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GG: There is a new global Pew poll that conducted a major survey of world opinion of 47 countries that was just released yesterday, and it shows that public opinion of the United States in virtually every country over the last 6 years has declined enormously. And there is a real confusion among Americans about why that is, and they have a hard time understanding why that is.
Have press failures in discussing what we are doing in the world played a role in that?
HT: I think the American people, like people all over the world, know that under international law, you only go to war if you're attacked or you have a treaty with another country to go to war if they're attacked.
An unprovoked war, based on every rationale that turns out to be untrue, certainly has caused our esteem in the world -- we are despised -- not because we gave them something and took it back. It's because we were on a pedestal. We had a halo. Everything we represented, people all over the world aspired to.
And what we did was absolutely betray those great values and principles. You do not attack a country that did nothing to you.
Have press failures in discussing what we are doing in the world played a role in that?
HT: I think the American people, like people all over the world, know that under international law, you only go to war if you're attacked or you have a treaty with another country to go to war if they're attacked.
An unprovoked war, based on every rationale that turns out to be untrue, certainly has caused our esteem in the world -- we are despised -- not because we gave them something and took it back. It's because we were on a pedestal. We had a halo. Everything we represented, people all over the world aspired to.
And what we did was absolutely betray those great values and principles. You do not attack a country that did nothing to you.
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AMY GOODMAN: We return to our interview with Academy Award-winning filmmaker Michael Moore. His new film SiCKO is being released in thousands of theaters next week. I asked Michael about the United States being ranked thirty-seventh in the world for its quality of healthcare.
MICHAEL MOORE: Yes. We’re behind Costa Rica, but ahead of Slovenia. And that’s according to the World Health Organization. It’s pretty pathetic when the richest country on earth is ranked number thirty-seven.
AMY GOODMAN: Michael Moore, you look at three -- really four -- places: France, Britain, Cuba, you spend time in, and then you go visit your relatives in Canada.
MICHAEL MOORE: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about these places and what each one has. You talk to, for example, Tony Benn, the parliamentarian, the MP in Britain. Talk about what they have and how they originated. Then we’ll talk about how we got what we have here.
MICHAEL MOORE: OK. Well, the Canadians, they have a very good system that covers everyone, and the people there are very happy with it. Basically, you pay for nothing. You choose your own doctor. You need to go to the hospital, you choose your own hospital. There’s freedom of choice. And, you know, you’ll hear the critics of the Canadian system here talk about, “Oh, the Canadians, you have to wait in line, you know, before you can get a knee replacement, or you have to wait x-number of number of weeks, you know, where you don’t have to wait in America.” You know, when I hear that, I think, well, that’s what you do when you have to share the pie. Sometimes you have to wait. You know, it’s like, I guess that’s not in our American mentality, where, you know -- to wait. You know, I want it now! Well, you know, sometimes when you -- like I said, when you’re sharing the pie, you get the first slice, you don’t have to wait; sometimes you get the third slice; sometimes you get the last slice. But the important thing to remember is, everyone gets a slice. That’s not the way it is here in this country.
Now, the British system is really government-owned, in the sense that the government owns and runs the hospitals, the government employs the doctors. And so, they work for the government, so it’s very much a government-owned and -run and -controlled program in Britain. And again, you know, everything is free. And you see the hospitals in the film. People are very happy with it. And, you know, if you know anybody that’s ever traveled to these countries, that’s had an experience of having to go into a Canadian hospital or British hospital -- I mean, like the one woman says in the film, you know, she thought it was going to be some dingy, horrible -- you know, like out of a Dickens novel or the old Soviet Union or something. And she went in there, and it was like, “Wow! This is incredible!”
France, though, is probably, if not the best, near the best of what we saw.
MICHAEL MOORE: Yes. We’re behind Costa Rica, but ahead of Slovenia. And that’s according to the World Health Organization. It’s pretty pathetic when the richest country on earth is ranked number thirty-seven.
AMY GOODMAN: Michael Moore, you look at three -- really four -- places: France, Britain, Cuba, you spend time in, and then you go visit your relatives in Canada.
MICHAEL MOORE: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about these places and what each one has. You talk to, for example, Tony Benn, the parliamentarian, the MP in Britain. Talk about what they have and how they originated. Then we’ll talk about how we got what we have here.
MICHAEL MOORE: OK. Well, the Canadians, they have a very good system that covers everyone, and the people there are very happy with it. Basically, you pay for nothing. You choose your own doctor. You need to go to the hospital, you choose your own hospital. There’s freedom of choice. And, you know, you’ll hear the critics of the Canadian system here talk about, “Oh, the Canadians, you have to wait in line, you know, before you can get a knee replacement, or you have to wait x-number of number of weeks, you know, where you don’t have to wait in America.” You know, when I hear that, I think, well, that’s what you do when you have to share the pie. Sometimes you have to wait. You know, it’s like, I guess that’s not in our American mentality, where, you know -- to wait. You know, I want it now! Well, you know, sometimes when you -- like I said, when you’re sharing the pie, you get the first slice, you don’t have to wait; sometimes you get the third slice; sometimes you get the last slice. But the important thing to remember is, everyone gets a slice. That’s not the way it is here in this country.
