Naomi Wolf on the coup that took place on October 1, on participating in the revolution, on Obama, on the bailout...

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Rob Kall Interview with Naomi Wolf Link: Conference Recording

Recorded 10/29/08 Transcribed by Carla Gilby, Linda Carraway, Paul Hawley, and Jim Magee. Edited by Jay Farrington



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Kall:  And good evening!  It’s Rob Kall and the Rob Kall Bottom Up Show.  Is there anybody out there or is everybody watching the Phillies? Anyway, we’ve got a great show tonight.  I’m very excited.  We’ve got Naomi Wolf, who wrote the book Give Me Liberty:  A Handbook for American Revolutionaries.  Naomi recently said that there was a coup in America on October 1st, which was the day that the $700B or $850B gift was given to the financial community. 

Wolf:  Hi, I’m here.

Kall:   And you’re here.  Oh, wonderful!

Wolf:  Hi, nice to be with you.  Go ahead.

Kall:  I was just talking about your book.  You know, I think of you kind of like a cross between a modern-day Tom Payne and Paul Revere.

Wolf:  I love that!  Can we throw a girl in there somewhere? (Laughs)

Kall:  Well, who?  You tell me! (Laughs)

Wolf:  Oh, I don’t know. I’m serious, though, thank you. Abigail Adams.  I’d go for her.

Kall:  OK.  So, did you hear Obama do his half hour gig?

Wolf:  No, I didn’t, actually.  I’ve been blogging away and trying to keep up with all my blogging obligations.  Is there any new news in the commercial that he made?

Kall:  I grabbed a quote from him I thought that would be apropos for our conversation.  So I’ll throw it at you.  We’ve got a lot to cover.  Do we have the whole hour?

Wolf:  Whatever part of it... let’s just cover what you’d like to cover.

Kall:  OK, great.  So, Obama said, “I learned at an early age how vital it is to defend liberty.”

Wolf:  He said that?

Kall:  He said that... BUT then he totally talked about Iran and Iraq and Afghanistan – he was just talking about military engagement.

Wolf:  Oh.  You mean we should go ahead and pursue those?  He didn’t talk about the Constitution?

Kall:  No.  His whole idea of defending liberty was military exercises, military strength, things like that.  And it’s fascinating, because you got all these chapters that talk about fake patriotism and fake democracy... there one on fake liberty? (laughs)

Wolf:  Well, it sounds like he could... it’s very disappointing.  It does sound like he’s defining liberty in a pretty fake way and to the rubric of what I call fake patriotism, you’re absolutely right – it’s very, very depressing.  It does fit in with what I’ve been telling people.  You know, people keep asking me about the election and I keep saying again and again, whoever is elected, we’re not out of the woods.  I mean, we’re in very serious trouble if McCain/Palin get in, or if the election is stolen, of course, but if by some miracle, and in a transparent, accountable election, Barack Obama becomes President, we are not done with our work by any means.

We’re still in serious trouble without a very committed citizen’s... trans-partisan citizen’s movement to restore the Constitution.  ‘Cause here’s why:  These laws are on the books, they’re there.  He caved on FISA, because of pressure from... and people have to understand it’s not his... it’s not anyone’s wish, it’s this gigantic – well, it’s some people’s wish – but there’s gigantic pressure from the telecommunications industry, from the defense contractors, who are now profiting from a police state in the United States because they’ve moved into surveillance and security technologies, and it’s only mobilized the movement of people that can push back against that.

And there’s still going to be laws on the books that would let him wire tap his opponents, which would let him arrest journalists under the Espionage Act that would let him put Matt Drudge in prison for three years in solitary confinement, without easy access to a lawyer.  The founders knew that any leader is going to be tempted by these things, no matter how well-intentioned they are, any leader is going to abuse these powers.  So it really is up to us to push it, to hold his feet to the fire if he is the President.

Kall:  Absolutely.  That’s what I believe is going to be the main job of what I do at OpEdNews. (http://www.opednews.com).  Are you familiar with OpEdNews, by the way?

Wolf:  I am!  I get them often in my inbox and I admire them so much, so many of them have been so right on.  And you guys also address many issues I’m sorry to say the mainstream media has been ignoring and neglecting.  You raise them in a very rigorous way.  Actually, OpEdNews is very much aligned with what I’ve been calling for lately.  I just wrote a column about this, as a syndicate that goes around the globe, a syndicated monthly column, and I was saying that we need not just blogging, but a kind of rigorous citizen journalism in which there’s training for ordinary citizens to get the basics of accountable journalism, so that they can back things up, use good documentation, understand how to use quotes and sources.  What I love about OpEdNews is that it’s rigorous op ed’s, but sort of liberated from the constraints of conventional media.

Kall:  Well, thank you.  What I wanted to do tonight was kind of get an overview of your book, the mission of the book and the vision of it, and then talk about what you said in a recent video that you did where you talked about a coup that took place on October 1st.  I wanted to kind of pick up where that left off, but... so, how’s that sound?

Wolf:  That sounds great, sure.  You want me to start with Give Me Liberty?

Kall:  Absolutely.

Wolf:  OK, sure thing. So...

Kall:  Let me kind of start it off here.  I’m going to read a little bit from it that I underlined.  You say that a paper coup has taken place.  And then you say that history shows that when an army of citizens supported by even a vestige of civil society believes in liberty, in the psychological space that is America, no power on Earth can ultimately suppress them.

But go ahead; tell us about where you came from in this book, the different phases of it.  It’s a wonderful, exciting book that is... it takes the idea of revolution and puts it into being, not something that you start in a country, but something that you maintain in a country.  I love that idea!

