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Profile of Michael E. Tigar
I want to answer this for myself to begin [...]
Michael E. Tigar: I want to answer this for myself to begin with. I try to see my anger as something that I am feeling, but not as me; and the same with my feelings of hatred towards others that may spring to mind or my desire to commit violence. These are things that are part of me, but are not me. And so, learning to pause and distance myself from these feelings as though [] Hahn says “they were the movement of branches of a tree, but not the tree itself” is what's important. Now the second thing, you know, I have represented people against whom the government has sought the capital penalty and there I've talked to jurors about finding in themselves the seeds of the anger and hatred that would propel them if they let it go to signing a paper authorizing the government to kill somebody. And there I have reached back into the cultural traditions that are shared by all of us, not all the same traditions to be sure, but in each of which we find the values of human worth and dignity and redemption and the frank recognition that we are always at risk of doing harm to others because we classified them as Others with a capital “O”; and in the midst of those traditions to see their way clear to a firm life. That is the task of each of us. On the grander political stage, maybe somebody else will give you an answer, but in our day to day lives we need to remind ourselves how we can touch that common thread of our shared traditions. In each of which as I say this idea can be found.
Well, no, I don't think so, but I think that [...]
Michael E. Tigar: Well, no, I don't think so, but I think that as humans we have a responsibility to all other species because first place, we are the only ones who are able to conceive and build systems of social regulations and systems to bring justice - justice not only to other human creatures but to all species on the planet. And second, because we as humans have the power - the power to affect the well being of all species that are living on the planet. So, how do we do that? How do we exercise our responsibility towards other species, even though we might believe, as I happen to, that we're entitled to eat some of them for our own sustenance? You may not agree with that but whether you agree with it or disagree that, we share this responsibility toward the planet as a whole; to use it responsibly. And it is, in fact, the irresponsible assumption that humans are entitled to take what they want, when they want it, directed by large political and corporate interests that has endangered the planet that we're now living on. So, regardless of our view about shadings of answer to that question, we share this responsibility.
Yes, that is a magnificent question. What [...]
Michael E. Tigar: Yes, that is a magnificent question. What did the French monarch say, "Apres moi, le deluge?" That's the first answer, isn't it? Let's hope that there is something after, other than a planet denuded of all its people and all its resources by the threat of nuclear war spawned, I'm afraid, by leaders of my own country in which though the leaders of other countries are also complicit. What's left after capitalism if capitalism succeeds; because of the dominance of the process of production by the honoring of private greed in destroying the planet through global warming and its consequences? Well, I think there is an after. I think that we are poised to take charge of our own destinies now. We are poised to develop and maintain institutions that bring the rule of law to bear upon the conduct of leaders that restrain and punish the activities of those such as President Bush who have engaged in war crimes and crimes against humanity, who bring to them therefore the same accountability that the square in Berlin where we are sitting in a sense represents in terms of the development and enforcement of these norms against claims of impunity, even by very powerful people. And we are poised as organized people to take charge of our own economies, through organizations of workers and other democratic organizations because we need to replace this confiscatory system, this kleptocracy with another one. Now, to do that, we have to grow organizations that reflect the values that we mean to have when we change things around. Trying to explain democracy to George Bush is like trying to explain a sundial to a bat. We have to talk amongst ourselves.
Bon jour, Monsieur Dubois in Metz, France. [...]
Michael E. Tigar: Bon jour, Monsieur Dubois in Metz, France. Good morning, Mr. Dubois in Metz, France. It consolidates dictatorship and in the following way we have seen demonstrations against World Trade Organization meetings by groups of workers, environmentalists, farmers, consumers, all people who are decisively affected in their lives and in their work by the consolidation of economic power, neoliberal economic power, in the hands of major corporations and their supporters in the group of so called advanced industrial countries. It is the urgent task of all groups of workers, farmers, consumers and environmental activists to resist, to resist this globalization movement which seeks to impose upon the world a certain set of economic institutions and standards, particularly this so-called globalization effort seems designed to maintain countries in the so called Third World in a condition of dependency upon the production of primary products. And globalization under those circumstances by promoting so called free trade impedes the orderly process of economic development on the part of those countries. Those who, like me, are engaged in the law, have a special responsibility to formulate and see applied, rules that respect the interests of workers and other groups who are adversely affected by the globalization movement, which among other things seeks on the continent of Europe to break down the various protections that have been instituted in the constitutions and laws of the members of the European community; and in the North America that seeks to break down worker and environmental protections by such devices as the NAFTA agreement.
The United States of America has an [...]
Michael E. Tigar: The United States of America has an incarceration rate five to seven times that of any advanced country. In that process that leads to incarceration, we deny effective assistance of counsel. We tolerate police misconduct. And so, it's clear to us, I think, that that's not working, because we still have this problem of violence. We have free access to guns. Anybody can get one. That's not the case in some other countries. We have pandemic racial discrimination. We see the disintegration of families. We see the extremes of wealth and poverty and an infrastructure of education that is truly not effective. And so, if we are to address this problem, we must begin to do it in a fundamental way. The palliatives that are often suggested simply don't work. We can, of course, begin by getting the cops out of their cars and doing things like community policing; but ultimately, it is the demonstrable inequalities that are producing the reactions that we are seeing in the inner cities. And those can only be addressed beginning in your local level, in Santa Monica, California, where you live. You could actually change the world of Santa Monica, California by instituting changes that changed the way in which police and public officials addressed the issues that young people are facing in your community. That is a vague answer in the time that we have, but I think that it is a beginning towards solving the problem you identify.
Oh my goodness, Mr. Robinson. You know, I [...]
Michael E. Tigar: Oh my goodness, Mr. Robinson. You know, I think that about 30% of the people at this table are going to tell you about Socrates dialogue “The Crito”, in which Socrates ready to take the hemlock that he's been sentenced to drink and therefore to give his life is asked why he doesn't run away, why he remains a loyal Athenian even as the Athenians are seeking his death? And then some other people are going to mention Roland Barthes's wonderful essay about the picture in Paris Match. Well, I am not an African American, but I tell you I have represented people who have been oppressed in my own country and I have represented people who have been oppressed in other countries. I represented the family of Orlando Letelier killed, blown up in the streets of Washington by the Chilean junta, and yet Orlando to the end of his life and despite his exile and the so called stripping of his citizenship by Pinochet who claimed, I am a Chilean. Well, I am an American. I am an American because in my own country I know best how to struggle for social change. Were I to pick up and move someplace else, I might for time be more comfortable, but I would be disempowered from participating in the process by which you and I standing together have got to change the world. And therefore, for no other reason, we ought to remain even if we don't recognize as I do, having been the son of a working class person who managed to get an education in this society of ours, that it is a society that has given many people, including me, I don't know about you, enormous opportunities and it's precisely because I'd like to see those opportunities spread around and shared, that also I think it's important to stay and fight. So, I’ll see you in the struggle.
Hello, Howard. How are you? Well, let's [...]
Michael E. Tigar: Hello, Howard. How are you? Well, let's see. How about health care? That's one, we could start with that. How about education and the opportunity for education? Because an informed and educated people is going to be in a position to rise up and take power and wrest power from those who perpetuate the systems of inequality and injustice that foster the issue for which your question is primarily addressed. And in the process, by the way, if we’re looking at it, with those resources think how many projects could be undertaken to deal with the creaking infrastructures that mean that so many people are underserved with the basic necessities of life and in the process put folks to work. No, indeed. You see, what your arithmetic does, good old Professor Zinn, is to tell us that indeed we need to turn the world upside down, because the realistic possibility we're ever going to get those trillion dollars running through our hands to do all of these things, depends in the first instance on changing the world, changing our individual societies in these quite fundamental ways. And your own people's history of the United States is reminiscent of that. Of course now that we're in Berlin, we could also read Brecht's poem "A Poor Man Reads History", and reflect on his reflections that all of these great events required a whole lot more people in the history books other than your excellent one, of course, I’ll give credit to.
The predominant reason for Middle East [...]
Michael E. Tigar: The predominant reason for Middle East conflict is that the Western powers have persisted in disrupting orderly mechanisms that would lead to people in the Middle East taking charge of their own destiny. When Mohammed Mossadegh became prime minister of Iran, he was forcibly ejected from that office based on a conspiracy of English and American Petroleum interests. Beginning in the 1920's, the Sunni Arabs were elevated over the Shiite Arabs, predominantly at the insistence of the British, and then the Americans took over. And all of this policy, and I could go on and on with examples - Suez in 1957 - directed by the United States, Great Britain and France predominantly, in order to preserve and protect political control over supplies of petroleum. Under those circumstances, the opportunity to bring into being relatively secular, relatively populist, relatively nationalist governments in Muslim and Arab countries, and also Iran which is not an Arab country, that would reflect the true desires of their people to control their own resources, we're systematically frustrated and at times, interfered by force of arms. That is the principal reason for the frustration and anger that emanates from the Middle East today. And unless we begin to address that problem, and to accept in the West the responsibility for the present situation, there is no hope at all of any constructive solution to the issues that now are causing such violence, not only there but emanating from the Middle East and in the capitals of the Western world.
Glenn, you live in Capetown. I sat on a [...]
Michael E. Tigar: Glenn, you live in Capetown. I sat on a hillside in Capetown a year before Nelson Mandela was released from prison, and I was training lawyers to cross examine police officers in mass demonstration cases. And I asked [Dallah Omar], now deceased, now gone, [“Dallah], why are we training these lawyers to do this?” And he took me aside and we went to dinner and he said, “You know, we're going to have massive non violent demonstrations all over South Africa. We're going to shut this government down. We're going to shut this country down. The Mass Democratic Movement is going to change the course of South African history and there’ll be massive arrests and we’ll be defending those.” And I said, “Oh, sure you will. Oh, sure you will.” I mean I've seen the guns and the dogs and the instruments of repression all over the place in South Africa. But you know what? They did it, didn't they? You did it. You did it in your own country. You didn't stop your country from going to war. You stopped your country from a systematic campaign of war-like violence against the entire black community. You did it. And you did it against all the odds. And you did it the old fashioned way, by organizing and by resting on the power of an organization that had developed itself in a disciplined way. So, the answer to your question; we need to take a page from your book. And thank you, thank you for the lesson that you gave to all of us.
In every period of human history, this [...]
Michael E. Tigar: In every period of human history, this question is posed and the answer is socially, historically and culturally determined. When the Americans who wrote the Declaration of Independence proclaimed certain inalienable rights and then went on to write a Constitution that supposedly enshrine them, they carefully excluded slaves, native Americans and women, and by inference, those who did not own property. That was the first generation of rights. Then in the wake of the Second World War and the struggles for colonial liberation and the founding of the United Nations, certain rights to education, to employment, social rights of people began to be recognized. And now the third generation of rights, the rights that might be called those of the earth and the environment and the place where we live, these third generation rights, are beginning to be recognized in documents of international organizations and in constitutional drafting such as that in Namibia and South Africa. So the recognition of rights is an historical and cultural process that doesn't arise out of the sprung from the brows of so called wise people rather these rights are stated and defined and put into practice based on social struggle. They are then protected or not protected, depending upon the establishment and maintenance of institutions where people who are denied them can bring their claims and have them heard. That is the task that confronts us now. It confronts you. It confronts me. To make sure that every person with a claim for justice under any of these three generations of rights has someone to go to to talk about it and a tribunal or forum in which the deprival of that right can be presented and the denial of that addressed. And that the gap between our ability to imagine these rights and the power of institutions to protect them is our struggle.
Good morning Amy Johnsen. Well, let's [...]
Michael E. Tigar: Good morning Amy Johnsen. Well, let's take a look at our own country, the United States, and see what its demands have done to countries that are to the south of us. For example, for many years, Cuba, which the United States occupied and invaded, had an economy that depended exclusively for its survival on sugar and tobacco. The island of Cuba has extraordinary richness, that is to say it had the means to feed all Cuban people and yet, the food that was on the table of Cuban people was imported, to an overwhelming extent, from abroad at prices that were adverse to the Cuban economy. The same story of monoculture, dependence upon a single primary product, can be replicated to a more or less great extent in every single country to the south of the United States in the so called Western hemisphere. And as the United Nations Conference on development and technology has shown, it is replicated in Africa, south of the Sahara, and throughout many countries in the continent of Asia. The issue, therefore, is to encourage countries in the so called Third World to break free of this cycle of dependency and to enter into their own plans of diversification and development.
I don't think so, necessarily. What is [...]
Michael E. Tigar: I don't think so, necessarily. What is necessary would be the following: First, understand and demand the enforcement of existing international norms that regulate the way in which governments and private entities deal with people, so called customary preemptory and treaty based norms of public international law that deal with what may broadly be termed - human rights. Second, strengthening of regional international institutions with a step towards globalist national institutions devoted to particular issues, such as the International Criminal Court to end impunity from prosecution for those who are guilty of serious crimes against humanity, crimes against the peace and genocide as well as offenses such as crimes against the environment. The strengthening of regional tribunals that are directed to the same objective such as the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. But none of these should diminish the responsibility of institutions in every single country to observe and respect the norms of international, transnational law, the rights of all people that have been developed in the process of the social struggles, the deliberation of the colonies and in the wake of the experiences of the Second World War. It's particularly important for us in the United States, where the president of United States is in the process of saying unashamedly, unabashedly that United States is a systematic violator of norms prohibiting unlawful attention, torture and demanding fairness of trials for people that you want to punish. These are transnational norms. They are the norm that make us, if we observe them, part of the European community and is compelling respect for those in domestic institutions that ought to be our first priority, before we think about building some other institutions. First things first. That's our struggle and we can do it.
