Responses to the Table of Free voices event

Below, we bring you the the transcript of responses by Susan George. To see the responses of other participants, click here

1. Silke Gesierich: Do we have the right to consider human beings as more valuable than other life forms?

Susan George I think we have the right to say that human beings have particular attributes that other life forms do not have. This is simply a matter of fact. We have consciousness; we have the ability to ask questions and try to answer them, which is what we are doing now; and we know that we are going to die, which other life forms do not know. And, therefore, we can say that yes, we have a certain value; but this does not mean on the contrary that we have any right to abuse other life forms which is what we tend to do everyday. It does not mean that we have the right to cause species extinction. It does not mean that we should have the right to patent the life forms in plants or animals, to sell their genes for our own use. It does not mean that we have the right to take up as much space as we take up on the planet because we are obliterating species everyday with our ecological footprint. We are treading on other species' capacity to exist. So, I think that there is a great difference between considering human beings valuable, which they are -- we are the only ones who can attempt to transform the planet and we have done it up to now, and we've done it often in a very destructive way, but there have been also cases where human beings have transformed the planet in very very beautiful ways. I think of the landscapes in Tuscany or the Philippines or some cases that have been worked for humans for [audio ends]

2. Haya El Azzah: Why is it that when the powerful use force it is called "self-defense" and when the weak use force it is called "terrorism"?

Susan George Well, this is very interesting because the questioner has understood, I think the questioner knows the answer himself, that the vocabulary that we use reflects power relations and here we have the powerful who are setting the terms of the discussion, who are themselves creating the vocabulary because its suits their needs. Terrorism is now being used to justify absolutely everything in the United States. It's incredibly convenient to have amorphous kind of threat of terrorism which would be, yes, violent; that's quite true, and I am in no way defending terrorism. But we have to recognize that both the use of force by the powerful, as we've just seen in Lebanon, and terrorism, as we have seen in London or New York or wherever, kill civilians. There is no excuse for the use of force against civilians in either case. But the name terrorism reflects the state of power; it reflects the fact that the media are not in the hands of the weak. The media are not in the hands of the other, of the countries that are the weakest and the ones where the "terrorists" come from. Perhaps when Aljazeera goes on the air worldwide, there will be another kind of vocabulary invented. This will be a very interesting experiment because, if you can control the vocabulary, you can control people's minds, you can get them to think in the categories that you want them to think in. And if you do that well enough, as George Orwell showed, you reduce the language so that there will not be anymore opportunities for people to express certain concepts, ceratin relationships. If you control the words -- Orwell showed when you reduce our vocabulary to the lowest common denominator, then people can no longer think of certain things. They will think as power wants them to think.

3. Elliot Chikoma: If Darwin's theory is right about life beginning in Africa, then why are African states less developed than Western states?

Susan George As far as I know, Darwin did not say that life began in Africa. Life, if you begin with the smallest forms of life, began underwater and it began pretty much all over at the same time. But, it took 4 million years for life to emerge on land and it's possible that recognizable human beings did emerge in Africa; although, even now there is some controversy about that among paleontologists. But in any case, the emergence of species called Homo sapiens, human beings, has nothing to do with the emergence of states, which came hundreds and thousands of years later. Homo sapiens has been around for several 100,000 years, but states you could say emerged with Egypt, perhaps in 4000 BC. So, there is a great difference there. Africa, of course, has suffered disproportionately from the slave trade, from colonialism, and perhaps because of slavery people decided it was safer to live in small communities, quite separate from each other, so this was not conducive to the emergence of states. Africa is also to a great degree continent without writing; it's not a civilization where literature is written and records are kept. And so, that's necessary for the state to continue, you have to have written culture. And, maybe also in Africa, the abundance of food and game made life too easy and this retarded the organization that's based on states and was necessary in colder western climates; but that's only speculation. I don't really know. But, in any case, our present industrialist, capitalist type of development does not correspond to the African mentality, which is based on extended families, communal traditions, land which is not proprietary. The person asking the question is from Namibia, and this is one of the most unequal societies on earth.

4. Wolfgang Jost: Why is an Iranian Nuclear bomb supposed to be more dangerous than an American, Israeli or French?

Susan George Well, no nuclear bomb is more or less dangerous. They are all horribly dangerous. And, we've really let Pandora's Box be opened and go all over the place. But, let's say simply that the Iranian bomb does not exist. It is very very far from happening. They do not have the capacity; and the Iranian "bomb" is largely a product of American propaganda, which is looking for an excuse to continue to change society as it keeps saying in the Middle East, which is to say to get control over the natural resources of the Middle East. So, it is using Iranian "bomb" which is, it's an imaginary one for the moment as an excuse possibly for bombing later on. That is what many reporters are saying from the - who know more about this subject than I do. But, I would say that Bush himself is responsible. If there is an Iranian bomb, we can put it on to George Bush because he is the one who has torn up the nuclear non-proliferation treaty; he is the one who has increased the spending on nukes; he is the one that has allowed his generals and his people in the Pentagon to go for what they call limited or deep penetration nuclear weapons that are supposed to be able to shatter the underground hideouts of people like Bin Laden. But if they don't know where Bin Laden is, it's a big deal to have the weapons, nuclear or otherwise. These nuclear weapons if ever used would be 10 times, 20 times, 50 times more dangerous than Hiroshima. The radiation fallout would be infinitely greater than the bombs that we have known and seen exploded up to now. So, all of this is totally irresponsible.

5. Qin Chuan: How can people in the developed world enjoy cheap products and also criticize China for its rapid industrialization?

Susan George Well, I think it's significant that this question comes from a Chinese person in Beijing. And the criticism, when it exists, is more because of China's very low standards of pay and very poor working conditions for a more or less captive workforce that produces those cheap products. That's what people complain about in the West. China has a huge reserve army of labor, and many of us see it as forcing down wages all over the world because we are all in competition with China now because it is attracting many Western firms which de-localize into China, but then sell their products back home. Many people feel that's not fair. China does not tolerate unions. It doesn't tolerate dissent in the workforce or protest or even collective bargaining. And, people also criticize China because its ecological record is disastrous, although fortunately it seems that provincial managers and party people are now going to judged not just on economic growth but also on their ecological record. I hope that this is true, but up till now they have only been told to go for economic growth, and that has meant repressing workforces, that has meant always coming down on the side of management, never on the side of workers. So, this is going to produce cheap goods for the rest of the world. And the danger for China is that the United States import market, which has been so strong up till now, is showing signs of declining; and if China is counting on continuing to export at the same level to the United States, it may be making a big mistake, just as American consumers may be making the mistake to rely so completely on Chinese goods.

6. Do you think, that now we have the internet in our homes, that we are being intimidated and controlled more than ever?

Susan George No, I don't think so, at least, not yet. I don't ever feel intimidated by my computer except that I've got too many messages that I'm expected to answer, but that's a different sort of problem. And I think that there are certainly ways, if you want to find them, that allow you to do things like blocking ads. You don't have to take the kinds of sites that are offered. You don't have to respond to the attempts to get you to buy this or that online. So I don't think it's -- I don't think that that's the real danger. The real danger is addiction. Sometimes I sense that in myself, getting addicted to my message box, so that I - maybe I save some time because I don't have to write out letters anymore, and put them in envelopes, and take them to the post. But, I've got a lot more that I'm expected to answer, and I think it's a good thing to have Internet at home. Many families communicate through that. Many families send pictures to each other. My children were in Africa. They sent me pictures every day of what they had just seen that day. I think that's marvelous. We feel much more in touch, and of course this can be multiplied by the hundreds, and keep communities and so on in touch. So, I -- for me the word is not intimidated, and it's not controlled, it's -- quite the contrary. I think it gives a sense of freedom, and a sense of capacity, and not -- we're not intimidated. We're not made to feel fearful, but we are made to feel that we are -- and we can be freer than we were, and we can be more creative than we were. So, I see no downside so long as there is a minimum of control exerted over the aspects of ads and pornography and all of that.

7. Jerry Mander: Is the ubiquitousness of mass media more of an opportunity or a problem?

Susan George Good question from Jerry Mander, who has been thinking seriously about these problems for years, and he used to be in the world of media, and now is in the world of world changing. So, I think it is probably a bit of both. It's a problem because the media are so highly concentrated that in the United States at least they are controlled by five or six very large corporations, and it is getting more concentrated also in the European countries and elsewhere. So, concentration and freedom of the press becomes a real issue here because the owners of large conglomerates do not want unwelcome news reported. And, most people are getting their news from television, which is becoming more and more trivial, and broadcasting what they call infotainment which isn't really information, and a lot of it is just people stories which have absolutely no news value and are not explaining to people how the world works. So, that is definitely a problem, and we should be worrying about it. But, we also have now an opportunity, which is that the alternative media and -- or even alternative mass media are coming up. Let me just give the example of how we used in France. For the constitutional campaign, we had a referendum on should we accept the European constitution, and people who said no because this was the most neo-liberal document that had ever been conceived, and we didn't want all these economic prescriptions. But we used the alternative media. We used the Internet. We used all kind of documentaries, and people were showing them all over France. There were a thousand collectives that were using these media every day, and it's a fight that we won. So, I think there is now also an opportunity. But it's like everything else. We've got to learn to use the techniques before the other side ruins the opportunity that we have.

8. Nicolas FLAGEY: Will it someday be possible to directly connect human brains to machines (like computers)? If Yes, when and how?

Susan George Actually, this has already happened in the sense I read in the "New Scientist" that one person who is paralyzed had actually moved a cursor on his computer screen using only brain power. So, this is a very small advance, but I would say a very significant one. And, it is possible that we really know so little about the brain, that it is entirely possible that we could instate direct communication through connecting brains to machinery or to each other. This would be a boon to paralyzed people, if it were possible. It would be a boon to blind people, who in some cases can already have certain sensations through direct connection, stimulation of their brains. So, again, I mean, this sort of technology doesn't scare me if it is used for the right purposes. Of course, if it is used to enslave people, if it is used to know what is in their heads, if it is used to do market research on what sort of products they are going to buy, and what sort of messages they will be sensitive to if they get them in advertising, or if they are getting them directly, then I think it's a total invasion of people's privacy and of their space; and that is not something I would want to see. But, all of this takes place in a particular economic context. It's very hard to answer the questions like this, and say is this a good thing or a bad thing. Well, in the present case this paralyzed person who moved a cursor on a screen, that is a good thing. But, it could be a bad one in the future.

9. Julia Butterfly Hill: What is your tree? What is it in your life that calls you to be bigger than what you think is possible?

Susan George Well, when you ask me, what my tree is, my tree is the Tilia. I think it's Linden. They smell so sweet in late May and June, and I love them, and for me that's home because I have two big ones in the garden; and I love those trees. And then I also love the [inaudible], the Horse-chestnut tree that's in the courtyard of my flat, and I remember the [inaudible]. Near my tree I lived happily, and that's how I feel next to that tree. Now, what calls me to be bigger than what I think possible? I suppose it's remembering my parents, remembering all the privileges I've had in life, and knowing that I owe something back to life. I owe something back to all of the people who helped make me what I am, who took responsibility for me when I was small, and who kept me safe. And I just hope to be worthy of the privileges that I have had in my life because I've had a very -- I've had a charmed life -- some suffering like everyone -- but really I have a sense of owing. I have a sense of duty and a sense of trying to be honorable.

10. Anonymous: What can we learn from Africa?

Susan George Well, here again the Africans will have a better idea of what we can learn from Africa than we will. But, I will just make a stab at the question from the little that I do know about Africa, which is that we can learn patience, and Africans have had to put up with an enormous amount, and they are still there in spite of absolutely horrendous trials. They are not -- they don't give up; they are very, very patient. We can learn the art of talking together. There is a system that they call [parabola]. People just sit and talk until they get the problem worked out. Now, [parabola], -- palaver comes from this in English -- is a system of allowing everyone to feel included, everyone is given a say, everyone can put their opinion on the table; but when you come to the end of the [parabola] the palaver, then you've got a consensus. People may agree more or less, but they will abide by it because that's what has been decided. And I think that would be a wonderful thing to learn from Africa. We can learn respect for old people. In Africa the old have wisdom, and they are recognized as having wisdom, and I like very much the expression "Every time an old man dies, it's a library that burns". That's an African saying and that's very true. The wisdom of the old and what they have accumulated is very important. We can learn laughter. Africans in the midst of again horrible situations, they still know how to laugh. They don't lose their sense of having fun together and just being together. Sometimes, even if something is not particularly funny, then often they are laughing. And we can lean a sense of family, very extended families that live in solidarity. But often what Westerners are referring to as corruption is nothing more than an extended sense of family, and solidarity that is owed to [audio ends]

11. Barbara Mark, Ph.D.: Who's responsibility is it to manage the world's natural resources?

Susan George Well, the big problem is that nobody sees it as their responsibility to manage the world's resources. So, it's every irresponsible corporation for itself, everyone trying to get at the same resources. And what does this result in? It's perfectly obvious; it results in over-fishing, so that we have "The Tragedy of the Commons," Garrett Harden's article of 40 years ago in nature where each fishing boat is trying to get one more ton of fish, and the result is that the stocks crash. We've already had the crash of cod off Newfoundland. I read the other day that the East China Sea is already dead. This comes from a Chinese news agency. It's not propaganda that this has been so over-fished, that there is practically no more hope for it. Fish stocks are crashing everywhere. The forests are becoming decimated, and bio- diversity is in the worst crisis since the days that the dinosaurs died. We are in the so called 5th great extinction. There have been 4 natural ones before humans, and now we are the cause of this great extinction. So, it's because nobody is managing the world's resources, water resources, fish, minerals, and all sorts of soils, that we are creating deserts, that we are creating forests which are chopped down and no longer productive, that we are creating dead seas and what we need is to accept the notion that we are living in a global commons.

12. Layna Francisco: What?s the most important subject in the arts that needs to be talked about and why?

Susan George Well, I am not sure of an answer for that, but I would say off hand that it is -- how can everyone have access to the arts? How can every culture have a way of preserving what it is about, in other words, have a museum which functions? When I think of the destruction of the Iraqi museum right after of the U.S. invasion, it makes me feel violent. I am a nonviolent person, but I want to really go out and kill somebody because it's not just killing human beings, it is killing the heritage of 1000's of years and millions of human beings. So, each culture should have a way of preserving what it is about, and everyone should have access to quality in the arts. We need much more popular theater. We've made progress in Europe at least and in some other countries; but a great deal remains to be done, so that everyone can afford to hear good music and read good books. We need libraries, and things that don't cost, to be able to go to the theater, to be able to have access to the most beautiful things that have been conceived either by the painter, the visual artist, the sculptor or by those who write and make their paintings in words, or through other means. Beautiful architecture that we can live in which inspires us and makes us feel rested when we are at home and invigorated when we are at work. Architecture can help to do that. So, I suppose that if I have to give an answer in one sentence, the subject and the arts that need to be talked about is quality for everyone and everywhere and to pay for it.

13. Miraj Khaled: What is God`s religion?

Susan George I loved that question when I saw it because I think this is very perceptive. And I think God's religion has to be mathematics, but it's more than that. He has organized the universe in such a way that it obeys a certain number of mathematical laws, and what's astonishing is that we actually have the mental equipment, not me, but some highly trained people to actually see more and more of what those laws are. But that's a bit metaphysical. I think God must also be about joy. It must be continuous joy. But what he thinks about the human race, I don't know. Perhaps, his religion was to say at the beginning I am going to make this incredible experiment. I am going to give life, and I am going to make it conscious, and it will know it is going to die. And it will know that it is mortal, and that civilization is mortal, and then we will see what happens. And he gave us freedom to make what happens happen according to our choices. So, his religion was also to make an experiment. I would like to think we are not going to fail in this experiment, and that we could give God credit for allowing that freedom to happen, including the freedom to fail, and it may end up that way.

14. Thomas Troxler: I am white, but I am more African than any black person who was raised in America. Should people really still be defined by their race, or is where they come

from more important? For example, aren´t African-Americans just Americans?

Susan George Well, there are some African-Americans here. So, they will answer that question much better than I am able to. But, certainly, at least one can say that not all feel that they are accepted as just Americans. We had another question this morning that said "Why do I still want to fight for this country, and love it when it makes me feel like an unwanted child?" This was a very impressive question from some one who identified himself as a black person in America. So, certainly, not all feel that they are the wanted children of America. Perhaps, in France where I live it's easier, but there again I am white. I am from the dominant community. So, I don't feel honest answering this question. But, my sense is - and this is very personal, this has no universal value whatever -- is that where we come from is more important, but where we choose to come from is more important still. There I do have a definite sense of having been born in America, having lived there for 20 years, having left, and now I have to say I feel much more European than American because I am a French citizen and I live as a European and I have chosen to be a European and to decide that this is where I live. This is where I am from. So, in that sense, I don't think it's a matter of race, although there is no real difference between the race of America and of Europeans. In the dominant communities everybody is white. But, for me it is true that where I live is where I come from, and it's what I am now. But, again, I cannot give any sort of universal answer to this question. And, I am sure there are better informed and qualified people around this table than me.

