welcome welcome very much conversations where i'm pleased to welcome to the program two gentlemen who are concerned with the media and also with the accurate reporting within the media that might be improved upon for many people's perspective and if i may i'd like to introduce on the far left up  lewis wolf who is generally in washington but is here in new york and we're very happy to welcome him to the program he's one of the co publishers of the founders of the journal covert action quarterly and lewis w to manhattan network thank you and i my media left is an old friend if i may say so bill or william shop who is with the is two for media analysis and is also one of the co founders of the covert action quarterly and gentlemen welcome very very much the conversation thank you glad to be here you know i wonder maybe you would bill maybe you could share just from your own background covert action quarterly has won so many awards in terms of the censorship awards that are given in terms of covering intelligence complex of the united states as it relates to foreign policy and very often and very importantly how it relates to media misinformation and disinformation primarily was the st time that any insider had detailed on a day by day basis the activities of a cia station what goes on in a foreign country through the station of the central intelligence agency that's based in that particular country we have them the u s government has them in every country but before that it was a very incredibly secretive operation very little was known about it no former c officers had ever done a tell all sort of a book and phil absolutely just told everything about everything and every operation to have been involved in every name of every person who'd ever been involved it was quite a a shockwave assassinated and if this only explanation that it didn't happen is that if anything had happened to him the whole world would have blamed the cia for it it would have been no i mean an accident and nobody would have believed it was an accident this is something to be said for that we talk about whistleblowers or people who actually do take that position that very often the best lumbar to use to say that i think the best defense is a firm and well thought out often in terms of some of these things to do well is a world i m they through their contacts with the governments in europe where he was staying they caused him to be deported from england they caused him to be deported from the netherlands they caused him to be deported from italy from from five or six or seven countries for a while he couldn't find any place to live alternately he settled in germany and spain and as residency has had residency in germany for many years but they made it very very difficult for him difficult for his family certainly difficult for him to do anything that he's significant and sort of straight employment because at that point he was not any longer interested in straight employment th what phil said was that you and i don't think he invented it i don't know who said it st he just said if you keep looking over your shoulder you're going to triple your own feet you just have to you just have to go forward and we did the same thing we took lou and i and ellen took a lot of heat when we st started covert action magazine the cia was not very well known and covert operations were not very well known and things things have changed mightily in the last twenty years and i'm sure we'll talk about yes no in those days people didn't know either much about it or didn't want to question or do you think well a lot of people thought it was horribly unpatriotic to complain about the fact that in our opinion the us government was doing itself doing the horribly unpatriotic things we were interfering in the affairs of other countries all around the world we were having foreign leaders and both in power in opposition  assassinated all around the world we were doing pretty terrible things and causing untold suffering and millions upon millions of deaths not not a handful but but you know fomenting revolutions and counter revolutions in which hundreds of thousands of millions of people would get killed now and we thought the patriotic thing to do was to object to our government doing this in the beginning there were a lot of people who just thought it was unpatriotic to criticize anything the government did it's a bit  now becoming that the questioning of this or whistle blowing in the sense of whistle blowing upon the united states government foreign policy initiatives and so within that larger sense perhaps and a couple of the some of these companies are walking with pretty big league boots you know we're  you how do you sense your audience as it were and interest in the toward the kind of stories you produce and i want to read you could talk a little bit about the covert action quarter what kinds of stories you tend to have there and how is that you've won so many wards from domestic history policy and in regard to the cia it has been sold to the american people as an agency protecting the american people protecting our country against foreign aggressors and foreign enemies the reality however is that the cia has engaged and continues to engage i want to make clear in a whole range of operations which we can discuss in some detail which the human cost the human factor here in the human cost of these operations is what causes and creates more enemies for the united states and then certainly and and and friends and the legacy of the cia around the world and also at home because there is what they call in the trade blowback and so the operations that are conducted and conceived out of langley at the headquarters in virginia tend to blow back and sunday times or happened which happens often for very frequently or in mexico city or in in pakistan where it is because of the of the electronic revolution and because people are more and more aware as you point out these stories these false and phony stories blow back and the same with the activities after the gulf war you remember that people came home the veterans came home with the gulf war syndrome