Rewind with Todd Boyle: David Barsamian at Tsunami Books (2017)

Presenter: Rewind with Todd Boyle to May 18, 2017, for a celebration of Alternative Radio. From Eugene PeaceWorks, here’s David Zupan:

David Zupan (Eugene PeaceWorks): One of America’s most tireless and wide-ranging investigative journalists, David Barsamian, has altered the independent media landscape with his weekly show, Alternative Radio, now in its (39th) year. Many of you probably heard that that show ran for 30 years at no charge to KLCC until they took it off the air… I’m happy to say it’s back on the air in Eugene on KEPW.

David Barsamian: Well, good evening Eugene! It’s wonderful to see you, see all of your beautiful faces here filling this room in this very valuable community resource, Tsunami Books. Independent bookstores like independent information is more and more a rare commodity. So we have to cherish it, we have to protect it, we have to make them grow.

[00:01:15] And hats off to Scott (Landfield) for so many years and his staff and others and all of you who hopefully shop here and buy books and support the store in very concrete ways.

[00:01:29] I can tell you, coming from Boulder, Colorado, a community relatively similar to Eugene, by the way, big university town and all of that, liberal Dems abound and a great community radio station (and you’ve launched one), but we don’t have a bookstore like this.

[00:01:48] I mean, it’s a real scandal that bookstores all across the country have been literally demolished by the juggernaut of Amazon, and yes, I know you can save a few extra bucks by ordering your books from that loathsome corporation in Seattle, but you’re talking about keeping your money in the community, and that is so valuable. Cherishing community is what we need to do.

[00:02:17] And a special thanks to comrade David Zupan for all the work he’s done over so many years around the issues of corporate control of media and now of course launching a new radio station. KEPW is community-based and independent and progressive and it will grow and expand to the extent that you support it.

[00:02:44] So here’s a very concrete thing you can do in your community. You know that this word community incidentally is bandied about in a very promiscuous way, often by big NPR affiliates like KLCC, KOPB, KUOW in Seattle, WGBH in Boston and BUR in Boston and NYC in New York, but what they want for community, they only want your money when they’re asking for it during their pledge drives.

[00:03:12] Here you have a community radio station responsive to your needs, which will be as excellent as you make it… It’s so important that we build alliances and grow a movement. Poco a poco, it happens one at a time. We have to start at the bottom and work our way up. So struggling for social change and social justice is not something that happens overnight.

[00:03:38] Just ask the six women who met in Seneca Falls, New York in 1846 who were decrying the pathetic state of women in the United States and complaining that we do all the work, we raise the children, we provide our husbands with sex when they demand it, we plant the seeds, we reap the crops, we do all the work, and we have no rights. We don’t have the right to vote. We don’t have the right to own property.

So that movement started in a very isolated kind of difficult situation, but it grew because people had faith, and when they organized together, that’s how movements grow.

[00:04:21] So this radio station, KEPW, and I’m very happy to tell you that there’s a sister station now in Florence, KXCR, in fact some of the Florence people are here. These are not small achievements in a time of corporate control of the airwaves, in a time of predatory, rapacious capitalism, for communities to organize and to establish independent progressive radio stations is a tremendous achievement.

[00:04:55] So hats off to the people in Florence and of course here in Eugene.

[00:05:02] Howard Zinn says, ‘We need to engage in whatever nonviolent actions appeal to us. The history of social change is the history of millions of actions, small and large, coming together at points to create a power that governments cannot suppress.’

[00:05:21] Zinn was, of course, a towering figure who literally reinvented the way we looked at American history, our own history, which had, until he came along, had always been a story about great men, almost invariably men, incidentally, great generals, great presidents, great captains of industry.

[00:05:43] And he told history from the bottom up, from the people who were on the receiving end of the actions and, you know, the kind of attitudes coming from the rich and the powerful. To be hopeful in bad times, Zinn says, ‘is not just foolishly romantic. It’s based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, and kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives.’

[00:06:20] And of course the media have a lot to do with shaping people’s perceptions, giving them information or not giving them information. And so today there’s like four or five corporations that control most of the media in the United States.

And while the so-called traditional media, the legacy media, is in fact losing eyes, they’re losing eyeballs, and losing ears, still 60% of Americans get their news from TV from those short newscasts, you know. And that’s a very dangerous situation when so many people are getting the source of information from so few. And never in the history of journalism have so many known so little about so much.

[00:07:15] These faux journalists are overpaid gas bags, lapdogs with laptops, stenographers. Instead of a press corps, we have a press corpse. These self-styled experts represent a range of opinion from A to B. I don’t even think that’s accurate anymore. It’s more like A to A squared. A to B is even too much, you know?

