Is opposition to the World Trade Organization the central theme of your campaign?

Definitely. We were very much involved in the critique of the WTO and mobilizing people to get them to Seattle.

The Corporatists knew that they couldn't repeal all these regulatory laws. So what do they do? The create a superautocracy out of Geneva that supersedes all our democratic processes. It subordinates Congress, the environment, child labor, human rights, all of it, to the dictates of international trade. It's like a silent coup d'etat. We were up against big business, the Clinton adminstration, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Chamber of Commerce, the Association of Manufacturers, thousands of PACs and all the goodies that Clinton could drop on wavering members of Congress. And we still almost beat them on NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement], which led to GATT [General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade], which was the precursor of the WTO.

About five years ago, I went to a protest against the International Monetary Fund in New York, and there were about thirty people there, from ten different leftist groups who all hated each other. I was depressed for months. Then Seattle exploded last December with 50,000 people. What happened?

Opposition to corporate power is going mainstream.

When was the last time you saw labor, environmental, consumer, student, church and human rights groups all under the same banner? That's very important. It's not just that there was a big demonstration in Seattle. Look at the coalition that's forming. That's important, because the corporate state respects no boundaries. It goes into every sector of society, and it outrages every sector of society. Even conservatives are outraged. I asked Bill Bennett, "Do you know that corporations are on a collision course with conservative principles?" He said, "I agree." Number one, corporate welfare grates on them. And number two, they hate the violent, pornographic exploitation of children. Nobody ever envisioned that corporations would be selling to two- and three- and four-year-olds by seperating them from their parents, by teaching them to nag their parents into buying the most awful things to eat and drink. They psychoanalyze these kids, figure out at what stage they're lonely, when the peer group dominates, et cetera, getting the child-development psychologists to consult on how best to enter their minds and bodies.

In a recent book, No Contest: Corporate Lawyers and the Perversion of Justice in America, you wrote about your colleagues at a reunion of the Harvard Law School class of 1970, who seemed disenchanted with their lives spent serving rich twits. Your line is "No one confronted the psychic costs of serving money rather than ideals." I see those psychic costs in journalism all the time.

The most valued human relationships are outside the market, and everything is up for sale in this country. The market has always been there, but it's had a relatively narrow role in past centuries. Now it's corroding all other human values. Ask people to tell you what they own. You'll wait fifteen minutes while they tell you about their stereo, their car, their house. You can keep pushing them and they'll never name what we own in common: public lands, timber, minerals, the public airwaves. It doesn't occur to them that we own these assets, because they're entirely controlled by corporations. That's commercialism.

I grew up corporate. I used to look at cars in terms of style: power, fins, hood ornaments. Growing up civic means you start looking at cars in terms of safety, fuel efficiency, ease of maintenance and repair, pollution control.

Was there a revelation in your childhood that set you upon your current path?

One day I came home from school, when I was about ten. My father said, "What did you do today in school? Did you learn how to believe, or did you learn how to think?" My parents were always taking me to the next step. And where are kids today? As pre-teenagers, they're spending thirty hours a week in the hands of the corporations. Television, video games, arcades, overmedication, war toys, cosmetics for little girls. Then the addictive industries hit them: alcohol, tobacco, drugs. They're spending less time with adults, including their parents, than any generation in history. We don't pay a penalty for that ? Our economy is designed to take adults away from the household for longer and longer periods of time– commuting, working longer hours – to make a middle-class living. The streets are empty in residential areas because people are working or too to do anything. The social clubs are closing down. There's no one to run for local office or serve on commissions. Nobody shows up at city council meetings. The figures are that Americans worked 63 more hours last year than they did twenty years ago, and for less money. This is a period of unprecedented economic growth and a booming stock market. What do you think is going to happen to these people when a recession or depression hits?

You once testified in front of a House committee on corporate welfare. Why do they even let you testify anymore?

Well, they don't. That was a special case. Most people in this town who call themseves conservatives are really corporatists. John Kasich, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, is an actual conservative. He opposed the B-2 bomber; he opposes corporate welfare. Over a period of of a year and a half, we convinced him to hold the first congressional hearings on corporate welfare. He invited me to be the lead-off witness. I wasn't restricted to five minutes, and it was on C-Span. We got a great reaction, but a lot of his colleagues weren't happy. We're now working with Kasich's office to develop a joint coalition to eliminate five corporate welfare programs, just for starters. If you include tax loopholes, bailouts, subsidies, technology giveaways and public resource giveaways, it comes to hundreds of billions a year.

In the Sixties and Seventies, you had a lot of legislators in your corner. Yet a liberal like Walter Mondale was also a member of the Trilateral Commission, which issued that famous report saying the United States had suffered from an "excess of democracy" in the Sixties. Did you ever feel like you were making a deal with the devil as you worked with Congress?

You tend to look at politicians piecemeal. Since you can't enact the laws, you pick one virtue here and one virtue there, and you don't deal with them except on your terms. Liberal Republicans in the Senate in those days – Javitz, Percy, Hatfield – were better than most Democrats are now. So it's a natural step now to enter the electoral arena. With corporate power, you've got to go to every front that they're fighting or they'll turn your flank and defeat you. You can't just beat them in court, or they'll override the decision by lobbying something through the legislature.

In 1996, you told the New York Times, "If I really wanted to beat Clinton, I would get out, raise $3 or $4 million, and maybe provide the margin for his defeat. That's not the purpose of this candidacy." Since you're planning to raise $5 million and run hard this year, does that mean you would not have a problem providing the margin of defeat for Gore?

I would not – not at all. Take every section of U.S. government and ask what's the difference between the two parties. Treasury, the Federal Reserve, Defense, State, Commerce, Labor: In all the departments and all the regulatory agencies, with the possible slight exception of the Environmental Protection Agency, there is no difference whatsoever between the two parties. In some areas, the Democrats are worse. They got elected by labor unions, and they've got the most mealy-mouthed, patsy Labor Department that any Republican would dream of having. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration is even worse off under the Democrats. We can't even get the Secretary of Labor to make a speech on occupational hazards. What else is there? The Institutes of Health are exactly the same under both parties. They're giving away all the research and development to the big drug comapnies, and you know who reversed the reasonable-price provision that was restraining what the drug companies could charge? Clinton. The Department of Energy is still subsidizing fossil and nuclear fuels. They still have a low priority for solar energy. It's a little better than under Reagan and Bush, but nothing like you would expect from the "environmental president and vice president."

On social services? They're cutting low-income housing, strangling legal services. The administration speaks a better game, but they do not fight a better game. And the Republicans never subsidized the merger of defese contractors. That's a Clinton innovation. A billion and a half dollars he spent in the Pentagon to subsidize the merger of Lockheed Martin. And now they're doing that for others, on the grounds that there's overcapacity. But they're knocking out a competitor, so they'll pay even more for weapons we don't need. The Republicans never thought of that one.

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