Exposing The Terrorism Trap
David Ross Interviews Michael Parenti
by Michael Parenti and David Ross
June-July International Socialist Review
July 20, 2002

Michael Parenti received a PhD in Political Science at Yale University.
He is one of the nation's leading progressive thinkers,an uncompromising
advocate for political and social justice. He has written sixteen books,
including Democracy for the Few, Dirty Truths, and The Sword and the
Dollar. His latest book, The Terrorism Trap: September 11 and Beyond, is
published by City Lights Books. His website is  www.michaelparenti.org .

David Ross is a grassroots activist who has worked on the Nader campaign,
corporate accountability, U.S. imperialism, and environmental issues. He
can be reached at [log in to unmask] .

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I'D LIKE to start out with the title of your new book. What do you mean by
the terrorism "trap"? THE ACTS of terrorism that took place on September 11
must be seen in a wider context. The reason these people  attacked us are
twofold.

First there are the immediate causes. They're driven by an apocalyptic
religious ideology. But at the same time the question comes up, "Why  did
they attack the United States?"

Bush says it's because we're so free and prosperous. Well, Denmark is a
lot freer and a lot more prosperous than we are, so is Sweden, so are a
number of other Western European countries, but they are not being
attacked in this same way. So we must try to look at the larger conditional
causes of terrorism.

The terrorist groups that have arisen in the Middle East and Central  Asia
have emerged from societies in which all popular coalitions and democratic
movements have been destroyed by U.S. interventionism:  Turkey, Yemen,
Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and others.

In country after country where democratic forces have tried to mobilize
for political and economic democracy, where student leaders, labor union
leaders, farm and peasant communal collective leaders, independent
journalist, liberal clergy, women's rights advocates, various groups of
people who have fought for social change in a democratic direction, these
reformist democratic forces have been the  object of the worst sort of
oppression over the last half century.

Democratic interests have been destroyed or left with nothing to hold on
to. Finding their economies, their cultures, and their societies spinning
or sinking beyond their grasp, finding themselves with no control over
their lives, many of these people, in a mixture of hope and desperation,
turn to a kind of totalizing religious solution.

One that actually preaches direct action and revenge against the evil
empire, in this case, as they see it, America. But it's really not America
that's doing this to them, it's the U.S. ruling class. America itself is a
entity of 260 million people, of many diverse groups most of whom do not
want to see their tax dollars expended and the blood of their sons and
daughters spilled in far off places, the names of which  they don't even
know, and usually cannot even find on the map.

They wonder why so much is spent on war and so little on things like local
education. Their schools are falling apart. The roof on the school is
leaking and the kids don't have sufficient textbooks, and school materials.
And that's not just in inner cities. I know schools in California, in
suburban areas, where the art teachers go out with their own money and buy
art supplies for the students because the budgets have been cut back so
much. And they're wondering why we have so much public poverty and so much
private wealth, so much civilian poverty and so much military glut and
military wealth. U.S. leaders
have built military bases all over the world.

It seems U.S. forces have got to be everywhere, all over the world,
occupying countries from Bosnia to Macedonia, to Kosovo, to Afghanistan, to
Tashkent, more and more places at the taxpayer's expense. Meanwhile the
quality of life in the U.S. is being neglected  and deteriorating. So it's
not really true that Americans are clamoring for empire.

Despite the monopoly propaganda of the corporate media and national
security state, Americans do at times question the terrible costs and
burdens of empire. But during times of crises, real or fabricated, our
leaders manage to convince people to rally mindlessly around the flag,
telling them, "this is for democracy," "this is for our national
security," "we've got to do this to fight terrorism."

Well, what's happened? U.S. forces went into Afghanistan, destroying much
of that already battered country-all supposedly to catch Osama bin Laden.
They never caught him, and now they say, "Oh that's not very important
anyway, we don't really have to catch him."