this was not a cia war this was a this was an operation conducted primarily by the pentagon and yet the cia was was in a minimally involved in the dissent from mission which and the public relations which sold that war to the gulf operation desert storm before it even happened yet hold that to the american people to accept that the congress our magazine i should say has tried to document has to to to really get the story out in its full and complete measure and not that we don't leave it to to innuendo or to rumor or anything like that we document what we write what we report and we've got the best writers we can find both in the u s and around the world who are exposing these covert operations and you bring up this idea of disinformation and you need media mediated manipulation of consciousness which is so much a part of governance or governing these days we look at the campaigning for presidency and it's a media campaign that is launched and the media becomes more and more important to the really is that connection between covert action quarterly and then the institute for media analysis the government has always known of the importance of the media i mean people don't realize but from the very beginning a very very substantial chunk of the intelligence budget of the cia budget was devoted to media operations from from the very beginning because that is as important or more important than actual operate on the ground in making people think that the reason something happened or something other than the real reason is making people think that certain events around the world mean other than they do and most particularly making things which in fact were generated by the us appear to be indigenous and i mean one of the  major aspects of a covert operation is that the us involvement is supposed to be kept secret so the us has stage wars and revolutions and coups and overthrows all around the world making it seem as if these were local internal matters of that particular country when in fact the thing could have been created from the very very beginning with us people and us money and us supporting us weapons and us uniforms and everything else and you just you hire the local people to kill each other but you've done everything and there wouldn't have been a civil war let's say where it was unless you had not the u s intelligence community had not decided to create a civil war on this and this is the worst part of it because many of these covert operations are become disputes that never would have happened in the st place if the u s hadn't decided to do it and that's and that's separate from things that are more direct like like just swinging elections to having fraud in elections or else not fraudulent in one sense but secretly giving millions and millions of one dollar to one dollar side in an election which will then win because it overwhelms the opposition you know it's interesting they had they had to think oh the institute for democracy or some some sort of an organization that had a great deal of american funding to to read democracy and influence elections and yet if they were to say that there are people going to influence elections here in the united states that's something of a horrendous something that cannot be allowed to have the chinese charge that the chinese are putting money into the into the campaign finance what one of the problems is because the level of hypocrisy is so high now that you can you know you can cut it with a shovel and you would think people understand but the american public to a large extent have become  inured to a lot of this over the years because it's just i mean the thing about the elections people think it is absolutely horrible that say the chinese would donate some money to some congressman's campaign and they do but the u s has been donating money donating being loose word to campaigns for fifty years and then over the world in some cases a huge amount i mean we're talking you know tens of millions of dollars hundreds of millions of dollars  some cases of recent years not even secretly and yet the government can take the position that it's not wrong for the national endowment for democracy to pump you know millions of dollars into elections in russia or ukraine or whatever but it would be the greatest sin in the world if some chinese businessman gave money to a candidate this is sort of hubris or arrogance on our part that we think that we have the right institutions that are to be put upon i don't know some people say pox romana or you know as an american that we have a pox on our kind of that we have the institutions that are going to influence the whole world and the sooner people can become aware of those structural just other kinds of things that we can oh yeah i mean little let let them  to tell everybody else in the world what's best for them the evidence has come it's become accepted i mean we this country goes crazy if some other country type tries to tell us what we should do or what position we should take on on some issue of the right and they've got it all right and yet right and we not only do we tell other countries how they should handle their internal affairs we tell them if they don't do it we're going to bomb the bejesus out of the realization we do that and we also can intimidate them with the bretton woods organizations which are in washington when they couldn't control that and came back when they could control it and it's just the u s government gives lip service to international law at best i mean we just simply do not accept anything that can tell the united states what to do because of this notion that we have the god given right to tell or be else in the world but that's not just an outgrowth of real politic into thinking that sovereignty resides at the national level and there's no more in omaha's morgan thought you could say there's no morality in international relations that kind of thing are we getting beyond that there were some of that international law right and gave lip service to to internationally united action but that was only because we knew that was going to come out the way we wanted to be and