E-mail a friendBenjamin Barber
airdate August 20, 2009
Benjamin Barber is a noted political theorist who consults regularly with institutions and leaders in the U.S. and Europe. He's a senior fellow at Demos and president-director of CivWorld at Demos, the international NGO that sponsors Interdependence Day and the Paradigm Project. His books include Jihad vs. McWorld and Consumed. Barber also co-wrote the prize-winning CBS/PBS series, The Struggle for Democracy. He earned his Ph.D. from Harvard and was a founding editor of the distinguished international journal, Political Theory.
Political theorist weighs in on the healthcare discussion and the public option component. (2:04)
Full interview. (11:19)
Benjamin Barber
Tavis: Dr. Benjamin Barber is a renowned political theorist and the founder of the annual Interdependence Day conference. This year's event, which focuses on the need for increased global cooperation, is being held in Istanbul, Turkey, from September 10th through the 12th. As with years past I am honored to attend this wonderful event. Ben Barber joins us tonight from New York. Ben Barber, as always, nice to talk to you, sir.
Benjamin Barber: Great to talk with you, Tavis.
Tavis: Before I jump into Interdependence Day and explain what it is for those who have not heard about it and why it's becoming such a global phenomenon, with all kinds of folk around the world participation, a couple of questions of news.
Last night on this program we had a fascinating conversation with Dr. Howard Dean. I don't want to color the question too much, but what's your sense of how this healthcare debate is playing out or is not playing out, as it were?
Barber: Well, Tavis, if we're going to have fair healthcare in America and not have single-payer, which means the government does it all, then there has to be, there must be a public option, which is to say the government has to provide a competitive alternative to private insurance companies.
And this talk about well, maybe we don't actually need a public option, maybe we can get a couple of civil society co-ops to do something, is really nonsense. If there is to be healthcare, government has to be present with a public option so there's genuine competition and the insurance companies know they've got to offer fair prices and fair contracts to those who they contract with.
So frankly, I don't think there will be healthcare at all unless there's a public option, and I hope to God that means there'll be a public option.
Tavis: Interdependence in part means having civil dialogue with our friends and neighbors around the world. What's your sense of how these uncivil conversations of late have been taking place around this contentious issue of healthcare?
Barber: (Laughs) That's a great way to put it, Tavis, because it's true - we're used to being rather uncivil with our friends, colleagues, partners and our adversaries abroad. But nowadays I must say I think we're more uncivil to one another than we are to the Iranians or to the North Koreans. It's quite extraordinary the way in which people come to town meetings with their congressman and shout them down and call them fascists and so on, because they want to talk about - just talk about - possibilities of public option, a more balanced and fair healthcare code than we currently have.
So it's very discouraging to see so many Americans think that citizenship means talk radio-style, polarized, angry polemics, and I hope we get over that and can get back to a real and honest discussion about healthcare, because that's the only way we're going to see a public option and that's what we're going to have to have.
Tavis: Howard Dean on healthcare last night, and just a minute ago, of course, the conversation with Arne Duncan, the Education secretary, about the state of education in this country. What's your sense of this $100 billion that President Obama has earmarked for education in the stimulus package? Is that enough, is it being focused in the right way? Your sense of, as a professor, your whole life dedicated to education, the state of education in this country.
Barber: It's not enough, Tavis. We need a lot more for education. The stimulus package has been much more, I think, productive than a lot of people thought it was going to be, but unfortunately an awful lot of it's going into so-called shovel-ready projects - roads, construction, and so on - and we desperately need the money in our schools and universities.
If you look at state universities across the country today, they are all cutting their budgets one after the other at a time when we need them more than ever to provide a public option for young people to go to college.
I think in back of the problem with the public option in education and the public option in health is really a deep American misunderstanding of what public means. Public means democratic, it means us. It means us providing healthcare for our loved ones, for our elders, and for people who need it. Public education means us providing education for our children, for our young ones, for our brothers and sisters.
And we somehow have this crazy notion that public means them, it, socialism, some bureaucratic government, when in fact it's really about us as democratic citizens taking care of our own. So I would like to see a lot more money going into public education, I'd see a lot more understanding going into the need for a public option in health, which would in effect provide Medicare and Medicaid-style health - 90 percent of the American people love their Medicaid and their Medicare - for others who need it and can't afford private health insurance.