The White House is now predicting that al Qaeda is planning some other
terrorist strikes of major magnitude, coming soon. So what exactly was
accomplished by waging war upon a weak impoverished battered country?
People say, "Well what would you do?"

I would go out and hunt the terrorist cells, specifically. I wouldn't go
out and bomb whole cities and villages. That's like trying to catch a flea
with a giant sledgehammer. But that policy has served George Bush and his
reactionaries in Washington quite well under the guise of this terrorism
battle. While the rest of us, you and I, saw September 11 as a horrible,
horrible tragedy, they saw it as a golden opportunity and they've been
pushing their reactionary agenda ever since.

The first thing George II did to fight terrorism after September 11, was to
call for an additional tax cut for the very rich. And the next thing he did
was to jack up the military budget even more, another 50 billion until now
it's close to 400 billion dollars.

None of this enhances our security against terrorism. WHAT ARE the
realmotives behind U.S. foreign policy? I BELIEVE the real motives behind
most of U.S foreign policy-these may not be the only concerns or the only
interests-but the major basic motives as measured by the kinds of countries
U.S. leaders support and the kinds of countries or political movements they
try to destroy is to keep the world safe for the Fortune 500.

To make sure that the transnational corporations and international global
finance capital continues to control the land, labor, resources, and
markets of most of the world, and ultimately, all of the world on terms
that are extremely favorable to them. The goal is to destroy, to
obliterate, to thwart any social movement or national leader who is trying
for an alternative way of using the land, the labor, the natural resources,
the markets, the capital of his or her country.

The most recent example is Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. Why is Chavez being
portrayed as an unstable, wild-eyed demagogue? It's a very repetitive,
rather obvious and predictable formula. A country tries to get out from
under the U.S. global-dominated economic system. They want to develop their
own society in their own way and you immediately begin to demonize their
leaders.

You talk about the leader being a "mercurial strong arm," "a strong
man," "erratic," "dangerous," "a repressive autocrat," "another
Hitler," "anti-American," and "anti-West." But it doesn't make somebody
anti-American if they criticize U.S. policy and want to develop in their
own way, a way that would be more beneficial for their people.

If I criticize U.S policy and say, "I don't like what our leaders are doing
in Iraq and Yugoslavia," "I don't like it bombing civilian populations,"
that doesn't make me anti-American. If I criticize what Israel is doing in
the West Bank, in Jenin, in Hebron and other places, that doesn't make me
anti-Jewish or anti-Semitic. That makes me anti- the particular leaders who
are making the particular policies in Israel or in the U. S. right now.

I'm opposed to those policies. That's not being bigoted against America, or
Israel, or France, or China. If I don't like Chinese policy in the business
zones that they've set up and a number of areas, that doesn't mean I'm an
anti-Asian, and a racist against the Chinese people. That is just a
manipulative kind of labeling.

To oppose the policies of a government does not mean you are against the
country or the people that the government supposedly represents. Such
opposition should be called what it really is: democracy, or democratic
dissent, or having a critical perspective about what your leaders are
doing. Either we have the right to democratic dissent and criticism of
these policies or we all lie down and let the leader, the Führer, do what
is best, while we follow uncritically, and obey whatever he commands.

That's just what the Germans did with Hitler, and look where it got them.
WHAT ARE the domestic repercussions from the so-called "war on terror?" I
ALREADY alluded to some of them. The war on terror has enabled the Bush
Administration to ram through the USA PATRIOT Act, which defines terrorism
so broadly that one could almost say that the conversation we are having
right now is aiding and abetting terrorism, and they could try to make a
case against us.

I'm not exaggerating. This "law" gives the CIA the right, once again, to
operate with domestic surveillance, which they've never really stopped
doing, which they've been doing in the U.S. all through these years. But
now they can be less sub-rosa about it. They can be more open and go and do
whatever they want. It gives them the powers to suspend habeas corpus, to
suspend our civil rights whenever they want. Well let me tell you, if under
the guise of fighting terrorism they think
they're going to take away our right to dissent, and our right to a trial
by jury, and our right to freedom of assembly and freedom of speech,
they've got another thing coming because millions of people do not agree
with that hysterical, stupid, USA, so-called, PATRIOT Act.

