Bill Moyers Interviews Benjamin Barber

FYI:


>http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript103_full.html
>
>Bill Moyers Interviews Benjamin Barber
>
>In New York this week, free trade is just one of the subjects on the agenda
>of the world economic forum.
>
>3,000 of the global elite are here, rubbing shoulders and networking, the
>Vatican of globilization.
>
>As usual, the protestors are here, too, urging the powers that be to
>remember democracy as they slice up the new world order.
>
>Benjamin Barber wrote the book on the new world order, called it JIHAD VS.
>MCWORLD, HOW TERROR IS CHALLENGING DEMOCRACY," and he wrote it before
>September 11. Call him prescient or call him a professor, he's both. And
>he's one of the leading thinkers about democracy.
>
>Thank you for joining us.
>
>MOYERS: You are speaking three times at the world economic forum. Does that
>feel you've been invited into the belly of the beast?
>
>BENJAMIN BARBER: Well, I have been along with 50 religious leaders from
>around the world.
>
>I'm not sure the corporate leaders have got religion, but they've figured
>out that it's relevant in a way that perhaps before 9/11 they never realized.
>
>MOYERS: As you make your way to and from the place where the conference is
>being held you're passing through all those protesters. What do they want?
>
>BARBER: I think the single word that captures what is a diverse group —
>like any groups there are a lot of different folks, and or kifts,
>Socialists, Green, union folks, syndicalists — a lot of different people.
>
>I think if you needed one word to describe them, the word would have to be
>democracy.
>
>Where is the democracy of the new world?
>
>We know where the corporations are.
>
>We know where the interest of investors are.
>
>We know where the interest of those who trade in commodities and financial
>capital are.
>
>Where is democracy?
>
>MOYERS: I talked to one of the leading activists about a week ago. As he
>was getting ready to come to the conference. He said as they write the
>rules of the new world order we just want to make sure they make the world
>safe for democracy?
>
>BARBER: In fact, they're making the world less safe for democracy.
>
>MOYERS: How so?
>
>BARBER: Because what they are doing is taking it away from sovereign nation
>states which have historically been the guardians and keepers of democracy,
>they're taking away their power to regulate and make the rules and putting
>it into the hands of new international institutions, which institutions
>themselves, however, are far less democratic than the nation- states where
>the rules were originally made.
>
>In that sense they're not just globalizing the economy, they're
>dedemocratizing the economy at the same time.
>
>MOYERS: But the underlying assumption of globalization is that capital must
>be free to go where it wants and do what it wishes so that the spreading
>wealth will lift all the votes.
>
>BARBER: That's the mythology, but of course the reality of capitalism
>historically has been its synergistic interaction with democracy.
>
>MOYERS: What do you mean?
>
>BARBER: It has flourished in Britain, France and the United States through
>the 19th and 20th centuries because it's had the tight relationship to the
>series of democratic institutions which have regulated it and prevented it
>from being destroyed by its own contradictions, which has done something on
>its behalf that it does badly.
>
>Capitalism is great at production, lousy at distribution.
>
>What this democratic state has done is help redistribute the profits and
>the rewards of capitalism to spread them evenly.
>
>It's also protected us at the local level from the savage face of
>capitalism because capitalism's productivity can be a savage and brutal thing.
>
>MOYERS: Do you think it's possible to write the rules of the new world
>order to promote globalization that are fair to corporations and fair to
>the environment, to workers, to democratic institutions.
>
>BARBER: Sure we can. We've been doing it in the United States for the last
>100 years. It's a contest that goes back and forth.
>
>Sometimes the corporations get the upper hand the market gets the upper
>hand. That's where the conservatives and the Tories are in power.
>
>Sometimes regulation in the interest of the people and welfare and social
>safety nets get the upper hand, that's when Roosevelt and the Great Society
>are there.
>
>We go back and forth. But over time we do it decently. There is no such
>dialectic in the international realm. It's only the corporate interest.
>It's only the banking interest. It's only the interest of the market. The
>voice of the people is silent, is absent.
>
>MOYERS: You saw that report on Chapter 11. What happens to your hopes for
>democracy when the system appears to so many people, including yours truly,
>to be rigged that way.
