AMY GOODMAN: Once again, it seems the U.S. solution to the problem of so-called terrorism is killing more lives than it’s saving. According to sources along the Afghan-Pakistan border, at least 40 people were killed and 60 wounded yesterday when U.S. jets bombed Afghanistan’s eastern Paktika province. Witnesses to the attack said that the bombs rained down so heavily that it was difficult to identify some of the dead. They also added that they did not understand why their homes had been targeted, since no members of Osama bin Laden’s Qaeda militant network were in the area. The report of the attack comes just a week after U.S. planes hit what’s believed to have been a convoy of tribal leaders en route to the inauguration of Hamid Karzai. An estimated 65 civilians were killed in that raid. Washington, however, continues to insist that the convoy was carrying al-Qaeda leaders and their Taliban protectors. And that follows a week or two before, when just as — at the Bonn, Germany, summit determining a new Afghan government, was deciding on the new leader, Hamid Karzai, his own headquarters was bombed, injuring him. Though there has been no official count offered by the U.S. government of Afghan civilian casualties, independent researchers like University of New Hampshire professor Marc Herold, whom we spoke with earlier this month, have been vigilantly tracking casualties since the bombing began on October 7th. It’s now widely believed that more Afghans have been killed in U.S. airstrikes than people were killed in the attacks of September 11th.

We’re going to turn now to a speech that was delivered by author and scholar Michael Parenti on the origins and solutions of so-called acts of terrorism. Michael Parenti gave the speech just after the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, before the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan began. We’re going to actually start with a part of the question-and-answer, where he talks about Afghanistan. This is Michael Parenti.

MICHAEL PARENTI: The first intervention in Afghanistan wasn’t the Soviet Union. It was Pakistan and the U.S. They went in. There was a military officers’ revolt against the right wing. The military officers were leftists. That means leftists or people who did things like wanting to educate children and women in Afghanistan, wanting land reform and such. The mujahideen tribes did not like that idea. The big landowners didn’t like that idea. The Pakistani military didn’t like that idea. So there was this fight. The left military around Kabul and few other places was heavily besieged. They repeatedly called for the Soviet Union to come in. The Soviets, reluctantly — and, by the way, refused the first several overtures — did come in and got themselves involved in a proxy war against the U.S. and CIA, lost it, went out.

The country was taken over by a mujahideen government. The opium — opium production went up tremendously. That was another thing with the left officers and the Soviets, is they interfered with a very profitable Soviet — with a very profitable heroin trade coming out of Afghanistan. Some of the, quote, “best” heroin in the world comes from that region. In fact, most of it comes from that region, through Europe into the U.S., into Europe, too, and other places. Heroin production is up again. The mujahideen are back in.

And then, suddenly, there emerges another group called the Taliban. Supposedly, they’re college students. Yeah, right. They’re college students who had a whole infrastructure, had the best arms there were, had communications, transportation, striking power, organization and money. It turns out they were financed by the CIA. The most retrograde element has taken over in Afghanistan. And so, you now have — you now have a Frankenstein monster, in a way. That is, you have a creation of the West that now is less than friendly. The Taliban actually are saying, “Well, we want to negotiate with you. You know, we’re not — we’re not going to invade your country or attack your country. Don’t attack our country.”

There is a way to stop terrorism. Bombing Afghanistan, a country which has been ravaged by war for the last 10 years, killing these people, these herdsmen and these tribesmen, you’re not going to — you’re not going to get — you know, they bombed — we’ve been — the U.S. has been bombing Iraq for now 11 years. They haven’t scratched Saddam Hussein once. He hasn’t missed a meal yet. He has slept in a warm, clean bed every night. You killed an awful lot of other beautiful people. I can tell — I can tell Mr. Bush that. And they’re still doing it. So, go bomb some hillsides in Afghanistan with your super missiles, kill bunches of people. You’re going to have hundreds of thousands of people fleeing terror. There’s terror at work already. And this is causing even greater starvation, greater dislocation, greater sickness, illnesses, when populations just start moving like that. There’s no productivity going on. So, it’s gotten terrible.

