The transcript of Dialogos Radio’s interview with scholar and author Mark Crispin Miller of New York University, editor of the “Forbidden Bookshelf” series of e-books, who spoke to us about the global spread of neoliberalism and its impacts on media and publishing, education, democracy, and free and fair elections. This interview aired on our broadcasts for the week of May 14-20, 2015. Find the podcast of this interview here.

MN: Joining us today on Dialogos Radio and the Dialogos Interview Series is Mark Crispin Miller, professor of media, culture, and communication at New York University. Mark is the author of a number of different books, including “Boxed In: The Culture of TV,” “Cruel and Unusual: Bush and Cheney’s New World Order,” and “Fooled Again: The Real Case for Electoral Reform.” He is also the editor of the “Forbidden Bookshelf” series of e-books, and the author of a number of essays and articles. Mark, welcome to our program today.

MCM: Thanks for having me on, Michael. I’m thrilled to be talking to you.

MN: Now to get us started, you’ve written a lot about the media and about issues relating to censorship and freedom of the press. On a global level, how is the media furthering and promoting neoliberal policies and the politics of economic austerity, and how is freedom of the press also being threatened in recent years?

MCM: Well, those two questions are closely related, obviously. I would say that the corporate media worldwide has done an excellent job promoting neoliberal policies in every sector of society and culture as well. Speaking of the American media, which actually ranks very, very low in the integrity of its news broadcasts, you could say that daily media coverage and commentary are a kind of endless propaganda drive on behalf of a version of austerity economics. Just to take one example, the U.S. press is, say, uncritically promoting a huge attack on public education and public schools in the United States, extolling the virtues of charter schools, attacking the teachers’ unions and so on. So without straying further into the weeds of such detail, I would say that the press is pretty much in the hands of the plutocracy, if you will, of the 1%, and it has a profound effect on press freedom and freedom of expression generally.

I mean, this is a subject that in itself could take us hours to talk about, and I’m sure your audience would find it very interesting. But I suppose, since our time is limited, I’ll talk primarily about the effect that this trend has had on book publishing.

You know, we are the land of the First Amendment and we therefore tend to congratulate ourselves on the state of freedom of expression in the United States, and press freedom as well. It’s very hard to find examples, not impossible, but hard to find examples of journalists who are obviously targeted for violence, who are killed, who are shot, as journalists in Russia have been, for example, and in other countries where the attack on a free press is marked by a kind of brutal and explicit violence.

Now, that kind of thing has actually been happening in the United States, something that doesn’t get much press attention. For example, the Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings met his end in an inexplicable car accident in the middle of the night, and this is someone that had taken down a very important general in the U.S. military with a highly critical article in Rolling Stone that damaged this officer’s career, and he was said to be working on something even more controversial and was quite nervous about his well-being when his car, as I said, inexplicably sped up and crashed into, I think it was a tree or a highway divider or something like this, in the wee hours of the night in California.

You know, here in the United States, we tend to talk a lot about certain kinds of books that are marked for censorship by Christian groups or by highly conservative school boards in the south. They’re usually erotic masterpieces, they’re almost exclusively novels, books like “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison, or erotic classics like Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl.” So we make much of books that offend a certain kind of taste and are therefore subject to local, highly parochial acts of censorship. So a particular group will try to have a book removed from the library shelves in that town or that county, or as I said, they will forbid teachers to assign particular books in school because they’re just too “dirty” or they’re not Christian enough.

That kind of thing is deplorable, and I think it’s all to the good that there are organized groups that fight such censorship, but that is not actually the most dangerous kind of suppression that we face in the United States. We face a much subtler kind of suppression, a subtler threat to free expression in the form of inexplicit tactics used to make sure that books threatening powerful interests either don’t see the light of day, or quickly disappear. I’m talking about threats of litigation by, say, powerful corporations or rich families, I’m talking about books whose own publishers have sometimes been complicit in failing to market or to print enough copies so that the book can succeed, I’m talking about books that reviewers shun, books whose existence you never hear a word about, or more often, books that are ridiculed and dismissed as “conspiracy theory.”

