CHRIS HEDGES: Welcome back.
I'm Chris Hedges.
This is The Real News.
This is part five of my conversation with
Robert Scheer, the author of They Know Everything
About You: How Data-Collecting Corporations
and Snooping Government Agencies Are Destroying
Democracy.
I love the book.
It's brilliant.
You're a great writer.
And it's an important book.
I wouldn't say they are destroying democracy;
I would say they have destroyed democracy.
You have held up throughout this conversation
the founding fathers.
And I want to go back to Thomas Paine, who
was the real radical, who called for--he didn't
use the word socialism, but a type of socialism,
who was an abolitionist, who was a proponent
of direct democracy, which the founding fathers
were not, who opposed the genocidal campaigns
against Native Americans, which all of the
founding fathers embraced with relish, who
wanted rights for women.
And I think Zinn points out that all of these
freedoms that you talk about were reserved
for a very small, select group of largely
slave-holding white males, our aristocratic
class, who replaced the aristocratic class
of Britain, and that it was--Washington, by
the time he was president, was the wealthiest
person in the United States, largely by seizing
Indian lands with land speculators and selling
it for profit--of course, he himself was a
large slaveholder--And that through the constitutional
conventions that were held after independence,
you really saw a rolling back of that populism
and radicalism that Paine, who himself became
a pariah, spoke so eloquently about, and of
course Common Sense and his journalism were
used to fuel--most of the people fighting
the revolution were yeoman farmers.
So they created mechanisms by which we would
never have a voice--the Senate, the Electoral
College.
That's how you had Al Gore win 500,000 more
votes than Bush and Bush still wins or Nader
did not lose the election.
Everything was built into the system to create
a kind of protection of rights for a very
select few.
And we saw throughout American history--and
Zinn does this in his book--the struggle by
labor, by women, by African-Americans, the
Communist Party.
We have erased the importance of the Communist
Party in this country all through the '20s
and '30s.
These radical movements that opened up that
space in American democracy, all of those
movements have been shut down in the name
of anticommunism, starting with Wilson but
running right through, past McCarthy.
Labor is a spent force.
You talk about labor, where you have less
than 12 percent of the American workforce
is unionized.
Only 6 percent of the labor force in the private
sector is unionized.
We have created an oligarchic state, a form
of neo-feudalism.
You have half this country living in poverty
or near poverty.
We have a looming climate crisis, especially
since we are not--and Barack Obama drills
like Sarah Palin--we are not able to stop
the ravaging of the planet, whether it's the
tar sands or dropping drill bits up into the
summer Arctic sea ice by Shell Oil, profiting
off the death throes of the planet.
These people are barreling forward in terms
of the impoverishment of the working class,
the destruction of the environment.
And they have created mechanisms--they certainly
are prepared for unrest.
They have run scenario after scenario after
scenario, and they have created mechanisms--militarized
police, drones, security and surveillance--an
evisceration--Obama's assault on civil liberties
is worse then, as I said before, anything
Bush has done.
They're ready to go.
They know something's coming, and they're
totally prepared.
And I don't see in that mechanism that they
have put into place--and what they have done
in terms of creating both a legal, a judicial,
and a security system that is so powerful,
so pervasive, and, as you said, far beyond
anything the Stasi ever dreamt of--I don't
see how at that point appealing or believing
that the system is reformable is anything
but futile.
ROBERT SCHEER: Wow.
So let's go have a drink.
HEDGES: Well, I want to resist.
But it's how you resist.
SCHEER: Yeah, I understand that.
HEDGES: And you resist through acts of civil
disobedience, by shutting the system down.
SCHEER: You know, I have no truly coherent,
rational way of countering what you just said.
All I have is biography.
You know.
And as--and here I do feel, as a journalist,
you know, what have I seen, just as what have
you seen.
And this period is not, to me, darker than,
say, the period I grew up in.
I mean, I was--if we can get little personal
here, I was born in 1936.
My father lost his job.
My father was a German Protestant from--you
know, heavy accent.
And my mother, who was Jewish, did not have
papers, because my mother was a refugee from
communism, amazingly enough.
Her movement, the Jewish Socialist Bund, had
been crushed by Lenin, and like many of the
immigrants who came to this country, she had
a checkered political past.
