we're doing a special sunday morning edition of community form and we're very lucky to have with us live in the studio this morning ted rall ted rall is a political cartoonist opinion columnist graphic novelist and former radio show host he has twice been awarded the robert f kennedy journalism award and was a finalist for the pulitzer prize his cartoons now appear in more than one hundred publications around the united states including los angeles times tucson weekly willamette week newark star ledger village voice and the new york times he is also author of numerous books including to afghanistan and back a graphic travelogue generally small show essays and cartoons on the bush years silk road to ruin is central asia of the new middle east the anti american manifesto and he is here to talk about bama well two years ago when i put out the anti american manifesto one of the reactions to the book which calls for the overthrow of the us government was that what about barack obama you know here's a guy who's obviously according to many liberals doing the best that he can but facing obstruction and by the republicans and that's really the problem that was in our a counter argument that i kept hearing and i didn't see things that way i as army kyle gorbachev eric alterman said that obama is the most progressive liberal well intentioned intelligent president but this system is capable of allowing to come to power in the same way that was really about the best leader that the soviet system was was ever going to elevate and the irony is that the soviet people saw that because gorbachev was an ok leader but the system was still not working for them that the revolutionary change in american politics for the first time since the late sixty's early seventy's americans are heading back into the streets we're no longer outsourcing our politics we have a tendency here in the united states almost unique to us to look at politics as something that we do want to lection day we go vote we put these leaders in charge we figure they'll do a good job and we check back on them two or four years later and we vote accordingly to paste on what we find or what we in our impressions know the country's politics are like that all politics happen every single day they happen with your over over coffee with your friends they you talk about politics over dinner with your with your family and in the united states because we don't hold peep well accountable our leaders accountable on a day to day hour to hour basis in the same way that they do in say europe or in other countries even entertainer ships there's more accountability ironically because people can go into the streets there can be demonstrations as we've seen during the arab spring there can be riots or revolutions uprisings but our leaders don't have to fear that and but obama by being the least bad leader that we've seen for a while still bad but the least bad it has has has exposed the nature of the system itself let's remember the biggest problem in the united states today is without a doubt the economy and joblessness you know between twenty and twenty five and twenty eight depending on how you count it million people lost their jobs during the two thousand and seven to two thousand and nine fiscal meltdown and these days there is no discussion of trying to figure out how to put these people back to work i mean we're talking about growth that's really effectively negative jobs growth and what's fascinating i think to most people is that the political system doesn't even seriously engage the question as to how do we get twenty to twenty five to twenty eight million people back to work we think well you know will slowly pull out of it over time they're not talking about i mean i'm not even saying that the that the solutions that mitt romney and barack obama are offering aren't enough they're really not even seriously engaged in the discussion and we end up talking about a lot of issues that are not as pressing and not as important i mean you know everything hinges on economic and political stability if we go the way of the soviet union in one thousand nine hundred one you know who knows what's going to come the so the so really the the way i'm looking at obama is he's a catalyst for change in the same way that gorbachev was he's trying to save the system by trying to manage it and keep it going the way it was the only way he really could have saved the system would have been to radically revamp it but he was never going to do that that was not his intention so and were you surprised at all by the complete lack of action by let's say the democratic party once he came into power i mean to do anything even remotely progressive i was surprised by the extent you know when when bill clinton came in in one thousand nine hundred three and it with a very similar ideology you know obama people forget this but during the primaries you know he was the conservative democrat john edwards was that the the one to the left and slightly more to him in the middle with hillary clinton and then you know he was the conservative democrat he was a member of the democratic leadership  so you know ideologically i wasn't surprised at all but i thought you know this will be bill clinton all over again you know that the smart money in washington said we're going to see a cabinet that looked with a lot of clinton clinton he still retreads but really that didn't happen so much on me i was shocked when paul krugman didn't get the nod for treasury or fed you know he was the guy who was right about the housing bubble and you know all along and his widely respected instead you know we got timothy geithner in these goldman sachs hacks who were wrong about everything