By Al Gore
(selected and reproduced by Intikhab Amir)
Why has America’s public discourse become less focused and clear, less reasoned? Faith in the power of reason – the belief that free citizens can govern themselves wisely and fairly by resorting to logical debate on the basis of the best evidence available, instead of raw power – was and remains the central premise of American democracy. This premise is now under assault. P-2
Abraham Lincoln said in 1838, when he and the United States were both very young, “Reason – cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason – must furnish all materials for our future support and defense. Let those materials be moulded into general intelligence, sound morality, and in particular, a reverence for the Constitution and laws.” P-2
Our Founders’ faith in the viability of representative democracy rested on their trust in the wisdom of a well-informed citizenry, their ingenious design for checks and balances, and their belief that the rule of reason is the natural sovereign of a free people. As Thomas Paine put it, “For as in absolute governments the king is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king and there ought to be no other.” P-5
The Founders placed particular emphasis on ensuring that the public could be well informed, and took great care to protect the openness of the marketplace of ideas so that knowledge could flow freely. Thus they not only protected freedom of assembly as a basic right, they made a special point – in the First Amendment – of protecting the freedom of the printing press. P-5
Radio, the Internet, movies, cell phones, iPods, computers, instant messaging, video games, and personal digital assistants all now vie for our attention – but it is television that still dominates the flow of information in modern America. In fact, according to an authoritative global study, Americans now watch television an average of four hours and thirty-five minutes every day – ninety minutes more than the world average. P-6
In all the years since then, television’s share of the total audience for news and information has continued to grow – and its lead over newsprint has continued to expand. Millions of Americans have simply stopped reading newspapers. Afternoon newspapers were the first to go broke. Now, virtually all newspapers are shrinking in profits, advertising, and circulation – and more than a few are even shrinking in their physical size. P-7
Clearly, at least to some degree, the “consent of the governed” was becoming a commodity to be purchased by the highest bidder. To the extent that money and the clever use of electronic mass media could be used to manipulate the outcome of elections, the role of reason began to diminish.” P-9
The opinions of the voters are sometime, in effect, being purchased – just a demand for new products is artificially created. Decades ago American journalist and political commentator Walter Lippmann wrote, “The manufacture of consent … was supposed to have died out with the appearance of democracy …but it has not died out. It has, in fact, improved enormously in technique…under the impact of propaganda, it is no longer plausible to believe in the original dogma of democracy.” P-10
The print-based public sphere that had emerged from the books, pamphlets, and essays of the Enlightenment has, in the blinking eyes of a single generation, come to seem as remote as the horse and buggy. P-11
Television news has been “dumbed down and tarted up.” The purpose of television news now seems primarily to be to “glue eyeballs to the screen” in order to build ratings and sell advertising. P-17
The subjugation of news by entertainment seriously harms our democracy: It leads to dysfunctional journalism that fails to inform the people. And when the people are not informed, they cannot hold government accountable when it is incompetent, corrupt, or both. P-17
As early as the 1920s, when radio, the forerunner of television, first debuted in the United States, there was immediate apprehension about its potential impact on democracy. Later, in the 1930s, Joy Elmer Morgan, director of the National Committee on Education by Radio, wrote that if control of radio were concentrated in the hands of few, “no nation can be free.” P-18
I believe that the vividness experienced in the reading of words is automatically modulated by the constant activation of the reasoning centers of the brain that are used in the process of cocreating the representation of reality the author has intended. By contrast, the visceral vividness portrayed on television has the capacity to trigger instinctual responses similar to those triggered by reality itself – and without being modulated by logic, reason, and reflective thought. P-19
Fear is the most powerful enemy of reason. Both fear and reason are essential to human survival, but relationship between them is unbalanced. Reason may sometimes dissipate fear, but fear frequently shuts down reason. As Edmund Burke wrote in England twenty years before the American Revolution, “No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.” P-23
The Roman philosopher and rhetoric teacher Lactantius wrote, “Where fear is present, wisdom cannot be.” P-24
We have always defined progress by our success in managing through our fears. Christopher Columbus, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, Susan B. Anthony, and Neil Armstrong all found success by challenging the unknown and overcoming fear with courage and a sense of proportion that helped them overcome legitimate fears without being distracted by distorted and illusory fears. P-24
We often make snap judgments based principally on our emotional reactions rather than considering all options rationally and making choices. P-29
When an emotional reaction like fear is especially strong, it can completely overwhelm our reasoning process. P-29
Vicarious Traumatization: If someone, such as a family member or an individual with whom we identify has experienced trauma, that person’s feelings can be communicated to us even though we didn’t directly experience the traumatic event. P-31
Recent research proves that the telling of traumatic stories to those who feel linked by identity to the victims of trauma – whether the shared identity is ethnic, religious, historical, cultural, linguistic, tribal, or nationalistic – can actually produce emotional and physical responses in the listener similar to those experienced by the victims. P-31
I am concerned about the potential for exploitation of the television medium by those who seek to use it to manipulate public opinion in ways that bypass reason and logic.