Now that’s why I’ve started this new series called “Forbidden Bookshelf.” As your listeners will understand, it’s a series that should interest Greek readers no less than American readers. What we’re doing with this series is bringing back as e-books volumes that were variously killed at birth in the ways that I’ve discussed.

A number of these books are available on Amazon, you could go there and find yourself a cheap used copy. But it’s important to understand that if you go looking for a book like that on Amazon, it presupposes your already having heard about it. That is something very different from a book you’ve never heard of, precisely because those interests have been successful in blacking them out. So we are literally republishing these books. Publishing them means not simply making them available as objects, it also means telling the world about them, soliciting reviews, spreading the word, advertising them. We’re also publishing them with new introductions, either by the authors themselves, or in the cases where they’re dead, we have noted experts writing new introductions for them.

We’re doing about a dozen to fourteen titles per year, and our aim is, on the one hand, to bring back books on really important subjects, books that deal with abuses of power or high crimes by the government itself, books that deal critically with extremely powerful interests like the DuPont family or the National Football League. We want to bring these individual books back because they’re important works of scholarship and journalism, and they deserve, in fact they require a second life.

But we’re also doing it, in order to make the larger point that we have become too ready, certainly in the United States, to believe those voices that laugh off uncomfortable works, uncomfortable research, uncomfortable arguments as “lunatic fantasy,” as “conspiracy theory.” This is actually a fairly recent tactic that’s been used by the state and others to dissuade people from reading these important works. One of the aims here, one of the purposes of “Forbidden Bookshelf” is to get people to reclaim the skepticism that I believe is essential to the survival of anything like democracy, a willingness to believe that elites are up to no good, are indeed capable of conspiring against our freedoms and against our economic well-being, so this is a very ambitious project, and one that I’m grateful for this opportunity to talk to you about.

MN: We are on the air with scholar and author Mark Crispin Miller of New York University here on Dialogos Radio and the Dialogos Interview Series, and Mark, some of our listeners might already be familiar with at least one of the books in the “Forbidden Bookshelf” series, as we featured a few months ago an interview with Kati Marton, a journalist and author who wrote “The Polk Conspiracy,” which is a book detailing the murder of American journalist George Polk in Greece under very suspicious circumstances during the Greek Civil War in 1948. Tell us about some of the more notable books in the “Forbidden Bookshelf” series, and also, what the response has been like so far to this new series of e-books.

MCM: Just to name a few, the books that we have brought out since last June include “Deadly Deceits: My 25 Years in the CIA,” by Ralph McGehee. This is a book that came out in the early ’80s. It’s a very powerful and really kind of frightening memoir of his experience, primarily in Southeast Asia, his discovery that the CIA was really not interested, which is to say the U.S. government was not interested, in any intelligence that might contradict their policy intentions. They wanted to be told certain things because they wanted to believe those things. He found in Vietnam, for example, that they just didn’t want to know anything that might interfere with their intention to promote the war. And there are other aspects of the agency’s routine functioning that he reveals in a book that he had trouble getting published, typically, and for which he was subjected to a lot of threats and stalking by his former colleagues in the agency, to the point that he finally had to move away from his home town in Virginia and relocate up in New England.

We’ve also published “The Phoenix Program,” by Douglas Valentine. This is a real classic work from the 90s. It is not only one of the best books available on the Vietnam War, but it is one of the best book’s available on the CIA’s covert operations. The Phoenix Program was a covert program of surveillance, abduction, torture, and assassination of civilians in South Vietnam, managed by the CIA, employing criminal elements among the South Vietnamese population. Estimates of how many South Vietnamese civilians killed by this program range from 20,000 to 40,000. It was a highly controversial operation when word of it finally became public. It was run by William Colby of the CIA, who went on to take over the whole agency, and Douglas Valentine’s book is based exclusively on interviews with CIA officers who had actually participated in the program itself, and the story of how he got access to them is very interesting and one that is available in his new introduction to the book.

