Remembering Howard Zinn
As the legendary activist and author discussed in one of his final
interviews, he wants to be remembered for "introducing a different
way of thinking about the world," and as "somebody who gave people a
feeling of hope and power that they didn't have before."
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A Conversation with Howard Zinn
http://www.playboy.com/articles/howard-zinn-interview/index.html
By Sanhita SinhaRoy
Jan 29, 2010
In His Final Interview, the Historian and Activist Discusses the
Country's Economic Turmoil
Howard Zinn died January 27 of an apparent heart attack in Santa
Monica, California at the age of 87. I interviewed Zinn twice for
Playboy; the final time was shortly before his death. (An edited
version of our interview with Zinn will run in the April 2010 issue
of Playboy.) I've known Zinn since 2001 when I began working at The
Progressive, and I met him in 2004 at the magazine's anniversary
celebration, where he had just given one of his typical impassioned
and humorous speeches. After the talk he came up to me and gave me a
hug. He told me I was a great editorwords I will never forget. Zinn
had a gentle way about him, and he was always gracious and humble
despite his fame. At the end of our final interview he asked me to
send him several issues of Playboy because he was too embarassed to
buy them at the store. Plus, he said, it would give him "an excuse to
read all of Playboy and not just my interview."
He will be missed.
--
PLAYBOY: What's your take on our jobless recovery?
ZINN: Unfortunately, the jobless situation calls for much bolder
measures than anybody has proposed. The Obama administration
recognizes the government must play some role in reducing
joblessness, but its role isn't large enough to deal with the
unemployment situation. We need something that goes beyond what was
done in the New Deal Era of Franklin D. Roosevelt, when the
government unabashedly created the Works Progress Administration,
which then created 8 million jobs.
The government needs to guarantee jobs to everybody who is willing to
work. If private enterprise won't hire people, the government must
hire people. The government hired people in the 1930s. Hundreds of
thousands of young people worked in the Civilian Conservation Corps.
Instead of drafting them into the Army in order to solve the
unemployment problem, it gave these young people a salary. They lived
in camps around the country and did enormously useful work restoring
forests and cleaning up rivers and building bridges. The WPA itself
did a huge amount of good work around the country, and the people
worked directly for the government.
We need a federal arts program in which the government will pay
musicians, directors, actors, poets, writers to do what they do best:
produce operas and murals and plays and books. It would take that
kind of a bold program to even begin to solve the problem of unemployment.
PLAYBOY: It doesn't appear likely Obama would get behind such a plan.
ZINN: The Obama administration has been timid in the face of cries of
big government. The administration hasn't come directly to the
American people and said, "There's nothing wrong with big
government." In fact, the Republicans want big government. The war
lovers want big government. There's no bigger government than what
you have when you go to war. The war is a government program, and
we've always had big government in this country.
The Obama administration could educate the American people about
this. Obama has a public platform. The whole idea of the Constitution
was to create a government strong enough to do the things the
founding fathers wanted it to do. But the big government that exists
works on behalf of the elite, of the wealthy classes. When government
begins to do things for the poor or for the middle class, the cry
goes up, "Oh, this is big government!" Obama needs to meet that
accusation head-on and educate the American people about the
necessity for government to do things private enterprise will not do,
like give free health care to everybody. When you're intimidated by
accusations of big governmentas the Obama administration has
beenyou draw back from what you need, such as true universal free
health care, the single-payer system. If you had a very simple plan,
which is a single-payer systemthe kind of thing they have in Canada
and France and Germany and Italy, where people have free health
carethe people can understand that. They can't understand
complicated compromises of a public option and private option. If you
educate the public, you'd have a public that makes demands to their
Congressmen, which would push Congress toward a different way of
thinking, or at least a different way of acting.
PLAYBOY: Should the administration frame health care around job creation?
ZINN: When issues are raised about it costing too much money, there's
a simple response: "We're paying $670 billion on a military budget."
Well, that is big money; that is big spending, and we could cut down
on that. One of the problems with taking care of the job situation or
taking care of the health situation is that we're expending our
national treasuries on war. You have to go into the delicate area of
foreign policy, which the Obama administration has been unwilling to
do. It has been unwilling to cut the military budget, unwilling to
withdraw troops from the Middle East. You become limited in what you
can do in domestic policy.
