Who's in charge, here in the USA? You and I, through our votes? Or are the rich in charge because they can influence who ends up in the state house or in Washington? If you want better schools, better healthcare, clean air and water, protected wilderness, better opportunities for poor people and more humane governments abroad, are you getting them? If not, do you feel you can change your leadership so you can get more of what you want?

Some people believe the USA is a champion of justice, equality and human rights at home and abroad. Others think the US government spends money, passes laws and acts abroad largely to benefit the minority of citizens who are rich, but covers up this fact with rhetoric and manipulation of public opinion. Still others feel so powerless to effect what happens with their tax money that they don't read the papers and don't vote.

Which is true, justice or tyranny? Are we well informed or deluded? Is political activism a pointless distraction from really important stuff, or is it unavoidable because we care about other people?

We explore these questions, and more, with radio producer, journalist, author and lecturer David Barsamian. Barsamian is host and producer of the award-winning program, "Alternative Radio" (AR), a weekly public affairs show which is broadcast on 125 public radio stations in the US and abroad. Barsamian is the foremost cronichler of renowned intellectual Noam Chomsky's work. Barsamian has written four books of interviews with Chomsky, his most recent being The Common Good, and has interviews with Chomsky on tape (available from AR). Barsamian's interviews have also featured such diverse voices as Edward Said, Barbara Ehrenreich, Angela Davis, Ralph Nader, Eqbal Ahmad, Michael Parenti, Helen Caldicott, Howard Zinn and Vandana Shiva.

Locally, AR is broadcast to Boulder and North Denver on KGNU (88.5 fm), and also on stations in Aspen, Carbondale, Paonia, Durango, Alamosa and Ignacio. For a free catalogue of AR programs and tapes write AR, P.O. Box 551, Boulder, CO 80306, or use the internet: ar@orci.com, or call them at 800-444-1977.

Nexus publisher Ravi Dykema spoke with Barsamian at Alternative Radio's offices in Boulder.

RD: Most people routinely hear, and school children hear, that we live in a democracy, and that we elect our representatives. They represent us, the people who vote for them, and they’re looking out for our interests. Therefore, we the people will be getting pretty much what we want and not getting what we don’t want. But I think your view is different.

DB: Well, that’s the fairy tale. That’s the wonderful foundation rock upon which American democracy is built, that there is choice, there are elections, you can kick out the guy if you don’t like him, you can vote in somebody you like.

RD: So what is the political reality, rather than the fairy tale?

DB: First of all, you have to understand that the seeming division between the two major political parties is false. If you look at them closely, in terms of their ideology and belief systems, they are virtually identical.

RD: Please give us a few examples of how they are identical.

DB: On U.S. military action around the world, they both agree completely that the United States is the global cop and must punish and keep in line any recalcitrant or foreign states that do not behave according to our rules of behavior.

RD: What else do they agree on?

DB: That’s a very big one. International rule. Corporate control and obedience to corporate power.

RD: Give an example of a law that explains what you mean.

DB: For example, the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

RD: The Republicans and Democrats equally supported it?

DB: Clinton and Gore, right behind it, telling us that the consumers are going to benefit, it’s going to set-off a wave of competition that’s going to drive down cable TV prices, you’ll have more choice and there’ll be more diversity.

RD: So they’re transparently pro-industry?

DB: There’s no question about it.

RD: How do you know that?

DB: The bill was written by the telecommunication giants themselves. They were invited into the committee rooms in the House and the Senate by the senators and congressmen, who said, "Well, what do you want in this bill? We’ll craft it. We’ll give you exactly what you want." And that’s how the legislation was passed. Clinton signed it. Since that day, there have been a wave of mergers. Instead of expanding the spectrum of ownership and creating more diversity and competition, the industry has collapsed into a handful of companies.

RD: In your view it hasn’t been good for consumers?

DB: It hasn’t. We know it hasn’t. Cable prices have doubled, tripled and quadrupled. The very first thing that was promised with that bill was that cable prices would drop. Telephone service prices would come down. They haven’t come down—they’ve gone up.

RD: Was there very little public debate leading up to the passage of that bill?

DB: What should have been front page news was page 67 news in the big newspapers.