whenever we do know it's going to come out the way we want to be then we say we support that type of international action then we was that none of you hired yet they had been let me just say that yeah after nuremberg yeah within a matter of weeks we were hiring a number of the the world criminals the world class war criminals who were not the may be fair to go back i mean because we do have this idea real policy we do have a world is becoming more and more global is there are some companies that will be able to operate in a global pattern where they will in a certain sense bypass as they can sovereign government  th you will do what we tell you and it's coming to be where the privatization in the public in the private sector is becoming more and more important but i want to get back up the cia as an agency for gathering intelligence and working in international three grew out of the o s s of the nd world war the intelligence activities donovan in those kind of people was there i knew people that were serving in the o s s proudly and well in terms of fighting the nazi and that sort of thing and then it somehow got off track or did you grow out of that or and does the cia an agency a entity like the cia exist with all sovereign countries are we just let's say in a certain sense condemning the united states for what is actually an international practice and all come with them aside the other kinds of agencies around the world that have this  time organization it was it was a few one hundred men mostly some women very few and their job was as they did it was harassment was covert activities sub par military activities but in my view in the view of a number of scholars of written on a was he was quite ineffectual not only against the germans but also in in asia in the arena against the japanese but that idealism that they had during o s s days very very quickly dissipated and they became very hard nosed very believers in in america rules the world how d before it was a noble agency there were became one that was doing things that could be seen in a certain interpretation is that you know i don't think whatever a moral leader will say that made me think a little in the beginning of had had some noble intentions when what happened was almost from the very beginning from talking  is that even before the last days of world war two the mission of the u s intelligence agencies to be was already clearly to fight communism rather than the nazis and th decision was made even before the world war two was over but it was more than that because what it really was was the global competition and once you set up a secret agency which is at the beginning of the president just the casualties in the overt war as there is generally because of the mission is to support the american commercial apparatus and multinational corporations and so on you will end up having the cia as an instrument keeping oligopolies in power in almost every country where they operate and what that will generally mean is that the majority of the people sometimes the vast majority of people in those countries live in misery so that the companies and organizations that support the government that we keep in power can do well so while the cia's mission in that country might not be to make the lives of ninety percent of the people miserable what they do will have the effect of making the lives of ninety percent of the people and the thing that needs to be very clear here is that the cia around the world since one thousand dollars since the early fifty's has created in country after country after country and we can list them if you want the agencies of repression in in iran in indonesia in the philippines in taiwan in malaysia in guatemala in brazil i mean the list is endless and i think people should understand that in order to enforce the system that the cia and the and the u s government seeks to impose they need to have an apparatus on the ground up and running and which is just as ruthless as it can be and let me just say that the one of the founding documents of the c the cia or something comparable to the c i a characteristic of to the degree they can muster is characteristic of all the governments of the world or is there something particularly if areas of that's the right term while the operations of the of our cia as compared to other intelligence agencies around the world are where does it fit in is there an international intelligence community and how do they get together and how does it end do you do look at some of the others other than the cia in terms of overall yeah i mean virtually every informed to true or occasionally it will be linked to domestic repression of the sort i mean some of these intelligence agencies have very little to do with international affairs but are mostly there is some branch of the government to  deal with the opposition but in order to interfere in the affairs of other countries and to the level at which the cia does you have to be a major power and the fact is that all the major powers have these institutions and all of them doing two or interfere in the way in which the cia did this and the way in which almost all the other major intelligence agencies even including the k g b did this the k g b was never responsible for the deaths of millions upon millions of people in foreign countries the way the the united states was in places like indonesia they have spies all over the place and they're always i mean every country wants the policies of other countries to be favorable to it the united states would like france or britain or germany or would like their foreign policy to be what we want to be in every country once said about everybody else but would rather the us does in order to manipulate those policies in other countries is like lucette is much more ruthless than than anybody else and current times are modern times and there have been i mean the the soviets the french the german the british the all have done some roof list things in their time but nobody made such a a steady and hugely financed policy of massive intervention as as the us did it's changing now because they're using public