forget about again the ideology just they were mistaken there was not a single progressive appointed to a cabinet senior cabinet level position in the clinton in the obama administration remember we had r reich in the in the first one thousand in the first clinton cabinet he didn't last long and blocked in the cabinet as a book that everyone should read if they really want to know what happens to liberals and in a democratic administration but i was surprised by the extent of the complete freeze out i mean liberals are the base of the democratic party in the same way that conservatives are the base of the republican party and you expect any kind of intelligent administration of a political party to include every strain of it's of italian logical backers in its in the way that it governs but with obama that has not been the case in there's been a little bit of lip service to liberalism in some ways but usually as  gay marriage after the people have already led the way i mean you know if obama had never said came out in favor of gay marriage gay marriage was going to be legalized anyway he's following the people you know we needed a leader to push for progressive principles because they were really the principles that were going to get us out of this economic disaster so i'm sure you've heard as well as i have that a lot of the of our so called elected officials our leaders say that well they can't do anything unless there's you know a push from the people themselves you know so have you been surprised by the up until the occupy movement the complete lack of push from any of its citizens or you know i yeah i i'm always surprised at how long it takes but i guess you know historically people tend to all historians are always surprised by how long it takes for people to get angry you know we were tolerance sheeple we put up with a lot and it it and then finally people just can't take it anymore and they head out into the street and even now the reaction is not what you you know what you would expect in terms of scale i mean when you consider that you have the low the lowest labor participation rate in the workforce since the hundred thirty s which means you know the real unemployment rate is over twenty percent when you have you know if they calculated it the way they did back in the thirty's the rates are very similar to the height of the great depression the misery is everywhere what's striking is that it's so hidden you know people instead of lining up for bread and selling out bills for a nickel on the street you know they're doubling tripling and quadrupling up on their on their relatives couches it's all you know people are are lending each other money that they know that they're never going to reap be able to repay i mean you know we're spiraling down the toilet and yet it's you know it's seek it's hidden and people i think what's happened is that people are internalizing their misery and their anger you know they're turning it against themselves they think it's their fault you know they lost their job it's somehow if you know and the system and the media really play into this they say like well you know you should you know this day and age you have to learn to build your own website you have to blog you have to you have to learn how to market yourself you can't work for one company your entire life you have to retrain well really you have to retrain with what money you got laid off you don't have any money to retrain and your salary has been shrinking for forty years so you don't have any savings it's not your fault and someone needs to tell the people that it's the government's duty to try to provide a the basic essential is of life to the citizenry it's specially in a country as rich as this so has this always been part of our culture do you think it's been amped up  in the last you know who knows ten twenty years in terms of conditioning us you know i think it's accelerating the you know the the the propaganda of the media has become so much more effective in the same way that we're able to do direct marketing you know we know the compete you know your computer knows that you know what kind of products to pitch you right based on your surfing habits and the political propaganda machine is nearly as sophisticated as  that you know they're they're able to know exactly how to push our buttons in a way that we're good that makes us look at you know for instance resort to zina phobia or or or to turn against each other rather than against the system itself i mean we have learned to expect nothing from our government i mean that we're told that every day it's like well don't expect anything you know this isn't a nanny state you're on your own it's like really ok if i'm on my own fine then i don't want to pay any taxes at all and i don't want to pay and i should be able to park my car wherever i want i don't want to pay a meter and five want to drive as fast as i can and i want to pay any speeding tickets if i'm on my own i want to i want the benefits of being on my own but it seems to me that the system that we're living in now is a system in which i'm on my own when it comes to expecting anything from this huge vast government infrastructure that is that is raping us financially and in other ways and it's but when it comes to you know it doesn't work it only works one way and it's the same thing in the workforce you know your your employers want to hire people who are pre trained wasn't like that forty years ago forty years ago you know effect if a company found  to job to fill and they couldn't find enough you hear this all the time you know we can't find the skilled workers it's so many unemployed people but we can find people trained in tool and die