RD: Were the Republicans and Democrats equally interested in suppressing debate about the Telecommunications act? Or was it a kind of collusion of the press that automatically happens?

DB: There’s a lot of self-censorship that goes on. This was seen as a business issue, not related to the public. It was of interest to a certain class, to the elite owners of the media, a handful of major corporations that were going to benefit from the passage of this bill. And it was treated entirely as a financial issue. It wasn’t treated as a major public issue, which it really is, just as building a highway system is, just as building schools are, as water purification plants are, etc. It’s a public issue. The air waves are owned by the public. Our political representatives gave away the public air waves to private entities. These private entities, corporations, don’t even pay rent for it. They get it for free.

Who are these corporations? They’re Westinghouse, Disney, Time-Warner. They are Rupert Murdock’s Fox Network, General Electric, Viacom. These are the major media corporations. They have enormous amounts of capital. They give money to both political parties. Not one or the other; both. Liberally. And it’s not surprising, therefore, that they can influence legislation, and the outcome of the legislation will serve their interests. I mean that’s a perfectly rational system. The people are only involved in terms of rhetoric. They’re not involved in the process, because the process is run and fueled by money. Ordinary people don’t have money. Large corporations, rich individuals, have money. They’re able to play the game. The rest of us are bystanders.

RD: So it’s not a democracy in the sense of one person/one vote.

DB: It’s a plutocracy. Demos means "people" in Greek, and "crocy" is a system of government. To what extent do the Demos rule in the United States? They don’t. People don’t have much say in important areas of decision-making.

RD: What about the present U.S. economy? I know your view is starkly different than the one we hear coming from Washington and the Colorado State House. Are we in trouble?

DB: Allen Greenspan says it’s a fairy tale economy, one that is unprecedented for its prosperity. And this is true, but it’s true for only a narrow segment of the population. The fact is that since the mid 1970s, actual wages have stagnated, and in some cases declined. Americans are now working 48 hours per week on average, eight more than they were, say, a generation ago. It is now the rule, not the exception, that both spouses work. There’s an enormous gap between the salaries of the upper echelon and most everyone else, the workers.

RD: Isn’t that one of the big stories of the ’80s?

DB: That decade of greed really saw a separation between the executive suite and the people in the streets. There was a dramatic increase in salaries and benefits for CEOs on a scale that is unparalleled in the world today: a CEO may earn 200, 300, 500 times the base salary of the average worker. In addition, there’s the golf club membership, the free Lear jet, the stretch limo, the jacuzzi in the office, the daily massage and all of these things that are built in, plus enormous stock options. So what has happened in the last 15 to 20 years is that the rich have gotten richer, the poor have certainly gotten poorer, and the large middle class, where most people find themselves, has pretty much stagnated or actually fallen behind.

RD: Let’s talk about U.S. actions abroad.

DB: The United States says it’s protecting the world. It’s promoting democracy around the world. In fact what it’s doing internationally is protecting hypocrisy around the world. It’s promoting the interests of the Fortune 500. Largely United States foreign policy is subordinated to the interests of this power group, because the political system is serving the economic system and vice versa. The leaders in the political and economic sphere trade places. When Clinton leaves office, do you think he’s going to be driving a truck on Highway 70? I don’t think so. I think he’s going to work for a large corporation. And he’s certainly going to write a book for one of them and get millions of dollars, and maybe become a talk-show host on one of the major networks. They go back and forth. The political people enter the corporate sphere, the corporate people go into the political sphere. There’s a saying in Armenia that one hand rubs the other, and that’s sort of what’s going on here. All the while, the propaganda you hear is that we have political diversity, lots of disagreement, but it’s just on superficial issues. Not on the major issues of power and privilege.

RD: But if this were so, we’d hear about it. There’d be somebody talking about it in the public forum, in the press, or we’d be hearing it on the BBC news that is broadcast on KGNU. Most people, I believe, aren’t listening to or reading alternative media. They aren’t hearing that U.S. foreign policy promotes the interests of only the Fortune 500 companies. And they’re going to think this sounds like a radical, whacked-out viewpoint. How would you defend such an alternative perspective?