Yes, it is; and you in Cape Town probably [...]
Michael E. Tigar: Yes, it is; and you in Cape Town probably understand better than many the ways in which it is corrupt and must be changed. I spent a great deal of time in South Africa, both during the apartheid period and after the release of Nelson Mandela from prison. And I have been impressed by the ways in which social struggle in South Africa to bring a greater measure of equality and non corruption has been progressing, although I must say that you see, and because I do from a distance, the dangers that lurk there. The system is corrupt because it is not expressly designed to serve the needs of the people who depend upon it. When the World Bank or International Monetary Fund extend credit accommodations to Third World countries, they condition it upon the dismantling of systems, of social welfare. When major, private corporations acquire control of parts of any economy, they act to break down organizations of workers. The World Trade Organization, the NAFTA, our own North American so called free trade area, the European Union; all of them seek as a part of their mission to break down localized controls, localized protections of the rights of workers, the rights of women, the rights of the disabled. For me, I have listened to my comrades in the African National Congress and I believe that the answer lies in socialism. I think that it is time to address fundamentally the distortions that have occurred as a result of the private ownership of the means of production, including in the Third World particularly, the domination and distortion of the potentially very rich and bountiful economies of Third World countries in the interest of corporate chieftains in the first world. So, that is our common interest.
Hello. I'm a lawyer. I think we need a [...]
Michael E. Tigar: Hello. I'm a lawyer. I think we need a taxonomy of terrorism. We need to know and accurately describe terrorism in order that we can prevent and punish it. Because there is something called terrorism and it is illegitimate. But look, and your question reflects this, how the term has been misused. When the Kenyan people rose up against British dominance, the Mau Mau Uprisings were called terrorist and were put down brutally. When Ahmed Ben Bella was the leader of the Algerian resistance, the French diverted his plane and arrested him. Why? Because he was a terrorist; when all that was happening was his people were engaged in legitimate arms struggle against French domination. Nelson Mandela was sent to jail as a terrorist. I happen to believe that arms struggle under certain circumstances is legitimate. And that a people dispossessed and deprived of political power may have to resort to armed struggle in order to change things. That has been the history of anti-Colonial movements. It was the history of the African National Congress which had its armed wing in Umkhonto we Sizwe. And so we must resist the efforts of the powerful to mischaracterize as terrorist legitimate movements for human freedom based upon representation of the views of a majority of the people who happen to be oppressed. Che Guevara in his book "Guerrilla Warfare” ably distinguished between legitimate exercises of armed force and those that can be called terrorists because they involve the needless risk to human life designed simply to move people, not out of voluntary support for social change, but out of fear. And I would signal also that it is important in our taxonomy of terrorism to recognize that state sponsored terrorism remains probably a larger threat than any collection of individuals could possibly do, because the state, when it commits acts legitimately designated as terror, is not only able to do so over a much broader scale and by an exponentially greater exercise of violence; but also the state when it sponsors terrorism, as in Chile for example under the junta is a recidivist; encouraged by what's gone before.
If there were an upsurge of violence in my [...]
Michael E. Tigar: If there were an upsurge of violence in my neighborhood, I would demand that there be more police on the streets. I would demand that the system that calls itself justice call to account those responsible for the violence. And so it is. Beginning with the First World War, right down to the present day, the international community heeding the calls of those who are the victims of senseless violence, has put into place measures that forbid the infliction of civilian casualties, that forbid absolutely the employment of certain kinds of weapons, and that same community is in the process of formulating still more stringent and detailed standards. But what has happened is that the leaders of states who are in a position to inflict civilian violence have felt [impunitive] from responsibility. It is time to end impunity. It is time to take the precedent of Pinochet who was finally brought to earth in London. It is time to emulate the movement for change in Chile. It is time to emulate those in France who prosecuted Maurice Papon. It is time to bring to account those who are causing these civilian deaths because after all, the cynicism and hypocrisy of one group of civilian deaths building on the other as a [] for example, says to the European leaders, ‘well don't lecture me about civilian deaths in Lebanon because you after all in NATO caused so many in Bosnia’; as though in a kind of Jonathan Swift way, we could write down all the terrible things that world leaders had done as precedent so that other world leaders could do them again when they had the opportunity. That is a perverse use of the concept of precedent and we need to stand up and say that we demand that our systems of justice put an end to the impunity of world leaders who are in a position to commit acts that involve violation of preemptory norms of international law, including the deaths of civilians. So there.
None, if we have any sense. For heaven's [...]
Michael E. Tigar: None, if we have any sense. For heaven's sake, the existing institutions such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation in United States can't even effectively and in consonance with our civil liberties employ the tools that they have. And now they're simply asking for more. The terrorism and anti terrorism become the slogans to maintain in power the corrupt and kleptocratic regime of George Bush and that gang of people that are leading the United States further down the road of foreign and military policies that are going to endanger the lives of our young people and the liberties of all of us. And so, we are going to learn, I hope once again, that this offering up of liberty in the name of security is always the sort of thing that demagogic regimes that seek to deprive people of the power to change their own lives put forward as a policy. In fact, it is always self defeating, and as the history of the United States of America and other countries have shown again and again and again, the offered trade, the proposed trade, is always at the cost of movement for social change that want to make a constructive difference in the way society is organized. And that's the way that power has been used and that's the way it's being used now. It is up there for those of us who are lawyers, and I'm one, to step forward and lend our voices against these repressive laws and to defend the people in Guantanamo and in the secret prisons and in all the other institutional forms that this systematic assault not only upon American constitutional liberty, but upon the very basic norms established by the international community and being conducted. I'm sorry if I seem a little worked up by it, but this is the question of the hour for all of us, in your country and in mine, to try to address.
Hi, Chris. Let me answer your question with [...]
Michael E. Tigar: Hi, Chris. Let me answer your question with a historical example. In the late 1970's, the people of Iran rose up and overthrew the government of the Shah of Iran. And they in that process occupied the American embassy and took hostages thus illustrating a very hostility of which you speak. Why? Why did they direct their hostility to the United States of America? Because the corrupt regime, dictatorial corrupt regime under which they had lived for so long, had been founded, financed, and supported by the United States of America and to a lesser extent Great Britain, and their combined military and economic power. And when the Iranian popular institutions, to the extent they existed, attempted in the early 1950's to put a secular nationalist leftist in charge, Mohammed Mossadegh as Premier, who would have sought to gather more of the benefits of Iran's rich resources for the benefit of the Iranian people, the United States and Great Britain intervened, overthrew him and restored the dictatorial control of the Shah. Much of the anger that we’re seeing in those countries dominated by dictatorial regimes is based on the perception and most of that perception is justified, that these regimes are founded, financed, supported and maintained by the economic and military power of the so called Western democracies. And that means that the responsibility for a bunch of what we're seeing in the world lies squarely on our shoulders to ameliorate and come back. So, think about it. And if these thoughts move you, you can become involved in that struggle.
Hello. Speaking as a jurist, I look at the [...]
Michael E. Tigar: Hello. Speaking as a jurist, I look at the example of the Namibibian in South African constitutions, the progression. I look at the universal declaration. I look at the various United Nations documents and I see a growing recognition, a consensus that we need to move beyond the protection of individual rights which was the subject of [Boujwa] democratic constitution into social and economic rights; and finally, to environmental rights; the rights of all species on the planet, so that we preserve the only planet in the universe in which we happen to live. For me, as an activist, I have struggled with people who have been deprived and people who feel that their rights have not been respected, to find forums and tribunals in which those rights can be asserted and in which authoritative judgments can be delivered about them. But my ability to do that depends upon listening to the voices of people who are deprived. I think that we are moving towards a world in which private ownership of the environment and private ownership of the means of production has been shown to be a dismal failure, because it takes out of the hands of the people most affected the crucial decisions that govern their lives and their future.
Adam, I don't know. It's certainly worth [...]
Michael E. Tigar: Adam, I don't know. It's certainly worth fighting for. We need to pretend that it's possible; how about that? You know, I'm a lawyer and I work with lawyers; lawyers whose job it is to enforce corporate social responsibility; lawyers who sue corporations to make them accountable for putting toxic substances into our drinking water and into the environment; lawyers who sue companies who make cigarettes and other socially irresponsible products; lawyers who sue companies who manufacture things that blow up and hurt people or don't work as they should. Now, the odd thing is, that this plaintiff's lawyer group has been stigmatized and in your own state of California, people, people who show up for jury service actually show up with the idea that there are too many lawsuits and too many frivolous lawsuits and too many people asserting their rights and that something needs to be done about it. And not only is that happening, but in state legislatures about across the country powerful corporate interests are shutting down interest to access to lawyers and access to the courts. The same thing is going on in the Congress of the United States. The corporate kleptocrats that are stealing from you and from me, from shareholders and from workers, are benefiting from congressional legislation that makes it harder to sue them and harder for lawyers to get a decent paycheck out of the fact that they spend years involving themselves in this kind of litigation. The attacks on labor unions, the attacks on the pensions of workers through these rigged bankruptcies that we're seeing particularly in the airline industry, all that, all of that, is a fruitful field or fruitful fields, within which to conduct important kinds of social struggle, to join with workers and consumers and victims of faulty products and victims of pollution and to wage the campaign against corporate greed and its consequences. Corporate social responsibility is not possible through the sort of enlightened self interest of allegedly beneficent corporate management. Corporate social responsibility is possible because people are going to organize and insist upon it. So, welcome to the fight, Adam.
David, I'm going to answer this question [...]
Michael E. Tigar: David, I'm going to answer this question based upon the third and fourth and fifth centuries of the Common Era. [Origine Perneau], of the Centre Jeanne d'Arc, The Center of Joan of Arc in France, has written a book called "La Femme au tourne des Cathedrales," “Women in the Time of the Cathedrals” and has pointed to the crucial role of women in the early church. Now this is not going to be sort of a religious homily or try to make us all become the good Roman Catholic, not at all. But that book and the study of the Joan of Arc Institute contains powerful, powerful insights about the role of women and of feminist ideology in important social struggles, to the extent where the church “fathers” had to suppress these women's movements in those succeeding centuries. So my first observation is that that really is a hell of a question and an extremely important one. And my second answer is that now the struggle must begin. It must begin in your country and in my country, where despite the fact that women have the vote, and their numbers have increased in the professions, they are confronting the glass ceiling that prevents them from rising into positions of true power. That is an issue that we must address in the context of our own societies and to the extent we have power to do it. We as white men of a certain age probably ought to set an example by making sure that we are mentoring and encouraging and working with powerful and articulate women so that they are with us and take their place in wielding whatever power you and I in our lives are able to wield; and for others, to deal with these issues of gender discrimination in our workplaces, in our educational system, in all aspects of our lives. We need to be conscious of the ways in which we have internalized certain attitudes about male dominance and address those issues.
Elliot Chikoma, what a question. Could you [...]
Michael E. Tigar: Elliot Chikoma, what a question. Could you reflect with me on the fact that Namibia, even ahead of South Africa, and has the most advanced Constitution and Bill of Rights in the entire world? That your neighboring country of South Africa gave us the insights of Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo and all of the people who swept into power in the wake of Mandela's release from prison. And then who put into place a constitutional court and a set of rights that could actually be vindicated in a tribunal. No, I think that we have to ask ourselves what develop means. Africa gave us Patrice Lumumba, who was of course brutally struck down. Africa gave us Jomo Kenyatta. Africa gave us Kwame Nkrumah. So in terms of development in some rational sense of the world, Africa has not been lacking. The insights of Africa have been in the advance. But of course perhaps you mean economic development. Well I think there are two sets of answers to that, maybe only one. The word is colonialism in the old form and imperialism in the modern form. The domination and distortion of African economies and political realities documented by Basil Davidson in his book “The Black Man's Burden”, which I encourage you to read, paint a sorry picture and lay the blame for much of what's contained in the question you ask, at the foot of the European adventurers who colonized your continent. And in terms of today, the continued dependence on monoculture and now the burgeoning discoveries of petroleum in Africa and the issues that are now presented, raise the risk that the vicious cycle of imperial control of African destiny will continue. But at the same time give you, in particular in your own country, an enormous opportunity to change the dynamic of power in the interest of all people in sub-Saharan Africa. Good luck.
Hi, Bo. In Tennessee, it doesn't say where [...]
Michael E. Tigar: Hi, Bo. In Tennessee, it doesn't say where in Tennessee, but I'm going to bet you something. Within a hundred kilometers of where you are, just as within 100 kilometers of where I now live, there are countless opportunities for you as there are for me, to observe what is the self serving and divisive process at work, even internationally. The debate over immigration is not only nationally, but internationally, divisive. It divides us one from another and tempts us to regard people who are, we think, not like us, from us; and thereby to justify actions against them that by any standard are illegitimate. When we confront the racism in our own communities, we’re able to see how that plays out in the international arena. Next, we can see how in the name of combating terrorism the rights of individuals are being repressed and submerged; and once again, combat the rhetoric of our leadership because, you see it really does translate, the anti terrorists rhetoric of our administration is designed as a cover to gain political power, to put forward a whole range of reactionary social policies. We can confront those reactionary social policies and expose the fundamentally hypocritical nature of that screen, that curtain that is sought to be drawn over what those in power are really up to. That, it seems to me, is the most important way to attack. You might also borrow a page from those of us that dealt with issues in the Vietnam War and take a look at the consequences on people in your community of their involvement in this military conflict, the families of military people, which I think is another avenue that remains unexplored. Good luck to you. Good luck.
Well, yes, we should have the right to [...]
