AMY GOODMAN: And you’re listening to Democracy Now! Michael Parenti is one of this country’s most engaging political analysts. He’s an author and social critic whose views are largely excluded from the mainstream corporate media, but his voice is often heard here on Pacifica Radio. His new book is called Dirty Truths: Reflections on Politics, Media, Ideology, Conspiracy, Ethnic Life and Class Power. In it, he addresses the relationship between wealth and poverty, the injustices of U.S. corporate global domination, censorship and the hype over terrorism — a broad range of pressing issues that are receiving scant attention in this election year. We now bring you Michael Parenti at a recent book signing in California in which he discussed the ideas in his book, Dirty Truths.

MICHAEL PARENTI: One of them, one of the selections, is called “Creating the Poor,” and it deals with the question of: Where do the poor come from? See, the Bible tells us that the poor shall always be — are always with us. But where did they originally come from? You know? So, I give a very unmysterious answer to this historical mystery, you know? I say that great wealth creates poverty, that we often juxtapose wealth and poverty. You know, we say, “There’s so much wealth and so much poverty, and this is terrible,” and all that. But we should start to realize that this — that these two things come together so often, it’s no accident. It’s because wealth causes poverty. That’s not what you usually learn. You learn that wealth abolishes poverty. “Oh, if we get so much wealth, you know, and the slice gets bigger for everybody, and it’s uplifted for everybody. And isn’t that great?”

The dirty truth is that the rich are the great cause of poverty. When a large surplus is accumulated by a few, then there is want and deprivation to be endured by the many, whose labor creates this surplus. Slave holders live in luxury and opulence because slaves toiled from dawn to dusk creating the slave holders’ wealth, while consuming a very meager portion of the wealth that they create. Today, in much of the world, there are great latifúndios. Wherever there are great latifúndios, there are great, great concentrations of landless, destitute peasants who have been crowded up into the dusty hills or who have ended up in the crowded shanty towns and such. Wherever there are rich corporate investors who extract enormous profits from production, so are there workers who put in long hours while paid but a small fraction of the value they produce.

Now, this isn’t a mere coincidence, as I said. How else is wealth accumulated? It’s from the labor of those who produce far more than they’re allowed to consume. Did the slave holder or the feudal lords who spent their days hunting, riding, dueling, feasting — did they create the abundance they enjoyed? And today, do the big shareholders, do the Steve Forbes, the Nelson Rockefellers, these others, who spend their lives boating, partying, attending charity balls, studying pottery and photography or running for public office, as more and more of them are doing — did they create the fortunes that accumulate from their investments?

You can see the connection between wealth and poverty when CEOs lay off thousands of workers and then vote themselves tremendous bonuses and salaries by speeding up the labor and productivity of the remaining surviving workers, scaring them to hell. And that’s the whole idea, is to get you scared, to get you working harder and harder for less and less, and settling for less.

And then, also, don’t forget not only the big salaries and bonuses they vote for themselves, but the billions, the billions of dollars that are then — god, what an amplification system here — the billions of dollars that are then — that are then distributed to the big shareholders. Mustn’t forget that. You see, you can — generally, you can — now it’s happening that they’re criticizing the CEOs who are making these enormous salaries, but that’s one thing. When you criticize the CEOs, you’re doing muckraking. You’re saying — you’re criticizing greedy individuals. If you were to criticize the whole shareholder class, that 1% or 2% at the top, that’s not even counted. When they do income distribution estimates, they don’t even count the people at the very top. They only go up to a million dollars. That’s the highest salary they do, a million dollars. But that doesn’t include the top 2% who own most of the wealth in America. They don’t even count them. They keep them statistically invisible. If you were to talk about how they’re — how they are really raking it in, then you would move from an exposé or criticism of greedy individuals to a class critique, a class analysis of the distribution of wealth and power. And that’s serious.

And we might ask why, after two centuries of incredible technological development and unprecedented economic expansion, two centuries of an increase in productivity barely imagined in earlier times, why, with all this increase of productivity and expansion, why have the number of people living in poverty in the free-market world grown so much more quickly than any other population cohort. Why has the world’s slum population increased at a far greater rate than the total global population? Why has such an amazing industrial growth been accompanied by increasing want and misery and repression? So, the next time someone preaches the gospel of economic freedom and productivity, we need to ask: For whose benefit, and at whose cost?