And lawyers--and then she got involved in
labor strikes--the first months she was here,
was arrested some ten times in the first half-year,
and lawyers told her, don't apply for citizenship,
because they'll deport you.
And so I was kind of--and they weren't even
married legally.
And they even misspelled my name on my birth
certificate at Bronx hospital.
So I can't say--I came into this world and
this country with uncertainty all around.
And, you know, what do you do?
What is your [incompr.]
And my parents were very poor and living in
the Bronx, and my father had another family
he had to support, etc., etc.
So I, you know, looked around.
But yet there was a tradition and an excitement
about social issues, in part because a guy
who could be seen as a ruling-class reformer,
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, however gave hope.
Okay?
And now I can reread Roosevelt and I can go
back and study Roosevelt.
I could talk about Roosevelt's failing, turning
back people trying to enter this country who
were escaping fascism.
I could talk about the failure to enter the
war against fascism [incompr.]
I could give the same lecture you gave just
opening this thing.
You know, why did it take so long to open
the second front in the war?
And why did we treat the Germans, Americans
living in this country different than the
Japanese Americans?
All of my German relatives, none of them were
rounded up, and the Japanese were.
My half-brother bombed our hometown in Germany.
He was in the Air Force.
No one challenged his [incompr.]
And then I remember as a kid, you know, my--I
had--a guy named Carl Juergens [spl?] was
one of my closest friends.
He couldn't play baseball, but he was the
best baseball player.
You know, I remember being taken by one of
my lefty--my uncle, Edward, to picket Ebbets
Field so they would hire Negroes.
You know.
I remember McCarthyism coming in.
And I was delivering milk then, when I was
12 and half years old, and people were throwing
out books in the garbage cans and trying to
get rid of them.
Well, one of the sets they threw out was the
collected works of Jefferson, you know, because
in that crazy McCarthy period, not only Tom
Paine, who--after all, his body was dug up
at another period and his bones scattered
through the landscape--.
And by the way, just let me reinforce what
you said.
I don't think we would have had a bill of
rights were it not for Tom Paine and other
people like that.
We wouldn't have had limited government and
the checks and balances and separation of
powers built into the Constitution the way
they were were there not a great deal of suspicion
of the elites, the guys with the wigs and
everything else who were making this law.
So to get a nation built, to get a Constitution--and
Charles and Mary Beard and other scholars
of that whole period have brilliantly outlined,
you know, this was forced upon them.
The reason the Fourth Amendment is there:
it was forced upon these people in government.
However, however you get this thing--and this
goes for societies that claim to be built
on socialism.
You know.
After all, this is what dissidents in any
society--Christian dissidents, you know, Muslim
dissidents who say, no, you'll be trained
in the Quran--they look for the parts of the
tradition that give them clarity and moral
support.
You know, in my own teaching on ethics, I
rely heavily--and you have much better training
than I do--but I rely on the Good Samaritan.
I think that is a testament to why we have
to care about poor people.
You know, I now rely on the Pope's writings
about poverty and so forth.
So we find our inspiration wherever we can.
And I certainly would not give a blank check
to the founders.
But I would say there is something in that
tradition that is invaluable.
Invaluable.
And the notion of distrust of government,
distrust of the powerful--.
HEDGES: The division of power.
That's key.
SCHEER: Yeah.
But the idea that it has to be checked, and
the belief that ordinary people are capable
of understanding their circumstance--.
And I agree with you.
The definition of ordinary people was limited.
But, you know, after all, Tom Paine, who was
a recent immigrant and who was a corset maker
and a worker and so forth, he was in that
ordinary definition.
People did listen to him.
They read his pamphlets.
We had a penny press.
We had wall posters.
We had dissent from the very beginning.
And that dissent demanded to be heard.
And the only way they could weave this nation
together was not just by going to the elite,
because the elite was fragmented.
After all, much of the elite in this country
supported the Brits.
They supported the king.
You know.
Washington was an exception in that respect,
and Madison and Hamilton.
You know, there was a very significant group
of people that didn't want to challenge the
king or who were indifferent, another third
or maybe a third were really the revolutionaries.
HEDGES: Well, the reason Paine rose is because
the entire government in Philadelphia remained
loyal to the crown.
SCHEER: Exactly.
HEDGES: And so they had to work with--Paine
made them very uncomfortable.