15. Claire Mackintosh: What are the basic dignities that each human being deserves and why do we let so many people go without them?

Susan George Well, here again, there is a lot of questions that have "we" in the title, and I just want to know who is "we" because the fact that many people are going without the basic dignities that each human beings deserves, it's not "we," if you mean the people around this table or people of goodwill everywhere that are preventing this. It is certain structures of power and certain elites, I would say. There is a quote that I like very much, which is "all for ourselves, and nothing for other people," seems to have been in every age of the world, the vile maxim of the masters of mankind, "all for ourselves, nothing for other people." It's Adam Smith who said that. Adam Smith, the father of Capitalism, the big -- the great theorist in the 18th century of Capitalism. And he knew that that was the tendency, "all for ourselves and nothing for other people." So, we are indeed allowing people to go without the basic necessities; and it's the basic necessities that include dignity because if you don't have enough to eat, if you have to beg, if you have -- if you don't have decent housing, you lose very quickly your dignity. You cannot achieve a decent life. And "we" do allow that because we have put the accumulation of wealth and the "all for ourselves and nothing for other people" principle at the top of our societies. And as -- so, I think we have to think in terms not just of the codified human rights, but we need basic material rights, basic human rights, but also let's say the right to work, the right to a family, the right to time for ourselves, not entirely consumed by survival.

16. Kent Keller: Why is it socially acceptable to hoard wealth while so many go without basic needs?

Susan George Well, it's acceptable socially to hoard wealth because in our society status very largely depends on wealth. Maybe this is universally true. In animal societies, the males show off to attract females. You know the peacock that has the most brilliant tail is the peacock that gets the most mates and, therefore, passes on its genes. And in our societies, it's very often the male who has the most wealth who attracts the most females; you know the expression "trophy wife." And so you - we are basically animals in this, and in our societies having a big house and having maybe a sports car plays the role of the peacock's tail. It's socially acceptable because people like to show off their possessions. It's socially acceptable because they are then able to buy the support of others. It's religion that tells us to get rid of our material possessions and to give to the poor, and maybe the ancient Greeks found displays of wealth were vulgar although they had plenty of slaves. But I cannot think of a single secular society outside of convents and lamaseries that has ever condemned the accumulation of wealth. On the contrary, all have admired the rich man, whether it was the emperor -- you can see plenty of examples of that at the Berlin Pergamum Museum of ancient empires, or whether it is the Crown Jewels in Istanbul, or whether it is other displays of wealth, the Medici in Florence, every society has admired this. Of course, there are better and worse ways of displaying it. But morality and ethics are something else.

17. Barcelona Forum, 2004: Are brands more powerful than governments?

Susan George I think it depends on which government and which brand and it depends on whether you measure power in money or in other ways with other attributes. Of course on the list of the largest economic entities in the world now, you would find - if you compared national, gross national product to corporate sales, there would be 49 governments and 51 corporations. So, in that sense General Motors or General Electric is larger and therefore more powerful, if you like, than Pakistan for instance or even than Saudi Arabia. Brands are also fragile because if they do something morally wrong, their sales can be immediately affected. So, they are very sensitive to public opinion and this is one way of keeping corporations honest. For instance, an attack against Coca-Cola or the boycott of Outspan oranges was very affective against apartheid. So, brands can vulnerable and this is a good thing for popular protests. But, life isn't just consuming, life is not just about what we buy, what we - which brands we may or may not be loyal to. And, of course, power can be exerted in many different ways. So, I would never go so far as to say that brands are more powerful than governments, particularly the largest and the most powerful and most aggressive governments, for instance, like the United States. Brands cannot go to war, for example. They can go to war symbolically like Coca-Cola against Pepsi-Cola or things like that, but they cannot - only in exceptional cases, do they ever kill anyone literally. So, the power that is expressed in putting an end to someone's life this is done by governments, and I would say almost never by brands.

18. Maria Kyriacou: what is the purpose of public international law if there are no effective enforcement mechanisms to apply it?

Susan George Public international law -- I think what the questioner means is the -- is instruments like the universal declaration of human rights, with protocols on civil and political rights and economic, cultural and social rights. Those are probably the instruments this person has in mind or the labor conventions of the International Labor Office, and these are worth having because they show us where we ought to be going. Even if they are not enforced, the nature of international law is improving. We are occasionally able to get decent international instruments approved and then call on governments to respect them. U.N. resolutions are not always observed, God knows, but it's a good thing that we have an organization that can make those resolutions and can keep hammering home the point that those resolutions exist and that they ought to be respected and that's the only way to live together. I would add as I did in the last question, the previous one, that the WTO, the World Trade Organization, does have an enforceable mechanism. They can authorize sanctions when a country is found in breach of the trade law. The problem is that that organization takes no account of working people's rights, it takes no account of environmental rights and every time there has been a decision that contained - that had an issue of labor or environment, it's always been decided against them. So, I think it's because the WTO is not obliged to recognize any other instrument of international law, there the goal should be to say the WTO should be under human rights law. It should not just be making up its own jurisprudence and there we do have universally agreed instruments that have been ratified by a great many countries which can serve as norms and standards. And I think it's important that we continue to say this should be the norm even if it's not enforced.

19. Nicola Brown: Why do we consider some lives to be worth more than others ?

Susan George This reminds me of the former World Bank Economist, Larry Summers, who later became Secretary of the Treasury in the U.S. and then ended up as President of Harvard University, which he has now left and gone elsewhere. But, he said famously at the World Bank that we should send our polluted waste to Africa because that is where lives are worth the least. He was speaking in totally economic terms because it's true. The statistics say these people are not going to live so long, so they are going die from something else, they are going to die from hunger or disease. So, I mean, pollution come from our waste, it's not that that's going to kill them because it takes a long time to kill. So, most of them will be dead anyway. So, let's send our polluted waste to Africa. When you start calculating that way and when you start calculating that some people are less skilled than others, therefore they can sell themselves for less to the highest bidder, therefore they are worth more, then, of course, their lives are worth more to capital. But worth, what does that mean? It means, as I understand it in this question, worth more means worth more economically, in economic terms. And so, that means what's your total earning power over your life? What is your total capacity to accumulate? What is your total capacity to contribute to the system both as a producer, a productive person, and as a consumer; and it's not a question that takes in the intrinsic worth. I am sure the question means the intrinsic worth of each individual, but that is not the way the dominant system sees human beings. It sees them in totally materialistic terms.

20. Ramazon Keskin: why are women still in a disadvantage?

Susan George Well, what's changed from 50 years ago when I was just starting out more or less, because I am 72 now, is that in fact above a certain level, I think women are at an advantage. But, I stress above a certain level because at the bottom of the class scale women are still indeed much worse off than men are. They do not yet receive equal pay for equal work, even in many advanced countries. There is great resistance to giving women equal status. This doesn't just come from men, but it comes also from, I think, capital in the general sense because women are often weaker, less well organized. They very often work only part time because often they are forced to work part time and they are more willing to accept poor working conditions, particularly if they are by themselves and having to raise children. So, they are more vulnerable in the South. In the poorer countries, you find that the economic processing zones are always peopled by women because very often the young women who have nimble fingers are the ones who are going to sustain their families. They may be worn-out by the time that they are 25, but then there are always more willing to come and take their place. And, let me just add, countries which are still neglecting a half of their population - that is to say the female half -- are going to be losers in the world. If you do no allow the skills of half of your people to find expression, then your society is going to be sooner or later a failed society; and I think that it serves those countries right that have refused to give women an equal place. That's about all I have to say on that one. But, there has been progress in the last 50 years and there is much more consciousness in certain milieu of the necessity for gender equality.

21. Anonymous: Who are your heroes?

Susan George Well, I have got some intellectual heroes who are also activists, people like Franz Fanon who had a great influence on me earlier in all his anti-colonial writings and his writings in favor of the oppressed peoples. Jean Paul Sartre influenced me a lot because he gave you the sense that you could chose your life, and that it wasn't over till it was over, and that your existence -- you were not an essence, you were an existence, and that existence you could shape, and you were responsible for shaping it, and so that has been a hero for me. The Vietnamese in the 60's and the 70's were a collective hero. I don't think I have ever seen such courage before or since, and that was a tragic moment, but it was also a moment in which one could be totally dedicated to a cause, and I tried to help in so far as I could. Salvador Allende was a hero of mine and the Chileans, and all of the Latin Americans, who went through prison and torture. I have led a very protected life, and I've not been tortured for my beliefs, and I don't think I would hold up under torture. And I even know some people who've been through it, and those people whether I know them personally or not, those people are heroes for me. And then there are the scientists who resisted because of their beliefs, Giordano Bruno who was burnt at the stake in Florence, or was it in Rome, I forget, in Rome, and in 1600 and Galileo resisted, and other scientists have tried to stand on the side of truth, and seen that they would stand for truth and not for received opinion, and anyone who does that is an intellectual hero. A more recent one is Nelson Mandela who led the struggle that we all know. I think there is many heroes that are not necessarily known, but who are -- they are -- and it's just because I don't know them that I am not saying their names, but who are [audio ends]

22. American Council for the United Nations University Millennium Project: How can everyone have sufficient clean water without conflict?

Susan George Sufficient clean water without conflict? The world is mostly made of water. I think it's about 70 percent of the planet that is covered with water. Most of it is salt, saline water. There is only about 3 percent of all of that, that's fresh water. So, this is already a scarce resource. We are 6.5 billion people, and none of us can live without water, and we have to stop privatizing it because privatizing water means that the poorest people are not going to get access to it; and we particularly have to stop polluting it because if we make filthy the little fresh water that we've got, if we are dumping pesticides into it, and petroleum into it, and who knows what, then of course it's going to become even less drinkable and we compound the problem. So, there are water wars to come. This is probably certain. There are many river basin systems where the water is -- it would have to serve in a river basin 10 to 15 countries. There is already a water war going on between Israel and Palestine. Although it's a muted war, it's one of the many wars that are going on between Israel and Palestine. But, we should expect others. We can expect between India and Bangladesh. We can expect many in the Middle East. So, what are the answers? Well, there is the answer of preserving, of not polluting. And then there is the answer also of desalinization. That's a technical fix, and for the moment it is still quite expensive; but desalinization plants are one answer, at least in coastal regions. But, it is going to take investment and I believe that investment should be public. I don't believe we should allow water to become a privatized good because it's necessary for everyone.

23. Michael Graham Richard: Television is a very powerful communication tool. Why do we use it to spread such unimportant information?

Susan George Well, television doesn't just spread unimportant information. It spreads absolute junk. And, let me quote the head of the main, the most popular public network in France -- well it's not public, it's private -- the TF1, which is the first channel in France. The Director of it said in a business conference, "Look, my job is to prepare people's minds, and to prepare them to receive the messages of Coca Cola." He used Coca Cola as an example, but he could have used any other product. He said "My job is to make sure that their consciousness is ready to receive this message. Therefore, the consciousness cannot be too filled up with facts which might be distressing. It can't be too filled up with anything that might stimulate people to actually think it has to be filled with the things that just prepare them to be receptive to the advertising message." He sees his job, his name is Patrick Le Lay, and as he said in this business conference, his job really consists in selling advertising and in convincing advertisers that they will be spending their money wisely by buying commercial time on TF1. And I think he is right. So, that is why television, if there is no public channel which is going to provide quality information and actually try to do its job of informing people as some still do, I think, there is the BBC and there is apparently although, I can't usually watch it, because I don't speak Arabic, but Aljazeera seems to be doing this kind of job also in the Middle East, doing it better by the way than CNN, then we are going to get programs which simply prepare us to receive the message of Coca Cola and make our consciousness more receptive to the ads, and that's the purpose of it.

24. Kenneth Hinchcliffe: How can architecture better serve the social, econmic, political and environmental concerns of our present and future?

Susan George Well, I think architects are often tyrannical. They know better than the people who will be using these structures, what those people ought to have. I can think of one building in Paris which is considered to be an architectural marvel, which is the institute of Arab Culture, and it was built by Jean Nouvel, who is a very famous architect. But the people who work there are not at all happy with the building, and nobody asked them before hand what were their needs. There are probably dozens of other examples like this. And, here I think we have to be quite careful and quite humble, and say, "Alright, we are going to be building for actual human beings, not ideal ones, not story book human beings, but people as they actually are, who have particular needs, maybe very, very basic." Women's bathrooms in France are never larger than men's. They should be. Women take longer. That's a simple biological fact. Architects don't take that into consideration, just terribly simple, extremely basic example. Ask the people who are going to be using the facilities in a building, ask the people who are going to be working there, ask the people who are going to be living there. Bring them together to discuss their needs in common; and if you don't know who they are exactly, then bring together the sorts of people that you think will be living there, and say, "What would you like in an ideal building which would be built for you?" The other thing is to put into building codes environmental concerns. Well, I haven't finished, but you can design buildings to be completely energy independent.

25. Anonymous: What does the future you want look like?

Susan George When I first saw that question, I thought of course about my usual subjects, and what I have fought for all my life. But, just to say more equality, and much less of a gap between the rich and poor, much less of a gap, and unfairness from North to South. I thought about the planet, about ecology. I thought about having lifelong schooling, but then I realized, and particularly I've just realized now hearing the introduction, that this is about literally "looking like." What do I want it to look like? And, this I suppose would mean that I would like to see a lot more color in our lives. I think that we could have houses that were much more imaginative from the outside. We could be giving joy in neighborhoods. We could organize lives so that people could come together more easily. Perhaps, the Italians do this better than any one. You know, how they say: "ci veniamo in piazza" - "we will see each other in the town square". And they all are out in the evening, and promenading and seeing each other, and that's a very human way to organize a city. So, let's say, let's take from the Italians their sense of how to organize a livable city. Let's take from the best gardeners the sense of color and unimaginably beautiful flowers. If somebody came from a monochrome world and looked at our flowers, they would think we must be crazy with joy to have those colors. And, we don't use them enough, or see them enough. Now, let's take from our artists much more public art work and have our future much more decorative, have much more -- I am now overlooking the economic questions about what people's work would be like, and what their homes would be like, and that they would have decent work and they would have dignity. We are really talking aesthetics here I guess in this last section of the table. So, I think, we could put more joy into our immediate surroundings and this would help us to live together.

26. Anonymous: If you had one piece of knowledge to give to the world, what would it be?

Susan George Well, that's a short answer to a short question. I would say power never gives up anything voluntarily. Everything, every advance in human history, every change for the better has to be taken preferably non-violently, preferably through democratic methods. But one of the reasons for violence in the world is that -- what I think to be a truth -- is that power never gives up anything voluntarily. There may be individuals who will do so, but as a class, the powerful never renounce their wealth or their capacity to influence and direct other people's lives. I like to quote a very great philosopher who said "All for ourselves and nothing for other people seems to have been in every age of the world the vile maxim of the masters of mankind." Now, that come not from Karl Marx but from Adam Smith, the great late 18th century writer on capitalism, sometimes called the father of capitalism, "all for ourselves and nothing for other people." So if that is indeed as Adam Smith said "the vile maxim of the masters of mankind," then that is a truth which I would want to communicate to others. I believe it is true; and the corollary to that is that if we want to have a world in which all does not go to ourselves, the masters of mankind, if you like, but to everyone, then we have got to organize and fight and resist.

27. Ebon Anonymous: How do we determine "truth" and "fact" when we can manufacture either?

Susan George I don't know how to answer that. I think of Abraham Lincoln, you know, the famous saying "You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time." And, this question seems to me to be saying that you can fool all of the people all of the time, and maybe politically speaking you can. Because, for instance, the American people were convinced, and the vast majority, for example, that September 11th had been directly caused by Saddam Hussein, by Iraq, and Hussein was implicated, whereas he had nothing to do with September 11th. And, they sincerely believed that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, while most people outside of America believed nothing of the kind, and whereas the UN was saying every day there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and now we know that was in fact the case, and that was the fact. But, the fact as it was manufactured by the American establishment said the opposite, and most people believed it. So, our friend, Ebon, from Brooklyn has a real point. But I suppose that the answer is what it has always been. We have to have freedom of debate. We have to have freedom of information, freedom of debate, because it is through the statement of error and the challenging of error that we can arrive at some measure of the truth. I don't say we will ever get to the absolute truth. But, at least, through democracy and through allowing people to have their say, and through debate, and through fact collecting, and through allowing people to disseminate what they see as being the truth as we are all doing today around this table, this is one way of arriving at some definition of what is the truth and what are the facts. So, I'm hoping that this particular table, this Dropping Knowledge event will be one contribution to answering your very important question.

