Robert Greenwald is with me, in fact I’m very pleased to have him here in the studio with us here in Portland. He’s here in Portland, and this particularly for our listeners on AM 620 KPOJ here in Portland, because tonight he’s doing a special screening of his movie "Rethink Afghanistan" plus a discussion with Robert Greenwald. It’s 7 o'clock at the Clinton Street Theater which is at 2522 SE Clinton Street in Portland, although if you live here you know where it is. Clinton Street Theater, Clintonst, or ClintonstTheater.com is the web site. $10 for tickets. And Robert, welcome to the show.
Robert Greenwald: Thank you, Thom, it’s great to be with you, it’s nice to be in Portland and the event tonight is a great benefit for the National Lawyers Guild Lewis and Clark military counseling project which speaks to what you were saying just before, that there are many men and women in the military who need help, who need counseling. The longer this war goes on, the more the needs are gonna be great and hopefully we’ll be able to raise some money to help them tonight and have a good discussion afterwards.
Thom Hartmann: Yeah. This is, you know, we’ve been talking about Haiti and we’re gonna get back to Haiti as we continue on the program, but there’s really at a certain level, kind of a seamless connection here between the tragedy in Haiti; not the earthquake itself, but the poverty that led to there not being building codes, that led to the earthquake being so much more destructive, and the situation in Afghanistan, in as much as both are being driven by economic interests in the United States and both are causing massive human devastation, Robert. Would you agree with that statement?
Robert Greenwald: Oh, very, very strongly. Thom, when I got off the plane in Afghanistan, in Kabul, and you read about the third poorest country in the world, but you get off, you see it, you see the hunger, you see the poverty, you see the joblessness. And then you see the billions of dollars that are being spent for military solutions that are not going to solve political social and economic problems. I think the most recent study said it’s 56,000 dollars a minute that we are spending, your dollars, just for the surge. And one million dollars for one troop for one year. Can you imagine what that money could do in Afghanistan or could do in Haiti or so many other places.
Thom Hartmann: Right.
Robert Greenwald: But we’ve got to get off this heroin of military, military, military.
Thom Hartmann: Right. I mean we’re all sitting, I did it myself, last night, I texted Haiti to 90999 I think it is, I’m quite sure, to contribute 10 bucks via cell phone to the Red Cross. I’m doing a number of other things as well but it was just, 'hey, you know, let me see if this works' so that if I wanted to talk about it on the air I could actually say that works. It does. And yet, you know, I’m gonna write a fairly large check at the end of year for my taxes and none of that is going to go to Haiti, a good chunk of that, what, a third, a half, you tell me Robert, is going to go to our military operations all around the world including these insane wars.
Robert Greenwald: Yes, exactly. We have to do what we can to help the people in the Haiti and in other countries and there are some good NGOs in Afghanistan. But if we can start to use this war in Afghanistan, at a time when people don’t have jobs, don’t have homes, elections are coming up, if we can start to use this as an opportunity to talk about these issues and that’s what we’re doing with your help and your listeners' help and the Rethink Afghanistan campaign. If they go to RethinkAfghanistan.com they can get clips of the film, they can get the whole film, we have a simple tool so they can send sections around to people. I tell you the more people find out about this war the more they dislike it. Public opinion has already moved significantly against it and it’s only gonna get more and we made the clips available so depending on what your issue is, it’s civilian casualties, or women, or the cost of war, security, you can send a little bit of it and just forward it on to somebody and say 'here’s what you didn’t know and here’s what you need to know'.
Thom Hartmann: Absolutely. We’re talking with Robert Greenwald, he has a special screening tonight here in Portland of Rethink Afghanistan, RethinkAfghanistan.com of course the website. And afterwards he’ll physically be there ‘cause he’s here in town, 7 o'clock at the Clinton Street Theater, if you’re in Portland, get out there. Um, Robert Greenwald, when Barack Obama decided to double down on Afghanistan, when he decided to go, you know, throw another 30000 troops in, now he’s asking for another 33 million dollars which I find particularly ironic because just last week the Chinese released their new bullet train, which covers a distance the equivalent of Chicago to New York in 7 hours at 238 miles an hour and it cost 32 billion dollars. And Obama wants 33 billion dollars for the next year in Afghanistan. When this happened it just brought back to me echoes of LBJ. Robert we have a little less than a minute left. Do you see any parallels here? Do you think that Obama might be making the same mistake Johnson made in Vietnam?
Robert Greenwald: I think making a, potentially making a worse mistake and I think our job as progressives is to push back very hard so that it’s not only the military who have essentially boxed them in on this but are creating a pressure on the other side. Because we have a democratic administration, we have the great tragedies and problems in this country, and we just cannot spend these billions and billions of dollars on wars and think it’s not going to effect us in any way. So in some ways because we have the 2010 elections, we have an economic crisis, and we have an unpopular war, I actually think there’s an opportunity and that’s what we’re driving with the RethinkAfghanistan campaign.
Thom Hartmann: That’s great. Robert Greenwald is with us, RethinkAfghanistan.com is the website. If you’re in Portland, if you’re listening to us on AM 620 KPOJ get down to the Clinton Street Theater tonight, starts at 7 o'clock, Robert will be there screening this brilliant movie, "Rethink Afghanistan".
Robert Greenwald: Thank you, Thom and thanks all the listeners. See you tonight.
Thom Hartmann: Thanks Robert.
Transcribed by Suzanne Roberts, Portland Psychology Clinic.