P-36
Television’s quasi-hypnotic effect is one reason that the political economy supported by the television industry is as different from the vibrant politics of America’s first century as those politics were different from the feudalism that thrived on the ignorance of the masses of people in the Dark Ages. P-36
Barry Glassner, a professor of sociology at the University of Southern California, argues that there are three techniques that together make up “fearmongering”: repetition, making the irregular seem regular, and misdirection. By using these narrative tools, anyone with a loud platform can ratchet up public anxieties and fears, distorting public discourse and reason. P-36/37
There are, of course, many historical examples of vivid imagery producing vicarious traumatization that has been used for positive purposes. For example, the images of civil rights protesters being threatened with snarling gods and being brutalized with fire hoses helped mobilize ordinary Americans to become part of broader movement for social justice. P-37
Even though logic and reason have played more prominent roles in the medium of print, they can also be used along with images to powerful and positive effect in the television medium. In fact, visual images of suffering are significant precisely because they can help generate empathy and goodwill. The horrifying pictures from inside Abu Ghraib prison commicated the essence of the wrongdoing these far more powerfully than any words could have. Even so, when such strong feelings are manipulated, the possibility for abuse becomes considerable. P-37
Terrorism relies on the stimulation of fear for political ends. Indeed, its specific goal is to distort the political reality of a nation by creating fear in the general population that is hugely disproportionate to the actual danger that the terrorists are capable of posing.
P-38/39
Attacking Iraq: It is a decision that could have been made only at a moment in time when reason was playing a sharply diminished role in our national deliberations. P-39
Thomas Jefferson would have recognized the linkage between absurd tragedy and the absence of reason. As he wrote to James Smith in 1822, “Man, once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without ruder, is the sport of every wind.” P-39
Like Bush, Nixon subordinated virtually every principle to his hunger for reelection. He instituted wage and price controls with as little regard for his conservative principles as President Bush has shown in piling up trillions of dollars of debt. P-43
After the oil embargo of 1973, Nixon secretly threatened a military invasion of the Middle Eastern oil fields. Now Bush has actually done it, keeping his true intentions secret, as Nixon did. After he was driven from office in disgrace, Nixon confided to one of his regular interlocutors: “People react to fear, not love. They don’t teach that in Sunday school, but it’s true.” P-43
Speaking on national television the night before that 1970 election, Senator Ed Muskie of Maine addressed the real choice confronting the voters: “There are only two kinds of politics. They’re not radical and reactionary or conservative and liberal or even Democratic and Republican. There are only the politics of fear and the politics of trust. One says you are encircled by monstrous dangers. Give us power over your freedom so we may protect you. The other says the world is a baffling and hazardous place, but it can be shaped to the will of men. “Cast your vote,” he concluded, “for trust in the ancient traditions of this home for freedom.” P-43
Fear displaces reason, reason challenges faith, faith overcomes fear. In a book banned by the church during the decade of Galileo’s trial in the seventeenth century, Religio Medici, Thomas Browne wrote, “As reason is rebel to faith, so passion is a rebel to reason.”
He concluded that faith, reason, and passion “may be all Kings, and yet make but one monarchy: every one exercising his sovereignty and prerogative in a due time and place according to the restraint and limit of circumstance.” P-45
“Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion,” wrote Thomas Jefferson. “Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because if there be one, He must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear.”