Wolf:  Me, too.  Well, it’s not my idea, it’s turns out the founding generation, these ordinary people, not just well-known founders who are captivated by liberty, really defined America in a way that is so different from how we... from the fake patriotism that we are taught.  They really defined the American... they defined America as a state of mind, a process of justice, a process of confrontation with oppression, not a place or even a system of government. 

In the Declaration of Independence, if you go to the second paragraph, which we’re never taught in middle school, it’s so radical, it’s a personal contract that each of us is supposed to commit to, to stand up against tyranny and oppression, and to overthrow our government, or defeat our government, or change our government when it’s no longer operating under the consent of the governed.

So it’s a very radical document, and I wrote Give Me Liberty because I had written this book, The End of America, which many people read last fall, which argued that there are these ten steps that you always see in a closing society, when a dictator is trying to crush democracy.  People are quite persuaded by this.  I thought it would get a lot more resistance, and they said, “OK, Naomi, we see this, these ten steps are here, now what do we do?” 

So Give Me Liberty is a sequel and it’s supposed to provide answers, or the goal is to provide answers.  Well, to provide energy, an inspiration, from this state of mind that we’re supposed to have, that the founders intended us to have. 

Also to analyze this fake patriotism that we’ve been bombarded with intentionally for 30 years, not just the last eight, although the last eight were particularly egregious, that has been directed by people who profit from an oligarchy, basically, at us, to get us to accept what I call fake democracy, increasing the limited scope for our citizen leadership, to get us to accept smaller and smaller spaces for protest and assembly, more and more intimidation from the state, to accept this message:  that our job as citizens is to vote and maybe e-mail our representatives, but not to lead and not to hold the debates and not to write the laws.

In fact, I learned from the founding generation of these ordinary people who changed the world, these farmers and artisans and washerwomen and enslaved African-Americans, that actually we are the ones who are supposed to be leading the country in a very revolutionary way. Lastly, then I add these seven core principles that I say we’re supposed to be carrying, that we’ve often been diverted from.  Then the last third of the book is these 55 action steps that you can take to seize the power back and to restore liberty, because we really are in a war right now and it’s going to take all of us taking steps like this to restore our freedom.

Kall:  And you really have put together very concrete, very specific instructions on just how to do these things.  It’s quite a collection you’ve put together here.

Wolf:  Thank you.  Which do you like?  Which struck you?

Kall:  It’s just the comprehensiveness of it.  Organizing national hearings; exposing government secrecy; making every vote count by Mark Crispin Miller, promoting democracy overseas through investment.  It’s just great basic resources... how to organize a town hall meeting.

I got started in politics shortly before the war.  I was not in it all my life.  I was involved in trying to wake people up using biofeedback and inner self-regulation training approaches for most of my life.  I just finally decided it wasn’t working fast enough, waking people up one at a time, and that’s why I started OpEdNews.

Wolf:  Oh, that’s very interesting!  That’s a fascinating background.  And a good way to take a little more direct action.

Kall:  (laughs) And another thing... Yeah, really (laughs)... But it’s always been about waking people up.  So I got training back in, I guess, 2003 with Camp Wellstone and just recently I’ve been through some community organization training, and what you’ve given here is really practical, concrete, step-by-step stuff that people can use, there are so many people that have woken up in the last... in the Bush Era, and they don’t know what to do.  They write blogs, they write articles...

Wolf:  That’s exactly right.

Kall:  And so you’ve given them very specific things to do.  There are great training organizations out there, but this is the kind of stuff people need to take their passion to make a difference to the next level.  It’s interesting – last week I had Mary Pipher on, who wrote a

book on writing to change the world, and now you’re going to give us some steps here, talk a little bit more about where we’re going with all this.  Another thing I just wanted to mention is happiness.  You talk a lot about happiness and it fascinated me, the way you describe the different way that people thought of happiness at the beginning of America.

Wolf:  Isn’t that interesting?

Kall:  Can you talk a little bit about that and about what Thomas Jefferson and others said about that?  Because another thing I’ve been involved with is positive psychology, one of my web sites is http://www.positivepsychology.net.

Wolf:  You’re very interested in happiness.  Well, then this will definitely resonate for you; it certainly resonated for me.  I was really stunned.  I always... The thing that most Americans, including myself, know from the Declaration of Independence is that famous phrase “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” 

And, really, part of the fake democracy messaging and fake patriotism messaging is the notion that this is the most important part of the Declaration of Independence; and it’s kind of the essence of America.  And that what it means is, we’re given the impression what it means is, you know, you can be a biker dude and I can be playing bridge and we’ll just leave each other alone, or you can consume in this part of the mall at Talbot’s and I’ll consume in that part of the mall at Victoria’s Secret and we’ll just leave each other alone; and we’ll all consume together, or we’ll meet our own personal goals side by side.

And that’s totally not... First of all, that’s not what happiness meant in the 18th century, to the people who drafted this beautiful document.  What happiness meant in the 18th century has much more of a sense of using your faculties to the highest point in a context of freedom to serve the greatest good. It’s a sense of devotion and harmony and service.

That blew my mind, because I think Americans really aren’t happy right now, and I think one reason they’re not happy is that the definition of happiness we’re given is all about consuming and personal gratification; whereas... I think another reason that American’s are not happy is that we’ve fallen away from this extraordinary ideal that we’re supposed to carry of being this nation that embodies justice, and the rule of law, and liberty – that each of us, individually is supposed to carry, not that our leaders are supposed to do it for us.

And so, then, moving on to the next paragraph, it’s so mind-blowing, too, because, as I say, you’re never taught this, but, as I mentioned, it’s like an absolute, categorical demand that you have to hold your government accountable when it goes astray.  So... I never will read the Declaration of Independence the same way again.

Kall:  Yes, you’ve really turned it from something that is stale... as you’ve described it, as an illegible piece of parchment that is shown as a picture, not a living document, in history books... you’ve turned it into something that is vital, that calls upon people to reach for the best within themselves and for their country, which maybe is the ultimate form of patriotism.

