Pacifica Radio’s Guns and Butter has stayed on the drumbeat coverage of the revolutionary economic school of thought, Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), broadcasting extensive audio from the grassroots economic summit in Rimini, Italy produced by journalist Paolo Barnard:  Summit Modern Money Theory 2012.  At Media Roots, we’ve covered the entire series.  With this week’s instalment, Dr. Stephanie Kelton’s discussion includes:

“Myths about taxation and government revenues in a sovereign currency situation; debts and deficits; full social security and price stability; the use of sectoral balances to analyze the financial position of the different sectors of the macro economy; the three sectors of the macro economy; the two rules governing the three sectors; the financial balance model.”

Messina

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GUNS AND BUTTER — “MMT emphasises the relationship between the state’s power over its money and its power to do things, real things, to conduct policy in an unconstrained way.  It emphasises that the state, because of its power over money, has a form of power to command resources in the economy.”  —Dr. Stephanie Kelton

“I’m Bonnie Faulkner.  Today on Guns and Butter:  Stephanie Kelton.  Today’s show:  Modern Money Theory Explained.

“Today’s presentation was given at the first Italian grassroots economic summit on Modern Money Theory in Rimini, Italy in February, 2012.

“Stephanie Kelton is associate professor of economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, research scholar at the Levy Economics Institute, and director of graduate student research at the Center for Full Employment and Price Stability.”  

Dr. Stephanie Kelton (c. 1:45):  “I’m going to cover some new ground.  And I’m also gonna go back and talk a little bit about a few really important concepts in MMT, that Paolo [Barnard] asked me to spend some more time talking about because I, maybe, went a little bit too quickly in one of the previous lessons.  So, let’s talk about MMT.  And why we think it’s such a revolutionary way to think about so many important economic questions.

“A day ago, two days ago, I forget, I’ve been awake a long time.  The Financial Times ran an article on MMT.  It was a big deal for us in terms of getting these ideas out there, into the mainstream and taken seriously by politicians, financial writers, and journalists, academics, and even into the hands of regular people, who pick up and read the papers.  
(c. 2:53)  “The Financial Times piece said that seeing MMT is like seeing an autostereogram, those images that look wavy and like there’s no picture.  But if you let your eyes rest long enough, the picture becomes clear.  And this is how the Financial Times described MMT.  Some people might see it right away.  And others will have to spend more time wrestling in their minds with some of the ideas because they’re so counter to everything, that we’ve been taught and that we thought we understood about money and government deficits and debt.  

(c. 3:39)  “And, so, I wanna go back and talk again about some of those important concepts.  We think, most people think, that the government collects taxes from us.  And raises money by selling bonds, so that it can finance its expenditures:  ‘The government needs our money, in order to spend.’  But MMT rejects that.  MMT says that a sovereign currency issuer doesn’t have to go out and get the currency from the users in the economy.  The sovereign currency spends its own IOUs, it spends its own money.  It creates its own currency. 

(c. 4:32) “Not only that, but the taxes they collect from us can’t actually finance anything.  And the bonds, that are sold to raise revenue for the state, in a sovereign government, also doesn’t pay for government spending.

“We think of two aspects of monetary channels.  We think of a vertical channel; this is where state money becomes important.  MMT emphasises that the state spends by issuing, what we call, high-powered money.  High-powered money is a fancy word for the currency of the state, the notes, the coins, and also the liabilities of the central bank, that are called bank reserves.

(c. 5:27)  “When you and I write a check to the government to pay our taxes, the check goes through a process where our bank account gets debited; and the numbers go down.  A government account gets a credit; and the numbers go up.  But the money supply, the high-powered money itself, the liabilities of the state are destroyed in the process.  They are eliminated from balance sheets.  The money has gone down the drain and it can’t be used to finance anything.  

(c. 6:07)  “In addition to the vertical money—the state money—there is a horizontal aspect in any modern monetary system.  Most of the transactions in the private sector don’t involve the government, but private-issued credit money.  We can think of this as the leveraging of state money.  So, high-powered money is the liability of the government.  It sits at the top of the pyramid.  And the private sector uses the government’s money to leverage the creation of its own IOUs, its own money, its own debt.

(c. 6:58)  “In all modern systems, the central bank targets an overnight interest rate.  And then it supplies reserves, on demand, horizontally, at the interest rate, that it sets.  It also drains any excess reserves using what we call open market operations, buying and selling government bonds to hit its overnight interest rate target.  So, bonds are thought of, more appropriately, not as a financing tool, but as an instrument of monetary policy.  Bonds help the government coordinate the reserve add, that is caused by its government spending, with the reserve drain, that’s caused by the collection of taxes.

“In the US, the Treasury and the Fed have a very complex way of coordinating the government’s fiscal operations.  Many of us in the MMT school have written about this.  It is very complex.  It involves a lot of institutional detail and it isn’t something, that we need to cover here today.  If you’re interested in finding out how the very detailed operations work, you can look for something published by Scott Fullwiler on the New Economic Perspectives blog.  You can look back at an article I published in 2000, in the Journal of Economic Issues, that was called ‘Do Taxes and Bonds Finance Government Spending?‘

(c. 8:52)  “And, of course, Randy Wray’s book, Understanding Modern Money, also deals with some of this.  But I’m gonna skip over the operational details and just tell you that when government spends it adds new money to the banking system.  When government collects taxes, it takes money out of the banking system.  If the government spends more than it takes out, we say that the government has run a deficit.  The deficit leaves extra reserves in the banking system.  And this triggers a response by the central bank.  The extra reserves push the interest rate down.  This is different from what conventional economics teaches us.  Conventional economics teaches that a government deficit should push interest rates up because the government is thought to compete for some limited pool of savings, and if you want to increase your deficit, you have to pay a higher price to get some of those savings.  MMT rejects that.

“We understand that the state creates money, that money is not scarce, that the government doesn’t borrow household saving to finance its deficit, but rather spends first, creating the reserves, that it then drains by selling bonds.  So, the private sector loses the reserves and gains the government bonds.  This is how bonds are used to maintain interest rates in a sovereign currency setting. 

“We use a graph.  I don’t know how helpful it is.  But the vertical component, is this component, that goes straight up and down, and it shows that Treasury spending adds high-powered money (HPM), that builds up in banks until we pay taxes and then some of that money goes down the drain or banks use the state money to create their own liabilities, lending to private citizens and to private firms, leveraging the state’s money.

(c. 11:31)  “So, this is what we like to think of as the vertical and horizontal parts of the story in MMT.  It incorporates the credit theory of money, endogenous money theory, and state money.  It’s all related to Lerner’s Theory of Functional Finance.  In that piece that Lerner wrote, entitled ‘Functional Finance and the Federal Debt,’ Lerner explained that taxes don’t finance anything.  The government can’t spend the money it collects.  It’s eliminated.  And he understood that bond sales are a tool for conducting monetary policy.  Conventional economics teaches that bonds are a tool for fiscal policy, that they are financing tools.  MMT views that very differently.  The bonds are important because they allow the central bank to sell and buy bonds, adding and draining reserves from the banking system in order to hit its interest rate target.  

(c. 12:44)  “So, we should reject the orthodox theory because it’s wrong.  Conventional wisdom on government finance, taxes, and bonds is incorrect.  The conventional theory is that if the government were to finance its spending by creating new money that it would be inflationary, hyperinflationary, they usually say.  But, in fact, as MMT shows, all government spending is, by definition, financed by the creation of new money.  Sometimes, people think that we’re proposing that government do something different, that MMT says sovereign governments should finance their spending by creating new money.  We’re just describing the way they do it now.  So, this isn’t a policy proposal.  It isn’t going to lead to inflation because they already do it that way and it’s not inflationary.

(c. 13:52)  “The orthodox position again suggests that the government sells bonds and that they have to compete for some little, limited, pool of financial resource that’s out there, and if the government wants a piece of that pool and private firms want a piece and households want a piece, we have to outbid one another, and the price of those savings goes up.  The argument in the textbooks is that as the price goes up, the interest rate rises, that this crowds out other forms of spending.  The government comes in and sees that pool and says I want this piece, pushes the interest rate up for all of the other borrowers who want to borrow.  

(c. 14:43)  “And, so, it crowds out the more efficient kinds of private sector spending to make room for the inefficient big government spending.  This is the conventional story.  But, of course, this is wrong.  The bonds are sold in order to take back government money that was created by running the government deficit in the first place.  So, the deficit creates the money that is then made available for purchasing the bonds.  The pool of resources is not limited.  It grows with deficit spending.

“So, everything that the conventional story teaches, what students in any economics class, in any classroom—as we were told yesterday, in Italy they’re being exposed to an orthodox, neoclassical version of economics that doesn’t apply to governments that issue a sovereign currency.”

Bonnie Faulkner (c. 15:54):  “You’re listening to professor and research scholar, Stephanie Kelton.  Today’s show:  ‘Modern Money Theory Explained.’  I’m Bonnie Faulkner.  This is Guns and Butter.  

Dr. Stephanie Kelton: “MMT emphasises the relationship between the state’s power over its money and its power to do things, real things, to conduct policy in an unconstrained way.  It emphasises that the state, because of its power over money, has a form of power to command resources in the economy.  The state imposes the tax; that allows the state to get people to want to work and produce and provide things to the state in order to get the money that they need to settle the tax liability.  This way, the state has command over how to use society’s resources.  It’s not something that’s immediately obvious, but it’s central to MMT.  

(c. 17:06)  “And, so, at an event like this, what we want to do, as much as anything, is to lift that veil that conceals the potential that the state has to use the monetary system in the public interest. [Applause]

“We talked a little bit yesterday about how economists think about the problem of unemployment.  Essentially, there are three options when it comes to dealing with the inevitability of unemployment in any market economy.  Pure unemployment means that the unemployed sit idle, as a buffer stock of people—human beings—who get no wage and have nothing useful to do.  They are assigned no tasks and they have no income.

“Under most systems, there is some form of support for the unemployed, a safety net of some kind.  It might be unemployment compensation, a small payment made to the person who’s lost a job and can’t find one.  That payment might go on for a period of weeks, months, or even years.  All the while, the person is drawing an income, but has no tasks to perform.  

“The third option, the one that MMT prefers, is a buffer stock of, not, unemployed, but of employed people.  And I talked about this yesterday and we referred to it as an Employer of Last Resort [ELR] programme or a Job Guarantee.  In a programme like this, when a person loses a job in the private sector or in the public sector, they have another job to go to.  The government does not allow them to sit idle and to pay them to do nothing.  It assigns them a useful task, something society needs done.  They get a wage.  And they get a task.