SCHEER: Yes.
Exactly.
HEDGES: But they had no choice.
SCHEER: And Paine was not alone.
There was Sam Adams.
There were others.
So I understand that.
What I don't want to lose here is, however
this Constitution got written and however
it's been interpreted, it has within it, particularly
the issue we're here to discuss today, this
Fourth Amendment and the First Amendment and
the protection against self-incrimination
and all of those other things, those ideas,
just like some ideas you will find in Marx's
writings or you'll find in Confucius or Aristotle's
writings, for all of the contradiction, right,
all the contradictions, when you find those
ideas, you want to hold on to them and you
want to raise them, you want to address them.
You know?
And that idea of limited government, that
idea that we have these basic rights that
no one can take away, I found as a kid to
be the source of my own energy.
Otherwise I would have given up.
You know.
I mean, I can tell you--just let me say one
little personal thing.
I worked in the post office to go through
college.
Okay?
Blankfein, the head of Goldman Sachs, his
father worked in the post office, okay?
He came out of that experience and said, I'm
going to be as rich as anybody can be, 'cause
I don't want to end up in the post office.
Alright?
I had the opposite experience.
I felt the people working with me in the post
office, many who were vets from World War
II, Korean War, and so on, I felt, you know,
these people are as smart as anyone I ever
meet in the university or anywhere else.
They're being deceived.
They're being lied to.
They're not being given the information.
If we can give them the information, if we
can raise these issues, if we can invoke the
best parts of our tradition, then we got a
shot, okay, and we can reverse some of these
laws.
You know, we had Taft-Hartley come in that
destroyed the unions.
HEDGES: Right, 1948.
SCHEER: We had McCarthyism come in.
And we had to fight back.
You know.
And you're absolutely right.
You know, it was--you know, this is what Martin
Luther King referred to.
You know, why did the FBI go after Martin
Luther King?
What was Hoover's excuse?
Hoover's excuse is that he had two close associates
who were former communists.
HEDGES: Rustin.
SCHEER: Huh?
No, not just Bayard Rustin.
He had--I'm blocking on their names, but there
were one black and one white Jewish.
HEDGES: Oh, the lawyer, Leventhal--
SCHEER: Levin, and I'm forgetting the other
person.
HEDGES: Oh, Lowenstein.
Lowenstein.
SCHEER: Yeah.
And Hoover went after King because King wouldn't
kick those people out.
He wouldn't kick out Bayard Rustin also.
And he used redbaiting against--Hoover.
HEDGES: Right.
But I would argue that at that point, however
flawed the system was--and we both understand
it was deeply flawed--the Constitution was
a living document.
At this point--I mean, Stalin had one of the
most enlightened constitutions ever written.
And so all of these things remain true on
paper, but they're not a judicial reality.
I mean, we now live in a country where the
military--and this is another direct violation
of the Constitution--can come in and carry
out extraordinary rendition on the streets
of American cities against American citizens
deemed to be terrorists by the government,
held in military facilities, and stripped
of due process.
I mean, that's just one of many examples.
So, over and over and over we have seen, largely
through the courts, a reinterpretation, a
radical reinterpretation of our most basic
constitutional rights, to essentially nullify
those rights.
SCHEER: Okay.
Let's understand something.
And I'm saying this not because I want to
flatter you.
First of all, I know it's not possible--you
don't fall for that.
But seriously, I am your editor at Truthdig,
and I have said publicly and I'll say it now:
I think you're the most important journalist
we have in the world, okay--that I know of.
I'm sure there are others that are more important.
I just don't know them.
Okay?
I don't read their language or I don't follow
them.
The reason I say that is because you are,
let's say it, the scold, the uncompromising
person who has called the university to task.
You did it when you gave that speech at a
commencement.
You called The New York Times to task when
you wouldn't accept their terms for going
along.
And you haven't even pointed out the biggest
problem we have in this society, which is
not the Cheneys, it's not the, really, proto-fascists
that we have out there; it's the good Germans,
it's the people who have gone along, it's
The New York Times when they allowed Wen Ho
Lee--not only allowed; encouraged Wen Ho Lee,
a scientist at Los Alamos, to be held in solitary
confinement and humiliated, with lights on
24-7, on totally trumped-up charges.