Wolf:  Well, that’s very kind, but truly, it was there; it was in there all along.  I was amazed, going back to the research that I did for Give me Liberty, because it was a totally different picture of what this nation and what we are intended to be than I was ever taught in high school, or in college, or in graduate school.  You know, the founding generation – and again, I didn’t just look at the well known white men whose names we’re all familiar with, but all these ordinary people, who were so on fire – they were doing things like... I’m not saying trying to stay home, but they were... you know, King George III’s tax collectors were oppressing them, breaking into homes without representation, without warrants, and they would dismantle the tax collector’s homes, brick by brick – there was not a brick standing.

When Washington went ahead and with the Jay Treaty and the people didn’t approve of it and they felt humiliated by it – there were riots up and down the Eastern seaboard.  I mean, these people just did not shut up about liberty, even the most oppressed people, the enslaved African-Americans.  I never knew this:  there were many, many what were called “Freedom Feet” in the Colonial Era, when African-American slaves would sue the state legislatures for their freedom using the language that is the same language as that in the Declaration of Independence. 

These people risked their lives to say, “You know what?  This ideal belongs to all of us.”  These are gutsy, gutsy people - and they categorically intended these seven core principles that we’ve been brainwashed to not carry in our hearts - things like ordinary people are supposed to run things; you have an obligation to dissent; you’re supposed to not have an established God, America does not establish a God over men and women because this is supposed to be national where you have freedom of conscience. They knew how corrupt it was when a state wraps its arms around a corrupt church and uses it to browbeat individuals.  The people who started this country fled places where Puritans and Huguenots and Quakers were tortured or murdered by the state because of their religious beliefs.

You know, this reverence for the rule of law we’re supposed to have is one of the key principles; so that when Sarah Palin or the White House defies subpoenas, that says anything, that that's un-American.  Finally, a core principle like the fact that we’re not supposed to have an oppressive empire subverting liberty around the world... that would’ve appalled the founders.  The founders didn’t see America as owning liberty; they saw America as serving liberty, and that liberty was universal.  So they would have been horrified at a situation where, since 1898, as long as we’ve had a measure of freedom at home, or most of us, we’ve turned a blind on the fact that business interests are sending our military around the world to subvert democratically-elected governments to install trusted dictators who oppress and torture and murder and silence the population exactly as the founders were oppressed by the greatest empire at that time on Earth.  So these core values are so important for us to get back to at a time when there really is a war against citizens.

Kall:  Absolutely.  I just need to do a station ID.  It’s the Rob Kall Bottom Up Radio Show, 1360 AM, WNJC.  I’m on the phone now with Naomi Wolf, who is the author of Give Me Liberty:  A Handbook for American Revolutionaries.  I mentioned in my e-mail to you, the name of the show is the Bottom Up Show, and it’s because I believe that we’re going through a bottom up revolution now.  You hear it almost every day, Obama talking about it, it’s talked about it all the time on the Internet.  The opposite of bottom up is top down; top down is when people are told “this is America, how wonderful it is,” rather than “everybody’s responsible for keeping America wonderful.”  And I always like to ask my guests about their observations on bottom up ways of seeing, understanding, the world and its processes.

Wolf:  Is that a question?

Kall:  That’s a question, yes.

Wolf:  Can you restate it?  I didn’t quite hear it.  Oh, you’re talking about bottom up ways of seeing the world and its progress?

            Kall:  Of seeing... particularly from your area of interest, of                liberty, of democracy, of revolution.

Wolf:  Well, it’s exactly about that.  You could not be more in alignment with this basic message, if that’s your focus.  We’ve been bombarded, again, with this messaging for a long time, that we should leave running the country to politicians, and we should leave the holding of the debates to Fox News and CNN, and we should leave writing the op-eds to the pundits (which is why I love OpEdNews), and that we should leave worrying about the Constitution to Constitutional scholars, and this is all wrong.

            

It has led to...You know, when I traveled the country last fall, I was very struck by how, as you say, people were aware, and they were waking up, and they were horrified that they felt absolutely powerless.  They were e-mailing their Congress people and they were calling them and it didn’t make a dime of difference.  They would march, and it didn’t make any difference at all.  I wrote a whole chapter on protest and why the marches we do now are designed to not change anything, because the kind of protests that actually changed the world are illegal in America now, deliberately, through a process of over-permitization... But anyway, they were trying that and it wasn’t getting them anywhere, and they were literally depressed, in the sense of... you studied happiness... in a sense, a clinical depression, where you feel like there’s no point in taking action, about democracy, they could not feel they could make a difference.

Kall:  Let’s talk about those protests.  You used a word that I couldn’t quite make out:  over-something-or-other...

Wolf:  Well, it’s kind of a word I’ve made up, to explain what happened to protests in this country:  over-permitization.  That there is a process of killing protests by demanding excessive permits that make the protest ineffectual.  So it’s a “death by permit,” a death to freedom of assembly by permit, that you have to apply for more and more constraining permit requirements in order to have any kind of assembly at all in this country, and the consequence... I mean, one typical thing, for instance, that in America you have to do in order to get a permit for a march is you have to stay on the sidewalk and not step into the street.

Well, I studied how citizens have fought back successfully against tyrants or dictators who were trying to close down a democracy or crush a democracy movement.  One thing that always, always, always works, just like the ten steps of closing a society always works, there are steps that always work in opening one back up, and one of them is mass protests.