28. Anonymus: What moves you?

Susan George Well, that's both a simple and very complex question. I don't like to talk about myself and my inner emotions. So, I will just say very banally that music moves me, that I very much like to go to the opera; and I think it's because it's 19th century, and a lot of it is, I mean, it allows you to have at least 19th century emotions. It allows you- it's okay at the opera to have -- to be in a plot where it's all about love, cruelty, hatred, revenge, the most basic emotions, which we are not supposed to have because we are too cool in the 21st century. So, that moves me. And, then sometimes when I am writing, and I find I have got a final sentence 'at last' after much, much work, just right. That moves me. I am very happy then, and I sometimes think, yes, that's it, and that's the way I should end this piece. And, sometimes, again, writing and getting it right, and knowing that I have sort of pulled an idea out of somewhere that was not formed, but that I've finally given it some shape, because things don't happen to me easily, and what people say to me, "Oh, but you write so easily," I want to strangle them because I don't write easily at all. And, so I am moved when that happens, and that I finally got something that approaches a graceful sentence because I don't think I have ever written an acceptable sentence on the first go. And then there are some things that are great, just like watching beautiful football. I love to watch the World Cup when it goes right because that is also very beautiful and moving.

29. Amy Green: In your opinion what should a young adult be reading, seeing or experiencing to spark a strong desire and knowledge to become a world-changer?

Susan George Well, here I am going to put in a word of publicity. I think people should be reading the work of all of the Transnational Institute fellows. I am the Board Chair of the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam, and I am going to give the website because I think our fellows are doing absolutely remarkable work in a whole series of fields, whether it's international relations, or drugs, or nuclear issues, or military, and peace issues, or ecology. We've got wonderful people. So, it's www.tni.org, that is for the Transnational Institute. You could go and see Ken Loach films and Vim Vender's films. He is here; he would be a good person to see. You should look at films that are coming out of other places than Hollywood. You should be getting as much diversity without having to travel, but then you should also try to travel. Every time you can pull a bit of money together, find out where you can go that won't cost the earth, and go there, and try to have exchange systems, try to -- and this is already happening very, very widely. The Erasmus system in Europe where a university student can go spend a whole year in another university somewhere, and this is becoming absolutely normal. We need to be talking to each other. The more we can talk cross culturally, the better. So, not just Europe to Europe, but also Europe to Asia, Europe to Latin America, North America to South, etc., etc. And, then also see what are the worst conditions in your own country. This can be an education in itself. Many [audio ends]

30. Anonymous: How do you counteract violence, anger or hatred?

Susan George How do you counteract violence, anger or hatred? Well, at least, anger, I think, is a natural human emotion, and the response from anger is often violence. So, maybe we are not going to be able to counteract natural human emotions. If you are a -- if someone aggresses you, you are going to be angry. And, whether you can do something about that anger or not, maybe you'll have to internalize it, but maybe you will be able to express it in terms of violence. So, this is true, and this is true at several levels. It's true at the interpersonal level where people may react violently to the aggressions committed against them. The obvious answer to the question is, well, remove the cause of anger. That's the best way to do it. But, when we get to the level of states, when we get to the level of political powers using violence and inciting to hatred, and here we are in the Bebelplatz which has a memorial to inciting to the Hitler's and the Third Reich's, the Nazis inciting to hatred of a people to the point where so many of them were eliminated. It's a very serious question to be asking here in the Bebelplatz. But, when you get to that level of political powers, the answers to violence and hatred and anger are its mediation. It can, I think, it can only be mediated in one way or another, and there are some attempts at this. One thinks immediately of the South African Commission on Truth and Reconciliation. The first thing to do is that one has to recognize the fact. Everybody has to know what actually happened. I have just heard from another participant here, Michael Tiger, that Henry Kissinger has now been shown to not only have ordered the assassination of Chilean General Schneider, but that he paid the assassins, and that he got the CIA to go and collect the murder weapons after the murder was committed. And, yet, he will not be tried in an American court. Well, I think, one should be angry and react to that with hatred. One can, I think, legitimately hate someone who is proven to be a war criminal.

31. David Dubois: Does economic globalization promote democracy or consolidate dictatorship?

Susan George Somewhere between the two because really what's happening with globalization on the ground is that for the first time in about a 100 years capital seems to me to be taking its revenge against the state and particularly against the welfare state. The gains of working people over the past century are being beaten back, are being thrown over, whether it's in terms of salaries or benefits or freedoms. Everything is being pushed down and that is an impact directly of globalization, but it's not exactly yet like the 19th century. I think if capital could manage to push us back into the 19th century, it would do so, if it could make sure that it had docile enough workers to do that. But we have a great difference between now and the 19th century, when Marx was writing, he was talking about the international working class, remember "Workers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains." Now, I think, we haven't anything that resembles the international working class. Workers are pitted against one another and it's not just between the developed countries and the less developed ones; even less developed ones can lose out to even less developed ones, for example, when Malaysia loses 2,500 jobs to Vietnam. This kind of thing happens all the time. And, when thousands of people lose their jobs because of a financial crisis, because capital is free to move in and out and does so, and there have been 90 large financial crises in just 10 years, that's when workers massively lose their jobs. So, we are certainly in a period of transition. I hope that we can move towards greater democracy because, if globalization continues without international rules, we are done for.

32. Florian Großer: How much of our liberty we are going to offer for our supposed security?

Susan George I think the man who answered that best is Benjamin Franklin over 200 years ago, and he said, "Those who would sacrifice freedom for safety deserve neither; those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither." But this is of course what the United States is doing. Security from "terrorism" is impossible to achieve. It is simply not achievable because it means you'd have to have a policeman behind virtually every person in the society. It means that you would have to have thought control, control, total control over the press. You would have to put every young male who showed the slightest signs of independence in jail. Already the population of -- 2 percent of the male population between, well, young adult males -- 2 percent of them are already in prison in the U.S. because they are considered dangerous. And so security is unachievable. But, to get that kind of unachievable security and the illusion that you are going to arrive at some sort of total safety, first it shows that if people are that terrified, then they really don't deserve a better form of government. But, let's say that they are still thinking and that Americans and others are not quite as scared and ninnies that this seems to suggest, then they have to recognize that their constitution is being destroyed as we speak, that terrorism is being used as an excuse to reduce their freedoms, and they have to stand up and say what it is, is important. You cannot rule out the possibility of terrorism. You can try to have a good political intelligence and good military intelligence. But, you're not going to escape totally. And, I might say that the best way to avoid terrorism is not to be aggressive to people to begin with, that this is -- if they hate us, sometimes they have good reasons.

33. Shoshana Friedman Anonymous: How would the world be today if the Africans were never brought over to the Americas to be enslaved?

Susan George Well, I'm not very good at "what if questions" because these have huge ramifications. My first reaction is, well, it's probably the Latin Americans who would have been enslaved. They would have gone down to the Indians of Brazil or the native peoples of Mexico or whatever, and enslaved them. And, there would have been a different people or set of peoples being enslaved, but the idea of getting people to do the dirty work for you is as old as history. And, probably, given the superior fire power of the Europeans -- but it wasn't just the Europeans, there were also Arab slave traders, and there were Africans who sold other Africans. I mean, we can't put this all down to the whites against the blacks, although that was the major part of it. And, a great deal of money was made out of the slave trade. But, of course, the "what if question." The U.S. would not have had a civil war. That would have changed the face of the country, and of course Africa itself would be richer. Africa itself would not have been deprived of its best young manpower. It would probably have a more centralized structure because I think it's true to say that Africans decided we are safer to live in small villages, quite remote from each other, so that they could be less easily attacked by slave traders, and people could be less easily kidnapped and captured and carried off. But, I'm not sure; I don't think that just because it wouldn't have been Africans who were enslaved that other peoples would not have been enslaved. I fear that, in any case, power would have exercised itself, and it would -- once it became possible to do so through superior naval power, capacity to transport people, massively superior firepower, which could coerce people that this would have happened anyway, and that it was the initial colonization of the American continents which lead to the phenomenon of slavery.

34. Sarah Francis: What does courage mean now?

Susan George What does courage mean now? Courage means probably what it's always meant. It means resistance. It means organizing against all odds even when you think you are going to fail. It means trying to do it anyway. It means not getting tired or burnt out, and getting up in the morning and saying, okay, today it may be bad again, but I am still going to get to the end of this day and take each day at a time. It means also probably repeating to oneself and to other people that sometimes we actually do make a change, and that we can never know in advance what will be the action that we do alone or preferably with other people which is going to make a difference. We do not know what is going to be the point at which we achieve a phase change, the way a change is achieved when water turns into steam or into ice. That's a phase change; it's no longer liquid. And, courage can bring about phase changes that we cannot predict. So, that I think is a good reason for acting even against the odds because you never know what your impact is going to be or what or when it's going to bring that about. So, courage used to mean probably being ready to fight in battles and actually risk your life. And now we risk our lives in different ways. Well, I have never really risked mine, so I can't say. I have never lived in truly dangerous situations the way so many people around this table have done. And so I feel not adequate to answering the question because I can think of people among these colleagues who have undergone horrible aggressions and are still fighting, and whose lives are being threatened as soon as they go home. And, those are the really courageous ones. So, I am not really qualified to speak about this.

35. Delgersaikhan Jadamba: How should the development of developing countries take place? Is micro- finance or macro- finance better?

Susan George Well, micro-finance and macro-finance are both tools, so I wouldn't say one is better than the other. Both of them are necessary because individuals need credit, but so do larger enterprises need investment. And, I think, we often neglect state investment which is, of course, part of the macro picture. State investment is necessary because otherwise you are not going have infrastructure like roads, like ports, like railways. Very, very seldom can these be private, and we need to have public goods, common goods, and public services. Micro-finance, of course, can work for individuals and sometimes small groups; and the best known of these is the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, but looking for micro credit for individuals, but this was thought of long ago, well before the Grameen Bank, by African societies which have a practice called tontine and then Western African countries where they pool their money together and then they can make loans to each other. Micro-finance seems to work better when it is done for groups, rather than for individuals, because, as far as I know, the Grameen Bank has never been self-supporting; and it still charges quite high interest rates, although it is playing a useful role. So, on one side, you need macro-finance; you need investment, particularly state investment, because without it you can't have development in the common factors. But macro investment from foreign sources is not always good and very often results in massive layoffs and perhaps greater economic efficiency, but lower levels of employment in the developing world. So, I would say stick to state investment in so far as possible.

36. Eric Mahleb: Is there value in resisting a new technology (genetically modified foods, for instance), which, while potentially harmful in the short term, could save millions of lives in the future?

Susan George Well, I think the saving millions of lives in the future, I would like some proof for that. The notion that, for instance, genetically modified crops are going to save millions of lives in the future, that is just sheer propaganda. These crops are going to decimate farmers. They are going to contaminate other people's fields. And, although the U.S. is saying they will save millions of lives because we are going to feed the world with them, that's what they have said about food aid for the last 30 years. And, although, it may have at some points in time saved a few lives, it has also destroyed the local farming system which sometimes has never recovered. By coming in and selling very cheap food or indeed giving away free food, some of their local farmers were ruined. So, I would be very skeptical about saying that a new technology, harmful in the short run -- well if it's harmful in the short run, I don't see why it's going to be useful in the long run. And, in the long run, as Keyne said, we are all dead. So, I would want to know who had developed the technology, I would want to know why they developed it, I would want to know how this technology was part of the economic picture, and how it was going to make profits for some corporation, and I would be extremely skeptical of believing any propaganda that said it will eventually save millions of lives. Now, if this is stem cell research, for instance, yes. I'm in favor of stem cell research because I don't agree that an embryo is a human being, so I have no moral feelings about a technology like that. And, about nanotechnology, I don't know; I'm not qualified.

37. Rodrigo baggio: We are in the knowledge age. How can the increase in access to technology (Internet and computer) among low- income communities help to promote social and economic development?

Susan George I can really only think of sort of practical answers to this question. I am sure there is a deeper philosophical level. But, all I can say is that it seems to me that an enormous amount of stuff is thrown away; and that if we were to keep it all, and recycle it, and make sure that it was in running order, we could probably equip all of those communities that you speak about in your question in a year because the amount of computers that get thrown away from offices that are upgrading every two, two and half, three years is appalling. So, I suppose that we should ask Bill Gates, with his foundation or something, to institute a system which would allow us to collect these much more systematically, return them to various points in our own communities, so that they get shipped to the North. The expenditure would only be minimal. But I really only have a kind of practical suggestion for that, which is not of much worth, because we are - the increase in access to technology can help social and economic development if only because it could help to avoid the worst mistakes that are somehow sometimes made. It could help to tell people this particular solution was tried in such a place, in such a time, and it didn't work there, and what did work was the following. I think if local communities would put online what has succeeded for them, we could have a grab bag of successful solutions. I would like to see architectural answers put online, so that people would take more confidence in their local skills and could see the results of the use of local skills and local architectures in other cities. I would like to see particularly the very poor communities, even favelas, since the questioner is from Brazil. In favelas, to be able to see how they could beautify their community, how they could make it more livable, how they could have ways of instating their own rules and not get taken over by a drug lords, etc. But it's all about putting things in common.

38. Anonymous: How can we create a balance between the preservation of local cultures and the development of a global community?

Susan George Well, I'm not sure I'm I like the expression "the preservation of local cultures" because it sounds as though that they are going to be preserved in formaldehyde or something, and that they should never change. I think local cultures are not set in cement. They are changing all the time, and they are changing because people and communities are responsive to the circumstances that they have to deal with. So, it's true that we want them to be able to continue to exist, and if that's what preservation means, then fine. But, let us think about - let's not think about so much what we are, and wanting to be absolutely always the same, and always looking backwards. I don't think that's what local cultures are necessarily doing. But let us look at what it is we can do together. In order to develop a global community, that's the only way that I can see to do that. We have to say, alright, we don't agree on perhaps everything, but there are enough things on which we agree that are necessary to do together, that we can concentrate on those things and then attempt to carry them out together. If local culture means food and festivals, if it means ways of being together and ways of raising your children and having family reunions and all those things that don't hurt anyone and can only help and give us social cohesiveness in a sense of place, in a sense of belonging, I am all for it. If a local culture is about being aggressive to outsiders, about mutilating or cloistering women, then there are some cultures I have to say I have no patience with; and I do not want to create a global community on the basis of some of the values that local cultures can demonstrate. I don't want a global community based on the cloistering of women or aggressiveness.

39. Matthias Hohlbach: How can two answers to a single question be right, but still contradict each other?

Susan George Well, that sort of depends on the question. I mean in any culture, and in any case that I can think of, 2 and 2 is always going to equal 4. So, there is no two answers to that question. It depends what the question is about. The only scientific area where I guess you can have two answers to the same question that are both right is in quantum mechanics, and I don't understand quantum mechanics, but that's okay, because there is a lot of physicists that don't understand it either. But, if you look up Schrodinger's cat, you can see that the cat can be both alive and dead at the same time, and there is no way for you to predict which it is. An atom can be not measured for its position and its speed at the same time although both exist and are factual. So, if that's what the question meant, I have to stop there on that. But, everything else's view point. The rest is depends on the question because if it's a qualitative question, it's a good thing that there is going to be a lot of different answers, and that they are going to contradict each other and that we can debate them and that we can attempt to arrive at some approximation of the truth, in so far as that exists in matters of view point and qualitative matters, because we are able to have different opinions. If everybody had the same opinion, it would be extremely boring, and we would be ants and not human beings. So, nobody wants to be robotic about the answers that we give to questions. We don't want to be following tele-guided systems like ants or bees or other social insects. We are not; we have consciousness; we have freedom; and we have the capacity to act. So, let's you [audio ends]

40. Anonymous: Can we still be indigenous in the twenty-first century?

Susan George Right. Can we still be indigenous in the 21st century? Well, I have to say, I have never felt particularly indigenous. So, I don't know quite what the question means, and does it mean can you be American in America? Can you be French in France? Can you be Japanese in Japan? Well, yes, obviously, but can you be a minority culture -- I guess that is what it means -- in the 21st century? The questioner has a point because it's becoming more and more difficult if you are in what is often referred to as an indigenous culture, which is a way of saying the original people who were there. It is -- that is more difficult. Let's look at how many languages are being lost. We've -- I think we lose 1000's of languages because - and there are many where there are only very few adult speakers that are left on earth. There is an occasional reportage that there is only three very old ladies or very old men who are still speaking some language. That's an indigenous culture that's going to be lost. And so there are many notions of indigenous which are going to be lost that has to be faced, which are going to be extinct. This also is part of life; extinctions and rebirths are always going on. Now, we are in a mass extinction of culture as we are in a mass extinction of biological species. So, all we can do is try to do the work at every level that Survival International tries to do, to preserve indigenous cultures, keep them free, but keep everybody free from the encroachments of capitalism which wants to take over their land, take over their space, not allow them to practice their ancestral ways, and we can try to protect them so that we, and they also a place.

