At Week's End; 723; AWE #723 Recaliming our Democracy: Sam Harris

Thank you very much for joining us today, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much Thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you Thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much,

thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very much, thank you very very much about anything as large as world hunger. How have you started? Blacksen, I always present myself as exhibit A in the ordinary person can make a difference. You said young man, I'm not sure that's applicable anymore, I'm 47 years old. For the first 31 years in my life, I felt hopeless about solving any big problem. World hunger environment, you name it if it was big, I felt hopeless about it, I say that's ordinary, I say that's what most people feel. Well, the polls tell us that. Great disillusion. Great cynicism. Yeah. And I'm talking just about an issue. Then when you add politics on top, then you really have despair. But 15 years ago, I realized that my hopelessness wasn't about technologies for growing food or providing basic health. That wasn't it. It was human nature. I felt hopeless about that people would just never get around to doing the things that needed to be done. Beginning in Washington, D .C. Sure. A lot of human nature there. No, absolutely. But I realized the obvious that there was a slice of

human nature. I had some control over my own. And I really just started to get involved. I mean, commitment for me used to be, I will if you will, commitment, you know, I'll recycle. If you'll recycle. Oh, you won't? Then I won't either. Well, what difference does it make if I do? But it just became, I will. And where results started is, I began speaking high school students, 7 ,000 high school students. 1978, 1979. And before I walked into the first classrooms, I read some statements from Jimmy Carter's presidential commission on hunger and others that called for the political will to end hunger. So I asked high school students one question, what's the name of your member of Congress? This is where a result starts. I don't want to know if you met him. I don't want to know if you have written them, just their name. And 200 new and 6 ,800 did not know the name of the member of Congress. And that's where results started out of that gap. And we realized we were going to have to teach the skills of democracy, starting at the most basic

level. Now, you have to add, this was 1978, 1979, a couple of months ago, in college, I asked 30 students to name the member of Congress. This was in the Department of Government and International Affairs, 5 new, 25 didn't know. So it's not a well, it took a long time for this decay to happen. We won't reverse it any time soon. Tell me about results. How did it actually start? What was the first thing you did once you learned the name of the Congress? Well, I started asking all these members of Congress, these students, the name of the member of Congress, and I moved to Los Angeles and I got involved in an event called the Los Angeles World Hunger event. And I met a couple and they said, well, we're inspired, but we're frustrated. We don't know what to do. And I said, well, when I lived in Miami, where I'd moved from, I had a group of friends who used to write letters once a month. So five days later, we were at their house writing some letters to members of Congress. Within two months, I was driving around to six locations, leaving these little groups. And it was from that start that results would grow. Although we didn't have any

paid staff for four and a half years. So we had time. So I would I say trial and error into the innovations that I say we, there are thousands of Americans out there who do write their congressman. They get back this now familiar, I think it's called in Washington, the Robo form. There are legions of baseless people in the basement of the capital who turn these things out. Thank you so much for your letter about X, Y, or Z. I'm on top of it. Don't worry about a thing or I'll take your views into consideration. The kiss off, the famous Washington kisser. Well, our newsletter quarterly is called entry point. It means writing a letter is the entry point, not an ending point, just the beginning. Yeah, just the beginning. And so we have I think a rather unique methodology of encouraging people to go beyond that letter. And maybe I could touch on it for a moment, sure. Every month, second Saturday of the month, we have a nationwide telephone conference call with 300 volunteers on the phone together from Anchorage, Alaska to Miami, Florida, Albuquerque and Santa