It’s not like go from A to B, on to Washington Mall, in an orderly line, without stepping into the street.  The kinds of marches that always change the course of history – that brought down the Berlin Wall in 1989, that liberated the Baltic states, that restored people power, that just very recently restored democracy to Pakistan... look at the pictures.  Those pictures are illegal in America.  There are people

thronging the street.  Business as usual can not take place.  It’s thousands and thousands of people bringing business as usual to a halt because they’re in the street, literally in the street. You know, Martin Luther King said, in defending marching without a permit, that sometimes the tension has to be visible, the things that are hidden have to be brought up, that business as usual shouldn’t keep going if the people are so distraught and so angry and so upset.  I’m not talking about violence; I’m talking about non-violent protest, but protest that actually stops things.

That’s a new goal now.  There’s a hilarious section, at least I think it’s hilarious, although it’s also heart breaking, this section of the book where I am so on fire, reading Jefferson and reading the early founders, that I go out to try to use all of my Constitutional rights as an American and show my citizen leadership. 

At one point, I try to hold a rally in Union Square for the Constitution and 15 minutes in, I realize that what I’m doing is illegal, because it’s illegal to use a bullhorn in Union Square without a permit.  And I look at this other rally in midtown for liberty, against the oppressors in China who are suppressing Tibet and about to hold the Olympics.  These protesters are penned in like livestock, in a little pen, surrounded by police officers, blocks away from the Chinese Embassy that they’re trying to protest, and I interview one of the sergeants, and these two groups of protesters have to share a bullhorn for a total four hours – you know, half an hour here, an hour and a half there, and the lieutenant says, “Our ideal, of course, would be none, no outlet.”  So... death by a thousand cuts.

And then, I went further and I looked for the permit process in New York and they can deny you a permit and there’s no recourse.  So, without actually overtly overturning and stripping the First Amendment, this process has basically made people feel – and we haven’t even gotten into the militarization of the police forces by Homeland Security, but we saw a guarantee of millions of dollars pumped into police forces to give them technologies like tasers and rubber bullets that are lethal, let alone the terrifying technologies, and unnamed, unidentified agents who could be Blackwater that we saw at the RNC – people are terrified to protest now, or at least not America.  So that’s one of the things that...

Kall:  In the RNC... was a terrifying story there.  You know, what

you’ve described with the permitization, I started a web site that describes it.  It’s called http://www.sphincterpolice.com; control freaks throughout the world.  It’s really... but it’s terrible.  Clarissa Pinkola Estés writes Running With Wolves [Women Who Run With the Wolves:  Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype (Ballantine 1992/1996)] about wild women, and really it’s wild America.  We need to have some of that heart that was in the original founders of America, and you can’t do that when you’ve put people in a little pen, and you can’t do that when the most common area where people gather is in a shopping mall, in an enclosed shopping mall.

Wolf:  Exactly.  Well, where you’re not allowed to protest, that’s the... that’s not public space.

Kall:  And that should be changed.  Protests and speaking within shopping malls should be required and allowed, and there’s no reason they couldn’t do that, either, is there?

Wolf:  Well, honestly, I’d like to see that, but legally it is private space.  So what I’d like to do is...

Kall:  You know what?  All they have to do is say, “If you’re going to build a shopping mall, or if you have one and you want to continue it, then you’ve got to allow people to speak, because this is America and that’s the common... this is the new community area.”

Wolf:  All right.  Look, I’m not a lawyer.  I’d love to see the First Amendment every damn place an American will be.  What you described when you talked about that inner wildness, that inner freedom, that’s what I discovered people around the world have always envied us for.  It’s not our standard of living; it’s how it feels inside to be free.  Americans? We have felt differently from other people internally, because there is this kind of... well, it’ll be an obscenity, but there’s kind of like “FU” to the powers that be, there’s a sense of “I can say what I want, I can go where I want, I am protected.”  And what protected us?  It was the Constitution.

I never realized before this journey that the Constitution is like this beautiful, powerful pair of arms, wrapping around me and my children, literally protecting us from beatings by a state agent, protecting us from being thrown in prison and left without due process, protecting us to say what we want and think what we want and feel how we feel,

and express it.  So, that’s what Americans are losing now, and so yeah, absolutely, Give Me Liberty is the only program for doing things that are necessary in order to get that back and keep it forever and make sure that our kids have it.  It’s so important that...

Kall:  I’ve got to tell you, when I read, I underline for quotations – I’m a quotation junkie.  Your book is rich with them.  I just realized, listening to you, you’re a Constitutional poet.

Wolf:  Oh, thank you!  That’s a beautiful thing to say.  Thank you.

Kall:  So... you’ve got a wish list.

Wolf:  I do.

Kall:  Want to talk a little about it?

Wolf:  Sure.  There are many things, I realize, that need to be changed.  The cool thing about going through the process of the Give Me Liberty journey is that it really... it tends to make people see things in a different way.  For instance, I just read in the news today that Bloomberg denied an emergency request by the Board of Elections to get more poll workers at the polls, so there’s going to be chaos, or insufficiency on election day. 

Before I went on this journey, I might have thought, “Ugh, God, they’re so incompetent,” or “Well, there they go again,” or whatever.   But now I’ve got this burning rage and I’m like, “OK, who do we sue?”  “How do I sue Bloomberg?”  Can I do a civil suit, can I do... where’s my lawyer, where’s the National Lawyer’s Guild?  I’m so ready with my army of citizens that I now know how to mobilize, to say, “Hold on.  That is a tyrant’s move.  That is a bid for power that the founders would not tolerate and I’m not going to let you get away with it.”

And, so, there’s so many steps, so many things, that I’m not even... like the Bailout Bill.  I haven’t seen the Bailout Bill.  I go in audiences... I’m sure somewhere, it’s got to be somewhere, but theoretically, ideally, it would be at least substantially excerpted in every major newspaper in America.  We’ve just given away $700B of our money.  We don’t know what the fine print says.  We don’t even know what the big print says! 