[00:07:39] So when things happen in Kuwait or Iran, there’s no historical context. Things just happen. So you don’t learn, you know, why the jihad proliferated from Pakistan in 1979 and 1980 to actually sweep across the world to where there are now al-Qaeda affiliates under different names and different kinds of tendencies, you know, as far away as Mali and Niger and Nigeria and in northeast Africa in Somalia, in East Africa, all over the Middle East, in Turkey, in Syria, in Iraq.

In fact, wherever the U.S. footprint has been placed down, there you have jihad. Can you make the connection? Can the corporate media make that connection between U.S. foreign policy and the spread of violence around the world?

[00:08:34] Do people like being bombed? Would we enjoy a drone strike on Tsunami Books right now, wiping all of us out? Would we find that a pleasant experience? I think not.

[00:08:46] And so when poor Pakistanis or Afghans or Syrians or Somalis or Libyans are blown to pieces by U.S. drone strikes, that might create some animosity. That might create some hostility. Make the connection between U.S. foreign policy and U.S. militarism and U.S. aggression and U.S. invasion and occupation.

We have over 1,000 military bases straddling the globe, but there’s no money for Lane Community College. People are being laid off. There’s no money for student loans. These are the kinds of things that should really agitate the population. And we have to have social change in this country and it’s got to come soon because U.S. imperialism is destroying the planet.

[00:09:36] The ruling class, the owners of the country, the Forbes 400, the Fortune 500, and the plutocrats, they give us a few crumbs, and they expect their hands to be kissed. We’re supposed to bow down in front of them.

Well, I’m not going to do it, and you’re not going to do it. And these radio stations that have just started in Florence and in Eugene are not going to do it. It’s time to fight back.

[00:10:07] We have to resist militarism. U.S. foreign policy is not about the fairy tales about bringing democracy to benighted and backwards people, liberating them, bringing them the glory of the free market and open trade and stuff like that, that’s all BS.

[00:10:25] I mean, that’s all propaganda. We have to be able to see through that and talk about imperialism, because that is the guiding force of U.S. foreign policy. And behind that imperialism, of course, is the military.

[00:10:39] And so when the corporations go after the resources around the world, from lithium, from copper, to bauxite, to iron ore, to oil, to all the other minerals, they’ve got this enormous military as a muscle to kind of enforce their will. That cannot continue. All things will end. This empire will end. And it’s up to us to see how that will happen.

[00:11:05] Will it disintegrate into civil war and massive discord? Or is another world possible, as Arundhati Roy likes to ask the question, where there is peace and social justice and ecojustice for particularly the poor around the globe.

[00:11:25] And behind this, of course, all of this is the system itself, which is capitalism, which they love to call the free market, as if it’s free. It’s not free. It’s an enslaved market that depends heavily on taxpayer intervention. Without it, there’s hardly a sector of this economy that could function without taxpayer support.

[00:11:47] So speaking clearly and identifying things, if we learned anything from Orwell, it’s that. It’s about speaking clearly and identifying things by their rightful names but he also acknowledged, he said that sometimes the thing that’s right in front of your nose is the hardest thing to see.

[00:12:08] The United States is at war in a whole host of countries where the U.S. carries out its terror attacks, and it’s not about democracy. It’s not about freedom. It’s not about women’s rights. It’s all about realpolitik. It’s all about militarism and extending the global reach of U.S. corporations.

[00:12:32] I’d like to see some of that money and some of that energy go back right here in our country where so many things desperately need to be addressed. We can do something about climate change if we act collectively. It has to be collective. It requires that kind of socialistic outlook that we’re in this together.

[00:12:56] Again, it’s right in front of us. If we had a media telling these stories, people would have a greater understanding of what’s going on and who benefits from this predatory capitalist economy.

[00:13:09] Speaking truth to power and decoding the propaganda is an essential part of the kind of work that independent journalists should be doing and are doing.

[00:13:21] And Alternative Radio (which actually goes back to ‘78 when I was a volunteer at a community radio station in Boulder, KGNU) is now on about 250 radio stations. It’s a chronicle of dissent, of movements, it exemplifies the founding principles of public broadcasting in this country.

[00:13:41] If you go back to the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, it’s a pretty radical document. If you actually read it, most people, you know, don’t have access to it. It was the last piece of great society legislation that LBJ pushed through. And then his whole administration went up in flames in the debacle in Indochina. But in that legislation, the principle of public broadcasting in this country is ‘to give voice to those who may otherwise be unheard, to be a forum for controversy and debate.’ Those are direct quotes.

[00:14:17] When you turn on NPR, okay, liberal NPR, I know a lot of you listen to it. What kind of debates do you hear? Well, there are opposing points of view. You get retired Lt. Gen. Wally W., and then you get retired Maj. Gen. Joe Kosinski, and they talk about, well, we need to ramp up our military presence in Afghanistan.

