DK: Right! [laughs]
RS: -- that the government would guarantee. And in fact, Democrats -- because you were in Congress when all of this was happening -- under Bill Clinton made an alliance with, you know, very right-wing Republicans in control of the Senate to pass all the banking deregulation that caused the Great Recession --
DK: Bob -- Bob, you're 100% right. What's happened is that the political center has shifted far to the right. So people who are even advocating things that are common sense, and right and decent for the mass of American people, are now painted at the margins because the center has shifted so far to the right, with the help of Democrats as much as Republicans.
RS: So now, you ran in the Democratic primary, just like Bernie Sanders is doing now. And I don't know if you recall, but I was not enthusiastic about your doing that; I thought it was kind of a trap. I think I was wrong; I not only think I was wrong, I'll admit I was wrong. I think you were able to raise a lot of issues that wouldn't have been raised. And now Bernie Sanders is engaged in the same kind of effort here as an Independent who now has gone into the Democratic primary. He has pledged to support -- that's the only part I don't like, he pledged to support whoever the party nominates. And you know, what are lessons you have -- you knew Bernie Sanders from the House, ah --
DK: Actually, I've known Bernie for almost 40 years. We were mayors, our terms kind of overlapped, going way back when. Bernie on the domestic issues is setting the pace, and is a necessary voice. He is having an impact. He may be responsible, if he doesn't get the nomination, for pushing Secretary Clinton toward a more progressive form of economics; that would be an achievement, if he doesn't get the nomination.
RS: But will she stay pushed? I mean, you can push these people in an election, but then they sell you out as soon as they've got the office.
DK: Well, you know, that's always a problem. But I also want to say this. You know, when I ran in 2004 and 2008, it was a continuation of an effort to challenge American interventionism, these mindless, however profitable wars that our country wages for interest groups that have nothing to do with the American people. And I wish, Bob, that someone running this year would carry those issues forward. So far, that's not happening. And that is a problem.
RS: Well, this is an important issue to discuss, then. Because you were in favor, and actually you put in legislation to have a Department of Peace. And I would say, yes, you were a great populist on the domestic, economic issues; but truly heroic, in the way Ron Dellums and a very few other people have been in the House, in challenging the imperial thrust of America, which really is what subverts the republic.
DK: Well, you know, when you come -- when you get inside the system -- you know, I come from the neighborhoods of Cleveland. And I got into Congress with the intention of fighting for more help for education for the people I represented, for healthcare, for retirement security, for jobs, for a cleaner environment, and on and on. And then when I got inside, what I found out is that I stepped into the belly of a beast of a war machine. And that's all it was about. We've spent trillions of dollars and wasted that money on wars. And when I really came to understand what it was about, it was pretty shocking, Bob. But to me, it wasn't enough to just say, well, I understand it; I gave hundreds and hundreds of speeches challenging the system, and I continue to do it today. And I do it now, saying we must end this interventionism; we must have a benign role for America in the world, not as a nation above nations, but a nation among nations. And we have to start to deemphasize the role of the military in our lives and in our culture. We are in a serious conflict right now over whether we're going to be able to maintain even a semblance of a democracy, or be overwhelmed by a tide of fascism and oligarchy.
RS: Well, you know, and the fact of the matter is that Hillary Clinton, who seems to be the frontrunner right now and is quite hawkish, and she -- we now know from these emails and everything else that she was much more hawkish than Obama. That she was one of the people in the administration leading the charge to overthrow secular, de-fanged dictators like Gaddafi, the same stupid thing that George W. Bush did in Iraq. You know, and so the question really is, is Bernie Sanders up to challenging her? Now, you say you knew him when he was a mayor, you knew him in the House; who is Bernie Sanders? Will he carry a progressive flag on international affairs?
DK: Well, on the domestic issues, Bernie is performing a critical function in carrying issues of equity, fairness, jobs, healthcare, social security into the general election, or into the primary season. But look, his campaign isn't about raising these foreign policy questions. And the reason why I think we need to have that voice in this election is for this reason. If you look at all the resources of the United States that go into these wars -- you know, the Joseph Stiglitz-Linda Bilmes study called The Three Trillion Dollar War is now the five trillion dollar war. And if you think of what it would mean to reprogram monies on the domestic side -- I mean, what Eisenhower said way back when about every bomb, you know, that's made takes money away from the needs of the people -- that was true then, it's true now. And so we have to make the connection. The reason why this is so urgent, there has to be a connection made between American interventionism, and the trillions of dollars that are wasted in these wars abroad, and government's lacking the ability to seriously meet a domestic agenda. And that doesn't even get into the broader questions of monetary policy, which is something else I've raised in the halls of Congress.
RS: You know, it's interesting you bring up Eisenhower, and Eisenhower's great, great lasting achievement; I mean, he did send the troops into Little Rock to enforce the law on the right to education, very important. But the fact of the matter is that Eisenhower's farewell speech -- like George Washington's farewell speech, which warned about the imposters of pretended patriotism -- Eisenhower in his farewell speech warned about the military-industrial complex. And as you well know that speech, here was the commander who basically had won World War II from the American side, an inspired world leader, and he was warning about a military-industrial complex that extends into every congressional district.
DK: No question about it.
RS: He was very explicit about it. But he also raised another question about fear mongering. You know, after all, it was Eisenhower who brought Soviet leader Khrushchev to the United States to see how we grow corn effectively [laughter]. And it really impressed Khrushchev, and probably began the end of the Cold War. So I raise a question about these Democrats, and Bernie Sanders is not going to raise these issues with Hilary Clinton, because Hilary Clinton's a fear mongerer. She has supported the surveillance state. She went along with an administration that does drone attacks, and so forth. And it's a real question that folks have: should they go for the Green Party, should they go for a third party, if Bernie Sanders does not rise to the occasion or if he loses, and the candidate of the Democrats is a war-mongering Democrat, and we've had plenty of them!
DK: Well, that's why it's important to inject this into the discussion now. You know, when I first came to Congress I was in a congressional hearing where the Department of Defense had to 'fess up that they had over one trillion, "t" for trillion, dollars in accounts they could not reconcile. There was at that point over 1187 different accounting systems deliberately obfuscating how the money's spent. Once I had that, Bob, I didn't vote for a single appropriation for these wars or for the military build-ups. Throughout my entire career, not once did I go along with this, because I knew how the money's being blown and wasted; and it ends up being, as a fellow by the name of Smedley Butler once said, a racket; "war is a racket."
RS: So people like yourself who've been dismissed as peaceniks, as unrealistic, as not pragmatic on foreign policy -- you know, without flattering you, because I've been critical when you needed criticism from my point of view -- but the fact of the matter is, you were way ahead of your time on these issues.
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