So now, having gone through this journey, and understanding that there are vested interests trying to keep these processes opaque, I’m furious and I’m like, “Where’s the bailout bill,” and hunting it down.  I think what people experience when they read Give Me Liberty is that they see all the ways in which they’re being excluded and they’ve got this kind of founder’s fire in them now.  They’re thinking, “What can I do in my life to push back at this, what are my resources?”

The question I want citizens to always ask themselves at this point is not just what’s in front of you keeping you from action but what are my resources to change things? ‘Cause we are so powerful when we take action together. So, you know, there are so many things

that needs to be changed. I called for a Deliberation Day, which is actually Bruce Ackerman’s idea. He’s a professor at Yale, but he’s had great results.

Instead of letting the pundits debate everything before an election... instead of leaving it to them, we should be assembling, and there’s an organization that can help us do this, in groups, big groups, city-wide, town-wide, village-wide, and it’s a structured deliberation process for two whole days.  It has to be two days so that emergency workers, you know, are taking care of vital services and they get their chance. But the citizens debate the issues and can put follow-up questions to representatives of the candidates together and what he found is that leaders emerged, solutions emerged, people vote smarter, they take ownership of issues. That’s one example.  I want mandatory voting.  You know there’s mandatory tax-paying, for Lord’s sake. You know, everyone should vote. I want us to change the Constitution, which the Founders allowed us to do, so that we have a national referendum. There are twenty-four states that have referenda, meaning the people write the laws and people pass the laws.  Europe has that...

Kall: Is that the Article 5 convention you’re talking about?

Wolf: Yes, I think it is. Yes.

Kall: Oh, we have got some readers who are very avid supporters of

that.

Klein:  Really?

Kall:  Oh, absolutely.  We’ve got a lot of articles on OpEdNews about

Article 5 Constitutional Convention.  So you believe that’s a

good thing?

Wolf:  Well, I don’t... I mean, I think we need to define our terms. 

I don’t think a random change in the Constitution is a good

thing.  I want a limited referendum system that the people would

debate very, very carefully. But I do believe that a limited national

referendum, even very occasionally, would be the only

thing to break the stranglehold of special interests on Congress.

‘Cause right now there’s legislation we’re never going to see like

capping emissions with the stranglehold of special interests, but that

a majority of Americans, of course, support.  And you know 70% of

Americans want to end the Iraq War.  We’re never going to end it,

without, necessarily, without a national referendum. Yes, I do believe

in that. I want the….                                                                                                                                      

Kall:  Great!

Wolf: ....people to have as much power as a lobbyist. Absolutely.  I want Congress to worry about the people and worry about what the national referendum will view.  Absolutely.  There are many other examples. I want there to be like the equivalent of a 311 phone call you can make. It’s so confusing right now and it’s so not transparent. If I have an issue, like I want a greenbelt around my town. Do I call the city council, do I call the state legislature, is it a federal issue? You know, who knows?  And this is one reason people give up. It’s been made deliberately opaque. I want there to be a national 311 where operators are standing by to tell citizens, “Well, this is how you take this action, this is where you go, this is how you get it done, this is how it can support you.”

I want citizens to write the op-eds.  As you know there’s a section in the book on ‘become a media yourself’, write the op-ed, here’s how you do it, pitch it, do radio, do television, here’s how you do it, frame the story, here's how you leak to a reporter who’s on background, off the record, on the record.  Many, many changes. But this is just the beginning because the ideal is that everyone reads this book and looks around them and thinks, “Ha! This is an institution that’s missing.  I can create it,” because I also offer people steps like ‘start your own political movement,’ ‘fund raise for your own nonprofit,’ and so on.  It’s... the only thing that can save us from this descending repression is millions of people taking these steps. Because it... history is clear – they cannot control us when we are running through their hands like sand. They cannot control us when millions of people are saying, “No,” and taking action and building their own power.

Kall:  You know what I’ve found, in my experience in working with

activism, is there’s the power curve law or the 80/20 rule where 20% of the people do 80% of the work; although it’s really more like 2% of the people do 98% of the work. And I don’t think that people don’t want to do it; I think they don’t know how.  And I think your book gives them a lot of ideas and practical things that they can do to go further. A lot of times I send out a daily newsletter through http://www.opednews.com and I’ll sign it off, “Do something extra today.”  I mean, it’s so easy to just spend five minutes making an extra phone call or just doing something that takes you out of your ordinary, and all of a sudden you’ve gone from being a spectator to being a revolutionary.

Wolf:  I totally hear you and I love it that you’re doing that, but what I also now feel is that the kind of activism we’ve been expecting of ourselves, like – understandably, I mean, this is how it was set up – make a phone call, or, e-mail your Congressperson, or, at the most hold a meeting.  That should be just the very beginning of this incredible dance.  And really….

Kall:  Absolutely.

Wolf: ...interesting, “OK, what... should I run for office?  Well, how do I do that?  OK, well, here’s Curtis Ellis, he can tell me how to run for office; he has a campaign network, I can call them.” Or, “Do I have a friend who would be a terrific Congressperson? OK, well, let me get that ball rolling.” Or, “Do I want to write a law? Well, how do I write a law?  Let me call the Initiative and Referendum Institute.” In other words, what I’m trying to do is bump up people’s sense of what their job is.  Their job is supposed to be to lead. That’s what the people are supposed to be doing. 

And definitely to lead a revolution, because we’re seeing with this financial meltdown and these horrific, kind of  secrets being revealed as deep, deep corruption in these ossified institutions and the system is imploding, morally and politically and economically. So at a time like this we have to build alternative structures to save ourselves, but also to kind of create a better America. And yeah, I want people to kind of look at themselves in the mirror and think, “I’m not going to wait for Barack Obama or John McCain to save me. That’s a stupid way of thinking. I’m going to save myself and save my community.”