“We mentioned yesterday that Argentina implemented a form of a Job Guarantee, theirs was called the Jefes Programme.  It offered a job to the head of household.  It gave them a useful task and it paid them a basic wage.  It was highly successful.

“ELR provides people with a transition job, as the economy goes through its normal business cycle of ups and downs.  And then business lay off and then rehire workers, these people have a place to go.  They don’t sit idle in the unemployed pool.  They work in a pool of employed people.  

“The Job Guarantee programme performs the task of a genuine automatic stabiliser; no government bureaucrat has to decide whether to spend when unemployment increases.  No bureaucrat has to decide; it happens automatically.  If you become unemployed and you would like to participate in the Job Guarantee programme, you show up and you’re assigned a task and paid a wage.  You may receive training while you’re in the programme.  When the private sector recovers and begins hiring again, workers will flow out of the Job Guarantee pool and back into other forms of employment.  In this way, the Job Guarantee is a buffer stock programme.  It buffers the economy against the inevitable economic cycle.  So, society gets workers performing useful tasks; the people get to do something useful that makes them feel like they are contributing members of society.  They have wages and benefits instead of nothing or a very minimum with probably no benefit.  

“We’ve never had a Job Guarantee programme in the U.S.  But we did have an interesting programme that did many of the same kinds of things.  Someone in the audience asked yesterday about Roosevelt’s New Deal.  When Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president and the U.S. economy was in the throes of the Great Depression, Roosevelt instituted an alphabet soup of jobs programmes:  the WPA was the Works Progress Administration, my grandfather, one of them, worked in the WPA; the CCC was the Civilian Conservation Corps.  Some of you have asked about environmental problems and whether MMT has anything to say about environmental policy or energy policy.  The CCC was very much concerned with the environmental aspects.  The NYA was the National Youth Administration.  This was a programme designed, specifically, to deal with the problem of youth unemployment, which we know is a very serious problem in many parts of Europe today.

(c. 22:59)  “Roosevelt’s programmes hired the unemployed, gave them a wage, and gave them something useful to do.  They built hospitals, schools, parks, bridges, roadways, airports, stadiums, and much, much more.  They rebuilt America.  The programmes employed millions of Americans in productive and socially useful jobs.  Builders, architects, engineers, and even painters, poets, and actors were employed in these programmes.  But this is something on a huge scale.  It requires the ability to run large government deficits.  It requires sovereign money.  With sovereign currency and a commitment to functional finance, people can design a democracy that works for them. 

“When the people understand this, it eliminates for the policymaker their excuse for not acting.  They cannot say, we don’t have the money to do it.  Whatever is physically possible is financially feasible.  The only constraints that we concern ourselves with, in MMT, are real constraints.  We have already overcome in our minds, because of the monetary system and our understanding of it, the financial constraints.  They don’t exist.  The issuer of the currency can mobilise resources to achieve public purpose.  In any democracy, the people should decide what that means.  As long as the real resources are available—when I say real resources, I mean the land, the cement, the steel, the real things you need to build roads and bridges and airports and schools, whatever it is that you decide you want and need as a people—as long as those things are available, the government, through its power to tax and spend and power to control its currency, can mobilise those resources for the benefit of all.

“Certain activities are simply too important to be left entirely to markets and their profit motive, as orthodox economics would have it.  Care for the environment, energy security, healthcare, income security for the elderly and the dependent, and so on, and so on, are too important to be left to market forces.  MMT shows us all that a new and better world is possible.

(c. 26:15)  “Okay, so I’m going to turn to a very important concept in MMT—the use of sectoral balances to analyse what’s happening to the financial positions of different sectors in the macroeconomy.  We’re gonna begin by recognising that deficits are normal.  Capitalist economies, many capitalist economies, run permanent deficits.  Surpluses are rare and fleeting in many large, rich countries in the world.  For some countries, the deficit emerges the ugly way.  The deficit appears because the economy is in trouble.  A recession causes rising unemployment and falling income.  When incomes fall, tax revenues drop off; deficits explode.  You’ve all seen that.  There’s an even uglier way to run a deficit and that is to implement fiscal austerity—recession by design.  And then there are the good deficits, the kind that MMT understands, doesn’t worry about, and supports.  The government can run a deficit by allowing its budget to expand and contract without any arbitrary limit to its size or to the time-frame, under which the deficit is allowed to be sustained.

(c. 28:10)  “With the kinds of policies that I’ve outlined, Job Guarantee and beyond, these may require the government to run deficits most, or even all, of the time.  So, the question is:  Is that good economics?” 

Bonnie Faulkner:  “You’re listening to professor and research scholar, Stephanie Kelton.  Today’s show:  ‘Modern Money Theory Explained.’  I’m Bonnie Faulkner.  This is Guns and Butter.  

Dr. Stephanie Kelton (c. 28:44): “A deficit hawk, we call them in the United States, is someone who is opposed to the deficit on principle.  A deficit hawk often favours what they call ‘sound money,’ a gold standard, a monetary union.  A deficit hawk would legislate rules that mandate balanced budgets at all times.  A deficit hawk believes that there’s no such thing as a good deficit.  And a deficit hawk supports immediate austerity to sharply reduce budget deficits.

“A deficit dove is a friendlier bird.  A deficit dove supports limited deficit spending in tough economic times.  But the doves want the government’s deficit balanced over the business cycle.  Deficits in bad times, surpluses in good times, balanced over the cycle.

“A dove supports rules to limit or constrain government spending.  Think of the Stability and Growth Pact, which allows small deficits, but also expects surpluses over the cycle.  A deficit dove recognises that the deficit is important when the economy turns down and they’re willing to run the deficit in difficult times.  But they want austerity after the economy recovers.  What are they worried about?

“Both the hawks and the doves are worried about the negative consequences of running a deficit.  They are convinced that, at some point, markets will refuse to lend at reasonable rates; interest rates will spike; the debt will become unsustainable; and they think that running large deficits will eventually lead to serious inflation.  Paul Krugman is a deficit dove.  MMT knows better.

“If the government takes advantage of its status as the issuer of the currency, the government could finance its deficit without borrowing at all.  It could be done with no bond sales.  This means no discipline from the bond markets.  No bond market vigilantes.  No solvency problem to deal with.  Interest rates would be lower, not higher, as [Paul] Krugman would suggest.  

“But what about inflation from running the economy too hot?  MMT doesn’t recommend that you run the economy too hot.  MMT recommends using deficits to bring the economy up to full employment, not to push it beyond.  This is a common criticism that we deal with from our critics who say we want huge deficits and beyond full employment and we never want them to stop and they’ll always be large, and, therefore, we must be insane.

“So, they mischaracterise us, so they can mock us.  Functional finance calls upon the government to maintain full employment and price stability.  We are as concerned with inflation, as anyone.  But we don’t view it as a serious problem when the economy is operating far below full employment with lots of available unused resources.  The government has plenty of space to push the economy before inflation should become a relative concern.

(c. 33:18)  “Okay, MMT emphasises that you cannot examine, weigh in on, give opinion to, make statements about the size of the government’s deficit or budget overall in isolation.  You cannot look at just one sector in the economy when we have a multisector economy.  You need to understand how the government’s budget is related to the rest of the economy.  To do this, we need a basic understanding of sectoral balances.  

(c. 34:03)  “So, what did the sectoral balances show?  In any given period, they show whether a particular part of the economy is spending more than its income—running a deficit—spending less than its income—running a surplus—or spending just equal to its income—balancing its budget.  We have to look at three sectors: two internal sectors—domestic sectors—and one external sector.  The internal sectors are your domestic private sector—the combination of all the households and firms in the country put together for analytical purposes—and the domestic public sector—local, state, provincial governments, national government.  Outside of the domestic sphere is the external sector.  This is the rest of the world.  We can call it the foreign sector, foreign governments, foreign households, foreign businesses. 

(c. 35:20)  “So, we have three sectors and two rules.  The two rules are that all three sectors cannot be in surplus at the same time.  And all three sectors cannot be in deficit at the same time.  These are not my rules.  These are the rules of accounting.  One person’s surplus is another person’s deficit.  The only way for one sector to run a positive balance is for at least one other sector to run a negative balance.  You might think of having three coins: heads is positive, tails is negative.  Hold three coins in your hand and flip all three, if they all come up heads, throw it out; it won’t work.  If they all come up tails, throw it out.  You can have two heads and a tail—two surpluses and a deficit—or two tails and a head—two deficits and one surplus.

(c. 36:38)  “Balance sheet rules apply.  Instinctively, we probably think there’s something inherently better about being in a surplus position. But, remember, we can’t all be in surplus at the same time.  It defies the laws of accounting.  At least one sector must be in deficit.

(c. 37:09)  “Here we see the government sector on the left and the non-government sector on the right.  The non-government sector includes domestic households, domestic firms, and the rest of the world, everyone who’s not government.  If there’s a surplus in the government sector than, by definition, there is a deficit in the non-government sector.  If the government is in deficit, then, by definition, the non-government sector is in surplus.

(c. 37:57)  “Two choices: two heads, one tail; two tails, one head.  Which one’s better?  The private sector needs to be in surplus almost all the time.  As a general rule, the private sector cannot survive in a deficit position.  Households and firms, as users of the currency, cannot continually spend more than their income.  At some point, even the financial wizards of Wall Street will run out of credit-worthy borrowers who are looking to borrow more.  When that happens, asset prices go sideways; sales soften; jobless claims go higher; and the economy turns down.  Government budget moves into deficit automatically, the ugly way.

“The private sector cannot create net wealth for itself.  Businesses, banks, and households together can borrow and lend, but every asset is offset by a liability from someone else in the private sector.  The assets and liabilities cancel each other out.  We can’t create net financial assets internally by ourselves, as a private sector.  Net financial wealth must come from outside the private sector.  

“So, where do surpluses come from?  Remember that a surplus means that your income exceeds your expenditure.  A deficit means you’re spending more than your income.  Any one of these sectors—the private sector on the left, the public sector and the foreign sector on the right—any one of them can be in deficit or surplus, but they can’t all be in deficit or surplus together. 

“If the government sector is running a deficit, it tends to add to the private sector’s surplus. 

“If the rest of the world is running a deficit against Italy, that means Italy has the surplus.  Either, a government deficit or a trade surplus will increase the private sector’s net wealth.  This is—for those of you who might’ve wondered where the equation came from—it comes from the national income accounting.  I’m just showing you, so that you know I’m legitimate.  You just move identities around.  Trust me, okay?   

