Norman Solomon interview,
Greg Speeter interview
Jody Williams interview,
Max Wolff interview
[January
2, 2004]
from the book
Hijacking Catastrophe
9/11, Fear and the Selling of
American Empire
edited by Sut Jhally and Jeremy
Earp
Olive Branch Press, 2004, paper
Norman Solomon, October 2003
p241
You don't need to be a rocket scientist or a social scientist
to know that if you're Tom Brokaw, and you're working for General
Electric when you work for NBC, and General Electric is a military
contractor, that if you launch an investigative series about war
profiteering in the United States, it's not exactly going to enhance
your career in that network. But Brokaw is not as good an example
as many others who are not famous, or who have less income and
less job security.
p242
If you're going to have US journalists embedded with the American
troops, then you should also have journalists embedded with the
Iraqi civilians. If you had had just as many American reporters
embedded with the families in Iraq who were dealing with 2,000-pound
bombs and cruise missiles exploding in their neighborhoods, then
you might have had a much more balanced perspective as a TV viewer
or reader or listener.
p243
... propaganda is about repetition ...
p243
Terror is an emotion, an experience; it is a human disaster at
an experiential level. It's not something that you can make war
on. That is like saying we're going to have a war on fear. Calling
this a "War on Terror" ...
p244
... we're in a realm where in the name of waging war against terror,
the US government terrorizes, and it does so against civilians
on a very large scale.
p245
There was an idolatry there (Iraq war), a kind of gods of metal
worship that ... is an extreme perversion in human terms. It's
not enough for us to be told to accept this war; we're really
encouraged to gain some kind of vicarious pleasure from it.
p252
If you look at the history of Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and
Arnold Schwarzenegger, who's a kind of Reagan on steroids, it
is at first incomprehensible that these people could be governor
of California, let alone president of the United States. But we're
acculturated to accept this. These folks are truly figureheads.
They have a personal role that they play, but they're serving
a function and there's that interplay between personalities. They're
really products and they're obviously serving huge multibillion-dollar
corporate agendas. So it's fascinating to talk about the persona
and the individual of George W. Bush. Yet at the end of the very
dire day that we find ourselves in the midst of, we're really
talking about an entire system that's cranked up for war and profiteering.
That's our challenge: to go beyond the personalities and see that
we have Reaganism without Reagan and Bushism without Bush when
he goes on his merry way. I think of it as a symbolic Mr. McGoo
presidency. It's the happy face put on the death machine, the
smiley sticker that is plastered onto the missiles and the bombs,
as the American flag was used.
p252
There are elements of near-fascism in the first George W. Bush
administration. Some of the policies, such as the Patriot Act,
the suspension of habeas corpus, the kind of confluence of militarism
and corporatism and jingoism, the erosion of civil liberties and
so forth, the idea that it's okay to attack basically any country
in the world at the say-so of the US president-there are some
policies with proximity to elements of fascism already in place.
I don't think we should wait to see how fascist a second term
of George W. Bush could turn out to be.
*****
Greg Speeter, December 2003
p255
Throughout history there's been tension between the amount of(
money that countries are willing to spend on social programs versus
what they spend on the military, and so people have traditionally
considered guns versus butter one of the big debates in economic
and social policy making. Certainly it's been a central issue
for us over the last 30 to 40 years. In the '60s, the Vietnam
War substantially cut back our ability to address the war on poverty.
In the '80s, the Reagan military budget led to significant cutbacks
in social spending. Really, when you look at the numbers, you
see that over the past 20 years we have cut back a trillion dollars
in housing, in education, in job training, in many other kinds
of spending. People felt that once the cold war was over, we'd
be able to put more money into butter, into social services and
programs. In fact, mayors throughout the country have asked for
an economic Marshall Plan, a peace dividend, to address our community
needs. That really never happened. We cut back a little bit in
military spending, but really ended up putting that money into
dealing with the national debt. Then came the Bush budget. George
W. Bush increased military spending from about 312 billion dollars
to 400 billion dollars in roughly three years. That immediately
began once again to make it very difficult to put any money into
social spending, because we were putting all of our money into
the Pentagon and preparing for war. So the big argument has always
been guns versus butter, and at this point, given the amount of
money that the Bush administration wants to spend on the military,
there's really no money that we can spend to address some of our
most pressing needs. Take health insurance, for example. In the
'90s, people were talking about providing health insurance for
everybody, but the fact is that 43 million people are now uninsured.