DB: You have to examine the media and the products the media produces. The overwhelming bulk of it is titillation and distraction. That’s why I say the media is a weapon of mass distraction. The media primarily focuses on Monica Lewinsky and Michael Jordon and Tanya Harding and Lorena Bobbit and Princess Di and John Lennon and Linda McCartney. The lives of the rich and famous, and of course crime. Much of the news consists of issues that are not fundamental to people’s lives. As they say in French, it’s a divertisement, a diversion from fundamental issues which affect everyone. Like housing. Like transportation. Like health care. Those are not left-liberal or right-conservative issues. I mean aren’t all people interested in health care? Why don’t people hear about essential, fundamental issues? The news is there, but you have to dig for it. You have to make an effort to find it. The networks are owned by large media conglomerates. They are not readily going to give you, the consumer, information that undermines their position of power and privilege. They’ll do that if we demand it, but generally they’re looking to deflect attention.

RD: Of course corporations are going to advocate for their own best interests, and others are going to advocate for their interests, and I figure that the plurality of ideas and discussion will lead to progress. That’s the way I view the free enterprise system combined with a free press. Apparently you don’t think it’s working.

DB: The news media are like any corporation and progress as defined by corporations is profits. And profits are more important than people. And corporate ideology is driven inexorably by the drive for profits, to increase gain, to expand markets. This is not any kind of left wing idea.

The consumer is manipulated by massive amounts of public relations, as opposed to real news. Americans consume more ads, on TV, radio or in print, than any other people on the face of the earth. And part of the ideology of the country is to consume more and more. Why do people need to buy a new car every year? Why can’t they keep the car that’s working perfectly well for six, seven, eight years? The United States has a $7 trillion annual economy. About 15 percent of that, $1 trillion, is devoted annually to public relations, to advertising, to convincing people to consume more, to buy more and more things. There are more public relations specialists in the United States today than working journalists.

RD: Can you give us an example of some law that may have been passed through a PR effort that turned out to be contrary to the interests of the general populus, but served the industrial interests?

DB: There are a couple of good examples. One is the North American Free Trade Agreement—NAFTA. The other is the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, GATT, which has now been superseded by The World Trade Organization. NAFTA promised to produce more jobs and provide higher wages for U.S. manufacturers. This was a local, North American trade agreement: Canada, Mexico, and the United States. Now, mind the language. "Free trade" sounds great. Everyone is for "free." Already you have a propaganda triumph. Are you against free trade? What do you want, slave trade? The spin-meisters thought of a very good way to get popular support for something by calling it "free trade." Now since NAFTA was passed after an enormous propaganda campaign, the result has been a loss in manufacturing jobs in the United States to Mexico. Electronics factories, sneaker plants and the like went to Mexico because labor is much cheaper there. There are no unions. There aren’t environmental laws to worry about. There aren’t as many nuisances as you have in the United States. So a lot of high-paying jobs left the country. Now, at the same time, jobs have been created in the United States, but they’re much lower paying than the jobs that left. Good manufacturing, blue-collar jobs pay on an average around $20 to $25/hour. That’s not what someone gets at the checkout counter at WalMart or bagging at King Soopers. Those are the kinds of jobs that have been created since the passage of NAFTA. So there’s just one example. You can pick any military program that the Pentagon is trying to get approved. It’s not in the public interest, but because of the subservience and the subordination of both political parties to large corporations, the legislation is passed, it’s signed, and the public is ignored.

RD: But the public favors a strong military, I have read, even after the fall of the former Soviet Union.

DB: There’s not a lot of evidence for that. It depends on how these questions are asked in polls. If the question is framed in the following way, "The United States is falling behind in missile defense," for example. China and Iraq are rapidly developing new weapons that may threaten the security of the United States. Now those are the embedded assumptions at the beginning. Now the question is "Would you favor an increase in spending on missile defense for the United States?", most people are going to say "yes," because they’ve been set-up with these initial assumptions: "Ooh, we’re falling behind? We want to protect our children or our families and our towns, etc. So, definitely, we need more defense. We don’t need more schools. We don’t need more public transportation. We don’t need more clinics. We don’t need more day care centers, but we need more B-2 bombers at $2 billion a pop, that can’t fly in the rain, that require special air-conditioned hangars, otherwise the metal starts to rust. We need more of those types of planes." Right? Wrong! B-2 bombers are built because Lockheed builds them, and Lockheed is one of the handful of major military contractors. And they’ve got political parties on their payroll. The same thing with Boeing. The same thing with Grumman, with Northrup. There’s a handful of these military contractors. There is a monopoly control. There is not diversity and competition. Why would managers of corporations want monopoly? Again it’s perfectly logical and rational. You can maximize gain if you completely control the market. That’s the way the system operates.