It has nothing to do with patriotism. It is an act which that gaggle of
wimps they call the U.S. Congress stampeded and ran into line to vote for
by an overwhelming majority because they had to show themselves as out
there fighting terrorism.

WHAT DO you believe are the real structures of economic and political power
in the United States?

THE REAL structures of economic and political power rest with the powers of
very big moneyed interests that finance right-wing think tanks, pay the big
paid lobbyists in Washington, and bankroll most of the big elections. If
you want to run for any really important federal office-even for the U.S.
House of Representatives-to wage a viable
electoral campaign in one congressional district now cost hundreds of
thousands of dollars.

The moneyed power also exists in a whole set of auxiliary institutions. The
representatives of corporate America sit on the Boards of Regents, and
Boards of Trustees that rule our universities and colleges. Corporate
America owns the major media. They control the economy. They control the
job market, the technology, interest rates, financial institutions. They
have tremendous influence over Congress. People say, "Oh, do you have a
conspiracy theory, do you think people really gather
together in a room and meet each other?" Certainly they meet all the time.
They meet at the Bohemian Grove and the Bohemian Club in San Francisco.

They meet at the Knickerbocker Club in New York. They meet at the White
House. They meet at the Council on Foreign Relations. They meet at the
Trilateral Commission and elsewhere. They're constantly meeting and
confabulating, and selecting the right people for the right positions, the
big policy-making positions in government. They're constantly setting up
policies, what to do and how to do it and how this best protects the powers-
that-be and the money-that-is. They don't rule entirely the way they would
like to. If they ruled entirely as they'd like to, they would have wiped
out social security twenty years ago.
They still have to deal with the popular vote to some degree and these are
precious democratic rights. That's about all we've got left, these few
rights, and sometimes not even that, as dissent is repressed or blocked out
of the media. And the vote is devalued when there's nobody worth voting for.

Here in California we are faced with one man named Simon who's running for
Governor whose a total right-wing, big-money conservative. He'srunning
against Gray Davis, who calls himself a Democrat, who is another
conservative, big-money individual who sold his soul to the energy
companies and the like. So, you often don't have a vote. I'm voting for the
Green Party candidate, Peter Camejo, just as a protest vote because neither
of these other two people are worth anything.

IN YOUR book, you respond to the often-heard statement that everything
changed after 9-11.

What didn't change after September 11? MANY OF the terrible things we
talked about, or if they have changed, they've changed for the worst.
The government is still constantly looking for ways to restrict our rights
and our freedoms. The government is still giving multibillion- dollar tax
write offs to the top one percent of the population at the expense of the
rest of us. You know every time they get a tax break that means that
portion of the tax burden shifts onto our backs, onto the backs of the
ordinary working people in America. The government is still out there
trying to destroy the environment and undermine the Clean Air Act, and the
Clean Water Act as imperfect and insufficient as those Acts are-trying to
roll them back. They're still trying to go after Social Security. They're
still sending troops, money and military materials all over the world to
suppress other people who are trying to build better lives for their own
countries, trying to get some land reform, trying to get a new kind of
government that would give education to the common people, that refuses to
sell all the public resources off to the big corporations for a song. U.S.
leaders, in the service of the big corporations, continue to undermine
movements and
governments that are trying to develop in more democratic ways, responsive
to the needs of their people.So I haven't seen all that much really
changing since September 11. Now, of course, for the people who are
directly impacted by the tragedy, who lost loved ones and such, their lives
have changed forever and this is something they'll live with for the rest
of their lives.

DO YOU believe our corporate-capitalist system is reformable? And if not,
what is your vision of an alternative political-economic system that would
be more just and egalitarian?