If you want to stop — if you want to stop terrorism, then we should not — or, the U.S. leaders should not try to be owning and controlling the planet. That’s why we’re so hated. I mean, you can have a country that has a foreign policy that pushes for international agreements, for cooperation. Why don’t we — why don’t we respect a nuclear freeze? Why don’t we sign on to the landmines bill to stop the landmining? Why don’t we stop the race of armaments into outer space? These are some of the things you can do. Why don’t we start respecting the economic development in other countries, and the cultural, economic, social, cultural, religious development in other countries, and pointedly say, “We extend the hand of friendship, that your development and well-being and prosperity is not a threat to us. It’s something that you have every right to”? And if General Motors next year doesn’t make $5 billion in profits, because now you, Yugoslavia, you’ve made your own car, and you’ve cut into the profits, when we’re going to make — they’re going to make only $4.9 billion in profits, or even $4 billion or $3 billion. That’s General Motors’ problem.

But as I say, the prosperity and development of other countries does not detract from our own prosperity. The poverty in other countries does not add to our prosperity, as I gave with the example of Nike, as I gave with the example of what happens to labor in El Salvador. But that would be the way, to be a country in partnership, rather than being a country that’s the almighty one that says, “We can go in anywhere. We can tell any country what they should do and what they shouldn’t do. And if they don’t do it, we’ll bomb the stuffing out of them.” Who gives these leaders in Washington the right to do that and dictate? You see? And this is — this is it.

The U.S. Congress, in this orgasm — I’m sorry, this orgy of — this orgy — it’s like an orgasm, everybody screaming — of patriotism — orgy is bad enough — orgy of patriotism, turns around and votes, 420 to 1, votes total power to President. Bush says, “We give you the power to pursue all-out war against any nation, any organization or movement or individual as you so choose.” You know, you can get up, and you can say, “I have — I have special information. I can’t reveal it, but it’s coming in Marseille. I’m going to bomb Marseille.” He wouldn’t do that, because France would be — all of Europe would be horrified and all that. But that’s — that’s what it comes down to. And, of course, there are — in fact, some of U.S. allies are saying, “But wait a minute. Who appointed him king of the world? Wait a minute. He has absolute, total power now to go bomb and to attack anywhere?” You know, some of these European countries have investments and such in Middle East and Africa and all that, and they don’t particularly want to see their pharmaceutical factories get bombed and their chemical plants and whatever else.
So, that’s not the way to do it.

You know, when Ronald Reagan sent those Marines into Lebanon, and the French — there were three contingents went into Lebanon. U.S. Marines, French soldiers and Italian soldiers, the Bersaglieri elite unit, went in. Some time later, five Marines were killed over a period of a week and a half from sniper shots. Then a suicide truck with explosives went right into the Marine compound and exploded, and 183 Marines were killed. So, altogether, that’s 188 killed. Another suicide car that very same time went into the French compound and killed a large number of French soldiers, too. The Italian compound wasn’t touched.

And I wondered about that, why that was so. And sometime later, I met a Lebanese friend who was very involved politically. I said, “How is it you didn’t hit the Italian compound?” And, you know, the president of Italy at that time was a guy named Pertini. He was a socialist. He had been a partisan fighter against the Nazis in World War II, and he was very popular. He was known as the people’s president. He was very much liked, and he did a lot of good things. He sent those troops into Lebanon, but with a different mandate. He said, “Don’t go in as conquerors. Go light and develop good relations with the people.” The Italians, this Lebanese friend said to me, “Well, they were wonderful.” This is not to say Italians are so wonderful compared to other ethnic groups. I’m not into that, even though I am Italian and have a lot of ethnic pride. This is a story I do like telling, though. Anyway, he said they put up field hospitals. They put up clinics. They helped the people in Lebanon. People came in who hadn’t seen a doctor in their lives, you know? They got all this kind of help, and they did all sorts of things like that, assisting the population.

So, these mad, crazy, bestial, insane terrorists, apparently, can make discriminations, you see. You got to ask yourself: Why are they targeting the U.S.? Why don’t they target Denmark? If they just want to be evil and kill people, why don’t they target — Denmark has a free society, democratic society, and it’s wide open. Security measures in Denmark don’t even compare to the U.S. Why don’t they target Sweden? I’ll give you a soft target. Why don’t they hit Luxembourg? I’ll bet we could take out Luxembourg. Why don’t they go in there and hit them? Why don’t they do that? Why didn’t they hit that Italian military compound, but they did hit the French and American ones?

If you act like a conqueror, you’re going to be hated as a conqueror. If you act as a friend and partner, then there’s room for cooperation and work and negotiation. But if you act as a friend and a partner, then you’re not serving the Fortune 500 anymore, and that might be a problem.

