Or just read some excerpts from that interview here:
BILL MOYERS: The dollar's sinking, food prices rising, recession looming and yet, on television, and just about everywhere we look, people squeezed to the breaking point are constantly being told to buy buy buy. And here we are, at the height of the holiday season. The malls and the shops are packed. Stuff is flying off the shelves. And like Grinch or Scrooge you, Benjamin Barber, stand up and say, "Capitalism is in trouble." Why?
BENJAMIN BARBER: Because things are flying off the shelves that we don't want or need or even understand what they are, but we go on buying them. Because capitalism needs us to buy things way beyond the scope of our needs and wants, just to stay in business, Bill. That's the bottom line. Capitalism is no longer manufacturing goods to meet real needs and human wants. It's manufacturing needs to sell us all the goods it's got to produce. They've got to sell all this stuff, and they have to figure out how to get us to want it.
Problem is, capitalism cannot stay indefinitely in business trying to manufacture needs for people in the middle class and the developed world who have most of what they need. It has to figure out how to address the real needs of people. We have real needs here for alternative energy -- energy from geothermal, wind, and tidal sources. Tidal is an amazing new field where you use the tides and the motions of the tides. It's expensive, difficult right now. But that's what you get the profits for, by investing in that.
With global warming, coastlines around this country are rising. Hurricane and flood damage is more extensive each year. We need housing that can withstand water. Big opportunities here. You could make a lot of money figuring out how to build inexpensive housing that withstands hurricanes and flooding. Very few people are doing it. That's the way capitalism ought to be working.
So capitalism is in trouble. But, secondly, capitalism has put democracy in trouble. Why? Because capitalism has tried to persuade us that being a private consumer is enough, that a citizen is nothing more than a consumer, that voting means spending your dollars spreading around your private prejudices, your private preferences -- not reaching public judgments, not finding common ground, not making decisions about the social consequences of private judgments, but instead just making the private judgments. And letting it all fall where it will.
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BENJAMIN BARBER: You walk through the mall, nothing there but shops. You could walk for miles and think that the whole world is constituted by retail shopping and nothing else.
BILL MOYERS: But there are jobs there. People are working there. And so people say, “Barber & Moyers, get with it, this is the 21st century, not the first half the 20th century." I mean the world has changed.
BENJAMIN BARBER: Yeah, but look at where the jobs are in our economy. There are plenty of jobs developing and selling drugs, both legal and illegal; there are jobs in the penitentiaries. You could say, "Gee, the prison expansions are good. More jobs for guards." Anything can provide jobs. The question is at what price? So we have to ask: Where do we want the jobs to be? Do we want our jobs to be in education? Do we want our jobs to be in the arts? Do we want our jobs to be in general services? Do we want our jobs to be in health? Or do we want our jobs to be in selling gadgets and luxuries, and unnecessary food that makes half the country obese? And by the way, those kinds of jobs now account for about half of all jobs. So where do we want the jobs to be? And, again, that's a social decision. The market puts the jobs wherever the marketers push them to. What we need to do, as citizens, is say, "Where do we want the jobs to be? What kinds of jobs do we want our young people to have?
When everything's marketing, and everything's retail, and everything's shopping, we somehow think that enhances our freedom. Well, it doesn't. It has a corrupting effect on the fundamental diversity and variety in our lives that make us human, that make us happy. And, in that sense, focusing on shopping and the fulfillment of private consumer desires actually undermines our happiness.
BILL MOYERS: Help me understand that. Because so many people will say choice is joy.
BENJAMIN BARBER: And they are right. But the question is what kind of choice? You go to LA today, you can choose to rent or buy any of 200 different kinds of automobile. And then, in those automobiles, you can sit, no matter which one you're in, for five hours not moving on the freeway system there. The one choice you don't have is genuine, efficient, cheap, accessible, public transportation. There's nothing as a consumer that you can do to get it. The choice must be a public one.
So many of our choices today are trivial. We feel that we're expanding and enhancing our choice, but the big choices -- a green environment, a safe city for our kids, good education -- simply, are not available through private consumer choices. That's the problem with vouchers for schools. You know, we think that with vouchers we can all find a good school. But if education itself is going under, and is not supported as a social good, no amount of private choices is going to give any of our kids in public or private schools appropriate education.
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BILL MOYERS: I read the other day that, for the first time, we Americans are spending more than we are saving. We have become a debtor nation in more ways than one. What does that mean in the long run?
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