What I try to do in Dirty Truths is not just denounce such things, but attempt to explain why they exist. When you start doing that, you move from a liberal complaint to a radical analysis. You see things are done to us for rational, self-interested reasons, from layoffs to polluted water, polluted air, from wasteful energy systems to the slaughter of innocents abroad. These aren’t the result of foolishness and stupidity. They benefit powerful interests who consciously pursue ways to undermine the substance of democracy — not necessarily the appearance of democracy, but the substance.

Look at the way the police power was used — look at the way police power is used in this society. Take the case, a tragic case not long ago, of Polly Klaas. Remember, they caught — they caught her would-be killer while she was still alive. He had hid her in the woods, and some woman in her house called the police. The police came, caught this guy in the woods, and they believed his story. He said he was just going for a stroll in the middle of the night in the middle of the woods, and his car had slipped into a ditch. And they helped him pull out his car, and he drove away. They never even did a thorough check on the guy. And he came back, found her and raped and killed her. I mean, what kind of police work was that? I mean, that was the most miserable — I mean, that was the most miserable kind of demonstration of police work.

I said at the time — I said, “If in Petaluma that guy had robbed a bank instead of taking a precious human life, they would have set up blockades. They would have had helicopters come in. They would have caught him in no time.” Do you know what happened about a year later in Petaluma? Some guys robbed a bank. I got the clippings out, because it’s very rare, you know, your theory is actually acted out in real life immediately like a laboratory test. And there it was. They robbed a bank. You know what happened? They had roadblocks up. They had helicopters. They caught them in 20 minutes. Tens of thousands of missing children every year, the police never even investigate. Why is that?

Forty Black churches have been torched this year, dozens more over the two years before. For two years, the authorities never even investigated, never even — the federal authorities never even moved on it for two years. Now they’re saying, “Well, we don’t see a conspiracy. We don’t see a pattern. We don’t — we’re not sure that it’s racially motivated.” Hello? I’m saying, “Hello? Wait. Am I — am I missing something here? You got these whites burning these Black churches, but you don’t think it’s racially motivated. OK, right. What would make it racially motivated? What would make it racially motivated? What would be the proof?” Well, the other thing the authorities said — I read this in The New York Times, I’m not kidding — they said, “Anyway, it’s hard to catch arsonists, because they burn the evidence.” You see?

Now, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, imagine if — imagine if 40 banks were burned in several states within a period of six months. Would the — and dozens had been burned in the two years before. Would the federal authorities have waited two years? You know? Would they have gone in and started critically examining the bank president and suspect — like, that’s what they’re doing with the Black churches. They’re questioning the ministers and the congregation. They’re questioning the public interest groups that have been pressuring them to get into the investigation. They’re questioning them — “What do you know?” — treating them like suspects. Well, now, if banks were burned, do you think they’d go in and they’d say, “We don’t see a pattern. We don’t know if this is anti-bank. We’re not — we don’t think there’s a conspiracy. And anyway, it’s hard to catch bank arsonists, because they burn the evidence. It’s hard to catch bank robbers. They take the money and run”? In fact, wouldn’t every bank in these particular regions have police guards in front of them? So, is there one rule for banks and another one for Black churches and abortion clinics?

Four Haitian talk show hosts in the United States were murdered. All were outspoken critics of the military regime that had overthrown President Aristide. The FBI didn’t see a pattern. They doubted that there was a political motive. Seven Vietnamese American editors and publicists have been murdered. They all called for normalizing relations with the Vietnam. FBI says they didn’t see a pattern. They didn’t think there was a political motive. I mean, even in one — a couple of cases, there was an organization, a Vietnamese organization, that claimed credit for the killings. They had some neutral, pastoral name like Vietnamese Warriors for Christ Against Communism, something like that. FBI said, “Ah, it’s probably a cultural group there. I don’t know. We don’t see, I know, no political motivation here.”