RD: But people believe that the government has outlawed monopolies.

DB: That’s the mythology. Like all mythology, you have to peel away the veneer and get to the core. If you look at the core, anti-trust legislation in the United States today is dead in the water. None of these mergers has been reversed. None of these takeovers has been stopped. The section of the justice department that oversees anti-trust laws is not functioning. They’ve given the large corporations everything they’ve wanted. Every takeover has been approved. The reality is that companies have increased in power and influence and that anti-trust legislation is simply not being enforced. This has nothing to do with Democrats or Republicans. This is straight across the board. It happened under Carter, it happened under Reagan, it happened under Bush, it’s happening under Clinton, it’ll happen under the next president.

RD: What about Microsoft being prosecuted for anti-trust violations?

DB: That’s one of the exceptions in the anti-trust arena. There are very, very few cases where the federal government is pursuing any kind of anti-monopoly. I think that’s largely due to the efforts of Ralph Nader and a handful of citizen activists in Washington who have watched Microsoft and Bill Gates grow in power and influence and have very effectively moved this into the public agenda. That’s been a great accomplishment of Nader, and that shows you that citizen activism still works, and you can make a difference if you get involved.

RD: What is the biggest issue domestically right now that we need to be paying attention to?

DB: Social Security is the big issue right now. Everyone who is working is paying into Social Security. Here’s a perfect example of how propaganda has moved the goal posts on this particular issue. Just 10 or 15 years ago, Social Security was considered sacred, like motherhood. Politicians couldn’t talk about it. In this period of 10 to 12 years, there’s been a very focused and concerted campaign saying that the baby boomers are going to get older, which is true, and that Social Security is going broke, and what are we going to do about it? That’s the debate. You have the car which is broken, and how are you going to fix it? Has anyone examined the car? However, the United States right now has a huge budget surplus. There is some disagreement between the Republicrats and the Demopublicans as to where that surplus should go. There is enough budget surplus now to fund Social Security for many, many decades into the 21st century, if they want to do it. Instead, they’re talking about giving a tax cut, which will mostly benefit the upper class. Your average person in the street might get a couple of hundred extra dollars. But if you’re in the upper level brackets, and you get a 30 percent break on your taxes, you’re talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars.

There’s wide disagreement about whether the system is actually imperiled. The debate has been largely driven by the right wing, in other words the Democrats and the Republicans, who want to turn the largest amount of capital still untouched, that’s in public hands, over to Wall Street. So people’s retirement then will be subject to the fluctuations of the stock market.

RD: Is that a problem?

DB: Japan is a very good example of why this is a bad idea. In the early 1990s, the Japanese government invested large amounts of their social security fund into the Japanese stock market. Why? The Tokyo market was booming. The Japanese stock market collapsed, taxes were raised, and the recipients of social security in Japan have seen their monthly paychecks cut, not increased. That’s something that people really have to think about carefully. Social Security was created by FDR in 1935 as part of the New Deal, on the heels of the greatest single market failure in the history of the United States. Anyone who has studied economics or history knows that these things work like tides. Sometimes the tide comes in, sometimes the tide goes out. Right now, the U.S. economy has been growing in certain areas, but there’s no guarantee that that’s going to continue. What would follow a crash of the stock market, and then what are the people going to do? What about people who are disadvantaged, for whom that’s the only check that they’re going to get when they’re old? They’re not privileged. Average people stand to lose a great deal. I think we really need to think about this carefully as a society. Do we want to privatize this Social Security fund, and hand it over to essentially private investors? Is that a wise decision? There should be discussion.

RD: Your premise is that the status of Social Security is not ailing as it is alleged to be. So the discussion is illegitimate to start with.