Michael E. Tigar: Well, yes, we should have the right to choose where we live. In the sense that illegitimate basis such as racial and religious discrimination should not bar choices that people make about where they want to live. But I think that we should have the right to choose where we live in a different and broader sense. None of us would choose to live in conditions of deprivation and squalor. None of us would choose to live in shelter that was clearly inadequate for our own and our families’ reasonable needs. And so, a right to choose presupposes a social decision to ensure that the stock of housing available to all people is adequate to nurture and maintain their needs, because without that fundamental decision about the right to choose where we live, almost everything else that you could think of doing turns out to be futile. I hope I caught the intent of your question.
Socially acceptable. Socially acceptable is [...]
Michael E. Tigar: Socially acceptable. Socially acceptable is a product of social and historical and cultural forces. It's true, that the dominant theme of American politics, particularly in the recent past, has been that this hoarding of wealth is acceptable. Acceptable even at the cost of impoverishing the work force, a decline in real wages, a negative savings rate, the lack of accountability by corporate kleptocracies for massive stock frauds that throw people out of work and deprive them of their pensions, and all the rest of that paraphernalia. Well, from Milwaukee to Florida to Los Angeles to San Francisco, it's time to take it back. It's time to march into the halls of our legislatures. It's time to insist on access to systems that dispense justice. It's time to insist on the rule of law. It's time to change things so that people whose rights are endangered and infringed have access to forums in which their claims can be heard. It's time to turn it around and turn it over, because as I say social acceptability is - it's determined by the voices that manage to get themselves heard, and we need your voice. And I think we need mine. And we need those of all the people who have some interest in the way things are going. You know, I'm a teacher, and I'm constantly talking to the students that I teach about the real world that lies beyond the borders of the law school where they happen to be studying. The real world where people can't enjoy these abstract ideas about equality that are supposed to be part of the warp and woof of the tapestry of American institutions. So, let's change what's acceptable, shall we? I think from your question it’s not acceptable to you and it certainly isn't to me. So let's talk about it.
A couple of suggestions and answer. Had [...]
Michael E. Tigar: A couple of suggestions and answer. Had European colonialism with its ghastly record of violence and enslavement not swept over Africa, it would be a very, very different continent. Basil Davidson’s book, “A Black Man's Burden”, contains what had been for me the most powerful insights into that. And if we, in the United States, let me see who asked – oh, yes, Miss Friedman in Chicago -- if we in the United States had not had this festering cancer within our body politic, this idea that human beings are chattels; if our body had not been ravaged by this cancer, we in the United States would not today be feeling the aftereffects of it in every area of our endeavor. The only positive thing we can say is that out of that experience, as often happens with experiences born of injustice, powerful voices were raised and powerful lessons were learned. If only we are willing to learn them. That's all I can suggest.
Matt, it doesn't say how old you are. You [...]
Michael E. Tigar: Matt, it doesn't say how old you are. You know, during the war in Vietnam which was a brutal and unjust war, the willingness of thousands of young American men to refuse to be inducted into the army, and therefore to confront the judicial system with necessity of dealing with that reality, was one of the major factors that turned public opinion and the opinion of judges, by the way, against the war. I litigated so called selective service draft cases all across the United States and all the way to the Supreme Court of United States and it was amazing to see how people's eyes opened because of the willingness of these brave young men and those who supported them to break the law. It is the willingness to break the law that provokes these important social changes. And so, when might it be - and you got a key word here - necessary. There is a doctrine in a criminal law and it's called, guess what, necessity. The people who sit in Wheeler Hall of the University California; the people who sit in Chancellor's offices in protest against abominable policies; the people who lie down in front of troop trains; the people who put themselves on the line are acting out this concept that sometimes it is necessary to break a rule of law in order to prevent a greater evil. And even though the law as personified by some judge or district attorney, winds up not agreeing, you know what? When you do it you’re going to get a chance to try your case to twelve people that is jurors, and you'll always therefore have the hope that a few of them are going to vote no, hang up the jury or they're going to acquit you altogether, as did that wonderful English jury in William Penn’s demonstration case back in the 17th century. So, study the background of so called creative lawbreaking and understand the power that it has. You know why Nelson Mandela got out of prison? Because during that fateful summer, non violent demonstrations shut the country down.
Mr. Davis, the question you pose is a [...]
Michael E. Tigar: Mr. Davis, the question you pose is a perennial one. You know, in 1608 or so, Hugo Grotius in his monumental treatise wrote about what he proclaimed to be universal human rights; and among the universal human rights was slavery, under certain carefully limited circumstances. Now by the early 1800's, slavery of course was the law in the United States and it was affirmed as a just part of our constitutional system, even though many of the most influential countries in the world had rejected it. By 1841, Justice Story was able to say for our Supreme Court that slavery violated universal laws of justice. So you see traditional values have always acted as a break on the recognition of so called universal rights. I think the problem lies in our easy acceptance of some idea of universality, which after all if we take the example of Grotius, simply means as far as I can see right now. Our struggle, yours and mine, is to work within the context of existing social orders, to improve our own perception of what is and is not universal, and then to seek to establish and maintain institutions of justice that permit the progressive realization of an increasingly broad and shared view of what universal human rights might consist of. And in that process, we ought to be listening as well as trying to teach, because cultures that may very well have principles that you or I would regard as inconsistent with our vision of human rights may have a great deal to teach us about areas of human striving to which we may not have paid sufficient attention.
No. No. No. Not really. And that's the [...]
Michael E. Tigar: No. No. No. Not really. And that's the beginning and not the end of the inquiry. Money dominates politics. Money dominates media. There is the politics of fear, overt racism and xenophobia designed to stampede people into making choices that are against their own interests and against the interests of the survival of all of us, which is a survival is linked together as it is linked to the fate of the planet. There is curtailed access to justice so that people whose demands, demands just to have some wrong you might think of as minor addressed, is curtailed in my own country in United States because they don't have access to counsel to present it and when people are accused by this thing called the state, they're denied access to meaningful representation in the process. So, no, there's nothing better than democracy, but we're all going to have to struggle to have it. And I add this, there is this peculiar conceit in bourgeois democracy that control over things, that is to say the means of production, does not mean control over people. That is a myth. And it is not a myth that has been recently discovered to be that. Take a look. Follow me, okay; my eyes. There he is. You see the book by Marx back there? Marx in his compelling discussion of volume one of capital wrote about it. He exposed the fraud of John Locke's theory about property. So democracy means taking control of all areas and all parts of our lives; all means by which the spirit of people is dominated. Good luck.
The attempt to introduce into the dialogue [...]
Michael E. Tigar: The attempt to introduce into the dialogue of transnational law, the concept of humanitarian intervention, is in my view a ploy. A game of words played by major powers in order to justify massive exercise of unreasonable force that has demonstrably endangered civilian populations and is demonstrably been in the service of the great powers. It's true that there is a doctrine of humanitarian intervention. It remains an exception to the idea of the territorial integrity and sovereignty of states. And thus, for example, in the case of apartheid South Africa it was legitimate for the international community to use certain sanctions, not military sanctions, in a way designed to and discourage what the apartheid regime was doing. Let's look at the so called humanitarian intervention. NATO in Bosnia; a huge cost in civilian lives. NATO in Afghanistan; not only a huge cost in civilian lives but cynical in the sense that over the long term as we are now beginning to see, exactly nothing has changed in the true constellation of power in Afghanistan, except to lead to the re-population of the opium crop to the extent where Afghanistan now produces the major share of it in the world. And now the United States in Iraq went after the lie about weapons of mass destruction is exposed, is parading the American leaders are the idea that this was some humanitarian gesture the United States was making. Humanitarian intervention is legitimate only under circumstances of legitimate collective security under the aegis that is of the United Nations charter, based on a true consensus, a true justification, a true calculus of harms and benefits and a concerted effort to use the minimum possible exercise of force. And by force I include economic sanctions, negotiations and all other measures short of military violence. The task of the world's people is to expose the humanitarian intervention for what it usually is. It's simply a mask the state puts on when it's about to commit some indignity on the Third World.
I doubt -- you know sitting over there, as I [...]
Michael E. Tigar: I doubt -- you know sitting over there, as I sit, is Willem Dafoe who's a great actor and I do, Jodie, because we just met this morning. I have this image of Willem Dafoe – he’d be the perfect one - walking up to George Bush saying, “All right, George, put down the bombs. Put down the bombs right now and nobody gets hurt.” That would be a hell of a final scene for wonderful movie. But Jodie you and I were talking this morning about the war in Vietnam and how the courage of thousands of young men and women who demonstrated -- the young men by refusing induction and facing the risk of prison, and young men and women joined then by their elders in the protests against that war that led to a change in the way that power was exercised. Of course, a terrible price continued to be paid by the Vietnamese people who suffered the consequences of that conflict, the armed consequences of that conflict for so long to come. We were lucky. And so the answer is certainly non violent protests; certainly people taking risks can influence policy. But, all during that struggle to change things, there is this awful and it seems as though inevitable risk that the struggle will in some measure take a form of armed conflict. We can try to minimize the hurt, try to change the rules of engagement, but ultimately, there is that risk. Right now in the United States, it is our job if we can, to mobilize every single resource that's available to us to try to head off what I fear very much is this inevitable consequence of what's going on in the world today. So I'm very glad that I was able to make your acquaintance today and to share across an entire generation these experiences about what we did the last time the United States was involved in a war.
In my country, the United States of America, [...]
Michael E. Tigar: In my country, the United States of America, the profit from terrorism goes to those companies that make these apparatuses to arm law enforcement, to invade the privacy of people, to jail people and hold them in jail; and because the terrorism card is being played cynically by politicians, it is the basis on which right-wingers seek to maintain their power and what do they use their power for? They use their power to deprive people of their right of access to the system of justice. They use their power to make sure that people don't have the ability to defend themselves and their jobs. They use their power to maintain an economic system that is corrupt and unjust. In short, the profit from terrorism is that group of people that are the most economically powerful and the most politically and socially corrupt. The anti terrorism campaign becomes the excuse to disempower people or attempt to disempower people from standing up in support of their rights. The root causes of terrorism we have discussed in the answer to earlier questions, but we all need to open our eyes and see what's being done behind this facade of the so called fight against terrorism. And I tell you something, it's about time for political figures who claim to be on the left to stand up and start saying some of these things, because the people as a whole aren't being fooled, but I think we could all use a little leadership here.
Yes, I'm afraid so. Yes, I fear so. A [...]
Michael E. Tigar: Yes, I'm afraid so. Yes, I fear so. A brand is after all a [corporatization], that is to say a corporate form that seeks to round up and own intellectual property and a property and a set of ideas that [coalize] around the brand. The owners of brands spend vast quantities of money to put their brand forward into the world. And in that way, brands have surpassed the ability of many governments to control them and their operations. A brand, take for example a brand of a pharmaceutical that is necessary to alleviate some problem of disease in some part of the world. The owner of the brand, that is to say the intellectual property that surrounds it, jealousy guards that accumulation of knowledge and prevents it from being released into the world, except upon payment of some oftentimes confiscatory sum of money. I think that we must as consumers exercise our right as consumers to minimize the effect of brands, but also as thinkers about the future, recognize that the world of ideas, often represented in brands and what is behind them, is the common treasury of all. A major theme of this conference is the way that we can take ideas and innovation and make them available to all people on a free and a fair basis. You might do some research to follow this up with the Center for the Public Domain at Duke Law School and the work of Professor James Boyle under the title “The New Enclosure Movement”.
Sara Francis in Dublin, we are, as you know [...]
Michael E. Tigar: Sara Francis in Dublin, we are, as you know in Berlin. That's where I am; in the Bebelplatz in former East Berlin; down the street I think it's over there somewhere, is a theater where Bertolt Brecht was who wrote the play "Mother Courage" so we could read that and find out what he was talking about. I think courage now requires not senseless rushing off into battles where we seek or may obtain whether we seek it not martyrdom. Rather, courage now means first an understanding of where we are in history and what is required of us. And then, and then to act based on that. And to act fully in realization of our own frailties and act together with others beginning as we mean to go on, by continuing to respect others. “I don't know too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart. That is Heaven’s part. Our part to murmur name upon name as a mother names her child, when sleep at last has come upon limbs that have run wild.” William Butler Yeats one of the greatest poets of your country wrote that, and all the way to the end as he saluted the courage of the Easter martyrs, I’ll write it out in a verse. Pierce and Connelly and McBride: “Wherever green is worn or changed, changed utterly. A terrible beauty is born. Is that terrible beauty something to do with courage?” In the history of your own country, there's an answer I think that's better than any that I could give. But thank you for asking the question because it made me think, even if I couldn't think of a very good answer.
It is supposed, as in the word supposition, [...]
Michael E. Tigar: It is supposed, as in the word supposition, to be by virtue of hypocrisy and a desire to dominate. Only one country has used a nuclear weapon, and it was used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States of America at an enormous cost of life, including overwhelmingly, civilian life. And yet, it is this same United States of America which today is engaged in a brutal war in Iraq, which is engaged in policies that enflame the Middle East, that is leading the insistence that Iran not have the kind of nuclear program which Iran proclaims is directed to peaceful uses. The answer, Mr. Jost, is that you and I have to unite and say that all nuclear weapons, no matter by whom possessed, are illegitimate. And that the countries with the greatest stockpiles and with a demonstrated willingness to use them, ought must be the first to rid themselves of these devices.
Oh my goodness. Well, public international [...]