41. Elena Kloppenburg: What are the three most important values a child should be taught?

Susan George My first reaction to that question is you only want three? There is a lot of important values that should be taught to a kid. But, I suppose, if you want three, I would say the child has to be taught to respect other people even if he or she doesn't like those people, to understand that everyone deserves respect, that that child even if it is a privileged child has absolutely no right to be disrespectful to anybody else and to hurt their dignity. That I think is the first thing a kid has to learn, that you must never treat people as object, or pretend that person is not as good as you are, or somehow has fewer rights than you do. So, respect for other people's dignity, whether you like them or not. Liking is not everything. I think encouraging them to keep trying when they fail or when they fear that they are going to fail because that can be worse than actually failing, the sense "I can't do it," to try to fill them with the confidence that they can do it; and that even if they can't and even if they don't manage, you will still love them and you will encourage them to try again. So, keep trying, even when you don't feel that you are getting anywhere. And then, I suppose, generosity and sharing. Children tend to be quite selfish, not want to share their toys. I suppose this is natural; we all start off that way. But we have to learn the hard way sometimes that it's through sharing and giving that we receive the most. And, this is not perhaps a natural instinct. That's why religions concentrated on it, but I think parents have to concentrate on generosity and sharing as well.

42. Katharina Donew: Why do we still believe more in nationality than in humanity?

Susan George Well, I suppose that we believe more in nationality than in humanity because it's quite impossible for us to love everyone at once. I mean, you can say abstractly I love humanity, but we know looking inside ourselves that that's not true because it's not possible. We can have an abstract love for them and want justice for humanity, but loving them with a real sentiment, with a real sense of being moved by -- no, I think that -- well, that's very rare. May be religious leaders have that, but I can't honestly claim that I do. So, we love what's closest to us, beginning with our families, our friends and then we can move out and say, I love my region, I feel very much at home where I live, and I love the nature around here, and then to the nation. So, we have a sense of belonging to a given community because we have grown up with the same songs, the same traditions, the same landscape, the same sorts of schools, and so on. And this makes us feel part of something. And although people do indeed feel more part of humanity, I think we haven't reached that stage of universal consciousness yet. So, it may also be because we haven't any democracy at the level of "humanity" and, therefore, because there is no democracy, there is no hope of affecting any kind of political or social change at that level. And so, we feel a bit dispossessed, and we don't feel any way that we know of, of becoming really connected and of changing something. With a nationality, at least you can try to get laws passed, you can try to get a change made in your government, you can vote for your government, you can attempt to influence your parliamentary representatives, whereas you can't do that at the level of humanity. You cannot make anything illegal, and that's probably the worst.

43. Sara Baig: How can we protect cities from sameness? How can we retain the identity of different cities?

Susan George Well, let us start by honoring people's architecture. Let us start by honoring local skills. One of the most beautiful buildings I know is in Mali, in Bamako, which was made by the former minister of culture, Aminata Traore who is a friend, and who used only local materials and only local artisans to build this absolutely wonderful guesthouse, which is far more beautiful and far more functional than this sort of concrete modern same identical buildings that are most other places in that city. So, I think, the answer to sameness is to have confidence in local techniques, which are there for a very good reason. They are there because they fit with the environment. They are there because they are made from local materials, and they are therefore cheaper. They are there because they have climactic significance, and they're better in the given climate of the place, than would be imported anything from the North; it doesn't work that well in the South. And let's stop giving so much power to outside architects and to architects that have been trained in using the same techniques all over the world. That's why the cities look the same. We can also do a lot more with cooperative housing. There is many places in the world now, including Uruguay, where people are building their own houses, but they are doing them on their own designs. They have a set budget, and they do the very best they can within that set budget, and they do some things that are very beautifully done. Self built architecture can be quite wonderful. And, let's make sure also that we leave spaces in our cities for art works that not everything should be built upon. There should be green spaces, there should be areas for kids to play safely, there should be places where people can congregate safely and have a place to walk and be with each other. It is common sense.

44. Andrew Anonymous: What if all Chinese people want a car?

Susan George My neighbor is Chinese. I am glad he is going to answer this for himself, but my answer would be there is no "if" in that sentence; they all do want a car. They all think they have a perfect right to a car because they see all Americans as having cars, and probably all Europeans having them, although that's not quite true. And, so the question is not what if they do, but what do we do since they all want a car? They, the Chinese, in a sense, do all have a right to a car. We have done it, so why not others? So, what do you do in that situation? Do you say, "no, you don't have a right to a car. We will keep on driving, but you can't." That doesn't seem to me to be fair. So the only other answer is to adapt what the German eco-philosopher, Erik Von Weizsacker has called Factor 10. He has shown with his colleagues at the Warburton Institute that you could cut down energy and material use by a factor of 10. You could simply divide it by 10. The technologies to do that are there; and even the automotive technologies, the materials you could use in a car, could be made much, much lighter, although they would not be less safe or weaker, that you could use fuel consumption mechanisms that would be much more economical, and this is the only way to go. So, that means quite huge investments in these alternative technologies because for the moment, although they exist, they are expensive. And so, if we want to use them that means we have got to invest in them so that they can be mass produced and so on. Otherwise, we are saying no to a perfectly normal aspiration.

45. Jason Robinson: Why do I as a black American continue to love and defend a country that treats me like an unwanted child? Question Donor 9046

Susan George That's really hard for me to answer because I have been a white person in white dominated societies all my life. So -- and even as a women, I don't know what it means to be excluded because I have always been a privileged person. So, I am perhaps not the person that should have the temerity or the -- what shall I say, should start and answer that question. But, let me say that it's probably not just because - it's not just a country that you would be defending, it's your idea of what that country could be and could become if it really lived up to its ideals, if it lived up to its initial declaration of independence, its constitution, you are also defending your family, your neighborhood, your friends, that all of that is what's in our immediate surroundings is part of that country and it's very good that you can feel that you love a country because we all should be able to love as widely as possible beyond our immediate surroundings and go to the level of the country and then to the level of the world humanity, of everything that is on this planet and everything indeed that's in the universe and love all of creation. So, I would congratulate Jason on that sentiment and say that it's up to him to say why is it. But I would say, not knowing him, that probably it's because he is thinking of an ideal country which has always put its ideals forward and for many periods of history abused them and traduced them and betrayed them; but in other periods its history has been a savior to others, has been, and has been [audio ends]

46. Jens von Schéele: How should an economic system be devised that isn't in conflict with human, animal or planet rights?

Susan George There is only one way to devise an economic system that isn't in conflict with human, animal or planet rights, and that is to accept the notion of limits. We need limits on disparities in salaries. For example, we need to accept that the highest paid cannot earn more than a multiple of x, may be 5, may be 10, I don't know, than the poorest paid worker. We need to accept limits on consumption, for instance, consumption of water by making it very expensive above a certain level. We need to accept limits on energy, limits on private transportation. We need to accept limits on the amount of resources that we can consume and encourage through that that people use public transport rather than private, that people accept to pay taxes so that every one can have access to the same public services, and that again means limiting one's private consumption because one is going to be paying taxes to the public treasury. If we don't have measures in limits, then the human animal, the species is going to take over the entire planet, and then every one will be losers. We are -- our tendency is to take everything for ourselves as if we were the only species on the planet, which is demonstrably untrue, but that we've already done. We are already taking over 85 percent of all of the resources for our own use as humans. We leave very little for other species, and this is increasing every year. So, the notion of limits on the size of the economy, the notion of personal limits, the notion of the limiting of how much we are able to consume as individuals but also as societies, is the only way that we can build a system that's expressed in this question. System based on competition and accumulation can never achieve a rights based system.

47. Adam furnari: Is corporate social responsibility possible?

Susan George Well, corporate social responsibility has become kind of a slogan. This is because corporations have wanted to be self-regulating. Their main dread is that they don't want any outside body coming in and worrying about their affairs and making them do something they don't want to do. So, their slogan has been, "We can take care of ourselves and we are socially responsible." Now, some of them probably are, but the self-policing -- I am not quite sure what that means because they don't always hold up in practice. I have been in seminars with corporate people on corporate social responsibility; and the first thing I say is, look, for me the first duty of a corporation is to pay its taxes or maybe some of them are; but statistically speaking, the amount of corporate taxes actually coming into state treasuries is going down every year, whether it's in the United States or whether it's in Europe, I don't know about Japan, but the proportion of taxes companies are paying are being reduced all the time because there are so many tax savings, so many tax dodges that they can use, and, of course, they have battalions of lawyers explaining to them how to avoid paying taxes. So, some of the major corporations in the United States have not paid taxes for at least five years whereas they are profitable companies. So, it's individuals, and it's people who are rooted, it is people who have an address that are paying the taxes, it's consumers who are paying the taxes, but corporations are not necessarily being socially responsible, if the first duty of corporations is to share in the collective expenditures of their own communities. And, this is where I think the so called CSR really falls short. Some are making efforts ecologically. Some are making efforts for their workforces and for the communities that they live in, but so long as there are no legal constraints, I think, it will remain a slogan which is what it is now.

48. Frank Davis: How can we reconcile respect for universal human rights when these rights conflict with traditional cultural and/or religious values? Question Donor 9046

Susan George We can't reconcile the two when religious values are unreconcilable with certain rights. The immediate that comes to mind is the rights of women and one thinks of extremes, one thinks of clitoridectomies, which is certainly against the rights of women, done at an age where women are not in a position to protect themselves and often done by women -- usually done by women, older women to younger women. And, this is certainly a violation of human rights. Cloistering women is a violation of human rights Not allowing them to work if they want to work is again a violation of human rights; not allowing them to vote, that's against their political and civil rights. So, religion is, I think, make myself unpopular, but religious values are not just peace and love, they have often been used as a way of pressing and of making particular groups of people subservient. Think of the untouchables in India. Is this a religious right, a religious value? It's nothing I would call religious if we limit religion to the notion of loving one's neighbor which seems to be a basic value in many religions; do not kill, do not do onto others what you would have not done unto you. But, there are religions, Hinduism, for instance, which work on the basis of some castes, some classes which are not fully human. I think religion, as people practice it, has often become one of the greatest dangers that we have to face today; and I would much rather have the society based on human rights values than on religious values.

49. Yang Shaobin: Do you know the connection between politics and violence?

Susan George This is a question which people, political philosophers in particular, have wrestled with for years. I think the best answer probably came from Carl von Clausewitz in the 19th century in Germany when he said that politics -- "War is politics continued by other means"; that's very well known. But, he also said that "War is an act of violence whose goal is to force the adversary to do our will." That's what politics is about. It's about forcing the adversary to do our will, whether that adversary is the opposite political party or whether the adversary is another country, is another political power. So, I think when Clausewitz says "War is an act of violence whose goal is to force the adversary to do our will," he is making that connection between politics and violence. But, the questioner is from China, so I think it's worth mentioning also the great theoretician of war from China of 500 B.C., Sun Tzu; and he was much more subtle. He said that "the best generals are those who never go to war." The best generals are those who don't have to do battle because they are good enough so that it's not even worth fighting; they don't have to fight because they have obtained what it is that they want through other means. In other words, we've recognized that states are always going to be opposed to each other and that the most clumsy, the least clever are going to use more because they have exhausted all the other means. And those are the stupid ones, those are the stupid generals, those are the ones who lose. And since the text that we heard just before we began this session comes from Lebanon, I think it's time literally to have a moment to think very seriously about Lebanon, but also to be glad in a sense that the one who went to war, the one who bombed is real -- that who bombed Lebanon really lost and that is encouraging, horrible as that [audio ends]

50. Tom Henze: Does our wealth depend on the 3rd world being poor?

Susan George Our wealth does not depend on the Third World being poor, but we have organized everything in the North, so that the Third World does remain poor. If the Third World were less poor, we would be selling them more, and we would in fact be richer. I am leaving out the ecological impacts here because we will be getting to that a bit later. We are underpaying raw materials to the South because we've organized an over supply. The debt of the South is useful to the North but much more as a tool of political control than of wealth. We don't accumulate much wealth because of the repayments on the debt of the South. But, everything is organized, so that we are receiving a net transfer in the North which is over $270 billion a year. In other words, the poor are supplying Marshall Plans to the rich. If you take the debt service alone, it's been 60 Marshall Plans that the South has supplied to the North. But, it's not because of that, that we are rich. It is in fact much further North. What is shameful is that, it is Southern immigrants to the North, who are working in the North, who are sending back to their own countries, their own families at least twice as much in their remittances than they are receiving in aid from us. But, there is a huge imbalance. The South is poor because it is vulnerable; it is poor because it is politically under control. But, it is not that the North depends on that to be rich. It is simply maintaining its hegemony by other means, instead of maintaining it through colonialism or through police methods.

51. David Letellier: Is there an ecological limit to economic growth ?

Susan George Well, that's the easiest question we have had so far. The answer is unequivocally, yes. There's absolutely no debate about this. Everybody who is thinking about these questions in the slightest understands that we have reached those limits already and that we are looking at the biosphere in entirely the wrong way. If you just look at the sky above us, that's all it takes to see that we are living in nature. Our economy does not encompass the biosphere. We are behaving as if it did. So, let's say our economy is like a box. And, the way our economy behaves is that we think we have got the biosphere in it like a circle, and we can just take out what resources we need and then throw away into that whatever we want to use, as pollution, and heat, and waste. But, we can't do that because in fact we are living inside the sphere of the biosphere, and we can't increase its size by 1 cubic centimeter. It's going to stay the size it is. And our economy is getting bigger and bigger, and that box is moving out towards the sphere. And, pretty soon the corners of that box are going to pierce the delicate membrane of this sphere. So, it is absolute folly to keep on going as we are doing. I like what Kenneth Boulding used to say, the late ecological economist, who said, "to believe that something can grow infinitely you've either got to be crazy or an economist. It's not healthy for humans to grow infinitely. If we did, I mean, people will get giantosis, that's -- it's an illness, and we are in a stage of illness for our economy.

52. Cat Matlock: How can we create communities that are sustainable so that we stop using up resources at a rate far faster than they can be replaced? Question Donor 3216

Susan George Well, this question of how we can create sustainable communities, it depends how long --how large the community is. This is very much related to the previous question about who is responsible for managing resources because at the global level, nobody is. It's possible for communities to manage their resources. But, in order to do so, they have to have rules and those rules have to be made by the community itself, and they have to be made in such a way that those who do not respect them can no longer be members of the community. That is a powerful incentive to respecting the rules. And the community must be able to decide who is a member and who isn't. If you are going to come in and irresponsibly break the rules, then you are not a member of the community. That is doable up to a certain size, and it works in anything from African societies to communities of Maine lobster fishermen. The Commons is a notion that has been helping people to manage for centuries so long as we have had settled communities undoubtedly. But, it does -- it starts not working when you get to larger dimensions, and this is another reason that we have to have resources because our communities so to speak are getting so large that people don't know each other, and they do not have ways to put pressure on each other so that everyone is respecting the rules. And this is possibly the hardest, most difficult issue that people have to confront in the 21st Century. Because, the question of if it's possible for one person or one nation to take so much -- that the U.S. consumes 25 percent of the resources with less than 5 percent of the world population, this just is no longer possible.

53. Noah Brotman: Why are we taking the incalculable risk of allowing genetically engineered food crops into the environment without fully understanding the effects and implications?

Susan George Well, as for many questions in this round table of Dropping Knowledge, I really want to know about the "we." I think this "we" business goes sometimes much too far, and that "we" are given the impression that everybody wants these things, and that there are certain forces that could all get together, and either get rid of something or make something else happen. And this is very rarely the case. And, with GMOs, genetically manipulated organisms, certainly, we do not want them. If you are speaking about the populations of Europe, people have voted at over 70 percent that they don't want these crops. So, we don't want them. And, yet, because they are big money makers for a certain number of corporations, they are being imposed. They are making use of lobbies. They are making use of their money and their influence on governments and the European commission, and they are perverting science. You can find examples of petitions that have been signed by supposedly independent scientists; and when you look them up, you discover that they are all related in one way or another to the same corporations that are trying to sell these crops. So, I think, we have plenty of proof already that environmentally these crops are a disaster. They are intervening in systems about which we have very little knowledge, and systems which have evolved over centuries, if not millennia, to a kind of stability. And, introducing a new sort of plant into those systems is going to change the soil composition, the insect balance, the soil balance, etc., etc.; and we are playing with fire. So, this is the sort of thing that isn't due to "we" because we are against it, and people have an instinctive knowledge that this is going to cause environmental and potentially health disaster. How I am not sure. But that corporations want it and they can pay to push and they can pay often to corrupt politicians.

54. Bill Joy: What concrete steps can we take to make sure that everyone has a decent education and that people, wherever they are born, have greater opportunity to contribute to the world?