to fill our our positions re lisa hire smart people and send them to school the way that employers have done for hundreds of years and you know but now it's like no you have to work for free in an unpaid internship and you have to go to school on your own dime and then pay massive exorbitant student loan interest that will be in slave you for the next ten to twenty years you know everything's on our shoulders have to bag our own groceries pump our own gas pay our own education do our own pay for our own retraining suck it up when we're unemployed and our unemployment benefits run out it's all on our own and it is you know they've gone too far they just have pushed us too far and it's just over and it's you know the rebellion has begun it's going to be in fits and starts but there's no turning back now they have just pushed it too far so what do you see as potential solutions and or steps towards this revolt well you know the when i wrote the anti american manifesto a couple of years ago what i argued was that the system is going to collapse anyway of its own accord and it would sure be better as messy and dangerous and violent as a revolution will be i can't say can be it will be too deep better to have a revolution and manage that change rather than just have a collapse happen i mean it would be nice to save the infrastructure that we have now it would be better to not stay to see stuff burn but that's but i think that we're going to we're still heading into a collapse mode i mean there is effectively no left in the united states and that's and you know i'm not saying that i'm a cartoonist eggs i'm prone to exaggeration but what i mean is yes we have liberals we have progressives but they're into they work in service to the democratic party they're part of the system itself we don't have a left which is to say an engaged organized force that is dedicated to radical political economic and social change that is interested in not bringing back the glass steagall act not in these kind of reformist moves but actually changing rethinking everything about the way we live as people and in our relationship with each other and with the world there is no group like that in the united states and so you know there's there's just a few random authors and there's our collective thoughts and you know there's there's really enticement poll numbers like the two thousand and nine polls that showed  incredible support for socialism and communism as economic systems in a country that's conservative it was surprising but so i don't think that you know as much as i do hope that there will be an organization that will form spontaneously and i think it's possible that that will happen i also don't think it's going to take decades to organize anymore i think with the internet everything is different you know that the internet is a tool of oppression it's also a tool of organization and resistance every technology cuts both ways and so i think just move a lot faster you know an organization could pop up overnight and within a year we could be having a completely different conversation but i think right now if i have to put my money on it we're just headed toward collapse it's just things are just going to get worse and worse and worse and more dystopian all the time well at the same time it has left infrastructure could be coming about i mean we're also looking at extremes on other sides like let's say the tea party and the the republican party which appears to be completely co opted by the the tea party at this point are you worried about that well yeah that's and that's a big part of my concern i mean you know in this country the right is very well organized and there and they are convinced that there be seized by the left i mean it's it's they're living in a fantasy world you know i mean i did a cartoon recently where i said you know i would vote for like the the right wing caricature of barack obama as a socialist kenyan born alinsky worshipping you know radical i would i like that guy except that he doesn't exist and it's what's disturbing is you know it's been pointed out that you're entitled to your opinion but you're not entitled to your own facts well i mean you know the ideology of this country as a quote unquote mainstream in its media and what is acceptable in mainstream political discourse has been moving i'm forty eight years old has been moving to the right my entire life through democratic and republican regimes alike you know i mean it's hard to imagine barack obama being considered far enough to the left for the republican party of one nine hundred sixty he would be he would have been considered a crazy right wing lunatic just be it you know we go to war without asking congress all the time every time there's any kind of you know little entanglement like syria you know he you know i don't think i said how or or even richard nixon would have countenance the idea that it's ok for a president to sign off on the assassination of an american citizen on american soil with nothing more than the stroke of a presidential pen and similarly you know barack i mean barry goldwater who was considered a wild eyed right wing  going to blow up the world in one thousand nine hundred sixty four today they would be too far to the left for today's democratic party i mean that's how far the whole the needle has moved over and you know i mean those people are  you know they're a big concern to me the tea party you know is that the basic idea of the tea party is somewhat noble let's go back to constitution constitutional purity let's let's get the government out of our lives but the the current what's happened is it's been completely bought and purchased by the koch brothers and other