Jensen: Where do you see such policies taking us?

Clark: The great issue of the twenty-first century will be that of the relationship between the rich and poor nations, and of the elimination of some percentage of those whom we consider not only expendable, but even undesirable. In many parts of the world, we've got 30 percent of the labor force unemployed and unemployable, and new technology renders them unnecessary. Why, then, from the perspective of capital — and, therefore, from the perspective of U.S. foreign policy — should we support them? Why worry about AIDS in Africa? Why worry about hunger and malnutrition in Bangladesh or Somalia?

Jensen: Let me see if I've got this right: From the perspective of those in power, it's desirable to keep the poor alive only insofar as they're useful, and the poor are useful only as labor, or as an excess pool of labor to drive wages down. Beyond that, who needs them?

Clark: Yes. It's hard for me to see how we will find meaningful and desirable employment for the poorest segment of the world's population in the face of both ecological degradation and technology's capacity to produce more than we need. How did Dostoevski put it? "The cruelest punishment that can be inflicted on a person is to force him to work hard at a meaningless task." That may or may not be true, but we do know that such make-work is a form of psychological torture. If your labor isn't needed, if you don't have skills, then what are you worth to a society that won't even bother to vaccinate your children or provide food for your starving infants?

In 1900, half of the labor force in the United States was involved in agriculture. Now it's probably less than 5 percent. In 1900, 80 percent of the labor force in China was involved in food production. When that figure comes down to 10 percent, what are those other 70 percent going to do?

Jensen: While we've been talking, I've been thinking about a conversation that took place years ago between Senator George McGovern and Robert Anderson, the president of the military contractor Rockwell International. McGovern asked Anderson if he wouldn't rather build mass-transit systems than B-1 bombers. Anderson said he would, but they both knew that there was no chance Congress would appropriate money for public transportation.

Clark: They were absolutely right. Capital in the United States would never accept that sort of shift in priorities, for many reasons. The first is that the military is a means of international domination, and any change that might threaten that domination will not be allowed to take place. The second reason is that capital requires continuing, ever expanding demand, and mass transit shrinks demand for automobiles and gas.

When my family moved to Los Angeles when I was a kid, before World War II, it was a paradise. The word smog hadn't been invented. There were no such things as freeways. There were mountains, beaches, deserts, and wildlife, and 49 percent of the land in the area was owned by the people of the United States. But the machinery that would destroy that paradise had already been put in motion.

In the 1920s, there had been struggles over whether there would continue to be mass transit in Los Angeles, which at the start of the century had an elaborate streetcar system. But powerful industries — the oil refiners and the automobile manufacturers — fiercely opposed what the people obviously needed. The citizens of Los Angeles were a fast-growing population with long distances to travel, and they needed to get there fast and cheaply. If they'd developed more mass transit, it would have led to an entirely different way of life. Instead, LA is now a big, sprawling metropolis with a tangle of freeways and millions of cars, unbelievable in its endless banality and congestion and noise and pollution. But think of what LA's maintaining its excellent mass-transit system would have done to the petrochemical industry and the automobile industry, with all of their accessories — tires, parts, and so on.

Capital promotes activities from which its owners can reap enormous profits. It does not matter if those activities are detrimental to living beings or communities. For example, those in power seem to have an unlimited imagination for conjuring up new excuses to throw money at the military. I was saddened by the almost pathetic naivete‚ of the people of this country some ten years ago, when we were talking about reaping a "peace dividend."

Jensen: Which, of course, we never hear about anymore.

Clark: But people believed there would be a peace dividend! Instead, we've devised incredible schemes like SDI — the "Star Wars" Strategic Defense Initiative, which is back again.

Jensen: The argument now is that we need SDI to protect us from North Korea.

Clark: That's crazy. In the current election, even more than in 1980, when Carter and Reagan were debating the military budget, we saw two candidates vying to prove that they each would provide a stronger defense. But defense from what? In order to keep increasing the demand for military products, we're teaching moral and fiscal insanity. I was in South Africa a couple of weeks ago. After all the people there have suffered, you have to be so hopeful for them, yet they just spent over a billion dollars on a bunch of naval vessels.

And we've been consistently sold a bill of goods that has made people believe they've been heroic when they've done terrible things in the name of their country through military actions. I mean, how many of those pilots who bombed Vietnam — even the ones who became prisoners — ever said to themselves, "I wonder what it was like being a Vietnamese villager when I was coming over and dropping those bombs"?

Jensen: I kept thinking about that when Senator John McCain used his former-prisoner-of-war status to gain political capital, and I never heard anyone publicly confront him about killing civilians.