Kall:  Yeah, you don’t want to wait for them to do it, that’s for sure. 

Wolf:  That's for sure. You know what else I've been thinking...

Kall:  It’s not an age-related thing, either.  You know, with sports you got to be young to get things done, but when it comes to being an activist you can wake up at seventy, eighty years old. One of our most active, productive editors is eighty-six years old. We have forty-four volunteer editors and Margaret Bassett, she’s amazing what she does. And she’s an inspiration to so many people and if you’re seventy-four years old and you’re retired and you’re on a disability, there are still so many things that you can do and that’s how we get to those millions of people that the government can’t all control that you just described.

Wolf:  Right, right. The other thing that happens when millions of

citizens say “no” in various ways, is it does shift the atmosphere in that when that happens, judges adjudicate differently and politicians kind of conclude different outcomes. I mean, citizens have so much power that they don’t realize, even if it’s just in kind of speaking up or writing an op-ed or submitting an op-ed or... You see, I'm obsessed with op ed's.  We have this program at the Woodhull Institute, that I co-founded, that has trained thousands of ordinary citizens in op-ed writing and they’re placing op-eds left and right, and they’re turning into pundits and they love it.

Kall:  Tell them to post them to OpEdNews, too.

Klein:  Oh, yes, I absolutely will. Of course I will.

Kall:  Is there a website for Woodhull Institute?  Do you have any websites you’d like to let people know about? Let’s make sure we don’t forget about that.

Wolf:  Thank you so much for reminding me.  See, I’m about to turn forty-six and I’m such a dinosaur.  You have to prompt me to remember the websites.  Absolutely so important.  You want to go to http://www.myamericaproject.org first, because we are offering “The End of America” movie.  You can either download it directly from the computer or order it like a DVD. And we’re asking people to hold screenings of it. It’s a very powerful film of my last book, Betsy’s Trip to Liberty.  And the idea is to hold—this is something you can do immediately—hold a screening in your house for your friends and family, your neighbors, your co-workers, to educate them about these threats to liberty. And you can also—there’s a user’s guide to the Bill of Rights and a user’s guide to the Constitution in the back of Give Me Liberty—that you can pass out, distribute.  Then you can also go to http://www.naomiwolf.org and, very soon,  http://www.myamericaproject.com  to sign up for some action, whether it’s directing organizations that you can watch the vote and make sure it’s accountable, to raising money for Iraq’s debts who have been... to this guy I interviewed today who was trampled by police horses when they were trying to bring their issues to the debate.

Or if you want to start what’s called a democracy commando commune, where you have a club where you gather your friends and register just twenty or thirty people and turn yourselves into a powerhouse to lobby your Representatives – all kinds of action steps you can take. And we’re also asking for people to sign a petition—and it may not be up yet, but it will be this week—to pass this amazing legislation, that was introduced by Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich, it hasn’t gone forward, but it alone would roll back these horrible, horrible laws. It’s a ….

Kall:  Is there a number for that legislation? H.R….?

Wolf:  But you know what?  People can go to http://www.americanfreedomcampaign.com and see the legislation itself and see the number [H.R. 3835] and I can e-mail you the information so that you can write about it, hopefully.

Kall:  OK. A little bit more now. First, this is Rob Kall, the “Rob Kall Bottom Up Show” 1360 AM WNJC, and I’m talking to Naomi Wolf, author of Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries and you just gave me a list...  I have a press release... is there any chance I can get you or your publicist to send me that and I can post this with a transcript of the interview?

Wolf:  Absolutely.  To send you the law itself?

Kall:  No, you  gave me—there’s a list of all these — your wish list for the future.

Wolf:  Oh, the wish list.  Of course.  Yes. Yes. Yes. I’ll ask my wonderful webmaster to send you the wish list.  I don’t think we

have it separate, but I will definitely ask him to send it.

Kall:  OK.  Now the other thing I want to make sure we cover here is you describe the ten things that indicate that –what is it that it indicates again? How do you describe it? 

Wolf: A closing society.

Kall:  A closing society.  And you said that we’ve seen it happen. And you said that a coup happened on the first of October. And I want to hear about those two things, and what your observations are since the first of October.

Wolf:  Sure. Well, I stand by what I said, that the whole thing about a coup is, it’s a sudden change in the form of government according to the dictionary definition, so what happened on the first of October was the First Brigade of the Third Infantry Division was deployed to somewhere in the United States of America. Now what this means is 3,000 to 4,000 battle-hardened warriors who had been doing crowd control in Fallujah... they’re very, very tough soldiers, according to members of the military. So, they’re somewhere.  Army Times. Now what you have to understand about this is, this is a departure from two hundred years of our having been protected by the Insurrection

Act of 1807 and Posse Comitatus of 1879, protected from military

policing civilian streets. That’s what the National Guard is for. And the reason the Founders wanted to protect us from military on our streets is that they understood that you can’t have a free society if the leader has military on the streets.  You just can’t.  And if you look at closed societies all over the world, the leader has the military doing civilian policing, that report to him.

Now who does the First Brigade report to?  Not to Congress, not to you and me, not to governors.  They report up the chain of command to George Bush.  And so they are his private army, they have to do what he says they have to.  If he says, “Arrest civilians,” they have to do it. If he says, “Fire at these civilians,” they have to do it. If he says, “Arrest this Congressperson,” they have to do it.  And as I’ve noted in a video that went viral, the administration is claiming the whole world is a battleground. That’s their justification for Guantanamo.  Well, if the whole world is a battleground for the War on Terror, how is the United States not part of the battlefield?  So it’s a very dangerous precedent. Now because they—nobody knows where they are—and what’s extraordinary to me is that not a single mainstream media outlet has covered this.  It’s not been on the news or the wires.  I’ve been lobbying colleagues at the New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer, I lobby everyone. I lobby Michael Kirk of Frontline: “Do some reporting on where the First Brigade is.” Everyone agrees it’s a huge story, but no one is covering it.