We've already gone from 41 million people to 43 million people
uninsured in just the last two years. At the same time, poverty's
increased, and talking about providing health insurance or addressing
educational needs is now really off the radar screen. 'What people
are now talking about is addressing terrorism or addressing war.
p256
... Grover Norquist, one of the most prominent of the neoconservative
tax policy experts, has said that he'd like to see the federal
government shrink to the size where he could flush it down the
toilet. Well, I think that's what's beginning to happen. We aren't
able to address health care, we aren't able to address education,
we aren't able to address many of these needs because the money
just isn't there. We're increasing a deficit that's already out
of sight, even though we managed to get it under control throughout
the '90s. Now we're seeing that deficit go to levels we've never
seen been before, and we know what the result will be. The federal
government will say we just don't have the money to deal with
some of our basic needs.
p257
This country ... is facing severe economic needs. Cities and towns
just don't have the money that they used to have. State governments
have said that they are in the worst fiscal crisis that they've
experienced in the last 50 years. So the entities that are really
receiving the brunt of these economic policies are our communities.
You're seeing in city after city; local governments cutting back
in fire and police, basic security; cutting back in education,
cutting back in other basic services that we used to take for
granted. What's really big government is then military. Just look
at where our tax dollar really goes. Forty-nine cents out of every
tax dollar is either going to the Pentagon or to interest on the
debt. Very little money is really going back into our communities,
much less than what was going back in the '60s and the '70s.
p257
The Project for the New American Century is clearly focused on
military spending and foreign policy, but it's part of a much
larger attempt by neoconservatives to take over and attempt to
decimate the role of government for most people. There are some
very real implications when we increase military spending, which
is precisely what they called for prior to September 11. In the
most general terms, it means we have fewer dollars to address
other needs. I think it's important for people to understand just
how big our military budget is, to make that the context for understanding
their demand for increasing it further. One indicator of the size
of our military budget is to compare it to what other countries
spend. The United States spends, at $400 billion this year, about
as much as much as the rest of the world combined. There is no
doubt that we have the most fire-power, our soldiers are far superior
to any other soldiers, our military is far more sophisticated
than any other in the world. This was true in 2000, when the Project
for the New American Century called for increasing defense spending
by $20 billion a year. Well, we've done that. We've done better
than that, so they've done very well in seeing their vision realized
as the military budget has gone up almost $100 billion in three
years. But it's important to take a look at how much we spend
on the military compared to other things. In fact, if you add
up the amount that the federal government is now spending on education,
how much we spend on job training, food and nutrition programs,
a variety of other
p258
The [Iraq] war effort is another $141 billion just in the year
2003 alone. The military budget is one tiling, that's the Pentagon,
but we have to pay extra to pay for a war. So in fact we've had
two payments for this war so far that have added up to $141 billion,
and that's an incredible amount of money. We could provide health
insurance for each of the 12 million children that don't have
health insurance for the next seven years with that $141 billion.
We could provide 1.4 million affordable housing units and totally
address our affordable housing crisis. We could provide 3 million
jobs with that kind of money, rebuild every school in this country
that needs to be rebuilt, and provide jobs for 60,000 teachers
for the next four years.
p258
The neoconservative movement really represents a very radical
approach to the role of the federal government. It's basically
trying to cut back the ability of the federal government to address
many of its community needs by increasing the military budget.
When you look at their policy proposals, I think it's clear they
want to cut back on the very positive things that have happened
since the '30s, since FDR and the New Deal.