(c. 41:42) “On one side of the equation, you see where our nation’s income comes from.  I call that sources of income.  On the other side of the equation, you see how we use our income.  Sources and uses have to be equal.  We can set these equations equal, move terms to other sides, and write this equation here.  Which is the important equation for us?  

(c. 42:10) “This is the difference between what the private sector is saving and spending.  This is the difference between what the public sector—the government—is spending and collecting.  This is the difference between what the rest of the world is buying from you—your exports—and what you are buying from them—imports.”

Bonnie Faulkner:  “You’re listening to professor and research scholar, Stephanie Kelton.  Today’s show:  ‘Modern Money Theory Explained.’  I’m Bonnie Faulkner.  This is Guns and Butter.”

Dr. Stephanie Kelton:  “I mentioned that if the private sector is going to be in surplus, it requires at least one other sector to be in deficit.  This is the actual data for Italy.  The red line on the bottom shows the government’s budget balance.  You can see that in every year, since 1996, the Italian government has run a deficit.  You can also see that the bigger the deficit in the government sector, the bigger the surplus in the private sector.  Indeed, they almost look like they move exactly opposite to one another.  You could even say that as the government goes down, you go up.  That’s a different way to think about the government’s deficit.  I’m not making it up.

(c. 44:08)  “Here’s Ireland.  It looks similar.  As Ireland’s government deficit exploded, so did the accumulation of financial assets—savings—in the private sector.

“Greece: similar.

“Spain: as deficits increase—here’s Spain at more than 10% deficit to GDP and here’s the Spanish private sector in surplus.

“Germany: Germany runs surpluses on occasion.  But what happened to the private sector?  As Germany’s budget moved in to surplus, you can see here in this period where the German budget was in surplus and the private sector was driven into deficit, not some place the private sector usually spends much time because the private sector can’t survive in deficit.  

(c. 45:20)  “Here’s the United Kingdom, Japan, and the United States.  The large deficits that have been run since the downturn in the economy following the financial crisis, huge deficits that have terrified the hawks, have helped the private sector rebuild and repair their balance sheets by adding to their financial savings.  This makes for a good deficit.  The reason that the two lines were not perfect mirror images in the last set of graphs was because I didn’t include the foreign sector.  I just wanted to focus you in on the relationship between the public sector’s deficit and the private sector’s surplus. 

“Here is a complete picture for the United States.  Every area in red shows you the US government’s budget position.  Anything that falls below zero indicates a public sector deficit.  You’ll notice that the U.S. government is almost always in deficit.  The blue represents the private sector’s balance.  You’ll notice that the private sector is almost always in surplus.  The green represents the foreign balance.  It’s been quite some time since the US ran a positive trade surplus.  You can see a few back in the early years.  We are now running trade deficits, sometimes, fairly substantial ones.  And that reduces the private sector’s surplus. 

“So, let’s focus in on a specific period of time.  The period in the late 1990s and early 2000s when for the first time in decades the US government ran budget surpluses.  You can see those surpluses where the red goes into positive territory.  These years here represent government budget surpluses.  Many people would inherently think that would be a good thing.  It shows fiscal responsibility.  Not only did they balance the budget, but they put it in surplus.  Meanwhile, our current account deficits were huge.  The rest of the world was running large positive balances against the US.  That reduced US private- sector savings.  Surpluses fell.  It pushed the private sector into deficit on an unprecedented scale.  The private sector went from surviving above the zero line to being pushed below zero.  And the private sector remained there for a period of years, spending more than its income, borrowing to do it.  And it was all fueled by a massive bubble economy that ended in recession, which drove the public sector’s balance back into deficit where it belongs. 

(c. 49:16)  “Okay, the last part that I want to introduce this morning is the Financial Balance Model.  We are very excited in the MMT world about this model.  It was developed by a friend of ours, who is an outstanding economist.  His name is Rob Parenteau.  He writes on the New Economics Perspectives blog.  And he came up with this model.  And it is the framework that allows us to compare all three sectors’ budget positions in a graph.  Economists like graphs.  So, in fact, it’s how you gain credibility in our world.  So, one must use models and graphs.

(c. 50:15)  “The vertical axis measures the public sector’s budget position.  If the government is in surplus, we’ll be in the top half of the graph.  If the government is in deficit, we’ll be in the bottom half of the graph.  The horizontal axis measure’s the current account, the foreign balance. 

“If you’re on the right half of the graph, the current account is in surplus. 

“If you’re on the left half of the graph, the current account is in deficit. 

“The dashed line shows the private sector’s financial balance set at zero. 

“So, every point along the dashed line is a point where the private sector has no surplus and no deficit—spending equals income.  Above the dashed line, the private sector is in deficit.  Remember what I said:  The private sector cannot survive in that territory.  Below the dashed line, the private sector is in surplus.  Okay?

(c. 51:39)  “For a country that issues a sovereign currency, fiat money, no fixed exchange rate, the world is your oyster.  You can be anywhere in the graph.  There are no rules or reasons that you can’t be located anywhere.  But remember the diagonal line, anywhere above that is unsustainable for the private sector.  So, the only sustainable space is below that line, the green line. 

“What about here for countries that use the euro?  Where are you supposed to operate?  Well, if you’re playing by the rules, your deficit is not supposed to exceed 3% of your GDP.  So, we put in a lower bound at 3%, negative.  This is the space that’s available—in theory.  What about countries in the Eurozone that run current account deficits?  Remember that current account deficit is every where to the left of the vertical line, but you can’t go below 3%.  So, countries with a current account deficit, they get that rectangle.  Countries that run current account surpluses have a different space.  A country with a current account surplus can put its private sector in surplus with a smaller public sector deficit.  

“Here’s the situation for a country that uses the euro and also runs a current account deficit.  Can you see it?  It’s a small space.  This is the space that you are given to work with.  Anything above the dashed line means a private sector deficit.  It’s not a sustainable space for you, for any of us.  You must be below the dashed line.  But you must also be above the red line.  But because you’re running a trade deficit, you’re also to the left of the vertical line.  You get only to play in that little triangle.

(c. 54:30)  “So, lets talk about what’s happened to Italy.  Germany has crushed many members of the Eurozone through its labour policies that began in the early 2000s.  Marshall [Auerback] talked last night about the Hirsch Commission and in Agenda 2012, which was Chancellor Schröder’s economic miracle, whereby Germany ‘reformed’ its labour markets by reducing the power of their labour unions and their craft guilds making it easier for their employers to fire people at will, cut unemployment benefits, so that German benefits last about half as long as benefits in the US.  They were harsh ‘reforms.’ And as they were being implemented, unemployment, initially, increased.  It hurt the German economy, but not for long because that pain was soon transferred to others. 

(c. 55:45)  “So, I want you to look at this picture:  Italy, in 1996, was running a trade surplus of more than 3% of your GDP.  You had more fiscal space before the German policies.  And now you have that little triangle.  It doesn’t give you enough policy space without breaking the Stability and Growth Pact rules it is extremely difficult for you to keep the private sector in surplus and the economy healthy.  I would say it’s impossible. 

(c. 56:22)  “Italy makes it into the small triangle, but not often.  Most of the time, though, your deficits have been large enough to compensate for the trade deficits that you run and you’ve been able to keep your private sector in surplus.  But that’s because the rules were broken.  If you had played by the rules, for the last 14 years, you would have been successful three times.

“Ireland would never be successful.  The space is just too small.

“You see Greece.  The triangle for Greece is way up in the corner.  They can’t play by these restrictive rules, either.

(c. 57:05)  “Same problem for Spain.

“Germany, on the other hand does brilliantly, almost every point is to the right of the green line where the private sector is in surplus.  Although, Germany breaks the Stability and Growth rules, like everyone else.  It’s the large current account surpluses that Germany runs, thanks to all of you.  It’s the secret to their success.  It’s why they can run smaller deficits, stay out of trouble.  You are financing it.”

Bonnie Faulkner (c. 57:57):  “You’ve been listening to professor and research scholar, Stephanie Kelton at the Summit on Modern Money Theory in Rimini, Italy.  Today’s show:  Modern Money Theory Explained.

“Stephanie Kelton is Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, Research Scholar at the Levy Economics Institute, and Director of Graduate Student Research at the Center for Full Employment and Price Stability.

“She is Creator and Editor of New Economic Perspectives.  Her research expertise is in Federal Reserve operations, fiscal policy, social security, healthcare, international finance, and employment policy.

“Please visit the University of Missouri, Kansas City New Economic Perspectives blog at www.NewEconomicPerspectives.org.  Visit the website for the first Italian Summit on Modern Money Theory at www.DemocraziaMMT.info.

“Guns and Butter is produced by Bonnie Faulkner and Yara Mako.  To leave comments or order copies of shows, email us at [email protected].  Visit our website at www.gunsandbutter.org.”

Transcript by Felipe Messina for Media Roots and Guns and Butter

fm: Updated 27 MAR 2013 19:07 CST

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UPDATE:

Also, please see MMT Summit: A Debate on How to Get Out of the Euro.

MEDIA ROOTS — Glenn Greenwald gave a lecture recently in Canada’s capital, Ottawa, entitled “Canada, America, Together Into The Storm: Secrecy, War and Civil Liberties,” hosted by long-time Greenwald reader Bill Owen with an introduction by Maher Arar.  (See transcript and video below.)

Recently, Media Roots noted the UK’s drive toward PATRIOT Act-style policies.  Here, Greenwald discusses the common mindset among English-speaking nations allied with the USA, which similarly creates conducive conditions for citizenries acquiescing and even demanding increasing civil liberties erosions, paving the path toward outright police state fascism.  Greenwald discusses these similar trends among Anglo nations, as their collective consciousness has been deeply altered through state-corporate propaganda in the post-9/11 era.

Greenwald outlines how 9/11 enabled the world’s dominant Anglo governments, as a bloc, to propagate fearmongering campaigns to inculcate a culture of fear and compliant and uncritical citizenries, which allow the military-industrial complex (MIC), which Eisenhower warned about 50 years ago, to usurp their resources, subjugating their peoples in the process by convincing them fiscal austerity is their only option.  (For alternatives to fiscal austerity, see the recent series on MMT.)  Additionally, these Anglo governments, dominated by the MIC and banker fascism, go further by convincing people to continually vote for the same corporate-funded political parties aligned with bankers and the MIC against the people, by persuading citizenries to adopt or enable pugnacious worldviews, which identify with militarism and nationalist exceptionalism.  Greenwald also offers insightful analysis on advocating a civil liberties agenda effectively and persuasively.  (Please see expanded comments below.)