Susan George Well, a decent education I think has to be a public education which is funded by the community, funded by the state, and is given the resources that it needs to make sure that every child can be in school if the parents want it to be in school from the age of 3; and that at least from the ages of 6 to 16 or 17, education is compulsory. Every child has to be in school. We can ensure that there are tutoring systems so that older children are helping younger ones and helping them over the hurdles. This exists in Brazil, and it is working very, very well; and it is giving self assurance to the older children, as well as to the younger ones, and the whole level has gone up. We have to make sure that education is free, and I would say free from nursery school right through university and graduate school. That may be too much to ask for at the beginning, but that is what we should be aiming for. I would say also that if we are worried about how we are going to pay for all of this, the best way to pay for it is invariably to reduce the military budget. If you compare the actual education budgets of most countries including my own, France, with the military budget, you will find that there is far more spent on the military which has much less use in a highly educated population. So, I would make sure that there was a credit, that there was taxes on corporations if necessary, and I would also give a life long education credit for [audio ends]

55. Nadja Holtz Calderón: How come we are so many people but still feel alone?

Susan George Well, I have to give first an economic answer to that question. It is better for a capitalist economy that there be an awful lot of people alone. It is much better to sell two houses instead of one, two refrigerators, two TV's instead of one. And the more people who are alone, the more they are going to need separate equipment. If you've got a large family and only one TV set, that means you are not -- you may be enjoying your family more, but you are not contributing that much to the economy. So, I suppose that was not the sense in which Nadia asked her question, but let's face it, our economy is improved by divorce. It's a very bad economy that can be improved by people being separated and leaving each other. But there are sort of different kinds of aloneness too. Everyone knows now after Robert Putnam's work called "Bowling Alone," that we are not participating in community activities as much as we used to. People don't have time. Many people are working two jobs just to stay afloat. They don't have time for social activities. The church seems to be surviving in the United States, but that is the only social institution where people do continue to participate. And "Bowling Alone," his title says it all. Even sports activities are not carried out together, whereas they used to be occasions where people can get together and meet. Some cultures resist this tendency better than others, and they are the ones that are less invaded by commercialism. But, you know, I think it's also possible to say that not ever being able to be alone is just as bad as feeling alone. There are places where people are so packed in and live in such dire housing conditions and community conditions, that they cannot be alone. They can't even be alone frankly to go to the toilet. There is no intimacy possible. I think this is just as bad and just as [audio ends]

56. Benjamin McQuillan: If any these questions are answered, how do we get the world to listen?

Susan George Well, Benjamin, it may take a long time because I've been active in politics for about 40 years now in various kinds of efforts to make social change. I've been aware, for example, of global warming for 20 years, and only now are people really trying seriously to do something about it. So, things take a long time to change. And, maybe this is the start of something. I very much hope that it is. I am sure that the knowledge which has been brought together here in this terrific table of people who have lived in such different conditions that we can only have a lot of wisdom here. There is no other outcome to this table. There may be some that are less prolific in wisdom than others -- I am sure I am not one of the best -- but at least there is going to be a lot of wisdom here. But it will take a long time to get it through. Now, I think all the technology which I don't necessarily understand but I can see dozens of young people here who do understand it, and some of the participants do understand it, and I am sure that they have strategies of what the publicity people call viral marketing. I am sure that there is going to be ways to push ideas through systems that will be much more efficient than anything that has been tried up to now which has been much more top down. I think it's going to be bottom up, and we will have a different two track system of [audio ends]

57. Kurt Weidemann: Which kind of genetic engineering should be allowed to correct defects and imperfections of genes? Question Donor 9046

Susan George Well, who is going to determine what are defects and what are imperfections. Is having brown skin an imperfection? Is it better to be white than brown? I am not convinced at all of that. If you are talking about genes that code for certain illnesses, I think we know now that it's much more subtle than that. There is no direct action between gene X and illness Y. There is an increased likelihood perhaps that there will be illness Y. But, it is not at all a sure thing. I am for the research that can help human beings, but again I very much fear the economic implications of all of this. And, you could imagine a situation in a kind of science fiction future in which people would be buying a genetic makeup for children so that you would have genes that code for being white, blue eyed, and blonde, and particularly intelligent for rich parents, and poor ones would be left, I don't know, with whatever they would get naturally. Fortunately, what they get naturally is often extremely rewarding. But, we could imagine two separate races developing if we allowed generic engineering to go too far. What we have to ask is always who pays for the research, who is trying to do what with it, what are their goals, what sorts of profits are they going to make, is this public or private research? Ask all those questions before you even start going into the lab. It is significant, I think, that the first decoding of the genetic code was done in a private laboratory by Craig [audio ends]

58. Sascha Hellmick: Why is the food we eat of such a bad quality?

Susan George Well, Sasha, we've just had a pretty good lunch. So, but I sympathize with your question. I'd say seriously it's because it's so far away from the producer. The food we eat has traveled so far, generally, before it reaches you, the consumer, that it has lost a lot of its flavor, a lot of its texture. The tomatoes have been ripened in chambers; the bananas have been sent away green. And, if it's processed food then it has gone through many, many industrial processes, which are capital intensive, and which have been making a good deal of money for Nestle or Unilever, or Kraft foods, or for Proctor and Gamble, or whoever the agro-business corporation is, that is putting those foods on the market. But, this says absolutely nothing about quality, and I would add that the race to productivity in agriculture also pushes farmers to use bad farming methods, to use too much fertilizer, to use chemical fertilizers, to use pesticides instead of producing foods as they were produced for centuries with what we now call organic methods, but which people at the time just thought were the normal methods using composting, using natural, human, animal and plant fertilizers, using ancient techniques to keep away the pests like intercropping, not planting everything on huge plots of monocultures but planting various kinds of crops together. And so it's because we are pushing always for money; and because food is a commodity like any other commodity, don't expect it to be special just because it's necessary for people's lives. It's because we've stretched out the food chain. Here is the farmer in the middle; he is buying his inputs, his pesticides, fertilizers because he thinks that's going to make him more money; and he has got to produce that way. And, then the agro-business guy is stretching out the food chain that way, and you are way way at the other end.

59. Max Stelmacker: How can the Internet as a global informational tool that criss-crosses entire continents, serve to enhance our own communities?

Susan George Well, if the questioner means by communities, our cities for instance are fairly close communities, which are manageable in human terms. I am not talking about the entire universe or whole nation. Certainly, the Internet has already helped some of them to do things like participatory budgeting. There are several cities in the world, there are some in France -- this started in Brazil, but there are some in other places now, which involve people through delegating systems to come and participate in drawing up and following the budget of the city, and actually sitting on the city council, but sometimes doing that virtually through the Internet. And, this has incredibly reduced waste and corruption in city budgets. It's gone down to just about zero because the people are watching exactly what is happening with their money. You can have the equivalent of town meetings over the Internet. These are practiced on other subjects regularly through tap rooms, things like that. You could interrogate elected officials about what are they going to do about this or that and make them hear your voice more directly than you can do through letters. So, I think that the direct transmission of local news and local meetings to people's homes, although we don't always have time to go to all of these things, when it is made easier for people, I think, they would have a sense of wanting to participate. And also, as these techniques become cheaper and cheaper, our own alliances are going to become less costly. I am a great believer in alliances. We have to go to many sectors, bring them together first locally then nationally and then cross-border and the technique is always the same and the [audio ends]

60. Wera Koseleck: What's after capitalism?

Susan George Well, I wish I knew. But whatever it is, I'm not going to see it. So, this is probably just as well for me because whatever comes after capitalism, I fear that it's most likely to be chaos and ecological collapse. So, perhaps I'm lucky to be as old as I am. The problem really is that capitalism and nature have completely different agendas. And, they even have incompatible notions of time and of space. Just for an example, if you cut down a forest, it's going to take at least 400 years for that forest to regenerate, but you will have sold off all the products in one year. That is what capitalism wants, is a quick sale of an ecological product which has taken hundreds if not thousands of years to produce. Capitalist space is different from ecological space. Capitalist space is using nature as a reservoir to throw away waste products and to take out resources, but that's not what natural space is about. So, I think what comes after capitalism is most likely to be ecological collapse, unless we can put real limits on capital's power both to take too much at one time which cannot be repaired and replaced, or whether it is to limit its own necessity constantly to accumulate, constantly to reinvest, constantly to expand. And so, we are in an incompatible system which is reaching its limits. And, if we don't put limits, then nature is going to impose limits on us. There's one wit who said anybody who thinks that growth can continue forever is either crazy or an economist. And, that is what capitalism thinks, that growth can continue forever, and that's simply not true.

61. Moise Marabout: Why is there no peace in Middle East yet?

Susan George Well, why is there no peace in the Middle East? Ask all of the statesmen since the First World War. Ask people who have grappled with this question for decades. But I would say basically that since the Balfour Declaration of 1918 which gave the right to the Zionists to settle in Israel, Israel is a state which has been grafted on to the Middle East, which did not have roots there; and however shameful the Second World War and however great the suffering of the Jewish people were during the Second World War, and God knows that they were enormous, still to say well, we will deal with this problem by giving a new state which is established on territory which belongs to other people was a way of solving the problem which perhaps for the West seemed to be a way of getting rid of a very large problem, but which simply created another and even more intractable and more insoluble problem, which is still with us, and likely to stay with us forever. Because, from what I understand, to a Palestinian home is his village. It's not even three kilometers down the road; it's not the same. Home is right where he lived or where his ancestors lived. And it is no good saying well but you can live somewhere else, you can be just as well off. No, that's not the way that they react. So, I'm personally very glad that the United States is now out of this discussion. Since the Israeli bombing of Lebanon, the United States has lost all credibility. The Israeli government lost that war. This was not the six day war; this was not a snap victory for Israel; it was a defeat. And this is very good because now perhaps Israel and the US will be forced to hear reason. Perhaps, Europe can do a little good as a mediator, but this war was perhaps the last one. We shall see. Simply because - Israel, aided by the United States with billions of dollars every year and of course armaments, lost that war. So, perhaps after all this suffering a new phase will open up.

62. Glen Tyler: Is the current economic system inherently corrupt? If so, how do we go about dismantling it?

Susan George Well, I don't think corrupt is exactly the right word because corruption means that you are paying someone for certain other types of behavior. But I would say that the rules of our economic system very definitely do reward those who already have wealth, and they do not reward those who have nothing. And if you don't have social entitlements in a system, and if you have social entitlements, it's because they were fought for, they were not given away, they were earned, they were struggled for, and, well, the poor people are going to remain poor. There is a so called power law of 80/20 distribution. In other words, the 80 percent of the population will get only 20 percent of the wealth, while 20 percent of the population will get 80 percent of the wealth. And we have gone well beyond that now. For example, we have in the world distribution, the top 20 percent has over 85 percent of the wealth now, whereas the bottom 20 percent has less than 1 percent of the wealth. So, if we want a different distribution, then we have to fight for redistribution because the natural distribution in an economic system without rules to limit -- what is called by the question corruption and which I would call rather an imbalance or vulnerability of the poor -- then the rich will always get a little bit more, and the poor will always get a little bit less. We have to support social struggles of the poor, so that their needs can be recognized and satisfied; and this will never happen spontaneously because those that have are happy to remain that way, and as a class they never give up spontaneously their wealth although they may do so individually. Many do individually but, as a class, this never happens spontaneously. It only happens through social movements and through social struggle.

63. David Woolfson: How can human society be in balance and harmony when there are so few women in positions of power and feminine values are so minimized in all areas?

Susan George Well, I don't know. I think once women get into positions of power, the result is very often a disaster. And, of course, the example of Margaret Thatcher is the one that immediately comes to mind. I wonder, if we don't have to ask, if it's not power that is more important than gender in this question because women who are ruthless enough to play the power game and to arrive at the top of corporate or political structures are not going to be doing that on the basis of what the questioner calls feminine values. And, I don't believe in making universals out of feminine or masculine values. I know plenty of men who are sensitive and who are caring; I know plenty of women who are ruthless and totally without scruples. So, I think that it's dangerous to make sort of huge generalizations, which are very culturally dependent, class dependent, depends on what position you occupy in society and what it is that, what you really want. But I would say that countries and societies that refuse to make use of the contributions that women could make are cheating themselves. They are going to be failed societies and particularly those that cloister their women and discriminate against them deserve what they will get. But unfortunately, the whole world is going to suffer from putting women at such a disadvantage. Perhaps, the fact that they haven't freed themselves shows that there are feminine values. I don't know. Is submission of feminine value? Is subservience a feminine value? I hope not, but some societies seem to exemplify that. But, let's not reify women and say that they have -- they are unaffected by power, unaffected by ambition, or sometimes unscrupulousness, because this is making -- This is demeaning, I think, for women and what it is saying is that they are not fully human if they don't participate in all the possible traits [audio ends]

64. Andra Schaede: At a time when the concepts of 'self-defense' and 'humanitarian intervention' are being redefined, how are we to tell the difference between 'holy war' and 'just war'?

Susan George Well, humanitarian intervention -- let's take that first -- never is from the weak to the strong. You cannot imagine the troops of Rwanda or of Nicaragua intervening to save people in the United States or Germany. It's true that you go traverse, send oil during the winter for heating to people in Pennsylvania who were freezing and very poor and unable to buy heating oil, but that kind of intervention from a weaker country to a more powerful one almost never exists, so humanitarian intervention can perfectly well serve the needs of the powerful. If you can save 50 people and do it on television and prove that you are contributing to peace, justice and everything we all love, that is much better as a cover if you are going to be doing dirty politics behind. But now let's take "holy war." I think those two words are incompatible; this is an oxymoron. I do not believe in "holy war," and I don't think that's anymore of a justification than saying because I am sticking the adjective humanitarian onto intervention that it is anymore justifiable. A "holy war" is a contradiction in terms and it is never going to be a "just war." We could talk about the sense of the term 'just war' and self-defense is a condition for a just war. However, I don't think that we can -- these concepts have all got to be examined very seriously to avoid falling into the trap of the previous question where certain words, certain content and certain expressions - "self defense," "humanitarian intervention" for example, "holy war," "just war," etc., all these concepts -- have got to be examined in very fine detail before we act on any of them because all of them can be extremely dangerous both to ourselves and to other people. And all of them are expressions of power in one way or another.

65. Arundhati Roy: Between non-violent resistance and armed struggle where do we go? What is effective? What is the right thing to do? Or do we need a biodiversity of resistance?

Susan George The right thing to do is not allow oneself to be wiped out or allow one's family to be wiped out, or indeed allow one's people to be wiped out. So, I think that the response really depends more on the attacker than on the person who is being attacked. The Vietnamese, for example, when they were being attacked by the United States, they had a bio-diversity of resistance. The entire society was organized from top to bottom. Part of it was military, part of it was civilian resistance, and part of it was a very effective intelligence service. But, whatever the means of resistance the goal was the same, the goal was to stop the American war against them. So, I don't really know how to answer this question, because I think it's a -- non-violent resistance is, of course, the course that I would follow and that I recommend in all normal situations, where one is not being physically attacked, and that survival is at stake and elimination is the goal. In most normal circumstances one can try civil disobedience and non-violent resistance, and resistance is the point there, and many people will think of good ways to do it, and good ways that are media friendly, and ways that can shame and humiliate the attacker. But, in more serious situations where there is a genuine threat of annihilation, either of oneself, one's family, one's community, one's nation, then the only answer is of course what Arundhati Roy calls with her usual genius, the bio-diversity of resistance. An imagination devoted to protecting oneself through whatever means possible and through not allowing the attacker to gain the upper hand, either militarily, physically, morally, intellectually. And, this is very difficult to do, but we have had some examples where it has been done brilliantly. The ANC is another example of, Nelson Mandela's struggle against apartheid is another brilliant example of a bio-diversity of resistance. The most heroic struggles are probably the most bio-diverse, just as the most resilient natural systems are the ones that have the most diversity. So, there is a good analogy there, resilience of natural systems, resilience of human systems.

66. Ethan Nadelmann: If somehow we could snap our fingers and there would no longer be any drugs in this world, would there be no more suffering? Or is it possible that addiction is not really about drugs, that addiction is really about the relationships that human beings form with one another?

Susan George Well, I've never taken drugs myself and I've never been confronted in a life situation with this problem, and thank God my children did not and do not have substance abuse problem. But, I suppose my generation would be more given to alcoholism than to drugs. But, I think, addiction it's not just a substance; it's an addiction to what we think is going to be pleasurable. Of course, human beings seek pleasure and they seek to avoid pain and drugs seem to be a quick road to doing both of those. In this, we are just like other species. If you give rats a possibility to push the pleasure button, they will do so to the point of exhaustion. And, I -- we always have to remember that we are animals and that we run the danger of the risk of giving in too much to our animal nature and not appealing to what some of the Renaissance philosophers called, you know, we are little below the angels. We are somewhere between the angel and the beast, and we can also call upon our more angelic natures. But, I think, we are -- we have a passion for pleasure, but we do not always understand what are the more refined kinds of pleasures and thereby fall back on drugs. And, I think, the suffering that is caused by this is caused to people whose horizons have not been opened to know what are more refined and more pleasurable pleasures, if I can say that, than those that come from substances and forgetting who one is. That's what substances do. They help us to forget who we are. We should do more to try to [audio ends]

67. Mike Walters: What steps can be immediately taken to prepare all world societies for the pending "Long Emergency" associated with the convergence of peak oil, distruction of biodiversity, climate change, poverty, and global disease?