So, it’s time for us to really become politically aware of this fact. Do not — do not believe — do not believe anything they tell you. I mean, some of it may be true, but that’s the problem. Always ask yourself: Is this true? How true? What does he mean? What’s the part of the story I’m not hearing? And look to alternative sources.

AMY GOODMAN: You have been listening to scholar and author Michael Parenti. He gave the speech before the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan, after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, his words about casualties certainly prescient. You may remember we did the interview with professor Marc Herold about a month ago, talking about his calculations of civilian casualties. Unfortunately, while the media has many obsessions, civilian casualties is not one of them. And he said then that he believed there were between 3,700 and 5,000 casualties. The only mainstream newspaper that picked up his meticulous calculations, that he’s been doing since the first day of the bombing, was The Guardian in London in a feature piece. Every day he spends 12 to 14 hours a day calculating, based on reports from around the world, the number of civilian casualties in Afghanistan. We’re going to go back to the beginning of Michael Parenti’s speech, where he talks about the issue of terrorism, when we come back. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: “Lord’s Prayer” from the CD Sam, Sam Archer, all that and more here on The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we go to the speech of Michael Parenti, author, scholar, books History as Mystery and Democracy for the Few. Michael Parenti.

MICHAEL PARENTI: For many of you, September 11 is a date that will live in your memory. And it certainly has been living in my memory for almost 30 years. It was on September 11, 1973, that U.S.-backed military in Chile overthrew the Chilean democracy, which was a democratic coalition government headed by Salvador Allende, Dr. Salvador Allende. And about 30,000 people were killed in that coup over a period of about several years. Another 100,000 were driven into exile or arrested, tortured, and thousands more disappeared, never accounted for, never showed up. Henry Kissinger, who was secretary of state, and Richard Nixon, who was president, were the people who really were very much behind that coup. That was an act of momentous terror. It was a terrorism. Death squads were used. People were dragged out of their houses. People were put up against the wall in the stadiums and summarily executed. That’s terrorism at work.

And so it has been in the last half-century that U.S. leaders — I don’t say “the United States,” and I don’t say “we.” We go, and we do this, and we go do that. I say, “We? Wait a minute. We? No, we pay the taxes. We get screwed over. We get drafted to go, or we have to go in the army. They. It’s they who do this. U.S. leaders have intervened directly with force and violence. The terror bombing of El Chorrillo, a neighborhood in Panama City, how many people have heard about it? Not that much, because the media didn’t really give it the kind of play that you would get. Three thousand people killed there in Panama City when George Bush the first, George the first, invaded Panama. The 2 million people who have died in Angola with the CIA-supported UNITA war of attrition against Angola. The almost a million who died in Mozambique, again, with these terror squads called RENAMO, is the headline — the abbreviated title, it’s not an acronym, really — and again, supported by U.S. forces. The million people who were killed in the military coup in Indonesia which overthrew Sukarno, a military that was trained, equipped, advised and whose salaries were even paid by the CIA and the U.S. State Department and such.

So, there have been these acts of mass murder. Now, the American people know very little of that. Very little of that gets even reported. The Indonesian massacre, in fact, didn’t — wasn’t even reported 'til several months later and got a box like this in Time magazine and one story in The New York Times with an editorial applauding the military and saying that's very good, that’s a stabilizing thing. And in Nicaragua, the Contra-backed — the U.S.-backed troops who went in there and hit what they call soft targets, which were farming cooperatives, schools, community houses, granaries, energy stations, housing projects, just hit them and killing people and terrorizing, spreading terror and disillusion, disabling and destabilizing these countries. Ríos Montt, now, this is — by the way, what I’m telling you is all a matter of public record. Ríos Montt in Guatemala, who went with the Guatemalan Army, that maddened, insane murder machine called the Guatemalan Army, and President Clinton last year, remember — two years ago, even went and apologized to Guatemala and said, “We’re sorry for our role when Ríos Montt went in there and wiped out 600 Mayan villages, 600 of them, 200,000 people, men, women and children, killed every single one of them in sight. And Clinton actually apologizes, says, “I feel your pain. I’m sorry.” He didn’t explain why was the U.S. supporting this thug and this terrorizer and this murderer.