organizations and quasar public organizations and multinational corporations in ways that they never did openly before in the old days the multinational corporations would be provide cover for the cia to do some of its things now they they do it political party in an upcoming election in some country in eastern europe in the old days the cia had to do that secretly you had to set up little organizations in list and stealing them here and there and funneled your money to them so they could get it and people would sneak across the border and give the money to the opposition now you don't have to do that now some american foundation will publicly open offices in the capital of this little country and give bottles of money to the people that the us government and coincidentally the foundation  win and some of them are related to multinational corporations some are not some there are certainly you can see among the major multinationals which countries would have an obvious interest in this country being pro this or anti that the country where you do a lot of your manufacturing you want to have very weak labor laws but you'd be perfectly happy if the company where your competitors base has very tough labor laws and you can been horrendously illegal or immoral or unethical in the in the context of we saw things in the past but is now becoming to worse is being openly done on a world scale is it a case the united states particularly comes into your focus cia and that sort of thing because we are particularly successful at a game that all the world is trying to pay so is in a certain sense trying to take pot shot on your parts at comp something comparable to microsoft is very very successful in the software industry  you you just don't want to you know you or you want to you know want to allow the success that they've been able to generate that's what politics and politics is all about and america's doing real well you're being a devil's advocate but i know like the pentagon and the numbers of people that are killed the numbers of elections that they can they can manipulate the numbers of newspapers that they can control and that's to me the most devastating statistic of all that is the human cost of their operations needless to say their failures as they call them and they rarely talk about their failures but the public knows more and more what they are the failure for r was the closest friend we had in for many many years and baby doc in haiti and suharto until last month in indonesia and you could go down the list you know when for the years that they they held power with the iron grip underwritten by and supported actively by the u s in particular the cia but also the state department and other arms of the government they were the best thing since sliced bread as far as the government the us government was perceived it and then suddenly when they can't hold power anymore when the public in the mass of the public in those countries in country after country cannot take it anymore and rises up and just throws them out suddenly now now we call them dictator  amazing yeah that does them good fortune the american people you know have very very short political memories for things like this and they did not only did they not hold the government to account for these quick flip flops they don't even hold the media to account because if you and the problem is it's a lot of hard work to do it but even if you take the case of of suharto if you looked on the front page of the new york times or the washington post for thirty years year after year after year they would talk about presidents a lot of this presidents were dictator would never ever appear two months before he's going to for the new york times will start saying you know present so hard to some people refer to as a dictator but another week or two later they're going to say president suharto the apparent dictator that and that happens time after time after time and sometimes it's very very we learn from some discussions and debates with people in major newspapers and particularly the times that they have the establishment press has formulaic ways of saying these things and in the modern age of computer which is some much easier than the old blue pencil day a reporter cannot get away with i mean for example for ten years at least long after the overthrow of n d and even to the point where where pinochet's power was diminishing the new york times always referred to the marxist salvador and trippingly and you could and it may have changed a little bit but at least as of a few years ago they always referred in the to the past history as the i n d regime and they always referred to the to the pinochet government yet and if you said the government the computer took out the word government and threw in the word regime because they had to say now that the all of the ironic thing is that i end there was elected in pinochet wasn't and yet because regime in this country in american english has a bad connotation to it the decision was made to refer to end these government as a regime and refer to pinochet as a government and that's and you just couldn't do it otherwise because your copy had to go through the computer before it got typeset i grabbed those words with and then that's becoming even more so now i've become more and more into the people don't realize the extent to which the little words that are in the news and the way whether it's dan rather reading off a script or something on the front page of the times or whatever it is and c n n and public radio and television to the sea there it creeps in the words of very very important you know building internal almost subconscious notions of things i mean you hear of a thing of our government referred to as a regime yeah yeah i never referred to as anything else but a regime you begin to think it probably took power in some bloody coup and it's a repressive nazi whatever out of iraq and you never realize that the only reason you think that is because they decided to use that hole at the yeah right and i don't remember you can it's very important to try to understand the media because it is influencing