Susan George Well, Mike Walters has asked the important question for the entire rest of this century. And, it is the one that I tried to make quite explicit in a book called "The Lugano Report," where I imagine that there is a report to be directed to Master of the Universe types who are asking pretty much that kind of question. How can we continue with this economic system without having total collapse? What must we do to make this continue to work? And the answer which is given unfortunately by this group of experts which I have invented -- I've been writing this report from start to finish - is, well, you cannot do it with 8 billion people on earth as there are going to be in 2020. That's tomorrow in historical terms. So, the long emergency has already started. And, if we try to manage the world as we are doing now with 8 billion people on earth, everything is going to collapse. So, the answer of this Lugano Report is either you have to have far fewer people which means that you have to allow a lot more deaths and indeed provoke a lot more deaths or allow them to happen -- this is not a Hitlerian solution -- or you have to change the system completely. Now, naturally, I advocate changing the system completely, but it's discouraging to see that nothing seems to happen until the price becomes so high that capitalism is obliged to change the way it produces. Now, technically the answer is easier. We have to invest in alternative energy and global medical care, and stop patenting all of our technology, and sharing it better. But it is going to be an emergency, and it's hard to get people to start preparing for what is not there already.

68. Anina Sprenger: How objective is science?

Susan George Yes, well, good question. It depends on how objective is science, it depends on what the hypothesis is, it depends on who is paying for the science, and where it is taking place, and what it is attempting to find. I would suppose that astronomy or cosmology is more objective than the biosciences, but I don't really know. I am not a scientist; I don't work in a lab. What I can say is that social science in my view is never objective and should not be called social science. Economics, for example, is never objective. It always starts from hypotheses which are bounded in one way or another by a world view. And anyone who believes that you can be neutral in the social sciences, and that you are not coming to your studies with a certain number of preconceived notions or indeed interests, is crazy. So, I think what's important is to declare what those interests are ahead of time. For instance, I believe that neo-liberalism and neo-liberal globalization is a bad thing in general for humanity. And, I believe it is beating back democracy. I would consider myself, at least my degrees, my diplomas say that I am probably a social scientist, if I am anything. But, I don't think I am objective for one moment, and I don't think anyone else in the profession is objective either. I am not qualified to say whether mathematics which is probably the purest science is objective or not. Perhaps, even there you would find that people have preconceived notions.

69. Nancy Clemons: What can I do, and tell others to do, to stop global warming?

Susan George Nancy Clemons is from Missouri, USA. So, I would say, Nancy Clemons, the best thing you can do is to get rid of George Bush and all of the people around him because it's the United States that has refused to ratify even a measure as mild as the Kyoto protocol which is not going to stop global warming, but which was at least a recognition by a lot of states that they had to start doing something. And, the US isn't even ready to do that small thing, saying Bush father and Bush son have both said, "Well, the American economy is not going to give way to any protocol, and we're not going to sign this." Well, the first thing is to change that political leadership because this is a leadership which does not understand the ecological measures to stop global warming would be the best economic investment that you could possibly make. It's the dirty production, it's the energy consuming production that is costly, and it's costly in just purely economic terms as well as ecological ones. Well, the other thing may be, because Americans have a good sense of humor usually, I think something we can all do worldwide is to shame and ridicule the people who are polluting. This is a bit crude, but I have often dreamed of having a bunch of little stickers printed up, so that as I went by -- because I don't have a car -- but as I would walk by parked cars, SUVs, for instance, hugely consuming automobiles, I could just put a little sticker on the car that would say "huge car, tiny - ." Well, you understand; it is a sexual allusion, you understand. And, I would do that to shame them but also to ridicule them. I think we have to get started laughing at these people, making them feel small, instead of feeling that they are grand and that they can lord it over everyone else because they have the bigger car, or they have a larger house to heat, or they are heating their houses as if it were high summer, and so on. This is -- individual measures can do some good, that's true. We can try individually to help to contribute to a better planet. But, really the only way to do it finally is through organizing with others and ultimately organizing politically.

70. Nathan Huening: How will the world compensate for the growing energy needs and resource consumption of developing nations like China and India when nations like the United States consume resources disproportionate to their populations?

Susan George The question of Nathan is quite right, that the -- what is called the ecological foot print of countries like the United States, but also Europe are much larger than what their populations would warrant. If you take the resource consumption of London, greater London, that takes up all of the ecological space of Great Britain. I think that the Netherlands, very densely populated Netherlands, it is something like five or six times the surface of the Netherlands as an ecological footprint. In other words, it is using the resources that come from an area five or six times greater than its own surface. So, we've got a real problem. And when we speak about China and India, as purchasing power goes up in those countries, so will resource consumption. This is automatic. Every statistic in the world shows you that as soon as income increases there are two resources whose consumption goes up. One is meat; the other is energy. More consumption of meat that means more consumption of greens, so less food that is eaten directly as greens. Energy, well, you know what that means. So, we are going to have to face this contradiction. The United States, as I said in the previous question, 25 % of the consumption of resources particularly of energy, less than 5% of the world population. This is unsustainable, and therefore what we have to look at is that the ecological problem is the most constraining one that we have in the world today. If it were only the politics, I would say we have time. We can solve the political, the economic inequalities; this is doable. But, if we don't get a handle and a control over our ecological problem, we are going to be trying to solve economic and social and political problems under the worst possible conditions. And, humanity can fail. We have to look that in the eye. The human adventure can fail. We are perhaps a failing species without realizing it yet.

71. Dagmar Seidel: Why is it easier to get a cold can of Coca Cola than a fresh glass of water?

Susan George Well, I am not sure that's true. In most places that I have lived, and certainly in the West, taps have drinkable water. It may taste a little bit of chlorine, but it is still drinkable. I suppose the answer to your question is that Coca Cola has better advertising than water. But even that isn't true, because you can now buy Avian Water for about the same price as Coca Cola in any dispenser in a railway station or on the corner or whatever. So, I think, what you are asking is probably why in the South -- I assume that's what you are asking -- why in the South the water is often so polluted that it's safer to drink Coca Cola than it is to drink the local water. And, it's absolutely true that there are about a billion people on Earth who have no access to clean water; and that they may be drinking water that's going to kill them and which indeed does kill, particularly, children, who have not had time to build up any immunity; and water is transmitting parasites which can cause you to die of perfectly horrible and perfectly avoidable diseases. So, yes, if you were living in one of those areas in the South, and you were poor, and you had no access to clean drinkable water -- and by the way I am going to have a sip now -- then you would be safer probably drinking Coca Cola, which at least would be made with purified water, which would not be the case for what the ordinary people around were drinking. And, Coca Cola will be expensive. It would take a lot of people's budgets, but it also has a certain prestige. See, I expect this is tap water, but we are in Berlin. So, there is no problem getting a fresh glass of water here, and personally I haven't had a glass of Coca Cola since I was a teenager, and I won't tell you how long ago that was.

72. Anonymous: What is today's most important unreported story?

Susan George Well, I tried to think about the answer to that. I can think of three great unreported stories. One is that George W. Bush is not really in charge. The person who is in charge is Dick Cheney seconded by Donald Rumsfeld, and you should watch what they are doing. Don't watch what Bush is doing. It's not worth your time. Meanwhile, while Bush is making the scene on camera and traveling, Cheney is back in Washington working, putting people in all of the administrations. He has got his spies all over the place, and he is the one who is actually running the country with this secondment of Rumsfeld to the Pentagon. So, that's a big unreported story. People don't say what he is up to, but he is up to a lot. And, he is the man who has also put oil at the center of the American State. So, it is not just armament, it is not just military industrial complex, it is military industrial petroleum complex at the very heart of the state. Second unreported story, which I couldn't report myself, but some enterprising journalist could truly do it, is that we've already got the technologies to produce ecologically. Nothing more needs to be invented. Of course, we can always invent better things. But, what we have already, if enough research and development were put into it, would be sufficient to reduce our energy consumption, even if we don't find another drop of petroleum in the world, by a factor of anything from 5 to 10. The same is true of metals. For instance, you could produce automobile bodies that would be far lighter and that would be requiring, therefore, far less energy to move them forward. There is work being done at the Aspen Institute on all of these issues, and I think that they should be better publicized. And the final story, I think, isn't being reported. People think that the north is aiding the south. That's absolutely wrong. The net transfers of wealth are going from south to north, rather than from north to south. People think that America, when you ask them how much is America spending of its budget on foreign aid, and they say "Oh, well, 10 or 15 percent." That's nonsense, and not only is America spending only a tiny amount of its budget, and of its GMP on north/south aid, but the net transfer from the south to the north, in terms of value and debt service, etc., is on the order of $270 billion a year.

73. Dan Hill: How could the technology boom of the past fifty years have been more useful to humankind if it wasn't driven by military or market forces?

Susan George When I hear that question, it makes me thing immediately of the experiment of the Lucas Aerospace workers in Britain. This is 20, 25 years ago. When the plant was going to be closed down, it was making military technology; and the workers and the engineers in the plant were asked to determine what sorts of products, socially useful products, they could make with the present skills that they had and with the present machinery and technology that they had. And they invented all kinds of things. They designed decentralized transport, cheap transport, cheap energy machines. They designed things for people's houses. I haven't gone back and looked at the designs that they made. But, it was quite remarkable and again an example of people power. So, if we had given the free rein to people working in the military industrial complex, they could use their creativity perfectly well to create socially useful inventions. Just as if we had public research in pharmacology, we could create perfectly good technology to cure diseases of poor people. But, we don't put the money there, because those medicines, although they could physically be produced, we don't invent those molecules, we don't invent that basic pharmaceutical technology because it doesn't bring in any money. These poor people are not going to give you a huge profit. So, therefore, again, we have to think much more about how we get market forces out of science, how we get military forces out of technology; and, therefore, we can redirect the money. And we always have to go the next level when we ask these questions.

74. What is the energy balance of renewable energy? Does it produce more energy than its production consumes?

Susan George From what I've read, but I am not an engineer, I am not a technician, and I am not a specialist, I think we are now at the point where we can produce all kinds of renewable energy systems which consume far less to produce than they later provide. I think wind power is one example. Wave power which is beginning to be used in some places, there are wave machines that can function for years without any further input of energy, but they do produce it. And, I suppose the more research there is the more improvement there is going to be. We have to recognize that the law, the Moore's law about computers -- you know, double the efficiency in 18 months on the size -- that applies to energy. If we put the money into it, we are going to find technologies that are smaller, that are less energy consuming to produce, and that will yield more energy as output. But, we haven't put enough research money into it because we've been counting on petroleum. So, personally, I am very glad to see petroleum at $80 a barrel, and I hope, and I probably will make a lot of enemies out there, I hope that it will go up to a $100 a barrel because this seems to be the only way to get the world to take this question seriously and start investing seriously in alternatives. Perhaps, the technique that is not yet efficient in the sense of this question is probably fuel cells which could produce hydrogen for cars that would only leave water as a trail so there would be no pollution from them. But, I think, these are not still not energy efficient in the production output sense.

75. Stephanie Allen: How can we stop gang violence in the inner cities and motivate young people to place importance on education instead of killing each other?

Susan George Well, I'd say it's ideal for the police forces, it's ideal for the state, and also in a certain way for the economy to keep those young people focused on each other, focused on fighting each other, way down at the bottom of society. Imagine what they might be able to do if they thought constructively, and if they thought 'hey, those guys down the road they are not our enemies, they are just like us. They are poor like us, they are deprived like us, they don't have any education like us, there are probably half of them on drugs like some of our guys are. Why don't we get together with them and see what it is we can do together, so that we would be less poor, less deprived, living in less rotten housing, and getting the right kind of food to eat, and living a decent life, and going to school, and having other goals?" But, if they are focused on each other, and they are just focused on territory, which is a kind of primitive way of living, I won't say animal, because we are talking about human beings after all, but I mean fighting over territories, about as low on the scale of -- as you are going to get. And, so, I would say it's, you know, this is not harmful to the state. It may create a little disorder. But, most of the disorder, the destruction, the deaths are going on at the bottom of society where they don't really give a damn anyway. Clearly, they don't give a damn what happens to those people because if they did those people would not be in the shape that they are in. So, that's the proof that the state is not going to intervene very much because it suits, to some degree, it suits its purpose. So, my conclusion to that question is for power it's always better to keep the powerless focused on each other, not just the gang focused on the other gang across the street, but keep people focused on what they are. Let's say, you know, I am a woman, or I am a lesbian, or I am black, or I am Jewish, whatever, keep people focused on their identities because that prevents from thinking of - they are always thinking about what they are, and what their demands are as coming from what they are, but not thinking about "hey, what could we do together, if we got together?" If all people with grievances got together, we could actually do something, and that's what's got to be [audio ends]

76. Howard Zinn: What would be the best use for the trillion dollars a year spent by the United States and other countries on their military budgets?

Susan George Well, that's the dream question. You give us a trillion dollars to play with over the next year, and we change the world. And, if you give it to us every year, we'll have heaven on earth. If money can do the job, then certainly a trillion dollars is far more than enough to do it. The United Nations Development Program says if you had even 120 billion a year, that's just about 12 percent of the offer you are making, the trillion dollars, that we could do everything that needs doing over a period of 10 years. So, a trillion, that's almost an embarrassment of riches. But, let's for starters say that they hope that the millennium development goals will be realized by 2015, now we are way off track on those. And, they are not even very ambitious what the millennium development goals are. They are saying let's cut in half the poverty in the Third World, cut in half the maternal and child deaths, cut in half the people who are suffering from hunger, take care of half the victims of tropical disease, etc.. Well, with that kind of money we can do it all. I mean we can certainly do it by 2015, if not tomorrow. We can put every kid into primary school and take it right through university if it's able to go that far. We could give everybody proper health care. We could give everybody clean drinking water. We could invest hugely in alternative research, particularly for alternative energy. We could wean the world from petroleum. We would not be destroying the environment at the rate that we are destroying it because much of that money would be invested in qualitative rather than quantitative things. We would reduce enormously the costs of having so many poor people, the environmental costs of having so many poor people on earth. Well, now that we've visited Utopia for a minute or so, let me say this is not going to happen, particularly since probably 40 percent to 50 percent of that trillion dollars you are talking about is American money. The next two military budgets in the world are Britain and then France, unfortunately, mea culpa, it's my country. And then come many others, China all the way down the list, Russia now way down the list, and so on. So, it's not going to happen because the United States is not going to get rid of its military budget, not only because it wants a strong military but because this is what some of us call America's version of socialism. You use the military money to keep the economy ticking over, that is hugely, a huge injection [audio ends]

77. Michelle : Will it now take a global government to solve what were once considered national or regional issues yet now affect us all?

Susan George That's a very good question because it puts its finger on what is happening with globalization. What is happening is that indeed many of the rules which do impact on us are being made at levels which are not democratic at all in Europe where I live. We have the European Union, where decisions are largely made by the un-elected Commission, with a Parliament which is not able to even initiate legislation, and where the Central Bank is totally independent of any political oversight at all. So European citizens are not able to influence very much what happens in Europe, and you get to the international level and you are even less able to influence. Many, many people are impacted by the decisions of the World Bank, of the International Monetary Fund, particularly the developing countries. And the World Trade Organization affects all of us, it affects the food we eat, it affects what products we can use and wear and buy at what price. But, it is making employment all the time. So, we have a kind of de facto ministry of finance, and ministry of trade, with the Bank, the Fund and the WTO, the World Trade Organization. But, we don't have any international ministry of health, of education, of human welfare, of public services, of transport, of all of the good things that we need. So, we do have to have global rules, and I would hope that we would have global rules also not just in the areas of finance, not just giving total freedom to capital to go where it likes in the world, but that we would have global rules about preserving public health, global rules about giving every child an education, global rules about respecting the rights of workers, and so on. And we don't have any of that because elsewhere the ILO, the International Labor Organization, cannot make binding decisions, but the World Trade Organization can. The World Health Organization cannot make binding decisions about health, can't force anybody to take them on. The UNESCO can't make binding decisions and force people to adopt proper educational systems. So, this is where we are stuck. We are stuck at levels of democracy which are totally inadequate to the needs that we have now. Global government, that's a different question. I don't think the world is ready for global government. I would not like to see yet a global parliament, but I would like to see international organizations which are much more capable of providing basic needs for everyone.

78. Angela Passion: The trend in war in the last 100 years has seen a dramatic increase in civilian death... why is this tolerated? Question Donor 2780

Susan George Well, wars used to be fought -- the earliest wars, I'd say beginning with the Greeks in Western World anyway, were fought by citizens against other citizens. Every young man was expected to know how to go to war, and then in the European states and the Westphalian system, from the 1600's onwards, wars were fought generally with mercenaries, and people paid to go to war by princes and kings. And, now, yes, indeed we've got modern "wars," which kill massively, kill civilians. This is mainly due, I think, to the fact of air power and not on military strategies. But, it seems to me that aerial bombing, aerial bombardment, aerial warfare is mostly used as intimidation. It's not accurate but it can level civilians, and it's supposed to sap the morale. It's supposed to discourage the populations from resisting; and then if ground troops come in afterwards, they're supposed to be able to make a clean sweep. Well, it hardly ever happens that way. The most recent example is, in spite of all the civilian deaths out in Lebanon, the people were cemented, the people were galvanized, and the people said no matter how many bombardments we have to suffer through we are not going to give in. Now, instead of having the Hezbollah destroyed, which is what they thought they would do, what Israel and the United States thought they could do, the whole country has rallied around the Hezbollah: Christians, different sorts of religions, different parts of the community. What did they gain by that? What do you gain by killing civilians? Absolutely nothing, even in terms of war. Remember the Vietnam War when huge numbers of civilians were murdered. Remember the famous saying 'we had to destroy the village to save it'. Those villagers were perfectly peaceable, and it's not tolerated. This is not tolerated by, certainly not by the people who are the victims, and others mobilize with them from outside, perhaps [audio ends]

79. Chris B: Why do so many people in foreign countries that don't have democracy which are also being oppressed by dictators, get so aggressive against the Western World, which wants to spread our way of life (i.e. not living in fear all the time etc.)