That new introduction by Douglas Valentine, which is called “The Phoenix Has Landed,” makes the very important argument that the Phoenix Program, beyond its horrific impact on the population in that one country at that time, actually can be regarded as a sort of template for similar kinds of operations in country after country all over the world, where the CIA would recruit these dangerous local elements to, basically, work to intimidate the opposition, the resistance, into non-existence. And he argues that all the hallmarks of the Phoenix Program, the use of high-tech surveillance, the creation of secret military courts, summary justice meted out covertly, he argues that all of these measures have now been adopted here at home in the United States as part of the so-called “War on Terror.” So this is a book that people who are concerned about the survival of democracy anywhere should definitely read.

We have published—I should say re-published—”Blowback” by Christopher Simpson, a history professor at American University. This is about how the CIA recruited former Nazis and fascists throughout the Cold War and the impact that this recruitment has had on America’s foreign and domestic policies. Other books have come out since “Blowback” on the same subject, but this book, I think, is the best one, and I think one indication of how powerful and honest a book it is, is the fact that it was targeted for a very hostile review in The New York Times. That’s true of many of the books we’ve published. In fact, Chris Simpson was able only to get a British publisher to take it in the first place, and then once it was published, as I said, it was singled out for a malicious review in the Sunday Times Book Review, by a reporter whose father was himself a fascist sympathizer in World War II, although that fact was not mentioned in the review, needless to say.

MN: Now, another topic that pertains to the suppression of information has to do with the issue of whistleblowers, and there’s been some very high profile cases that have made global headlines in recent years, of course, such as the information that was revealed by Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning and websites such as WikiLeaks, and the government crackdowns which followed. Where do you see this going in the next few years?

MCM: The fact that this kind of revelation is easier than ever, thanks to the Internet, is precisely the reason why governments the world over have stepped up their efforts to wipe out this kind of unauthorized public information. The easier it is to tell the world what’s going on, the less control states have over the means of information, the more extreme measures governments have to use in order to keep the faucet shut, keep it closed, so that nothing escapes from it. Now, on the one hand, there are prosecutions, and I have to note that Barack Obama has actually been a more aggressive antagonist, a more aggressive persecutor of whistleblowers than any president in previous American history. They have used the Espionage Act, which is an unfortunate relic of World War I, they have used that draconian piece of legislation to go after more whistleblowers than all of our previous presidents combined. I think the number is seven by now, seven Espionage Act cases. This is an extreme step, and indicates, as I say, a kind of rising uneasiness over the possibilities that people may hear what they’re not supposed to hear, in this culture of extreme secrecy that now passes for a government.

I also want to add that it’s under Obama that the state has committed itself explicitly to a kind of policy of covert subversion of certain kinds of public discussions, of stories that the state simply does not want people discussing. There’s a famous First Amendment lawyer, this is quite ironic, Cass Sunstein is his name, a constitutional scholar who went to work for the Obama administration in some regulatory capacity. He actually co-authored an essay for a magazine, a journal published by Harvard University, on the need for what he called “cognitive infiltration,” and this is what he meant by that phrase: he was talking specifically about 9/11 and the fact that there are more and more people questioning the official explanation of those terrorist attacks, and really unprecedented numbers of reputable experts, architects, engineers, and so on, who are calling the official account of 9/11 into question on purely scientific grounds. There are websites and chat rooms and so on devoted to this kind of discussion. According to Cass Sunstein, this kind of public discussion is extremely dangerous. He believes that it poses a mortal threat to the survival of American democracy. I think what he actually believes is that it poses a threat to the American government, to its reputation. So, the solution that he explicitly advanced in this article of his was the use of “trolls” to go online and find ways to disrupt these discussions by sowing discord among the discussants or counterattacking with propaganda shots that would distract people from the issue at hand.

That kind of extreme subversive activity is completely continuous with the recent statements by David Cameron, the British prime minister, who actually said, was quoted in the British press as saying, a few months ago, that 9/11 skepticism is as dangerous as ISIS. He actually said this, and Francois Hollande of France recently made a similar statement, that this kind of public discussion is dangerous. So, I can’t think of better examples of extreme overreaction of states around the world when it comes to the danger of being confronted with free conversation of what we might call “forbidden” subjects. And again, it has everything to do with the universal availability of taboo information on the Internet.