Fe included. And we have a guest speaker almost every month. In March, the guest speaker was Congressman of Stabontaurus of Los Angeles. The month before Jim Grant, the executive director of UNICEF, UN Children's Fund. So you can sit right here in this community with a team of 10 or 15 others and link in not only to your local team and a national team, but a guest speaker each month. That's one of our tools that I think is unique where people feel so disconnected, usually, to connect people. But how do you bring this to bear? What kind of pressure we know, the meaning of that term in Washington? What sort of pressure do you bring to bear on the people who make the decision? Well, let me give you an example. We have been lobbying for years on a thing called micro enterprise poverty lending. Tiny loans, mostly for the poorest women. And one of our board members founded a bank in Bangladesh. That's been a model for replications around the world, including right here in this community

and this country. Woman might get a tiny loan in Bangladesh by a milkhouse, sell the milk, make a profit. Feed her family better, put a tin roof on the house so it doesn't rain in anymore, etc. Well, in 1987, we started lobbying for this. And this gives you a sense of what we do. We wanted to set aside $50 million for small loans, mostly for poor women. Sounded like a no -brainer to us, but that year a Reagan administration official was quoted anonymously in a Christian science monitor article as saying, the poor have neither the talent, skills, nor IQ to get out of poverty end of quote, which is why we shouldn't give tiny loans to poor women. So that's what we're up against. He was saying, let's give larger loans, higher up the ladder to people who could hire them, rather than give them a chance with a small loan. That year results volunteers generated 100 editorials, not letters to the editor, 200 more of those. And your viewers, I think, will realize that

editorials are usually comments on the news, and small loans for poor women were not in the news in 1987. So this is volunteers on conference calls with guest speakers, learning to speak about this stuff, then picking up the phone, I say nervous finger, pushing the buttons and calling the newspapers. So we're really ginning up press pressures for small things. On members of Congress, from their home distance. And then they'd send the editorials to Washington, and we'd send them four at a time to 120 key people, members of Congress. There's no talent, skills, or IQ guy would get the editorial. Anyone who needed lots of those in the Congress. This is true. And so at the end of the year, $50 million was set aside for tiny loans for poor women. But we weren't dummies, we knew the administration opposed it. The next year we did an oversight report to find out if the money went where it was supposed to. It didn't. The three lead sponsors then asked for a GAO investigation. They corroborated

our findings, and finally it started to happen. And 30 of us, including two from New Mexico, flew, paid our own way, flew to El Salvador, and visited one of these programs that was funded by this campaign. But it took the lobbying, the oversight report, the GAO report, and finally. This is not for the weak need or faint of heart, but it does work. You can say that about democracy. This is true for the weak, yeah. How many of you are doing this? You and what army are you watching? Well, back in 87, there were just a couple of hundred of us in communities around the country. These were volunteers. Volunteers, yeah. And so, but well trained, well coached, and the message is this success wasn't the result of the bankers in this country or the college professors. It was ordinary folks who said, I'm going to learn about this, learn to speak about it, pick up the phone, and open my mouth. How do you answer the argument

that it's all well and good for the Congress to feel pressure on something marginal and high -minded, like micro loans for the very poor and the third world. But if you start running into those issues or areas that really affect the Congress, campaign spending reform, health care reform, which we're now fighting, welfare reform, areas that are much more bread and butter, sometimes life and death for a sitting politician, not at all marginal. Does the same pressure work? I mean, it seems all very high -minded and a bit dainty. Well, I didn't feel very dainty in the middle of the battle. But again, it keeps going back to waking the public up. People say, well, they spend all this money on campaigns. Yeah, it's because we're asleep mostly. And they got to do these odd ads to wake us up to maybe get half of us even to the polls. Well, the other half stays at home. I start the introduction of the book with a statement

by a member of Congress in the 92 election. He said, people are saying, none of the presidential candidates are any good. They don't stop there. They said, none of the senators are any good. None of the representatives are any good. He said, well, let me tell you, the American public's no great bargain either. And, you know, I think it just brings up our role in the matter. If you think these guys are bad, you should see their constituents. Well, yeah, and my corollary statement that I love from Israeli diplomat Abba, even he said, governments can be counted on to do the right thing. But only after they've exhausted all other possibilities. And I'm just saying, I say it's our responsibility to see that they do the right thing without exhausting all those other possibilities. I keep coming back to our role in the mess. It isn't their mess. It's our mess. And we can change it. We can make a difference with it. Let's take the constituent parts of the beast here in Washington. First of all, big money. You're there. You're working with volunteers. A lot of idealism. You know that just down the street