Why are we hated throughout the Middle East, after we bombed Somalia and killed 10,000 people with a military intervention, compliments of George the first and Clinton, who continued it? Why are we hated throughout Latin America? It’s not just the Middle East. You can go through Latin America. You can go through other parts of the world, Pacific world, Pacific Basin, and you’ll find people who see the United States as intervening everywhere, intervening either directly with their own troops, as in Grenada, Panama, Somalia, Iraq, Yugoslavia. I was in Yugoslavia in the summer of 1999 after Clinton’s 76 days of bombing around the clock. You want to talk about terror? You could see it.

This is not — by the way, this is not to justify or excuse what happened in New York, which was a horrible thing. But that’s the point. The horror has come home, and we can see suddenly what other people have been going through, not with a plane going into a building, but with carpet bombing, with hitting, knocking out bridges in the Danube River, depleted uranium in the Danube River, which is a source of drinking water for millions of people, the cancer cases. The next year I went to Iraq, and I saw children with cancer. They said the cancer, the leukemia rate among children has just skyrocketed, especially in southern Iraq around Basra and there. And to see these kids in these hospitals is one of the most heartbreaking things, from the terror bombing of U.S. and NATO forces in Iraq spreading out that depleted uranium and everything else. They said, “We never had a high cancer rate in this country until that happened.”

All of that is terror. And so, people — but, you see, our media doesn’t tell us. Our media tells us that we are an innocent nation. We are an American nation and has been holding out a helping hand to people all over the world, and now these forces of evil hate us. They hate us because we love freedom. Well, I think the — I think the people are rather innocent. I think they’re innocent of what their leaders do in their name. And I think maybe it’s time that we wake up, because the first condition of a democratic citizenry is to have a critical view of what’s going on.

I remember during the Gulf War, a student saying to me, “Well, this is the difference between you and me. Yeah, it’s not very pretty, what’s happening there. They are destroying a lot of things. But I have my faith in President Bush. I place my faith in President Bush.” That was the first Bush, Bush the first, George the first, he was talking about. And I said — he said, “I trust President Bush.” I said, “What do you mean, you have your faith — you have faith in President Bush? Faith? What are we doing, religion here or politics? Do you have faith the way my Italian grandma had faith in St. Anthony? She’s like, 'Oooh, you go, Georgie Bush'? You light a candle to him? Or what are you talking about? Faith? What do you mean, you trust?”

Trust. Trust, which is something where you put your interest in someone else’s hand, something you do only with very close friends and loved ones — and even them, check them out once in a while, right? That’s what trust is about. But democracy, democracy is about distrust. Democracy is about accountability. Democracy is about exposure. It’s about political competition. It’s about debate. It’s about showing us: What are the reasons you’re doing this? What are the reasons you want another $20 billion for this and another $20 billion for that? What are the reasons you want to tax us even more and tax us even more? For what? What are the reasons you want to send American boys and girls now over to this country or that country or the other country? What’s the reason that we have 350 military bases all over the world? Why do we have our fleet making port in about 40 different countries? Why are we — why do we — why are we militarizing outer space now with new forms of weaponry we hope which will be able to attack and immobilize whole populations with new electromagnetic weapons and all this sort of thing? Why are they doing in it? Why are we training and supplying and financing the troops and the paramilitaries and the police of scores and scores of other nations? Is it because to guard them from attacking each other? No, El Salvador wasn’t going to invade Guatemala. Guatemala wasn’t going to invade Nicaragua. Nicaragua wasn’t going to invade Honduras. No, it was to arm them to the teeth to keep their own people under the heel of those client state rulers. But why would we do that? Why are those U.S. leaders doing that?

I would argue that it’s not, as they say, to protect democracy in these countries. In some cases, they overthrew democracies. I already gave you an example — in Chile in 1973, in Guatemala in 1954, in Haiti under Father Aristide, death squads killing Haitians, a popular movement, the people mobilizing themselves for something better. That’s not what U.S. policy is about, because George Bush and his friends and Bill Clinton and his friends do not represent the interests of the American people. They represent the interests of the transnational corporations. Their goal is to make the world safe for the Fortune 500, to prevent competing forms of political-economic governance, to prevent countries or movements or organizations to develop that say, “We want to use the land and the labor and the capital and the natural resources of our country for our collective development, for ourselves. And we don’t want to leave this open and leave it as just so much raw material for you guys to come in, take as you want, your agribusiness firms, your banks, your investors, your whatever else.”