[00:14:42] So then the debate becomes: How do you do that? How many more troops? And then one will say, ‘Well, I think we need 5,000 more special ops groups.’ ‘No,’ the other one says, ‘3,000.’ And that’s the debate.

[00:14:53] Where’s the voice saying: ‘Why are we in Afghanistan? What right does the United States have to invade and occupy and brutalize another country?’ Those questions cannot be asked. They don’t even occur to the journalists at National Propaganda Radio. I mean NPR, National Public Radio, which has more and more shifted to the right, like elites in this country, and they’re in lockstep with many of the elites.

[00:15:25] It’s NPR with its very smooth talking, almost glib and banal interviewers who—‘So good to see you again, Michael.’ ‘Good to be back with you, David. It’s always a pleasure.’ People speak in complete sentences. There’s no yelling. There seems to be a command of adverbs, even. Anyone—no, there are A few older people here remember adverbs, right? And so we get lulled to sleep by that.

[00:15:56] But I think, you know, we should hold it to a much higher standard. And it has moved far away from the founding principles of public broadcasting in this country to give voice to those who may otherwise be unheard.

[00:16:09] Thomas Merton in his book Seeds of Destruction writes: ‘A falsely informed public with a distorted view of political reality and an oversimplified negative attitude towards other races and peoples cannot be expected to react in any other way than with irrational and violent responses.’

[00:16:32] And that speaks right to the role of the media in shaping and forming a public opinion about various issues.

[00:16:42] Learning from Indigenous cultures, of course, again, is part of, I think, the solution. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz has a terrific program on Alternative Radio, how Native societies organize their communities around the common ground, around common ownership. There wasn’t private ownership of the stream. The community owned it. There wasn’t private ownership of the fields. It was owned by the community. It was the commons. So that is, of course, something that we could emulate.

[00:17:18] Human life itself is under threat because of this runaway system that sees Mother Nature as a dumpster, you know, or a giant mine to extract wealth from. It’s profits over people, it’s profits over nature, and until and unless that changes, we are putting the planet and ourselves in great jeopardy.

[00:17:42] So that’s the key thing here, throughout history when social changes happened. It’s always been, as Margaret Mead said, a few people that have gotten together that have made social change possible.

[00:17:54] So when you get together, finding kindred spirits, it’s so important that you act, that you mobilize yourselves, particularly people of privilege. And we are people of privilege. We are positioned to make social change happen. We have to get off of Facebook and into the face of the creeps in the suites who rule over us. We have to melt them with the noise we make and get them out of those suites and rock up their comfort zones.

[00:18:22] So if it’s attending town meetings, if it’s going to Salem to protest, if it’s going to Washington, D.C. to march, do what you can, get in community groups like 350.org, like CODE PINK, like the other organizations you have here in the city, like CALC.

[00:18:42] Thank you very much. And don’t forget: Support Tsunami Books. Support KEPW. Support Community Radio. You can do it. We can do it together. Onward!

[00:19:00] Presenter: That’s a celebration of Alternative Radio from May 2017. Listen to the complete video on Todd Boyle’s YouTube channel. You can hear David Barsamian every Wednesday morning at 9 a.m.

Rewind with Todd Boyle is a production of KEPW 97.3, Eugene’s PeaceWorks Community Radio.

You can help mark the July 1, 2025 start of a new fiscal year by donating to Alternative Radio.

June 2025 programs:

• Gabor Maté/Chris Hedges – Palestine: The Moral Issue of Our Time
• Heather Cox Richardson – Cowboy Authoritarianism in America
• Michael Eric Dyson – Malcolm X & the Politics of Race

Upcoming in July/August 2025:

• Stephen Kinzer – Iran: The 1953 American Coup
• Bill Moyers – Media Reform
• Azad Essa – The India-Israel Alliance
• Claudia de la Cruz – Imagining a New World
• Vijay Prashad – Is the Nakba Permanent?
• Robin D.G. Kelley – Solidarity & Black Resistance to Fascism
• David Korten – Being Human: Finding Our Place in Creation’s Journey

Book news

• Arundhati Roy and David Barsamian – The Architecture of Modern Empire, $23.
• Maahin Ahmed – To Tear Down The Empire, review of The Architecture of Modern Empire in Against The Current
• Chris Hedges – A Genocide Foretold, $19.
• Noam Chomsky & Vijay Prashad – The Withdrawal: The Fragility of U.S. Power, $24
• Istanbul, Turkey. Acik Gazette, 21 June 2025 – Bilingual Interview with David Barsamian.