PLAYBOY: Can our government rebuild our manufacturing base?
ZINN: Well, there's not much you can do about companies that decide
to go overseas because they're going to get cheap labor and less
control over environmental issues. Our government has to take care of
people who have lost their jobs, which is why government-guaranteed
employment is important.
PLAYBOY: Is globalization here to stay?
ZINN: You can't stop globalization. You can try to reach
international agreements about environmental requirements, and try to
reach international agreements about minimum wages for people in
other countries. That's a difficult job, but ultimately countries
will stop going overseas when they face regulations they don't want,
or face wage requirements they can't meet.
PLAYBOY: Is the term jobless recovery an oxymoron?
ZINN: Well, it's certainly not an economic recovery. The language of
economics is based on the stock market. If business people are doing
well and stockholders are doing well, and if the Dow Jones average
goes up, it's assumed that we have economic recovery. But you have to
measure economic recovery not by how people are doing at the top but
how people are doing at the bottom. If people are still unemployed or
people are still losing their homes, then you don't have economic
recovery. They ought to stop giving the Dow Jones average every night
on television. Instead they should give figures on unemployment and
figures on foreclosures.
PLAYBOY: Economists predict foreclosures will continue to climb.
ZINN: That's another area where the government has to be bold and
declare a moratorium. Declare that people are not going to lose their
homes if they can't pay their mortgages. Let the banks suffer, but
don't let people suffer. Instead of giving a trillion dollars to
financial institutions and hoping these institutions will make it
easier for people to pay their mortgages, the government has to help
people directly. The Obama administration has insisted on doing
things through the private sector, which is really the trickle-down
theorythe idea that if you give people at the top a bailout of $600
billion or $700 billion or a bailout of a $1 trillion, you hope they
will use that money to help people in need. But the people at the top
won't use that money to help people because their motive is profit,
not humanitarian concerns.
PLAYBOY: There has been some of this resistance to foreclosures at
the local level. Local law enforcement has suspended evictions, and
nonprofits have engaged in civil disobedience in front of foreclosed
properties.
ZINN: That's exactly what is needed. If the government isn't going to
stop foreclosures, citizens must. This goes back to the Revolutionary
period, to Shays's Rebellion in Massachusetts, when thousands of
farmers gathered around courthouses and would not let the courts take
away people's farms. And it goes back to the 1930s when people
organized unemployment councils, tenants' organizations. When people
were evicted, they moved the furniture back into the apartmentsit
was direct action by citizens where the government won't take action.
That is what is needed today. If citizens began to act this way, if
people simply will not permit homes to be taken away from their
neighbors, then the government will recognize it has to step in and
do the same, but do it efficiently and legally.
PLAYBOY: Obama signed the stimulus package into law on February 17,
2009. How do you think it has performed over the past year?
ZINN: Well, the stimulus package is based on getting money to the
top, and it's a very weak beginning of what should be a government
program to guarantee jobs and health care and housing protection for
people. So the stimulus plan is too little, too late. What is need
now is not a little jab of a stimulus. What is needed is a great
overhaul of domestic policy that then requires a great overhaul of
foreign policy. Obama talked about bringing troops home from Iraq,
but then he sends troops to Afghanistan. I don't think the American
people want to maintain a war in Afghanistan. The American people are
tired of war, and the administration should recognize that and act
upon that. Then there would be an enormous amount of money available
to do much more than the small steps that were taken in the stimulus package.
PLAYBOY: Some argue Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernake and former
chair Alan Greenspan led us into this mess. Yet Bernake may get a
second term, which doesn't indicate Obama's campaign motto of "change."
ZINN: Exactly. He talked about change and then he appointed Lawrence
Summers as one of this chief advisors. And Robert Rubin. These are
people who participated in all of those activities that led to this
financial collapse.
No, we have not seen that kind of change, even on matters of
constitutional rights. There could hardly be anything more obvious
and flagrant than what happened at Guantánamo and what is continuing
to happen at Guantánamo. Here Obama promised to close the base. Well,
it's taking him a long time to do that, and he's coming up with all
sorts of solutions that are inhumane, such as taking these people
from Guantánamowho have not been tried, who have not been found
guiltyand proposes sending them to maximum security prisons. We
don't send people to maximum security prisons before they have had a
trial, before they have been found guilty of any crime. Obama is
presumably a constitutional lawyer, but even on something like civil
liberties, civil rights, the things he made strong pledges on, he has failed.
