’s enough.” They’d have put pressure on Congressmen. So there is a strong element of truth in that.

Kilkenny: There was an interesting article in the New York Times about the future of war, how it will be small, covert, airborne, and I was wondering if you could give your opinion on how we as an international population can react to something that’s done in secrecy? How can we protest or prevent a war that’s covert and so small?

Ali: I think, the same we do when the war is big. You provide information, you tell them what’s going on, and slowly things begin to come out. Even in the case of Gaza now, Israeli soldiers are beginning to talk about what they did. So, for the first time, the New York Times is reporting atrocities committed by Israelis on its front page!

Kilstein: Shocking.

Ali: Yeah! They’ve never done that before. So you see, things can move. The fact that Israeli soldiers themselves are saying they destroyed a family because they didn’t answer their questions, they killed an old woman on the street. We know all this. The Palestinians have been saying this for years, but suddenly people are noticing because it’s beginning to affect the Israelis. So it’s very difficult for them to get away with a covert war for too long, especially now that we have alternative media.

That is a big advantage: the indie media movement played a big, big role in making it possible to spread the news. So I’m not saying we can rival the global media networks. Obviously, we don’t have that arm, but at the same time, we can put out an alternative view. Whenever I appear on Democracy Now, or a show like that, I get emails from all over the world. I just got one from France saying, “Hi, I just switched on Democracy Now today and saw your interview.” This is an old friend of mine in Paris, so one shouldn’t underestimate our own strength.

Kilstein: How would you describe your job as a writer?

Ali: I write fiction and non-fiction both. Let’s not talk about the non-fiction today because that’s written in very different circumstances, but when I write fiction, the aim is to try and appeal to an audience, which is not one’s usual audience, to sort of entice people, who are not even political, to try and read a book. My writing is very much determined by that. I hate writing jargon. I don’t like writing like sort of desiccated academic, using a private language to impress one’s friends. I don’t – I really don’t like that. I think it’s very mean-spirited, people who do that. You have to write clearly, and lucidly, and I use a lot of poetry, a lot of literature, when I write my books because that’s the way I think anyway. I just hope it reaches as many people as possible.

Often I get emails, saying, “God, we didn’t know that this Arab poet you quoted existed,” or things like that. So it does work. Anyway, that’s how I do it.

Kilkenny: What makes you happy?

Ali: Many things. Sometimes if you see a very strikingly good movie, it makes you happy, you go to a concert and the music is great, you’re happy. In political terms, what really makes me happy when I see people working together, acting collectively, realizing their strength, and winning their demands. And that makes me really happy, and that’s what they’ve been doing in South America, and that’s what they did in Pakistan a week or so ago, when you had half a million people threatening to lay siege to the capital of Pakistan unless a very courageous chief justice was restored. And the United States blinked, and then instructed their stooges in Pakistan restore the chief justice. For the last four days, the country has been euphoric, celebrating on the streets. And it’s a nice feeling.

Listen to the entire episode here.

Called “arguably the most important intellectual alive” by the New York Times, Noam Chomsky is also known as a political activist.

In the 1966 essay, “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” Chomsky challenged intellectuals “to speak the truth and expose lies,” and he carried his protests beyond the printed page: he became a tax resister and he was arrested in 1967 at the Pentagon while protesting military involvement in Southeast Asia.

Chomsky’s criticism of U.S. governmental policies has continued unabated since that time. In Deterring Democracy and in other books he has focused on trade and economic issues and accuses the Government of being a “rogue superpower.”

“I’m a citizen of the United States,” says Chomsky, “and I have a share of responsibility for what it does.”

Citizen Radio is on BTR every Wednesday. Episodes air 24/7.

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Allison Kilkenny: In an unpublished article for the Washington Post, you wrote that the NAFTA protests during the 90s in Mexico gave, quote: “only a bare glimpse of time bombs waiting to explode. Do you thinks the drug cartels in Mexico are a byproduct of the trade inequalities you explained in that Post article? Also, if you could talk about the roles international banks and corporations play in the War on Drugs.

Noam Chomsky: I can’t really talk about it because there isn’t any war on drugs. If there was a war on drugs, the government would take measures which it knows could control the use of drugs.

