[Reader-list] Fwd: Excerpts from Howard Zinn (Interview-2009 March, In Socialist Worker)

[Venugopalan K M]

You can't leave it to the market. If you're facing an economic crisis like
we're facing now, you can't do what was done in the past. You can't pour
money into the upper levels of the country and into the corporations, and
hope that it somehow trickles down. That's a trickle-down theory.  Do you
know about the trickle-down theory? If the money does trickle down, it will
be a trickle, and that's all.

WHAT WAS one of the first things that happened when the Bush administration
saw that the economy was in trouble? A $700 billion bailout, and who did we
give the $700 billion to? To the financial institutions that ruined us--that
caused this crisis.

This was when the presidential campaign was still going on, and it pained me
to see McCain and Obama standing there, both of them endorsing this huge
bailout to the corporations.

What Obama should have been saying was: Hey, wait a while. The banks aren't
poverty stricken. The CEOs aren't poverty stricken. But there are people who
are out of work. There are people who can't pay their mortgages. Let's take
$700 billion and give it directly to the people who need it. Let's take $1
trillion, let's take $2 trillion. They spend that on bombers.

We don't need to spend the hundreds of billions of dollars on the military
budget. Take all the money allocated to military bases and the military
budget, and--this is part of the emancipation--you can use that money to
give everybody free health care, to guarantee jobs to everybody who doesn't
have a job, guaranteed payment of rent to everybody who can't pay their
rent, build child care centers.

I took a cab from--do you call it Reagan National Airport?--and I like to
get into conversations with cab drivers. And if I think the cab driver has a
foreign accent, I will say, "Where are you from?" I asked this cab driver,
and he said, "Afghanistan." I told him the truth--that I'd never had a cab
driver from Afghanistan before.

I saw that I didn't have a lot more time left, so I had to get to the heart
of the matter. I said, "What do you think of President Obama's idea of
sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan?" He shook his head. He said,
"What they need is food. They need health care. They need houses. That's
what they need."

This is the mindset that sends 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, and that
says, as Obama has, that we've got to have a bigger military. My heart sank
when Obama said that. Why do we need a bigger military? We have an enormous
military budget. Has Obama talked about cutting the military budget in half
or some fraction? No.

We have military bases in a hundred countries. We have 14 military bases on
Okinawa alone. Who wants us there? The governments. They get benefits. But
the people don't really want us there. Right now, there are huge
demonstrations in Italy against the establishment of a U.S. military base.
There have been big demonstrations in South Korea and on Okinawa.

They want to have platforms in space, where they can aim their weapons hit
wherever they want. It's pretty scary, unless you believe them when they
say, "Oh, we're very precise. We have the latest equipment. We can target
anywhere and hit just what we want." This is what they've been saying all
along, right?

But then you notice that with all the sophisticated equipment and so on,
they can actually decide that they're going to bomb this one house. But
there's one problem: They don't know who's in the house. They can hit one
car with a rocket from a great distance. Do they know who's in the car? No.

And later--after the bodies have been taken out of the car, after the bodies
have been taken out of the house--they tell you, "Well, there were three
suspected terrorists in that house, and yes, there's seven other people
killed, including two children, but we got the suspected terrorists."

But notice that the word is "suspected." The truth is they don't know who
the terrorists are.

We have to get out of that mindset. And Obama has to be pulled by the people
who elected him, by the people who are enthusiastic about him. We're the
ones who have to tell him, "No, you're on the wrong course with this
militaristic idea of using force to accomplish things in the world. We won't
accomplish anything that way, and we'll remain a hated country in the
world."

The word defense is one of the most misused words in the English language.
"We bombed this country in self-defense." "The Israelis pulverize and
destroy Gaza in self-defense." This isn't defense. This is aggression. And
we want a country that doesn't commit aggression anymore.

Let's use the money to help other people around the world, not to send
bombers over there. When disasters take place, they need helicopters to
transport people out of the floods and out of devastated areas. They need
helicopters to save people's lives, and the helicopters are over in the
Middle East, bombing and strafing people.

What's required is a total turnaround. We want a country that uses its
resources, its wealth and its power to help people, not to hurt them. That's
what we need.

We are citizens. We must not put ourselves in the position of looking at the
world from their eyes and say, "Well, we have to compromise, we have to do
this for political reasons." We have to speak our minds.

This is the position that the abolitionists were in before the Civil War,
and people said, "Well, you have to look at it from Lincoln's point of
view." Lincoln didn't believe that his first priority was abolishing
slavery. But the anti-slavery movement did, and the abolitionists said,
"We're not going to put ourselves in Lincoln's position. We are going to
express our own position, and we are going to express it so powerfully that
Lincoln will have to listen to us."

And the anti-slavery movement grew large enough and powerful enough that
Lincoln had to listen. That's how we got the Emancipation Proclamation and
the 13th and 14th and 15th Amendments.

That's been the story of this country. Where progress has been made,
wherever any kind of injustice has been overturned, it's been because people
acted as citizens, and not as politicians. They didn't just moan. They
worked, they acted, they organized, they rioted if necessary.

And the anti-slavery movement grew large enough and powerful enough that
Lincoln had to listen. That's how we got the Emancipation Proclamation and
the 13th and 14th and 15th Amendments.

They did all sorts of things to bring their situation to the attention of
people in power. And that's what we have to do today.


http://socialistworker.org/2009/03/13/standing-for-justice














You cannot build anything on the foundations of caste. You cannot build up a
nation, you cannot build up a morality. Anything that you will build on the
foundations of caste will crack and will never be a whole.
-AMBEDKAR



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