MN: We are on the air with professor and scholar Mark Crispin Miller of New York University here on Dialogos Radio and the Dialogos Interview Series, and Mark, even though the presidential elections are still a year and a half away in the United States, we’ve seen in recent weeks a number of candidates declaring their candidacy. Do you see, in any of the candidates that have declared or who are likely to declare, any hope for a change of direction on issues pertaining to freedom of the press, freedom of speech, or freedom of information?

MCM: Well that’s a very good question. I can think of a few possible candidates whose policies would take us in the right direction. But I have to say that such a discussion of these particular candidates is unfortunately besides the point, because, as I myself have demonstrated extensively in a book that was blacked out in exactly the way that I’ve been describing, America’s election system is among the worst in the so-called “free world,” and in fact, since 2000, our presidential elections and many of our congressional elections have been rigged through electronic means. This is the thesis of my book, “Fooled Again,” which came out in 2005, and was an exhaustive demonstration of how the Republican right had stolen the election of 2004 for Bush and Cheney. Now, the theft of the 2000 election by Bush and Cheney is fairly widely accepted, because the Supreme Court, as you know, stepped in at the last minute and simply halted the vote count in the state of Florida. That’s something that the press has been willing to discuss and acknowledge. But the theft of the 2004 election, primarily through electronic means, is one of those forbidden subjects, and discussion thereof has therefore been stigmatized as “conspiracy theory.”

The fact is that we now have a computerized voting and vote counting system in the United States, a system that was a bipartisan achievement, although it was primarily the Bush Republicans who drove it home. And not only do we have a system that is very, very easily hacked, the counting easily rigged, the electronic voting lists easily purged, imperceptibly changed, and that’s all bad enough, but the companies that manage the election process, the voting system, are all private companies. And all of them, and I’m not exaggerating, are owned and managed by right-wing Republicans, in many cases rabid Christianists, theocrats, people with a really anti-democratic agenda. So one of the things I’ve been trying to do for years, certainly since “Fooled Again” came out, is promote a broader understanding of the absolutely fundamental threat that this development has posed to the survival of American democracy.

Your listeners should be interested to hear that the right in the United States is vastly overrepresented in terms of its representation in Congress, in terms of those presidents who seemingly have been elected by right-wing voters. There is, and I am not exaggerating when I say this, there is no evidence that Bush-Cheney won the 2004 election, other than the official claim that he won, other than the official numbers that have been used to demonstrate his victory. All the solid evidence actually suggests that John Kerry won that election, just as all the evidence makes clear that Al Gore actually did win the 2000 election. The vote count in Florida that the Republicans managed successfully to delay until after 9/11, that vote count finally did take place and it actually showed that Al Gore had won the election in the key state of Florida. I mean, this is mind-boggling that it isn’t better known, that it is a fact, and anyone that is interested can contact me or go online and look for the numbers.

The fact is that we’re not going to get anywhere, we’re not going to make any progress until we have a legitimate election system. And I say this as one who is thoroughly disgusted, really, with both major political parties in the United States. I’m am not naive about the fact that the major parties are all too similar on economic issues, on war issues, and many other issues. I’m well aware of that. However, in a country like the United States, the possibility of some kind of alternative means of changing the direction of the country through some kind of actual revolution in the streets, that possibility is remote to the point of non-existent. You have to have a viable election in order to get anything meaningful accomplished, and as long as the Republican party, with Democratic complicity, basically has a hammerlock on the voting system, so that they can install politicians despite the will of the electorate, and pursue agendas that are completely detested by a majority of the population, as long as that’s the case, we’re in very big trouble.