DB: I believe that to a great extent, it’s illegitimate. It’s predicated on the fact that the United States’ economy is going to grow or not grow by certain percentages. This is, again, fantasy, like the genie rubbing the lamp and predicting, "Oh, in 12 years, the U.S. GNP will grow by 2.6 percent." Nobody knows what it’s going to be in 12 years. This is not science. These are projections.

RD: Going back to foreign policy, what do you think is really going on?

DB: The U.S. is the super-power: in fact the French call the United States the hyper-power. In a unipolar world, it has no equal adversary, economically, politically, militarily, diplomatically. It straddles the globe now in a rather unprecedented manner, historically speaking.

RD: Is it comparable to the former dominance of the British Empire?

DB: That might be a good analogy. Largely United States foreign policy is not driven by concerns for democracy or freedom, although rhetorically everything is housed within that framework. The main issues turn around economic power and political economy. For example, you’ll recall the Gulf War. The United States was outraged that Iraq invaded Kuwait and violated the sovereignty of Kuwait in August of 1990. That resulted in a massive military build-up. More than 500,000 troops were sent to the Middle East. The Gulf War ensued. There was much carnage, much environmental damage, many deaths, and much suffering that continues today, eight years after the Gulf War. What happened exactly 10 years before that event? Iraq invaded Iran, it’s neighbor, with which it shares a very long frontier. A clear violation of Iranian sovereignty. What was the response from the United States? It was to supply military weapons and give intelligence and diplomatic support to Iraq. What happened to our solemn concern for international law and the sanctity of frontiers? When a country is invaded that we don’t like, then we don’t care about international law? That seems to be exactly the case.

RD: Are there other examples?

DB: In1983, the United States invaded Grenada. In 1989, the United States invaded Panama. Direct violations of international law. No one could do anything about it. This is what happens when there’s no countervailing force to U.S. military power. For $300 billion a year, we have more weapons of mass destruction than all the countries in the world combined. Sadam Hussein is being targeted today for having the potential to produce weapons of mass destruction. He has not produced any weapons of mass destruction. This is even acknowledged by Clinton.

RD: Nevertheless, he is accused of having manufactured biological/chemical weapons.

In 1998, when the United States was allied with Iraq and supported Saddam Hussein, Iraq used poisoned gas on its own Kurdish population. The United States didn’t say a word. Now if this isn’t hypocrisy, what is it?

RD: To your best knowledge, the United States knew that Iraq gassed its own citizens and did not say anything.

DB: That’s correct. Soon after the gassing of the Kurds the U.S. dramatically increased its agricultural loans to Iraq. This was during the Bush administration. So that shows you our concern for human rights. Turkey is another example. Turkey invaded Cyprus in 1974, and continues to occupy the northern third of the island, in direct violation of international law. The United States is very close economically, politically, militarily, with Turkey. It uses Turkish air bases to bomb Iraq and to patrol the Middle East. Turkey, by the State Department’s own reports, conducts extra-judicial executions, that means it shoots people on the street, not arresting them. There’s no judicial process. Regularly uses torture. It has carpet-bombed whole Kurdish areas in southeastern Turkey. Three thousand villages have been razed to the ground. It has conducted a massive campaign of repression against its own population, particularly the Kurdish population, which makes up about 15 to 20 percent of the total Turkish population, and all of this is done with U.S. military weapons and with U.S. economic support. The U.S. government expresses concern for the Kurds in Iraq, but to the same people right across the border, it’s goodnight and good luck.

RD: So proclamations of defending human rights, or bombing Iraq because of their human rights violations, is hypocrisy.

DB: The U.S. record on human rights is very selectively applied. It’s applied to enemy states. Not to states that the U.S. is closely allied with. So Turkey has a free pass. So does Israel. So do other states like Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. One of the most repressive and fanatical fundamentalist states in the world is Saudi Arabia. Does the United States say anything about women’s rights? Or habeas corpus? Or a free press, or any of those things about Saudi Arabia? Not a word. There the economic interest is dominant, because we want Saudi oil.

RD: Another grotesque example of U.S. hypocrisy in regards to human rights is East Timor, an island north of Australia (see story in "Happenings").

