In his new book, The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina, Frank Rich writes, "... whatever else 9/11 was, we can see now that it was the beginning of a new national narrative -- a compelling and often persuasive story that was told by the president of the United States and his administration to mobilize a shell-shocked country desperate to be led."

According to Rich, the administration's highest priority was not to eliminate Al Qaeda, but to consolidate its own power, and this aim called for a propaganda presidency in which reality was consistently replaced by "truthiness."

Rich, who became a New York Times op-ed columnist in 1994 after serving for 13 years as the newspaper's chief drama critic, talked to Terrence McNally.

Terrence McNally: Paul Krugman, fellow New York Times op-ed writer, joined the Times as a mild mannered Princeton economist. In fact, he'd been attacked by the left for being a cheerleader for globalization. Then, on the job, he morphed into a fiery critic of the Bush administration. Now here you are, for years an entertainment writer ...

Frank Rich: There's something about the Bush administration that brings out the best or worst in everyone I guess.

McNally: Tell us a bit about that evolution.

Rich: I've had a very strange career. I grew up in Washington, D.C., in a family that was not involved with politics, which is sort of like growing up in Beverly Hills in a family that's got nothing to do with show business. I was always captivated by politics, but I was also stage-struck as a kid and interested in theater and culture. I've always written about both, though I did have a long period when I was a drama critic at the Times. But even then I was writing a bit about politics and culture for the New Republic and Esquire and elsewhere.

I think that in the case of Paul, he's a numbers guy who really understands economics, and he was appalled -- and rightly so -- in the earliest days of the Bush administration when he saw their fuzzy math. The numbers just didn't add up, and I think it offended his professionalism as an economist. I don't think there was anything particularly ideological about it.

In my case, it wasn't the numbers that caught my eye, but the stagecraft. Why are they always putting on a show? Why does everything have a backdrop with Orwellian words telling you what to think? What are they hiding? What is this "Wizard of Oz"-like theater they've set up?

After all the time I spent thinking about the theater, including Washington theater, if I know nothing else, I know empty spectacle when I see it. Not to make light of something that's been tragic for many Americans and the world, but their whole spectacle is like a big empty Andrew Lloyd Webber contraption -- chandeliers rising and falling, people landing in planes on aircraft carriers and celebrating victory -- and it's empty inside.

McNally: I imagine you've wished you could have the same power as a critic of the administration that you were said to have as a critic of Broadway --

Rich: Unfortunately this is not a show that could be closed out of town. It's had quite a run.

McNally: Why did you write this book? Is it because you began to see that the primary narrative of this administration was the fact that they were putting out a "story"?

Rich: That's exactly right. I started talking about this book with my editor at Penguin a year and a half ago, maybe even longer. Because of my strong belief in wanting to tell this as a narrative as opposed to just throwing together collected columns, I felt it had to have a third act curtain. I'm such a creature of the theater and of narrative, that I felt I couldn't sit down and start writing this book unless I knew, in at least some figurative sense, when it was ending.

One place to look for an ending was in the 2004 election. I made an informal agreement with my editor that if Kerry won, well that's the end of the story, but, as we know, that did not happen.

I finally decided to write the book when I realized that Katrina was the third act curtain. That disaster and the Bush administration's response to it stripped bare everything that had been true about the administration all along. All in one place, happening 24/7, in real time, on television with all the network anchors watching: the use of spin, the claiming of triumphs and successes that hadn't happened, the slowness to react to a city under siege, looting -- just as in Baghdad after the invasion of Iraq -- everything playing out in fast motion.

I rolled the dice and said, this is the end of my book, he can't come back from it. That's when I started to write.

McNally: You felt Katrina, tragic as it was, might be the end of this story. You also wrote an article in which you said -- I'm going to misquote you -- "The Iraq war is over, someone tell the president." Is that close?

Rich: Yes, I actually wrote that quite some time ago.

McNally: Is it possible that events are going to make you as wrong as the administration was when they claimed "Mission Accomplished?"

Rich: I'm not declaring something quite as definitive as they did. There are many things that can scramble the situation in Iraq and at home, events that have nothing to do with politicians, such as, God forbid, another domestic terrorism attack -- but I have felt for some time that with the Iraq war, all we're talking about is the negotiation of how we draw down.

Sadly, the war is going to go on for a very long time, but American engagement at this level is -- as the vice president said of the insurgency over a year ago -- in its last throes. There's almost uniform agreement everywhere, except in the White House, that we have to start figuring out the terms under which we're going to turn this over to the Iraqis. We're not going to get out all at once, and no one really is advocating that in either political party in Washington.

Now we have conservative Republicans, including columnists like George Will saying it's untenable, or Max Boot, a conservative writer for the Los Angeles Times, likening the war to Vietnam and saying either we've got to throw in a bunch more troops or cut back to 50,000. I don't think we have the "more troops" to put in there, so we're just really talking about the terms of what is going to be some kind of slow fade.

McNally: So you meant not the actual end, but the tipping point?

Rich: The tipping point to American involvement. And when I said, "Tell it to the president," no kidding, because this is a guy who keeps saying, "We planned for victory, we will stay the course" -- and there's no plan. Other people are going to make the plan for him and, depending on what happens in the election this November, those plans may proceed quite quickly ... If one of the houses changes hands, and this guy is a lame duck ...

McNally: I agree. If even one house shifts, the conversation will shift. Suddenly the media may not feel the need to kiss up as much in exchange for access.

Rich: I think we've already seen that shift. One point I make in my book is that for the longest time, you had to watch Jon Stewart to see the administration get caught in a lie. Dick Cheney would go on a network talk show and say, "I never said that there was a pretty well confirmed connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein," and Jon Stewart would show you the "Meet the Press" clip where he said it.

Starting with Katrina, the media had to get with the program of actually being news people again. Whether it be the infamous Michael Brown, or, for that matter, Michael Chertoff saying, "What's going on in the Superdome, we've heard nothing about that," while you can see in split screen exactly what's going on. They've finally brought on themselves a media that's not as compliant as it was in the months and even years after 9/11.

McNally: In reading your detailed description of the almost daily development and execution of their propaganda, I found myself remembering events that had shocked or infuriated me when they happened, but that I'd almost forgotten since. For instance, Enron or Abramoff, which at the time seemed so huge and so tied to them. Somehow I feel so much gets swamped by our ridiculous focus on Iraq.

Rich: I was trying to write a very lean, almost screenplay-like narrative of the past four or five years, told almost entirely through their PR stunts and presentations.