Tavis: I could take your last comment to mean - I don't know if you want me to take it to mean this, so let me just ask you - I could take your last comment to mean that in this era of Obama, this era of openness and of change and of hope and Americans coming together that Americans are becoming more nativist. Do you mean to suggest that? And if so, what's behind Americans becoming more nativist? That is to say, turning more inward?
Barber: Well, it's hard for me, Tavis, to discern whether Americans are becoming more nativist or the media and politicians are becoming more so -
Tavis: Ah, I hear you.
Barber: - and putting Americans (laughter) kind of in a cage where they don't belong. My sense is even with a president who, as you know, I greatly admire, I think he's somewhat behind the curve of the American people, not out ahead.
I think Americans are ready for the public option. I think they are ready for greater investment by the government, by the state, in education for young people, and I think he's maybe been a little bit scared, cowed into nervousness by what's going on with, as you talked about, the angry, polarized dissent that we're hearing in town meetings and that we're hearing from public radio.
People screaming fascist, people screaming socialist. Everyone who says there's something socialist about the president's education program or the president's health program has never set foot in a socialist country. I have, I know what it is.
Democracy has nothing to do with socialism. It's about Americans doing for their fellow citizens what those citizens can't always do for themselves, and providing real competition by yes, encouraging the private sector to compete by also giving them something to compete with - a genuine public option in education, in health, and in other fields as well.
Tavis: Let me move now to Interdependence Day. You mentioned President Obama. He was in Turkey, as you well know, earlier this year, speaking to a number of students in that country, and here we come - or go, I should say - to Turkey in a matter of days with Interdependence Day.
Let me start by asking, for those who don't know, what Interdependence Day is, how it got started, what's it all about?
Barber: Well, the term interdependence refers not to some aspiration to have world government or everybody to get along, but to the reality that almost every challenge we face in the modern world, from ecology and global warming to the universal disease like swine flu and HIV and Hong Kong flu, they're around everywhere, to global markets, some of which are predatory, so the labor forces that move around the world at will despite fences and walls and sovereign forces.
It refers to the reality that we live in an interdependent world where all of the challenges we face are interdependent. We started Interdependence Day a few days, really, after 9/11, when it became so apparent that the United States that had been insulated by its oceans and by its bounty from foreign invasion and attack was in this new interdependent world of the 21st century itself vulnerable to new interdependent forces of terrorism.
And we designated September 12th, the day after September 11th, as a day to think about and reflect on the challenges of interdependence and the possibilities of more interdependent public policy and foreign policy.
Since then we've been in six global cities around the world and this is the seventh year of meeting with religious, artistic, cultural, political leaders, a youth summit as well as older and distinguished guests, coming together to look at and examine all of the issues, all of the challenges of interdependence and find out whether there's a way to do the things together we can no longer do alone, one nation at a time.
Tavis: I'm wondering whether or not - and I want to phrase this the right way - the spirit of this conference, you suspect, will be different this year as the first one where we as Americans go to attend (audio skip) American president, Du Bois, the great Black intellectual - W. E. B. Du Bois, many, many decades ago talked about interdependence. How will this, you think, be different, how will the reception be different, the conversation different, when as Americans we go to participate in an international conference with the backdrop of an African American president?
Barber: Well, as you said earlier, Tavis, President Obama opened his international campaign after the G20 conference in Turkey. He's been in Cairo since then, he is the new multicultural, internationalist face of the United States. He has an open and fresh attitude towards the world which has already begun to change foreign policy and change attitudes abroad towards America.
So I think indeed this Interdependence Day, our seventh one, in Istanbul will have a new sense of promise, a new sense of hope, because the most powerful and important country in the world, which historically has been isolated, insulated, doing its own thing, has come to recognize it belongs to and is part of the world, and leadership means America working in and cooperating with the world, not trying unilaterally to impose its will on the world.
So Istanbul and Interdependence Day I think will be shaped and influenced by the new Obama administration and what that represents to the world about America becoming part of that world.
Tavis: One of the nation's most regarded political theorists, Ben Barber, founder and creator of Interdependence Day this year in Istanbul, Turkey. Dr. Barber, nice to have you on the program and I'll see you in a few weeks, I hope.
Barber: I'll see you in Istanbul, Tavis, great.
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