DB: East Timor was a Portuguese colony for about 400 years. In 1974, when the Portuguese fascist dictatorship collapsed, a number of its colonies broke free. East Timor was one of them. Within a very short time, in December, 1975, the Indonesian armed forces, supported by the United States diplomatically and economically, invaded East Timor. In early December, 1975, President Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger visited Jakarta. They gave then President Suharto a green light to invade East Timor. A couple of days, after they left, in fact, Indonesia invaded this small island. What ensued can only be described in genocidal terms. Proportionately the greatest number of people died since the holocaust. This is an island with a population of 600,000 people. Somewhere between 200,000 to 300,000 East Timors have been killed by the Indonesian armed forces. The United States protected Indonesia, even though Indonesia was condemned by the United Nations. The United States kept an umbrella, a diplomatic, military, and economic umbrella, around Indonesia throughout the ensuing 24 years of occupation. The human rights violations in East Timor have been amply documented by Human Rights Watch, the United Nations and Amnesty International.

RD: And the American public knows almost nothing about this? We learned a lot about the genocide in Cambodia that was happening around the same time.

DB: Well that again shows you how human rights are selectively applied.

RD: The U.S. Government doesn’t control the press, does it?

DB: The U.S. Government largely sets the agenda for the press. And the press knows what to cover. The government creates the issues and the atmosphere and the ideology with which the media fall into step. So the case of Cambodia and East Timor is very instructive, because you can do a comparison. They were almost going on at the same time in the mid-1970s. There were hundreds of articles and TV documentaries and stories about Cambodia, and virtually nothing on East Timor.

RD: Why so much about Cambodia?

DB: Because the victims in Cambodia were worthy victims within the framework of U.S. ideology. It was important to show that the Khmer Rouge was evil and doing all these horrible things and, therefore, the United States by extension was justified in fighting the war in Indochina to prevent these fanatics from coming into power and conducting mass murder.

RD: But the Khmer Rouge were not a client state of the U.S.

DB: No they weren’t, not at all. Whereas Indonesia was and is. Therefore their victims in East Timor were unworthy. So that’s the selective application of human rights, and even of genocide. Like the example of the Kurds I mentioned earlier. The Kurds in Turkey have been viciously attacked, assaulted, murdered, by the Turkish government. The same thing has happened in Iraq. What do you hear more about?

RD: It sounds like we can’t be confident that we’re going to get a very clear picture of what’s going on, either in domestic policy or in foreign policy. How does that occur and what can we do about it?

DB: The camera takers and the people who make the film and the people who load the film into the camera and snap the photograph have certain vested interests, and they want to take pictures of only certain things. They don’t want you to see the whole picture. Just this frame, which they want you to focus on. That’s because the media, which is the lens that most people see things through, is owned and controlled by large corporations. Large corporations are interested in certain outcomes, both politically and economically. Politically they want the status quo. They don’t want anything to rock the boat. Stability is almost a mantra in the business world. In order to grow and to maximize profits, you need stability. Now in the third world, in many countries, the United States has promoted stability in the name of democracy, while supporting repressive governments, like in Zaire, Guatemala. Nicaragua, Iran under the Shah. We were promoting stability under the slogan of democracy while, in fact, supporting repressive, brutal dictatorships.

Now what to do about this is a big question. I think people should be skeptical but not cynical. Cynicism is not enabling. Skepticism is. Cynicism leads to total turn-off. Skepticism leads to questioning, which is healthy. For example, I’ve said a number of things in the course of this interview. I would urge people to go out and find out for themselves whether the United States supported Iraq and Saddam Hussein throughout the 1980s, giving him large amounts of money, weapons, intelligence information, etc. Find out for yourself. People should be skeptical. They should go out, find out the information on their own, and then they own it. And they can make their determination. That’s how we grow and learn things. And I think that’s really what a democracy is about, when you have that exchange of information.

RD: And can people get this sort of information from the TV?

DB: There’s very little on TV.

RD: Is it impossible to gather such information, or is it reasonably doable?

DB: It’s reasonably doable, but it takes effort. You have to go to the edges of the media, not to the center. This information is not going to be on Dan Rather or Tom Brokaw or Peter Jennings, the three network anchors.