Messina

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SALON — In the post I wrote earlier today, I mentioned a speech I gave in Ottawa on Thursday on secrecy, militarism, and civil liberties as it affects both the U.S. and Canada. Below is a video of that speech, courtesy of Prism Magazine, which was sponsored by the Carleton School of Journalism and Communications and the National Press Club Foundation. The event was hosted by Bill Owen, the long-time reader and commenter here whose idea it was to invite me to Ottawa and who organized the event. I was introduced by Maher Arar, the heroic Canadian-Syrian citizen abducted in 2002 by the U.S. and rendered to Syria for a year, where he was interrogated and tortured; Arar is now the publisher of Prism and his commentary on the event is here.

Those who have heard me speak on these topics will find some of the speech familiar, but much of it is new. I’m traveling home this evening so posting may be slight to non-existent tomorrow, so this video is offered in lieu of tomorrow’s writing:

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Bill Owen (Event Host):  “Tonight, I’m gonna introduce Maher Arar, who actually needs no introduction.  And then he’s gonna introduce Glenn for you.  And then we’re gonna have Glenn Greenwald Speaks in Ottawa.  So, up next we’ve got Maher Arar.  Thank you very much for coming.”

Maher Arar (Publisher, Prism Magazine):  “Thank you very much for this warm reception.  Good evening everyone and thank you all for coming.  First, I would like to thank Bill Owen for inviting such an inspirational speaker to town.  As far as I know, Ottawa is the only Canadian city that Glenn Greenwald is visiting on his speaking tour.  On behalf of Ottawans, I would like to thank Glenn for accepting the invitation.  Ottawa is honoured to have him speak on such important topics, as ‘Secrecy, Wars, and Civil Liberties.’  Those who have followed Glenn’s writings know very well that he is no stranger to these kinds of topics.

“Glenn started his career as a constitutional and civil litigation lawyer in the U.S.  After practicing at an established law firm, Glenn ventured into launching his own practice, during which he took on high-profile cases, all in the areas of constitutional law and civil rights.  After practicing for over eleven years as a lawyer, Glenn decided to embark on a different kind of venture.  He became a full-time blogger.  On his personal blog, named Unclaimed Territory, that was launched in 2005, Glenn wrote, and I quote here, ‘I was bored with litigating full-time. And I wanted to do other things, which I thought were more engaging and could make more of an impact, including political writing.’

“In 2007, Glenn became a contributing writer for Salon.com, a prominent online American magazine where he still blogs almost on a daily basis.  True to his words, Glenn’s writings have been extremely engaging.  With regards to impact, one only needs to read what the famous filmmaker and activist, Michael Moore, said about him.  And I quote here:  ‘The first thing I do when I turn on the computer in the morning is go to Glenn Greenwald’s blog to see what he said. He is truly one of our greatest writers right now.’

“It has also been said that the people at the White House carefully monitor Glenn’s writings and impatiently await to read his blog posts.  Glenn also wrote three New York Times best-sellers.  His latest book, With Liberty and Justice for Some, is a must read for those who want to know more about the two-tiered justice system in the U.S. and what kind of country the U.S. has become.  I, myself, read it from cover to cover.  When I say cover to cover, I say that in literal meaning; and it’s very rare for me to focus [Audience Laughter] and finish books.  This is one of the very few books that I really finished reading.  And I really recommend you read this book.  As I understand, I think it’s on sale by Octopus books today. 

“Some of his awards and accolades, include the following—I don’t have too much time to list all of them, but I’ll just mention a few:  Dan Amira of New York magazine ranked Glenn as one of the top forty most popular political commentators.  On January 22, 2009, Forbes magazine named Glenn one of the 25 most influential liberals in the U.S. media, even though Glenn does not describe himself as a ‘liberal’ per se, but that’s how, at least, the magazine put him.  Prominent website, MediaSite.com considers Glenn one of the most influential print and online columnists in the U.S.  If anything, these awards attest to his growing influence on the political discourse in the United States.

“Before closing, I would like to share with you this comment that a Canadian from Vancouver wrote in reaction to the interview Glenn gave to Prism magazine:  ‘Glenn, I cannot thank you enough for fighting for truth and reason, often against groups of two or three, whom are shoulders to knees with the state. Cover more about Canada. Our politicians are so corrupt.  And it’s so easy for them to just get away with it because, sadly, there is no Canadian Greenwald, Chomsky, Scahill, Hedges, or take your pick. You have a lot of readers in Vancouver. And if you find your way to lecture in Vancouver, well, please do so.’

“And I say, Glenn, you have a lot of fans and readers in Ottawa as well. [Applause]  We are very honoured to have you among us in Ottawa.  Please join me in welcoming, Glenn Greenwald, which you already did. [Applause]”

Glenn Greenwald (c. 5:40):  “Thank you very much. [Applause]  Thanks so much for that and thank you for coming out this evening.  And thank you as well to Prism Magazine, to the Ottawa School of Journalism and Communication and to the National Press Club Foundation for sponsoring the event.  And, particularly, thank you to Bill Owen, who is a resident of Ottawa and a long-time reader of mine, whose idea it was to have me come here and who really did a fantastic job on organising the event.  I really appreciate that. 

“I’m really happy to be in Canada and to be here to speak about these issues.  And the reason for that is the following.  I actually go to a lot of events and have been speaking at a lot of events over the past several years about issues of civil liberties erosions and endless war and militarism and growing government secrecy and executive authority in the post-9/11 era.  And, typically, because I write about the conduct of the United States government, primarily, most of those events that I attend are in the United States.  But over the past several years I’ve been asked with increasing frequency to speak about these issues in countries other than the United States.  And I also have a very international readership.  I think only something like 55% or 60% who read me are located within the United States and the rest are outside of the United States.  These facts used to be a little bit baffling to me.  I had a hard time, at first, understanding why, given my focus on the policies and conduct of the U.S. government, that was the case. 

“And one of the things I’ve realised from going to different countries and speaking about these issues and becoming somewhat immersed in their political controversies and political disputes and speaking with people in those countries who work on these same issues is that there really is an extreme similarity in the dynamic of how these issues express themselves in what I would describe generally as ‘Western’ countries, but more specifically in the United States and its predominantly English-speaking allies, by which I mean Britain, Australia, and Canada. 

(c. 7:51)  “And the similarity that I would, I think there’s a lot of ways you could talk about these similarities.  But the principal way that I would talk about it, and think about it, is that it is defined by this extremely glaring paradox.  And that paradox is the following:  The West really started to pay attention to the concept of what it considers to be terrorism, which, essentially, means violence committed by Muslims directed at the West.  It really started to pay attention, in a significant way, to that issue and to its understanding of that problem with the September 11th attack on the United States. 

“And it isn’t very surprising, in fact it’s perfectly natural, that in the immediate aftermath of that event, which was pretty traumatic for people—and not just in the United States, but in the West to perceive that there was this newfound vulnerability—to react or even overreact in ways that they hadn’t previously considered doing.  So, it made sense that in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and the weeks and months and, even say, the first couple of years, that people were willing to invest more power in their government in exchange for promises of safety.  And, yet, one would expect, just naturally, that as cultures and societies became increasingly removed from that traumatic event—we’re now over a decade away from the 9/11 attacks; we’re more than six years away from the subway bombings in London; neither Australia nor Canada have ever had a serious terrorist attack perpetrated [by] Islamic radicals—you would think that, as the threat and the perception of a threat subsided, these policies would begin to recede and that the willingness of the populations to invest these extraordinary powers in their government would be reduced as well. 

(c. 9:34)  “And what has happened instead—and this is what I referred to as the paradox; and it’s happened not only in the United States, but its closest allies—is exactly the opposite.  As we’ve gotten further away from the memory of the 9/11 attack, as the perception of the threat from Islamic radicalism and what we consider to be terrorism, as that perception diminishes, the claims that governments are making on increased power in the name of terrorism have actually been increasing.  And they’ve been increasing radically and dramatically, especially, as of late.  So, you see claims in the United States that the government has the power to do things like, not just imprison people without due process or charges of any kind, but to target their own citizens for assassination.  You see proposals pending by the British and Canadian governments to dramatically increase their ability to engage in surveillance on the internet.  You see in Australia all kinds of measures to increase detention and surveillance authorities, all being justified in the name of this threat that has actually really diminished significantly over the past decade.

(c. 10:43)  “And, so, this is what I mean by the similarity.  The trends are very similar between the United States and other countries that express an interest in having these discussions.  And it’s not really immediately obvious that that should be the case.  I mean different countries, even English-speaking allies of an Anglo tradition, have very different political cultures; they have very different understandings of their relationship with their government.  They have different understandings of what threats are and what really threatens their interests.  And, yet, you do have this extreme similarity that I think, at first glance, is surprising.

“And I think it’s really worth asking:  What it is that accounts for these similarities?  Why is it that these countries of seemingly disparate political orientations are, nonetheless, progressing evermore aggressively on this route of empowering the government to detain and to surveil, to a belief in the ‘virtues’ of militarism and endless war and an expanding national security state, to allowing government and political officials to operate behind an increasingly opaque wall of secrecy?  What is it that accounts for this trend that, really, can be seen across cultural lines in a variety of countries that have sort of banded together in the wake of 9/11 and in common cause?

(c. 12:03)  “And I think there’s a few factors that account for this, that are really worth considering.  The first one is that it is all driven by a common mindset, a common mentality.  And that mentality can be described along the following lines:  It is the mentality that says that if you can be convinced that there’s some threat that’s being posed to your security and your safety, it is worthwhile to empower the government to take whatever steps it can take to minimise the risk that’s being posed to your security and your safety, without regard to assessing whatever cost doing so might entail to things like your liberty or your privacy or your ability to restrain political power.  It’s really a mindset that venerates physical security above all other values, all other political values.  So, that as long as you can be convinced that there’s some mild benefit to security from a certain government policy or power, then people who have acquiesced to this mindset are willing to accept that proposed power and proposed policy.