Kall: How about Congress? How about Kucinich and Robert Wexler – are any of them asking what’s going on with that?

Wolf: I don’t have a direct line to them. If your readers want to check at district offices and get some feelings from them, that would be fantastic.

But what I have to explain to people about the nature of the coup is:  you don’t have to see bodies in the streets for the coup to have happened, in the sense that, all it takes at this stage is a sudden action, even a small one, and people will go quiet.

In Italy it was still a parliamentary democracy when the Black Shirts were lined up around the walls of the Parliament. They were still debating. It was like, the First Brigade could just as easily line up around the halls of Congress right now. It was still a parliamentary democracy, but people got intimidated and closed down.

Same thing with Germany. It was a parliamentary democracy when the Brown Shirts were sent, since Hitler’d studied Mussolini, to intimidate the parliamentarians in the Reichstag. And all it took in Italy was one violent murder by Black Shirts of one politician, and in Germany it took the Night of the Long Knives, this action by Brown Shirts, and everyone went absolutely quiet. So it doesn’t take much.

In Zimbabwe, they just had a close election, and Mugabe sent the military to intimidate voters and the opposition. In Azerbaijan, the military are sent to intimidate voters. So what I fear--and the reason I’m raising such a hue and cry about this, because this is the way to stop it--is that—and I’m relieved that we haven’t seen them yet, but people have to not stop this hue and cry, not stop their legal actions, among other things--but what I fear is that, in a close election, they’re priming us for “chaos and confusion.” Angry Obama voters find that they’ve been purged by the millions from the rolls, whoever, they’re going to speak up. Well, if they speak up, or if they are upset, all it takes is one citizen tasered to death—and these tasers kill people—and footage of it replayed again and again on the nightly news, for us to still have the First Amendment, but everyone to be scared to speak. And then, if he (Bush) can deploy the First Brigade, he can deploy the Second Brigade, or the Third Brigade—I mean, Karl Rove works by inches. So that’s why I say a coup has taken place. It’s like being a little bit pregnant: Once you have the military in the streets, it’s not a democracy anymore; it is by definition a police state.

Kall: But it’s not just that. You’ve got that list of ten different stages. What’s that list? Can you run through that quickly?

Wolf: The first is to invoke a terrifying internal and external threat; often it’s a real one that will be hyped. The second is to develop a prison system outside the rule of law where torture takes place. The third is to develop a paramilitary force that is not answerable to the people. The fourth is to create a surveillance apparatus aimed at ordinary citizens. Fifth is to infiltrate and harass citizens’ groups. Sixth is to target individuals like Dan Rather or the Dixie Chicks with job loss or recrimination – Valerie Plame is another.

Seventh is to restrict the press, you start to arrest journalists as you see at the RNC, at or threaten journalists with prosecution under the Espionage Act. Eighth is, you start to recast criticism as espionage and dissent as treason. Then (ninth) you start to subvert the rule of law – you know, ignoring subpoenas, ignoring Congress when they say where are the missing e-mails, ignoring Congress when they say where are the destroyed tapes, just simply disregard the law, and that’s how the First Brigade got deployed: it’s against the law, and Bush issued a signing statement to say he doesn’t feel bound by it.

And the last step is to make it easier for the president to declare martial law, and right now we are one step away from the president declaring martial law legally, because with the Defense Authorization Act of 2007 he can say it’s an emergency, and once he says it, he can deploy troops or the federalized National Guard or Blackwater or wherever he wants in the United States of America—and suspend elections if he wants to.

So just because it hasn’t happened yet doesn’t mean this is not an extremely dangerous situation, because one thing I’ve learned about closing societies is that, once people realize what’s happened, it’s usually too late to take action. We’re so used to thinking, “Oh well, we’ll just throw the bums out, or the ACLU will sue them,” or whatever, that’s what happens in democracy time. In police state time, when the edict comes out or the troop is deployed or the politician is assassinated, you’re not free anymore to take these steps because people are in a state of intimidation, and the law doesn’t work the same way it did before that step was taken.

Kall: So it’s the bringing back of the First Brigade, the violation of Posse Comitatus Act, that’s why it’s a coup here in the United States?

Wolf: Yes, that is the completion of the coup.

Kall: What about the money?  What about the 700, 800...

Wolf: Oh, thank you.  You’re exactly right. The definition of a police state is that the leader has his own military and his own treasury. What we’re seeing now—and again it’s so under-reported; this is being sent to me in e-mails—is that billions are being given to banks, not to lend it to hurting consumers, but to buy weakened banks, which by the way is exactly what they did in Germany: they weakened the businesses of Jews deliberately, and then when they were wounded and devalued, the state moved in and snapped them all up and made huge profits.

Kall: Now NPR has reported that you’ve--Now I was listening on NPR today; also you’ve got these private investing companies, and they basically are predators, like jackals, going after weakened companies or even taking strong companies and forcing them to allow themselves to be acquired and then selling them off for the parts, or what have you. Really, this is a way to get rid of diversity in business, the way to consolidate power. It’s all bad stuff.

Wolf: I’d actually flip what you’re saying around. It would be a way to get rid of diversity in business if we were a strong democracy, but what you’re seeing is the behavior of a Latin American oligarchy. This is exactly how they do things in Latin American dictatorships: they grab a chunk of the assets and nationalize them, and then a small group of cronies basically hand out the goods to one another. What people have to understand about a police state is – we’re so used to thinking, “Well, they would never do that because it’s bad for the economy,” or “It will destroy the middle class because people won’t be able to keep their homes”—in a police state they don’t care about having a strong middle class. They’re better served by depleting or erasing the middle class and having either this tiny oligarchy or people in misery.