Michael E. Tigar: Oh my goodness. Well, public international law, a foundation of which was the protection of human rights, the rights of the environment and of the planet, begins today as it has always begun with aspirations that are the product of social and historical forces that dictate their content so that Hugo Grouches in 1608 or whatever could write of the law of war and peace and have what he thought of as universal but what we now recognize as a very imperfect vision of the rights of all people, because he included slavery. In the wake of the Second World War, we have this system. There is a consensus on the part of the people of the world about peremptory norms of international law forbidding such things as torture, the use of weapons of mass destruction, crimes against the peace, genocide, crimes against humanity. And so that's where it begins. All principles of law that make any sense begin as an expression of human aspirations in a juridical form. The next thing is to devise and develop institutions to enforce them and that's always, always lagged behind. It lagged behind in the history of Western Europe. If you read English or Greek, Spanish or Portuguese or Chinese you can read my book "Law and the Rise of Capitalism" in which I tried to talk about that. But for today, I think it's a mistake to say that there are no institutions that support them. There is a European Convention on human rights. There was the prosecution of Pinochet in Chile. There was the successful move by [Juan Garces] and other courageous lawyers in Spain. Courageous lawyers in Chile. There was a prosecution of Maurice Papon in France that who had been a [] minister. In short, these events, these events bring us, bring us not only to justice or something like justice in individual cases, but to a realization that there is the power to enforce through these institutions these norms. And then to build on that knowledge, to create other norms such as the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia, Tribunal for Rwanda, the International Criminal Court and the growing application of these norms in such tribunals as the Constitutional Court of South Africa. So, that's the struggle. You identified it.
Yes, I think I do. If I kill you for greed [...]
Michael E. Tigar: Yes, I think I do. If I kill you for greed or envy, I create a harm to your family and your village, but a political organization is capable of structures - structures through which justice can be done to be sure, but structures which greatly magnify, exponentially if you will, the capacity to commit violence and to commit it in a deniable way. It is the organized political structure that can provide the resources to build a nuclear weapon and the organized political structure that can deploy and use it against tens of thousands of civilian people at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is an organized political structure that, as a comment we just heard, can take a people to war and inflict the most terrible casualties and the political elites, the political leaders, speaking in a kind of disconnected prose, as though the deaths were some abstractions far from them. It is a political structure that can impose censorship to prevent people from understanding the horrors of what's really being done in their name and the political structure that can protect those who profit from the making the war. By the same token, political structure is nothing more than a construct. It is an organization. And the majority of the world's people can take their places in the struggle to transform the economic and political structures that give the capacity for the enormously magnified violence of which, as I say, only some structures are capable.
Hi. Hypocrisy and selfishness. Hypocrisy [...]
Michael E. Tigar: Hi. Hypocrisy and selfishness. Hypocrisy and selfishness. There it is in two words. I don't know how much that needs to concern us. It is that hypocrisy and selfishness emanates from predictable places in the first world and elsewhere, but I want to turn this question back to an examination of China's rapid industrialization. China, of course, and its people have the right to development, but I see in Chinese development an increasing gap between rich and poor, the migration of income and assets to the top 20% of the population to where the curve begins to resemble the terrible injustice of the economic inequality in the United States. I see, as you must from where you sit, the fact that pollution in the cities, in the water courses and now drifting across the whole planet, has become a cost of this kind of industrial development in China. I see foreign dominance of this process of making what you and your question call cheap products, and I wonder how much of Chinese sovereignty over the process of control that's necessary for all the survival on this planet is distorting development so that it is not taking place truly in the interest of the Chinese people. And I wonder also how this process is tied to an ongoing foreign prosperity. I live in a country with a negative savings rate, with a decline in real wages, and with all sorts of danger signs that an economic dependence on that market may not in the long run serve the interest of the people, such as the Chinese, who are in some measure allied to that economic development. I wish you so well in your work, because the challenge that you face is a formidable one.
Yes. It's called imperialism, and it takes [...]
Michael E. Tigar: Yes. It's called imperialism, and it takes the following forms among others. First, World Bank and IMF make credits to Third World countries conditioned on the dismantling or cutting back of social welfare programs. The economic policies of the great nations as enforced through World Trade Organization maintain so called Third World countries in conditions of dependence on single crops or single resources and frustrate their efforts to use their own resources for purposes of their own development. Patterns of ownership that stretch from Metropolitan countries into the colonial world do the same thing. That is the reality. Aided them by corrupt comprador governments in those so called Third World countries, this process continue. It is up to us in the First World to insist that our corporate citizens behave responsibly on a number of level; for instance, as a matter of the environment. That we in our country's cut back on reliance's on fossil fuels so that imperialist ventures based on a desire to control petroleum resources become more important. And it is our job to support and defend movements for liberation in other parts of the world that seek to gain control of the resources of their own countries to use for the benefit of their own people. And such movements are in place and at work as we speak. You can simply choose one. You could start with Nepal. You could continue with India. You could look to the impending petroleum crisis in sub-Saharan Africa. You could look to the experiences of Venezuela, Chile, Bolivia, and so on. And in all of these countries, lend your support to those voices.
Oh my goodness. Have you ever heard the [...]
Michael E. Tigar: Oh my goodness. Have you ever heard the song that Janis Joplin used to sing, "Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose, nothin' ain't worth nothing, but it’s free?" Yes, freedom, well it is a power to choose. I don't say a right to choose. Abstractly we can proclaim all sorts of rights to choose where you live and where you're gonna go and so on. It's the power to choose. When we think of it that way we understand that freedom is constrained by necessity. I might be free to live anywhere I want, but I don't have the power to live anywhere I want. I might be free to choose good medical care, but I don't have the power to choose medical care. Why? Because I'm in a condition and situation of deprivation. The difference between the shadow and the substance of freedom, it can be contained in one word equality. Unless we understand that freedom is worth nothing to the great majority of people, unless we couple it with equal access for all the goods that are available in the world, then it's just a shadow. And Janis Joplin’s song turned out to be true, hasn't it? Good luck, because in Canada you have begun to confront these issues, and I welcome your concern with the struggle that you've brought to our attention. Thanks.
Oh, Ms. Rogers, what a question. I sense [...]
Michael E. Tigar: Oh, Ms. Rogers, what a question. I sense that we are poised today on a precipice. It's possible that so much harm will be done to the human condition by these wars, that it will be irrecoverable. It is possible so much harm is now being done to the planet on which we live that we can't recover from it. And so in the present time under this risk, what do we do? Well, the line, it seems to me is that we are all responsible to be responsible to the human condition and that means that exercising our freedom to amass for ourselves more of the world's goods than we can responsibly use, using our freedom to oppress others, using our so called freedom as a way of expressing and putting into practice the hatreds and suspicions and hostilities is indeed a misuse of that freedom. And as to who should decide—Heraclites said, “you know injustice is a good thing because if it weren't for injustice we wouldn't know what justice was.” People recognize injustice. That's easy. So that is the easy part. Corporate greed has resulted in management salaries being a multiple of several hundred times workers' salaries, a much greater distinction, a much greater gap than existed in any previous time in American history. The amount of wealth that flows upward to the upper quintile, upper 20%, is greater and getting bigger and the gap is bigger among people of color. So we understand that the distribution based on the exercise of the personal freedom that has existed here before, is simply wrong. We need to reinvigorate the institutions of justice that make sure that those that have taken from others unfairly are brought to account for it. We need to give people access to existing institutions of justice; but more important than that, we need to organize in a way that identifies the regime that in the name of protecting us from terrorism and carrying on these destructive foreign wars is kleptocratic.
Bloom. What a wonderful image. A flower. [...]
Michael E. Tigar: Bloom. What a wonderful image. A flower. Flower. Now I'm a teacher, and I have to say, no, it does not. It does not because of the inequality of access to education. It does not because we are not listening to our students. We are not fashioning our relationship with our students based on the needs of the community of which they are a part. You know academic freedom which is something that I am supposed to know about as a university professor and as a lawyer, used to mean simply the independence of educational institutions from governmental control. And surely that remains an important value. But in addition to that, you as a teacher and I as a teacher need to have the freedom to develop curriculum, to develop approaches to our students that liberate their minds and make them responsible participants in the struggle for social change. And, and this is something by the way that the legal system of the United States slowly began to take account of, the students themselves must have the freedom to learn; the freedom to express themselves; the freedom to try out ideas and behavior within very broad limits, so that they become ready to be responsible participants in the struggle for social change and not simply automatons. That is our challenge. And I salute you as someone also involved in teaching and I hope that we can do better at it in the future. Oh, if any of my students are listening, let me know, would you? Thank you.
Well, may I ask you a question? What does [...]
Michael E. Tigar: Well, may I ask you a question? What does ‘our’ mean? I tell you something, not mine. And I suspect not yours. By ‘our’, we perhaps look at the wealth enjoyed by the top 20% of people in your country and in my country. And it certainly is important that the disproportionate consumption of resources by so called first world countries come very quickly to an end; and that there be a more equitable sharing of all the resources on the planet among so called rich and so called poor countries. Also, following on the footsteps of the development economists, the continued domination of Third World economies by first world economies keeping them in a state of economic subjugation due to dependence on particular primary products that too, has to end. But this planet of ours has enough resources for all the people on the planet to enjoy a decent standard of living. That's for sure. And therefore, it seems to me that for those of us in the first world, the struggle is for that magical thing called equality and justice in our own societies to attack the kleptocratic fiefdoms of corporate power in your country and in mine; to restore order, to maintain, to obtain a balance of power in our respective countries, because without us pursuing the struggle and being successful in the struggle in our own countries, the constellation of power that prevents Third World development is going to continue. So that's our job, right where we are, and you and I, sir, are not going to lose a thing.
You're in the United Kingdom. You might [...]
Michael E. Tigar: You're in the United Kingdom. You might want to read George Thomson's book “Aeschylus and Athens” and his books on the early Aegean. I suggest that because the concept of worth has to do with the [commodification] of everything. That is to say, in wrongful death actions brought in a court, we assess damages. We award damages to the family of the person whose life has been taken, based upon what? Their financial expectation had the person who's been killed lived and been able to contribute. Sometimes we add to that certain kinds of dignitary damages, but the base line consists of precisely this business, the [commodification] of life. The United States shot down an airliner with several hundred people, the amount that they paid the families was based upon a rather insultingly cheap vision of the [commodification] of life. We see that in payments in war torn areas. And so what is our answer? Our answer is to break free from the idea that the value of things somehow relates intrinsically to the price of things; to break free from the ideological construct that value and price are somehow intrinsically related. That's the struggle. And it is a philosophical struggle that I suggest that reading the works of George Thomson and then on into the tradition in which he writes might help us all. At least, that's where I started to think about it in some serious way. Thanks.
Both. Let me share with you some [...]
Michael E. Tigar: Both. Let me share with you some observations based on the legal history of the social changes in Western Europe, which is the thing that I know more about than some other things. Micro-finance is an essential ingredient of liaisons within groups and communities. It binds together groups that have subsisted together and share certain needs and aspirations and values over a long period of time. Micro-finance, therefore, helps to maintain the kinds of institutions that even a great social transformation cannot destroy if it wants too. Indeed, it is the mistaken effort to destroy the sorts of community and village and family-based institutions that micro-finance cultivates and helps, that has led to the most terrible excesses of governments in the wake of great social transformations. And we can look at that, for example, in the context of the French revolution. But at the same time, the macro climate, the macro climate must ensure that the values of the society as a whole do not permit micro-finance activities to degenerate into selfishness and a kind of petty bourgeois, them against us, mentality. We need both kinds of institutions and the failure to see that we need both kinds of institutions has, as I have said, led to the failures and excesses of many great social transformations. And so, although I understand that on a dark night you would give more for a view of a meter or two ahead of you than for vision of some dark horizon or some light horizon in the distance. It's necessary to have both kinds of visions in your mind as you address this problem of development.
I can speak most intelligently, based on my [...]
Michael E. Tigar: I can speak most intelligently, based on my experience as an American. The antislavery movement in the United States was to a great extent lead with the voices of powerful women who had the hope that in the wake of the American Civil War, the constitutional amendments, the 13th, 14th and 15th, which commanded among other things equal protection, would guarantee the right of women to do such elementary things as join the professions and vote; that turned out not to be so. And so the women's movement reorganized itself and in the wake of the first world war and the promises that were made to the whole world about the liberating effect of the end of the war, campaigned actively and militantly to gain the vote for women. Now, despite that progress, women are still at an economic and cultural disadvantage in the United States. This remains then, for a constitutional system that is assertedly based on the dignity and worth of every person, a major challenge; and it is a challenge that is being confronted of course not only in United States but around the world. I think that, of course beyond organizing, it's necessary to organize around principles that can find expression as aspirations for justice, claims for justice and then to take those aspirations and those principles into tribunals, to see that these rights are protected. Finally, in the jurisprudence of the United States Supreme Court there is a recognition that discrimination against women simply cannot continue in all the many forms in which it does. Economic discrimination against women has been addressed in congressional legislation, and yet the Bush Administrations attempt to head off access by all people who feel their rights are being violated to the courts in any meaningful way, to head off their right to counsel in civil cases raising constitutional issues, those things remain an impediment to the assertion and vindication of the rights of women as well as of the rights of all people. And I would say this also, the rights of all people is what we really need to be talking about here and placing the rights of women and the discrimination against women in context.
Arundhati Roy, you know the answer to this [...]