Well, now, are the FBI and the police being stupid, or are they being political, when they do this? I would say that you’re being stupid if you think stupidity is at work. And we love to do that, by the way. We love to say, “How stupid they are! They’re doing this and this. How stupid that is! And they want to raise that, but then that’s going to happen. Oh, how stupid!” It’s not stupid. They know what they’re doing. It’s stupid from your interests. It’s stupid from a social point of view. It’s stupid from the point of view of wanting to have a decent, better community, a fairer, more equitable community. But they know what they’re doing. It’s not — it’s not — they’re not stupid. “U.S. foreign policy, so stupid,” I hear people say. “It’s so stupid!” I say I don’t think so. I think it’s a brilliant, murderous, global, successful foreign policy. It is — it is suppressive, self-rewarding, elitist. It’s been incredible. And at no time in history has there been a foreign policy that has done the things that U.S. power has done all over the world. They’ve got it locked up practically.

We used to love to say Ronald Reagan was stupid. For eight years, I would have to argue with people, with audiences, with people on the left, say, “He’s not stupid. Will you stop calling the guy stupid?” I mean, that’s a stupid statement to call him stupid. I mean, he wasn’t very sharp. He would go to — he would go to Uruguay and say, “It’s wonderful to be here in Bolivia.” Remember when he did that? But he, unlike most of the presidents who came before him, including Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford, he knew he had an agenda, and he knew what he wanted to do, and he did it. He doubled the military budget. He destroyed the progressive income tax. He exercised his veto again and again for conservative ends with incredible precision. He held down the minimum wage, didn’t move an inch when he was in. He redistributed income by billions of dollars. He made the poor poorer and the rich richer. And he left — when he left the White House, he left the world as a dirtier, poorer place, but a richer place for him and that 1% or 2% at the top.

And we’re being stupid when we think those who control the world’s wealth, technology, markets, armies, money supplies, natural resources and media, that they’re stupid. Aren’t they stupid? They’re in control of everything, and we think they’re stupid. We sit there so superior and say, “They don’t do what I want. They must be stupid. That’s why.” We’re stupid when we think that they don’t know what they’re doing and they don’t have any conscious concern for their own interests.

Oh, but if you say they are consciously doing this, well, do you have a conspiracy, huh? I mean, do you think there’s a little group of men sitting around in a room planning all this sort of thing? That’s an image that’s supposed to devastate you, demolish the argument, that wins the field, you know? I say, “No, no, they’re not sitting around in a room. They jump out of airplanes, and when they free fall, they talk to each other. Or they meet on park benches.” Of course they’re sitting around in rooms! Where the hell else do you think they sit around? They got lots of rooms in the White House. They got lots of rooms at General Motors. They got lots of rooms in Langley, Virginia, at the CIA. There’s nobody who confabulates and plans and plots the way the ruling interests do. They’ve got their Trilateral Commission, and they got their Council for Foreign Relations, and they got their Bilderberg conferences, and they got their Bohemian Grove, and they got — the local elites have their Bohemian Club here in San Francisco. They’re always meeting and talking and figuring out with their experts in there and their others. And we say, “You don’t think they actually talk to each other and consort. It’s conspiracy!”

AMY GOODMAN: Michael Parenti, political commentator and author. His latest book is Dirty Truths: Reflections on Politics, Media, Ideology, Conspiracy, Ethnic Life and Class Power. We’ll have more from Mr. Parenti in just a minute. You’re listening to Democracy Now!

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AMY GOODMAN: You’re listening to Democracy Now!, Pacific Radio’s daily grassroots election show. I’m Amy Goodman. And we’re going back to political commentator Michael Parenti, author of many books, including Against Empire, Democracy for the Few and Land of Idols. His latest book is called Dirty Truths, and it deals with ecological apocalypse, the relationship between wealth and poverty, the terrorism hype and the continuing mystifications about the Kennedy assassination, also deceptions and injustices of U.S. corporate global domination. Michael Parenti.