Now, the British system is really government-owned, in the sense that the government owns and runs the hospitals, the government employs the doctors. And so, they work for the government, so it’s very much a government-owned and -run and -controlled program in Britain. And again, you know, everything is free. And you see the hospitals in the film. People are very happy with it. And, you know, if you know anybody that’s ever traveled to these countries, that’s had an experience of having to go into a Canadian hospital or British hospital -- I mean, like the one woman says in the film, you know, she thought it was going to be some dingy, horrible -- you know, like out of a Dickens novel or the old Soviet Union or something. And she went in there, and it was like, “Wow! This is incredible!”
France, though, is probably, if not the best, near the best of what we saw.
Jun 21st
OLBERMANN: The administration has said that the president will faithfully execute the law in a manner that is consistent with the Constitution. Is the danger, though, here with the signing statements that Mr. Bush gets to interpret the Constitution his way? Is that, I mean, this may be naive and old-fashioned, but shouldn‘t, isn‘t that up to the courts?
TURLEY: It‘s supposed to be up to the courts. And, in fact, you have to remember that this president has been reversed in pretty stark terms by courts all around the country, who‘ve said that his interpretations of his own authority is not only extreme, but, at points, dangerous.
But also, he‘s not interpreting the Constitution when he‘s rewriting these laws. The Constitution is perfectly clear. It‘s not subject to interpretation on this point. Congress writes the law. He can veto it, but he can‘t rewrite it. And when you look at these laws, that‘s what he‘s doing. Notably, many of these laws that he has refused to comply with involve sharing information with Congress, which is a longstanding problem with this president. He has, perhaps, the most contempt of any modern president for the separation of powers, and specifically the powers of the legislative branch.
TURLEY: It‘s supposed to be up to the courts. And, in fact, you have to remember that this president has been reversed in pretty stark terms by courts all around the country, who‘ve said that his interpretations of his own authority is not only extreme, but, at points, dangerous.
But also, he‘s not interpreting the Constitution when he‘s rewriting these laws. The Constitution is perfectly clear. It‘s not subject to interpretation on this point. Congress writes the law. He can veto it, but he can‘t rewrite it. And when you look at these laws, that‘s what he‘s doing. Notably, many of these laws that he has refused to comply with involve sharing information with Congress, which is a longstanding problem with this president. He has, perhaps, the most contempt of any modern president for the separation of powers, and specifically the powers of the legislative branch.
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SARAH: In your book, you say, “Lurking beneath the surface of every society, including ours, is the passionate yearning for a nationalist cause that exalts us ... the kind that war alone is able to deliver.” That yearning suggest that we’re always going to be either at war or on the brink of war. Do you see any forces can temper that tendency?
CHRIS: The only force that is powerful enough to subvert the force of war is love. Love is never organized. Love is always individual love. Love is a force that is built between two human beings. In wartime, everything is done to subvert that force.
I don’t know that there’s an organized force that can stand up to the allure of war, which gives us a sense of empowerment—allows us to be part of a cause, to ennoble ourselves, to rise above our small stations in life.
The need to find meaning like that, I think, is an indication of the huge deficit of our emotional life. In conflict after conflict, those who are able to remain sane, who were never able to hate the perfidious enemy (who, in places like the Balkans, were often their neighbors), were those who had good relationships, those who were in love.
I think particularly, in the war in Bosnia, of a Serb woman and her husband who took in two Muslim children and cared for them during the conflict, although they were ridiculed for it by everyone else in the town.
In the grand scheme of things, those small acts of resistance end up being more powerful than we suspect at the time, if nothing else, because they remind us what moral behavior is. When you live in the midst of war, when incredibly powerful weapons are being deployed to kill you, these acts often appear futile, even absurd. Ultimately, I think they are not.
CHRIS: The only force that is powerful enough to subvert the force of war is love. Love is never organized. Love is always individual love. Love is a force that is built between two human beings. In wartime, everything is done to subvert that force.
I don’t know that there’s an organized force that can stand up to the allure of war, which gives us a sense of empowerment—allows us to be part of a cause, to ennoble ourselves, to rise above our small stations in life.
The need to find meaning like that, I think, is an indication of the huge deficit of our emotional life. In conflict after conflict, those who are able to remain sane, who were never able to hate the perfidious enemy (who, in places like the Balkans, were often their neighbors), were those who had good relationships, those who were in love.