Let me quickly add, Michael, that there are three states in this country that have governors who are pushing radical neoliberal agendas. That’s Wisconsin, Ohio, and Michigan. Three governors representing the so-called “Tea Party,” backed by the Koch family. They are dismantling the public workers’ unions, they are attacking public education, they’re promoting absolutely extreme agendas despite the fact that in all three states, there are majorities of voters who represent organized labor and others, Wisconsin in particular has always been a progressive state. There is evidence in all three cases that these governors and many other officers who have taken over those governments simply were not elected. There is copious evidence that the exit polls and other statistical measures make quite clear that those elections were stolen. And yet, this is something that almost no one talks about for the same reason that all the books we were talking about earlier are unknown to a vast majority of the American people, and that is that the whole subject has been basically stigmatized as “insane.”

One of the books we’re bringing out in August is called “Vote Scam” by Peter Collier and his brother Kenneth. This book came out in the ’90s, and was the first book to investigate, in horrifying detail, the fixing of elections through computerized means, even back then. This is a book that the authors ultimately had to self-publish, because nobody would accept it, although it’s an extremely well-written and well-researched book, so we’ll be bringing it back. But, every time we have an election in the United States, everybody talks about the candidates and their chances and their strategies and the demographics of the electorate on and on and on. I’m telling you that all of this is fundamentally besides the point as long as our elections system is corrupt, as it most certainly is.

MN: In terms of combating this corruption and these instances of electoral fraud, do you believe that there is any role at all that social movements can play in bringing about some sort of change, and not just in the United States but Europe and elsewhere as well. By way of example, Greece held elections about three months ago, a new government has come into power that was promising its own message of “hope and change,” and it has, in that period since then, gone back on many of its pre-election promises. What could social movements and citizens do to hold their governments and to hold the system as a whole more accountable?

MCM: That’s a very good question. Greece, if I may say so, I mean I’m an outsider, but Greece is in its precarious situation precisely because it’s such a lonely stance that it’s striking, that it’s been practically the only country whose people have resisted vigorously. I mean there are some others who have done so, but Greece stands out for the intensity of its resistance. In that case, a seemingly alternative government was actually elected, and it seems legitimately elected by a people fed up with the status quo, and yet here we see that government backtracking.

Similar things have actually happened before throughout Europe. So-called socialist parties have, really since the 70s, been betraying their supporters. I mean, it’s happened in France, it’s happened in Britain, it’s happened in Germany, and it’s happened with the active assistance of the U.S.A. and the covert arms of its government. So what we’re witnessing and have witnessed is the imposition of a neoliberal order against the will of the electorate, even in those places where the voters have a right to expect that their votes actually did count. So I think two things have to happen. I think, first of all, there has to be a reassertion of the necessity of legitimate electoral democracy, certainly in the United States, and in other countries where that integrity has been threatened by the rise of electronic voting. Now, I’ll say that in the Netherlands, and in Ireland and in Germany, they tried to use computerized voting, and in all three countries, they went back to hand-counted ballots, paper ballots, which is the only way to go.

Now, there’s a book, let me recommend, it’s an e-book by an election rights activist named Jonathan Simon, it’s called “Code Red.” It’s an indispensable new book on the corruption of the voting system in the United States, and anyone who is concerned about the preservation of legitimate democracy in other countries should read this book just to be forewarned about the possibility of something happening to their voting systems. However, beyond all this discussion of electoral integrity, I take the point of your question very seriously. Social movements are essential. I mean, social movements are really just another word for democracy. We have to have an aroused plurality of voters, of citizens, who will not accept, who will ultimately simply reject the failure of their governments to honor the agendas that they promised and that got them elected in the first place. I mean, something sort of like that happened in the United States when a clear majority of voters were actively led to believe that Barack Obama would offer a kind of, I don’t know if I would say “radical,” but a marked difference from the policies promoted by Bush-Cheney. I didn’t believe it, to tell you the truth, I’m from Illinois, where Barack Obama was a Senator, so I knew enough about him not even to vote for him, because I knew it wasn’t true, but the fact is that he got elected overwhelmingly, a black man got elected overwhelmingly in the United States, primarily because his team advertised him as a bold departure from the status quo as defined by Bush-Cheney, who never were elected in the first place. Despite that, we have seen this administration, as far as I’m concerned, outstrip Bush-Cheney at all the worst policies that people objected to and that led them to vote for a Democratic alternative.