or somewhere over the rainbow. There are lobbies that are funded by multi -million, sometimes multi -billion -dollar corporations, trade associations, and so on. Can citizens ever really hope to compete with that enormous imbalance of power there? And the health care debate is illustrative of all that. No, I keep wanting to go back. They need those millions of dollars for campaigns from those corporate interests or whatever, only because we're so asleep during the elections. They need that kind of money for TV time and radio time, etc. To get our attention. You know, so I'm going to keep bringing it back to us. But I have to admit that I've found results volunteers be real effective and real successful with representatives. But in the larger population states where you have 29 million constituents and two senators, you know, in the larger population states where you have 19 million citizens and two senators, you know, who have to raise 10, 15 million for a

campaign? It's real tough. And they still spend a dollar or two for every citizen. Exactly. And a little of, I'm usually an optimistic guy. And I can kind of fall into some of the cynicism on the money and the Senate issue, especially, where they don't have to be with the public, but every six years in an election. Well, I'm wondering if, for groups like yours, reform or the process, public campaign financing or whatever reform it takes here, isn't as important in the long run as what you're doing on your own agenda, because it will, won't it free you? I wouldn't want to underestimate the importance of reform of the process. But what we're up to actually is reform of the citizen. Or another way of saying it is the book title is reclaiming our democracy, healing the break between people and government. And starting at the grassroots itself. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of people say, if I get, I can't fight city hall. But what I say to people is, look,

how many friends on your block write your member of Congress or me with him or her? How many people at work write or meet with your member? Not many. You know, actually, if you did, it's actually a little easier, sad to say, because so few are involved. So there's almost a slice of good news in the despair of that. But there really is an abocation of responsibility, isn't there, at the grassroots level. I mean, it's all well and good to say these guys are a bunch of scoundrels, they're non -responsive. But in the end, they survive on our indifference. There's a success story, isn't there, right here in Albuquerque? Can you tell us about that? Well, and it's a story, one of the, I described the book as dozens of stories of ordinary people doing extraordinary things, or their political voices. And I say, anybody could see themselves, because people start very much from their ordinairiness. And it's, this is about a woman in Albuquerque, and I tell it every night, I'm on this 85 -city tour, because I think it's such a gem, Sarah Keeney lives in this community. She said, and I think it's very, it's just key to what we're talking about. She said, the first time I heard

about results, it felt like a heavy weight on my shoulder. I never heard of anybody who worked with their member of Congress and felt it made any difference. Now, I say that's ordinary, you know, and that's where she starts, and that's where a lot of these stories start. Then she says, after a while, she went to Washington on a family trip, that had gotten involved with results, and decided to meet her congressman at the time, Manuel Lujan. She said, I never heard of anything, congressman Lujan supported that I believed in, and I'm sure he'll say no to whatever I ask. There were lots of those. Okay, but there's still this attitude problem at home. But then she goes into him, and talks about another piece that we're working on, to vaccinate kids that we're dying of, yeah, preventable things like measles and tetanus. And she said, I was nervous, and my hand was shaking, when I handed him the bill. You know, he looked at it, and he looked at me, and he said, yes, I'll co -sponsor this. And she said, my mouth flew open, but I had no words to say. And as she walked back across the capital grounds, she said, I noticed a difference between me and my business dress with my briefcase, and the tourists,

in short, taking snapshots of the dome. She said, I was glad that I'll return home with more than just a photograph, because she was actually, you might say, for the first time in her life, returning home with her democracy, into, which is a very exciting thing, a souvenir of Washington. This is true. Suppose we get past the Congress, big, big, assumption here, onto that other monster in Washington, the bureaucracy, which, as we know, doesn't get elected every two or six years, goes on and on forever and ever. As you pointed out, in your oversight to study by the GAO, found out the government really wasn't doing what it was mandated or paid to do by the Congress, how do you cope with this inertia in the legion of bureaucrats in Washington? Well, the bottom line is it's not easy. I mean, no one said, oh, this is great. You're going to do this work, and I have, I just want to tell you, it's going to be very, very easy. It's not. So we've done oversight reports on where the money was going on the microcredit. We're finishing an oversight right now.