RD: Or All Things Considered?

DB: Or National Public Radio, or the BBC News, or the News Hour with Jim Lehrer or Washington Week In Review or Wall Street Week In Review. It’s simply not going to be there. Largely you have to go to independent media to find out what’s going on. And then you’ll have a kind of balance. You can weigh things in a way that you’re not getting now because the scale is so tilted in the direction of corporate media. And it’s so ideologically loaded and driven and class conscious to an extent that’s just astounding. By that I mean the media promote certain class interests, economic class interests. In the United States we don’t think we have classes, but we do. We have a ruling class. We have a group of people that owns the country. Just get a Fortune 500 list if you want to find out who owns most of the wealth in the United States. And you may say, "Well, what about Bill Gates? He just broke through in the last 10 years." Here and there, people break through, but then they join the club and function like a club member, not like a renegade. If Gates stepped out of line and started doing things that would threaten the class interests of his brethren, you would see the acceptability of Bill Gates change in a very big way.

RD: Where can people find accurate information?

DB: It takes a little bit of work, but it’s there. One place is Rocky Mountain Media Watch in Denver. Left Hand Book Store in Boulder is another. There’s Z Magazine; the Nation; the Progressive; there’s American Friends Service Committee in Denver; Channel 54; Free Speech TV; there’s Alternative Radio; KGNU; there are web sites; there’s Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen in Washington D.C.; there are all kinds of environmental groups... Our area is blessed with the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center, in Boulder, an extraordinary institution, where you can participate in all kinds of peace and justice activities, whether it’s around the Middle East or East Timor or health care, or social security.

RD: Can people make a difference?

DB: There are all kinds of possibilities for getting involved, so I can’t accept the lame excuse that is sometimes offered that you can’t do anything. You can do a lot. The proof of this is, for example, the civil rights movement. One woman in 1955, Rosa Parks, decided not to sit in the back of a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. By that single action, she ignited the Montgomery bus boycott, which ignited a civil rights movement, which extended democracy to a large section of the U.S. population that had been living in apartheid. That was remarkable. People make a difference. Rachel Carson made a difference. People and corporations were using pesticides indiscriminately. She wrote Silent Spring in the early 1960s. Ralph Nader made a difference, and is making a difference. I mean his work on auto safety alone, on seat belts, on auto design, on crash-worthiness of vehicles, dashboard design, collapsible seats and all these kinds of things, may have resulted in the saving of perhaps a million lives and countless others from being badly injured. That’s remarkable. As for not getting involved, I think the planetary consequences of that kind of, I hesitate to use the word narcissism, but self-absorption, are potentially very, very damaging. The psychic consequences are very damaging, to be so self-absorbed and to be not part of the larger community and working for peace and justice and social change. I think one feels an enormous sense of accomplishment in participating in these kinds of activities, in fostering growth; individual growth as well as community growth. I’m talking about a generosity of spirit here. That’s really what’s so important. In extending oneself to others, and not just thinking "Well, I don’t have children. Why should I pay taxes for schools? That’s your problem. You have children. You decided to have them. You pay taxes." Or, I don’t have a car, therefore why should I care whether the roads are paved or not? Of course I care. I have a bike. I ride on those roads. So I should care. But it’s part of the common good. We all benefit when the general good benefits. We all participate. Just like clean air. We all need to have clean air, clean water, good food, affordable housing, and affordable health care, good schools. All of these are issues in which people can get involved. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out a lot of these important public issues. And I would encourage people to get involved on a level that they’re comfortable with, and only they would know what that is. For example, perhaps working with the East Timor Action Network might be too daunting. You might think, "I don’t know anything about international affairs. I’ve never been to Asia. But I am interested in organic food. So maybe I can get involved in a local co-op. Or one of the organic farms here in town. Maybe that’s something within my parameter. Maybe I could do more about recycling." It’s not required to take enormous steps. You can take small steps. It’s much easier to take those steps in harmony with others so you don’t have a sense of isolation that you’re just doing this on your own. You will find there are others actually in your very community who are very concerned about whatever concerns you, and you get an enormous amount of strength. And that’s why community is important.