MICHAEL PARENTI: A conspiracy is a secret deception for illegal ends. That’s what conspiracy is. So, can we really believe in conspiracies? Can we really believe in conspiracies? Bom, bom. We can’t believe in all conspiracies. Some are kooky theories, it’s true. The U.N.'s black helicopters that have already taken over America, that's a hard one. But does that mean we can’t believe in any conspiracies? Well, well, Parenti, if you believe in conspiracies, then that means, if you’re asking us to believe in conspiracies, we would have to believe that politicians and state leaders and corporate leaders lie to the public. That’s what you’d have to believe if you believe in conspiracy. You’d have to believe that they sometimes operate in secrecy, that they — that they suppress information and destroy incriminating documents, that they go outside the law or around the law, that they profess to be serving the people while really serving their own powerful interests. Who can believe all that? Next time, next thing you’ll be telling me there’s no Easter Bunny.

We’re not talking about a conspiracy theory here, ladies and gentlemen. We’re talking about a conspiracy reality, a political reality. That’s what we’re talking about. If the mythologies that our leaders offer as justifications for their policies sometimes seem irrational or stupid, that doesn’t mean the policy itself is irrational from the standpoint of the class interests of those who pursue that policy. See, a lot of times we think something is irrational or stupid, because we see the discrepancy between what is being said and certain evident things, so we say, “This person is all mixed up.” But there’s a difference between stupidity and subterfuge. There’s a difference between confusion and deception. They’re committing deception. They’re saying these things not because they’re stupid, but because they’re liars.

One of the problems we face, and one of the problems Dirty Truths, this book, tries to address, is that we’re continually bombarded with information. It’s not true we can’t find out. I mean, that’s also true. You could ask an investigative journalist about that. It’s often a struggle to extract answers or get evidence. But if you look around you, you’re bombarded with information, but we’re not given any explanation about why these things are happening. We get reports every day from political leaders, from news media, about all sorts of crimes and problems and conflicts, but little is said about how the social order is organized and whose interests prevail. When it’s — devoid of a framework that explains why things happen, we’re left to see the world pretty much as do the right-wing and centrist pundits. I call it pundit gossip. I call it expert excretia. I call it a number of other things I won’t repeat here. They would have us see the world as a flow of events, happenstances, personalities, ambitions, developments — that’s a choice word, “developments” — today. You know, what does that mean? Developments? You see? For them, things never happen because powerful class interests want them to happen. Yet I can’t help noticing how so much of innocent happenstance really keeps reinforcing the same class interests. It’s a remarkable, remarkable coincidence.

This, ladies and gentlemen, I think, is how we learn stupidity. We learn not to associate social problems with the socioeconomic forces that have created them. We learn to amputate our own thoughts. We learn not to look at immediate actualities in relation to a larger set of social relations.

Now, imagine if we attempted something different. Let’s say we tried to explain that both wealth and poverty were an intended accomplishment of economic exploitation at home and abroad. How could such an analysis be made in the mainstream corporate media? Impossible. Suppose we started with a particular story about how underpaid, malnourished children in Indonesia are contracted by multinational corporations at near-starvation wages. This information wouldn’t be carried in any right-wing publications, but it already has appeared. It appeared after years of effort by protesters, some protesters. It’s appeared in the centrist mainstream press. Finally, with a little help from Kathie Lee, the media discovered this issue of child labor in Indonesia, and now it’s news.

What if we then crossed the line and said that these exploitative relations were backed by the full might of the Indonesian military regime, and, in fact, that the Indonesian generals, the whole Suharto family, was up to their ears in investments in child labor contracting? Well, that would even eliminate a lot of other publications from carrying it, but The New York Times and The Washington Post might still put that datum in. I haven’t seen it, but they might still put it in paragraph 23, page — page 27. It might be in there. I saw a whole show of Nightline with Ted Koppel a couple of weeks ago on child labor in Indonesia, and he never once mentioned the Indonesian government.

Suppose, then, we crossed another line in this question of Indonesia, and we said that these repressive arrangements would not last very long at all, were it not for the U.S. national security state, which has armed, trained, paid and advised that deranged murder machine known as the Indonesian military? Well, what if we said that the CIA and the U.S. military intelligence were heavily involved in Indonesia, propping up this government and keeping things as they were, in effect, supporting the conditions that make for child labor? Such a story would be even more unlikely to be reported in the mainstream press or even in the liberal press. But it’s still issue-specific and safely without any overall analytic framework, so it would probably get published in left liberal opinion journals like The Nation, The Progressive, In These Times. It would be a muckraking piece, and you can get it in.