I tell you how they presented something, and then show you what was behind the curtain that renders it false. For instance, the first half of the book ends with the official war in Iraq, the 43 days between the day we invaded Iraq and the day that Bush went on the aircraft carrier outside of San Diego and said the major combat operations had ended -- "Mission Accomplished."

I realized that this war -- despite the fact that there were reporters embedded and we were getting all this coverage -- was essentially a series of discrete shows put on for the American public. Many were fairly meaningless in terms of the actual war, but all served the purpose of keeping casualties -- our own and Iraqi civilians -- off screen.

If you look back on it, what happened in those 43 days?

First we had shock and awe, this strange beginning, which was very telegenic and which people were riveted to on television. As someone later said, we were watching munitions and bombs going off in a city of six million people, yet we had no sense of what they were hitting or if anyone was being killed. It was just like watching a Lumiere display.

Then we started to take some casualties, there was a little bit of nay saying about the conduct of the invasion, and suddenly we had this drama about the rescue of Jessica Lynch, which we would later find out was at variance with the facts as Jessica Lynch herself knew them -- though she was out of it at the time.

McNally: -- which meant she was perfectly cast. She couldn't contradict the story.

Rich: Exactly. They manufactured this Rambo-like scenario and a dramatic rescue. Now she was a brave young woman who suffered a grievous injury and was captured, but the sort of Audie Murphy drama created by the Pentagon had nothing to do with reality.

Next came the toppling of the Saddam Hussein statue, one of many such statues in Baghdad. As some people pointed out at the time, it was a contrived event done with the help of the Americans. Television commentators, following the lead of Rumsfeld and others, kept referring to it as a moment in history tantamount to the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, but the Berliners tore down their wall, the Americans didn't. This was a completely different and somewhat staged event.

Then finally we get to "Mission Accomplished," like a big MGM musical first act finale, celebrating the end of combat operations. But sadly, as we well know, they weren't ending.

So that's sort of the pattern of the whole book: I've looked at everything as they presented it, and then tried to puncture the balloons and, where appropriate, show what was actually inside.

McNally: In fact, quite a long section of the book offers a timeline.

Rich: During the early days of the Valerie Plame/Joseph Wilson leak case, I began to notice reporting about the evidence of WMD's that had been presented to the public in the run up to the war -- through the press, including somewhat notoriously through the New York Times. We started to learn for the first time that there was a discrepancy between what they had been saying and what they actually knew, and when they knew it.

As an aid to myself, almost like Cliff's notes, I started keeping a calendar. I'd just say, "They said on x-date, January 2003, that Saddam had uranium from Africa ..." Then I would find out that Joe Wilson or someone else had reported earlier that it wasn't true. I started noting these discrepancies, and it became almost like a game. That appendix is up to 80 pages now.

It's rather eye opening -- two columns side by side: their own words on one side, on the other published information through which we later learned that they were telling us things they knew to be false.

McNally: Can you speak just a bit about the role of the New York Times and Judith Miller in pushing the administration's story?

Rich: I talk about Judy Miller in the book. Essentially, for whatever reasons, Judy ran articles that the Times published in the run-up to the war that were overly credulous about WMD claims. Intentionally or not, these often backed up the scenario the administration was cooking up to take us into war against the "grave threat" presented by Saddam Hussein.

McNally: One could almost construct another visual aid -- two columns side by side, the administration's talking points and Judith Miller's articles.

Rich: Indeed. In the timeline I have some excerpts from Miller's activities when they relate to the main narrative. She was not alone in doing this, however. Many others did too.

There were also good reporters at the New York Times, the Washington Post and elsewhere, particularly at the Knight-Ridder chain, that did have accurate stories, questioning the administration line. But those stories were often buried. It was a huge failure of the media in which, of course, the Times was complicit.

This is, however, a separate issue from her involvement with the Plame case, which is much more complicated. I'm not so sure that she did anything wrong in that regard, and, in fact, she went to jail for a worthy principle.

McNally: You've put this book out a couple of months ahead of the November elections. It reminds people, "In case you've gotten foggy about it, here's just how much they were lying, here's just how much they were manipulating you." Are you hopeful at this moment that voters will hold them accountable?

You said at the top that you feel they can't get their credibility back. For me, watching Bush, Rove, and the GOP is almost like watching Jason or Chucky from the slasher movies. They keep coming back no matter what you do to them. I call them "electoral savants," phenomenally good at demonizing their enemies and winning elections, but with no inclination or competence for governing. Up until November 8th I will be afraid that they're going to pull this off again.

Rich: Look, anything can happen. It's foolhardy to predict an election like this, which is, after all, hundreds of individual local elections, where most people are not voting with some big national picture in mind. I don't know what's going to happen. I guess anything's possible, That said, 60 percent of the country is against the war the government's fighting in Iraq, and 70 percent feels that the country is on the wrong track.

McNally: That's an amazing number.

Rich: People are discontented for a lot of reasons. Iraq is very high on the list, but so are certain economic issues, particularly the inequality of gain for the middle class, in terms of tax cuts and everything else. I think these things eventually do have consequences.

I believe that the Bush propaganda machine -- and this as a big point in my book -- has been enabled by two things. One is the media environment, whether it be the credulousness of newspapers like the Times in the run up to the war, the obsequiousness on the part of a lot of television news, which is still the main way that most Americans get their news, or the press's self-inflicted errors, like ours, like CBS's. All of that has helped them.

But so has a not very interesting or brave Democratic party with a rather lousy bunch of leaders, including potential presidents. One reason I feel the tide is changing -- I felt this even before the 2004 election and before I started to write this book -- is that Kerry was an incredibly ineffectual candidate. He was clumsy, and his views about the war were incoherent. Even so, he lost by only three and a half million votes against a war president. I think that if the Democratic party had had its act together, they could have probably done better than they did in 2000, when, as we know, they won the popular vote.

It didn't happen largely because you can't fight something with nothing. The Democrats have to start fighting something with something. That doesn't mean doctrinaire positions, but it means leadership and sticking their necks out there and taking stands, and I think we're finally beginning to see some of that.

Daughters, do you feel that your mother is always criticizing you? Mothers, do you feel that your daughter shuts you out? Do you habitually bicker with each other, yet long for approval and understanding? In her newest book, "You're Wearing That? Understanding Mothers and Daughters In Conversation," linguist Deborah Tannen untangles the knots that daughters and mothers tend to get tied up in.