And it’s pretty well understood. Years ago — maybe twenty-five, thirty years ago — around the time Nixon’s first War on Drugs was called, there was a big study by the army and the RAND corporation (the main, outside advisory research bureau) analyzing the effects on drug use of various approaches to it. They studied four. The one that came out the most cost effective was prevention and treatment by a large margin. Next, much more expensive and less effective, was police work. Still less effective and more costly was border interdiction. And least effective and most costly was out-of-country operations like chemical warfare in Columbia. Well, the methods that are used are the exact opposite. Most of the funding goes into cross-border operations (least effective, most costly,) next, interdiction and police action, and least to prevention and treatment. And there’s pretty independent evidence that this is correct.

So, for example, smoking is far more destructive than drugs by orders of magnitude. Now, you don’t carry out chemical warfare in North Carolina or Kentucky. You don’t interdict the borders because it’s produced here. You don’t arrest kids for having a cigarette. But in fact, prevention and treatment have sharply reduced smoking.

Throughout the 1980s, there was a general shift among young people toward more healthy lifestyles, so you have a reduction in smoking, a reduction in the use of red meat, in alcoholism, a whole pile of things. If you walk around a college campus, you rarely see kids with cigarettes. If you go down to the slums, you do. But that’s because the social-cultural change was kind of class-based. But it worked. And as I said, it’s even things like red meat. People eat healthier diets. And that’s pretty much what the RAND-Army approach predicted. So that suggests, since policies have been followed for decades, which were known in advance to have exactly the wrong properties (and it’s shown by evidence that they do have the wrong properties,) but they continue with them. Well, to a rational person, that suggests that something else is going on with the planning. And I don’t think it’s hard to figure out.

Out-of-country operations are just a cover for counter-insurgency, or for clearing land in Columbia and driving out peasants so multi-national corporations can come in for mining, and resource-extraction, and agribusiness, and macra production, and so on. Which is why you have (outside of Afghanistan) probably the largest refugee population in the world in Columbia. [The War on Drugs is] not effecting drug production. In fact, it’s going up by, I think, 25% last year. But it’s going to continue because that wasn’t the purpose.

Here in the United States, the drug war has been associated, clearly, with a very sharp rise in incarceration. If you go back to 1980, the prison population in the United States, per capita, was approximately like other industrial countries – kind of toward the high end, but not off the chart. Now, it’s five to ten times as high and still going up. And most of it is drug related (also, length of sentences, and repeated sentences, and so on.)

And it mostly targets what are called the “dangerous classes,” the poor, minorities, and so on. So like, black males, is astronomical. On the other hand, drug use among wealthy people is barely prosecuted. So it’s a class-based form of control of superfluous population, and for that purpose, it seems to be working.

It’s also making a lot of money for commercial enterprises. What some criminologists call the prison-industrial complex has been a pretty substantial development, especially for rural counties, it’s a Godsend. When they build prisons, it brings in construction work, jobs, and surveillance. A couple of years ago, maybe still, the fastest growing white-collar profession was security officer, and it gets rid of people you don’t want anything to do with. They don’t have a place in the current industrial system. And there’s also racial elements involved. So you can say the drug war is a success for what its real purpose is, but not for its proclaimed purposes.

There was just a study initiated by three pretty conservative former Latin American presidents: [Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil, César Gaviria of Colombia, and Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico,] and they came out with the conclusion, which anybody whose watching it knows is correct, but because it comes from that source, it was publicized, namely that the drug war in Latin America has been a complete failure in terms of its proclaimed objectives. But that just tells you those weren’t the proclaimed objectives. Rational people don’t keep pursuing a policy that’s failing when they know there’s a better policy unless there’s some other reason, and I think the other reason is not terribly hidden. So you can’t really talk about a war on drugs. You can go back to the question and formulate it differently (laughter), but it would be based on a different assumption.

Jamie Kilstein: For a country predicated on a separation of church and state, why do you think that we let religion dictate so much of our lives and public policy?

Chomsky: Well, those are two questions that are different. As far as our lives are concerned, the United States has always been an unusually religious country. The country was founded by religious extremists. The Puritans who came over were waving the holy book, and following the Lord’s commands when they exterminated the Amalekites, and the Scotch-Irish immigration that followed – German immigration – were also highly religious, and it’s been a very fundamentalist country. And there are repeated continentalist revivals, one of the last ones in the 1950s. That’s where you get things like “In God We Trust”, “One Nation Under God,” and all that kind of business. It’s a streak in American society that differentiates it from other industrial societies, pretty sharply in fact, but those are individual choices.