I talked about Sarah going in on the child survival funding, vaccination of kids and other basic things. We're finishing an oversight report on that right now. So there's this constant pressure to not only find something that works lobby for it. And then if you're successful, find out if the success really panned out through the bureaucracy every bill in a sense, somebody once said, goes forth as a kind of naked little orphan. You have to clothe it, you have to feed it, you have to watch out for it because there are forces in the dark wood waiting for it there. Tell me about your sense of Washington, since you've been there. Are we on an upward swing here in terms of our democracy? Well, I know best the last 15 years. And I've often described most of the 80s that the public was asleep. Somewhere around the 92 election, I say the public got cranky. Now, I don't know where cranky goes. I mean, it may go back to sleep or it may go somewhere better or worse. I don't know. I actually prefer cranky to asleep, but I prefer something better.

When I talk around the country a lot of times, I speak about some steps to reclaiming democracy. Maybe I could touch on one or two of them. For me, the first step is we have to know what we're up against. If you or I or the viewers want to reclaim our democracy, we need to know what we're up against. Not to stop just to go in with our eyes open. Of corollary to that one is the environment ain't rooting for us to succeed. And my favorite example of this, just before I left at the end of November on this tour, months ago, I turned on the TV news. And this is what I saw. An update on the Butterfoco Amy Fisher trial, followed immediately. I'm not changing the order. Bob had severed penis trial followed by Menendez brothers, murder parents, followed by where is Michael Jackson's story. And all in an instant, our predicament was crystallized for me. And what came to mind is this delicious statement from the former president of Johns Hopkins University, Stephen Muller, he said, amidst the glut of insignificance that engulfs us all,

the temptation is understandable to stop thinking. The trouble is, unthinking persons cannot choose, but must let others choose for them. So this glut of insignificance, yes, indeed. I wonder if there isn't, though, a certain glutney out there in the public at large. I mean, the whole sort of tabloid journalism, which we deplore, does we know, make millions for newspapers, now for television, going increasingly toward that format and that style, that substance. Again, doesn't it mean the re -education of the citizenry? Exactly. Here's my cut on it. I say that most people feel they make a difference in their family, and perhaps in their community. But when you get out to the nation and the world, I say most people feel they have no impact. Now, that's a painful place to be, actually. And sometimes it's better to cover that up, maybe it's not better, but it feels better, to cover that sense of impedance as a person with your nation and your world, with these

diversions as this tabloid television that you're talking about. Anyway, my first step is know what you're up against if you want to reclaim, not to stop, but just to go in with your eyes open. My second step is find an issue you're passionate about. A lot of times people say to me in word or deed, there really isn't anything I care that much about. And for me, it's a kind of defense mechanism. Why get too worked up about anything if you only believe you're gonna fail? Sure. So we cut ourselves off from caring too much, but Americans do care. They care about their families, they care about neighborhood. Yes, yes. And I was interviewed recently in Los Angeles and they said the kind of, why should we care about over there or not here? And I said, you know, when there's hunger and poverty in the world, there's instability. When there's instability, people move. When people leave their refugees, their immigration, diseases cross borders, tuberculosis should be gone. It's not global warming, nose, no

boundaries. I said, you know, when the ground shakes and those particularly effective in, when the emergency is such that the ground shakes like the earthquakes, we come together, don't we? We kind of get it together. We got to get good at getting into action before the ground shakes, before the emergency gets to that level. But can you say, I'm, can you really convey this message to the American people that what happens in the world matters to them? You know, we have a long historical tradition of turning our backs on the world. Whenever we felt we could afford it, the Cold War is over, the Russians are no longer an immediate threat, whatever happens 20 or 30 years from now, isn't it time to throw up the fence and turn around and face inward? There's a lot of that temptation out there. Yeah, there is. And I don't think it's wise. I don't think it's the right road to go down. And I think we do it at our peril because the world is getting very much smaller and problems elsewhere seem to spill right over real quickly. And it's something we need to learn. Without engaging you in partisan judgments here,