Michael E. Tigar: Arundhati Roy, you know the answer to this based on your own experience better than any answer I can give you, but okay. I'll try. You can grade my paper. Yes, we need a bio-diversity of resistance. And that is not an abstract proposition. In the demonstrated history of movements that have transformed their societies and been responsible for social change - progressive social change - there has been a spectrum of action from nonviolent resistance, to political organizing, to speechmaking to armed struggle; legitimate arms struggle based on the principles laid down by, among others, the African National Congress and Che Guevara to distinguish between mere terrorism, violence for its own sake with unnecessary casualties, and arms struggle that is undertaken to mobilize and protect a majority - an oppressed majority. The African National Congress had its message of peace in change it also had [more in another language], the armed wing. The struggle for change in every single place where struggle has been successful has employed what you term a bio-diversity of tactics. It is not for you and not for me to judge within that very large, wide, legitimate spectrum, what tactics are appropriate. Only at the end - only at the end where the use of violence shades off into what a consensus would say is illegitimate, and we can find plenty of literature on that, Would we say these methods become something that deserve the condemnation of the entire international community. And I in an earlier answer talked about the hypocritical way in which the French dealt with Bambela and the British government dealt with Jomo Kenyatta and so on, simply to point up that all of this posturing about the need to try to make change peaceful when a repressive regime imposes extraordinary restrictions on efforts to get peaceful change. All that posturing has simply got to be rejected in the interest of giving our deference to the people who are there and who are engaged in struggle.
I am not entitled to sit at this table and [...]
Michael E. Tigar: I am not entitled to sit at this table and answer the question, so I'm going to channel my daughter, Dr. Katie McQueen, who is at Baylor College of Medicine and who deals with addiction medicine. And she deals with it in the context of underserved communities, poor people and people of color. And I think she would answer that if you could snap your fingers and make all the drugs go away, that no, there would not be an end to suffering. That the suffering is there and then come the drugs. And we are talking here about the significant drug problems that are supposed to be addressed by law enforcement and all the rest of it; that is to say in communities of poor people and people of color. Rather, indeed, it is not simply as you say, and let me look at your question here, that addiction is about the relationships that human beings form with one another. Not only is it about relationships that human beings form with another, it is about relationships of dominance that drive people to despair. And cause them to seek an answer to their despair in substances, which by the way can include cigarettes, that is nicotine, alcohol, as well as the whole palette, cornucopia of so called mind altering drugs, because chemically they all bear, I think, a powerful relationship to one another. So to my daughter, Katie McQueen, I hope I've said it correctly. I hope I’ve understood what you have to teach and Mr. Nadelmann, I salute you, because I think your question shows that you're on the right track. And I think my daughter thinks so, too.
Judith, our responsibility is this big. [...]
Michael E. Tigar: Judith, our responsibility is this big. It's this big. It's this big. It's as big as this table. It’s as big as this building, and I’ll tell you why. Because the solution to the AIDS crisis lies in great measure, in the hands of pharmaceutical companies that had to be forced to begin to open their hearts and their pocketbooks to provide the drugs that are necessary. My goodness, in the country where I live, because of these wrong social policies that we hope to change, there are 8 million children who are without health insurance. The majority of Americans don't have adequate access to medical care, and if that's the case in United States, the so called richest and most powerful nation in the world, then what does that say about the attitude of the people in my country, and I don't know what it is in yours, about the health needs of people in Africa? Moreover, it is our responsibility because the AIDS crisis and the reaction to it is also products of our own misguided, silly, but culturally determined attitudes toward sexuality, toward sexual orientation, toward sexual conduct, as though the people who somehow contracted AIDS are the other; and beyond the reach of our compassion and our help. Unless we confront this greed, this egoism, this refusal to recognize all people as part of the human family, we’re in for a great deal of trouble. Thank you very much for asking that question. There is something we can do about it right here and in our own countries.
My mother, who at the age of 89 still [...]
Michael E. Tigar: My mother, who at the age of 89 still practices the values about justice and contribution to a more peaceful world. My children, who each in their own way are making their contributions. If they're listening or if they hear this, thank you for that. Clarence Darrow, the American lawyer who gave up a wealthy practice in order to represent people, working people, people deprived of their rights, and to raise his voice in their defense for the keen understanding of history. Abdullah Omar, now gone, who was Nelson Mandela's lawyer all those years in the wake of Mandela's coming out of Robben Island, instrumental in forming the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa; Dullah and his wife Farida, shining examples. And finally, because it doesn't really do us a lot of good to have an unguided and unstructured view of what's wrong and of the need and the mechanism of social change to correct it; old Karl Marx, whose name is on one of the books that is behind us, the image that you could perhaps see and whose name was on so many of the 20,000 books burned here in this square on that night or those nights of the book burning that is memorialized by the memorial that's just behind the lens of the camera through which you’re seeing me and the microphone to which your hearing those words.
I'll go part way with you. Patent law as it [...]
Michael E. Tigar: I'll go part way with you. Patent law as it was conceived, was designed to reward inventors by in exchange for a full disclosure of the invention, a limited time within which they could profit from it. That idea of patent laws is in fact an inducement, a spur to creativity. But what's happened is that engrafted under patent laws are ever longer terms of exclusivity, confiscatory licensing provisions and then this thing called trade secrets, which are based on nondisclosure of essential information by which nondisclosure courts and capitalist countries hold that corporations usually, hold limitless ability to exploit knowledge. It's that pounding up of knowledge, it's that surrounding of what ought to be a common treasury for all as the old English Digger Movement used to say about the land, that is the evil. And the appropriation for private purposes of intellectual property that ought to be the common treasury for all is the evil against which we are now contending. And I suggest that if you would just modify your question a little bit, then - well you and I would be in agreement for whatever that's worth - but we could unite the interest in encouraging invention with the interest of all people in breaking the power of monopoly capital to restrict access to information and the fruits of creativity.
Yes. I'm going to steal something from Mr. [...]
Michael E. Tigar: Yes. I'm going to steal something from Mr. Wallace, who is one of the people whose foundation and family have supported this event. He was objecting to the term sustainable development because it suggests that we can just go on and on and on, that this is somehow an inexhaustible source of goods and services and resources from which we can all help ourselves and the fact is there isn't. This planet is it folks. Some day the people are going to rise up and say the end has come now for the all you can eat buffet for the rich folks and the only what’s left over for the poor and we're going to have to realize that the basket of goods, resources, and services is indeed finite. And that a decent respect requires us to recognize that we must all and each observe and understand a limit on our own ability to consume, if the goal of a reorganization of social systems to provide an equality of opportunity is fully to be realized in the way that the planet can sustain. So yes, there is a limit and you know, I think, I hope that those who such as you Mr. Letellier are involved in these issues can help us discover it and understand it.
No. You are Miss Anonymous or Mr. Anonymous [...]
Michael E. Tigar: No. You are Miss Anonymous or Mr. Anonymous from Stoke on Trent, you're the country that gave us John Milton who wrote, “I cannot praise a fugitive in cloistered virtue unexercised and unbreathed that never sallies out to see her adversary. Let her and falsehood grapple whoever knew truth to be put to the worst in a free and open encounter.” Now what does that mean? It means that the perceived threat of the Internet and all of the information that flows over it is rather from efforts to control and direct and focus and limit that content and not from all of the cacophony, the contrariety, the [adversariness] of all of the voices to which one can have access there. Yes, at times it's a burden because we do feel, I think, threatened or intimidated – that’s your word – intimidated, by the sheer volume of information and contrariety of views. But I think that as responsible people we need to see our way past that and see our way past the point of talking about things and move through this process of sifting to constructive action, to change the world once we’ve been enabled to understand it better.
Number one, I think it's cruel to your pets [...]
Michael E. Tigar: Number one, I think it's cruel to your pets not to give them opportunities to not become - what is that - obese, lazy, dependent and less curious. But let's go to the main point. Yes, indeed. Technology is wonderful, but of course it permits people to become obese, lazy, dependent and less curious. But the problem is that it isn't just technology. Technology's neutral. Technology simply permits things. Nuclear technology is neutral but somebody could decide to make a bomb with it. What's happening is that people are working longer hours for shorter pay and resorting therefore to technology to make up the gap instead of taking the time to prepare healthy meals. People are finding limited choices in the supermarkets because technology driven by agribusiness and corporate conglomerates is restricting the choices available to them. A part of the process of human liberation is taking responsibility for all aspects of our own society and lives and changing things so that everybody has the opportunity to experience the benefits of technology without being compelled by the controls that technology permits that holds the power to impose, on the way that they live their lives.
Hi, Cat Matlock in North Carolina. As it [...]
Michael E. Tigar: Hi, Cat Matlock in North Carolina. As it happens, my wife Jane and I have just moved to North Carolina in Chatham County, maybe you know where that is. In Chatham County we have just kicked out three developer cronies’ commissioners and now we're going to have a majority of environmental responsible people. We have farmers markets in every community in the county; and then around in Orange County where Chapel Hill is, in Durham County and Wake County where Raleigh is, that not only gives us good produce but give us examples of how to do things. North Carolina has programs run by the forestry department. They have a whole thing on how to build a green house, which takes up a small footprint and does not consume more resources than absolutely necessary. In short, despite the ecological crisis that infects much of the state, for example, a majority of the water courses in North Carolina are polluted, and despite the efforts by big people like Hugo Neu to build landfills on wetlands, there's a movement that's pushing back. Now I'm answering Cat Matlock's question from North Carolina. There's also suits against environmental excess insisting on environmental impact statements, suits to block irresponsible development. Good lawyers can get involved in that and raise their own level of visibility in the community as well as getting something done. In short, folks in North Carolina are getting organized. Not everywhere and not with undiminished or unequivocal success, but those of you listening in other states, look around. There are similar opportunities in your community as well and the struggle is worth participating in.
[MISSING AUDIO] is the next conflict. That [...]
Michael E. Tigar: [MISSING AUDIO] is the next conflict. That will surpass perhaps in intensity the conflict over petroleum as a resource. Fact two: while this crisis impends, global warming is creating patterns of drought in parts of the world that seriously impends on people's ability to conduct the ordinary affairs of life and to maintain agricultural pursuits. Fact three: pollution of major water courses in China, in Western Europe, in the United States, South America, everywhere in the world, pollution of major water courses that flow through many different countries and into the sea, creates a perhaps irreversible threat to the universal supply of clean water for drinking and agricultural purposes. Those are the facts. Now what's the solution? The solution obviously is first, transnational; because these water courses that are essential to serving farmers and residents of all these regions, these watercourses pass through several different countries and thus point-source pollution in one can have results in another. So the solution is transnational. Transnational institutions and transnational agreements exist, so the rules are reasonably clear about point source type pollution. What's missing is the adequate mechanisms of enforcement and adequate organization to bring enforcement actions and see that they are carried through, both civil for damages, civil for remedies required to be taken, and criminal in the case of polluters. Institutional frameworks have begun to exist for that in individual countries and transnationally. You've got to resort to those and then for the broader problem of drought and global warming, as an impediment to a free supply of water, that answer is the one that many of us have given in response to earlier questions.
Yes. I do not feel that I am wise enough to [...]
Michael E. Tigar: Yes. I do not feel that I am wise enough to inflict suffering and pain on individuals in order to bring about some so called greater good later. I do not believe that any government of which I'm aware is capable of making those decisions either; at least I'm not willing to trust them to do it. And I certainly do not trust those people who have rounded up and in the name of patent, copyright and trade secret control access to knowledge, to make those decisions on my behalf or to have governments, agencies and regulators or even the people as a whole make those decisions based on the information that they choose to provide. No, indeed. The history of claimed harmless innovations of various kinds that concur with the natural world, whether it's DDT or [Statton’s] with side effects or anyone of a number things we can talk about, tell us that this sort of bargain is one that we ought not to be making. And that if that is indeed the form in which the question is presented that it is our obligation to say, “No, why don't we wait a while.” We just don't know enough. Does that make me a Luddite? Maybe so.
Much of the answer to this question is [...]
Michael E. Tigar: Much of the answer to this question is suggested by the answers that have been given before. But you know when the ship Titanic began to sink, I think it was the stern that went, many people went to the bow and pointed back and said, “Look, look, look, those peoples’ end of the ship is sinking.” Well, you know --and then if you look over my shoulder I'm going to duck down now, you can look back that way, they have a pile of books representing the books that were burned in this very place, the Bebelplatz. I've said this before, I think today even, Bertolt Brecht wrote a poem called “All of Us or None” and I don't do German, but that's the English title and you can look it up. He was talking in the context of social organization, comrades getting together to make a more just society, but boy, aren’t we aware that our planet is small? Aren’t we aware that we are all in this together? Aren’t we aware that it's all of us or none? And look what's happening. Look what's happening. In our own country, the United States of America, what's the greatest risk? The greatest risk is this willingness to point to the other. The greatest risk is the racism towards groups within our own society and community, whether it's over the immigration debate or anti terrorism or wherever, everybody's getting permission to speak in terms that 10 years ago we would have recognized as overtly racist. And then we couple that with the fact that as we look abroad, these same sets of policies and attitudes lead towards jingoism xenophobia. So the step that we must prepare -- we can talk about the scientific steps, I guess maybe that’s what I’m supposed to say -- but the step we need to prepare is to organize around the principle of our united interests in preserving the world and in turning the social system upside down so that we can do that. That's where really need to put a lot of our energy right now.
Who owns the television stations? On top of [...]
Michael E. Tigar: Who owns the television stations? On top of who owns the television stations, who buys the time on the television stations to present the programs? Commercials. Many recent studies show that a half dozen major corporations control or in the process of controlling, not simply television, but a whole range of other media outlets so that a majority of the information package that is available to people is now dominated by a very few voices. Of course, the issue is the important information. What is the important information? The important information for you involved in the environmental movement is the depredations to be committed upon the environment by guess what, private corporations that have some alliances with those in an ownership position. For me as a human rights lawyer, the important information is the information about the tortures and disappearances' in secret prisons and unfair supposed trials that are to be visited upon people and the systematic brutality being committed in our name in a country called Iraq and elsewhere. And what is that? That's a veil of secrecy is drawn over that and you don't have to intimidate too many media barons to keep that message, those important tools from getting out. We share an interest in this because communication is the web that binds us together as we each, in our way and for our part of the process, seek to make social change.