I remember once, when I lived in Spokane, Washington, there was a gala event called "A Celebration of Heroes." The headliner was the Gulf War commander Norman Schwarzkopf. Neither the mainstream nor the alternative papers published articles, or even letters to the editor, about Schwarzkopf's war crimes. I think that holding up mass murderers as heroes is as much a problem as holding up the rich.

Clark: Violence may not be as harmful as greed in the long run, because it's harder to kill people directly than it is to kill them with sanctions. If you killed that many with bullets, your finger would get tired.

Colin Powell seems to be a compelling figure, but when he was asked during the Gulf War how many Iraqis he thought the United States had killed, his response was — and this is a direct quote — "Frankly, that's a number that doesn't interest me very much." Now, aside from international law, which requires that all participants in war count their enemy dead, that is an extraordinarily inhumane statement. And then you see a fellow like General Barry McCaffrey, whom Clinton later named as his drug czar, coming in and attacking defenseless Iraqi troops as they withdrew, killing several thousand people just like that. [Snaps his finger.] That's a war crime of the first magnitude. And yet these men are rewarded; they're seen as heroes.

Jensen: On another subject, you've also spoken out against our nation's prison system.

Clark: One of the most devastating things that have happened in this society — and one of the most ignored — is the stunning growth of the prison system and the use of capital punishment. In the 1960s, a time of maximum domestic turbulence, we were able to bring the government out against the death penalty, leading to a halt in federal executions in 1963. In fact, the first year in U.S. history that there were no executions anywhere was 1968. We also had a moratorium on federal prison construction. The federal-prison population was then around twenty thousand. Now, of course, we're building prisons like mad, and the federal-prison population is currently about 145,000.

In 1971, prisoners at Attica in New York State rebelled against horrible prison conditions. (Conditions overall are worse today.) The suppression of that rebellion is still the bloodiest day of battle between Americans on American soil since the Civil War: thirty-seven people were killed. At that time, there were fewer than thirteen thousand prisoners in the whole New York prison system; today there are about seventy-five thousand. And the population of the state hasn't risen 5 percent.

Across the country, more than 2 million people are in prison. And in California — which we tend to think of as a trendsetter for the rest of the country — 40 percent of African American males between the ages of seventeen and twenty-seven, the most vital years of their lives, are either in prison or under some form of community supervision or probation. What's the reason behind this? It's a means of controlling a major segment of the population. But what does it do to the people?

And what does it mean that we've got politicians like New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, who insists on sending people to jail for what he calls "quality of life" crimes? What does it mean when 70 percent of young-adult African American males have arrest records? What does it mean when so many of these African Americans have had frightening and damaging experiences with the police? We say we're "the land of the free and the home of the brave," yet we have a prison system unrivaled in the so-called democratic societies, and probably in any society on the planet today. And we're Lord High Executioner.

In the 1960s, South Africa was the world's leading executioner for postjudicial convictions, executing about three hundred people every year — nearly one each day. Most years, all of those executed were black, with the occasional exception of a white who had been convicted of being part of the African National Congress's resistance to apartheid. Back then, the principal argument we made in this country against the death penalty was "We don't want to be like South Africa." Part of the reason that argument worked is that the civil-rights movement was ascendant. Another is that people recognized that our executions were racist: For instance, 89 percent of the executions for rape, from the time statistics began to be collected until the Supreme Court abolished executions for rape, were of African American men. And although we don't know the race of all the victims, because those statistics weren't kept, those whose race we have been able to determine were all white. The imposition of the death penalty was — and remains — blatantly racist.

Now South Africa has abolished the death penalty; its constitution prohibits it. Prior to that, its supreme court found the death penalty to be a violation of international and domestic laws. Yet we come on like gangbusters for capital punishment. George W. Bush executed more people than any other governor in the history of the United States.

Jensen: You seem to be a good person, yet you filled a major government post. That seems to me an immense contradiction.

Clark: If your premises are correct, then that's a terrible indictment of the system. There is something desperately wrong if we don't have the best among us in government service. But it's true; we drive them out.

I joined the Marines during World War II, but a bunch of my buddies were conscientious objectors. Even then, I realized that they were better men than I, that what they did took more courage. I mean, to join the Marines is a piece of cake: all you've got to do is go down to the recruitment center and sign up. But I've watched my conscientious-objector friends over the years, and I have to say that they've been very lonely; in some ways, their lives were pretty much wasted. We're social creatures, and these men — boys, really, when they first made that decision — were ostracized for what they did, for following their conscience. And I think that lack of social esteem affected how they perceived themselves.