consciousness and influencing and allowing for people to internalize certain kinds of values and has a political connotation the media that power that it has not had historically and to analyze it and to understand it is really of the essence in terms of trying to understand published policy don't you don't you think that as you were just speaking a boss trying to remember the law it's time i read in any print media the word regime after sions as regimes in terms of how they operate yeah yeah yards are astonishing i mean the thing is that the the government directly and indirectly through the establishment press have been spinning the news for ever centuries i suppose probably forever i mean right i mean to a certain extent the ancient governments tried to do the same thing i mean you know i mean there were the victors carved media an awful lot of it has become self propelled yes and through self censorship more than anything else i mean the cia doesn't need although they have them all over that it doesn't need an actual employed  case officer agent inside the newsroom of every major publication around the world now mind you it still has them and a lot of places but it doesn't need it as much now because if it can manipulate the government thinking and that's relation to the corporate thinking the publishers of the establishment press are going to say what they want them to say now they have the fallback they've got those computers that will take out the bad word but they almost don't have to you the community don't have to do that very much what i mean it's not i mean the other thing is that shouldn't be that surprising people in this country will use an expression like the establishment press right establishment media without stopping to think what that means i mean if they said the communist press they know that means the press that takes the view of the communist party if they said th social democrat press or the christian democrats and people in europe know because in europe they're much more honest about it you'll go to a newsstand there's six papers everybody knows that's the communist paper that's the christian democrat paper that's the social democrat paper that's the whatever paper you know that right but in this country you think they're all very objective except for the fact that they're just that mission press which means that the paper that represent and promote and push and insist on the view of the establishment and what if they say that the establishment is a very big umbrella very big tent or there's all kinds of thought institution right now run out of the us of a nation agency it's a sort of a newfangled version of what bill is talking about and it's called world net where they have completely i think stage managed conferences they call in press conferences where madeleine albright for example and other officials will sit in a studio and she will take questions from journalists in particular countries ok and they're all it's real life like it happens a lot and the problem is that the people who are allowed to ask those questions are handpicked their people and anyone who they know is going to ask the wrong question and they have to submit questions in writing before they come in to ask them the whole thing is completely fabulous and yet this is how a part of the whole media manipulation that we think we conduct it's only a small part but it's pretty blatant i do want to talk about  what they say that for reporters something that the thing that they're going to filter out reporters who come in who simply are not informed they do not understand the nuances of the language they don't understand the nuance of the policy not well enough informed they're likely to ask just well naive questions they just don't understand the realities and they want people who really do understand so that it won't lose time with a lot of you know the riff raff asking naive questions from alternative views rather than it being some sort of a thing that's going to seriously question the way the system works they just don't want people who aren't informed so they want those qualified people to be having internalized and actually learned the realities of by the way in which this world works so that we can get real news reporting out there and they waste their time with you know well that's what i mean now that you've said it you know i'm there are probably take that that i use of the time but we know perfectly well that what they do is exclude people who are going to ask questions they don't want to be asked and there's nothing to do with how and in fact most of the people they're excluding are probably considerably more well informed than the people they people include have simply been able to write i mean it does you don't have to know that much to know what kind of a question the official would like to get asked but you do have to know something than know what kind of a question the official would not like to get and the people in the media will very often it might be in a certain sense of yours don't have dinners and they will have just self sense it in a certain sense or internalized those values in their psychological makeup they're not doing it perhaps in a way that is nefarious in their own or you know some sort of a thing like they just internalize values and then they begin to recognize that most of them get rewards most of these major people are not part of some monstrous overt conspiracy we don't sit down and say well we're not going to talk about that strike in that city because this big corporation doesn't really want that to be talked about they they sort of know in general that you know it is not the working people of the country that own their corporations right bosses and the you know the big and how it is yeah i mean sometimes it's more direct yeah it was in this country in particular was happening all around the world almost all major media organizations are no longer independent companies they are now small parts of giant conglomerates whose major business is no longer the new every major network and most major newspapers are owned by companies entertainment whose major