Tannen's bestseller, "You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation," brought gender difference in communication style to public awareness. A later book, "The Argument Culture: Stopping America's War on Words," explored why America seems to make everything a battle, a debate, or a war -- and what that costs us as a society.

TERRENCE MCNALLY: In the new book, "You're Wearing That?" you mention that you would often ask yourself, "Would my mother understand this? Read this? Appreciate this?"

DEBORAH TANNEN: My father would read my academic articles. My mother would be impressed, maybe, but she wouldn't read that kind of thing. So I wanted to write things she could read and talk in a way that people like her would be interested in hearing.

MCNALLY: "You're Wearing That?" grew out of a previous book, didn't it?

TANNEN: My previous book, "I Only Say This Because I Love You," was about adult family relationships. The reactions I got -- in frequency, but also in passion -- disproportionately focused on the mother/daughter relationship. In fact, many people told me they heard the title in their mother's voice.

It kind of captures one of the central conundrums of that relationship. Mothers see their job as being helpful, taking care of us, being protective, but anything you do in that vein always implies criticism. If you weren't doing something wrong, you wouldn't need that advice, help or protection.

MCNALLY: Women tend to communicate about personal things more than men. A father may feel that his role is to protect and to care for, but he's unlikely to do it as much in conversation. With a mother and a daughter, "You're wearing that?" can almost never be heard as a neutral question, can it?

TANNEN: I talk about the big three -- hair, clothes and weight. "You're wearing that?" could stand for any comment about appearance. And it's daughters turning that same critical eye on their mothers. Women are judged by appearance, and mothers and daughters feel that the other represents us to the world. Mothers, in particular, do get blamed if their daughters appear unacceptable in some way.

MCNALLY: But it's not just about the Big Three. The same phenomenon occurs with life choices, career choices, relationship choices. Often these two adults are speaking out of their first relationship as a child and a parent, aren't they?

TANNEN: It's about much bigger things -- how you raise your children becomes very loaded. Your choice of partners, lifestyle, all those things. Also tiny things. I cite one conversation where a daughter was making a salad and her mother said, "You're gonna quarter those tomatoes?"

The daughter answered, "Something wrong with that?"

Mom: "Oh no, no, no. It's just that, personally, I'd slice them."

And the daughter's thinking, "Can't I do anything without my mother telling me to do it another way?"

We think we're having a perfectly lovely conversation and then, suddenly, somebody says something and feelings are hurt. When your feelings are hurt, you react and then the other person's feelings are hurt. Each one thinks the other introduced the note of contention into the conversation. No matter now old we are, we want to feel that our mothers think we're great, maybe even perfect -- even though nobody's perfect.

And daughters are the only ones who can give their mothers the final stamp of approval that she was a good mother, which all mothers worry about.

MCNALLY: Your own mother died during the writing of this book. You write that you spent more and more time with her as she grew weaker. How did that experience influence the process of writing the book, if not the content?

TANNEN: I actually did the major writing after she'd died, when I think my emotions were much closer to the surface. The importance of that relationship was so present and real to me. I think it enhanced the book.

I would almost say I was at war with my mother, except I don't want to use a war metaphor. We struggled when I was younger. I put quite a few examples in the book where she talked in ways that I was critical of.

But when I put an example in a book, I always have to show both speakers' points of view. It forced me to look at conversations as my mother might have looked at them. It helped me understand her motives and took away some of the resentment and anger that I'd felt at the time.

MCNALLY: You say that the experience of caring for your mother toward the end transformed your relationship. My guess is that the writing of the book transformed your understanding of the relationship.

TANNEN: That's a good way to put it. As our mothers age, and we do a lot of physical caretaking, many of us come to look at our mothers in a new way. Taking care of another person in that basic way fills you with a kind of love that I don't think you feel in other context. I think it's quite a bit like what mothers feel taking care of young children.

Writing the book "You Just Don't Understand," I noticed that women and men often walk away from a conversation having focused on different elements. Whenever we talk to each other, we're negotiating how close or distant we want to be, as well as who has more power.

Women seem to focus more on the constant question, "Are we close or are we distant?" When I talk to women about their mothers and daughters, almost in the first sentence, every single one tells me, "We're close," or "We're not close," or "I want to be closer than I am, or closer than I was to my own mother."

I think that physical closeness is one of the things that makes the relationship so rewarding. We have to keep in mind these are the best conversations, as well as the worst.

MCNALLY: I want to turn to an earlier book. Most of your work is about one-to-one communication, but "The Argument Culture" looks at the whole of society. You wrote:

"The argument culture rests on the assumption that opposition is the best way to get anything done. The best way to discuss an idea is to set up a debate. The best way to cover news is to find people who express the most extreme views and present them as both sides. The best way to begin an essay -- you point out how this is perpetuated in academia -- is to attack someone or someone's idea. The best way to show you're really thoughtful is to criticize. The best way to settle disputes is to litigate them."

What has come to you over the years about this?

TANNEN: I had delusions of grandeur that things would actually change because I wrote that book. It got quite a bit of attention from journalists, not all of whom were happy with what I call "agonism," using a war-like approach. They don't really see a way out.

It seems so self-evident at first blush to Americans: "Oh, of course, let's debate. That's the best way to learn something." But it's not the best way to bring out nuances or complexities. Often people who don't have extreme views feel left out of the conversation.

The audience on cable for shows like "Cross Talk" is actually pretty small -- political junkies. But the majority of people quickly get turned off because of all the yelling, and because the information is so confusing.

Global warming is a perfect example because producers think that they must always have two sides. Even print journalists feel you should always present the other side. Right after they tell you about the scientists who believe global warming is a significant problem, they quote others who say it's not. You don't see that the dissenters are a tiny minority, often funded by the fossil fuel industry. Too often people end up thinking, "Who knows what the truth is?"

MCNALLY: It works in other ways too. In the lead-up to the Iraq war, too few Democrats were willing to take a strong opposition position because they were afraid of how that might be perceived. So journalists only reported the pro-war side.

TANNEN: I think you're right about that, but sometimes the Democrats say something that doesn't get reported because it's not punched up. It's thoughtful, or nuanced, or complex. Politicians catch on quickly that if they want to get on the evening news, they'd better insult somebody.

MCNALLY: You also point out that extreme positions are less likely to lead to solutions or to learning. When I moderate panels, I say to the panelists, "I don't want you to just repeat what you already know. I want everyone -- even the panel -- to learn something new today."