It seems the best among us often get purged. I have seen many new congresspeople come into Washington, and some of them are just such good people that you can hardly stand it — bright, articulate, and caring about issues. But it seems that, if they get reelected a few times, they start to sit around and scowl and drink too much, and their families break up. If you see this happen enough times, you begin to realize the enormous corrupting power of our political system. To be successful in it, you might have to make compromises that will cause you not to like yourself very much. And then you'll have to compensate for that in some way. You can become excessively ambitious, or greedy, or corrupt, or something else, but something's got to happen, because if you don't like yourself, what do you do?

Young people often ask me if they should go to law school, and I always say, "If you're not tough, you'll get your values beaten out of you, and you'll move into a kind of fee-grabbing existence where your self-esteem will depend on how much you bill per hour and what kind of clients you bring in to the law firm. You might find yourself turning into nothing but a money mill."

If we are to significantly change our culture, we need to recognize that we are held in thrall by two desperately harmful value patterns. One is the glorification of violence. We absolutely, irrationally, insanely glorify violence. We often think that we enjoy watching the good guys kill the bad guys, but the truth is that we enjoy watching the kill itself.

The other value is materialism. We are the most materialistic people who have ever lived. We value things over children. Indeed, the way we show how much we value children is by giving them things, to the point where a mother's self-esteem depends on whether she's the first in her neighborhood to get her child some new toy.

I think the hardest part for us is to break through the illusory world that the media create. Television is a big part of our reality. Children spend more time watching TV than they do in school or participating in any other activity. And television is a preacher of materialism above all else. It tells us constantly to want things. More money is spent on commercials than on the entertainment itself. And that entertainment is essentially hypnotic.

I think often of the Roman poet Juvenal's line about "bread and circuses." All these distractions that now fill our lives are an unprecedented mechanism of social control, because they occupy so much of our time that we don't reason, we don't imagine, and we don't use our senses. We walk though our day mesmerized, never questioning, never thinking, never appreciating. From this process we emerge a synthetic vessel without moral purpose, with no notion in our head or our heart of what is good for people, of what builds a healthier, happier, more loving society.

You began this interview by asking me about U.S. foreign policy, and I said that it's been a failure. Here is the standard by which I would judge any foreign or domestic policy: has it built a healthier, happier, more loving society, both at home and abroad? The answer, in our case, is no on both counts.

Jensen: So what do we do?

Clark: I think the solution relies on the power of the idea, and the power of the word, and on a belief that, in the end, the ultimate power resides in the people.

In discussing the effects of U.S. foreign policy, we've been talking about only one part of the story. Another part is resistance — the power of the people. We saw that in the Philippines, when Marcos was deposed in a nonviolent revolution, and we saw that in Iran, when the Shah's staggering power was overcome, as well, by a nonviolent revolution.

Of course, just getting rid of Marcos or the Shah is not the end of the story. People sometimes think that, after the glorious revolution, everybody is going to live happily ever after. But it doesn't work that way. What they've gone through in the struggle has divided them, confused them, driven them to extremes of desperation.

I think what all of this means is that we each have to do our own part, and become responsible, civic-minded citizens: we have to realize that we won't be happy unless we try to do our part. And if a small portion of us simply do our part, that will be enough. If even 1 percent of the people of this country could break out of the invisible chains, they could bring down this military-industrial complex — this tyranny of corporations, this plutocracy — overnight. That's all it would take: 1 percent of the people.

We also have to realize that we're going to be here only one time, and we've got to enjoy life, however hard it is. To miss the opportunity for joy is to miss life. Any fool can be unhappy; in fact, we make whole industries out of being unhappy, because happy people generally make lousy consumers. It's interesting to see how the poor understand all of this better than the rich. This morning, I was in court over in Brooklyn, representing a group of Romany — they're often called Gypsies, but they don't like to be called that — who were claiming recognition for losses in the Holocaust. The Romany lost 1.5 million people, yet nobody pays any attention to their claims. In fact, last year, the city of Munich, Germany, enacted legislation that is almost a verbatim reproduction of 1934 legislation prohibiting Romany from coming into the city: they'll be arrested if they do. The Romany might be the most endangered people on the planet — even more so than the 200 million indigenous people around the globe. They are fugitives everywhere they go, persecuted everywhere. Yet, like the traditional indigenous peoples, they are people of exceptional joy. They sing and dance and have fun. They can't see life as so much drudgery.

I saw that same joy among the civil-rights protesters in the 1960s. Watching them sing as they marched, I couldn't help but realize that you feel better when you're doing something you feel is right — no matter how hard it is.

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