We need a citizens movement in this country that is made up of those
people who voted for Obama. This huge number of people voted for what
worked for him and these are his constituency, and these are the
people whose desires he is ignoring. These are the people he made
pledges to, and he's violating those pledges. These are the people
who should now become a force that says to Obama, "We insist you come
through on the promises you made."
PLAYBOY: As a historian and as someone who has lived through many of
the nation's economic ups and downs, how is this economic turmoil
different from past ones?
ZINN: People have been reminded of 1929 Depression. It hasn't gotten
that bad. At that time one third of the labor force was unemployed.
Now, of course, we have a bigger unemployment rate than the
statistics show. When they say "Oh, there's 10 percent unemployed,"
it really means there's 20 percent unemployed. So it's not as bad as
it was in 1929.
The most accurate way to measure how bad it is not by the superficial
signs of how the stock market is doing, but to measure things by how
ordinary people are living, and how many of them are losing their
homes, and how many are losing their jobs, and how many kids are
still going hungry, and how budgets are being cut for education and
health. We need to start rethinking our idea of what an economic crisis is.
To put it another way, this country has been in a continual economic
crisis from the beginning of its history. What we call economic
crisis is when things get very, very bad. But when things are not
that bad, in normal times, one out of five kids grows up hungry. In
normal times people lose their jobs and people have their homes
foreclosed, and people live in terrible housing conditions. That's
normal. And when that situation exists, they don't call it an economic crisis.
We have to redefine the idea of what is an economic crisis. When you
have an economic system in which wealth gravitates to the top and you
have a permanent underclass of poor people living in poor homes and
without health care, then you are in constant economic crisis.
You have to rethink what kind of economic system you live under and
take bold steps to change that.
PLAYBOY: Now that the Democrats are on the cusp of losing their
filibuster-proof supermajority in Congress, and what will this mean
for financial reform?
ZINN: Well, first of all, the Democrats will blame the fact that the
Republicans for the filibuster, but the fact is the Democrats have
been so weak on financial reform, so weak on every aspect of the
economy that the many problems, not the Republicans or their
opportunity to…or their ability of filibuster,
The main problem is the Democratic Party is not a fighting party on
economic issues. Its reforms are so modest, so weak, so timid that
even if these reforms were passed over the filibuster, they wouldn't
be the fundamental reforms. I don't put as much stock on the
importance of the filibuster as I do in the state of the Democratic
Party, which is rather pitiful.
PLAYBOY: What about the jobs that could potentially be created if the
Democrats were to maintain their supermajority?
ZINN: Well, what current jobs would be created if the Democrats were
to maintain their majority? I haven't seen them propose a real jobs
bill. The economic stimulus that Obama has proposed and that
Democrats supported is a very small step in the direction we need to
go. We have a serious unemployment problem in this country. The 10
percent unemployment statistic underestimates the real unemployment
situation because it doesn't account for people who have stopped
asking for unemployment Insurance and people who have been
discouraged from looking for work.
Let's put it this way, the Obama administration and the Democratic
Party have not been willing to go as far as the 70-year-old New Deal
jobs program. That program created jobs for 8 million Americans,
which in proportion to the population today would mean jobs for at
least 15 million Americans. But the Democratic Party is stuck, and
Obama is stuck, in the idea of doing things through the market, doing
things through private business and depending on private businesses
to create jobs. It's like easing homeowners' problems by giving money
to the banks or giving subsidies or tax benefits to employers in the
hope they then will create jobs.
PLAYBOY: So you don't think there's a difference between Coakley and
Brown in terms of job creation and how it will affect the midterm
elections in November?
ZINN: Coakley and Brown are another matter. There's a bigger
difference between Coakley and Brown than there is generally between
the Democratic and Republican Party. But even so, the difference is
not a fundamental one. As far as I know Coakley doesn't stand for the
kind of bold job creation program I am talking about. There are a few
people in Congress who are in favor of such a creative program. I'm
thinking of Representative Dennis Kucinich and I'm thinking of
Senator Bernie Sanders, but obviously they're a tiny minority.