TANNEN: When you have a debate format, you can't acknowledge when your opponent comes up with a good idea. You can't bring forth any ideas that might support the other view rather than your own. So all kinds of information gets suppressed. The goal is to win the argument.

We see this in classrooms too. If you ask, "What do you see wrong with the article you read?" you'll get certain kinds of information. But other kinds of information may not come out, like how this relates to other things we've read, or what we should know about the background of this approach. There are so many nuances, so many ways of integrating ideas other than fighting over them.

MCNALLY: I've noticed folks in the Bush administration often use the technique of the "straw man" in order to have an argument even when the other side isn't even there.

To defend illegal wiretapping, Bush will say, "There are some who believe that we shouldn't investigate terrorist organizations." Or about Iraq, "There are those who believe we should just get out tomorrow." These people, who aren't named and don't necessarily even exist, basically embody the argument 180 degrees from his position. He pretends that the only choice is between those two extremes.

TANNEN: Worthless information can get out there, masquerading as the other side of a debate. Holocaust deniers have had more success in the United States than anywhere else because they masquerade as the other side.

Deborah Lipstat wrote a book about deniers, and TV producers wanted to invite the deniers to debate her. Of course, this would give them a national forum that they shouldn't have because there's nothing to debate.

MCNALLY: You quote John Dewey, "Democracy begins in conversation."

In this debate format, most people find themselves going to one side or the other. Yet it's likely that any solution that's going to work in Iraq, or with Social Security or health care or global warming, is going to be some better-fashioned new idea that is neither A nor B.

TANNEN: Another part of the problem is the 24-hour news cycle. Nobody really has enough time to put together the shows or write the articles. They're all running to stay in place. It's very easy to put on a show by getting two people to fight with each other. There's a fear that you might lose the audience if you don't keep it at that level.

MCNALLY: The journalist or the producer has to do very little research.

TANNEN: It's easy and you don't have to think too much. Cross-cultural contrasts are often interesting. I had a student who studied talk shows in Japan, and she found that it was quite unusual for a show to have two experts. They would have one or they would have more than two. In fact, one that she studied had 13.

Can you imagine that in the United States? Having two makes it tempting, first of all, to put the extreme views in those two slots, and also for the two to stake out opposing positions. Of course, that's a war metaphor -- staking out positions.

There's a lot of talk about family values in this country. Yet in most states women with children can be denied jobs or given less pay, just because they are mothers. The wage gap between mothers and non-mothers is now greater than the wage gap between women and men. In their new book, The Motherhood Manifesto: What America's Moms Want and What to Do About It (Nation Books), Moveon.org co-founder Joan Blades and consultant and author Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner ask: Isn't it about time that we actually started supporting families and mothers?

Terrence McNally Joan, briefly how did you get to this book?

Joan Blades: I only became aware of the huge bias against mothers in the workplace a couple of years ago. I went, "Wait a minute, what's that about? You mean to say mothers are half as likely to be offered a job as non-mothers -- and they get paid less for doing the same work?" All of a sudden I could see why there are so many women and children in poverty, and why there are so few women in the halls of power, be it corporate or legislative.

TM Kristin, what led you to team up with Joan on this project?

Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner I'm a mom of two kids, a 9-year-old and a 7-year-old, and I've been juggling work and family for years. I've spent time as a stay-at-home mom, time doing contract work and time as a journalist. These issues are near and dear to my heart.

The book "The Motherhood Manifesto" and the organization momsrising.org came about because Joan and I saw problems shared by so many women in this country not being addressed. We both want to bring these issues into the daylight, so we can talk about them and work on solutions.

TM What are some of the most revealing or important numbers in terms of the raw deal for mothers?

KRF: One study found that women without children make 90 cents to a man's dollar, women with children make 73 cents to a man's dollar, and single mothers, who often bear the burden of supporting their families the most, make 56 to 66 cents to a man's dollar.

Dr. Shelley Correll of Cornell looked for the root of the wage gap between mothers and non-mothers. She compared women with equal resumes and equal job descriptions -- with only one difference. One bio said the woman had children and the other bio did not have that information. Between equally qualified people, women with children were 44 percent less likely to be hired and were offered $11,000 lower starting salaries.

TM Everything else about the person and the resume was the same?

KRF: Identical, absolutely identical. And this is important because right now a quarter of our families with children under 6 live in poverty. Having a baby is a leading cause of poverty in this country. Most families need two working parents in order to stay financially solvent, and wages of mothers are a very important part of the family economy.

TM In some of the personal stories, you show families where both parents work to make ends meet. They parcel out vacations and sick leave very carefully, and it hardly leaves room for the miracle of birth.

JB: Of 168 countries in a global study, 163 have paid maternity leave. The U.S. is one of only five countries that does not. The only other industrialized country that doesn't is Australia, but they have universal health care, a year off unpaid, and some kind of subsidy for kids.

In the book we write about Salina. Pooling all her potential days off, she and her husband figured out that she could take one month off. Now only a month off with a newborn is bad enough, but then she went into labor early and the baby had to be in the hospital for the first couple of weeks. She was not about to spend her month off with the baby in the hospital, so she went back to work days after giving birth.

She took her month off when the baby came home, which was wonderful. But then what does she do? Well she was lucky -- her employer was highly sympathetic. She took her baby to work with her and learned how to breastfeed while working.

TM So she took a one-month-old to work?

JB: Yes. So here we have women learning how to breastfeed and type at the same time.

TM I'm sure there are stories where women have to be in bed the last two weeks of pregnancy. The two weeks off that they were planning to share with the child are now spent waiting for the child. And then they're asking, "Are we going to be able to pay our rent? Are we going to be able to afford our car payment? Or am I going to have to go back to work two weeks after the baby is born?" Correct?

JB: Exactly, and that's where the poverty spells come in, because bottom line: Infants take really close care, and it's a hugely hard thing to leave your infant with anyone but the father or grandmother. Most mothers of new mothers are working too now.

KRF: I think you really hit on a point here with the paid family leave issue, because it radiates out into most of the other points in "The Motherhood Manifesto."

For example, we have somebody like Salina, who isn't in a high wage job, and has now taken all of her sick leave and all of her vacation leave. You can't even do that in all states, but she lives in Washington state and you can do it there. Now, what happens when the baby gets sick or she gets sick? She doesn't have any leave; she's used that up already.

She also has an issue of the cost of child care, which in this country is between $4,000 and $10,000 a year -- while the minimum wage is only $5.15 an hour. That's around $12,000 a year if you work full-time 52 weeks a year without breaks.