As far as influencing public policy is concerned, that’s mostly the last twenty or thirty years. I think [President Carter] inadvertently taught a lesson to party managers, namely that if you pretend to be religious, you can pick up a big electoral block. And in fact, every candidate for president since Carter has made a big show of being in church. Even people like Clinton, who is probably as religious as I am, makes a show of walking out of the Baptist church every Sunday morning. That’s a way to pick up a lot of votes cheap, and it was understood. That has an associated effect. Namely, the constituency begins to have an effect on policy, and that was exploited.

It’s been a funny economic period for the last thirty years. We’ve been through thirty years with real wage stagnation. That’s never happened before. There’s been economic growth, there’s been a sharp rise in productivity, but the effects have flown and gone into very few pockets. For a majority of the population, it’s been a bad period. Stagnation, sometimes decline, reduction of benefits, higher working hours, a lot of breakdown of social structure, it’s hard for people to deal with. Now, the parties don’t want to deal with this because their constituency is basically business and the wealthy, so they’d like to divert attention to other topics. Those are called social issues like stem cell research, abortion, and so on. These become not individual matters anymore, which they were before, but rather social policy, and are used (and I presume designed) to keep away from the issues that really affect people.

Take the drug war. People would like to reduce drugs, but you don’t want to pay attention to the real issue because the drug war is serving other purposes.

Or take health care, let’s say. Health care has been the top issue, or close to the top issue, for the population for decades for good reasons. The health care system is a complete disaster. It’s about twice the per capita cost of other comparable countries and some of the worst outcomes, and there are enormous numbers of people either uninsured or underinsured. And that’s something people feel in their lives, so they care about it, and they also have an opinion. Ever since polls have been taken, a large majority want a national healthcare system (getting rid of the privatized healthcare system).

But here you have a real conflict because the pharmaceutical corporations and the insurance industry, and related industries, want a privatized system, and the public is opposed, so you have to somehow marginalize that question.

It’s usually described in the press as “politically impossible,” meaning the only thing for it is a large majority of the population, but “lacking political support,” or “how difficult it would be to put it through.” But it’s not particularly difficult. You’d extend Medicare to the whole population, which is what a large part of the majority wants. But it runs into the interests that really set policies, so the goal is to divert attention away from those things to some other things. That’s the sort of Reagan Democrat phenomenon, and in that respect, religion can be mobilized. The religious commitments, which have always been there, can be mobilized into a political force. And I think that’s happened.

So to go back to your question, there’s a difference between the fact that it’s individual choice, and it happens to be an extremely religious country (way off the charts,) to policy. In fact, our policy has been mostly recent, pretty much coinciding with the period of harsh economic and social realities in the population, and I think it can be understood plausibly as a conscious diversion from issues party manages, and their constituencies, don’t want discussed.

In fact, during this period, the public relations industry, which is a huge industry, has been very frank about the fact that they are marketing candidates like commodities. It wasn’t published much here, but after the Obama election, the advertising industry gave Obama an award for best marketing campaign of the year. And they’re right. It was a great marketing campaign. “Hope.” “Change.” No content. (laughter) They went on to say, and this is top executives who are quoted, that they’ve been marketing candidates ever since Reagan, (laughter) and this is the best achievement they’ve ever had.

Kilstein: It’s unsettling

Kilkenny: Yeah (laughter)

Chomsky: No, it makes good sense. These guys study public opinion closely, and they’re perfectly aware that on a host of major issues, both political parties are pretty well to the right of the population, so it makes good sense to keep away from issues, and to focus on personalities, qualities. It’s not just true for the general population. It’s also true for the intellectual elite.

I sometimes torture myself by listening to NPR. (laughter) And I happened to pick up an interview that they were having after one of the Clinton-Obama debates during the primaries. And they were interviewing the New York Times political correspondent. I forget her name. They were on about for ten, or fifteen minutes, and the discussion was mostly about things like this: Apparently, at the beginning of the debate, Clinton walked in, and Obama sort of held her chair while she sat down, and the question was about his body language. Was he deferential: White Lady…

Kilstein: (laughter) Jesus

Chomsky: …Black Boy? Or was he kind of contemptuous? But that was the discussion. Not about what they were talking about, not about the issues. Maybe it’s not even conscious anymore. It’s so internalized. It’s internalized that you want to keep away from issues.

Kilstein: I bet it was Maureen Dowd (laughter)

Kilkenny: Do you think fascism is inevitable in a Capitalistic society?