industry is not that well know general electric is not a you know they they they make you know the  station is a small part of it the even the new york times company as more other businesses than that than a newspaper really by far they're one of the biggest paper manufacturing companies the world and wood pulp and that kind of things and the times itself is a small part of it every single major media operation is now being run by people who are a businessman with stockholders in the bottom line and i'm not a company whose main business is is news and i know they will end up having you know people working for them who understand that they will also have people working for them who realize that you do not bite the hand that feeds you and none of the made these major corporations ever unless it happens by accident and then people with the axe will fall ever run stories and they try to look at that sort of them but they do and you have these people these large corporate ben bag dickie and has press better than anyone has the you know has documented the degree to which the consolidation down into a few media companies controlling eighty five percent of what goes before the eyeballs and ears of the people of this country is by fewer smaller companies and you've got so many people within those companies that are not even don't even have the patina of a journalistic objectivity or something like admiral or something like that but they're just simply businessmen making business decisions and then in the same time a head of the invisible hand of business stock values is going to best let the world run on automatic pilot or something i don't know that they actually believe that then you have the example and i'm trying to remember his name pete williams who was the pentagon spokesman who crosses the street one day he's at the pentagon his last day the next day he said it was at n b c where he is now a correspondent yeah this is really dirty stuff so you so you say you have a combination of both the government and the and the and the press the press had been in one thing i don't know making whoever said it that you're to afflict the comfortable and bring comfort to the afflicted that kind of a journalistic kind of charge is being lost by the media do you think the media you  analysis what do you see about me when you tell us and we do want to touch you want to take a minute or two to look at the television media and also the internet that's emerging as a miraculous new kind of development is coming on the scene but we do we are here after all in public access cable television which in a certain sense is supposedly in theoretically in a sense divorced from the commoditization process of information and it's set aside for the folks in a way and whether  the networks and the well ok but anyway you do see this is a problem in terms of the voices of alternative voices being able to find a way into the public consciousness oh absolutely absolutely it's gotten to be  really compete on the same level with the networks and the major national and local newspapers at all it's it's almost insurmountable it's not insurmountable when the problem really is glaring it's more samantha when you're dealing with with national and local issues than international issues because international issues it's very hard to convince people what's really happening in some country ten thousand mile the way if the networks in the papers are saying something to the country it's much harder for the establishment to fool people about what's happening on main street because there's a limit to how much you can lie in a newspaper that something that happened in the middle of town and everybody saw it and said no that's not true that's not what happened  you can describe a demonstration in istanbul and you can say whatever you want nobody who reads the paper here is going to know whether you're telling the truth or not they'll many will unfortunately assume you are and you couldn't really describe a major thing happening in the middle new york city or washington to inaccurate with people having some smart couldn't say of him full of people came to protest the vietnam war when there were ten million people yeah right right right so they can do better on fooling people on foreign policy than on have a big tent we're under the word rubric establishment that it can hold a wide variety of thought and wide variety of philosophy and in fact some people think there's very not a dime's difference between the republican the democrats now and that kind of thing and so forth but it is it possible within that large tent that perhaps they will have a certain point come to a with the downsizing with the globalization with the negative effect that so many people are feeling some people feel there's a certain degree to fight the wall street setting records and the employment levels and so forth being high and the economy is being well in but there are a lot of people who have a certain sense a sense of this expert systems other kinds of things threats displacement of labor problems that there is a level of nks that's abroad in the society and that if within that broad tent someone could find a philosophy let's say a political philosophy which would bring let's just say a human face to capitalism or something of that sort that would be able to bring an alternative system that the competitive forces within this establishment would be able to find itself if they could but find a reasonable alternative voice to the way things are going to be operated domestically and internationally but they haven't yet quite found that voice within the tent which we call the establishment if they did there could be competitive forces who would go with that politically or not or do you think that that's a dead issue that we cannot find answers within the broad array of the established notions of accepted wisdom and that sort of i don't think the tent is they want a lot of people in the tent who either people or ideas into the tent which are different than the status quo what is the i don't think i don't think most of us are in that what is all about all right what is