The Democratic Party is following the principle of the "trickle down"
theory. If you want to help people who are in need, you give the
money to people who are not in need and those people who are not in
need, namely the business interests the corporations, they will then
help the people who are in need. Now, this will not happen; the
principle is wrong. The government should be giving direct economic
aid to people. The government should be creating jobs for anybody who
wants a job and right after World War II the Congress passed a full
Employment Act. Well, it was words not action, but the principle was
that the government would be responsible, seeing to it, that anybody
who wanted a job could get a job.
Well, that principle enunciated the Employment Act of 1946 has never
been followed through because of this ideological block of the market
system, capitalism, business and a fear of government programs. The
Democratic Party should not be afraid of government programs, and
Obama should come boldly before the American publicwhich has been
indoctrinated by both parties to think, Oh, government mustn't do
this. Whenever the Democratic Party or Obama are accused of having
big government, they retreats from it, instead of saying "Big
government can be very good." Look at Social Security, look at
Medicare, look at the post office, look at the G.I. Bill. There is
historic precedent for the government doing things that private
enterprise will not do, and the Democratic Party has been unwilling
to break with this really cautious ideology of doing things through
the market system.
PLAYBOY: Coakley losing to Brown, or the Democrats losing seats in
the midterms, really doesn't make that much of a difference, then?
ZINN: Well, we always are in a position of having to elect people who
make small differences, and sure, therefore I will vote for Coakley
over Brown and urge other people to do so, understanding that the
difference is not a huge one. Just as I will vote for the Democratic
Party most of the time over the Republican Party knowing that the
difference will not be the kind of difference we should have. So it's
too easy to caricature people who think both parties are inadequate,
to caricature them as saying…well, they think both parties are
exactly the same. No, they're not exactly the same, but they're not
different enough to solve the fundamental problems that we have in
this country.
PLAYBOY: So what can the average American do?
ZINN: Not much alone, individually. The only time citizens can do
anything is if they organize, if they create a movement, if they act
collectively, if they join their strengths. The trade union movement,
of course, is an example of that. The trade union movement is weak,
and the trade union movement needs to become stronger. Citizens need
to organize in such a way that they can present the members of
Congress with demands and say, "We are going to vote for you if you
listen to us," or "We're not going to vote for you if you don't
listen to us." In other words, people have to organize to create a
citizens movement. We have to think about the 1930s as a model;
people organized in the face of economic crisisorganized into
tenants' movements and unemployment councils and of course they
organized a new trade union movement, the CIO. So we need people to
organize. Of course, this is not easy, and it won't happen overnight.
Because it's not easy the tendency is to throw up your hands and not
do anything, but we have to start at some point, and the starting
point is people getting together with other people and creating
organizations. For instance, people can get together to stop
evictions. Neighbors can get together. This is something that can be
done at a local level. This was done in the 1930s when neighbors got
together to stop the evictions of people who weren't able to pay
their rent and the 1930s were full of such incidents. Tenants'
councils had been formed and when people were evicted from their
tenements, their neighbors gathered and put their furniture back in the house.
Now, today foreclosures are taking place, people are losing their
homes. Maybe we should get together and not allow people to be
evicted from their homes. They are substituting for a government
which is not acting on their behalf because if the government were
acting on their behalf, the government would stop foreclosures, just
stop it cold. So what people have to do is sort of look around in
their community, get together with other people and begin to organize.
PLAYBOY: Well, some may argue too that the formation of Tea Parties
ZINN: The problem with the Tea Parties is that it's a very nice idea
to have tea parties. That's a very nice idea for indignant people to
get together. What I've seen in these Tea Parties is that their
program is not a very progressive program.
They're getting together for what seem to be unprogressive policies.
I don't know a lot about what the Tea Parties stand for, but what
I've seen suggests that the main object of the Tea Parties seems to
be to unseat Obama, and to me that's not the problem. I know a
right-wing radio host promotes the Tea Parties, and that suggest to
me that the Tea Parties are kind of right-wing populist movement. We
don't need a right-wing populist movement. It was a right-wing
populist movement that put the Nazis into power in Germany.
PLAYBOY: But in terms of people getting together and organizing, they
could say they are doing that.
ZINN: Yes, in those terms. We could learn from the tactic of getting
people together. That's what we should be doing: getting together for
purposes different than the purposes of the Tea Party.
PLAYBOY: Most of the people who are going to be motivated to organize
and assemble are people who have lost their jobs, but there's so much
pressure to constantly look for work that they don't necessarily have
the time or the will to get together with one another.