Susan George Well, I think, Chris B is only 16, and it shows because Chris B has kind of swallowed the propaganda that is being spread. He lives in Canada; I mean, if he'd lived in America, he would probably be worse. But, let me say that the Western World does not want to spread "our way of life," which means, I think, Chris probably means by that opportunities, political freedoms, etc. It doesn't want to spread the good things about the West. What it really wants to do is to open up opportunities for our corporations, open up opportunities for control over resources. And, if Chris would simply look at the single case of Iraq, of which he is a contemporary, he will see that Iraqis are in far greater danger today of being killed or kidnapped than they were under Saddam Hussein. Now, that does not mean that I am condoning anything about the behavior of Saddam Hussein, neither his prisons, nor his genocide among the Kurds or among minorities in Iraq. But, today there are thousands of Iraqis being killed, at least a hundred everyday. It seems to be getting worse and worse, and when we occupy countries in order to so called -- so to say, spread our way of life, what we're doing is imposing military intervention on those people, instead of using diplomacy or other peaceful non-violent methods. And, I think that we would be aggressive too, you know, as Chris B says, why did they get so aggressive. Well, you'd be aggressive too if you were under occupation. You would be aggressive too if your children were in danger every time they went out to try to go to school, every time that your mother tried to go to the market. You would be aggressive too if she didn't know if she was going to be coming home alive, or if you didn't know whether your mother would be there that evening to prepare the family meal. And, those are the chances that you take today in occupied countries. So, spreading our way of life is, I think, a real contradiction. And that, if Chris has heard this in school, I suggest that he take it up with his teacher and look more closely at what actually happens.

80. Bo Chamberlain: How can the decent people of the world help each other while the actions of their leadership are self-serving and internationally divisive?

Susan George Well, I am very glad this question comes from an American because certainly it's the American government that's probably been the most self-serving and the most divisive. And so, it's a terribly serious question because Americans have a hard time doing that. And we all know outside that there are many, many decent Americans. I was born there myself, and I know that that's a fact. So, I think, the answer in practical terms to Bo Chamberlain's question is that we've got to organize cross border, preferably through NGOs, through non-government organizations, but any kind of organization that it is first important to create alliances from outside with Americans or with whoever is behaving in a self-serving and a divisive way, to tell them that we know that it's not you the people. We know it's your government. We don't hold you guilty of the offenses of your government. But it's also up to the people in the U. S. or in whatever country is being self-serving and divisive, whose leadership is misbehaving in such a way, to inform people outside of what are the real conditions in the country, and who is organizing, and who is doing what, and what it is that you need from us because very often people are shy of offering anything spontaneously, of saying "Well, we think we know how the situation could be made better." And, I also can make a sort of general answer. This goes for the United States, but it would also go for Israel or for the Middle Eastern countries. Let us please try to loosen the hold of religion over politics. Let us please try to secularize politics. That is what we can do for each other. Religion should have its place, but its place is not in directing politics. Because, once religion comes into it, we start arguing about questions which are highly emotional, impossible to decide in the political arena, and can only, at least in historical terms, end in bloodshed as they always seems to do. So, let us increase the power of secular institutions. This is something we can very definitely do for each other. Wherever it is we live, guard the secular power from religious interference. That I think is something that is incumbent upon all of us.

81. Judy Twedt: Should we have the right to choose where we live?

Susan George That's very hard to answer. I would say yes, within reason. But, for instance, all Africans cannot come to Spain or to France or to Europe. All Latin Americans, Central Americans and Mexicans cannot come to live in Mexico. So, the answer, I think, to this question is not so much to say everybody can choose where they want to live, when we know that the conditions of where they are already living are so horrible that most of them, a great many of them, are going to want to move and live somewhere else. What we have to do instead is saying -- is to say that we will make the conditions where people live as inviting as possible, so that migration is not the only answer that they have in order to live a decent life and be able to educate their children in a decent environment. Leaving and having to start all over somewhere else is not necessarily the best solution. I often say, "Well, I am an immigrant myself. I chose that I wanted to live in France." I left the United States when I was in my early 20's, and I have been there ever since. But, there were not a 100 or 200 or 500,000 young American women who wanted to go and live in France in the 1950's. This was an individual decision. When you get to the point where people are making mass decisions, then it's impossible to say, "Well, yes, everybody has the right to choose where they want to live" simply because the states that would be receiving do not have the capacity to integrate huge masses of people who are -- and the people who are moving are mostly doing so because they are desperate. They are taking enormous risks. Look at the people who are arriving in the Canary Islands every week in makeshift boats and they are arriving on the beach by the hundreds. And, these people are absolutely desperate. Otherwise, they would not have left. That's not a fair choice. That's not saying I am going to choose where I am going to live. You are not going to choose to risk 9 chances out of 10 of drowning or being killed before you actually arrive. That's not a choice. That is a forced situation which has been created by the North and the South. Among countries of approximately equal status, yes, I think, it's easier to say people can choose where they want to live. This is a part of personal freedom, but we have to also understand that if we do not want masses and masses of people choosing to come and live in the North, then we have got to do what is necessary and pay for it to make life decent and livable where they are in the South.

82. Jodie evans: I would like to know if there?s a way when change is happening that it can happen gracefully and doesn?t have to take innocent victims with it? Is there a way for America to lose its standing as the most powerful nation on this planet without that disrupting the entire planet? Can power ever relinquish power?

Susan George Dear Jodie, good question, as always. I think the answer is power cannot relinquish power. Maybe power can be divested. In the case of the United States it could be divested tomorrow if the Chinese wanted to cash in all of their U.S. treasury bonds, but of course that would be a huge loss for the Chinese as well. So, that's probably not going to happen. But, I think, sometimes a few people working together can force power to give up something. We can sometimes have a slight victory so that they at least don't acquire more power. I can think of one fight like that in an area that's not the peace community, but a fight I was in some years ago about a new investment treaty called the multilateral agreement on investment which would have given even more power to transnational corporations, even less power to governments, and no power at all to citizens, and we beat it because we organized against it. So, maybe there is a possibility of preventing even worse abuses from taking place. Getting rid of power over us is obviously more difficult because it's always more difficult to get rid of something that is already in existence, already ratified, so to speak, already armed and already in a position to exercise what the philosopher has called the means of legitimate violence. That's the definition of the state. It has the power of legitimate violence. It can do violence to you, you cannot do violence to it, and that's the definition. So, to try to get the state to give up the means and the capacity of legitimate violence, I think, that is not going to happen. But sometimes one can modify the state's behavior, always remembering that as Nietzsche said the state is the coldest of all the cold monsters.

83. Adrienn Meszaros: What is the modern version of colonialization?

Susan George Yes, there is a modern version of colonialism, and it's got a name. It's called debt. It is called debt followed by the structural adjustment policies imposed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Structural adjustment is a kind of a code word to mean austerity policies. What it means is that it's neo-liberal policies. The Bank and the Fund move in and they say "okay, if you are going to pay back your debt, and you must pay back your debt, then you have to put interest rates way, way up." That makes it harder for businesses to borrow and to employ people. You've got to privatize everything in sight, so that gives big opportunities to foreign companies and local elites to buy up all of the public, previously public companies. You have to concentrate on exports because of course that's the only way you are going to earn hard currency to be able to pay back your debt. So, don't worry about producing for local people's needs. You have to produce for export. And, all of these policies have been very beneficial to a tiny minority of the people in these countries but hugely harmful to the great majority of the population, to the point where there have been riots in dozens of indebted countries that they are undergoing structural adjustments. Also, because the prices of basic food stuffs, the price of water, the price of energy increases, there is no more subsidies to public transport or very often schools become fee paying. Health care is no longer free or cheap or affordable. All of this is due to these policies. Well, why do I say debt is a new form of colonialism? Because it allows intervention in state policies which - it is better than colonialism because it doesn't need an army. It doesn't need an administration. It doesn't cost you anything, as the person intervening, the state, the power is intervening. You even get paid a little bit because you are still getting interest back on your debt. It's not a lot of money, but it's a lot for the country concerned. But it isn't very much for the creditors. And, this is really an ideal system because it isn't even very visible. Colonialism is visible. People think this is rotten; you know there's pictures taken. But debt isn't visible, and it works just as well, even more efficiently.

84. Saphyre Rogers: Where does the line between personal freedom and social responsibility towards the common good fall? Who gets to decide?

Susan George Well, economic freedom in my view has to be curtailed. You cannot say that someone has a right to have all the wealth in a society. We are now at a stage where three people in the world have a personal fortune which is equivalent to the gross national product of the 48 poorest countries in the world. I find that personally inexcusable, and I do not find this exercising personal responsibility. Unfortunately, there never seems to be a point where one says "enough." And, this seems to me, what we are not able to do as humans we don't say where the limits are. And, this to me, whether it's in the domain of personal freedom, whether it's in the domain of the ecology, of the environment we've got to think far more seriously about where we are setting the limits. All right and personal freedom in social responsibility towards the common good, that can in one way come down to paying taxes. The Scandinavians have done this very well. They have a high tax system, but they also have a very high social protection system. They are concentrating on the social wage rather than on the individual economic solution. Many collective solutions, many common goods, but people are expected to pay for those. And, I think, that who gets to decide, well, it's the members of a given community that get to decide. You can only make the idea of the Commons work if the members of that Commons are able to make the rules themselves, and if they are able to decide who is a member and who isn't. That is where personal freedom comes in because if everybody is free, as Garrett Hardin said 40 years ago, "to put one more cow on the Commons and then one more and one more and one more," because everybody is trying to maximize their personal freedom, and their personal wealth, then the Commons is going to collapse because it can't support everyone doing that [audio ends]

85. Sr.Jacintha Fernandes: Does our education system really enable a child to bloom?

Susan George Probably most formal educational systems do not allow children to bloom. It's very difficult to find the right mix between discipline and freedom, the freedom to explore, the freedom to express ones needs. And when anybody who's ever had children knows that children are always looking for limits, and so education has also got to be about fixing boundaries and explaining, determining, allowing them to understand where those boundaries are. But this is hindering them in blooming because blooming also means that they must be free to make mistakes and that they must be free to learn also who they are, so -- without being punished and education systems are very often about punishment as well. So, I think we need to allow children to grow up to be able to function in complex societies and that means that they have to master certain skills in basic skills in schools, so that they can then learn to learn, so that learning can become a life long experience. Perhaps, the best system for that that's been invented is in Brazil where older children are called on to tutor younger ones to help them when they have difficulties in school in learning those skills. This seems to work very well because it increases the cohesion between the older and the younger. For instance, no older boy is going to let his little brother that he is tutoring be bullied in school or racketed, as we say, and finds the other children telling him to give them their lunch or their candy or their money or whatever. And this tutoring system, which goes right up to university level, seems to work very well and kids can earn points for it, which help them to get into university later, so it gives them a sense of responsibility very early on. They are responsible for younger child and this can only be allowing them to bloom because it gives them self assurance and the sense of self worth and a sense of mastering skills themselves. But our -- most educational systems are not very inventive and don't expect probably enough of children. Children are capable of learning. Every kid could learn four languages before the age of five with absolutely no difficulty, and I don't know why we are not equipping them for that, but very few societies are.

86. Ãtienne Savard: Why don't we dump all patent laws all around the world and stop restraining creativity and innovation?

Susan George There we have another question with a "we" in it, and I feel very uncomfortable with all these "we" questions because, it's not -- because the majority of humanity would like to do x, y or z, that that will happen. Patent laws exist because there is innovation and people want to be paid for innovation. Now, I could say -- I take an interest in this question. I am a writer. Part of my income is made up of selling books. So, I think that we should not have a system in which everything is free and that intellectual creativity is free because I think that to be creative and take the time, you know, you are only paid at about the minimum wage level anyway from royalties, unless you are Dan Brown or the Da Vinci code author or something. So, I think that inventors have a right to be paid something for their invention and, therefore, to take out a patent, so that they cannot be copied by just anyone, when often years and years of work can have gone into some invention. Inventions don't just happen. They happen because people are qualified to invent them. But, the TRIPs, the trade related intellectual property regime of the WTO, is on the contrary completely unfair. Most patent laws previously in the developing world, Argentina and the Philippines, etc., were on the order of eight years of protection for an innovation. The TRIPs brings this, the patent law convention, and the WTO brings this up to 20 years of protection. And, that is really just preventing the transfer of technology. Twenty years is too long, and yet this has been enforced universally by those who are inventing the technology, which is to say mostly the trans-national corporations of the North. The inventors today are now very rarely individual people, although a lot of people made a lot of money in the big Internet boom. Mostly, they come from corporations, and it's corporations that get the benefit of the patents and then they transfer them.

87. Siri Hustvedt: How does consumer culture actually influence the personalities, the ways people live, the way they think within a given culture? How does it become part of us and what does it mean to be able to resist that visual and verbal culture that seems to me is always reducing and simplifying reality into something that can be easily bought and sold?

Susan George Well, I think, that this questioner has answered her own question. She sees very well what the consumer culture can do to us. If you expose little children to four or five hours of television every day, they will have seen thousands of hours of advertising before they are five, and they will be completely prepared to be good consumers for the rest of their lives. So, I think, she has answered her own question. It does become part of them when they get a bit older, and there is a visual and a verbal culture because they hear the same slogans all the time. The songs that they first hear are publicity jingles, and they can sing them together. And they -- so, it does reduce and simplify reality to something that can be easily bought and sold. Well, how does one fight against that? The perception is correct of the questioner's. The answer is inherent in the question. You stop exposing kids to hours of TV every day in their daily lives, which is only creating a monoculture of the mind. It's like having only one crop in an entire county, that you only raise one thing. Well, that's monoculture in the fields, but you can also have monoculture of the mind. And, you need a diversity of food for your spirit as well as for your body. So, also, I think it would be very good if the schools would teach kids to deconstruct these messages. There is no critical examination of the kinds of messages that they are receiving. Is there any school, primary school or secondary school in the US that is teaching kids how to read the television advertisements that they are hearing? I mean, really read them, deconstruct them, understand what it is that's happening, what are the techniques that are being used to persuade them. I think if you could teach children to decode that would go some way towards helping them to resist, because that's another word in the question, I think, yes. How do we -- what does it mean to be able to resist that visual and verbal culture. Well, resistance means first of all knowledge. You've got to teach people the techniques that are being used upon them for them to have some resistance and some protection against those techniques.

88. Sabastiao Salgado: Can a person be perceptive enough to see our planet in a way that tells them that they too are part of nature?

Susan George Yes, many people already are perceptive enough to see themselves as a part of nature. The problem is probably that this is, I think, the first year ever in human history where more than half of the people in the entire world are living in cities. This has never happened before, and it's harder in a city to see yourself as a part of nature. So, it's not so much a perception as a way of life that's been put in the place of that perception. People have been forced to leave the country side. All those migrants into cities are not living in the center of the city where there is a certain number of amenities, transport and reasonable water supply and telephones and so on. They are living in a sort of no man's land between urban and rural, which is a rurban. Some people call it rurban, instead of urban, because they are not yet in the part of the city that has amenities. Often, they are living in slums. It is very hard to see yourself as a part of nature if you are living in a slum. So, what's the answer to that? I think the answer is we have to green our cities. That seems pretty obvious. There are a few experiments of having green roofs, of having plants and trees being part of our buildings. There is an Austrian architect who has made marvelous houses in Vienna called Friedensreich Hundertwasser who has influenced me a lot, although I am not an architect. But, I think, that he shows through his, what he calls his tree tenants, how we can green our cities and how we can help people to understand that wherever they are, they are living in an eco-system, that wherever they are, they have to preserve that eco-system. And, a tree tenant is a good way to show that, because the tree tenant pays its rent, it pays its rent in giving you shade when it's hot, and in giving you light when it's colder, in cleaning the air around you because it's absorbing, and so on. So, there are ways of thinking about cleaner and more green [audio ends]

89. Desiree Zwanck: Why does it seem that life gets more and more stressful with each thing we invent to save time?

Susan George Well, I think it's because we replace people with machines. It used to be that to do tasks you would have groups of people. Well, sometimes it wasn't too great because you would have mistresses and servants in houses, and that did not always work for the best interests of the servants. But, at least, it was a human system for getting tasks done. Now, you are in charge of your own house, and you have to do everything, even if you have got machines to help you do it. I like to think of the system in Japan which is instated system of earning points to take care of old people, not having machines to take care of them, or surveillance cameras or whatever to see that they are doing okay, but to have people actually go in and look to their needs, and read to them and take care of them. This increases social cohesion and the people who do it are earning points, a kind of alternative currency, which they can use later if they get too old to take care of themselves for certain needs, and you can imagine that will stop using machinery and use people instead. It seems everywhere this has been tried, it has been taken up by people who really want to do it. And they would much rather buy from a local person their food than to buy it from a supermarket which is much more high tech, although it maybe quicker. The system is the fastest growing. In France, it's called the AMOP which is the system of purchasing from local producers, and that gives the farmer a livelihood, and it gives consumers better food and more connection to the person who is producing it. This increases social cohesion as well. So, I think, let's use alternative currencies. Let's try to use people every time we can instead of machines, not exploiting them of course, but reducing the number of things that we rely on from machines and giving more work to people. And perhaps alternative currencies are one answer to the problems that this can create in the more developed societies.