Now, suppose we then pointed out that the conditions found in Indonesia, the heartless economic exploitation, the brutal military repression, the lavish U.S. support — supposing we said that those conditions exist in scores of other countries. Then suppose we cross that most serious line of all, and instead of deploring this and saying it’s terrible, we say — that we ask why. We say, “Why? Why is the United States involved in such unsavory pursuits and propping up unsavory fascist regimes all over the world, with or without the benefit of showcase elections? Why is it doing that?” You know, for years, people bemoaned the fact that the U.S. was on the wrong side, against the people. But it’s — and nobody ever asked, “Why? Why are they doing that?”

And what if then we tried to explain the whole phenomenon by noting how consistent it was with the U.S. dedication to making the world safe for free market capitalism, for international global finance capital? What if we said that this policy was the intended goal to maximize opportunities to accumulate wealth and depress wages and depress the work levels of workers throughout the world, including within the U.S., and prevent them from organizing on behalf of their own interests? Then, what if, from all of this, we concluded that U.S. policy is neither timid, the way the conservatives say, nor foolish, the way the liberals say, but we say that it knows exactly what they’re doing, it’s remarkably successful in rolling back just about all governments and social movements that have attempted to use their land, their labor, their resources and their markets for the betterment of their own people, to try to use their resources for popular needs rather than for global finance capital?

Well, such an analysis, very hurriedly sketched here, as I’ve just done, would amount to a Marxist analysis of capitalist imperialism. Wow! It almost certainly would not be published anywhere, except in a Marxist publication, not because it’s Marxist, but because it’s true. It’s the whole truth. That doesn’t — it’s not — Marx didn’t invent these things. He discovered some of them. We’ve crossed too many lines, and we’ve committed an important — we violated an important taboo. We tried to explain the particular situation, child labor, in terms of a larger set of social relations, corporate capitalist relations. Our presentation would be rejected out of hand as ideological and nothing new.

There was an editorial in The Nation. It went as follows. It said, “Imagine that Russia has been governed by a popularly elected communist over the last five years. Imagine that this communist pursued harsh economic policies that pushed one-third of the citizens into poverty.” It’s actually closer to 70% are below or near the poverty line. Imagine that this communist devastated the middle class while turning most of its richest assets to a small segment of previous Communist Party officials, or his cronies, let’s say. Then this communist president used tanks to disband the democratically elected parliament because they opposed the harsh measures and giveaways. Then this communist rewrote the constitution, that enabled him to rule virtually by decree. So, these are all the things that Boris Yeltsin did, you see.

Now imagine if a communist did it, The Nation says. Would the U.S. president enthusiastically support the reelection of this communist president? The article makes that a rhetorical question. The answer, implicitly, is no. In fact, my answer is yes, because the communist president wouldn’t be a communist in anything but name, and would be doing exactly what the U.S. imperialists want: developing a strong executive power that helps to dismantle the socialist system and opening it up for capital penetration, creating private wealth and public poverty, destroying the gains and powers of organized labor. That’s what Yeltsin did. If the communists did it, they would be fine. They’d kiss him and hug him, like they’re kissing and hugging the leaders in China, who are doing exactly that. They’re communists, but they’ve opened up their country to foreign investment. You got people in China now working 14-hour days in the business zones, wherever else. Of course, of course, they would — they would enthusiastically endorse him. Just because the editors of The Nation don’t know what our leaders are doing doesn’t mean our leaders don’t know what they’re doing.

Political thought in this country, even among the presumably politically literate, is seriously truncated, brothers and sisters. Marxism is hated and feared by the powers that be, because it gets us into the dangerous habit of asking why, of seeing the linkage between political interest and class power. Given the absence of any real alternative media, we intellectual workers are under an obligation to produce materials that assist rather than discourage people in their efforts at self-education, to get people away from the punditry gossip and soundbites and toward a critical analysis of power and interest. I mean, the ways we’ve been conditioned by the media. You sometimes see people interviewed on TV repeating the campaign advertisements that they heard, the same soundbites, the same slogans, the punditry fixation. The number of times recently I’ve been asked by people, “Who do you think is going to win the election? Clinton or Dole?” I mean, what? Is that — it’s such an exciting choice that you can’t wait? I mean, you’re going to ask me who? That’s a punditry gossip question.