Well, that really is what it is about. I would say, because you can look, and you can see there are dictators, and the U.S. opposes some of them, but also loves others. When Fidel Castro took over in Cuba and formed what he thought was a popular dictatorship, he was asked, “Do you have freedom of the press?” He said, “No, we don’t really. You’re not free in Cuba to preach capitalism, racism, sexism or imperialism or those things. We do have a controlled press.” “Why don’t you have our capitalist point of view in here in Cuba?” He said, “Well, we get all your stations from Miami anyway, but we’ll be happy to put your viewpoint on our official television when you would make time to put our viewpoint on your television.” “Oh, we can’t do that, because we have a free and independent press.” Right. OK, so we are told that we must oppose Cuba because Fidel Castro is a dictator.

But wait a minute. Before Fidel Castro took power in 1959, there had been 20 years of rule by a dictator. His name was Batista. Batista was a butcher. He was hated by the Cuban people. And the U.S. loved him, kissed him, hugged him, gave — made nice-nice with him, sent him aid, trained his Guardia Civil and all this sort of thing. What’s the difference? What was the difference between Batista and Castro? The difference was that Batista was a cooperative dictator. What does that mean? It means that he opened up his country to U.S. interests. He said, “Come on in, boys. The tobacco industry here, the best in the world, right? Cuban tobacco, Cuban cigars. It’s yours. The cotton industry, the sugar industry, the magnesium, the mining, the shell food, the tourist industry — big one — all yours. You guys, come on in. You own it all, Yankees. You can have it. You can profit. And I keep my people down, so that they work hard for less. And the less you have to pay them, the more there is for you. And all you got to do, though, is take care of me, my family, my brother Juan, my brother José, my cousin this and that. You give me my boodle, you train my police and paramilitary, and we’ll take care of everything for you.” And so it was a client-state relationship. So, what you had was U.S. tax money going in there to make the world safe, to make Cuba safe for big U.S. investments — even exporting some of our jobs there, by the way.

I was looking at — I was looking at El Salvador. Do you know who’s in El Salvador? ITT, General Motors, Firestone, Microsoft. I’m saying, “What the hell’s in El Salvador?” I mean, there’s just what? Some bananas and sugar. And what are all these big companies doing in El Salvador? Well, they’ve gone in there, you know? They’ve gone in there for that other resource, that other resource which adds value to any production and gives you your profit, that other resource which is called labor. They go down for the labor. And you have Salvadorians making energy rods, rubber tires, automobile parts, you name it, everything. So there go our jobs. Our jobs are being exported. Now, I don’t begrudge other people getting jobs in the industrial world, but — first of all, they’re not even getting decent pay — but not when it’s at the expense of people who have been fighting to get a higher standard of political — of economic democracy.

AMY GOODMAN: You’re listening to Michael Parenti, author and scholar. Among his books, History as Mystery, Democracy for the Few. And if you want to get a copy of this videotape, you can call 1-800-926-3921. That’s 1-800-926-3921, as we go back to author and activist Michael Parenti.

MICHAEL PARENTI: Another goal is not only to prevent competing forms of capital, such as socialist or collectivist or communitarian, whatever else. And that’s where the pattern has been generally. You attack those, those authoritarian countries that are trying any kind of distributive politics. Iraq is a very fascinating example, but I’m going to get to that in a minute. But you also attack — you also support certain democracies, if they are free market democracies, and you attack democracies also that might be trying to redistribute things.

Salvador Allende’s crime in Chile was he did not interfere with anybody’s democratic rights, not any newspaper, not any radio station, not any demonstration, whatever else. What he did do is he started to interfere with certain economic rights, ITT and the big copper industry. And he started saying, “This should be publicly owned. We got to take some of this money, spend less of it on the military, more on people, more on building up clinics, schools, neighborhood industries and the like.” And that’s when they hit him. He wasn’t like Batista. He didn’t say, “Come on in, boys. It’s all yours.” He did say, “We need a minimum wage. If you come in, you got to pay our workers a decent wage,” etc., etc.

And corporations really, generally, don’t like that, you see. If you’re a head of a corporation, you always have this problem that your workers and others want to spend money on really stupid, stupid things, stupid things like wages, pensions, healthcare plans, paid holidays, sick leave, environmental protections, occupational safety. When will it end? Stupid things! Every dollar I got to spend on stupid things like that is one less dollar I can put in my pocket or give to my stockholders.