>
>BARBER: There's a kind of a pretense here.
>
>The pretense is that we have an international privatized market in which
>there are no rules and no regulations. That it's a genuine entrepreneurial
>sector. But that's not true. There are rules. There are regulations.
>Chapter 11 is one set of regulations that in effect protect investors,
>often at the expense of ecology, of safety, for a local population.
>
>The W.T.O. provision....
>
>MOYERS: The World Trade Organization.
>
>BARBER: The World Trade Organization provision on boycotts does the same
>thing. It says if Americans organize, say, to bar Indian rugs made by child
>slave labor in India from coming in here that's an illegal boycott and the
>United States will be penalized if it permits that boycott to interfere
>with the rug trade from India.
>
>Once again we have international rules but rules that favor and are made by
>corporations' interest not by the democratic peoples around the world who
>have to live with the consequences.
>
>But starting on September 12, the world changed profoundly not just for you
>and me and the American people and people around the world but for the
>multi-national corporations and multi-national banks because what happened
>on September 11 is that globalization showed its malevolent face.
>
>It suddenly became apparent to corporations that a world of and anarchic
>markets without democratic regulations without an international criminal
>tribunal was a world in which terrorists could operate even more
>effectively than multi-national corporations.
>
>That's why this weekend in New York, 50 religious leaders from around the
>world, are meeting with the corporations.
>
>That's why I think people like me, civic democrats, idealists, were
>invited. I think after September 11, there is a new political realism. And
>the name of that political realism is democracy.
>
>MOYERS: Ben, Ben, Ben, within 24 hours after the World Trade Center, the
>corporations were in there with bills in Congress that attempted to attach
>to the defense bill.
>
>Here young Americans were about to be sent in harm's way this far places
>like Afghanistan.
>
>And these energy corporations were in there with their rented politicians
>in Congress proposing amendments to the defense bill to provide huge
>billion-dollar subsidies to some of America's richest corporations.
>
>BARBER: In that same week a number of interesting things happened.
>
>First of all on September 12, not one American, not one politician called
>Bill Gates or Michael Eisner and said help us out of our plight. "What are
>we going to do?"
>
>A week after the downing of those buildings President Bush and the
>Republicans who had made a fetish of not paying the United Nations' dues
>paid the U.N. dues that the U.S. owed.
>
>They began to talk in, for them, unusual multi-lateral terms. Colin Powell,
>Secretary Powell, began to say we need a coalition of nations.
>
>And the first thing these corporations did planning for Davos
>(Switzerland). Said let's move in.
>
>Davos is where for 27 years these corporate guys have met in a little
>charming alpine resort away from the eye of the media, away from the world
>where they can do their deals and networking and so on.
>
>They moved it to New York in part as a tribute to New York, in part because
>they needed the attention.
>
>MOYERS: You're saying the world economic conference came here for the same
>reason that the terrorists came here: because it's conspicuous. It's the
>place to make your point.
>
>BARBER: It's the very thing they hadn't wanted: transparency. They've
>invited transparency and they've done it also by inviting interlocutors,
>people who talk with them who come from a different segment from those they
>normally invite.
>
>I would say very simply they are running scared. Wouldn't you?
>
>One thing we can all agree, terrorism is bad for democracy but it's even
>worse for business.
>
>Ask business how they fared, ask the economy how they fared, terrorism, the
>very anarchy of globalization which these corporations have welcomed for
>years suddenly showed its dark side, its perverse side, its anti-business 
>side.
>
>Now corporations themselves are asking, we need government cooperation.
>
>MOYERS: When do you expect the multi-national corporations to go back to
>Congress and say we've been rethinking Chapter 11. We want to democratize
>it we want to ameliorate the effects of Chapter 11.
>
>BARBER: They won't lift a finger, Bill, to do that.
>
>But what may happen is if the American people figure out, helped along
>about documentaries by this, that there are rules out there in the new
>global world which privilege the corporations and prejudice the interest of
>the American people and the Mexican people and the Canadian people and
>start to do something about it, the corporations will say, "well, that's
>the cost of doing business in a modern world where terrorists also operate
>in the war on terror, you can say democracy has taken on fundamentalism and
>terrorism.