A few of the pieces in this book deal with some theoretical questions, such as: Is there false consciousness? How can you use the concept? Why it’s important to settle that question for purposes of political understanding and also for political organizing. A small amount of the material is rather technical, in a way, but I think it’s in a nonlethal, accessible way. There’s an essay called “Political Science Fiction,” which is an analysis of the stages of the political science profession, the dominant paradigms of political science, from the traditionalist to institutionalist to behavioralist to post-behavioralist and radical, and the conflicts that went on. Well, why have a technical piece like that in a book that’s meant for the lay reader? Well, why patronize the lay reader? The lay reader can read this. The lay reader could see that — could see, in this particular high-flown, rarefied place, the same replication of struggles and hypocrisies and contradictions that exist in the larger society.

I have — I have an essay in Dirty Truths called “Now for the Weather.” That’s the title of it. I said earlier that authors who start reading from their book at people are just committing outrageous self-indulgences. I happen to like outrageous self-indulgences, I have to confess now, so I will read, but it’s just a small portion. It’s a — it’s a quick self-indulgence. Quote: “When the evening news tells us what’s happening with the weather, potentially cataclysmic developments, such as ozone depletion and global warming, are not mentioned. Weather is defined in a limited way: cloudy and clear, cold and warm.” And this is maybe the key sentence for the whole — maybe for the whole talk tonight. “The weather is reported the way politics is reported: isolated daily particulars unconnected to the larger structural forces that help create them.”

I also have about four selections in the book that relate to my own personal experience. I don’t really have an interest in doing personal things. I’ve actually been interviewed a few times by journalists who have wanted to do a personal article, like, what’s the real Michael Parenti. I said, “Why? Come on. Are you kidding? What is this, Parade magazine you’re writing for or something?” I hope — I hope the most interesting thing about me are my ideas. The four pieces were all previously published, but they’ve been redone. They’re inserted here because, I think, in the microcosm — again, in the microcosm, in personal experience, there’s a reflection of the larger whole pattern of social power. And that was what was interest — that’s why I had an interest to write these autobiographical pieces, because they reflected a larger thing.

One was on how I was censored by NPR when they were thinking of having me on as a commentator. Do any of you ever know that? Did I tell you that? I got a call once, and the lady says, “We have Cokie and Kevin, Cokie Roberts and Kevin Phillips, on All Things Considered, and we’re thinking now of broadening, and your name keeps coming up,” she said. “Would you like to be one of the commentators?” I said, “Yeah, sure, that’d be great.” And well, Pete, my friend, said, “Why aren’t you more enthusiastic about this?” I said, “It’s not going to happen. It’s not going to happen.” And she said, “Now, it would also entail things like, you know, you’d have to be in here every so often.” I was living in Washington, D.C., at the time, I said, “Sure, that’d be good.” “And occasionally we go with Cokie and Kevin, and you would come along, for a weekend retreat.” No, weekend retreat, that’s a — I mean, to sit for a whole weekend listening to Cokie Roberts do her spin, you know, is my idea of purgatory. I said, “Yeah, sure. OK, sure, I’ll do that. Yeah.” Well, it never came through. It got zapped upstairs. And there’s more in the story. Another piece I did was on how I was shut out of academia — I mean, a number of times, but I’ve been kicked out of some of the best universities in America because of my political activism and the like.

AMY GOODMAN: And you’re listening to Michael Parenti, a recent speech he gave at a bookstore in San Francisco. His latest book is Dirty Truths: Reflections on Politics, Media, Ideology, Conspiracy, Ethnic Life and Class Power. And over the next months, we’ll be bringing you more of this political commentator, as he was explaining, excluded from the corporate media, not to mention academia. You’re listening to Democracy Now! Coming up in just a minute, we’ll be talking about the docket of the Supreme Court. Stay with us.