Well, we really are not taking that risk. [...]
Michael E. Tigar: Well, we really are not taking that risk. That risk is being taken for us. Let me tell you a story. There was a farmer in the Middle West who planted just his ordinary corn crop, but over in the next field owned by somebody else, the farmer was planting one of these genetically altered crops. Well, through a process of pollination and migration and so forth and so on, some of the genetically altered substance gets involved in the non GM0 farmer's crop. So now in the next planting season, he's actually got some seed that contains some of this genetically altered material and he gets sued by the agricultural conglomerate that invented the genetically altered material saying why he's appropriated their intellectual property and now he has to pay a royalty. Well, that story illustrates the problem here. GMO material, this genetically operated stuff, supposedly has these great benefits but what it actually is is a device by which multinational agricultural conglomerates can increase their own profitability and actually own the rights to these life forms and thereby derive enormous profits that would otherwise go to farmers and take that profit out of the food chain, thus making food more expensive when it reaches your table and contributing to the [corporatization] of agriculture of the world around. Now, all of these consequences are being adversely felt as we speak and they are consequences of this corporate greed driven by and sustained by rules that permit this form of proprietary acquisition of the very information on the basis of which are vital food supply is based. And that's what's going on and it needs to be resisted, as it is.
What a wonderful question. At all times in [...]
Michael E. Tigar: What a wonderful question. At all times in human history, science, the practice of science in any organized way, has been under the control of governments or holders of private property; that is to say its surplus value that supports science. So that seriously curbs the objectivity of science. Today, science as practiced by doctors working for pharmaceutical companies has the goal and an end and an object, which is profitability. There's very little so called pure science being done. Read the work of J.D. Bernal, B E R N A L, who wrote brilliantly about how the history of science shows the manipulation of science and of scientists in the service of power. And then you can read “American Prometheus”, the wonderful book about Robert Oppenheimer to show how nuclear technology was distorted and through lies and misrepresentations finally brought to bear tragically on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the only victims of nuclear power and nuclear power administered in hands of the United States. So, sometimes the scientific methodology can be said to have some objectivity, but the uses of science and the task to which scientists are put, lack objectivity because of these instruments of social control of which I have spoken.
You know, a couple of months ago my wife [...]
Michael E. Tigar: You know, a couple of months ago my wife said, “Really we should go see that movie "An Inconvenient Truth". So many people have said that it has an important message.” And I said, “Really? I'd rather watch grass grow then listen to Al Gore talk for half an hour.” But I went. And despite some of the mawkish stuff that got involved in there, the presentation in an engaging way of these compelling facts, coupled with the fact that thereafter you can go on a website, you can take a list off the movie itself, and understand steps that we can take right now to deal with global warming, and all of the associated environmental issues, I thought was inspirational. And so, for right now, we have this wonderful opportunity which is to take our friends to go see that movie and when it comes out in DVD form to rent it and show it to our friends, and promise them that in this process they actually are going to be entertained. And from that, begin to look back at the history of environmental concern, perhaps beginning with Rachel Carson's wonderful book "Silent Spring", about DDT and the birds, which I read as a child in school. That's a starting place there in Cameron, Missouri and all over the place. Because, see, not only do you get out of that the message, but you get the idea that these folks that took power after Al Gore got elected President, really mean to create a disastrous situation on all issues related to the maintenance of the environment as well as in so many other areas of human endeavor. So, good luck.
Mr. Huening, I suspect that you in Chapel [...]
Michael E. Tigar: Mr. Huening, I suspect that you in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and I sitting down in Chatham County try very hard in our individual lives and the lives of our family and community to see that there's not an over consumption of resources. But the fact remains, as you point out, that our country is responsible for this hugely disproportionate consumption of resources in addition to the world’s pile of trash, as we move this stuff through the consumption cycle. And therefore, organizing around environmental issues remains one of the key points in our political agenda. After all, the very same political forces that using the excuse of anti terrorism are seeking to maintain themselves in power are also responsible for maintaining greed driven entities, institutions and practices that endanger the environment and contribute to cause this over consumption of which you speak. While at the same time, seeking to dismantle and destroy the instruments, such as miles per gallon requirements, and suits about excess pollution, and suits about toxic waste that could curb the unrestrained greed of the corporate kleptocrats. That's your job and mine because the risk on the other side is, and we're beginning to see it that xenophobic reactions to the consumption by India and China in their development of resources are going to heighten the crisis that we now face in the United States; the crisis of blaming the other. And from immigration to attacks on the development policies of countries such as China and India, the xenophobia is yet another part of this whole concatenation of social policies that unless we resist it, tends towards disaster.
Mr. Hinchcliffe, I hope you're an architect, [...]
Michael E. Tigar: Mr. Hinchcliffe, I hope you're an architect, but if not, it doesn't matter. Frank Lloyd Wright said this, "Consider that you as young architects are to be the pattern-givers of civilization. You must be the way-showers, as no stream can rise higher than its source so you can rise no more or better to architecture than you are. So why not go to work on yourselves to make yourselves in quality what you would have your buildings be." Yes, architecture. There is, of course, the soaring genius of [Corbusier] and if you go to Barcelona you see the frivolity and idiosyncratic character of Gaudi’s vision. You see the illumination of the [Eampay]. We sit here today in a square - the Bebelplatz - in Berlin and we see a monument in front of us that's eclipsed a little bit by the table, to the attempted destruction of human learning by the burning of books; and behind me, just over my shoulder, this tower of representations of the books of the great minds of our time. All of these architectural renderings that attempt to express certain kinds of human desire, certain kinds of fruits of human struggle; and if you're doing that and escaping from the constraints that people are trying to put on you as an architect, then you are doing something worthy. Or even if you’re building green and sustainable houses for people, so that those houses are machines for living. No, no, no. Architecture indeed which is suggested by your question is an opportunity to serve the economic, social, political, environmental and cultural concerns of all people.
I want our shared future, yours and mine, to [...]
Michael E. Tigar: I want our shared future, yours and mine, to be dominated by a sense of justice, respect and love for one another; by loving kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy and equanimity. But to have those things, we must struggle to end the exploitation and the violence that sustains that system of exploitation. And to put into place human institutions that are designed to guarantee and to secure respect for these values. And to identify, and if necessary, to confine and punish those who would war against them. We can begin today by insisting that those guilty of organizing industry and the machinery of war to cause the unbelievable carnage and destruction that we're seeing all around us are brought to justice. And that their claims of impunity from responsibility are rejected. That is to say, we can begin right now to take steps towards the future that I at least would like to see.
Hi, Jerry. I see Jerry, he's across the [...]
Michael E. Tigar: Hi, Jerry. I see Jerry, he's across the table over there. He's waiting for the answer; maybe he'll look at it later. Jerry, I don't think the ubiquity of mass media is the problem. The ubiquity of mass media is potentially a great boom because it theoretically would permit all sorts of voices to be heard and all sorts of challenges to accepted wisdom to be entertained. The problem is not ubiquity, but the concentration of control of mass media in the hands of a few. And I think that you know and I know, since we share a past in alternative forms of communication for want of a better word, but that's what the issue is today. Is that when the media - you don't have to scare very many people to shut down aggressive reporting about important issues. You don't have to mislead very many key reporters to cause false stories to gain acceptance. And the few people that you do have to scare or mislead turn out to have a great economic interest in not rocking the boat. So that rare occasions when really great communications breakthroughs happen, the result, it seems to me, of whatever ubiquity there might be out there in opposition to the control, the increasingly kind of hydra - Is that a mixed metaphor? - But anyway, the control of all of these outlets in the hands of a few.
We are already doing it. What is in [...]
Michael E. Tigar: We are already doing it. What is in electroencephalogram? Well it's a connection of electrodes to parts of your head to read the brain functions. What's the brain? What's going on in there? Well, it’s a form of electrical energy. Things are moving around, right? And the way that they move around is influenced by all sorts of chemical reactions. Hey, I think, from what I understand it's just energy and I understand this from having spoken to a lot of people about this so called drug problem and what happens to drugs, and worked in the law in matters that involve brain capacity and the way that people make decisions. So, based on that imperfect understanding, there is some possibility that this energy can be tapped into without actually physically intruding in the brain and then the question becomes, well, is it possible to translate the energy of the brain into controlled responses. Well, I've just run out of knowledge. I’ve used all the words I know. Why don't you and I take a chance and read Dr. Schwartz and Sharon Begley's book called "The Mind and the Brain" which has some wonderful research on this subject and then when we both finish the book, we can come back next year and we can talk about it some more when at least I will be better informed and can make an answer. Or maybe we'll find the answer in the book.
Bill, I now understand, I guess for the [...]
Michael E. Tigar: Bill, I now understand, I guess for the first time, that you're an international person, but you live in California. So we could use that as an example, couldn't we? How about if we repealed Proposition 13 that limits the amount of money that's available for public schools in California? How about if we ended the systematic under funding of public education, which has reached crisis proportions? After all, even though a person can, let's say, go to law school today, and that's my realm of experience, they wind up with a crushing burden of debt that disables them from participating in pro bono activities in the public interest, even if they wanted to. So, okay that's the issue. And it can only be met by public support of public education. That's number one. But more broadly than that, we live in a country now that has a negative savings rate. What does that mean? That is whatever money people might have thought they put aside for their children's education, is being by one device or another eroded, mostly because they simply needed to live on. This of course is the broad gauge social problem that's going to require fundamental social change to answer, but you and I can begin to point up, to agitate for the need to reform the financing of public education so that everybody has the opportunity to have access to it in some meaningful way. And the reform of the tax structure along those lines is a first, very controversial but necessary, step.
The ability to be alone, to be at peace with [...]
Michael E. Tigar: The ability to be alone, to be at peace with one's self, that is of course a great gift and to be cultivated and treasured; but to be lonely, to be disconnected, to be alienated, that is something to be understood and struggled against. Alienation from one's fellow creatures, from people of different beliefs, ethnicities, races and nations, from one's work; that is a condition that is being imposed upon us by the forces that have organized the means of production and the instruments of government in a way to make us feel that way. That is a part of our disempowerment. To be willing to be alone is fine; to feel lonely is to feel disempowered. And the antidote to it is to understand the sources of that disempowerment and in whose interest disempowerment is operating, and to seize that power by uniting with our fellow creatures to change the world in fundamental ways. You have allies in that process. You have allies in that process.
The power of information and access to [...]
Michael E. Tigar: The power of information and access to information is demonstrated by a number of events. First, the unparalleled effort of government organizations to draw the veil of secrecy over their criminal acts, and I'm talking about the Bush administration and its co conspirators. Second, the unparalleled efforts of so called entertainment or media giants, who control access to media and who control the content of what is out there in the world; to direct people's attention towards these profit making providers of what passes for information and to restrict the flow of information through the deployment of ideas about intellectual property, trade secrets and so on, subjects that we'll be taking up in greater detail. Therefore, since the power of information access has been demonstrated so clearly by the adversaries of human liberation, it must be because they have studied it, that human liberation depends vitally upon making access to information as unparalleled access that the computer age makes possible to all people in all circumstances all over the world. Not that that alone is going to solve matters, but it gives folks the resources; first to recognize that they are not alone; second, to see that their circumstance is not unique to them. It is not their fault. And next to see that there are so many others who share these aspirations, these desires, this need, this willingness to participate in the struggle that we can begin the process of change. And actually, you know the fellow that asked this question is sitting just two chairs away from me and I see that either he answered the question in very few words or decided not to answer it because he was the one that asked it. I look forward to his comments on what the other 111 people here have to say.
It's not a fair question. It's not fair to [...]
Michael E. Tigar: It's not a fair question. It's not fair to trees because there are so many; but if I had to choose one without being insulting to all the other trees, and I mean this, it would be the heavy-butted sycamore that sat in the pasture of the farm that I had in Loudon County, Virginia. Heavy-butted because of the wide trunk that it had feeding as it did on the water from the artesian spring, the healthy water that was below that flowed through the spring house and into the pond. And those branches, those branches that could move back and forth with such power and yet it helped me to understand that just as my anger, my hostility, my confusion is not me, so those branches moving are not the tree. And it is that understanding of the distinction between what is going on that's affecting me in the world and the essential me, the [roots of] me, the me that reaches its roots down to derive sustenance from all of the experience of those that have gone before and from the struggles that they have endured and the lessons that they have passed on that brings to mind this image. And so when you ask, “What is your tree?”, I think of that one and if I had to choose one to be a metaphor for the kind of existence that I'd like to have, it'd be that sycamore down in the pasture, which although that farm is no longer in our family, I'd like to think we're still there.
Create a diversion. Create forums and [...]
Michael E. Tigar: Create a diversion. Create forums and demonstrations and events that people can see and experience and participate in. This idea that we can do politics by sending in our money so that somebody will act on our behalf which seems increasingly to be an organizational technique, is something that has simply got to stop. Okay, there's 112 people seated around this table. I feel inadequate to answer a bunch of these questions but you know, I've answered them all and I've done that so that we can actually create some kind of a knowledge base and start a debate that spreads outside the control of the monopoly dominated media and into laptop computers all over the world. We've got to diversify the signals that are coming in and the only way we can do that is by seizing control of events over which we, to whatever extent we can, have control. To present some different reality about the world that folks can organize around. We understand how it's done. Well it's easy to do if you got a billion dollars to market a diet beverage. It's hard to do if we don't have much money. But it's something that we simply have to do. For me, sometimes test litigation does it. Sometimes if somebody gets prosecuted for exercising their rights we can turn a criminal case into something that the media has to cover so that our message trickles out. Yes, that happens, but waiting until somebody gets prosecuted is a hell of a price to pay for the opportunity to communicate. Affirmative lawsuits have some value in that respect, but those are some of the ways in which we can think about doing this in our community. If you're listening to this that means you've become a part of the alternative reality. Keep on.