So all of these points are tied together: the high cost of child care, the lack of paid family leave, the low wages and even the health care issues. Most industrialized countries have some form of universal health care. We do not. All of this burden is mainly placed on the mother.

It's important to point out that in countries where there are family-friendly policies, we do not see the maternal wage gaps that we have here -- women with children making 73 cents to a man's dollar.

TM Why do the conditions exist in the U.S. that lower mothers' wages?

KRF: When we talk about work and family balance in America -- and we often use that phrase -- we put it all on the mother as an individual to figure out how to balance these issues. As if buying a calendar, maybe with a cute kitten on it, would fix everything. If you could just write in neater handwriting where you're supposed to be at what time … But in fact, it's not just up to the mother.

We have a country of rugged individualists, but it's not just up to the individual mothers. When this many people have the same problems at the same time, this is a societal issue -- not a personal scheduling failure.

With MomsRising and with the book, we're saying: Let's bring these issues to light. Let's join together on MomsRising.org and say, look, we share these problems and we need to share our solutions. It's time to do that.

TM What underlies the discrimination -- employers just can't be bothered? They don't want to worry about having to be more flexible. They don't want to worry about what happens when your child gets sick. They don't have room or time for natural human care and compassion and being part of a community …?

JB: All that may be true, but the book also offers stories of businesses that have chosen to make their work flexible and parent-friendly in a broad variety of ways -- and those businesses are thriving. It's good for business when work is good for the workers.

TM By being rigid and exclusionary, they're losing enormous talent, aren't they?

JB: Exactly.

TM A woman who left a career to have a child and wants to come back into the work force -- someone who has experience, who's managed time well, who's handled lots of responsibilities -- will be rejected in favor of someone who may be just starting out …?

JB: On the other hand, when you give parents good jobs that are respectful of their responsibilities, you get huge loyalty, hard work and a very cohesive workplace. That has great value to the employer as well as the employee.

TM Worrying about the day or two she might take off because her child is sick ignores the fact that she's likely to be there for years if treated well.

KRF: People assume that maybe it's the mother's fault; they're not committed to their jobs. In fact, studies show that mothers who know their children are relying on them for food and a roof over their heads are often more committed to their jobs.

Retaining employees saves businesses a lot of money in recruitment and retraining costs. Often when there are flexible work options, we see a higher level of productivity because of that increased loyalty.

Flexible work options can be had in a number of different types of companies. One in the book, Johnson Moving and Storage -- not typically the kind of place you expect to find flexible work options -- worked it out with their moving van dispatchers in a way that was helpful for the company as well as for the employees. The owner told us very frankly that he was able to attract more highly qualified employees due to the flexible work options.

TM Why do you think things in the U.S. are so much worse in so many ways than most other countries? What drives the status quo?

JB: I think we're having a problem with long-term thinking. Frankly, to have a vibrant future, we have to be taking good care of our kids. In 20 years they're going to be the engine of our country. We have to invest in them, and the best way to invest in them is to make it possible for their parents to do a fine job raising them.

Unfortunately, we keep thinking too short-term. For example, it's crazy that there are millions of kids without health benefits. It's crazy that we're not investing in quality early child care, because kids that get to school not ready to learn end up costing much more. They repeat grades and need extra tutoring.

Child care workers are pretty much the lowest paid workers in America. They have families to support too, and if they get an offer to do some other kind of work, they're going to take it. So kids don't get stability of caregivers, and young children need continuity.

You've got a lot of pieces that are all interacting here. We're thinking quarterly, or the next election, and we need to be thinking the next decade.

For more information or to get involved, visit MomsRising.org.

In 1954, when the national mood was one of suspicion and conformity, Aldous Huxley wrote, "All ... the hallucinogens that ripen in berries or can be squeezed from roots -- all, without exception, have been known and systematically used by human beings from time immemorial."

Ten years later Timothy Leary was fired from Harvard for "systematically using" LSD (admittedly not from a berry or a root) with students. Leary's sensational promotion of turning on and dropping out closed the door on serious dialogue or research into the potential benefits of psychedelic substances. Yet today, in the midst of the current revival of patriotic and moral paranoia, some are beginning once again to scientifically consider their value as visionary or psychological medicine.

Charles Grob, M.D., is director of the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center and professor of Psychiatry and Pediatrics at the UCLA School of Medicine. He conducted the first government-approved psycholobiological research study of MDMA, was the principal investigator of an international project in the Brazilian Amazon of ayahuasca, and is now studying the use of psilocybin with advanced-stage cancer patients. He is editor of "Hallucinogens: A Reader" and recently co-edited, with Roger Walsh, "Higher Wisdom: Eminent Elders Explore the Continuing Impact of Psychedelics."

Terrence McNally: How and when did you decide to work with psychedelics?

Charles Grob: Growing up in the '60s, it was impossible to not be exposed to the controversies and the extraordinary powers of these compounds. In the early '70s, I read much of the literature that was available at the time, and I was struck by the potential these compounds had to help us understand the mind and mental illness, and to help us develop new and novel treatments. I was aware that, in order to speak out on this issue, one needed credentials, so I went back to school and got all the degrees and training I needed. It was always my intention to conduct proactive approved research in this area, though in the late '70s and early '80s there was virtually nothing going on in this country or elsewhere.

McNally: In 1973 I interviewed Stanislov Grof, who was then doing government-funded research in Maryland on the use of LSD with terminal cancer patients. Six months later I tried to follow up, and the state of Maryland wrote back that Dr. Grof was no longer in its employ. He had been let go, and the government funding had ended.

Grob: Around the same time, I heard Grof speak at the annual meeting of the Humanistic Psychology Association in New York City, and I was impressed with the enormous potential of the work he was doing.

McNally: Tell us about your study on anxiety in cancer patients.

Grob: At the L.A. Biomedical Research Institute at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, we have full regulatory approval to conduct a study using psilocybin -- the active alkaloid in hallucinogenic mushrooms -- in the treatment of the anxiety associated with advanced-stage cancer.

McNally: What is the status of the study at this time? Do you have any preliminary results?

Grob: We've been treating individuals for the past year and a half who fit all our inclusion/exclusion criteria. To date, we've studied five subjects in entirety. We're approved for a total of 12, so we hope to treat seven more. We're finding recruitment very challenging because we have very tight inclusion/exclusion criteria. We've interviewed a number of individuals who at first seemed to fit our criteria, but whose medical condition then drastically deteriorated so that they could no longer participate. We're very interested in talking with individuals who might fit.