ZINN: This has always been true. The people who are in trouble must
take care of their personal needs and their security. People have
always found when they had the incentive, when they had the strong
enough motivation, people have always found the time and the energy
to get together and organize in spite of their personal difficulties.
That's been a constant all the way through American history.
PLAYBOY: In the past when people have had similar economic problems,
they haven't been in such dire debt, which especially forces a person
to find a job and focus on yourself or your family.
ZINN: That's certainly true, but no matter how they try to find a
job, no matter how they are pushed by the fact that they are in debt,
the fact is that the jobs are not there, and therefore the solution
to their problem is to organize in such a way to demand that the
government create jobs for them.
PLAYBOY: Many European countries have steady unemployment hovering
around 10 percent. Why is it wrong if the U.S. has the same?
ZINN: The difference is that these other countries have very generous
unemployment benefits. France has a high unemployment rate, and the
unemployed there get 60 and 75 percent of the salary. Our unemployed
get nothing like that. Unemployment benefits in France last several
years. The government has a responsibility to make sure that
unemployed people have an adequate standard of living by giving
generous unemployment benefits over a long enough period of time.
PLAYBOY: And health care is extended too for those who are unemployed.
ZINN: Well, of course, yes. The difference with other countries is
whether you're employed or unemployed you get health care. You get
free health care. Health care is not dependent on whether you're
employed or unemployed. In this country it is dependent and this is
one of the scandals of the Democratic Party that it has not fought
for true universal health care that is free government-organized
health care as they have in Canada and France. I mean the United
Nations puts ranks the United States about 37th in health care. Here
we are, the richest country in the world, and we're ranked 37th in
health care. There are all these other countries that are ahead of
us, and the fact that the Democratic Party cannot move boldly and ask
for a government health care even when they sort of compromise and
compromise and end up with, well, with We won't have public health
care, but we'll have a public option for the possibility of public
health care, and even that gets thrown out as we have seen happen.
When you start with a compromise, you end up with a compromise of
compromise of a compromise, and that's what has happened to health
care in the Obama administration.
PLAYBOY: Circling back to what happens if Brown takes the late Ted
Kennedy's seat, doesn't that mean good-bye to health care, good-bye
to financial reform?
ZINN: Well, it may very well be, but it should be recognized that for
the Democrats to so-call "win" on health care reform is a very feeble
victory, and so, yes, you take what you can, but you understand what
you're getting, and what we are getting in health care reform is
really flagrantly inadequate.
PLAYBOY: To steer back to the economic situation. What will a
prolonged unemployment mean?
ZINN: It will mean that the already great gap between the superrich
and everybody else will be greater. Maybe the growth in unemployment
will finally lead people to organize in a way that they haven't
organized before. I mean if something terrible is happening in the
economy, you hope it can at least impel people to become angry and
militant and do what was done in the 1930s. But certainly the
continuation of unemployment is not going to be a good thing.
PLAYBOY: With Thatcher's Britain in the early 1980s, the lack of
response from the government meant a two-decade-long recovery.
ZINN: England at least has been ahead of us in the matter of social
policy, the matter of health care and other social policies despite
the Thatcher regime. One thing that happens is when liberal
administrations are replaced by conservative administration, the
liberal administration has put through reforms that are then very
hard to destroy, and so the principles of Roosevelt reformseven
though we've had a succession of centrist Democrats and conservative
Republicans since Rooseveltthe basic Roosevelt reforms of Social
Security and unemployment insurance, they've remained. The basic
reforms of the 1960s with Medicare, Medicaid they have remained.
Well, Clinton preceded over the worst case of the destruction of a
New Deal reform, but my point is, if you fight for policy, even if
you then lose the election, it's very hard to dislodge those policies.
I was just talking this afternoon to a group of trade unionists
gathered here in Cambridge, and one of them, who is from Australia,
pointed out that in Australia there was a socialist prime minister
who was not elected for a second term. However, while he was in
office, he put through a group of reforms in health care and other
economic reforms that were not overturned. I cite this because the
argument very often for the Obama administration, and for being so
cautious is that it's important for Obama to win the next election.
And my point is no, it's not important for Obama to win the next
electionnot as important as putting through economic policies that
will then be hard to dislodge no matter who is elected.
.
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