I think particularly, in the war in Bosnia, of a Serb woman and her husband who took in two Muslim children and cared for them during the conflict, although they were ridiculed for it by everyone else in the town.
In the grand scheme of things, those small acts of resistance end up being more powerful than we suspect at the time, if nothing else, because they remind us what moral behavior is. When you live in the midst of war, when incredibly powerful weapons are being deployed to kill you, these acts often appear futile, even absurd. Ultimately, I think they are not.
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AMY GOODMAN: John Perkins, what do you see as the solutions right now?
JOHN PERKINS: Well, you know, Amy, this empire that we’ve created really has an emperor, and it’s not the president of this country. The President serves, you know, for a short period of time. But it doesn't really matter whether we have a Democrat or a Republican in the White House or running Congress; the empire goes on, because it’s really run by what I call the corporatocracy, which is a group of men who run our biggest corporations. This isn’t a conspiracy theory. They don’t need to conspire. They all know what serves their best interest. But they really are the equivalent of the emperor, because they do not serve at the wish of the people, they’re not democratically elected, they don’t serve any limited term. They essentially answer to no one, except their own boards, and most corporate CEOs actually run their boards, rather than the other way around. And they are the power behind this.
And so, if we want to turn this around, we have to impact them very strongly, which means that we have to change the corporations, which is their power base. And what I feel very strongly is that today corporations exists for the primary purpose of making large profits, making a few very rich people a lot richer on a quarterly basis, on a daily basis, on a very short-term basis. That shouldn't be. There is no reason for that to be.
Corporations have been defined as individuals. Individuals have to be good citizens. Corporations need to be good citizens. They need to take -- their primary goal must be to take care of their employees, their customers and all the people around the world who provide the resources that go into making this world run, and to take care of the environments and the communities where those people live.
We must get the corporations to redefine themselves, and I think it’s very realistic that we can do so. Every corporate executive out there is smart enough to realize that he’s running a very failed system. As an economist, as a rational person, nobody can conclude anything otherwise. If you look at the fact that less than 5% of the world's population live in the United States and we consume more than 25% of the world's resources and create over 30% of its major pollution, you can only conclude that we’ve created a very flawed and failed system. This is not a model that can be sold to the Chinese or the Indians or the Africans or the Middle Easterners or the Latin Americans. We can’t even continue with it ourselves. It has to change. And corporate executives know that. They’re smart individuals. I believe that they want to see change.
And when we have really pushed them to change, we’ve been extremely successful. For example, we’ve got them to clean up rivers that were terribly polluted in the 1970s in this country. We got them to get rid of the aerosol cans that were destroying the ozone layer. We got them to change their policies toward hiring and promoting minorities and women. We’ve gotten them to put seatbelts in cars and airbags, against their initial resistance. We’ve got them to change tremendously in any specific area where we’ve set out to do that.
Now, it behooves us, we must convince them that their corporations need to be institutions to make this a better world, rather than institutions that serve a few very rich people and their goal is to make those people even richer. We need to turn this around. We must.
JOHN PERKINS: Well, you know, Amy, this empire that we’ve created really has an emperor, and it’s not the president of this country. The President serves, you know, for a short period of time. But it doesn't really matter whether we have a Democrat or a Republican in the White House or running Congress; the empire goes on, because it’s really run by what I call the corporatocracy, which is a group of men who run our biggest corporations. This isn’t a conspiracy theory. They don’t need to conspire. They all know what serves their best interest. But they really are the equivalent of the emperor, because they do not serve at the wish of the people, they’re not democratically elected, they don’t serve any limited term. They essentially answer to no one, except their own boards, and most corporate CEOs actually run their boards, rather than the other way around. And they are the power behind this.
And so, if we want to turn this around, we have to impact them very strongly, which means that we have to change the corporations, which is their power base. And what I feel very strongly is that today corporations exists for the primary purpose of making large profits, making a few very rich people a lot richer on a quarterly basis, on a daily basis, on a very short-term basis. That shouldn't be. There is no reason for that to be.
Corporations have been defined as individuals. Individuals have to be good citizens. Corporations need to be good citizens. They need to take -- their primary goal must be to take care of their employees, their customers and all the people around the world who provide the resources that go into making this world run, and to take care of the environments and the communities where those people live.
We must get the corporations to redefine themselves, and I think it’s very realistic that we can do so. Every corporate executive out there is smart enough to realize that he’s running a very failed system. As an economist, as a rational person, nobody can conclude anything otherwise. If you look at the fact that less than 5% of the world's population live in the United States and we consume more than 25% of the world's resources and create over 30% of its major pollution, you can only conclude that we’ve created a very flawed and failed system. This is not a model that can be sold to the Chinese or the Indians or the Africans or the Middle Easterners or the Latin Americans. We can’t even continue with it ourselves. It has to change. And corporate executives know that. They’re smart individuals. I believe that they want to see change.