corporate interests and and what's happening is that these very naive political babies that join the tea party are you know have have basic they're rubes and they're babes in the woods and they're wet behind the ears or any other metaphor you want they're they're being they're being taken advantage of and their instincts as quote unquote patriots are being directed into xena phobia gay bashing and all sorts all manner of hatred and contempt of anything that smacks of socialism or leftism even though really the the complaints that they have are really left wing complaints you know i mean you're complaining about banks tears gone wild well listen you know that's that's something you know leftists are the natural enemies of bankers not rightists so do you see any opening there for dialogue amongst people who are protesting the i do actually any you know i'm i'm i'm a member of my local occupy movement in long island where i live in new york and you know we often talk about this i think that revolution you know that people who oppose the state should get together regardless of where they stand on the ideological spectrum and form alliances of convenience and we can always document shah masood who organized the afghan resistance against the soviets in the eighty's famously said you know first we kill the russians next we kill each other let's you know let's let's get together and you know i there's a lot of people on the right who i think how i have a better understanding of the nature of the system then some liberals who really still think that if they go out and support barack obama that he is going to bust out and become a liberal progressive you know as a lame duck i mean everybody's forgetting what happens in a second term which is the day he takes office the new president is a lame duck and you know it doesn't really even if he wants to get much done second terms are only going to why presidents want second term they never do anything they can't so i mean you know you're not getting liberal obama in you know next year if he wins it's just it's not going to happen and so  know i think that liberals don't need to understand that we are talking with ted rall he is author of the new book the book of obama from hope and change to the age of revolt in addition to your many books you have a great website awesome and everyone should call in and like send in massive amounts of money this is such a wonderful place to come to live it feels like family every time i come here and a girl home totally what list same i become more and more stupid which of course is a very common phenomen people and especially i like to come home here where i have been coming through for them ten so this is like home and family and thank you for coming we have our work cut out for  science and nuclear plants all over and they have no way to store any of those released and when you talk to your latest slate chair and find out if they have a so we have to really start talking to now i don't need them people now are like that but start for next year for the next election to lay the groundwork to go and actually have  evolution we cannot do anything unless we have for years so many people have gone out and have told people how bad the nuclear problems out nuclear waste of anybody and bruce skagen ash poken and all these people who know what the problems are but somehow we have not branched out far enough into the communities to bring them message to all of the people who will be affected who are right now i would hazard a guess that fifty percent of the people in seattle have no clue what is going on out here and what damage can be done if there is an accident or if somebody pushes the wrong button at one time so this is one thing we can do and i know that you're going to write that this and i would give you the address and i think they need to get out a whole lot of input into their plan their members of the board if you want to have citizen volunteers to work with you on the preservation of the city sates oakridge then to see hanford washington and los alamos new mexico i would be very happy to share ideas i have for mak keep the alarm systems turned on play the same type of music they play it chernobyl exhibit any and all pictures you can find of the aftermath of our atomic bombs of hiroshima and and listened to the armed forces radio and i always heard the propaganda and i heard from both sides i heard it from the chairman say which of course there's only one newspaper and that was earned by g ls so that all the news and the media were to same and now also heard them say how america was winning and how america was going to help us if we sure that people like mike and the other people who bring the news of what is going on every day on our computers that we keep them alive and working for us and that we make that the news accessible to all the people who really need to hear what we're doing here that it's not all been just terrible news in my life i've had a lot of fun some of the stuff i've glad you're not feeling sick or something and that's what we need to do we need to keep a little sense of humor when orders goes down like when they say to his cab standing with their bicycles every time wish stand women in black on our surge the original they usually stand there and i don't know way they would guard us we are so dangerous i but i like to smile at them and some of the things i don't know if you have seen the shall fail thing where i got sprayed again and i think the reason i got chosen for that role was sad experience i got sprayed was pepsi cola all over the place and that and that one immediately when they are two so it is fun when people call you up and say would you come with us we're