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Tavis: Benjamin Barber is a renowned author and political theorist who's a professor of civil society at the University of Maryland. His many notable books include the international bestseller "Jihad vs. McWorld." His latest is called "Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole." Dr. Ben Barber, nice to have you back on the program.

Dr. Benjamin Barber: Great to see you again, Tavis. (unintelligible)

Tavis: Good to see you again. Let me start with a definition - and I don't mean to be flippant about this. We are all consumers at some level. We are all subjected to consumerism at a certain level. So when you say consumerism, what does Ben Barber mean?

Barber: Well, what I mean is consumerism 24-seven, day and night, all the time, 52 weeks a year. Of course, as you say, we all have to consume. Our material wants are important; we've gotta get the stuff we need to live. But not 24 hours a day, not on TV, not on the Internet, not all the time.

Tavis: Why not?

Barber: Because if we do that, we crowd out every other part of our life. Human beings, we pray, we play, we make love, we make art, we have lots of things we do. And we shop and we buy and we produce things. They're all important parts of things. But if one dominates everything, we lose our balance.

Tavis: What's the evidence to suggest - I'm not asking this question out of any naïveté or just downright ignorance - but what is the evidence that we are being consumerized to death? That it's taking over all these other things that we do?

Barber: Well, in a sense why I try to do in the book is provide a wide panoply of evidence from every possible - looking at advertising statistics, marketing statistics, the amount of time kids spend on television, up to eight hours a day. The targeting of very, very young people, down to two years old and one year old as consumers.

There's all kinds of evidence that suggests that we have become a society obsessed with consumerism but for a reason that has to do with the problems of modern capitalism.

Tavis: I don't wanna jump too far ahead of myself, 'cause I wanna come back and break down this subtitle and talk about the children, about the adults, and about the rest of us as just citizens. Before I do that, though, I'm curious as to what your thoughts are about what this conversation really means. And what I mean by that question is at the end of the day, the folk who subject us to consumerism, they control the shots here, one could argue.

You may counter-argue, but I could argue with you - let me just argue for the sake of argument - that they control the shots. What do we do after we read Barber's book about being consumerized? The folks that run Wall Street, the folk that run Madison Avenue, don't they call the shots? What could we do about being consumerized to death anyway?

Barber: Well, they do call the shots but what I'm arguing in this book is that it's really the market that's calling the shots for them. They also, if you like, are victims. They are seeing a world created that they don't want for their kids and wives and husbands either. And then in that sense, though, they may be predators of our children, they, too are subject to the same forces.

And the forces grow out of the nature of modern capitalism and the modern market. So there is something we can do about it, and that's maybe what we can get to as we talk.

Tavis: Couldn’t one argue that if consumerism is what drives America - was it Calvin Coolidge? "The business of America is business." I think he said that. So if the business of America is business, then isn't this a good thing that businesses are thriving so much now that 24-seven they're making more money, and that's what America's all about anyway - mo' money, mo' money, mo' money.

Barber: (Laughs) Well, there's that, but business was, once upon a time - from the birth of capitalism right through Coolidge and FDR - business was about producing goods and services for people with real wants and needs. And in a way, that's a great formula, because it means if you do that, if you answer the real needs of people, you can make a buck along the way, you create a more prosperous, bountiful society, and you make a profit.

That's how capitalism works. It's a kind of synergy between selfishness and altruism. You serve yourself, you make money; but you serve the real needs of others. But sometime in the last 75 years, as capitalism succeeded - and that's the irony - as it succeeded in meeting our needs, meeting our wants, increasingly we had, at least among the middle class, a satisfied society.

And at that point, capitalism had a dilemma. It had produced all the goods and services that most of us needed for a decent life - we know there's a big chunk of America and a big chunk of the world that that's not true of, and we'll come to them in a minute - but for those that had their needs satisfied, capitalism had a problem.

They no longer had needs and wants, and the question is what capitalism did. And what it did is start manufacturing not goods to meet real needs, but it started manufacturing needs to sell all the goods that it has, and that's where advertising and marketing and dumbing down of adults and infantilization, all the stuff I talk about, that's where all that comes in.

Tavis: How do you respond to one who says that those product producers who are watching right now who are mad at you for even saying this on TV - those product producers aren't really to blame, but those of us who have bought into the model you’ve just laid out about how this thing got flipped, it's those of us who are responding to this new model. Is it their fault, or is it our fault?

Barber: Well in a way, it's nobody's fault. It's the fault of the success of capitalism. Capitalism really worked. It produced the goods and services that the middle class needed. What it's not doing is serving the needs and wants of the poor here in America, and of the poor billions around the world. In other words, it's serving phony needs that it trumps up to try to sell us goods.

Here in this country among the middle class and among the poor here in New Orleans and around the Third World where there are real needs, but the people have no revenue (unintelligible)…

Tavis: But Dr. Barber, who ever said capitalism was about serving the needs of the poor, though?

Barber: No, it's about serving needs.

Tavis: Right.

Barber: And after all, the west - in the fifteenth century in France and the eighteenth century in America, there weren’t a whole lot of rich people. There were a lot of people with needs, and what capitalism did is it invested - it gloried in work, it said, "Work hard, invest, defer gratification. You will serve the bounty of the country and eventually you'll make a profit."

But now it's profit right away by trumping up needs, by targeting children. It really has reversed the logic of capitalism, so instead of serving real needs, it creates unnecessary needs to sell goods that people really don't want. We can take an example. I'm glad to see you're drinking regular water here. I'm going to have a sip. But mostly when I go on a show, it's bottled water we've got.