Chomsky: Well, you know, the term “fascism” has taken on a special connotation. In the 1930s – pre-Hitler, or before the real effects of Hitler were concerned – it wasn’t considered a particularly negative term. It was considered a notion of social organization. So for example, [President Roosevelt] was a great admirer of [Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini.] That “admirable, Italian gentleman.” American investors loved Mussolini. They poured money into Italian Capitalism.

Kilkenny: Wow

Chomsky: …It was controlling the work force. It was orderly. It was running things. They were making plenty of profit. In fact, Fortune magazine had a story in the early ‘30s, which had a headline about Mussolini saying, ‘The Wops are Un-Wopping Themselves.’ (laughter) You know, the ‘Wops’ are finally getting things straight. They had a real, good fascist government.

Kilstein: Wow

Chomsky: …And pretty much the same thing was true with Hitler. The state department in 1937, I think, described Hitler as a moderate, standing between extremes of right and left. Sumner Welles, Roosevelt’s main adviser, came back from the Munich Conference in ’38, saying “Real Hope. We can really work with Hitler. He’s kind of a good guy,” and again, American investment shot up in Germany. The business classes liked him. It was even more so in England.

In fact, if you read back, the really serious political economists like Robert Brady, one of the best, kind of Veblenite political economists, he just described fascism as a tendency that the industrial world is moving towards, including the New Deal as an example. Coordinated state planning for corporate structures in the interest of business controlling things, and so on. In that sense, you could say, yeah, some kind of fascism is like an aspect of Capitalism. But what the term has come to mean now is storm troopers, extermination camps, other such things, aggression. In that sense, there’s no reason to expect it. Counterproductive.

Kilkenny: But do you think there’s a way to be sort of an egalitarian society…

Chomsky: In principle?

Kilkenny: Right.

Chomsky: Sure.

Kilkenny: With Capitalism being the main…

Chomsky: It’s kind of interesting. If you read Adam Smith, a great hero, one of his arguments, he had the argument in favor of markets, but kind of nuanced arguments, not as extreme as is thought. But one of his arguments, like one of his main ones, was that under conditions of perfect liberty, markets would lead to perfect equality. Not a very good argument, but that was the argument. And he took perfect equality to be something we’d want. And he meant equality of condition, not opportunity. He said that’s what markets should lead to, and there’s an argument for that.

But under real world conditions, it goes the other way for all kinds of reasons. One reason, and there are a lot of built-in, serious inefficiencies to markets. In fact, we’re suffering from some of them right now.

One of the major properties of markets – if you take a good economics course you learn this in the first term – is that they under price social effects. So if you sell me a car, we can make a good deal for ourselves. We both gain from it, but [Kilstein] is paying a cost. So there’s more pollution, more congestion, the price of oil goes up, and these effects are spread through the population, the count of all can be quite large. It’s called externalities. Economists put them in a footnote, but they’re not so small.

Now, when you get financial institutions, there’s an effect called systemic risk. So if Goldman Sachs makes a loan, if they’re managed well, they take into account the effect to themselves if the loan go sour, but they don’t count in the consequences to the system as a whole if the loan goes sour. And that’s what’s happening now. You under price risk, and so there’s too much of it. There are other factors that also lead to too much of, and sooner or later, it all unravels, and you have a major crisis.

These are just properties of markets. And there are other properties. Say, when I go home tonight, I have a choice on the market. I can choose to go home in a Ford or a Toyoto. But I can’t choose to go home on a public transportation system because that’s not one of the options that a market provides. I can choose this doctor or that doctor, but I can’t choose a national health system. That’s not an option on the market. These are options for societies that are reasonable, world democratic societies, more reasonable societies where everything is under popular control (socialist societies, anarchist societies,) but markets don’t allow any of that.

So they’re heavily biased in favor of certain kinds of outcomes, which are in many ways anti-social outcomes. With regards to public transportation, one of the outcomes may be the destruction of the species. There’s nothing in markets that gives any incentive to care whether your grandchildren survive. The choices aren’t there. So even human survival isn’t very likely under market societies.

In fact, there are a lot of illusions about that. It’s commonly believed that the United States is a market society with entrepreneurial initiative and consumer choice, and all of those wonderful things, but it’s very far from that.

In fact, the very place where we’re sitting is a good illustration. What’s MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology]? MIT is technically a private institution, but it’s publically funded through the government. What is it funded for? Well, it’s funded to create the technology of the future, which private corporations can make profit on. So the main elements of the productive economy now, like computers and the Internet, were developed right here, and similar places, under Pentagon funding for decades, not short periods. The public was paying the cost for a long period. The public was taking the risks, and it finally ends up in Bill Gates’s pockets.