doing a yes man program on drilling in the arctic each one teach one or as our friend jackie said take one step out of your comfort zone if you want to make a difference this is the best students stay for over the weekend and he called me right afterwards and he said you'd be proud of me i did five steps  zone that's something everybody can do and people don't need to be shouted because when you speak out it's amazing how everybody responds on the buses people ask me what are you doing and and why is the morning in my building our community asked me to come down and tell them home to vote for and they all came was their ballots i and they all filled the ballots out the way my money back i but i need a good lawyer to come up with i can do that but i think that would be one of the good things to do their stuff will wind up and asked for my neighbor back and i want the now closed less because you got other things to do with a great quote from i mean rick over i think the human race is going to wreck itself and it important that we get control of this horrible force and try to eliminate it i do not believe that no clear power is worse where said if it creates radiation admiral as near as i can recall it was in the late seventy's maybe seventy eight some friends of mine heard that there was a protest going on out here about the base and there was a farm down the road peterson farm that was going to lose part of or all of their away and due to access to this new base they were building and so i don't know who got the thing going myself and three or four of the people drove out and walked from peterson's farm up to the old main gate seemed like there were a couple hundred of us but that's my memory and we all stood there and i don't remember exactly what we did except i remember some people went over the fence and that seemed like a pretty bold action my background  was as a kind of a pacifist in the sixty eight convention in chicago was the first time i really got into a real action during the vietnam war of course and democratic convention  and so i have interesting memories of that time marching down the streets of chicago or saying peace now peace now and have an echo in the sky scrapers the big tall buildings and seen how the police reacted so anyway when i heard about this peterson farm thing in conjunction with building the base here it seemed like a logical thing to go out and see what was happening and so i became aware of the base that they were creating here and that there was a counter  group of people that were trying to slow it down maybe even stop it and i didn't get real active then i don't recall that i don't think we had the ground zero house then i'm pretty sure we didn't maybe they had the property but not the house as don't really recall but in the mid eighty's it became very clear that the base had happened and they were starting to bring in the missiles and the missile motors and the fuel and all that stuff and and i heard about the white train the white train was carrying these components from the midwest different places where it was manufactured and they painted it white because that would reflect the heat they were carrying very dangerous cargo and people were tracking the train from when it left the plant where it was made and they were tracking it on the railroad line and giving  updates ok the train is this places that plays it's had to know predicted to be so and so and so the first actions that i really got involved with were around that the the white train coming in and jim and showed douglas and other people back then were kind of organizing you know with stu some resistance to that and kind of the obvious thing was well it's coming down the tracks right here going into the base and maybe we should try and stop the train and and ever since chicago i've kind of been interested in being on the street to you know taking action you know where where it might have an impact so the idea of stopping a train seemed like a cool thing to do so i got involved with an affinity group that met in seattle i think it was called the gobby affinity and we talked a lot about front of it we we did a lot of planning as did some other people too and so i forget if it might have been one nine hundred eighty five and i'm not quite sure on the date but  nineteen or twenty of us sat down on the tracks and the train came and the train stopped there was some nervousness about it i chose to believe then that the train would stop i didn't think that it would really run over us but i remember sitting up towards the front we sat in twos you know the line back from wherever we decided was on this side of the gate obviously and i remember being a little apprehensive but knowing that i was doing for me i was doing the right thing and the train stopped and  federal officials after not real long time sitting there removed us from the track they actually hauled some of us off i went passive and they had to remove me physically and they put us on a bus they arrested us and put us on a bus and sometime later i don't know if it was a couple of months we knew we were going to have to go to court we got released on her person or cognizance and the short of us that we went to court for five days in our case at county in port orchard and a jury of our peers found us innocent we admitted we did it we there was all kinds of photographic evidence that we had done and yet that jury found in our favor essentially because we were honoring international law we were breaking a minor a lot to honor a higher law it was quite a feeling because i think most of us thought it would be pretty hard to be found innocent  so that was that was quite an experience there were some other trade actions