P-45
Jefferson and our other Founders believed that the progressive unfolding of the Enlightenment would allow reason to assume important duties that had been performed by blind faith. They had confidence that the twin daughters of reason – science and law – would enlighten us and empower us to restrain our passions and build our courage. P-46
Fear, however, can disrupt the easy balance between reason and faith – especially irrational fear of a kind less readily dispelled by reason. When fear crowds our reason, many people feel a greater need for the comforting certainty of absolute faith. And they become more vulnerable to the appeals of secular leaders who profess absolute certainty in simplistic explanations portraying all problems as manifestations of the struggle between good and evil. P-47
If dogma and blind faith rush in to fill vacuum left by reason’s departure, they allow for the exercise of new forms of power more arbitrary and less derived from the consent of the governed. In simple terms, when fear and anxiety play a large role in our society, logic and reason play a diminished role in our collective decision making. P-48
One of the most important contributions of America to the world was the precision of our Founders in separating the relationship between God and government. God’s role in establishing the basis for government, they believe, was to endow every individual with “certain unalienable right” – not to endow any particular leader with a divine right to exercise power over others. P-48
“A religious sect may degenerate into a political faction,” wrote James Madison, but the new American nation would nevertheless be protected against the ungovernable combination of religious fervor and political power as long as the Constitution prohibited the federal government from establishing any particular creed as preeminent.
This principle was so well established that in 1797 the U.S. Senate unanimously approved, and President John Adams signed, a treaty that contained the following declaration: “The United States is not a Christian nation any more than it is a Jewish or Muhammedan Nation.” P-49
Our Founders relied time and again on this same Newtonian system of checks and counterweights in order to protect the Republic against the abusive combination of religion and political power. They trusted in the mechanics of balance because they knew that human beings would always seek power. Therefore, the only way to create a safe forum for reason was to disperse power into separate sources that would constantly push against one another in a self-balancing system. And they followed one guiding principle above all others in their effort to establish an equipoise that allowed rational discourse to maintain its equilibrium: Prevent the concentration of too much power in the hands of single person or small group. P-50
Any effort by any government official in America to claim any divine right is therefore blasphemy. Government, in the American design, has absolutely no God-given rights. Its moral authority comes from the integrity of its deliberative processes and our own participation in those processes. Its derivation of just power from the consent of the governed must flow according to the rule of law. As John Adams first wrote in Massachusetts, we are “a government of laws and not of men.” P-50
The separation of church and state was thus based not only on the Founders’ insights into fear, faith, and reason, but also on their new awareness of the nature of power. They understood that the love of power can become so intoxicating that it overwhelms reason. It was actually this distrust of concentrated power that led them not only to separate organized religion from the exercise of governmental authority, but also to separate powers of the national government into three coequal branches and embed each in a complex web of checks and balances designed to further prevent the aggregation of too much power in any one branch. P-50
Laws were to be deliberated carefully and crafted within a legislative branch that was itself insulated against the danger of concentrated power with its own separation into two coequal chambers, each endowed with a different set of perspectives and incentives – and with special provisions designed to protect passionately held minority views from being overrun by majority opinions. P-50/51
The brain and immune system have something important in common: Neither is fully formed at birth; both continue to develop rapidly during infancy. We humans have the longest extended period of infancy of any creatures in nature. This characteristic of our species – called “neoteny” – has profound implications for our tendency to absorb vast amounts of culture, tradition, and beliefs into the “operating system” of our brains. Psychological and relationship patterns – including dysfunctions – and all manner of other habits and behaviors are passed down from one generation to the next. P-52
Simplicity is always more appealing than complexity, and faith is always more comforting than doubt. Both religious faith and uncomplicated explanations of the world are even more highly valued at a time of great fear. Moreover, during times of great uncertainty and public anxiety, any leader who combines simplistic policies with claims of divine guidance is more likely to escape difficult questions based on glaring logical flaws in his arguments. P-55
He (Bush Jr.) waged the politics of blind faith. He used a counterfeit combination of misdirected vengeance and misguided dogma to dominate the national discussion, bypass reason, silence dissent, and intimidate those who questioned his logic both inside and outside the administration. P-60
His budget policy – which transformed a $ 5 trillion into a $ 4 trillion deficit – has been, in its own way, just as spectacular a collision between illusion and reality as the Iraq war.