Kilkenny: Right, right

Chomsky: …And that’s the way most of the high-tech economy works. So where’s the market society? Well, it’s there, it’s at the marketing end. Even there, marketing is carried out in a way intended purposefully to undermine markets. In fact, we all kind of know it, but we parrot the words without recognizing it.

So you’ve seen television ads. Suppose there’s a television ad for a drug, or a car, or something. In a market society, what you would have is a description of the properties of the commodity because then you get what are called ‘informed consumers making rational choices.’ But that’s not what you get. What you get is forms of delusion because the business wants to create uninformed consumers, who make irrational choices. That is, they want to undermine markets. Which is very much like the political system. You want an electorate, which is uninformed and makes irrational choices under modern democracy, so the whole kind of ideology is so remote from reality that it’s almost impossible to discuss.

And this is not something like Quantum physics. This is something right in front of everyone’s eyes. It takes tremendous amounts of indoctrination to be able to produce journalists and commentators and academics, and others, who can talk about it as a Free Market society because it’s right in front of your eyes that it’s nothing of the sort. So that really takes effective indoctrination.

And it’s not that people are lying. It’s worse than that. It’s internalized. You really believe the falsehoods you’re producing. Like a well-run totalitarian society, or a well-run religious faith where people don’t lie when they say there are miracles. They believe it. And people aren’t lying when they say it’s a market society. It’s just sort of driven into them that you don’t question it even though the counter-evidence is right in your face.

Kilstein: What gives you hope and makes you happy?

Chomsky: People like you. That’s where the hope is. In fact, there have been a lot of positive changes in the last – let’s say in my lifetime – last thirty, forty years, sort of active political lifetime. As a matter of fact, since I was a kid. Things are nowhere near as bad as what I was watching during the Depression. A lot of achievements were made during the New Deal, and they didn’t come from above. They came from activism.

By the time workers were carrying out sit-down strikes, which is like one step before taking over the factory and running it for yourself, which really put the fear of God into the business world, so there were measures introduced, which were good measures: Social Security, welfare state measures, some degree of regulation, and so on. That was positive. And it happened again in the ‘60s. There was a lot of popular activism, and it made a huge effect.

First of all, it led [President Johnson] to introduce extensions of welfare state measures, but it also just changed the culture. The role of minorities, women, environment, all sorts of things that weren’t questions even came to the center of the agenda, and it ended up being a much more civilized society.

In the 1980s, there was a growth of international solidarity movements, something which had never existed in the history of imperialism. In the whole history of imperialism, nobody thought of going to the country that is under attack and living in villages with people to help them and protect them with a white face. The idea didn’t occur to anybody. Tens of thousands of people were doing in the ‘80s. And it’s grown all over Central America.

And incidentally, a lot of them were coming out of Conservative religious circles. Religion in the United States is a very multifaceted affair. A lot were affected by liberation theology. A lot were coming out of the evangelical movement.

One of Obama’s half a dozen pastors is Jim Wallis, who comes out of that sector: Evangelical Christianity, which was dedicated to social service. Out of that came the solidarity movement, which extended into the current global justice movement, mostly young people, world social forum, and other social forums. That’s positive advances. And there’s no particular reason why that should stop.

In fact, we’re better off now than earlier because you can build on the successes of earlier generations and start from a higher level. So there’s plenty of problems, but no reason to lose hope.

Listen here.

Allison and Jamie discuss Atheism, Desmond Tutu, and play the second half of their interview with Princeton professor and author, Melissa Harris-Lacewell.

There are Atheism groups popping up all over the country, but they have yet to rival the church with social welfare projects. Jamie proposes a solution for this.

In part two of her interview, Melissa Harris-Lacewell discusses New Orleans, James Perry, America being post-racial (it’s not,) hip-hop and the notion of “Ride or Die,” and what makes her happy.

Citizen Radio airs every Wednesday (and replays throughout the week) over on BTR.

And join us every Wednesday over on Breakthru Radio!

Melissa Harris-​Lacewell is Associate Professor of Politics and African American Studies at Princeton University. She is the author of the award-winning book, Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought, (Princeton 2004). And she is currently at work on a new book: Sister Citizen: A Text For Colored Girls Who’ve Considered Politics When Being Strong Wasn’t Enough.

Check out Melissa’s blog: http:​/​/​princetonprofs.​ blogspot. com/

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