(c. 13:18)  “And the reason that that explains the paradox that I started out by describing—the paradox that, as we move farther away from 9/11 and the threat of terrorism, we continue to allow greater government power in the name of terrorism and greater government secrecy and assaults on liberty and the like—the reason that mindset explains that is because it is a self-perpetuating mindset.  Once you go down that path of thinking, it is impossible to remove yourself from that path.  And the reason is because there is never a moment when we reach a state of complete and absolute safety.  That’s a purely illusory state of affairs.  We’re always going to have some sort of threat that can be identified to our security and our physical wellbeing.  And if governments are in a position where they can justify new powers based on simply identifying added or new or still existing threats to physical security, then it will always be the case, by definition, that government can convince their population to allow them greater and greater power in the name of this threat. 

(c. 14:22)  “And I think when we talk, ten years removed from 9/11, and in this world that we consider the post-9/11 era, I think if we talk about that mindset in the way that I just described it, it doesn’t seem all that odd or weird or extraordinary, the idea that we should consider physical security to be the most important value that outweighs all other considerations.  That doesn’t seem like a particularly radical or fringe notion.  And, in fact, in the United States there are lots of politicians, including ones who are on the Right wing of the Republican party who pride themselves on exuding what they consider to be this sort of tough guy demeanour, this sort of I’m a rugged individualist who is going to stand firm against my enemies.  And they will constantly say, without really much controversy, if you raise the issues of civil liberties or privacy or government surveillance, what they’ll say with a perfectly straight-face, with no recognition that it’s an odd or a radical concept, they say, well, civil liberties really don’t matter much if you’re dead.  Which is really a way of saying that:  As long as I can do something to increase my own security, I’m willing to do that because staying alive is the most important value.  And they say it as though it’s just the most obvious thing in the world, that it’s not controversial.

(c. 15:38)  “And what’s really strange about that concept is that it really is an extremely radical concept. And, by radical, I mean it’s really a new concept, a new way of thinking, certainly, in recent Western political traditions.  And if you look back, for example, at what American schoolchildren are taught about the American founding and the reasons why we should revere the American founders, the sort of mythical proclamation that is supposed to define the American ethos was when Patrick Henry stood up and was told that revolution against the greatest empire on the Earth at the time—the British Empire—was likely to be a futile cause, that they were going to wipe out the American colonists.  And he stood up and said, ‘Give me liberty or give me death,’ which is a renunciation of this idea that the only thing that matters is political or physical security. It’s the opposite embrace.  It’s the idea that there are certain things more important than maximising physical safety, including being able to live with basic liberties, being able to live free of despotism and tyranny. 

“And this was not supposed to be a radical concept.  This was supposed to be the defining ethos of the American political project that all American schoolchildren are taught to embrace.  And, yet, I think, not just in the United States, but in its Western allies as well, that value has really been lost. 

(c. 17:06)  “And I wanted to make it just a little bit less abstract than Patrick Henry’s sort of mythical proclamation.  If you look at the U.S. Constitution—and this is true of constitutions in pretty much every single Western country—what you find is that value that I just described embedded very clearly in the document, pervading our understanding of what political liberties are supposed to be about.  And the example I always like to focus on is the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which says that the government shall be barred from searching or seizing people’s homes or property or papers or effects, unless they can first demonstrate to a court that there is probable cause to believe that the people or the homes that they wanna search relate substantially to criminal activity. 

“And the reason why that’s a pretty amazing right to embed into the Constitution—and there are similar rights in most Western constitutions—is because it’s actually a pretty risky thing to do to constrain the ability of the police to investigate crimes that way, to say to the police you cannot enter homes and you cannot search whatever you wanna search, unless you first convince a court that there is evidence to reach a level of probable cause, so that the court approves of what it is that you wanna do, because, if you restrain the police that way, what you are basically doing is insuring that lots of really evil and violent criminals are going to remain unapprehended.  It would be so much better for security, if we allowed the police to invade whatever homes they wanted, at will, to search whomever they wanted under any circumstances at any moment.  In a mindset that said physical security was the most important thing, that capturing people who mean to do us or our families harm is the most important political priority, a mindset like that would never have approved of the Fourth Amendment because why would you possibly wanna restrain the police in their efforts to keep you and your family safe?  And, yet, exactly the opposite judgment was made at the time the American Constitution was written and was ratified.  It’s the exact opposite political tradition and political judgement, that permeates Western conceptions of freedom, generally, which is the idea that there are other values that compete, at least on an equal basis, and, in fact, are more important than mere physical security.  And, yet, the 9/11 attack enabled government to propagate this mindset of fearmongering, so that it has caused large majorities of Western countries, of Western populations, to abandon that central political judgment, that, really, had endured for several centuries.  And once you abandon that political judgment it becomes self-perpetuating.  It no longer matters how proximate a particular threat is, how close you are to the threat of terrorism.  As long as the threat of terrorism is still vaguely out there, or the threat of crime is vaguely out there—and it always will be—then the government can always convince the citizenry that greater and greater powers are warranted.  And I think that’s what you’re seeing in all of these Western countries, this idea that has really permeated these countries like a contagion, like a virus.  And it’s what really accounts for this paradox that I described taking place in all of these different nations.

(c. 20:28)  “So, that’s one reason that I think accounts for that common trend among these different countries.  A second reason is that these policies, that all of these countries banded together to pursue in the wake of 9/11 and in the name of terrorism, militarism, war, taking a militarised approach to the problem of terrorism, empowering the government domestically to monitor and surveil various populations and, really, the population as a whole.  That gives rise to a very powerful industry, basically a national security state and a surveillance industry, that essentially needs the continuation of these policies, as the fuel that feeds it, even once the justification for those policies no longer exists.

(c. 21:17)  “So, you can look back; this is not a controversial conception.  You can look back 50 years to the farewell address given by Dwight Eisenhower, who was a Republican two-term American president.  He was also a five-star general, who commanded World War II troops and is often credited with winning World War II for the United States.  No radical he, Dwight Eisenhower, and, yet, when he left his presidency after two terms, he gave a speech to the United States and he warned the United States of what he called the military-industrial complex, the collaboration between the public war-making factions of the government and the private industry, that produces armaments and produces weapons and produces defence technology.  And the way in which these two factions band together, he warned, 50 years ago, would threaten to subvert democracy.  That they would, essentially, become more powerful—even in democratically-elected officials—that they would exist beyond the realm of democratic accountability.  And their voracious appetite for more profit would, basically, insure that they would continuously create the pretext for war, for more militarism, for more of a national security state mindset, even when there was no justification for it. 

(c. 22:35)  “And you see this mindset that he warned of 50 years ago—and it’s so much worse now—constantly.  I know there’s a debate in Canada, a controversy in Canada, over the government’s acquisition of F-35 fighter jets and this spiralling cost in the procurement process.  And one of the really funny and weird things is that, in preparation for my coming here, I actually immersed myself pretty intensively in this controversy.  I read a lot of articles and a lot of columnists and a lot of debates about it taking place in Canada.  And one of the things that you will never find, even from proponents of the government’s attempt to purchase these weapons—and it’s really a conspicuous absence and, yet, it doesn’t really seem to strike very many people in its absence—is any real explanation for why Canada needs these extremely sophisticated fighter jets. [Audience Laughter]  You know?  I remember I started reading it; and I spent like a few days reading it; and there was all this technical debate about whether the procurement process was corrupt.  And was it a reasonable expectation that the costs have spiralled?  And then, all of a sudden, I just took a step back; I put that down and I said to myself:  Why does Canada need these weapons?  Is there a country threatening Canada?  Is there some reason that these extremely sophisticated fighter jets will ward off the threat of terrorism? 

(c. 24:02)  “And the reason that that explanation is lacking is because this machine of militarism marches on without any need for any real pretext or justification.  There’s some vague claims about how national security requires this purchase.  But it really is a culture, that drives policy.  And it doesn’t really need to give an explanation to the citizenry.  And what’s really most amazing about that is—I know, just in the couple of days that I’ve been here and in the couple of weeks that preceded my arrival here and I was following Canadian debates—one of the things that you see in Canadian political discourse is something that you see in almost every Western political culture now, which is constant claims from the government and the political class, that the country is burdened by extreme levels of debt.  And that, as a result, all kinds of government services need to be cut. 

“Just listening to local television here in Ottawa, I heard all kinds of discussion about huge layoffs on the part of government agencies.  There are all kinds of debates about, what social services need to be cut, even though cutting these social services and laying off people will take money out of the economy at exactly the time that the economy is restricting.  But there is this constant claim that there is huge economic pressures that compell the government to eliminate all luxury items and anything, including even necessities.  And, yet, at the very same time, there’s hundreds of billions of dollars being spent on weapons that the government plainly does not need. 

(c. 25:30):  “This is true in the United States, even more so in Britain.  It’s true in Australia.  It’s true throughout the Western world.  And the reason is that this industry, this complex about which Eisenhower warned, is really that powerful that it can continue to commandeer the money from the middle-classes of this country, of the taxpayers, at exactly the same time they are being told they have to sacrifice, they have to subject themselves to all kinds of austerity and pain, they can commandeer this money to feed this insatiable beast that is endless militarism, even without even pretending that there is a real justification.  It, too, is a self-perpetuating complex. 

(c. 26:10)  “And then the third factor, that I think explains the common dynamic that I described, this paradox in all of these countries, is the fact that power is extremely addictive, that’s just true as part of human nature.  And one of the things that happens when governments can convince their populations that there is some grave external threat or even internal threat, that necessitates a posture of militarism and greater government power to protect the population, is that political leaders become increasingly unconstrained in the power that they exercise.  And this, too, goes back; that observation is as old as politics, itself.  Cicero, as part of the Roman Empire, observed that, in times of war, the law falls mute, meaning once a government can convince its citizenry to go to war, law and legal constraints, the instruments we use to constrain political leaders simply no longer matter.  And James Madison, the American founder, probably most responsible for the framing of the American Constitution said that war is the greatest enemy of liberty, the one most to be dreaded because in times of war the population, not only acquiesces to, but encourages and demands restrictions of political liberty, which is another way of saying increasing government power.

(c. 27:32)  “And, so, when you constantly tell a population for over a decade that it faces this grave threat, whatever you want to call it—terrorism, Islamic radicalism, domestic crime—you put the population in a posture of fear.  And once they are in a posture of fear, they no longer want to constrain political leaders.  And political leaders like that state of affairs.  And they become addicted to it.  And the more it happens, the more they want it to happen.  And you see this with Western leaders as well, who, not because they are consciously malignant in their intentions, but sometimes even because they believe they’re benevolent, they believe that they should not be constrained by bothersome concepts of law or democratic accountability or transparency.  And they know that keeping the population in a state of fear is the way to convince them not to so constrain them.