And when we have really pushed them to change, we’ve been extremely successful. For example, we’ve got them to clean up rivers that were terribly polluted in the 1970s in this country. We got them to get rid of the aerosol cans that were destroying the ozone layer. We got them to change their policies toward hiring and promoting minorities and women. We’ve gotten them to put seatbelts in cars and airbags, against their initial resistance. We’ve got them to change tremendously in any specific area where we’ve set out to do that.
Now, it behooves us, we must convince them that their corporations need to be institutions to make this a better world, rather than institutions that serve a few very rich people and their goal is to make those people even richer. We need to turn this around. We must.
Jun 5th
The Book that Should Be on President Bush’s Reading...
Jun 5th
AMY GOODMAN: Well, before we go further, “economic hit men” -- for those who haven’t heard you describe this, let alone describe yourself as this, what do you mean?
JOHN PERKINS: Well, really, I think it’s fair to say that since World War II, we economic hit men have managed to create the world's first truly global empire, and we've done it primarily without the military, unlike other empires in history. We've done it through economics very subtly.
We work many different ways, but perhaps the most common one is that we will identify a third world country that has resources our corporations covet, such as oil, and then we arrange a huge loan to that country from the World Bank or one of its sister organizations. The money never actually goes to the country. It goes instead to US corporations, who build big infrastructure projects -- power grids, industrial parks, harbors, highways -- things that benefit a few very rich people but do not reach the poor at all. The poor aren’t connected to the power grids. They don’t have the skills to get jobs in industrial parks. But they and the whole country are left holding this huge debt, and it’s such a big bet that the country can't possibly repay it. So at some point in time, we economic hit men go back to the country and say, “Look, you know, you owe us a lot of money. You can't pay your debt, so you’ve got to give us a pound of flesh.”
JOHN PERKINS: Well, really, I think it’s fair to say that since World War II, we economic hit men have managed to create the world's first truly global empire, and we've done it primarily without the military, unlike other empires in history. We've done it through economics very subtly.
We work many different ways, but perhaps the most common one is that we will identify a third world country that has resources our corporations covet, such as oil, and then we arrange a huge loan to that country from the World Bank or one of its sister organizations. The money never actually goes to the country. It goes instead to US corporations, who build big infrastructure projects -- power grids, industrial parks, harbors, highways -- things that benefit a few very rich people but do not reach the poor at all. The poor aren’t connected to the power grids. They don’t have the skills to get jobs in industrial parks. But they and the whole country are left holding this huge debt, and it’s such a big bet that the country can't possibly repay it. So at some point in time, we economic hit men go back to the country and say, “Look, you know, you owe us a lot of money. You can't pay your debt, so you’ve got to give us a pound of flesh.”
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More posts = more attention?
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Structured Procrastination
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MM: In Big Coal, you juxtapose the coal industry to Silicon Valley and its culture of entrepreneurship and innovation. Why has the coal industry been so resistant to technological change and adaptation?
Goodell: Because for the last 100 years, they’ve relied on political leverage and power to protect themselves from market forces.
That was the great innovation of Samuel Insull, sort of the Steve Jobs of the electric power industry. A protégé of Edison’s, he took over his own power company, Commonwealth Edison, in Chicago and operated in the 1920s. His great innovation was the idea that utilities were a natural monopoly. He proposed the creation of a quasi-regulatory body called a public utilities commission, which he knew he could control. And so the utilities have had a protected monopoly on electric power generation in America.
Today’s electric power industry is a legacy of that original vision of Samuel Insull. They are only just now beginning to have to deal with market forces, and they don’t like it. Because of the enormous political influence of Big Coal — the mining companies, the railroads and the energy companies that burn coal — and because of the complexities of electrical power generation, they have a very powerful position to put off any kind of changes and to continue with the status quo. And that is pretty much what they are doing.
Goodell: Because for the last 100 years, they’ve relied on political leverage and power to protect themselves from market forces.
That was the great innovation of Samuel Insull, sort of the Steve Jobs of the electric power industry. A protégé of Edison’s, he took over his own power company, Commonwealth Edison, in Chicago and operated in the 1920s. His great innovation was the idea that utilities were a natural monopoly. He proposed the creation of a quasi-regulatory body called a public utilities commission, which he knew he could control. And so the utilities have had a protected monopoly on electric power generation in America.
Today’s electric power industry is a legacy of that original vision of Samuel Insull. They are only just now beginning to have to deal with market forces, and they don’t like it. Because of the enormous political influence of Big Coal — the mining companies, the railroads and the energy companies that burn coal — and because of the complexities of electrical power generation, they have a very powerful position to put off any kind of changes and to continue with the status quo. And that is pretty much what they are doing.
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