that i participated in and eventually that kind of morphed into doing actions at the gates  main gate i didn't really participate in anything during that era and old maid i think that they can actually close that gate i think because they were used in the trigger avenue and the new main gate and so from the mid eighty's on pretty much been this is been the focus of my piece work being involved in ground zero it's been very satisfied it's been frustrating at times it's i always try to remember and i'll paraphrase gandhi's admonition if you will that no matter what i do it will probably be insignificant but it's important that i do it and i hold on to that because sometimes i get a martin luther king was another one and joan baez was really one of my first heroes as she and her mother were active in draft resistance in oakland probably back in the late sixty's maybe sixty seven or sixty eight back in that time and at one point she and her mother got arrested in front of the oakland draft board where they inducted the guys down there  and i remember being so impressed that you know that those women of two generations would put their lives on the line and yes one year ago folklife i think it was joan came to do a show and i went kind of backstage this was a fenced off area but i stood there and she came out actually her mother came out first and i got to meet her and thank her for doing what she did because it changed my life it got me to be an activist and she gave me a hug and she said well thank you for doing what you're doing and then joan came out and offered to hug me and i got to thank her too and it was just such a you know m l k had already been assassinated deonte of course had been assassinated so i only had one living hero bafta and i got to hug her and and thank her and her mother too so that was really a nice treat so i continue here because i feel responsible because ground zero gives me an opportunity to participate in standing up for peace and and what i like here is it gives me countless opportunities to be of all kinds of service you know i can park cars or i can wash dishes or i can be a peacekeeper or a quite often i can risk arrest i've actually been arrested i don't know exactly how many times so i do that periodical so it's just it's it's actually when i go home after this weekend to be a long weekend i'm tired but i feel like i've stood up for peace and i've tried to make a difference and that makes me feel good so even though sometimes it's discouraging sometimes hard work it's it's so labor of love and so i'm in for i mean for the the time that i have here on the planet to try and make it a better place   if i see an opportunity to share my experience here back where i live in l b washington i do that and it's almost you know when i'm here this seems like the most important and when i'm home it does too but i have an easier time relating when i'm here than to people there who a lot of them just don't care that's discouraging i mean they just they're unaware they have no idea that they live a two hour drive away from all these nuclear weapons sometimes i find it hard to believe that you and i are sitting and i find that to be unconscionable and i just i just feel like it's time to change to try and change things so to answer your question at home i do what i can to spread the word in the nearest big town where i live which is eatonville on fridays between four and six i'm there standing up for peace with my sign honk for peace peace now hold the sign and the reason there is because of cindy sheehan it must have been more than five years ago i'm thinking i have to check with her when she had an encampment close to george bush's house on the road to his house or something and for some reason that made the news and the people people in eatonville kind of spontaneously said hey we should support her and on friday we should all get together with candles on the corner and have our sides and do a peace demonstration and son of a gun if one hundred people didn't show up to do that and the impetus for that was cindy sheehan doing what she did then and which continues to do so for the next four years every friday there was at least two of us and sometimes as many as fifteen of us it varied from friday to friday and we had every concept of consecutive fridays for over five four years and then it kind of fell apart people kind of drifted away and i left town for a few months and when i came back i just went back to the corner because that's what i like to do and i've been there  since so with a few breaks i guess i've been there in my sixth year now and we get a lot of going to the mountain traffic we get a lot of guys coming home from work it's a busy corners the busiest corner in this town for we stop and that's very satisfying you know i just didn't people hock people smile they wave if i could take a poll it's got to be a third to a half of those people are  g me and my signs not me so much but the signs are there for peace and i think i think if you asked anybody they're going to say yeah i'd like it to be a peaceful world and but most say but you know we have to have peace through strength or we you know they have some reason you know but ultimately because i think of nuclear weapons i think we're up against the wall here is bad enough that we killing people all over the world but now we have nuclear weapons and and more of them and we're we're we're likely to use them either on purpose or accidentally and so the classic comment here is well i want my grandchildren have a world to live in and the doomsday clock is it five minutes till midnight i think and it goes back and forth between five to three or you know whatever so i do stand up for