I SEE a system in which the people who do the labor, who work and create
the value in society, should be the ones who have the say as to how it will
be used. And that means you've got to have elections that are not money
driven but are really based on issues with clear alternative perspectives
which will allow people to vote. You've got to have voting systems that are
not restrictive, not an obstacle course designed to disfranchise the poor
and the dissident. You've got to have free open ballot access to a variety
of parties. You should have proportional representation, which means that
if a political party gets
15 percent of the vote, they will get roughly 15 percent of the
representation in the State Assembly or the Congress, or wherever it  may
be. You should get rid of the Electoral College, which elects the president
with 550 votes or so. You should have a direct election of the president by
direct popular vote, so that every vote counts equally regardless of its
location. You should also have a whole change in our priorities. The
corporations should be heavily taxed. They used to provide about 20-30
percent of the national revenue, and today they provide more like 6-7
percent, if that.

Many of the biggest corporations don't even pay taxes. They even get a
negative tax refund because they haven't paid any taxes-they have so many
tax write offs, they actually get refunded for taxes they never even paid!
What a system. I would also put under public ownership some of the basic
industries in our society: the utilities, the energy companies, and this
sort of thing. I would develop alternative, renewable, sustainable, energy
systems: tidal energy, thermal energy, wind energy, solar power energy.
These things are not pie-in-the-sky things. I hear that by 2030 Germany is
going to be moving toward a point where a third or half of their national
energy sources are going to come from wind. Denmark is doing the same thing.

There are countries all over the world doing the same thing. There are
houses in the United States, literally thousands of them, that are  heated
either partially are totally by solar power. One could go on.  There's no
mystery as to what could be done. The alternatives are there. They're not
just in blueprints. They're actually being put into operation in
communities.

I would support family farming and communal farming, which is often the
safest farming. It's the best, and is often very efficient. It may not have
that immediate, high-powered, mass productivity that the big agribusiness
farms have, but the commodities that come out are usually safer and
cleaner. They're not ridden with genetically engineered foods or
pesticides, or not as much. The family farm and the communal farm uses the
water on its own land so they don't poison it and spray it to
the same degree as big agribusiness. They care for the land. In the long
run they're more efficient. They don't just do cosmetic farming. They don't
just discard a third of the crop because it might have some scratches on
the skin of the potato or it looks irregular in its shape. They sell those
potatoes too.

I would democratize our universities so that they're not run by a small
group of rich businessmen who stand with ideological control over much of
the faculty and administration. I would have the universities run by
committees of faculty and administrators and students and staff, all of
them having a say in things.

It might be a little more difficult, sometimes a little messier, sometimes
very wonderful and very rewarding, but it would be at least more
democratic, more creative and more equitable so the universities wouldn't
be serving as instruments of the big corporations as they increasingly are
becoming. That's just scratching the surface.

I would take the corporate media and remind them that they are using the
public domain, the airwaves. These airwaves are the property of the people
of the United States. In fact they now want to sell the airwaves
themselves, the actual air. They want to sell that and make that the
private property of the corporate media. There are plans afoot to do that
very thing.

They're going in the other direction. They want to privatize our water
systems, so we have to pay exorbitant prices for our water. There are now
communities in India were these poor struggling families are paying  30-40
percent of their income just for water. The globalizing corporate goal is
to do the same here.

They're looking for commodities that people can't do without that they can
grab hold of. Anything in the public sector that is being produced by the
state, by the government, for the people, creating jobs and spending power,
creating a tax base, fulfilling human needs-but without making a profit for
the moneyed class-is hated by that class.

They want to move in and grab hold of everything, be it education, health,
medical care, water supplies, electrical utilities, whatever else.
Privatize, privatize, deregulate, and hand it over to the moneybags. They
will charge whatever the market will bear. They will do these sorts of
things and the rest of us will be their economic slaves, working just to
buy the basic necessities of life.

That's their goal, the third worldization of America-and everywhere else.
They just want to get richer and richer and make us work harder and harder
for less and less. That's what globalization and the "free market" are all
about.

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