P-61
Others seem convinced that his personal religious conversion experience was so profound that he relies on religious faith in place of logical analysis. P-61
Stalin “had a slogan and it worked pretty well for him whenever he ran into difficulty: ‘No man no problem.’”
It is power that is key to understanding the cynical manipulation of faith and the assault on reason. Over time, this administration has focused more and more of its attention on the operations of this vicious cycle, and slowly but surely, its need for more and more power has become an all-consuming goal. It is love of power for its own sake that is the original sin of his presidency. P-71
Capitalism and democracy shared the same internal logic: Free markets and representative democracy were both assumed to operate best when individuals made rational decisions – whether they were buying and selling property or accepting and rejecting proposition. Both works took for granted the existence of a public sphere defined by the printed word to which all literate individuals had equal access. And both shared a common enemy: despotic rulers capable of using arbitrary power to confiscate property and restrict liberty. P-72
If political and economic freedoms have been siblings in history of liberty, it is the incestuous coupling of wealth and power that poses the deadliest threat to democracy.
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That is what has happened throughout human history. Over and over again, wealth and power have become concentrated in the hands of a few who consolidate and perpetuate their control at the expense of the many. P-73
The derivation of just power from the consent of the governed depends upon the integrity of the reasoning process through which that consent is given. If the reasoning process is corrupted by money and deception, then consent of the governed is based on false premises, and any power thus derived is inherently counterfeit and unjust. If the consent of the governed is extorted through the manipulation of mass fears, or embezzled with claims of divine guidance, democracy is impoverished. If the suspension of reason causes a significant portion of the citizenry to lose confidence in the integrity of the process, democracy can be bankrupted. P-73
Founder of capitalism, Adam Smith, wrote in The Wealth of Nations about the wealthy and powerful corrupt elites throughout the history of the world prior to the dawn of the new age: “All for ourselves and nothing for other people seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” P-74
And of course, the apostle Paul wrote in his letter to Timothy: “The love of money is the root of all evil.” P-74
In the words of Johnson’s contemporary Immanuel Kant, the most influential European Philosopher of the Enlightenment: “The enjoyment of power inevitably corrupts the judgment of reason, and perverts its liberty.” P-74
The idea of self-government became feasible after the printing press – and, in its wake, the Enlightenment – distributed knowledge widely to individuals and created a market place of ideas based on the rule of reason. As soon as decisions could be freely discussed and debated, reason began to displace wealth as the principal source of power. P-74/75
When only those have wealth can afford to enter the principal forum in which the majority of people receive their information, then those who can pay the price of admission automatically become more influential. Their opinion becomes more important than the opinions of others. The nation’s priorities then change. P-76
…the outrageous decision to brazenly grant sole-source no-bid contracts worth $ 10 billion to Vice President Cheney’s former company Halliburton – which paid him $ 150,000 annually until 2005 – has convinced many observers that incompetence, cronyism, and corruption have played a significant role in undermining U.S. policy in Iraq. P-81
No coincidentally, the first audits of the massive sums flowing through the U.S. authorities in Iraq now show that billions of dollars in money appropriated by Congress and Iraqi oil revenue have disappeared with absolutely no record of where they went, to whom, for what, or when. And charges of massive corruption are now widespread.