And so, Allende was troublesome, and he had to be done in. Don’t believe me. Listen to Henry Kissinger, who was secretary of state. He said, “If you got to choose between democracy and the economy, you go for the economy.” He said that. I thought it was nice. And every so often they get a little close to the truth. You know, “Oh, look at that. Henry almost said something that was true.”

AMY GOODMAN: Michael Parenti, author and scholar. We’re going to go back to this speech after our break. And again that number, if you’d like to find out more about the videotape of his global look and reach at the world, call 1-800-926-3921. That’s 1-800-926-3921. Back in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: Stevie Wonder, “A Place in the Sun,” as we go back to Michael Parenti.

MICHAEL PARENTI: The other thing that you — the other thing U.S. policy is dedicated to now is not only to stop competing forms of capital, as in Libya with Gaddafi, who is turning Libya — there’s another case. Libya was run by dictators before. U.S. loved them. Gaddafi came in with his colonels, took over the country. He took over a social structure that was like Saudi Arabia — that is, where a fraction of 1% obscenely rich owned everything in Libya, got all the oil revenues, kicked them out, nationalized the oil industry, took the earnings from the oil industry and started doing things like reforestation. Libyan people were allowed to go to school, free education for the first time in their history, free medical care, so forth and so on, doing those kinds of things. That’s not what the world should be about. The world is not to be organized to benefit that 95, 98%. It’s organized to benefit that 2 or 3% at the top.

OK. In addition, U.S. policy, we now are seeing, is also dedicated to preventing competing formations of capital, not competing capital forms. You get the difference? With, say, a socialist or collectivist society would be a — it’s a competing capital form. But it’s also now dedicated to stopping competing formations of capitalism. That makes it clearer, competing formations of capitalism, not only competing forms, but within the global capitalist sphere itself.

One of the problems with the Third World is not that people are stupid or lazy or poor or can’t do anything. In fact, the opposite. It’s that people were developing, and they were developing their industries. You know, you used to get — certain countries in Africa, you used to get raw leather hides from them. And then, before you know it, you got conditioned finished leather. And then, before you know it, you started getting leather goods, purses, shoes and all this sort of thing. Hey, we don’t want that. We don’t want those things competing with us. Now, for a while — for a while they were — for a while, they were allowing that. Much of the Third World was getting some aid. There was the feeling that, well, we need — we need to develop some level of prosperity; otherwise, these people will go communist, and we can’t have that. So what do we do? We give them some aid and all that sort of thing, and we look out for U.S. interests, too.

But then, suddenly, something happened. The communist countries fell, were overthrown. The Soviet Union was overthrown, and that sort of thing. And there was a big celebration. We said, “We won. We won. There is no alternative system. It’s going to be global capitalism from now on.” Shortly after that, a rather querulous note began to be injected in conservative magazines and publications, and it went like this, it says, “We now have Eastern Europe going into a free market system. And that meant, you know, the end of pensions, the end of minimum wages, the end of wage guarantee, of job guarantees, the end of all those things, a tremendous — sudden, tremendous climb in crime, homelessness, poverty, prostitution, beggary and the like, all through Russia, Ukraine, Hungary, Slovakia, Bulgaria and now Yugoslavia.

Why don’t we do rollback here, too? That is, the whole idea is to really oppose competing formations of capitalism. If I can undo your system, privatize it and deindustrialize it and really impoverish it, that elevates the value of my capital. I don’t have to worry about your prosperity anymore. There’s no Soviet Union for you to get competing aid from. I don’t have to worry about it. The world is ours.

So, what we’ve had now is a rollback — wipe out the economy, flood its markets with underpriced, Western-subsidized goods, privatize its industries, eliminate competing capitalist forms, eliminate nonprofit public ownership. One thing that happened in Yugoslavia, the minute Milošević was kicked out, was the Koštunica government came in, and they put up for privatization 7,000 businesses, worker-controlled businesses, worker-owned, community-controlled businesses, all of them put up for privatization. Most of privatization, by the way, ends up to be just deindustrializing. They buy it for garage sale, and they just put it out of business or put it in mothballs.

A very good case is Saddam Hussein. It’s Iraq. Saddam Hussein was CIA. He came in. He was working with the CIA to destroy the Iraqi revolution, which he did. He destroyed the Kurdish independent party. He destroyed the Baath — he destroyed the left wing of his own Baathist party. He destroyed the Communist Party. He destroyed all that. He was the CIA’s boy.