Now in America, bottled water is unnecessary. Anyone, even poor folks, can get out of their tap clean, decent water. But it's $10 billion a year, the business that we make selling water to people who don't need the water that's in the bottles. Meanwhile in the Third World, where there are people who are thirsty and don't have potable water, don't have water clean enough even to clean their clothes in, there is no water, capitalism and the market's doing nothing to meet that need. That shows how unbalanced capitalism has become.

Tavis: While you take a sip of that water in that mug, let me go a little deeper into the text, then, specifically to this subtitle, which I think gives us a good chance to get into some more detail here. When you say that markets are corrupting children, tell me what you mean.

Barber: Well, what I mean is this: if you have a society where you’ve gotta sell to more and more people to keep capitalism afloat, it's not good enough just to sell to adults. You gotta sell to adults all the time, but that doesn’t make enough money. So you start going down the ladder. Let's sell to teenagers. Let's sell to tweens, the 10 to 12 years old.

Let's sell to kids six to eight. Let's sell to toddlers. Let's try to sell to, if we can, infants - of course, through their parents. So what the marketers are doing are targeting younger and younger children who have discretion over larger and larger amounts of income via their parents, who they persuade to buy them things, so that it becomes very profitable to target kids and make them want things.

Whatever we say about adults, you can't say that a two year old has wants other than those that are excited by the marketplace and by advertisers and so forth. And what we are getting increasingly is the exploitation of our children and the corruption of our children by turning them into tiny shoppers, into permanent little consumers, who learn nowadays about brand logos before they learn to read.

Tavis: When you say it infantilizes adults, you mean what?

Barber: Other side of that, if you're gonna target children and try to take advantage of their discretionary income, you've also gotta get adults to shop all the time. And you want them to shop the same way teens do - not prudently, not with discretion, not "I need this, but not today; I shopped last week, that's enough."

You want them to be impulsive, teenage shoppers and you want them to want all the junk and stuff that teenagers want. The result is an effort actually to dumb down adults and turn them into teen consumers, and it's been very successful, Tavis. I'll give you an example here.

Tavis: Please.

Barber: In 2004 - you can trace this, it's the same in 2000 and 2006 - the most popular four movies in the world among adults, teens, children, everybody - not just teenagers, but everywhere - were “Shrek II,” “Spiderman II,” the latest Harry Potter film of that year, and “The Incredibles.” Four nice films, but designed for kids. They were bought by adults; they were sent around the world and marketed all over the world.

So that in effect, we have kids' fare being marketed all over the world. Same with fast food. Fast food's for kids who don't want to sit down and eat, but now it's marketed to kids everywhere. Athletic gear, same thing. So a lot of what's being marketed is being marketed for teen taste to adults, and for that to work you’ve gotta turn adults into impulsive shoppers.

Tavis: All right, we all know adults who, of course, act like children, but there is a difference between being a child and being an adult. If children are being - no pun intended - toyed with and played with and brought into this, teased by these advertisers, teased by this notion of consumerism, we give the kids a pass. Let's give the kids a pass for the moment. But for we adults who don't necessarily deserve a pass, how do we take this hook, line, and sinker?

Barber: Well, that's a great question, and here's, I think, what happened. Traditionally, parents have seen themselves as gatekeepers - and by the way, so have ministers and rabbis and imans. They see themselves teachers to - university professors - protect the children. That’s been kind of the mantra of a healthy society: protect the children against predators, whether the predators come from the state, whether they come from the marketplace.

Protect them. Be gatekeepers. And traditionally, all the institutions helped us do that. But today, market institutions and increasingly television and the Internet are going the other way. They're saying, "Let's get the parents, gatekeepers, out of the way. Let's 'liberate' the children. Let's 'empower' the children," which means make them consumers in the marketplace and get Dad and Mom out of the way.

So in effect, we have an adult social set of institutions making war on parents and telling them "Get out of the way, do what your kid says, don't stand in their way." And that's devastating, because it means parents don't have a support system and it's much harder for them than it used to be to do what they ought to do and want to do, which is to protect their kids.

Tavis: Let me offer this as the exit question. You and I were last summer at a conference where there were a number of religious speakers who were presenting - and you just mentioned a bunch of imans and rabbis and ministers a moment ago. That reminds me of a story in the Bible by Jonah, who was swallowed by the whale - more exact, for those folks who are going to hit me on my hermeneutics, he was actually (laughter) swallowed by a big fish, technically, and not a whale.

But Jonah finds himself in the belly of this whale, as you well know, and eventually, he works his way out. So you argue that we have been swallowed whole as citizens by this consumerism. How do we come out of the belly of this big fish, the belly of this whale?

Barber: Well, we'll never climb out as consumers. We can only climb back out as citizens. We have to retrieve our civic power, we have to re-empower ourselves as real choosers who, through our democratic institutions make capitalism work. Capitalism and Democracy have worked best when they’ve worked together. During the Roosevelt era, during the sixties.

They serve each other. One has freedom and entrepreneurship; the other has regulation and justice. You put them together, you get a great system. That's what we need to do: put them together again. To do that, we have to retrieve our sense of citizenship and think of ourselves not just as consumers, but also as citizens.

Tavis: Is that possible?

Barber: Sure it's possible. The great thing is, even the consuming market people and the advertisers don't like the society that's being created. And we see among kids' resistance to this, we see among adults an insistence that they retrieve their role as gatekeepers, and we see a new assertion of Americans as citizens in their country willing to use public institutions to regulate and direct capitalism in healthy directions. That’s what needed.

Tavis: Benjamin Barber always makes me think, and the new book meets the test. "Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilizes Adults, and Swallows Citizens Whole," by Dr. Benjamin Barber. Doc, as always, good to see you.

Barber: Thank you so much, Tavis.

Tavis: Glad to have you on.

Barber: It's really good to see you.