P-81
The essential cruelty of Bush’s game is that he take an astonishingly selfish and greedy collection of economic and political proposals and then cloaks them with a phony moral authority, thus misleading many Americans who have a deep and genuine desire to do good in the world. And in the process he convinces these Americans to lend unquestioning support for proposals that actually hurt their families and their communities. P-81
Democracy begins with the premise that all are created equal. Capitalism begins with the premise that competition will inevitably produce inequality, depending on differences in talent, industriousness, and fortune. The two value systems have been reigning philosophies in two different spheres of life. P-83
Unfortunately, neither logic nor mortality was sufficient to dispel the corrupt understanding of “property” that was at the heart of slavery. Slavery was a living, breathing mockery of the guiding principle of democracy. The inclusion of the odious “three-fifths” clause in the original U.S. Constitution marked the prevailing moral blindness of America’s Founders where slavery was concerned. Even though sanctioned by the Constitution of 1789, it was an example of the corruption of democracy by the enforcement of an immoral property “right.” P-87
Thomas Jefferson had expressed concern about what he saw as the encroaching danger in 1821 – more than a decade after he left the presidency: “Our country is now taking so steady a course as to show by what road it will pass to destruction, to wit: by consolidation of power first, and then corruption, its necessary consequences. The engine of consolidation will be the Federal judiciary; the two other branches the corrupting and corrupted instruments.” P-87
By the end of the nineteenth century, the “monopolies in commerce” that Jefferson had wanted to prohibit in the Bill of Rights were full-blown monster, crushing competition from smaller businesses, bleeding farmers with extortionate shipping costs, and buying politicians at every level of government. P-88
Halfway through his second term, after winning many battles against monopolies on behalf of the public interest, Roosevelt said, in April 1906, “Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics, is the first task of the statesmanship of the day.” P-90
The societal impacts of this revolutionary technology were very different in the United States from those in the rest of the world. In the United States, the defenders of democracy insisted that constraints be placed on the new medium. The “equal time rule” ensured that political parties and candidates for office received equal amounts of airtime; the Fairness Doctrine ensured that differing points of view were included in programming; and the “public interest standard” required all of those in the small group granted licenses to keep the public interest always in mind – upon penalty of losing the license to someone else if they did not. P-91
In 1922, less than five years after the armistice that ended World War I, Joseph Stalin was named general secretary of the Communist Party in the newly formed Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and the leader of the new Fascist Party in Italy, Benito Mussolini, was named prime minister of a coalition government. A half year earlier, Adolf Hitler had been named chairman of the new National Socialist Party in Germany.
All three would require several years to consolidate their power. Each one mobilized support for his malignant, totalitarian ideology by using the powerful new medium for mass communication that also debuted on the world stage in 1922: radio.
Totalitarianism appeared in three distinctive designs: Nazism and fascism were fraternal twins and cousins to communism. Even though the first two say the third as their moral enemy, all three relied materially on propaganda delivered over the radio to engineer total state control over all political and economic power. Whatever their doctrinal differences, the result was the same in all totalitarian regimes: The freedom and rights of the individual were effectively eliminated.
Without the introduction of radio, it is doubtful that these totalitarian regimes would have commanded the obedience of the people in the manner they did. As Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda, would say later, “ It would not have been possible for us to take power or to use it in the way we have without the radio…The radio is the most influential and important intermediary between a spiritual movement and the nation, between the idea and the people.” P-92/93
Propaganda became a science, but the word actually dates back to Counter-Reformation – a period when the Catholic Church paid new attention to improving the effectiveness of its efforts at persuasion designed to win the hearts and minds of Europeans who were converting to Protestantism in large numbers. Perhaps for that reason, the word propaganda still does not have the same pejorative meaning in Europe that it does in the United States. P-93
WORK IS FREEDOM – the sign above entrance of the Nazi extermination camps – symbolizes the evil uses to which psychology-based persuasion was put by the Nazis.