(c. 28:22)  “And so these are the factors that I think explain why this trend exists, why it’s so powerful, why it continues, even as we move further and further away from a palpable threat of terrorism.  And I think the important thing to note about all of those factors—the ones that I just described—is how potent they are, how much they appeal to base instincts.  The desire for power, the pursuit of profit are incredibly central attributes of human nature.  Once you are able to put a population in fear of their physical safety, the instinct to safeguard our physical wellbeing, the wellbeing of our families, is incredibly base.  And then when you add on top of that the tactic of convincing the population that it’s only a subset of the population, a small subset of the population, that will be targeted by these civil liberties abuses, by this increasing government surveillance or detention, which in Western countries means Muslims, which are minorities in all of these countries, what you add on to that—this pernicious flavouring that all of that has—is the idea that it won’t affect the majority of people in this society, it will only affect these others, who are sort of foreign and exotic, even when they are citizens of your own country.  And that, too, is a very base and primal appeal, the idea that there should be others who should be demonised and treated differently is something that appeals to us, as human beings as well.  These are incredibly potent forces being brought to bear to insure the continuation of these policies.  It’s easy to scoff at them.  It’s easy to look at them in an overly rationalised or intellectualised way and be dismissive of them.  But they are incredibly powerful, in terms of the appeal that they have to all human beings, by virtue of our human nature.

(c. 30:14)  “And, so, I think it’s extremely important, in fact incumbent, upon anybody who wants to work against these trends or to convince our fellow citizens that they should care more about them and to oppose them, to think about ways to compete with these very primal forces, in terms of how they can be counterbalanced and how you can convince people, despite all of these extraordinarily formidable obstacles that have been arrayed in favour of these policies, how you can convince them to oppose these policies. 

“And I think one of the things that often happens is, even among people who are sympathetic to the need to confront these policies, to battle against these trends, is a sort of attitude of defeatism sets in:  Well, I just don’t believe that the average person is ever really gonna care about these rights.  I don’t believe that they’re ever gonna be convinced that they’re more important than their physical safety.  I just don’t think this is a possibility. 

(c. 31:13)  “Or the tactic is just the wrong one.  It’s too abstract and overly intellectualised.  So, the attempt is made to convince people that they should care about basic liberties or civil protections or government transparency and accountability based on things that are simply too abstract to compete with these primal drives, the idea that, well, these are the things that make us free as a people or these are things embedded in our political tradition.  These really don’t even compete with the power of fear or the demonization of others when it comes to persuading people to act.

“And, so, I think it’s very important whenever people gather in a situation like this and wanna talk about basic freedoms and liberties and transparency and accountability to do the hard work of thinking about how to talk about them in a way that will get other people, who don’t already see that they’re important, to start realising their importance.

(c. 32:08)  “And, so, I just want to spend a little bit of time examining some of those ways that I think that that can be highlighted because I think that even for people who are intellectually sympathetic to a civil liberties agenda—to the idea that these things done in the name of security should be resisted—I think sometimes even people in this room, who are sympathetic to that agenda also fall prey to the idea that, well, maybe these conceptions aren’t really quite that important.  And the reason why it’s easy for people to fall prey to that mindset is because for most people in this room, I’d venture to bet, and for most people who are otherwise sympathetic to a civil liberties agenda or advocacy of these issues, when you wake up in the morning on your list of immediate worries, you do not find things like fear that the government is going to come to your home and ship you to Guantánamo and keep you there for a decade without charges.  Or you probably don’t wake up worried that that afternoon the government is going to send unmanned drones over your house and launch a Hellfire missile that will explode your house and kill your family, or that you will be persecuted for you political speech by being charged with criminal offences.  And, so, it’s easy to keep these at a, sort of, distance and to think, well, even though I’m intellectually sympathetic to them, I don’t really feel like they’re of immediate concern to me.  And, so, it’s easy to deprioritise them.

“So, I wanna talk about why all of those assumptions are untrue and ways that I think those assumptions can be dislodged when talking to other people about why they should care more about them or think that these things are disturbing. 

(33:47)  “So, the first point I wanna talk about is the nature of what we even mean when we talk about these basic liberties.  What does it mean that we refer to when we describe civil liberties or the assault on civil liberties or constitutional freedoms or the basic rights that in the Western tradition have come to define freedom?  And, really, all that means—it’s a pretty simple concept—all it really means is the limits and the lines that we’ve imposed on the government that they cannot cross under any circumstances because we believe that to allow them to cross those lines is too dangerous and will inevitably lead to some form of tyranny. 

(c. 34:30)  “So, for example, generally in Western societies, that consider themselves free, we have the idea that governments can’t imprison us unless they first charge us with a crime and present the evidence in a fair and open tribunal and convince either a jury or a judge beyond reasonable doubt or some standard that we’re actually guilty of those crimes.  We, certainly, believe that governments can’t simply target us for assassination.  We think that powers that the government exercises, that are the most consequential should not be exercised in complete secrecy and in the dark, but instead should have all kinds of oversight and transparency to them. 

(c. 35:07)  “These are the kinds of things that we’re talking about, the most basic safeguards to political freedom when we talk about civil liberties.  And one of the ways that it’s easy to convince the population to either accept and support assaults on those freedoms or to at least passively accept that they’re going to happen, is to convince people that they will not be affected, that only some minority group, that probably deserves it in some way will be.  That’s what I was describing earlier by the way in which Western countries have been convinced that since most of these abuses are being applied to Muslims and maybe even to Muslims who are, sort of, more religious, who seem a little bit more inclined to identify as Muslims, rather than as Canadians or Americans or Brits, that, specifically, for those kinds of Muslims, that these are the groups of people, for whom these abuses are being confined.  Therefore, I don’t really need to care about them much.

“So, leave aside the question of whether or not that is an incredibly amoral way of thinking, that as long as it’s just them over there who are being tortured and detained and assassinated, I don’t really need to worry about it as much as long as it doesn’t happen to me.  If somebody is of that mindset, there’s probably not a lot you can do to persuade them.  But leave that aside, that question.  And, instead, focus on the following:  It simply is an invariable truth that whenever some new power is acquired in the name of some kind of threat, it always—not sometimes, not often, not usually—it always extends beyond its original application, beyond its original justification.  

“You know, it’s amazing in the United States in the wake of 9/11, one of the most controversial things that was done by the U.S. government—and this was done in the weeks after 9/11, literally two weeks after 9/11—was the enactment of legislation called the PATRIOT Act, that empowered the U.S. government with all sorts of new powers of surveillance and infiltration.  And, at the time, it was incredibly controversial.  It was considered this radical step, but the country accepted it on the grounds that, as the World Trade Center was still smouldering, it was necessary to take these extraordinary steps to prevent it from happening again. Well, ten years later, the PATRIOT Act is not even controversial any longer.  Every four years it has to get renewed.  And the vote in the Congress and the Senate is something like 91 to 9 to renew it.  Now, that there’s a Democrat in office, all Democrats and Republicans with very few exceptions the last time, last year, voted to renew the PATRIOT Act with no reforms of any kind.  And the reason that is, it’s become completely normalised.  And the reason it’s become completely normalised, whereas, even in the wake of 9/11, in the weeks after 9/11, it was considered radical is because people have become convinced that the PATRIOT Act is something that only gets applied to ‘Muslim radicals,’ that’s the only people on whom the government is interested in spying.  

“And the reality is completely the opposite.  There are countless applications now of how the government uses the powers of the PATRIOT Act to spy on dissident political groups, on peace groups, to infiltrate student organisations, who are opposing policies of the 9/11 attacks.  The surveillance policies in the United States have grown dramatically, so that there’s almost no limits now on the way in which they can use these surveillance powers. 

“I know—again, in my preparation for coming to Canada—there were some documents that were obtained—this week, I believe—where this federalised, national, centralised agency, that is designed and was created to monitor threats of terrorism on Canadian soil, basically got caught monitoring and infiltrating the Occupy Movement that existed on Canadian soil on the grounds that they’ve now expanded their mandate, so that any threats to Canadian national security, whether from ‘Islamic terrorists’ wanting to blow up shopping centres to college students gathering together and peacefully assembling in a park in order to protest financial policies, is now within the purview of this agency and its powers can be used every bit as much against them, as they can against Muslims.  I know there’s some controversy of the Defence Ministry here where the powers of spying and surveillance have been used against political opponents of the Defence Ministry.  This is always the way in which power is expanded.

“Before I started writing about political issues, I was a constitutional lawyer.  And one of the types of work that I did was free speech advocacy and free speech defence.  And, in the course of that work, I would represent people who had some really repellent and pernicious political opinions.  I mean really offensive political views, people like White supremacists and neo-Nazis, and people who believed in violence against immigrants, people who were very, very extreme in their views.  And, like most people who defend free speech, in the United States, lawyers who defend free speech in the United States, like the ACLU and others, I would always get asked:  Look, I totally believe in free speech, they would say. I think it’s super important, but I just don’t understand why you would need to represent people like that. Why you need to represent those people in defence of this principle?  And the answer, that I would always give is, really, the only answer that you can give:  Whenever the government wants to infringe political liberty, it always targets the people who are most marginalised and hated in the society because that’s the way the government convinces the citizenry that those abuses are justifiable. 

“And the problem with it, with the attitude that, well, I’m gonna allow the government infringement of these rights, as applied to those people over there because they kind of deserve it, is that once you allow that to take place, given your dislike for those people or given your belief that they’re sufficiently separated from you that it doesn’t threaten you, those abuses become legitimised.  They become institutionalised. And it then becomes impossible to argue against them any longer. 

“There’s a huge political controversy the United States—or at least there’s a political controversy in the United States; it’s not huge, it should be—about the asserted power of President Obama to target American citizens for assassination.  Literally, to sit in secret, with no transparency and no accountability and order American citizens to be killed, executed, by the CIA without even bothering to charge them with a crime.  And President Obama has not only asserted this power, he’s exercised it when he targeted Anwar al-Awlaki, the U.S.-born U.S. citizen Muslim preacher, who was in Yemen for assassination.  He was killed last September [2011] by a drone attack.  And this is something that you see constantly, the idea that, well, I’m comfortable having this power asserted because it’s being applied to this Muslim preacher who I kind of think probably deserves death.  But there’s no sense at all that if you allow the president this power—the power, I think, that is the most tyrannical power our government can exercise—the power to target one’s own citizens for death without due process, that power, eventually, at some point—even if you think Barack Obama is this sophisticated and noble and magnanimous progressive constitutional scholar—at some point, as troubling as this is to a lot of people, he’s gonna leave office and there’s gonna be somebody less noble, less magnanimous in office who will who will inherit that power. And for anyone who is comfortable with the assertion of that power now, none of those people will have standing to complain or object when that power is applied to people they think don’t deserve to be executed without due process.  That’s always the nature of civil liberties abuses; they always extend beyond their original application, then, in a sense, you’re enabling and aiding and abetting the institution of this policy. 