I believe that there should be a larger and more vigorous social movement in this country to fix the election system and otherwise work against those entrenched interests that are basically pushing us all towards extreme income inequality and a kind of serf-like existence for the majority of Americans, and I think that such social movements in other countries have to continue to fight and to intensify the fight, and I think ultimately, align themselves one with another, to comprise a global movement. I would say that this may sound like I’m teetering off the subject, but I believe in it deeply and I think that it’s a very important thing to do.

I think that people in cities worldwide have got to organize and fight back against the kind of devastating overdevelopment that neoliberalism promotes in city after city, the destruction of coherent neighborhoods, their replacement by residential towers and office buildings and tourist attractions, buildings to be used by the elite for greater profit. This is a policy that has had disastrous social, economic, and environmental consequences in cities all over the world. Cities in China and Russia, cities in North Africa, all over Europe, and right here in New York City, where I sit talking to you now, we are witnessing the visible destruction of an affordable city that was once economically diverse, and its replacement by, as I say, gleaming towers whose penthouses are owned by billionaires from all over the world, penthouses and apartments that they almost never even visit, they buy them as investment, they buy them as potential havens against the day when their own governments try to put them in prison for embezzlement or theft. I believe that this kind of gradual replacement of a livable, habitable, affordable city environment by an unsustainable and unaffordable alternative, this can only be stopped through mass action by people in cities all over the world, and people ultimately joining hands to help one another out. So, you couldn’t be talking to a more ardent believer in social movements than myself. I think that our only hope lies in that direction.

MN: We are on the air with professor and scholar Mark Crispin Miller of New York University here on Dialogos Radio and the Dialogos Interview Series, and Mark, one final issue that I wanted to bring up before we close out the interview pertains to your role as an educator…how would you gauge the impact of neoliberalism on education, both public education and higher education, especially in terms of issues such as cost and accessibility and privatization, and also on the quality of education, and the de-emphasizing of the liberal arts?

MCM: Well Michael, we could devote a whole separate interview to this subject, because I happen to be heavily involved in the faculty resistance to the neoliberal sweep that’s taking place at New York University, which let me tell you represents the avant-garde of everything that’s wrong with U.S. higher education, and everything that’s wrong with U.S. higher education is also wrong with higher education globally. We have universities increasingly dominated by hedge fund managers, corporate lawyers, real estate developers, building contractors, and Wall Street bank presidents.

No university in the world, I don’t think, is more perfectly dominated by that element than New York University, whose board, you can look it up online, is not only extraordinary for its size, it has over 90 members, counting every class of member, but it’s also unique for the fact that there’s not a single professor on that board, not one academic member. They are all financiers, they are all neoliberal players of the kinds that I’ve just described, and this has had a shattering effect on NYU, which is now the most expensive university in the United States. It has the worst financial aid. Our student body carries a debt load 40% heavier than the national average. We have 70% of our courses now taught by non-tenured faculty, by adjuncts who at least have a union here, by contract faculty who are full-time but have no union and are crushed by a huge teaching load and tons of committee work and still an expectation of publishing scholarship and who are paid much less than the tenured faculty, whose numbers are also dwindling because the board and its hand-picked administration don’t want a tenured faculty. They don’t want a faculty that’s that expensive, and they certainly don’t want a faculty that has the kind of job security that permits them to resist.

I could continue to go on and tell you the horror stories of what’s been done to gouge the students and to squeeze the faculty, to suppress dissent, to stifle free expression. You know, NYU has these notorious branches in Abu Dhabi and in Shanghai, where freedom of expression is pretty much impossible and academic freedom is a fantasy. The same repressiveness is actually one of the goals of the people who run NYU right here in New York, and there are many, many instances of students and faculty being suppressed in less spectacular ways than they are suppressed in places like the United Arab Emirates.