I must ask you what you think the sum will be of this whitewater controversy in Washington. We have a president who's beleaguered, who says, and I think, aptly so, that he's being diverted from other important measures on his agenda. At any rate, we have a press in a Congress absorbed in this issue. Does this come under the category of sort of full disclosure? Why not let us know how we governed ourselves in Arkansas or Washington in the 1980s because coming to terms with our past is part of what you're talking about in terms of education. Well, I don't want to be simplistic about it, but I see it as a game, as a political game, that gets to be played because we're asleep. And the game is, if you're in power and I'm a Republican, I'll do whatever to cut you down. If you're in power and I'm a Democrat and you're a Republican, I'll do it. And so it's this rather than dealing with the problems that we face. And this, I can say right now, the Republicans are pulling this one off. Now we can go back a few years

and say the same about the Democrats because they're just changing costumes right now on this kind of activity. But I think we have some problems of poverty and crime and other issues related to health and welfare reform and that we really ought to be looking at. Well, I agree with that, but I'm thinking of remarks at Congressman Leach of Iowa made recently. He said, yes, we do have things that we should be doing, things we're better off doing. But you can't afford to ignore issues of government ethics or collusion between government and private interests as in Arkansas because that's the essence of the system in so many ways. That's the invisible half of the iceberg that American citizens don't ordinarily see. Just how collusive, how complicit is this republic, special interest in the public has become in Washington. Yeah, so I think the president's got to get quick with the full disclosure and let the chips fall where they may and get on with the business that needs to be dealt

with. Are you encouraged, you're around to 80 cities. We're number what, 50, 51, 50 of the 80. Are you encouraged by what you see out there in terms of grassroots democracy? Well, I am only because I have a certain view. In other words, all the previous 50 evenings I've been with groups of folks. I mean, you were nearly 70 here in Albuquerque. It was a very exciting evening. I mean, at the end there might have been 60 or 65 left in the room because it's a tough evening that I lead. But they were writing letters to the senators. They were writing letters to the representative. They were engaged. They were just really demonstrating the best in our spirit. And so I am encouraged, but it's not easy. It's not done. It's not anywhere near done. And I just really always want people to realize that it is ordinary folks that make the change and that when people lead leaders do follow. Like I put you on the spot, a personal political observation because you've really been in the trenches. Can you

reform these old parties? Can you really change this old system? Or is it going to take a fairly radical jerk here to get us out of our sleep as you've described? We just have a minute or so. Well, I think I keep wanting to go back to reforming us, to reforming the public, to coming off the couch and finding the issues that you're concerned at. Just imagine for a moment if everyone was active in something they cared about. I don't think the problems would be around, actually. But there's this hopelessness. This can't do anything, especially can't fight city hall that keeps people inactive. And if that changed, my real commitment, though I spend day and night working to end hunger and poverty, is to make a difference with people themselves. With people, we might even get them different candidates, not just the lesser of evils, which we're so often succinct to face now. And so I really urge people to find a group that they can work with and maybe they can get

involved in the local results group. We have a phone number and maybe I could just buy people, no, it's 268 .7851. 268 .7851 right here in Albuquerque. Sam Harris, thank you very much. Needless to say, good luck. I'll need it, thanks a lot. And thank you for joining us for it Weeks End. I'm Roger Morris. Please think about reclaiming our democracy. For a cassette copy of this at Weeks End Program, send

$35, which includes shipping and handling to K -N -M -E -TV, 1 ,200 University Boulevard Northeast, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 8702, or call 1 -800 -328 -563. Thank you very much.