McNally: Where would potential candidates learn about this, and how would they apply?

Grob: Our website -- canceranxietystudy.org -- details the inclusion/exclusion criteria and provides information about the methodology.

McNally: Can you verify Huxley's contention that all plant hallucinogens, without exception, have been known and systematically used by human beings from time immemorial?

Grob: Certainly the anthropological and historical evidence is very rich that even pre-civilization cultures highly valued hallucinogenic plants. Aboriginal cultures often used them as one of the core activities for reinforcing belief systems and tribal cohesion. This is quite apparent if you look at the indigenous peoples in the Amazon basin in South America, where the plant ayahuasca is used for religious, spiritual and healing purposes. As far back as human habitation of the Amazon basin has been established, there are indications that ayahuasca was an integral part of their lives and belief systems.

McNally: I've traveled a bit in the rainforest of Ecuador, and among the Achuar people it is an important and seldom-used ritual taken at key passages in life.

Grob: These are not by any stretch of the imagination recreational compounds. Indigenous peoples use them for very serious purposes, often having to do with healing.

McNally: Do you view the recent Supreme Court decision to allow ayahuasca to be taken in a religious context as an isolated instance based on specifics of the particular case or something more?

Grob: On February 21st, the court ruled unanimously that a branch of a Brazilian syncretic church, the Unial de Vegetal, or UDV, in Santa Fe, N.M., had legal sanction to continue to utilize ayahuasca as a psychoactive sacrament in their religious ceremonies. This is really an extraordinary decision and establishes a remarkable precedent, although at this point I believe it only applies to the UDV.

I was an expert medical witness for the UDV, and so followed the case very closely. I had been the principal investigator of a series of research studies in Brazil, using members of the UDV as subjects. I did not expect the case to win in a conservative federal court in the throes of a vicious decades-long drug war.

McNally: This was one of the first decisions of the Roberts-Alito court, wasn't it?

Grob: I believe it's the first decision that Chief Justice Roberts penned himself. Though Alito was not part of the decision because he had not heard the arguments, he subsequently stated that he would have gone along with the majority.

The Justice Department appealed, and the appeal was heard by a panel of the Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver. Again I was not overly optimistic and again I was surprised: the UDV's position prevailed. It was then appealed to the full Circuit Court of Appeals and won again. Then it went to the Supreme Court, where on February 21st they issued their unanimous decision.

McNally: There was the precedent of the peyote churches of the Native Americans, yes?

Grob: The Native American Church has for some time had permission to use peyote as part of their religious ceremonies. Whereas peyote use among native peoples is established by treaty between the sovereign Indian nations and the United States, the Santa Fe case does not involve indigenous people. This was the first time in almost 1,600 years that a nonindigenous people had gained permission from the government to use a plant hallucinogen for religious ceremonial purpose -- not since Alaric the Hun sacked Elevsis in the year 396.

McNally: I guess you can't use that as precedent. What leads you to believe that psychedelic substances might have therapeutic use?

Grob: There's a very rich body of literature dating back to the mid-late 1950's that demonstrates it. Though methodologies at the time were not like methodologies today, they offer ample indication that we should at least study this further.

There were a number of studies which demonstrated therapeutic response among patient populations that did not normally respond well to conventional psychiatric and medical treatments -- first and foremost, chronic hardcore alcoholics and drug addicts. In the late '50s and early '60s, Humphrey Osmond in Western Canada demonstrated that some seriously ill alcoholics who had not responded to any conventional treatment did remarkably well after even a single dose treatment.

McNally: So your mission is to reopen the pursuit of this knowledge for the benefit of society?

Grob: Absolutely. My goal has always been to get this research back on track. By the early 1970s, all of the exciting and promising studies were forced to terminate because of the cultural turmoil of the time. Thirty-plus years later, I think it's high time that we review the old data and initiate new research.

McNally: In addition to your cancer anxiety study, are there other studies ongoing?

Grob: Dr. Francisco Moreno at the University of Arizona just completed a pilot study using psilocybin to treat chronic refractory obsessive-compulsive disorder. A psychiatrist named Michael Mithoffer in Charleston, S.C., has permission to use MDMA in the treatment of chronic post-traumatic stress disorder.

Though there are no clinical application treatment studies in Europe, Franz Volenwieder (also affiliated with Heffter) at the Burhholzi Clinic and the University of Zurich has done extraordinary work mapping the effects of MDMA and other hallucinogenic substances on the brain, using state-of-the art brain imaging technology.

McNally: What's your aim in the new book, "Higher Wisdom," which includes Ram Dass, Hofman, Sasha Shulgin, among others.

Grob: In the late 1980s, when I moved from Johns Hopkins to the University of California, I established a friendship with Roger Walsh, a psychiatrist at UC Irvine, who felt that it was important to preserve the stories and experiences of the leading early investigators and theorists on the issue of psychedelics. Along with Gary Bravo, another UC Irvine psychiatrist, we interviewed anyone we could find who had established a reputation in the field of psychedelic research in the 1950s and 1960s.

McNally: What were a couple of the big lessons you drew from your conversations with them?

Grob: These individuals were profoundly influenced personally by their experiences. They shared the vision that, under optimal circumstances and with all the proper safeguards in place, these compounds had an extraordinary capacity to help heal, to help enlighten and to help us learn.

McNally: MDMA was originally used in therapy, wasn't it?

Grob: In the late '70s and early '80s a large number of psychotherapists, mostly in California, formed an underground where MDMA was used for a variety of clinical indications, though very little of their clinical work was published.

Unfortunately the secret got out to the greater society at large, and it became a very popular recreational drug, particularly among the youth culture in California and Texas. It then spread throughout the country, over to Europe and around the world, setting off the ecstasy rave phenomenon.

McNally: What are the dangers, warnings and cautions with MDMA?

Grob: Oh, there are certainly dangers with MDMA, and individuals really need to be apprised and not to take foolish risks. There's a serious danger of malignant hyperthermia, or overheating, which is exacerbated by vigorous exercise in a hot, stuffy environment, and the failure to replace lost body fluids. This is just what happens in the rave setting, and there have unfortunately been some fatalities secondary to malignant hyperthermia.

The flipside risk is water intoxication. Several young people have actually drunk so much water that they have lowered their serum sodium and experienced seizures, and died as well. It can be a very tricky compound.