Then he did something that was — that got rather annoying, because now the ante is up. Now it’s no longer, “OK, sure, I’ll help you people do this, that, but make sure you have private capital, because we’ve got to watch out for the Russians. We don’t want you to go socialist.” Now he’s not going to go socialist, but he’s a competing capitalist form. He’s doing something else. He’s doing development. He started training engineers and a whole technical — technological and professional class in Iraq. Iraq had the highest standard of living in the Middle East. He was looking for a better deal on the oil prices. He was getting uppity about the oil prices and standing up to the U.S. and the West and that sort of thing, and he had to be dealt with. How is he dealt with? First of all, the same way that Noriega was dealt with, the same way Gaddafi was dealt with, the same way Milošević was dealt with. You demonize him. You talk about what a demon he is. And that gives you license then to bomb and attack his people. So, this is what I think we have before us.

And I think now we’ve explained a mystery: why, after half a century of Western investment and aid, the Third World is not better off, but poorer. It’s poorer than it’s ever been before. The number of people living in poverty throughout the world is growing at a faster rate than the world’s population. And the world’s population is growing at quite a pace, isn’t it? Poverty is spreading as wealth grows and accumulates. The goal of Western investment is not to develop competing formations of capitalism or capital, but to advance the profits of capital accumulation of Western investors.

The relationship between wealth and poverty is not just a juxtaposition. We often say, “Look at all this wealth here, and and look at all this poverty here. Isn’t this terrible?” like it’s just an unfortunate happenstance. In fact, it’s not just a juxtaposition, but a dynamic interrelation. Wealth creates poverty. That’s how you get poverty, by accumulating wealth. The way you get the rich slave owner living in such luxury on those gorgeous, glorious plantations is by having slaves and working them day and night. James Madison said that for every slave he had on his — James Madison, by the way, was the president of the United States. He was the fourth president of the United States. He said, for every slave on his plantation, he reckoned he made $275 a year in profits, and it cost him only $24 to sustain that slave. So, that’s quite a profit. That’s very good. And this was back in the days when, you know, $275 could buy you Rhode Island or something. So, OK, that’s a — you can’t have feudal lords living in great castles, unless you have serfs whose labor is being exploited. In the expropriation, the surplus of their labor goes to the lords. And you can’t have big, rich, corporate, transnational capitalists, unless you have workers.

So the world is, you see, divided into column A and column B. In column A are those people who live mostly off earnings from investments, dividends on stocks, interest on bonds, rents on properties, royalties on natural resources, like oil well earnings, this sort of thing. And in column B are people who live mostly on wages, salaries, fees, commissions — work, in other words. And what people in column A and column B have in common is that they both live off the labor of the people in column B.

David Rockefeller — you can say, “Well, David Rockefeller, he’s retired now, but he used to work. He was the head of Rockefeller Brothers.” Yeah, he worked. He could work very hard. But that can’t explain the immense wealth he was making. David Rockefeller will sit here for an hour with you, and he leaves this room. He’s richer than when he walked in, maybe not this week, but generally he is. You, you walk out of here poorer, because that little bit of money you got in the bank has already gotten chewed up a little by inflation by now.

The people in column A make up less than 1% of the world’s population. The rest of the people are in column B. Of course, there are many differences. There are people who can make more, who are prosperous and so forth, but for the most part, everybody still has to keep working.

And that policy — the policy and the class that George Bush represents is the people in column A, and none of that benefit trickles down to us. When Nike moves, closes down U.S. jobs in Ohio, where they’re paying people $18, $20 an hour, with benefits and everything else, and he moves to Indonesia, where they’re paying people 18 cents an hour, Nike does that, and it’s not to give you a better deal. They still come back and sell those shoes at, what, $120, $130, $200, right?

So, the goal of those who control — I’m going to end it right here — the goal of those who control the land, labor, capital, technology and resources of this society and most of the world — the goal is to get us back to 1870. That is, the goal is to get us back to a impoverished population where the labor unions have been broken, where there’s no minimum wage law, where there’s no child labor laws, where people work harder and harder for less and less. The harder they can get you to work — the poorer they can make you, then the harder you will work for less and less.

You might ask yourself: Why is it Americans won’t work for 18 cents an hour the way those Indonesians do? Is it because we’re so much more self-respecting? Is that it? No American would take a job for 18 cents an hour. No, it’s because we’re no longer in 1870. We’ve had a century of democratic struggle, of organizing in the workplace, of fighting for a better life, a better — a better — a better size of the pie. And the goal is always relentlessly, by those who think the pie was given to them by God, and they don’t have to give anybody a crumb or a slice — the goal is to get us back to 1870.