>
>It's now time for democracy with equal force and equal strength to take on
>global markets, to take on global corporations, to take on the and anarchic
>side of globalization that is economic and not just fundamentalism.
>
>MOYERS: You're calling for something akin to the Reformation several
>hundred years ago.
>
>For years now the ruling ideology, the ruling religion of America has been
>free market.
>
>Its god and profit. Its heaven is the corporate board room. Its hell is
>regulation. Its Bible is THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. Its choir of angels is
>the corporate media.
>
>You've got a religion in this country of free markets that is established
>in the political culture as well. How do you expect to have a Reformation?
>
>BARBER: Because we have the great and perverse assistance now of a new
>anti-prophet named Osama bin Laden. We have September 11.
>
>We have seen suddenly and abruptly the perverse animal and malevolent side
>of globalization, of anarchy of a world without rules of a world in which
>the United States refuses to play ball with the new international criminal
>tribunal which is now not available to deal with terrorists. The
>corporations have seen it too and they are scared.
>
>President Bush who came in after all as a kind of fraternity boy interested
>primarily in seeing to it that the economic interest that had supported him
>and he had supported would have free reign has suddenly become an apostle
>of strong government.
>
>Yes in the name of a war on terrorism but many different dimensions of that
>war point back to a relegitimation of our democratic institutions.
>
>The President in the State of the Union said this is going on, folks. This
>is a long war. This was isn't over.
>
>He even hinted toward the end of the speech that it was a war that would
>require volunteer citizens doing community service, that would require
>other things than just military actions.
>
>MOYERS: To beat my favorite dead horse — poor thing — can we do what you're
>talking about unless we break the grip of money on our political system?
>
>BARBER:No, I would say if there's one thing we first have to do it's to do
>genuine and real campaign finance reform because if the money interests in
>America, the powerful corporate interests in America through money control
>the government that in turn controls the international organization like
>the World Trade Organization, like the International Monetary Fund, like
>the NAFTA treaties and the regulations there, then there's a vicious circle
>because in effect they don't have to buy the international regulations,
>they buy the governments here and let our government buy the international
>regulations on their behalf.
>
>It's that vicious cycle that I think we now have a potential to break
>because of the events of September 11 and their aftermath.
>
>MOYERS: What is your answer or your response to Italy's Berlusconi or
>America's Henry Kissinger who say that to pursue democratic values as
>Benjamin Barber is proposing, to pursue democratic values in this kind of
>world is to undermine our true national interest.
>
>BARBER: Well, people like Sam Huntington and his clash of civilizations
>have argued and Berlusconi Prime Minister, the Conservative, the almost Neo
>Fascist Prime Minister of Italy has argued that the West alone is democratic.
>
>Islam and the rest of the world is not democratic. This is a clash between
>democracy and Islam. The West and the rest.
>
>But that goes back to a long ancient quarrel in the democratic tradition.
>There's two kinds of democrats. Democracy for me and mine.
>
>The Athenians, a few of them were citizens and everybody else were slaves.
>The American founders us white men with property, we're good democratic
>citizens but women, blacks, slaves, non-property owning whites, not good
>citizens.
>
>And those who have believed in what I believe is the true democratic
>tradition that democracy is the right of every man woman and child to be
>engaged in acts of self-governance, that every living human wants to govern
>his and her own life and wants to participate in the communities of power
>that govern them.
>
>In other words, democracy is a claim not that I run my life — and I have a
>right to — but that we all have exactly the same right.
>
>It's a universal claim. That's the claim I'm betting on. It's not just
>idealism. That's the new realism.
>
>The new realism says whether or not you agree with Barber on this, we will
>not have our democracy unless they find a democracy in Palestinian and
>Afghanistan.
>
>There are no walls high enough to keep out the perils of a world full of
>injustice and inequality.
>
>There are no oceans wide enough, no walls high enough to separate us from
>that world. That means that the new inter-dependence which is the essence
>of globalization means we can't have democracy by ourselves.
>
>We all get it around the world or in time we lose ours.
>
>MOYERS: Thank you very much, Benjamin Barber for being with us.
>
>We have to get you back now to the belly of the beast.
>
>Good luck.
>
>###
>
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