The question you put then is, what can academics do about this? My view is, again, as with the people who are being squeezed out of cities throughout the country and the world, so it is with faculty who are increasingly overworked and underpaid and exploited. So it is the students who are increasingly squeezed and shortchanged and offered courses that have less and less of a critical component, that serve more and more as credentials for finding work in the neoliberal machine. In both cases, what we need is to organize, students and faculty need to work together, as has started to happen at NYU per se. But, the faculties and student bodies of universities throughout the cities and the country also have to unify increasingly and say no to this huge trend, and one of the biggest incentives for such organization and resistance is, of course, the scourge of student debt, which under this neoliberal regime has risen to become the most common form of debt in the United States. It has far surpassed consumer spending debt, it’s over a trillion dollars now, and in the United States, students are essentially legally prevented from declaring bankruptcy when they go broke because of this crushing debt. We have students who are basically embarking on lives of peonage until their dying day because the debt that they carry for their education is so heavy.

There are groups that have been formed in the United States, specifically around the issue of student debt, and we work closely with them at NYU, but I believe that education is now at a point of unprecedented crisis, not only here but worldwide, and it’s because of these high rollers who have basically taken over the institution to the point that education as we’ve always known it is almost impossible. The aim of the system is not to educate, the aim of the system is to extract as much cash as possible from the paying customers and to create a generation of people who don’t even know enough about what’s going on to question it, to make the content of education apolitical, uncritical, basically to teach people to think that this is all conspiracy theory and insanity. So I believe that we have to return to something like the spirit that obtained in this country in the 60s and 70s, and in other countries, France, Greece, when there was a broader kind of critical movement by the student masses in favor of a more humanistic and engaged education. It’s difficult to do that, harder to do that today, precisely because of the crushing debt burden borne by so many students, so many of whom tell me that because of their debt, precisely because of their debt, they are paradoxically afraid to do anything to resist or protest it, they’re afraid they’ll lose a scholarship, they’re afraid that their chances for finding work, which are already pretty slim, will shrink even further. So when we’re talking about social movements and possible mass responses to the situation prevailing today, we have to take into account the peculiarly inhibiting effect of debt, which aside from its material destructiveness also has a kind of psychological effect that can be incapacitating. I think the more we talk about this, the more we organize to show that it is possible to fight back, to demand debt forgiveness, the better off we’ll be. That’s where our salvation lies, and I think it’s possible to do it.

MN: Mark, before we wrap up, where can our listeners find out more information about you and your work and your writings?

MCM: Well, my own website is called “News from Underground,” and it is at markcrispinmiller.com, and people can contact me at markcrispinmiller [at] gmail [dot] com. My books are on Amazon, and my website is yet another attempt to circulate stories from all over the world, stories that have been insufficiently covered or blacked-out altogether by the corporate media, and often, Michael, let me add by the left, liberal press as well. Since I’ve taken to championing important works that need to see the light of day, I’ve discovered that many of my ostensible allies on the left are also reluctant to discuss many of these issues. So I no longer see this in left-right terms, to tell you the truth, I think that the problem of free speech and free expression and so on transcends that division, because I think many of the outlets and individuals on the left have been co-opted in various ways, often through their funding sources, they get money from particular foundations that make clear they don’t want certain subjects discussed. So I guess I’m somewhat radical in my notions of what’s permissible or even mandatory subjects for discussion, and I see myself as one of a community that doesn’t have a clear label any longer.

I just basically believe in the restoration of political democracy and the discovery of economic democracy. Otherwise, to be perfectly frank, I think the planet is doomed. I think that there are environmental consequences to these policies that are ultimately going to prove to be decisive, that are all-important, so that actually, rational people have no choice but to participate in this subject. It isn’t just a class struggle, although it certainly is that, but it’s a struggle for the survival of the species, in fact. So I’ll be happy to hear from anyone who wants to suggest particular book titles for the series, or discuss any of the issues we’ve talked about today.

MN: Mark, thank you very much for taking the time to speak with us today here on Dialogos Radio and the Dialogos Interview Series, and best of luck with all of your continued efforts.

MCM: Thanks a lot, and I’ll talk to you anytime you want.

Please excuse any typos or errors which may exist within this transcript.