You know, it's when we're treating our whistleblowers,
when this president has gone after whistleblowers
with an intensity that exceeds that of all
previous presidents.
HEDGES: Or Chelsea Manning exposes clear war
crimes, and the only person who's prosecuted
is not those helicopter pilots who violated,
I think, three or four--.
SCHEER: Okay.
So I think your--you've talked about my being--making
a real contribution.
Your unique contribution is to call out the
enablers of a move towards fascism.
And without them, there cannot be--
HEDGES: That's right.
SCHEER: There cannot be.
What happened in Germany was that the good
Germans went along.
That--we know that.
That's really what Hannah Arendt--that's what
is meant by the banality of evil, okay, that
people went along because their careerism
trumped their integrity, because their fear
trumped it.
And that of course is what the surveillance
state is expecting and has expected.
And the betrayal of a Nancy Pelosi, you know,
as Bill Binney pointed out, the reason Nancy
Pelosi could not go for impeaching George
W. Bush is he called in the two top leaders
of the House and the Senate and had them made--made
them complicit.
He did with the Mafia did.
You know.
And there's a famous quote from the head of
Citicorp when Bill Clinton gave them the reversal
of Glass-Steagall.
He said he called up the president and told
him what really was going on, and he said,
to turn to his partner, he said, we made the
president complicit in this deal.
So there's no question that you have caught
the real illness of our society, which is
the complicity of well-intentioned, well-spoken,
well-educated people going along with absolute
madness.
The people at The New York Times or elsewhere
who told us, oh, we buy this weapons of mass
distraction, and we're going to go invade
Iraq, a government, or Saddam Hussein, who
had nothing to do with 9/11.
They went along.
And then, when you don't find the weapons,
they still go along with the war and they
still go along with the lies.
And then, yes, let's talk about Chelsea Manning.
Here is a person who--what was the great crime?
To show us that civilians were killed in Iraq,
and including shooting at Reuters reporters,
and that the government was not going to tell
us, and instead of that person being of awarded
with a Nobel Prize, sitting in jail for this
very lengthy term.
Yes.
But where we disagree, where we disagree is
that I feel inspired by the--.
What's the right word?
I want to say non-sellout, but that's too
meek.
By the wonderful moments of our history, by
the saving grace of a Daniel Ellsberg or Chelsea
Manning and so forth.
And what are they doing?
They're doing the same thing that dissidents
did in the Soviet Union.
The dissidents in the Soviet Union were really
appealing, originally, to the promise of socialism
that was betrayed.
After all, the promise of socialism was not
to implement a system more coercive than what
the tsar had, right?
HEDGES: Right.
SCHEER: Okay?
So that's what a dissident does in Cuba.
You know?
It's to appeal to what was supposed to be
the promise of the Cuban Revolution.
The first people that Fidel Castro cracked
down on were people who had written for Lunes
de Revolución, which was the cultural segment
of the revolution's paper.
HEDGES: Right, Carlos Franqui and--.
Right.
SCHEER: Yeah.
Exactly.
And these people said, you are betraying the
Cuban Revolution.
What I say in this book is you're betraying
the basic, positive, most thrilling notion
of the American experience, which is the notion
that we individuals are the ones that are
guarding freedom, not you guys who are in
power, and we are obligated as citizens to
challenge you at every turn, you have all
the power.
That is the requirement of our Constitution
whether the Supreme Court acknowledges his
or not.
So I want to call them out.
And I think--and that's why I brought up the
biographical things--I think that gives us
room to call them out, okay?
'Cause they have tried to take away our legitimacy.
They take away the legitimacy of a Chelsea
Manning, right?
They say, you are a traitor, right?
I am saying, no, Chelsea Manning is a heroine,
okay?
Heroine.
You know, Bill Binney is a hero, Edward Snowden
is a great hero, Daniel Ellsberg was a hero,
in the same way that Tom Paine was a hero.
HEDGES: And we'll end on that.
Thank you very much, Bob Scheer.
We've been discussing Bob's extremely important
book They Know Everything About You: How Data-Collecting
Corporations and Snooping Government Agencies
Are Destroying Democracy.
It's been a pleasure.
As you know, I hold very few people in this
country, certainly very few journalists, in
as high a regard as I hold you.
Thank you.
And thank you for joining us on The Real News.