Psychology-based communication was first developed by another Austrian of Hitler’s generation, Edward Bernay, Sigmund Freud’s nephew. Bernays adapted the revolutionary insights of his uncle to create the modern science of mass persuasion – based not on reason, but no the manipulation of subconscious feelings and impulses. Bernays, considered the father of public relations, left Austria long before the Nazi rise to power and immigrated to the United States, where he transformed commercial advertising and began a similar transformation of political persuasion. P-93/94
The combination of psychologically driven public relations and electronic mass media broadcasting led to modern propaganda. Reason was displaced not only by the substitution of broadcasting for print, but also by the science of PR as the principal language by which communication occurs in the public forum – for both commercial and political purposes. P-94
One of Bernay’s first breakthroughs involved his work for the American Tobacco Company, when he interviewed psychoanalysts to discover the reason women in the 1920s would not smoke cigarettes. Upon learning their view that women of the era saw cigarettes as phallic symbols of male power and thus inappropriate for women, Bernays hired a group of women to dress and act suffragists. They marched down New Rok’s Fifth Avenue in a parade for women’s rights and upon passing news photographers pulled out and lit cigarettes, proclaiming them “torches of freedom.” The strategy worked to break women’s resistance to cigarettes. P-94
A second victory involved another corporate client, Betty Crocker. Bernays discovered that women were not buying cake mixes because they felt ashamed to present their husbands with a cake that required so little work. Bernays advised changing the formula to require the addition of a fresh egg, and once again, the strategy worked. Women felt they had done enough to deserve praise for their baking and the cake mix started selling robustly. P-94
Bernays business partner, Paul Mazur, understood the larger significance of the new techniques of mass persuasion. “We must shift America from a needs to desire culture,” Mazur said. “People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality. Man’s desires must overshadow his needs.” P-94
Galbraith is said to have quipped, “Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it’s just the opposite.” P-95
The manufacture of consent. P-96
Adam Smith, who described the collective wisdom of free markets as the “invisible hand,” also considered the free flow of information essential to the efficiency of capitalism. When information is freely available to individuals and flows unimpeded throughout the political or economic system, the important decisions are not always made by the same small group of people. Instead, the ability to make judgments is widely distributed throughout the entire system, so each individual can contribute to the collective wisdom. P-100
The Soviet Union’s economy collapsed because it relied on a central processor to make all economic decisions, and it didn’t work very well. Innovation withered, and corruption took root. The North Korean economy continues to rely on a central processor, and today its people are starving. But capitalist economies distribute the power to those located outside the center – entrepreneurs and consumers, who make their own decisions independent of one another – and accumulated wisdom marries supply to demand and allocates both efficiently. P-101/102
As a result of the 9/11 Commission report, we now know that within hours after the attack of September 11, 2001, Secretary Rumsfeld was busy attempting to find a way to link Saddam Hussein with the attack. We have the sworn testimony of the president’s White House head of counter terrorism, Richard Clarke, that on the day after the attack, September 12, the president wanted to connect the attacks to Saddam. Further, Clarke recounted on the news program 60 Minutes:
The President dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said, “ I want you to find whether Iraq did this.”…I said, “Mr. President. We’ve done this before. We have been looking at this. We looked at it with an open mind. Mr. President, there’s no connection.” He came back at me and said, “Iraq. Saddam. Find out if there’s a connection.”…We got together all the FBI experts, all the CIA experts. They all cleared the report, and we sent it up to the president and it got bounced by the national security adviser or deputy. It got bounced and was sent back saying, “Wrong answer. Do it again.”…And I don’t think he, the president, sees memos that he wouldn’t like the answer. 107
Leonardo da Vinci once wrote, “The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.” 112
We now know from the CIA that a comprehensive and authoritative analysis of the likely consequences of the invasion – prepared long beforehand – accurately predicted the chaos, popular resentment, and growing likelihood of civil war and that this analysis was presented to the president. P-114/115
Two months before the Iraq war began, President Bush received detailed and comprehensive secret reports warning him that likely result of an American-led invasion of Iraq would be increased support for Islamic fundamentalism, deep division in Iraqi society, high levels of violent internal conflict, and guerilla warfare aimed at U.S. forces.