it when we talk about this i was in the alternative what is the defining characteristic of the alternative and what is the institution or the basic institution that is to be safeguarded under the rubric establishment and what is the holy grail that is so assiduously being protected own the vast majority of microsoft and now course the justice department is pursuing legal avenues against microsoft and the fact is until forbes magazine of all people comes out with their list their annual list and this week showing that the bill gates the obscenity of a bill gates having that kind of money to say nothing of the fact that he doesn't so that this would be easy this would be the cynical anon or something of trying to find some sort of a thing is that if you know there's lots of different kinds of things you could find and so  whatever mask you put on it and i think it's probably inherent in that system that you can't have the kind of economic democracy that we're talking about because i mean i don't want to get into i mean i'm not an economist and i don't know all the terminology right but basically if people are making a profit off the labors of others the other is a losing something that those people are making they're not sharing at the boys and the worker don't sit down and share the profit and i don't know if this is you know this it's maybe you can take tens or hundreds or thousands of years to evolve something  remotely idyllic if we haven't blown the world to bits before that happens but in the short term at least the difficulty is fighting these myths that democratic capitalism is the system we have in this country is is like wonderful for everybody well it's not one don't know but you can you can bring up the so we don't have the story in itself could be we don't have democratic capitalism we have democrat we have economic pathak recy this is a plutocratic system we live compact consistent combat i don't know that you can have well there are certain inherently undemocratic things in capitalism which is a someone's going to be making money in some ways and we're losing it well all right maybe maybe i don't know maybe but i know it's strange and wonders time if you could have a country where getting creating rich people did not require creating poor people that would be terrific but i haven't seen that yet well nobody ever wonder i don't know i mean it's interesting i mean because you assume zero sum in your analysis there that for one to win another is to lose bucky fuller used to go around and now you've got a range of people going around the technological capability was creating an abstract capability where we had the ability which we had had historically there we crossed the line from where there were more in r and abstract capability more haves and have nots in terms of our technological augmented capability of but i would say i would submit that it might be that we've come at a time where you know and then with the microprocessor and the moore's law and the going and even george gilder right winger like george gilder is going around saying scarcity is an absurdity we don't have a scarcity we only have an inefficient in a capable everything you're saying about the potential yes there the fact that there is more than enough food to feed everybody food added resources i know but they're not given in the way to the people that need it and be the gap is getting worse i mean the scariest thing about this country and most of the  starving and it's the if well gap we're decreasing then you could you could go on the map so perhaps i think there's still maybe some room for evidence for optimism because if it was as you were in a trend we were going to go into the future like that it really would be a disaster scenario that would have for the humans and we could not do joint interview so there is an in evolution is punctuated equilibrium where there's a tremendous build up of forces a tremendous build up of forces of an inappropriate utilization of what we're capable of doing and that story will be told at some point and maybe there will be a liberation of the human condition it may end up there is there must be some place where that story can be told in the media and it's important that there be some alternative capability or places public access one public access here that's and it exists around the country and it's important and i just wondered if maybe you think that this noncom out of size used of television which is television's the leading aspect of consciousness now and the noncom out of size use of the internet which we see is coming like the cow real over the hill there might not be some importance to be placed upon those two instances of communication in terms of maintaining milieu where some alternative vision might be able to find its way in terms of this larger understanding of how the earth might be transformed we've got about one minute and you see a connection between the i think that if the guy access television and the democratic aspects and they're going to start streaming on to the internet we've got about two or three year window where the access become a real threat to this establishment believe that we're talking about they will try to get rid of the public access and everything related to it very quickly and if you and your supporters and that whole concept are strong enough to beat back that move then that's a major victory because the minute you begin to look dangerous to surf going to try to get ready unless you have an alternative which is within the big tent that makes it possible so this happy scenario where we're going to allow ourselves to do what we're capable of doing is able to present itself on a political realistic tablo in the in the in the system so you have to have a system where the system can be made aware of what it's capable of doing which it doesn't do within the normal cont know that's the challenge of what you're both your journal and your i think the best tool that people would have is to be able to recognize to recognize dissin from a show in the within that big tent that they see and they see on television or in their in the newspapers