(c. 43:25)  “The second important reason why it’s so imperative [] is because the values that they destroy are incredibly significant and once destroyed the destruction is really irreversible.  I think there’s this sense, for example, among the younger generation that has grown up accustomed to internet usage, there’s a sort of ethos in Silicon Valley and among the internet generation that privacy is not really that important, that privacy doesn’t really have significant value, and that there’s a generalised sense that the government has inculcated that privacy is not something you should value unless you’re doing something wrong.  If you don’t do something wrong, if you’re not engaging in something wrong, why do you care if the government knows what you’re doing and keeps track of what you’re doing, has files on you to record what it is you’re doing.  This is something that you would only care about if you’re actually engaged in wrongdoing.  And the extent to which we’ve allowed privacy to be destroyed in the name of surveillance is almost impossible to overstate.  It really is the case that there’s very little that you can do on the internet, which is where most of our intellectual and mental life occurs now, without serious and permanent detection on the part of the government and private corporations.

“And it’s difficult sometimes to convince people why privacy is critically important, but one of the ways that you can convince people that they should care about it is you can look to the 1984 novel by George Orwell, in which he imagined this dystopia where no privacy exists and there were monitors by Big Brother in every single crevice of one’s home.  So, there was literally nothing that you did that was beyond the reach of government monitoring.  Most people would be instinctively adverse to that sort of constant surveillance, even if they can’t really explain why.  And the reason is because privacy is also an important part of our human nature.  We need privacy, even though we’re social creatures, because privacy is the place where creativity flourishes, where we can experiment with different kinds of thought, where we can challenge and defy convention and orthodoxy.  It’s the place where you can experiment about who you are and what type of person you want to be and what type of person you want to become and how you express yourself, how you can find your own path and deviate from the norm.  Only the private realm enables that because when you’re constantly being watched by judgmental eyes there is a sense that you need to conform, that’s what it’s designed to do.  And, so, the loss of privacy, although it’s difficult to convey why is an incredibly destructive trend for us to permit.

(c. 46:16)  “And to be a little bit more concrete about it, in terms of the internet, the value of the internet depends almost, the political value of the internet depends almost entirely on the ability of citizens to engage in activism and to communicate with one another, with anonymity, and with privacy.  The Western world was almost unanimous in cheering the developments of the Arab Spring last year, the ability of citizens in incredibly oppressed countries to band together and communicate with one another and challenge some of the world’s most entrenched despots.  And, yet, one of the reasons why they were able to that is because—there were lots of reasons—but one reason is because the internet finally fulfilled its promise as this democratising technology to allow even populations that had been purposely deprived to band together and communicate with one another in a way that turned them into a very powerful force.  And the only way that that was allowed, the only way they were able to do so was without fear of government monitoring and constant government detection. 

“That’s the reason why almost every Western society is seeking to engage in full-scale surveillance of the internet because they know that if they can ruin the ability to use the internet with privacy and anonymity, then it will really gut the value of that technology to challenge those in power.  That’s an incredibly important attribute of the internet that is under constant attack.  And I think it’s not all that difficult if you look at the way in which the internet has been used successfully to understand why it’s important to resist that. 

(c. 47:53)  “The last point I wanna make—and then we’ll have time for a good, substantial, question and answer session—is what I think is probably the most significant harm from allowing these erosions to take place, even if you think they’re not directly affecting you.  And, yet, it’s probably the most difficult to convey.  But I spent a lot of time thinking about it, a lot of time writing about this point.  And I want to just describe it this way.  One of the things that happens when governments are permitted to constantly increase their own authority and their own power at the expense of the privacy and liberty of individual citizens is that it fundamentally changes the relationship between the citizenry and their own government.  And, more specifically, it does that by creating a climate of fear that radically alters the behaviour and the sense of possibility that people in a certain society have. 

“And I just wanna tell a little personal anecdote about when that really became crystallised for me and moved beyond the realm of the abstract into the very concrete.  I have spent a lot of time over the past couple of years writing about WikiLeaks.  And I write almost always in defence of that group and the whistleblowing and sort of explosions in the wall of secrecy behind which governments operate that they’ve been able to effectuate. And I remember the first time that I read about WikiLeaks was in January of 2010.  And this is before very many people had heard about WikiLeaks.  I hadn’t heard about them at all.  It was before they really did any of their newsmaking releases.  It was before they even posted the video of the helicopters in Baghdad shooting Reuters journalists and civilians.  It was before they had done much in the way of big newsmaking at all in the United States. 

“And the way that I had learned about WikiLeaks was that there was a top-secret report prepared by the Pentagon in 2008 and this topsecret report decreed WikiLeaks to be an enemy of the state.  And it talked about ways that the Pentagon wanted to go about destroying WikiLeaks and undermining their efficacy.  It talked about fabricating documents and submitting them, so that once WikiLeaks published false documents, then their credibility would be destroyed.  It talked about uncovering the identity of their sources, so that nobody would feel safe leaking any more to WikiLeaks.  It was a very elaborate plan prepared by the Pentagon, as to how they would destroy this ‘enemy of the state.’  And, it was marked top-secret.  Ironically, this report got leaked to WikiLeaks, [Audience Laugher] which published it on its website. 

“The report in full, the top-secret report.  And The New York Times had a brief article about it.  And it talked about how the Pentagon had declared this group that nobody had really heard of before to be an enemy of the state.  And I remember at the time—I didn’t know anything about WikiLeaks, but I remember reading that report and The New York Times account of it and thinking that any organisation that has been declared an enemy of the state by the Pentagon and that the Pentagon is working to destroy it is one that needs a lot more attention and probably a lot of support.  And, so, I went and looked at the history of WikiLeaks and I had found that they had done some incredibly impressive work on transparency.  They had exposed corporate wrongdoing in West Africa. They had exposed government deceit in parts of Australia and in northern Europe that the model and the template that they had created was a very exciting one because it was allowing government transparency in a way that established newspapers, for all sorts of reasons, were incapable of. 

“And because I view pervasive government secrecy as the linchpin of all the abuses that we’ve been talking about and transparency and sunlight as the ultimate weapon against them, I was very enthused by the promise of this organisation.  And I wrote a long article highlighting their successes and the promise that I thought they held and I interviewed Julian Assange and I published the interview with this article I wrote.  And at the end of the piece that I wrote, I encouraged people who were also supportive of their work to donate money to the organisation because they were facing budgetary constraints that were preventing them from processing a lot of the leaks that they were sitting on, including the ones that ultimately made such news.  And I included some links to their PayPal account and some information about how to wire money to their account as well. 

“And this is something that I periodically do, I encourage readers to donate money to organisations or causes that I think are constructive.  And, in response to my writing that, I had I mean hundreds of people definitely dozens, probably hundreds in all different venues, in the comment section to the article I had written, by email, at events like this come up to me and basically say the same thing, which is something along the following lines.  They would say, look, I agree with you about the great promise that WikiLeaks holds. You’ve convinced me that this is an organisation, that merits a lot of support. But I’m actually afraid that if I donate money to them digitally through PayPal or wiring money to their bank acount, that I’m actually gonna end up on some government list somewhere or worse, that I, at some point, if WikiLeaks in the future is declared by the U.S. government to be a ‘terrorist’ organisation, I could actually be prosecuted for materially supporting a terrorist group.

(c. 53:17)  “And these are not people prone to paranoia or conspiracy.  These were very well-grounded, rational, reasoned people who were expressing to me this fear that I hadn’t previously considered, but given how many people were expressing it—these were American citizens, largely—really amazed me.  And it was actually pretty jarring and eye-opening.  And the reason is that WikiLeaks is an organisation that had never been—in fact, they have never been, to this day—charged with, let alone convicted of, any crime of any kind, nor could they be since they’re engaged in the art of pure journalism, what media outlets around the world do, which is receive government secrets from people who are in government and then publish those secrets to inform citizens about what governments and corporate factions are doing.  And, yet, here were countless people petrified of asserting their most basic First Amendment rights of free speech and free assembly and free petition, which is what donating money into a political organisation, whose cause you support.  They were petrified of exercising their own constitutional rights.  They didn’t need to be threatened with police invasions of their home or arrest if they did it. They didn’t need a law to abolish free speech, the climate of fear that has been created was sufficient to get them, on their own to voluntarily relinquish the exercise of their own rights and you can offer all the right in the world on a piece of paper or a piece of parchment if you want, but if you put the citizenry into a position of fear about exercising those rights, those rights become worthless.

“And the reason they were afraid of exercising those rights is because they’ve watched their own government over the past decade demonstrate repeatedly that they are willing to cross, not some lines that we’ve imposed on how they can exercise their power, but every line without any consequence and without any recrimination.

(c. 55:19)  “And there’s this one other personal anecdote that I wanna share just to bolster that point and to underscore and to highlight what I mean.  In addition to WikiLeaks I also spend a lot of time and have spent a lot of time writing about the case of Bradley Manning, the Army private who is accused of being the principal leaker to WikiLeaks of those newsworthy leaks.  And in December of 2010 I wrote an article detailing the ways, in which he was being confined in extremely oppressive and inhumane conditions, ones that the U.N. just recently, the top torture investigator at the U.N. last month concluded was both inhumane and cruel, that he was subjected to extreme protracted solitary confinement, was harrassed, and, sort of, in all these sadistic ways, ones that the U.S. government itself has characterised as torture when done by other countries, that studies show result in possibly permanent, psychologically crippling, afflictions. 

“And one of the things that was so baffling to me about what was being done—and a lot of people asked me this question as well:  Why would the Obama Administration want to subject him to this level of mistreatment?  It actually seems counterproductive.  Because, for one thing, it makes prosecution more difficult because if you drive a prisoner into insanity through the treatment to which you subject him, you cannot convict him.  It also means that any statements that he makes while in custody that are incriminating can be subject to challenge that he only made them because he was being coerced by the conditions.  It also of created sympathy for him and turned him into a martyr among people who were otherwise unsympathetic to those leaks.  In fact, President Obama’s State Department Spokesman P.J. Crowley denounced the treatment as stupid and counterproductive and then was forced to resign.  It really elevated the controversy around Bradley Manning.  It created lots of sympathy for him.  So, it was hard to figure out why they’d want to do it.  It seemed counterproductive, contrary to their own interests.