P-115
We now know, for example, from a document dated just two weeks to the day after Bush’s inauguration, that his National Security Council was ordered to meld it its review of operational policies toward “rogue states” (including Iraq) with the secretive Cheney Energy Task Force’s “actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields.” P-117
We know from documents obtained in discovery proceedings against that Cheney task force, by the odd combination of the conservative group Judicial Watch and the Sierra Club, that one of the documents that was receiving scrutiny by the task force during that same time period was a highly detailed map of Iraq – showing none of the cities, none of the places where people lived, but showing in great detail the location of every single oil deposit known to exist in the country, with dotted line demarcating blocks for promising exploration – a map that, in the words of a Canadian journalist, resembled a butcher’s drawing of a steer with the prime cuts delineated by dotted lines. P-118
We know that Cheney himself, while heading Halliburton, did a considerable amount of business with Iraq – even though it was under UN sanctions at the time. And we know that Cheney stated in a public speech to the Institute of Petroleum in London in 1999, more than a year before becoming vice president, that over the coming decade the world would need, in his opinion, fifty million additional barrels of oil each day. P-118
The cynical belief by some that oil played an outsize role in Bush’s perception and policy toward Iraq was later enhanced when it became clear that one of the few facilities in the entire country that was secured by U.S. troops following the invasion was Iraq’s oil ministry. The Iraqi National Museum with its priceless archaeological treasures dating from the birth of human civilization; the electric facilities so crucial to maintaining a standard of living for Iraqi citizens during the occupation that was soon to begin; schools, hospitals, and ministries of every kind – all of those were left to the looters. P-119
Moreover, in early 2007, the government that the United States helped to establish in Baghdad enacted legislation that was written in Washington to giver U.S. and British oil companies the dominant role in exploiting the massive oil reserves of Iraq. P-119
CNN’s Christiane Amanpour said, “I think the press was muzzled, and I think the press self-muzzled. I’m sorry to say, but certainly television – and perhaps, to a certain extent, my station – was intimidated by the administration.” P-127
War is a lawful violence, but even in its midst we acknowledge the need for rules. P-147
When leaders are not held accountable for serious mistakes, they and their successors are more likely to repeat those mistakes. P-178
The absence of any enlightened nation building after World War I led directly to the conditions that made all of Europe vulnerable to fascism and the rise of Adolf Hitler and made all of Europe vulnerable to his evil designs. By contrast, after World War II, there was an enlightened vision embodied in the Marshall Plan, the UN, NATO, and all of the other nation-building efforts that in turn led directly to the conditions that fostered prosperity and American leadership throughout the world. P-190
Actually, the largest supplier of oil to the United States is now Canada, and our second largest supplier is Mexico. Saudi Arabia is only our third largest supplier. (The fourth largest is Venezuela.) But the Persian Gulf still dominates the top of the list of world suppliers – and since the market for oil is largely integrated globally, any disruption of oil supplies or prices originating in the Persian Gulf would quickly have a cascading impact on the world market for oil – and on the U.S. economy. P-192
The Chinese use two symbols, the first of which – by itself – means danger. The second, in isolation, means opportunity. Put them together and you get “crisis.” Our single word conveys the danger but doesn’t always communicate the presence of opportunity in every crisis. P214
The survival of freedom depends upon the rule of law. The rule of law depends in turn upon the respect each generation of Americans has for the integrity with which our law are written, interpreted, and enforced. P-221
President Bush is hardly he first president to seek control over the federal judiciary. Indeed, the struggle between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson was partly about whether the Federalist or the anti-Federalists would control, the majority of the judges. And Franklin Delano Roosevelt tried unsuccessfully to expand the size of the Supreme Court and “pack” it with justices who would support his New Deal agenda. P-229
In the House of Representatives, the number who face a genuinely competitive election contest every two years is typically less than 15 percent, and the number of seats that actually change hands every two years is very small. Every so often, there is a larger shift in the public mood – as there was in 1994 and 2006 – when control of the Congress changes from one party to the other. But too many incumbents have come to believe that the key to continued access to the money for reelection is to stay on the good side of those who have the money to give; and, in the case of the Republican Party, the whole process is controlled largely by the incumbent president and his political organization.