90. Glen : How do we stop our governments from going to war?

Susan George Well, there is a bit of good news here. After all, historically speaking, after centuries of bloody, bloody wars involving all kinds of states in Europe, for the last 60 years, at least since the Second World War, we've been at peace, we've managed to make a European Union. Now we've managed to bring in the former satellites of the Soviet Union. It's almost unimaginable to have a war now between European countries as it would be to have a war, a shooting war between the United States and Canada. So this is a kind of progress, but what we are faced with now is governments from the West bringing the prophecy of Samuel Huntington to life, which is to save the clash of civilizations. It seems to me that Bush is going all out for that and doing everything he can to make this constant clash of civilizations, which I thought was nonsense when Huntington published it in the early 90's, but it's now becoming true. How can we stop governments from going to war? This is very difficult. I think of the 15th of February, 2003, when there were millions of people in the streets from all over the world -- first time that it ever happened -- but it was not enough to prevent Bush from going to war. The invasion of Iraq had after all been planned since 1992 by the far right wing forces that are dominant now in the American government. So once the thing has been decided and it's been decided at a certain level and that government thinks that it is capable of carrying out this war -- as we have seen totally incapable and Rumsfield and the others were living in some sort of a fantasy world where it just didn't occur to them that they could lose and it didn't occur to them that the Iraqis would reject the occupying power. So maybe the only way to prevent governments from going to war is to show them that they are going to lose as we've just seen with Israel's in Lebanon.

91. Amy Johnson: If we produce enough food to feed everyone in the world, why don't we?

Susan George Well, "we" is a big word here because who is producing the food and who is going to be able to eat it? These are questions that are not determined by moral pressure; these are questions of pure economics. And, if a person does not have enough land to grow his or her own food or does not have enough money to purchase it, then that person is going to go hungry, even though physically speaking there may be enough to share out among everybody. For the market, food is a commodity, just like anything else. It's not because its absolutely necessary to life that that status changes and most of the statistics that you will see, like the question expresses - well, what you are talking about there is we are producing enough to feed everyone if its in terms of grain, of cereals. But when you consider that a huge proportion of grain is fed to animals and we do not all have a vegetarian diet, it means that there will be food which is going into value added activities, as economists say, which is going to feed animals which can be -- and their meat can be sold at a higher price; and, therefore, you can also see in the statistics that when a country becomes a little bit richer, when there is a higher gross national product per capita, people immediately start buying more meat. So, they move up the food chain. That's what's happening, for instance, in China right now. We also do produce enough food for everyone, but most of this production is in places where people are not going hungry; and where people are going hungry, very often their farmers have been ruined by cheap imports coming from the rich countries. This has happened massively in Mexico. So, there are many more poor Mexicans than there were and many have lost their farms and these people cannot compete. Thai rice farmers have lost their land; Filipino rice farmers have lost their land. We can't look at production and consumption as if there were just a straight line between them.

92. Matt Anonymous: When might it become necessary to break the law?

Susan George Well, it's often become necessary to break the law and that is it's often how human progress occurs. There is a situation which has been legally recognized in French law, at least, which is called the State of Emergency or Urgency. The first case that was decided in the 1880's was when a woman was convicted of stealing bread, but she said, "Look here is my child. My child would have starved to death. I didn't have any bread, I have nothing to feed him and if I had not stolen this bread then I was going to be creating an even -- and committing an even more serious crime because my child would have died or become desperately ill." And the judge, for the first time, ruled that the woman had acted in a state of urgency or emergency and that she was perfectly justified in doing so. So, she broke the law. Yes, she shouldn't steal but she did so for very good reasons. I think there is collective moments where we are also in state of emergency. For example, now in France people are cutting down or pulling up, uprooting genetically modified organism crops. This is breaking the law, but they are doing so. Knowing that they are breaking the law, they are doing it in broad daylight because they feel that the society is in a state of emergency; and if they don't protest in this way against GMOs, then they are leaving the door open to the utter ruin of agriculture. Certainly during ecological crises, Greenpeace spends its time breaking the law, but in a non-violent way. Let me stress that the non-violent part is extremely important, but that civil disobedience in America, since from the time of Thoreau, right on has been an essential part of changing the law. The civil rights protests, everything that has made us progress -- not everything but very often -- has been because the law has become unadapted to the present needs of society; and it's because people broke it that it was understood that it had to be changed.

93. Alex: Is there something better then democracy?

Susan George Well, if we all are going to start, we can all start with Winston Churchill who said democracy is the worst political system except for all the others that have ever been tried. So, once you've said that, you haven't quite said it all because now we do have different parameters. And, I think one of them is that we know more about participatory democracy which is an improvement on representative democracy. But, personally, I think we need a combination of both. I think representational democracy is important. We must elect representatives whose full time job it is to take care of the affairs of the community, of the nation, because nobody can take enough time off of their own work to do the requisite number of things that always need doing. As Oscar Wilde said, in his own inimitable way, "Socialism is all very well, but it takes too many evenings." So, participatory democracy means that we can add to representational democracy; we can continue to participate while carrying out our normal daily lives. Examples of this are rampant in Brazil, for instance, where the budgets of many cities are decided in a participatory way. And, when people are looking at where the money is going, deciding where it's going to be spent, and following it all the way to its being spent, this reduces corruption to the lowest possible level. There is no waste. This has turned out to be an extraordinarily efficient system. Participatory democracy in running the schools, in running many other institutions has been shown to be an improvement. But, the other kind of improvement we need over what we now understand by democracy is international democracy because unfortunately the system we have stops at the state level, at the national level. That is the last level at which we can vote and hope to have some influence over what happens. But, many decisions are being taken, in my case at the European level, that affect my life. And, Europe as a structure is absolutely undemocratic. And, decisions are also being taken at the international level by huge institutions like the World Bank, the IMF, the World Trade Organization, in particular, which no citizen has a prayer of ever influencing. Any time you want to influence what happens at the international level, well, you just have to start pushing the stone up the hill, and it may very well roll all the way back down, and you will have to start all over again. So, this is where we need some structures. We need to think about international democratic structures because I think democracy is the right idea. It is the right basis, but it was thought about, and conceived at a time when politics did not go much beyond the local, the regional, or at most the national level. And, now we are in a completely different phase of human history. So, we have got to conceive of a political system which allows us to regulate this particular phase. Every society needs rules, and those rules have to be decided by popular participation.

94. Barcelona Forum, 2004: Who is profiting from terrorism?

Susan George Very good question. What comes to mind for me right away is, well, Halliburton, for instance, so called reconstruction in Iraq. The 11th of September, fifth anniversary, day after tomorrow, we have a terrorist act in New York and in Washington followed by the invasion of a country which had absolutely nothing to do with the terrorism, which is the Iraq war, which was planned, as I said in the previous question, beginning in the early 1990's. And, Iraq had absolutely no connection with the terrorism, but that justified the American decision to bomb that country. So, clearly, in that case the Americans profited from terrorism by doing something that they intended to do anyway but did not have a good enough excuse for it. And, they were able to convince the American people that Saddam Hussein had something to do with the terrorist attack, which he had absolutely nothing to do with. Well, first of all, Iraq was one of the few secular governments, not at all a religiously oriented government in the Middle East, not that I am defending Saddam Hussein, that's not true. But now we have an Iraq that has been invaded, bombarded, leveled. Well, we have the public works companies, we have companies like Dick Cheney's Halliburton, we will have oil companies which will come in, and I would also say that - well, do people know that the Pentagon has a department which is for reconstruction, and it's got offices in it for reconstructing countries they haven't even destroyed yet? That's what the Pentagon is thinking of, of all the business opportunities that there will be. And I would say also that the Bush administration has used terrorism as an excuse to destroy a lot of the American people's constitutional freedoms. The shameful act of Congress called the U.S. Patriot Act has given powers which will constitute -- which still are constitutionally outlawed, but none the less they are applying them, on lawful searches and seizures. They use this as an excuse to reduce the freedoms of people, and people who were able to protest are being intimidated. And this is -- I would say terrorism is maybe the best excuse that has ever been invented for unlawful government action. So, it's not just materially profiting like corporations that are profiting, but it's also political profiting through governments gaining more power, and the Bush administration in particular, the executive gaining more power over the legislative and over the people, and to helping to destroy the constitution.

95. Adelina Wong: What is freedom? Is it relative to where you are in the world?

Susan George Well, there are many different kinds of freedom. Yes, it's relative to where you are in the world. Let's start with the conceptions of freedom, the notions of political freedom, of religious freedom, religious tolerance, the rights to own property, the freedom of opinion, the freedom of the press, all of these are concepts which were invented in the West at around the end of the 18th century, with what is called the movement of the Enlightenment. And they were conceived and developed by mostly Western philosophers and realized first in the West. But now they have become universally desirable, and in many other countries these same freedoms have been realized. I think where the problem comes is to say, "Well, some people don't really need to have freedom of conscience, because they are based on different values, Asian values or Middle Eastern values, or something." Very often, I think that's an excuse for not giving people what is required for their own personal dignity and their own personal freedom. Enslaving women, in particular, confining women to particular roles to me is a violation of freedom. So, therefore, of course, freedom definitely depends on where you are in the world. If you are working a 12 hour day, 7 days a week, and you are not allowed any holiday, certainly that's not a life with any material freedom in it. And, that's going to depend on where you are in the world, and what the labor laws are in the part of the world that you are living in. Where we run into problems in the West is when people speak of economic freedom as if it were at the same level as political or religious or freedom of opinion or freedom of the press, economic freedom to do exactly what you like no matter who you hurt. This I think is not freedom. But, this is an idea that is being followed by many people now in the United States, in particular, but also they have spread it to the rest of the world. It's called neo-liberalism, and it says you can do whatever you like with your money. It's reducing taxes; you don't really have to contribute to the community. And more and more laws are being eroded in order to allow total economic freedom. And this, I think, is contrary to the traditional notions of freedom.

96. Judith Anonymous: AIDS in Africa: how big is our responsibility?

Susan George Well, I don't know who "our" is in this question; I don't know who is the "we". There is many, many questions with "we" in it, and I would hope we could define who is "we" in each one of these questions. But, if the sense of that is how much are "we" in the North responsible, I would say that our responsibility is huge. This is just one more example, but an especially spectacular one, of how a disease which is killing millions - there are other diseases, tuberculosis, malaria, and so on - which could be relatively easy brought under control - I don't say cured but relatively easily prevented and people could be allowed to live longer lives. A few years ago Kofi Annan asked in a major speech for ten billion dollars a year for these three diseases. Well, ten billion dollars a year frankly in today's world is peanuts. This is nothing; every single day there's l500 billion, every day traded on currency markets alone, so ten billion should be for any normal society a completely easy sum to find. We don't, we don't do it. And, let's face it. AIDS may have begun as a disease of rich people in the United States or Brazil. It starts up in the upper scales, particularly among homosexuals, artists, people who take cocaine, and so on. But then it drops very rapidly down into the poorer classes, and now it has become a completely lower class disease and so the people who have it are not that interesting for the powers that be because they're poor, they don't consume, and they are just simply not taken into account because they don't contribute to capitalist production and capitalist consumption so we could find the medicine, but the pharmaceutical companies even went to court trying to prevent the competition of generic drugs. We could allow generic drugs to be exported, but we're still stymieing that although they can now be produced in some places. The countries in the South can produce them are still not allowed to export them because of patenting laws. So our rules and our stinginess are preventing tens of millions of people from living slightly more normal lives.

97. Ian Manheimer: Look at domesticated animals - pets - and how their inability to fend for themselves has rendered them largely obese, lazy, dependent, and less curious. In this sense: Are humans becoming domesticated by technology?

Susan George Well, humans are becoming obese because its food technology is pretty terrible, and it's filling us with fats and sugars if we eat too much processed food. But, you will notice that it's the poor who by and large become obese, and the rich remain slender because the rich can afford good food. Lazy? No, I don't think so. I think technology can free us from a certain number of dependencies; it can free us from drudgery. So, I am not a Luddite at all. I am for improving people's lives through technology, and I would much rather frankly have a dishwasher and a washing machine in order not to have to spend the time that one used to have to spend on doing laundry and doing the dishes. So, I am not certainly not a Luddite, and I am not a Luddite for more modern technologies, like the Internet. I think -- I am a researcher basically. I like to look things up; I like to know things. I almost never go to a library anymore because I can find everything on the Internet. This is a blessing. And I can find it more easily. There are some subjects that I research, for example, about the World Trade Organization for which I would used to have to go Geneva because that's the only place that I could find the information. It wouldn't be in any library that I could find locally. So, now I don't have to. It's all online. I think that's it's always the same thing. People think that the particular situation that they are confronted with is the first time in history that people have ever been confronted with it. Well, no. I mean, I am pretty sure that the same sort of question, not the same exact one, but the same sort of question was invented with the invention of the printing press, and later with the invention of the airplane, and with the invention of the cinema, and so on. And, I don't think that we are becoming domesticated by technology. We are more curious because we have more opportunities to ask questions. And, dependent? Well dependent on what? I think we are dependent each other. And I like a project, like Wikipedia which makes people dependent on each other for their knowledge. I think that increases the sense of cohesion.

98. Keith Dierkx: What are the myths that we need to create to change the world for the better?

Susan George Well, I don't really know how to answer that because I don't think that we create myths. There are myths that are created by events by exceptional personalities. I don't know. Mother Teresa was a myth, as well as being a living person, what Americans now call a living legend, you know, and that's a myth. I think the image of the Blue Planet that was taken from space, although it is factual, created a kind of a myth of its own. It created an ideal picture. It gave us a sense of having our place in the cosmos, of being something alive in a very dark space of non-living matter, and that myths come out of daily perceptions. So, anything can become a myth. Maybe this table within five years is going to be mythical, and that people will say, "Oh you know who was there"; and they will name hundreds of people who weren't actually here, but who should have been here. And, maybe we here are creating a myth today; I don't know, but I should like to think so because the idea of this table, which is bringing together people from all over the world, from a great many different backgrounds, and people who are all working in one way or another to create a better world, I can see this easily becoming a myth because it's got the modern components. It's got all the media. It's got all the raw material necessary to create a myth. And so, perhaps, we are actually participating in one, and perhaps we will find if we live long enough, that this particular event, of which we were each one a very small part, has achieved that sort of status. But, it's nothing that you can create, and you can't say, "Alright, tomorrow morning I am going to set out to create a myth, and by evening the myth will be created." This is not the ways things like that happen. They happen because there is a kind of viral progression, there's a kind of geometric progression of certain ideas, and all we can do is hope that the good ideas will prevail.

99. Anonymous: What is the future of the city?

Susan George The future of the city seems to be to get bigger. This is the first year, I think, 2006, in history where there are now more people living in cities on the planet than there are people living in the countryside. For centuries, for all of our history, there were far more rural people than urban ones, and now this balance is beginning to change. So, the city is the future, and in the city, it may be a space which is the kind of size which people can manage. I think the future of the city has to be an ecological one. It has to be one in which consciously ecological systems are fostered. A city urban ecosystem, that means parks, yes, it means planting trees, yes. But, it also means putting green where green never was before. Putting green on our facades, putting green on our roofs, using building systems which are much more economical of energy, using new ways of incorporating nature into our systems so that we use the sun much more, and we can feel part of the city. It's also a community, which is of the size where people can help each other. You could have citywide currencies which could be used by people inside the borders of the city, which could provide an alternative to the national currency, and provide a lot of jobs. This is already a fact in some American cities and elsewhere. It was used in Austria by several thousand people. These are not radical schemes, but they do help to provide employment, and they keep cities together. They keep people working inside the boundaries of the cities. They promote local solutions to local problems. I hope that this is the future of the city because cities can be quite marvelous places. It's there that we find culture, that we find all sorts of people who make our lives more interesting. It's there that we find universities like the magnificent one that we are contemplating here as we speak. I love cities, and I think that they could be so much more amenable to human life than they are now. But, for that to happen humans have to realize they're just part of an ecosystem, and they can help to create that ecosystem.

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