Perhaps the biggest danger, though, is drug substitution. A large percentage of what passes as ecstasy actually does not contain MDMA, but other drugs. Some are relatively benign like caffeine or aspirin, but others are potentially dangerous or lethal, like paramethoxy amphetamine, PMA, the most potent and potentially lethal amphetamine known. You have no idea what you're getting.

McNally: Because it's illegal, the greatest danger comes from buying something on the street with no oversight or regulation, correct?

Grob: There are absolutely no controls. In fact, I can't think of a drug which is more frequently misrepresented and substituted than the ecstasy MDMA compound.

McNally: In other words, the fact that we have closed our eyes and pushed all of these psychedelic substances aside as illegal creates many of the problems associated with them.

Here's a big two-part question. Do you suspect that the roots of any cultural or scientific trends grew out of the use of psychedelics in the '60s and '70s? For instance, the rise of Buddhism or other Eastern spiritual and health practices, or the internet or electronically networked organizations?

Grob: Yes, of the several million people who presumably took psychedelics back in the '60s in this country and in Europe, many were profoundly influenced. It influenced their attitude towards their own career choices, their relationships, their attitudes towards peace and conflict. During the '60s there was a tremendous sense that these compounds, if utilized optimally, could catalyze very salutary changes around the world.

Until his death in 1963, Huxley held the vision that if these compounds were introduced wisely, quietly and discreetly to the leaders of our culture, there would be a ripple-down effect with enormous positive changes. He believed it might be a mechanism through which the very likelihood of world survival would be enhanced.

The cultural turmoil, with youth culture radically split off from mainstream culture, led to a move not only to shut down research but also to distance mainstream culture, mainstream scholars and scientists from even exploring the potential benefits of the use to individuals, families and culture.

McNally: Final question. What do you know of the current cultural context? What's happening out there these days?

Grob: There's certainly a concern for widespread misuse and abuse of compounds like ecstasy. Serious use of these compounds has had to go deeply underground. There's increased interest in ayahuasca, particularly in the Amazon basin. A big article in a recent National Geographic Adventure magazine highlighted ayahuasca shamanism, and has had a very strong apparently positive response.

I think individuals are starting to wake up to the possibility that, when taken under optimal conditions, these plants might have profound potential to facilitate positive change. That being said, one also has to employ all the essential safeguards to minimize the likelihood of harm.

Of all the resources needed to build an economy that will sustain economic progress, none is more scarce than time. That is one of the key messages of Lester Brown's new book, "Plan B. 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble." The world may finally be listening.

China now consumes more grain, meat, coal and steel than the United States. If China's income grows as projected, in 2031 its income per person will match incomes in the United States today. At that point, it will be consuming the equivalent of two-thirds of the current world grain harvest, driving 1.1 billion cars (versus 800 million in the world today) and using 99 million barrels of oil per day, well above current world production of 84 million barrels. That's Plan A.

New threats -- climate change, environmental degradation, the persistence of poverty and the loss of hope -- call for new strategies. Brown -- who left World Watch in 2001 to found Earth Policy Institute -- says it's time for Plan B -- a renewable-energy-based, reuse-recycle economy with a diversified transport system: time to build a new economy and a new world. The world is now spending $975 billion annually for military purposes. Plan B -- social goals and earth restoration -- requires an additional annual expenditure of $161 billion.

Brown, founder of the World Watch Institute, was in Europe recently to address the Royal Geographic Society in London, the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and the OECD in Paris. He will speak to the World Affairs Councils of San Francisco and Los Angeles the first week of February.

TERRENCE MCNALLY: For many, environmental issues are local -- the beach, the nearby polluting factory, the smog. Yet you focused on the global environment at a time when few were. Where did that come from?

LESTER BROWN: Well I suppose there were a number of things that contributed to it. One was, when I was farming I was very much aware of the environmental issues that one has to deal with, whether it's water resources or weather or soils or crop diseases or what have you.

Beyond that, after I graduated from Rutgers in 1955 with a degree in agricultural science, I had the chance to spend half of 1956 living in villages in India, and there I was exposed very directly to the food population issue, though India at that time had only 430 million people or so compared with over a billion today.

Then I became a foreign policy adviser to Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman during the Kennedy-Johnson administration. The population pressures on resources and the problems associated with that, whether it's deforestation or overgrazing or soil erosion, aquifer depletion, those problems were becoming evident way back then. By 1974 I was convinced not only that these were going to be major issues, but also that we needed a research institute to focus on environmental issues at the global level.

TM: Yet you also make clear that we need a vision of the future, not just the bad news.

LB: No question. If we don't have a sense of where we want to go, we're probably not going to get there. I think one of the things that's lacking in the global environmental movement is a vision. We spend so much time being against things, it's not always clear what we're for.

TM: In the first paragraph of the Preface to "Plan B: 2.0," you write: "If our goal is to sustain economic progress, we have no choice other than to move onto a new path." Two things -- first, you don't mention the word "environment" in that sentence, you're talking about economic progress. Second, why isn't that reality being recognized and acted on?

LB: Two things are driving the recognition of the need for a restructuring of the global economy. One is the knowledge of what's happening to the economy's environmental support systems, whether it's forests or fisheries or rangelands or soils or aquifers or the climate system. Many environmentalists have been clear for some time that we have to restructure the economy if we want progress to continue. If we don't, we're going to be in serious trouble.

In Jared Diamond's book, "Collapse," he looked at earlier civilizations, many of which also got on to an economic path that was environmentally unsustainable. He pointed out was that some of those early civilizations realized they were in trouble and made the needed course corrections to survive. Others either did not understand they were in environmental trouble, or understood it but politically they could not mobilize an effective response.

TM: "Plan B" came out two years ago. Why did you feel the need to deliver "Plan B: 2.0"?

LB: Enough things have changed over the past two years, both in terms of what we can do and the potential of new technologies like gas-electric hybrid cars and advances in wind turbine design, and so forth. But more importantly, the evidence first of all, that China has already overtaken the United States in the consumption of most basic resources.

Ever since you and I can remember, we've been saying that the U.S. with 5 percent of the world's people consumes a third or 40 percent of the world's resources. That was true for a long time. It is no longer true. China is now consuming more of these basic resources. Look at the food sector -- grain and meat, the energy sector -- oil and coal, the industrial sector -- steel. China now consumes more of all of those than the United States except for oil. Their consumption of meat is nearly double that of the United States, and their steel consumption, 258 million tons a year. We consumed 104 million tons a year last year.

TM: India is expected to overtake China in terms of population. We hear about India mostly in terms of outsourcing jobs to India. What's its take on resources?