Sabastiao, you have made an excellent start, [...]
Michael E. Tigar: Sabastiao, you have made an excellent start, and I'm glad to know the person behind the question. In our community, local farmers come with their produce as -- this is in North Carolina -- people move away from growing tobacco, and have rediscovered sustainable and organic agriculture. The struggle to maintain the small scale agricultural production is a part of this process but more simply take your children, all of you, by the hand or yourself if you don't have children, and go to meet the people who grow your food. Take a walk in the country. If you live in the city, get out of it and look around you. It won’t be hard to find not only a way to look at and be a part of nature, but also to begin to see the signs that the planet upon which we all depend for our survival is in trouble; and having sharpened your perception, you can become involved in the increasingly organized movement to create a society in which reliance on nature and respect for nature is a value, rather than the exploitation of resources for private profit.
Coca Cola dominates the market. Unless you [...]
Michael E. Tigar: Coca Cola dominates the market. Unless you want to buy Dasani water, which is Coca Cola's packaging of ordinary water at prices that you would expect to pay for Coca Cola or even pretty good wine. There you are. Our choices about beverages are determined by these major players in the marketplace who spend enormous amounts of money to push their brands upon the world. And it's not good for our health. It's not good for our children's health; and yet it's happening. Not only is it easier to get that cold can of Coca Cola, in United States these cold cans of Coca Cola are being sold to school children in schools, in vending machines, so that they don't spend their money on other things that might be more healthy for them. I think and this is beginning to happen in United States and I hope elsewhere, that the recognition as to what marketing is doing to turn people away from healthy choices is all in all a worthwhile one. The broader problem about access to water is a later question in this series and then we can broaden our perspective to take a look at that issue. But that's my response to your immediate question. I hope it helps.
Africa. Brussels, Belgium, we can learn from [...]
Michael E. Tigar: Africa. Brussels, Belgium, we can learn from Africa what the colonial powers refused to learn and what they sought to conceal in their rhetoric. Was it [Amy LaVandervelle] who denounced in the turn of the century –that’s a Belgian Socialist - the Belgian colonial adventure in Africa saying the work of civilization as you call it is an enormous and continual butchery. What we learn from Africa is the lasting and maligning effect of colonialism. What we can learn from Africa are the terrible lessons of that postcolonial period in which corrupt government after corrupt government succeeded in taking power and not being able to fulfill the basic requirements of a state. What we can learn from Africa is that those voices that seek to identify and validate the authentic experience of African self determination have at times been brutally silenced by the actions of the Western powers; and I include among that Patrice Lumumba and of course the repression that Nelson Mandela experienced, Jomo Kenyatta, Kwame Nkrumah, and so on. We can learn from Africa the terrible consequences of monoculture and the distortion of economies to where they cannot use their resources to develop in a way that serves the needs of all their people. And we can, observing all of this, reflect those of us in the so called First World or the Metropolitan countries on our responsibility to end this system of colonial imperial domination as quickly and effectively as we possibly can and to decline to have any part in it. That it seems to me is the lesson speaking as a resident of someone who lives in one of those Metropolitan countries to a questioner who also does.
Start close to home. We actually have a [...]
Michael E. Tigar: Start close to home. We actually have a United States Senator who said the other day in Belgrade that these terrorists drive taxis by day and kill at night. We actually have an immigration debate that is overtly racist. We actually have measures to exclude by such things as English as the national language of the United States, and validate the cultures of all of the many different groups that have come together in the United States. It's that jingoism, that xenophobia, that racism that represents in the United States of America a strong barrier to being a responsible member of a global community. We had better look around ourselves and deal with that issue as it arises in our own communities and take that as a good first start; because that's the debate that threatens to cause the country to lurch into a kind of overtly fascist way of governance.
Ben, I've checked with my colleague. I [...]
Michael E. Tigar: Ben, I've checked with my colleague. I didn't answer any of the questions. Nobody at this table answered any of the questions and they're lying to you if they tell you otherwise. We provided some answers to these questions. And you know what, tomorrow the answers might change, or least the valid answers to the extent that valid might change. That's what it's about. And how do we get the world to listen? Well, we've done our part. We’ve sat here all day and said this. The people in the center of this thing are doing their part. They're going to broadcast this around the world and edit it and repeat it and you too can download it and send it out and get people to listen. That's for you to do, right? In any language and to everybody; and so, [more in a different language], [frieden und freundschaft], peace and friendship, [more in a different language], [more in a different language], whatever it is the slogan you want to do, end this disempowerment in which you seem to be stuck, if that's where you’re stuck, join with your neighbor and let's go out. The consequences, well the consequences are human liberation. The task is worth the candle and, you know, if you've been hanging out all this long, thank you for listening because your answers, when you and your friends in struggle come up with them, are bound to be just as valid, if not more so, than any that have been provided at this table today. And that I think is the most important message.
Do you remember, or have you read, of the [...]
Michael E. Tigar: Do you remember, or have you read, of the shock and horror that went ‘round the world when the death camps were discovered and the publicity about them spread around the world in the wake of the Second World War? Okay. Think about that. The most -- the best -- the most important unreported story would: 1) Awaken the world to the horrors of injustice; 2) It would break through the shield of governmental secrecy behind which governments operate not simply incompetently, but in criminal ways. And it would be about something so essential to the human condition; and what is that? That story is the secret prisons, the CIA's rendition of prisoners, the horrors of Guantanamo where people are held, torture being committed in the name of United States, in Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq – excuse me, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo, and in all these secret prisons and the proposals to try people for their lives without the semblance of fairness. And over it all, over it all is a shield of governmental secrecy that would have to be broken through to let the light shine in in order to report that story. Thus accomplishing at one fell swoop awakening human beings all over the planet to this human tragedy, quickening the sense of injustice leading to demands for justice and breaking the back of the secrecy with which thus far this corrupt regime has sought to cloak its actions. Is there someone out there today who is courageous enough to report this story? Is there a media leader out there who is courageous enough to put it on the front page and carry it there with the same intensity that the New York Times carried the phony reporting of Judith Miller? Well let's find out.
The questioner is from Germany and I am [...]
Michael E. Tigar: The questioner is from Germany and I am seated in the shadow of the law faculty of Humboldt University, and I'm a lawyer. I happen to believe that contradiction is the way that people, societies, institutions and life forms grow and change. And in doing so, I understand that I get that from Hegel and Marx and I'm pointing over my shoulder because their books are represented in the sculpture that's behind me. This is the dialectic, yes, from Hegel and on to Marx. And let me give you an example from the law of contracts. It is a maxim of the law of contract that contracts must be kept, [more in another language]. It is a maxim of the law that contractual - keeping a contract - can be excused and must be, if circumstances change. [more in another language. Now there is a set of opposed principles and it is important to an orderly system of justice, an orderly system that does justice, to be able to hold in its head, to hold in its tools, these contradictory ideas so that no one way of looking at things will always dominate and lead to an unjust results. And so it is in the human condition, the ability to hold in your head contradictory ideas and to see what might apply under one circumstance and what might apply in another circumstance is absolutely essential because stinting in knowing that you can do that is one way that we stay open to challenges to the existing order and to ideas of how things should be. So, it's just something that we have to accept about the world that we live in.
We are all in this together. Or as Brecht [...]
Michael E. Tigar: We are all in this together. Or as Brecht said, "All of us or none". We are all in this together.
Now, here's a headline from the business [...]
Michael E. Tigar: Now, here's a headline from the business section of last week's paper "Real wages down, worker productivity up". And what does that mean? That means that businesses have invented means to get more out of every worker, every working minute. But of course the workers aren't deriving the benefit from that because although their productivity is up, which means they are contributing more to corporate profits, their real wages are down which means they're taking home less to feed their families. Ah, and it was ever thus. Good old Karl Marx wrote about it in volume one of "Capital" and that's that book that's behind us. Did you ever see the movie Charlie Chaplin's movie “Modern Times"? Well if you haven't seen it, go rent it and look at it. And if you have seen it, then rent it and look at it again and share it with your friends. Because your question says each thing we invent. We understand what we invent and then why is what we invent turned against us? That is the message of Charlie Chaplin's great movie and besides that, it's funny.
Tens of thousands of people in Hiroshima and [...]
Michael E. Tigar: Tens of thousands of people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki would have been permitted to live out the course of their lives. The highways of America would not be choked by gas guzzling vehicles marketed at various times and in various ways because those were the ones that created the most profit for the automobile companies, and so on. This is an important question because technological innovation and development is inevitable and the question during the whole of recorded history has been how each technological change can be turned either for or against the interests of those people who have to work to sustain themselves; who have only their own labor power to give. We can pause and look around us and ask about the ways in which the things we buy would be better value and more efficient if not driven by market forces, and how the needless deaths and maimings would not have occurred if technology had not been placed in service of the exercise of military power. And having done the inventory, understand that the task now, as it has been time out of mind, is to gain control of technology on behalf of the people who operate the system and turn it to the benefit of everybody. And that's not a pipe dream. It's something that we can organize and do.
Well here I am, back to Heraclites again, [...]
Michael E. Tigar: Well here I am, back to Heraclites again, who said that the experiencing injustice is essential because it helps us to understand what justice is. We have experienced the private profit, greed driven control of the world's resources. We have experienced the ways in which that control has distorted the economies of countries in the Third World by creating monoculture and supporting the comprador regimes that do the bidding of those entities. And now is the time for a change. Who will control the world's resources in the future? The countries where those resources are located are increasingly - the people of those countries - seeing the necessity to seize control of their own destiny. Much of the conflict in the world occurs because the United States and other powerful Metropolitan countries want to make sure that the democratization of control of resources does not occur, that the resources are not exported for the benefit of Metropolitan countries, but rather are used to benefit the places where they happen to be found or exploited. So that's the first place where responsibilities start. And you and I sitting in the United States of America have the obligation to see our government turn away from the disastrous foreign and military policies that impede that process of control. And to see through labels such as terrorism and the war on terror and the need to intervene here and there as simply covers, simply covers for the desire by profit driven corporations to control sources of these valuable things that are thought to be essential to our economic survival. Join the Sierra Club. Get involved in environmental lawsuits.
We must be indigenous in the 20th century. [...]
Michael E. Tigar: We must be indigenous in the 20th century. Oh, I know, indigenous ethnic identity gets a bad name because of ethnic violence, of course. I mean there are places where children will point to you and somebody's grandfathers’ grandfather committed a wrong against somebody else's grandfathers' grandfather and it has not yet been avenged. But the preservation of the identity of indigenous people, the celebration of all of the cultures that are existing in the world is an important part of the vibrancy, I think, of a global community. As somebody interested in international law, what troubles me is that the international law protection of indigenous peoples, unlike some other protection such as the norm against torture, is ill defined, relatively ill defined, and the rights of indigenous peoples are not fully protected. They’re conditionally defined and conditionally protected to put things simply - and I hope, not to oversimplify. But respect for one another's cultural identity and tradition and learning from another's cultural identity and tradition is as much a part of this process of uniting around our common goals as human beings who need to turn the world upside down and replace these corrupt social structures, as is the process of uniting in an organized way.
None. None at all, and I hear that the nice [...]
Michael E. Tigar: None. None at all, and I hear that the nice person next to me saying none also, and I think I'm hearing none on the other side. My goodness me. Defects and imperfections. In whose eyes? Once we start giving authorities of any kind, the opportunity to judge what is a defect or imperfection and then go about the business figuring out how to "correct" those we are headed backwards to some of the most difficult, painful and barbaric times in human history. So, the answer's no. No.
All right, you have to read the question in [...]
Michael E. Tigar: All right, you have to read the question in order to know my answer. The question is, “How can we determine 'truth' in inverted commas and 'fact' in inverted commas, when we can manufacture either?” Because we can't manufacture truth or fact. What is being manufactured for our benefit and to our detriment is the perception of truth and fact — and we have seen it. This regime in the United States today, which is the most repressive and corrupt within my memory, survives based on what? Survives based on lies and survives based upon an unparalleled resort to secrecy and to overt threats to those who seek to pierce through the veil of secrecy, in order to place its misdeeds beyond public gaze. And so, Ebon, the problem is to use all of the resources at our command: first, to encourage the media giants to stand up to government and say, “No, no, you can't prosecute us. We've got plenty of resources to defend. We're going to go right on doing whatever it is we’re doing"; to use the Freedom of Information Act and go to court to compel the government to release information and then in our organizing efforts in our communities, to see that information is as widely disseminated as possible; to stand up to the government's lies as more and more people are doing. That, it seems to me, is the task. And that's one reason why I insisted, and I hope not improperly, on noting the fact that you put truth and fact in quotes because I think that you know what's going on.
One: Do not take what is not properly yours [...]
Michael E. Tigar: One: Do not take what is not properly yours and no more than is justly yours, and struggle against those who would do so. Two: Respect life. Three: Do not abuse others in your relationships. I think those three really do summarize it all. And when you say what is this the three most important values a child should be taught, then the next question is “How?” And since you're 30 and I'm more than twice that, I think that we really ought to add ‘by example’. That's always best. Children are such geniuses at spotting hypocrisy, aren't they? That's why.