Kall: And you talk about there being war against the middle class, and Bill Moyers has talked about it too of course. Do you want to talk about that?

Wolf: I’m not sure I distinguish war against the middle class from a general war against citizens. I suggest that’s a subset of what we need to understand the bailout is, which is not a stupid move in a strong capitalist democracy; it’s the conventional act of Latin American oligarchs seizing the treasury. I mean, look at the Philippines, look at Haiti: people go in, and they plunder the treasury, and they give the stuff to their friends, and there’s no accountability, and they don’t care if it destroys the economy. They don’t care as long as they’re in their gated communities with the treasury parceled out among themselves. People have to get what they’re looking at: they’re looking at normal behavior in a police state in terms of the financial transactions.

Kall: So what can we expect to see in the next one, two, three months, between now and the Inauguration?

Wolf: Well—God. I mean, it depends on us. I think what citizens have to realize is that, as they’re waking up, they’re beating back some of the worst of it, but they have to stay vigilant. For instance, there was this horrible bill, H.R. 1955, which was going to criminalize speech like this conversation, the “thought crimes” bill. And citizens woke up, and they pushed it back and resisted, so it hasn’t come down the pipe yet. If we stay passive, I’m afraid we’re going to see some deployment of the First Brigade somewhere in America or some tampering with the election or, God forbid, a declaration of martial law or a state of emergency. Why not?

Kall: I predict that the first use of that First Brigade will be one that looks legitimate, the use of it after a hurricane or a blizzard or something like that?

Wolf: They actually did that already, because Karl Rove is so smart. They deployed them actually after a hurricane, I believe in Alabama, to kind of get us used to the idea that they’re here for good. But those jobs are jobs that are done by the National Guard and by certain medical corps and emergency corps. It affected this fascinating discussion that I blogged about among military people and National Guard people saying, “Why does the First Brigade have to come in and do this? We’re taking care of those jobs.”

You’re quite right: We’re going to get eased into it initially in benevolent circumstances, and then suddenly you’ll have a Praetorian Guard. So that’s what I’m afraid of, God forbid. I’ve been saying for a year that, in a closing society, leading up to an election, you start to see, in the last weeks and months, hyped threats, crises, and instability to give the leader a chance to intervene, to give the leader a chance to tamper with the vote.

 People don’t understand that dictators love elections. They’re always having elections; they just make sure the elections are corrupted and that their guy or girl gets in. And that’s how I see Sarah Palin, as the kind of heir to this police state push. Not so much John McCain; I think they’re calculating that he won’t—I wrote a blog about the nature of his illness and his demographic, and I think they’re calculating that—

Kall: I wrote one about Sarah Palin and the Siamese fighting fish: when they mate, the female kills the male after they’re done. That’s what I see Sarah Palin doing. McCain won’t last two years.

Wolf: That’s profound.

Kall: She won’t kill him. She’ll find out something about him that forces him to resign.

Wolf: Well, she’s already stabbing him in the back. It’s extraordinary, because she feels like she’s got an independent platform, which was my argument, and yours. But you know, flipping it around—that’s what I foresee in case of, God forbid, a hyped threat or a staged threat or a staged terrorist attack, because believe me, it happens. The British Empire staged attacks against their own people continually to justify their own agenda.

But if we are active, and if we rise up, and if we press  the military to get them to sign a pledge to not take up arms against the United States, and if we—I’m calling on people to lobby their attorney general to start prosecution proceedings against President Bush, bipartisan impeachment and prosecution, because I don’t think it’s safe to leave him. Election to Inauguration is a chunk of time; I don’t think it’s safe to leave this murderous criminal in power, and I’m not using those terms rhetorically.

Charlotte Dennett is an aspiring attorney general in Vermont who has promised to initiate indictment and prosecution proceedings. So I think if enough citizens stand up and say we’re going to prosecute, we’re going to hold you accountable, there are going to be tribunals, there’s going to be a Nuremberg-type trial for crimes against the Constitution, crimes against the people, war crimes, warrantless wiretapping, then what you see is that we have a very good chance of restoring the republic.

          Kall: I hope we can. Well, we’ve reached the end of our            program.   

         Thanks, and good night, everybody. 

-30-

Authors Bio:

Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect,
connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.

Check out his platform at RobKall.com

He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity

He's given talks and workshops to Fortune
500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered
first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and
Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful
people on his Bottom Up Radio Show,
and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and
opinion sites, OpEdNews.com

more detailed bio:

Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, debillionairizing the planet and the Psychopathy Defense and Optimization Project.

Rob Kall Wikipedia Page

Rob Kall's Bottom Up Radio Show: Over 400 podcasts are archived for downloading here, or can be accessed from iTunes. Or check out my Youtube Channel

Rob Kall/OpEdNews Bottom Up YouTube video channel

Rob was published regularly on the Huffingtonpost.com for several years.

Rob is, with Opednews.com the first media winner of the Pillar Award for supporting Whistleblowers and the first amendment.

To learn more about Rob and OpEdNews.com, check out A Voice For Truth - ROB KALL | OM Times Magazine and this article.

For Rob's work in non-political realms mostly before 2000, see his C.V.. and here's an article on the Storycon Summit Meeting he founded and organized for eight years.

Press coverage in the Wall Street Journal: Party's Left Pushes for a Seat at the Table

Talk Nation Radio interview by David Swanson: Rob Kall on Bottom-Up Governance June, 2017

Here is a one hour radio interview where Rob was a guest- on Envision This, and here is the transcript..

To watch Rob having a lively conversation with John Conyers, then Chair of the House Judiciary committee, click here. Watch Rob speaking on Bottom up economics at the Occupy G8 Economic Summit, here.

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Rob's articles express his personal opinion, not the opinion of this website.

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