In other words, the United States was a Third World country a hundred years before the term “Third World country” was ever coined. In 1870, we had child labor. We had mass poverty. We had typhoid epidemics in Philadelphia and Baltimore. We had mass unemployment. We had people living in desperation, prostitution, beggary — I mean, big time. We had a few people in obscene wealth, obscene riches, and the mass of the people struggling, with a very small middle class just hanging on by its bleeding fingers. That is their goal, to get back to that, where they can write the tickets, where they are not bothered by people who are trying to constantly better their lives at the expense of those who own it all.

The thing about the difference between the struggle between the haves and the have-nots, the haves are really the have-it-alls. They want it all. They want to bring back 14-hour workdays. They want no social services. They say that. They want — with GATT and WTO and NAFTA and FTAA, which is now pending, the goal is to eliminate public services, to — any public service will now be considered an infringement and interference with the private market, a lost business opportunity, and the public, whatever it is, the municipality, the state government or the federal government, would have to pay some imaginary lost compensations to any corporation that’s in that particular line of business. No social services, no social benefits. They say that. They don’t want Social Security. They’re nibbling at it. They can’t come right out and say, “Let’s get rid of the whole thing,” which is what they want to do. It doesn’t work. Instead, they tell us, “It doesn’t work. It’s going to go bankrupt.” It’s going to go so bankrupt that it’s got an $80, $100, $200 billion surplus, and they’re dipping into it. He’s eager. Bush is eager to dip into that Social Security and spend it on more arms, more — more guns, more satellites, more outer space missiles, more aircraft carriers, all of which are going to stop a terrorist with a little — with a little ceramic knife, aren’t they? As they’ve done so brilliantly so far.

So, they’re still fighting against the eight-hour day. They’re still fighting against occupational safety. They call it bureaucratic intervention — interference. They’re still fighting to destroy and roll back labor unions, and they’re doing a very good job of that. You know, half a century ago, 35% of our workforce was unionized. Today it’s down to something like 13%. They’re still fighting against public health programs, against public education, against disability insurance and old age pensions.

So, what we need, then, is a global anti-imperialist movement. There is a U.S. empire, and we have to oppose it. And we got to point out that the patriotic thing, the patriotic thing, is to have a government — this is our flag, too. The patriotic thing is to have a government that works for the interests of the people in column B, and not for the Rockefellers, the Morgans, the Mellons, the Huntington Hartfords, the Bill Gateses and the others in column A.

We not only need an anti-imperialist movement, we already have one. We saw it in Seattle against the WTO, in Washington, D.C., against the IMF and the World Bank, in Prague, in Quebec City, in Sydney, Australia, in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Genoa. They call us agitators, but I have another word for it when people get out, and they mobilize, and they demand a change, and they expose an issue, and they confront that issue, and they offer an alternative. They call us agitators. I have another word for it. I call that democracy, democracy and democracy. And let’s have more of it. Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: Author and scholar Michael Parenti. And if you would like more information on this videotape, you can call 1-800-926-3921. That’s 1-800-926-3921. And for all of you who’ve been asking how you can make your year-end tax-deductible contributions to help us out at Democracy Now! in Exile, yes, our phone bills are very high. The phone company not only charges a war tax, but it profits during war. Our last bill was $6,400 for one month. But you know the kind of coverage you’re getting, from Afghanistan and Pakistan, Uzbekistan and all those parts. You can write that tax-deductible contribution to the Institute for Media Analysis and send it to our P.O. box, P.O. Box 693, New York, NY 10013. That’s Institute for Media Analysis, P.O. Box 693, New York, NY 10013. And thank you so much for thinking of us. Democracy Now! in Exile is produced by Lizzy Ratner, Kris Abrams, Brad Simpson, Miranda Kennedy. Anthony Sloan is our engineer and music maestro. Special thanks to Aimée Pomerleau at KPFA, all the folks there and at KFCF, to all the Pacific affiliates. We are Pacifica. Also thanks to Manhattan Neighborhood Network, all the public access TV stations running us and Free Speech TV. In exile from the embattled studios of WBAI, the studios of the banned and the fired, studios of our listeners, I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for listening.