(c. 57:23)  “And, after spending some time being asked this a lot and actually asking myself it a lot.  Why would they want to do this?  The thing that I realised is that the reason that Bradley Manning was put into those conditions and treated with such cruelty and inhumane barbarism is the same same reason that the U.S. government abducted hundreds of people and shipped them thousands of miles away to a Caribbean Island and dressed then in orange jumpsuits and shackles and showed the world that.  It’s the same reason that the U.S. government bombs people at will and blows up huge numbers of families and civilians and innocent people all the time, knowing that it’s going to do that.  And, yet, continues to do it.  It’s a way of expressing to the world, especially to anybody who might challenge U.S. government power and policy and authority:

“‘If you want to challenge what we’re doing, if you are a would-be whistleblower who discovers things that we’ve done corruptly in secret and want to expose it to the world, think about it twice and look at what we’ve done to Bradley Manning without any limits.  Or if you’re somebody who wants to resist U.S. government invasions or occupations, look at what we’ve done to Guantánamo prisoners, people around the world that we’ve abducted and detained and rendered for torture.  And we’ve done all of this without consequence because there are no lines that we won’t cross and that we can’t cross at will.  It’s a way of conveying to the population that you should be in a posture of fear when it comes to thinking about challenging what we are doing.’

“That’s the motive for it.  It’s the effect of it in the ultimate outcome.

“And I think that it’s very difficult, sometimes, to convince people that that really is the case, that a climate of fear has arisen because typically people consider climates of climates of fear to be something that exist in other countries, those bad tyrannies over there.  And the way that populations get convinced to view themselves as free even when they’re not is that people are very willing to delude themselves.  It’s not a fun thing to realise that there are certain liberties that you’ve always thought you’ve had that you’ve taken for granted, that you actually can’t exercise without punishment.  And, so, people convince themselves: Well, actually those aren’t things that I want to do. I don’t actually want to meaningfully challenge the government. I don’t want to oppose government policy in any meaningful way. I don’t want to go and join the Occupy Movement. I’m not doing it because I’m afraid to; I’m not doing it because I don’t want to.

(c. 59:56)  “And, so, there is nothing that I want to do that I am restrained from doing and, therefore, by definition, I’m free.   

(c. 60:00)  “The socialist activist Rosa Luxemburg put it this way, she said, “He who does not move, does not notice his own chains.’ 

“If you, basically, are somebody who convinces herself that you don’t really want to engage in politically controversial speech or dissident political activism, you won’t realise the restrictions that have been imposed on those basic liberties.  And that’s the way that societies get put into postures of tyranny, while they convince themselves that they are actually still free.  That’s why the climate of fear is actually more pernicious.  It’s more insidious, as a form of tyranny than overt tyranny, than actually communicating to the population that they no longer have these rights.  So, those are the ways that I think it’s possible to convey to people why they ought to care about these kinds of trends in a concrete way. 

(c. 60:58)  “And the last point I wanna make is, you know, it’s very easy to gather in a place like this and to spend an hour and a half or so talking about these very not very sunshiny developments.  When you do that this sort of gloominess can set in like, I just listened to this person talk for an hour about all the horrible things that are taking place by these hugely formidable forces. I think I wanna go jump off a bridge. [Audience Twitter]  That’s a reaction that you can induce if you talk about it in this way.  And, you know, it is true that if a society remains in this posture of fear and continuously viewing its own liberties as unimportant that the political culture can sufficiently degrade, so that these changes become irreversible.

“I had this sort of jarring experience a couple of months ago; I went and spoke at a college campus and I talked about the differences in the post-9/11 era and how these liberties have been eroded.  And there were some high school students, 16 or 15, who had come from far away to hear me speak and they were people worked at their high school newspaper.  And afterwards they came up to me and said, ‘You know, you keep talking about this world that existed before 9/11, as though we all are supposed to understand how things have changed. Well, for people my age,’ this 15-year-old girl said, ‘I was actually five years old at the time of 9/11, or four years old. So, people my age, my peers, don’t really even know a world before 9/11.’  I mean this the entirety of our understanding of political culture is that’s how these trends can become irreversible.  Is the political culture just so accepts them as normalised that they don’t even know there’s a possibility for anything else. 

“The thing I think that I always think is the ultimate antidote to that kind of defeatism is what happened in the Arab Spring where you saw populations that had been kept deliberately deprived in every single way, not just materially, but spiritually and in every conceivable way, purposely kept weakened and deprived, challenged the most entrenched despots that the world knows, ones that had been in power for decades, literally, that are funded and supported and propped up by the United States and its allies.  And, yet, they created almost overnight, explosively, this extremely intimidating force, that threatened those seemingly invulnerable, powerful factions.  And if those people with those resources are that level of political change then people in the westen world are certainly capable of that level of political change, then people in the Western world with our resources, our opportunities are certainly capable of the same thing.  And if we aren’t doing it, if we aren’t succeeding in that effort, it’s not because it’s not possible, it’s simply because we just haven’t figured out the right way to do it.  And what I look to do when I get up in the morning and I write and I come to places like this and gather with people and, I presume, what you look to do, by the virtue of the fact you’re here, is to find the right way to communicate to our fellow citizens is that this cause is urgent and to figure out the best way to do it.

“So, with that, I thank you very much for coming.”

Transcript by Felipe Messina for Media Roots and Glenn Greenwald

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Glenn Greenwald, without question one of the USA’s most important political thinkers, makes the excellent observation about the base and primal drives, which often inform people’s acquiescence or support for regressive policies, and the importance of not being dismissive of people who may be informed by such drives.  Often we think, myself included, that if we simply present the truth to people the truth shall set us free.  But the fact is, as Greenwald soberly points out, deep-seated psychoemotional drives are, more often than not, at play in shaping our attitudes, mindsets, and worldviews.  It’s a crucial point, indeed, to constantly ask ourselves—those of us who are actively sympathetic to a civil liberties agenda or cognisant of US/NATO imperialism or assaults against the working-class, labour, education, a government of, by, and for the people—whether or not we are really reaching out to those who are not yet aware or persuaded to act.  Certainly, preaching to the choir, as it were, does not challenge those primal human drives, those political forces, nor those political parties acting so effectively against the interests of the people.

But I would respectfully stress, even striking particular policies in the short term, in the USA, at least, we’d still be left with the same rigged de facto two-party system, which engendered those policies in the long run.  And others would go further to argue we’d still have a rotten capitalist system based on exploitation and oppression.  And others would argue further, such as anarcho-primitivists, we’d still have regressive domination through agriculture and so forth.  But I would simply stress the prime legal-political avenue the citizenry currently has to participate in the legal-political process—as opposed to the also important cultural-political process—to exercise meaningful political clout with legal and, therefore, policy/political consequence is the vote through free and fair elections.  Protests and mass demonstrations are crucial, but they do not have the direct legal impact, which is made by voting political parties into, or out of, power.  It’s important to remember, truly democratic elections mean one citizen, one vote, rather than our current paradigm, which entails one dollar, one vote.

Indeed, Glenn Greenwald has said as much himself when discussing the fraudulent promise of Obama, “I think the only means of true political change will come from people working outside of that [two-party electoral] system to undermine it, and subvert it, and weaken it, and destroy it; not try to work within it to change it.”

Messina

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RT TV – The Transportation Security Administration has been the subject of criticism by seemingly all who fly in the USA. They’re accused of violating privacy when asking travelers to go through naked body scanner machines all for the supposed sake of “national security.” One of the companies behind the controversial equipment is now pushing to have these scanners installed nationwide. So do these scanners actually make us safer? Charlie McGrath, founder of WideAwakeNews.com, joins Abby Martin in the RT studio to discuss.

Abby Martin interviews Charlie McGrath about the TSA

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Flickr user the Consumerist

RT TV — Mumia Abu Jamal is an African American writer, journalist and activist whose infamous prison case has sparked international outrage for decades.  In 1981, Mumia was charged with first degree murder for allegedly killing a police officer, but many have disputed the evidence that put him behind bars and demand for him to be re-tried.

He has spent the last 29 years of his life on death row, but in January of this year the sentence was reduced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.  At the “Occupy the Justice” rally in Washington DC, Abby Martin of RT spoke with protesters who gathered in solidarity with the Occupy Movement to “Occupy the Justice Department” on Mumia’s 58th birthday.

Hundreds rallied in front of the Department of Justice to call attention to not only Mumia’s case, but also to the inequalities of the US justice system, the privatization of the prison industry and to end mass incarceration in the US, where currently one out of every 100 Americans are in jail.

People have long used Mumia’s case to lobby attention to the inherent corruption and racial inequality in the American prison system.

Mumia supporter Matthew Johnson equated the racial injustice surrounding Mumia Abu Jamal to the controversial case of the shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. “It’s the whole idea that if you’re black, you’re somehow more dangerous than a white person. [In the case of Trayvon] you’re carrying iced tea and Skittles and wearing a hoodie and somehow you’re a threat to a man who weighs 60 pounds more than you who has a gun. It just wouldn’t happen the other way around.”

He continues to explain that this particular case needs to be broadened in the context of social justice for everyone, regardless of color or creed.

Some came to protest more generally what they called the prison industrial complex, in which government and corporations collude to keep the private prisons occupied to capacity with prisoners. Activist Kevin Price elaborates on the growing trend of for profit prisons. “As violent crime rates have fallen and imprisonment rates have skyrocketed, it just doesn’t make sense unless you are looking at [the issue] in the context of for profit incarceration,” he says.

Although the reduced sentence for Mumia was seen as a hopeful step for some, others claimed that it was simply a political strategy to appease the public while still not making any significant overtures towards justice for Mumia.

“That’s their way of trying to turn their back on the issue and get political with [it]… but justice requires that the innocent be free,” declares Baba Zayed Muhhamad, national minister of culture for the New Black Panther Party.

He continues to describe how the two most prominent African American politicians, Attorney General Eric Holder and President Barack Obama, have turned their back on the black generation. “Barack Obama made the mistake of saying that we’re the ones that we’ve been waiting for, and we’re not going to wait on them. We’re going to see that we get justice for that generation and… better opportunities to create justice for our children. We’re not going to compromise with that.”

Abby Martin for RT

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