P-238
I believe that the viability of democracy depends upon the openness, reliability, appropriateness, responsiveness, and two-way nature of the communication environment. After all, democracy depends upon the regular sending and receiving of signals – not only between the people and those who aspire to be their elected representatives but also among the people themselves. It is the connection of each individual to the national conversation that is the key. I believe that the citizens of any democracy learn, over time, to adopt a basic posture toward the possibilities of self-government. P-248
The traditional progress solution to problems that involve a lack of participation by citizens in civic and democratic processes is to redouble their emphasis on education. And education is, in fact, an extremely valuable strategy for solving many of society’s ills. In an age where information has more economic value than ever before, it is obvious that education should have a higher national priority. It is also clear that democracies are more likely to succeed when there is widespread access to high-quality education. P-251
Education alone, however, is necessary but insufficient. A well-educated citizenry is more likely to be a well-informed citizenry, but the two concepts are entirely different, one from the other. It is possible to be extremely well educated and, at the same, ill informed or misinformed. In the 1930s and 1940s, many members of the Nazi Party in Germany were extremely well educated – but their knowledge of literature, music, mathematics, and philosophy simply empowered them to be more effective Nazis. No matter how educated they were, no matter how well they had cultivated their intellect, they were still trapped in a web of totalitarian propaganda that mobilized them for evil purposes. P-251
The Enlightenment, for all of its liberating qualities – especially its empowerment of individuals with the ability to use reason as a source of influence and power – has also had a dark side that thoughtful people worried about from its beginning. Abstract thought, when organized into clever, self-contained, logical formulations, can sometimes have its own quasi-hypnotic effect and so completely capture the human mind as to shut out the leavening influences of everyday experience. Time and again, passionate believers in tightly organized philosophies and ideologies have closed their minds to the cries of human suffering that they inflict on others who have not yet pledged their allegiance and surrendered their minds to the same ideology. P-252
As Jefferson write in a letter to Charles Yancey: “…Where the press is free, and every man able to read, all is safe.” P-252
The twentieth century brought it’s own bitter lessons. The new and incredible powerful electronic media that began to replace the printing press – first radio and film and then television – were used to indoctrinate millions Germans, Austrians, Italians, Russians, Japanese, Chinese, and others with elaborate abstract ideologies that made many of them deaf, blind, and numb to the systematic leading of tens of millions of their fellow human beings “to the slaughter.” P-252
Nazism, fascism, and communism were belief systems adopted passionately by millions of well-educated men and women. Taken together, all of the totalitarian ideologies were self-contained and delivered through a one-way flow of propaganda that prevented the people who were enmeshed in the ideology from actively participating in challenging its lack of human values. P-252/253
In age of propaganda, education itself can become suspect. When ideology is so often woven into the “facts” that are delivered in fully formed and self-contained packages, people naturally begin to develop some cynicism about what they are being told. When people are subjected to ubiquitous and unrelenting mass advertising, reason and logic often begin to seem like they are no more than handmaidens for the sophisticated sales force. And now that these same techniques dominate the political messages sent by candidates to voters, the integrity of our democracy has been placed under the same cloud of suspicion. P-253
Many advocacy organizations – progressive as well as conservative – often give the impression that they already have exclusive possession of the truth and merely have to “educate” others about what they already know. Resentment toward this attitude is also one of the many reasons for a resurgence of the traditional anti-intellectual strain in America. P-253
When people don’t have an opportunity to interact on equal terms and test the validity of what they’re being “taught” in the light of their own experience, and share with one another in a robust and dynamic dialogue that enriches what the “experts” are telling them with the wisdom of the groups as a whole, they naturally begin to resist the assumption that the experts know best. P-253
The remedy for what ails our democracy is not simply better education (as important as that is) or civic education (as important as that can be), but the reestablishment of a genuine democratic discourse in which individuals can participate in a meaningful way – a conversation of democracy in which meritorious ideas and opinions from individuals do, in fact, evoke a meaningful response. P-254
While education remains important, it is now connection that is the key. A well-connected citizenry is made up of men and women who discuss and debate ideas and issues among themselves and who constantly test the validity of the information and impressions they receive from one another – as well as the ones they receive from their government. No citizenry can be well informed without a constant flow of honest information about contemporary events and without a full opportunity to participate in a discussion of the choices that the society must make. P-254
According to a survey conducted by FindLaw.com, only 43 percent of Americans could name a single Supreme Court justice. In the survey, respondents incorrectely identified George W. Bush and Arnold Schwarzenegger as Supreme Court justices. Moreover, this survey, released in January 2006, was conducted immediately after two new vacancies appeared on the court. According to the 2000 National Election Studies survey, only 11 percent could identify Supreme Court chief justice as the post held by William Rehnquist.
P-255
The Internet has several structural characteristics that make it particularly useful and powerful as a tool for reinvigorating representative democracy. P-262
We also offer, free of charge, at www.current.tv, what I believe to be the world’s best online training program in how to make high-quality television content. P-264
The democratization of knowledge by the print medium brought the Enlightenment. Now, broadband interconnection is supporting decentralized processes that reinvigorate democracy. P270