First, can we understand that the artist is [...]
Michael E. Tigar: First, can we understand that the artist is condemned to signify? It's all very well to say well I'm just doing this art for myself, but somebody's going to look at it and interpret it. Can we understand, second, that all artists produced and supported the production of it supported by some measure of the operation of surplus value? John Berger, B E R G E R, and that wonderful book of essays from so long ago, “Permanent Red”, explored this theme. So with this in mind, what is the most important topic? It is the way in which the censorship of artistic expression goes on in the world, in which corporate and governmental censors through means that are more or less subtle and often a great deal less, attempt to curb the artistic temperament and prevent the expression of people's desires and needs in an artistic framework that make them accessible and serve as the focal point of organization to change things as they are. That, that is in this, as in many other times, I think the most important question that confronts the arts today. As in that poem that attributes to Nelson Rockefeller, some statement {AUDIO PROBLEM] well after all, it's what my wall. That sums up the attitudes of the potential censors, doesn't it?
I would like it to be said of me that a [...]
Michael E. Tigar: I would like it to be said of me that a passion for justice ruled my life, not solely in some abstract appreciation of the meaning of justice, but having stepped down from the tableau and engaged in the theater or arena of reality and action. I would like it to be said that I saw and understood as Heraclites' reminded us, injustice, and therefore formed some discernible, defensible idea of what justice is about. That's what moves me.
In our tradition, the one of which I'm a [...]
Michael E. Tigar: In our tradition, the one of which I'm a part, we understand reality and what we must do with myths and parables, do we not? The so called miracle of the loaves and fishes is something about love increasing by being given away and that's what the metaphor is. In Greece, in ancient Greece the myths were what - of all powerful gods, right, who had the absolute power to shape the world and also really the inevitability of fate? And then historically in Sophocles' play “Oedipus at Colonus” we begin to see the idea of mythology as having to do with human choices and with human responsibility for human conduct that is done intentionally, but not otherwise. Well, today, for me there are myths aplenty at this table and you ought to listen to some of the shamans. Here's my myth. Man calls his children, his six children in around his bed and he holds up a stick, and he breaks it. He holds up another stick and he breaks it. And then he takes a bunch of sticks and he holds them up and of course despite all his power he can't break them. And that myth has to do with empowerment. That by ourselves we are powerless, that united together like the bundle of sticks we have power. That's an Irish myth. And you should have your own; but good question. Good question.
You really need to ask this question of a [...]
Michael E. Tigar: You really need to ask this question of a scientist, but I tell you, yes I think so. We use photovoltaic solar panels in a number of applications, as personally my family does, and I have this sense that the amount of energy required to produce that photovoltaic panel is probably more than we're going to save by using it over time and some people have said that hybrid automobiles, some of the hybrid technology raises that. So, let’s just make that ill informed assumption and go on to talk about it. I think that in the early stages, alternative energy sources can be problematic; wind energy kills birds, it takes more energy to make a [] panel then perhaps you’re going to get out of it at the end. I think the objective is to try these things out over a period of time on the assumption that the gap between input and outgo is not horrifically great and we really have the possibility to shrink that gap to zero and push the equation back the other way. At least I hope that that's what's going on. Given the marketing hype that is associated with some so called renewable energy technologies, I'm a little skeptical about that, but that's the hope. If you live in Antarctica that must mean that you're involved with science in some way and you probably have an answer to that question and when you do please mail it in, because-- that we ought to have it. As to the sort of policy judgment, I've tried to share my views on that with you from an uninformed perspective. ‘Course if we all waited to be informed, then we would never do anything, would we?
Every country in the world has a national [...]
Michael E. Tigar: Every country in the world has a national anthem, but so far we've been unable to come up with a tune that can be sung by all. There's the [National] [SINGING], but people identify with the Nation State. They do that for historic, based on a historical analysis because the Nation State was the specific form of social organization that accompanied the rise to power a bourgeois democracy as it took power and sought to destroy the vestiges of feudalism. No doubt, the next phase of human development will see a systems of social organization that are more adapted to some new form of social order and in which, while national or ethnic or cultural, however you want to say it, racial differences are respected and honored, the social form of organization called the Nation State will become less important. We’re already seeing signs of that and as you organize against the forces in the European Union, that are seeking to destroy national regimes that protect the rights of workers and minorities and women, you will see that you probably have more in common with people who are laboring under the same disabilities as you are in your life in France or England or Italy, have more in common with them than you do with some folks who are living in your own country. And it is that sort of activity that holds the key to solving the problem that you're talking about. But for now, this powerful ideological force, the Nation State, has so much going for it invested in the system of social organization that we have, that it remains something that we contended with.
The European Community has standards for [...]
Michael E. Tigar: The European Community has standards for something called food quality. We see the standards being enforced on price lists in restaurants and on the packaging labels in supermarkets, but still people lament as you do that the food is of bad quality. In United States we have nutritional labeling but still we lament and rightly so that the food is of bad quality. I wonder what the problem is. Well the problem is that agribusiness has driven out responsible farming practices that the exploitation of certain kinds of crops has irrevocably and in some instances damaged the soil on which crops are grown, and that the economic motivation that's necessary to draw responsible farmers into the marketplace is hard to find and in many cases existed once but no longer does. In the European Community, although their politics are perhaps not everything one would wish for, the pressure by French farmers to preserve a certain mode of farming against the demands of agribusiness is worth supporting. The pressure to support true efforts at family farms in the United States is worth supporting. So that we can try to slow down this pace of driving families out of the farming business with foreclosures and unreasonable agricultural policies. Well, that's just a little of the problem. It is the destruction by greed driven major corporate entities supported by powerful lobbies that has endangered the food supply in quite fundamental ways and you and I exercising our power in politics and as consumers can push back against that. There are plenty of opportunities in your country as there are in mine. Those of you in the United States go online to farm aid and see what Willie Nelson has to say. As so often happens, going and finding out what Willie Nelson has to say is a good first step towards coming up with a sensible social policy.
Well, I mean no disrespect to those who are [...]
Michael E. Tigar: Well, I mean no disrespect to those who are -- profess this or that, but for me God is very devote. She believes in you and she believes in me for we are, after all, the ones that have created her and probably in our image. She is therefore quite disappointed that you and I have not yet managed to achieve victory over exploitation, racism, bigotry, violence and repression. But the God that I imagine and that I have created in my mind, forgives us for our failures and hopes that we will do better in the future. And I mean sincerely every word I said because that is an image that I have tried to use as guidance in my daily life.
Speaking as an American, our country [...]
Michael E. Tigar: Speaking as an American, our country directed by this corrupt regime can stop blowing them up; which inevitably if it ever leads to rebuilding is going to lead to rebuilding with a kind of depressing sameness because you’ll need to get the job done quickly. But now let’s talk more broadly and less depressingly about it. The modernization of cultures is a creature in many instances of a kind of colonial imperial mentality. The uniqueness of the dwelling choices freely made by organized people from culture to culture is something that has to be a part of the social struggle. And when it is threatened in the interest always, always, always the interest of these huge aggregations of monopoly capital to tear down the old and put up the ugly new, it is the local folks that have got to resist it. Here we sit -- my goodness, and I don't know you're going to get a picture of it. I hope you do on the Internet -- this plaza, this place where so much happened that is important to the history of the world as we know it; and it is in the process of being preserved and aspects of it made into monuments so that we don't forget the past. That is a task that needs to be replicated by organizing in every single city across the world, so that like so many other parts of our own individual cultures, we can keep hold of what defines us and what is important to us.
I can only speak to that from the [...]
Michael E. Tigar: I can only speak to that from the perspective of my own country. The 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to the United States Constitution, which were passed after the American Civil War, declared indeed that all persons born or naturalized in United States were citizens. So, African Americans became what they had not been before under the old original Constitution, just Americans. But these just Americans quickly saw that the institution of legalized segregation prevented them, and not by any desire of their own, from being just Americans. The 4,000 - more than 4,000 - lynchings across the face of the South showed that when it came to being accused of a crime, they weren't just Americans. When it came to finding a place to live or a job or a decent education, they weren't just Americans. And they aren’t just Americans today. African Americans are still disadvantaged systematically in a number of ways despite this studied and hypocritical denial of that fact by recent decisions of the Supreme Court of United States. So, the image that you would get on reading the Constitution is very, very far from the reality and all you have to do is walk with me through the corridors of power and walk with me through the corridors of any court in any major city in the United States; and through some of the neighborhoods where people don't get a chance to choose the place that they live or some of the school's that are unequally built and unequally maintained. So, I think that that is the answer to your question. But there's also something else, Africans in my country, like Africans in your country, have a cultural tradition or cultural traditions, that its right to nurture and respect and cherish and that's why your Constitution in South Africa now recognizes 11 official languages, including Xhosa and Zulu, whereas before it only recognized two. Why? To give some dignity and respect and to recognize that it is out of many individual cultural traditions that a strong and free nation can be built.
In our tradition revelation comes before the [...]
Michael E. Tigar: In our tradition revelation comes before the lesson. Within 100 kilometers, Ms. Green, of where you live in Columbia, South Carolina and within 100 kilometers of every single person who is hearing the sound of my voice, there are the lessons. But let's talk about Columbia, South Carolina. Go and sit one morning in the criminal courts and watch the way in which people become ciphers in this system that denies them their rights in fundamental way, and uses the so called procedural fairness of the criminal law system simply as a device for social control. Go down to the soup kitchen and watch people who are hungry. Then spend the next day and go through the neighborhoods where people live in conditions of systematic deprivation. Go and study, talk to your neighbors, talk to people you know, people who’ve lost their jobs in downsizing and look at the way in which greed and economic system that exists today is impacting, changing, eroding the opportunity of people to live meaningful and productive lives. And then walk around within this hundred kilometers and see the way in which irresponsible practices are pillaging the land, pillaging the scarce resources of the planet in which we live. In short, broaden your understanding by observing the way in which people in our culture live today; not the imagined way that we see that the media presents, but the reality of it. I am struck over and over and over again as a university professor how ignorant our students are who come into the classroom of the conditions to which the rules they study as law students are addressed.
Mr. Stelmacker, do you know what really [...]
Michael E. Tigar: Mr. Stelmacker, do you know what really hacks off, what really angers the folks that are in monopoly control of communications technology? You know what we found out in our community? A simple proposal - the community of Chapel Hill, North Carolina proposed to make wi fi available throughout the city using existing cellular towers, electric towers, telephone towers so that everybody could sign on the Internet free without paying a monthly subscription. That's a manageable project in a town like Chapel Hill, North Carolina. And the outcry from the monopoly driven purveyors of these services continues. And so no decision has been made. You want to make the Internet a powerful tool in your community? You know, just think of it. How much trouble is it in your community to put a leaflet on everybody's front porch? Well, it's a lot. But if you could do something like that, make wi fi available throughout so that everybody could sign on, you would greatly increase the ability of people to communicate with each other and to receive and evaluate all of these ideas that are going on. Wouldn't that be terrific? I think that's something that's worth working on. So that this becomes a public service just like water is a public service and just like any other public utility that's regarded as something that's essential to the proper functioning of every residence in the community. And then we just got to make sure there are enough computers to go around. There's some program started up about that. And then we can get organized and do something to change the rest of the world.
Nick, I don't know what the future of the [...]
Michael E. Tigar: Nick, I don't know what the future of the city is in Brisbane. I do sense that cities are inevitable, that is to say these of agglomerations of people created by the society—the social changes that began in Western Europe and the United States, oh, 1700's a good point to begin seeing them happening in earnest, certainly in western Europe. So, the task therefore, is to build within these inevitable concentrations of people, humane and just social systems, to make sure that police power and political power is not used in a way that violates fundamental principles of human dignity. I'm a lawyer. For me, the most chilling spectacle, when I look at major cities - and I've been in a number of them - representing people, deprived people, poor people, people of color, people the state's going after, is the treadmill, the absolute mockery of any idea of individualize justice for people that are caught up by the police in a society that incarcerates five to seven times as many as any Western European country. And the lack of available remedies for people who are - whose rights are violated every day by the misconduct of public officials who feel they have a license to do so because this system is increasingly rigged to deny them a day in court. What did [Kamir] say after the Second World War? What are we going to do? How are we going to save the world? We've got to give people their chance for justice. Seeing that the human race is the only species in the world to concede because when societies organizes a certain level of technicality, certain concentration, structures to preserve essential human rights become essential, and that is our task faced with the growth of the city.
Andrew, from Frankfurt, this is the best [...]
Michael E. Tigar: Andrew, from Frankfurt, this is the best question of the day, so far as I am concerned. The first thing that it requires it to confront is, that if all Chinese people want a car, then many Chinese people will realize that their aspiration for cars or wherever else it is that they want, simply cannot as Chinese society is now organized be satisfied. Having left many of its socialist principles behind, the growing inequality between rich and poor in China guarantees that that's going to be the reaction, if all Chinese want a car; but most significantly, if many Chinese began to want and then to acquire cars, the inevitable harm that was spoken of at the beginning of this session is going to happen. Petroleum prices will continue their sharp, upward movement and economic chaos in the West at the most or at the very least the grim, inevitable realization that something has to be done about the excess consumption of these fossil fuels in United States of America and other Western countries, is going to be impressed on people's consciousness. And so, a changing Chinese pattern of consumption can help the rest of the world realize that with respect to these scarce and dwindling resources, we are all in this together. And that moment when realize that we are all in this together, will be a decisive and defining one because it could be an opportunity for increased conflict and tension or an opportunity to take the next step forward. Good question. Thank you.