*****
Jody Williams, January 2004
p274
Why aren't we invading Burma? It has been controlled by a military
dictatorship since the late '80s. Why aren't we overthrowing Musharraf
in Pakistan, who took over the country by coup, who refuses to
give the democracy that he said he was going to give to the government?
Why are we in bed with all of the -stans, you know, Tajikistan,
Turkmenistan, our latest new friends, who are horrific dictators
that do not allow freedom of expression, human rights, etc., etc.,
in their countries?
We support democracy when it is convenient
to the interests of the United States. Maybe I'm an idealist to
believe that there should be some sort of standard for determining
how we conduct our foreign policy, but I believe there should
be a standard. We are seen in the world as hypocrites, we are
seen as liars, we are seen as an imperialist power. It is tragic
that Americans for the most part don't really understand how much
the United States government is hated around the world.
p277
They don't have to do anything. If they scare you so much you
don't dare say what you think... that's the beginning of totalitarianism
...
p279
It's human nature to want to believe our leaders. You want to
believe all the mythologies that you're taught. I'm actually working
on a book right now that has come out of two years of listening
to people express their ignorance about American foreign policy.
Trying to give people just a basic primer to understand the huge
gap between the mythology of American values and how the values
really play out in foreign policy. It's that gap in the foreign
policy that makes the rest of the world hate us and see us as
imperialist hypocrites. But Americans are just fairly ignorant
of the history of this country and so they are unaware. They want
to believe that we really stand for democracy everywhere. That
we really stand for freedom of expression and a strong, viable
free press and the right to dissent, and it's ridiculous. Sometimes
we do; often we don't.
*****
Max Wolff, April 2003
p285
We have the most unequal distribution of wealth in the developed
world ...
p287
[There is] ... purposeful upward wealth redistribution. There
is no serious economic debate on what this is and has been producing-rising
inequality. There's been intentional reduction in the equity of
the system. In other words, we're rewarding the highest income
groups more than ever before in terms of our tax models, at least
more than since the era of managed capitalism began in the '30s.
State finances are squeezed and services are cut-redistributing
wealth from the many to the few. You target the highest income
people for the largest tax cuts for one of two reasons: either
you are corrupt and paying back people who donated to your campaign,
or you honestly believe that trickledown works. Assuming you are
not corrupt, you would seek to return wealth disproportionately
to the wealthiest people hoping they spend it, creating an economy
built around meeting elite needs and desires. A vast service class
catering to whims for luxury goods, private professional services,
vacations homes, resorts and spas, and private doctors will be
built up around private decisions to spend. Sound familiar?
In addition you need to crush union movements,
limit corporate oversight and the ability to file lawsuits. You
would want to limit environmental standards, state regulatory
authority, and corporate taxation. Much of this has been done,
and so attention is coming to center on directly subsidizing private
firms with public monies. Cost plus contracting and privatizing
would then be favored. Wars are a popular way to transfer wealth
and silence criticism at the same time. I would assume you'd have
to believe the trickle-down theory, or that its just a smash-and-grab
gangsterism.
p290
... corporations and the Administration are essentially one and
the same.
p291
The idea that runs throughout the Bush Departments of State and
Defense is that this is a new economic period; it is not one of
corporate battles, although that's the rhetoric. It's one in which
the power of the US central state will be systematically brought
to bear at great cost in lives, both American and foreign, at
great cost in resources, both American and foreign, to secure
for American firms, and for America, a dominant position in the
next century.
p292
Increased military spending benefits the economy because any spending
would. If the government bought textbooks, that would also benefit
the economy, only we'd be left with more kids with high school
and college degrees instead of more unexploded ordinances in Third
World countries. Both are spending; they both inject money into
the economy. All expenditures fund the purchase and sale of goods
and services that benefit the overall economy. But if you build
up a giant arsenal, the temptation to use it is higher and it
means that money is channeled to contractors who reap the profits.
Hijacking
Catastrophe
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