LB: India has a huge population, but they're still mostly poor; they're a good 20 years behind China. They're probably where China was in 1980 or '85.

TM: Having said that, India still has a middle class of about 300 million, about the size of the entire U.S. population.

LB: That's right and it's growing fast.

Now that China has overtaken the U.S. in the total consumption of resources, we have license to ask the next question: What if China catches up to the U.S. in consumption per person? If their economy, which has been growing at 9 or 10 percent a year in recent years, drops down to 8 percent a year, by 2031, income per person in China will be the same as that in the U.S. today. By 2031 we're probably talking about 1.45 billion Chinese.

TM: 1.45 billion consuming at the rate we consume today is impossible. China alone would consume more than one earth at that point.

LB: Based on those projections, in 2031, China would be consuming two thirds of the current world grain harvest. Their consumption of paper would be double current world production. There go the world's forests. If China in 2031 has three cars for every four people, as we now have in this country, it would have a fleet of 1.1 billion cars.

The current global fleet is 800 million. They would have to pave over an area comparable to the land they now have in rice, and they would be consuming 99 million barrels of oil a day. The world is currently producing 84 million barrels a day and will probably never produce much more than that.

TM: Because we're also close to or about to hit peak oil. We've heard the diagnosis. What's the prescription? What is Plan B?

LB: The Western economic model, the fossil fuel-based, automobile-centered throw-away economy, is not going to work for China. It won't work for India, which by 2031 will have an even larger population, nor will it work for the other three billion people in the developing countries, who are also dreaming the American dream. Most importantly, it will not work for the industrial countries either in a world that is more and more integrated economically and where we all depend on the same oil, grain and iron ore.

So then the question becomes, if the old economy won't work, what will the new economy look like?

We can see this much more clearly than we could even two years ago, and that's exciting. It will be powered by renewable sources of energy. It will have a comprehensive re-use recycle system, and it will have a much more diversified transport system, not as much the automobile-centered system we now have.

We can now see the new economy beginning to emerge in various places around the world. We see it in the wind farms of Western Europe, the solar rooftops of Japan, the bicycle-friendly streets of Amsterdam, the reforested mountains of South Korea and the growing fleet of gas-electric hybrid cars in the United States. It's beginning to take shape, but it's not moving fast enough.

TM: What is it going to take to accelerate that?

LB: It's difficult to say. I play around with scenarios that will wake us up. The situation today reminds me a bit of the United States in the early 1940s when we were trying to ignore the war in Europe and the war in Asia, somehow thinking that we could get through without getting involved -- and then came Pearl Harbor. Overnight literally everything changed, and we mobilized for a war like you've never seen a country mobilize before. It was an extraordinary performance, but it took a very clear, distinct wake-up call.

TM: At the point at which we get a wake-up call that extreme, it may be too late to reverse some of those things, isn't that true?

LB: It's quite possible that the wake-up call will come too late.

TM: I'm an optimist. I look at the negatives that we see right now -- the incompetence in the war and the response to Katrina, the rampant corruption in D.C. -- as perhaps offering a teachable moment. Could Plan B offer the kind of dream -- like Martin Luther King Jr.'s civil rights dream or John Kennedy's Apollo mission -- that could rally people to take on a big challenge that's not a military challenge?

LB: That's an exciting way to put it. I think of King from time to time -- "I have a dream." He kept repeating that theme and described various parts of it, and it became a shared vision of our society.

The wake-up call could come with another disruption in the supply of oil that would drive prices up to, say, $100 a barrel, which is entirely feasible. Another less direct possibility: When the price of oil gets up to $60 a barrel, it becomes profitable to convert many agricultural commodities into automotive fuel. Almost everything that we eat can be converted either into ethanol or bio-diesel to run automobiles. As we develop the ethanol distilling capacity and the bio-diesel refining capacity, the price of oil begins to set the price of food. If the food value of a commodity is less than the fuel value, it will be converted into fuel.

TM: In other words, we would take food out of the mouths of the poor and put it into the fuel tanks of the rich?

LB: That's right. One of the consequences of high oil prices is that it sets up direct competition between supermarkets and service stations for the same commodities. The difference is that, in agricultural terms, the appetite of service stations is basically insatiable.

TM: If the world gets hammered this year and next year as they did last year by weather disasters, the people or the insurance companies are going to say, something has to be done about climate change -- another possible wake-up call. What is Plan B?

LB: Plan B has three components: (1) a restructuring of the global economy so that it can sustain civilization; (2) an all-out effort to eradicate poverty, stabilize population and restore hope in order to elicit participation of the developing countries; and (3) a systematic effort to restore natural systems.

Virtually everything we need to do to build an economy that will sustain economic progress is already being done in one or more countries. In Europe, for instance, which is leading the world into the wind era, some 40 million people now get their residential electricity from wind farms. The European Wind Energy Association projects that by 2020, half of the region's population -- 195 million Europeans -- will be getting their residential electricity from wind.

TM: But it's not just about new technologies, is it?

LB: That's right. Building an economy that will sustain economic progress also means eradicating poverty and stabilizing population -- in effect, restoring hope among the world's poor. Eradicating poverty accelerates the shift to smaller families. Smaller families in turn help to eradicate poverty.

The principal line items in the budget to eradicate poverty are investments in universal primary school education; school lunch programs for the poorest of the poor; basic village-level health care, including vaccinations for childhood diseases; and reproductive health and family planning services for all the world's women. In total, reaching these goals will take $68 billion of additional expenditures each year.

TM: Where does the environment fit in all this?

LB: A strategy for eradicating poverty will not succeed if an economy's environmental support systems are collapsing. This means putting together an earth restoration budget -- one to reforest the earth, restore fisheries, eliminate overgrazing, protect biological diversity and raise water productivity to the point where we can stabilize water tables and restore the flow of rivers. Adopted worldwide, these measures require additional expenditures of $93 billion per year.

Combining social goals and earth restoration components into a Plan B budget means an additional annual expenditure of $161 billion. Such an investment is huge, but it is not a charitable act. It is an investment in the world in which our children will live.

TM: Where's the money going to come from?

LB: The world is now spending $975 billion annually for military purposes. The U.S. 2006 military budget of $492 billion, accounting for half of the world total, goes largely to the development and production of new weapon systems. Unfortunately, these weapons are of little help in curbing terrorism, nor can they reverse the deforestation of the earth or stabilize climate.

If the United States were to underwrite the entire $161 billion Plan B budget by shifting resources from the $492 billion spent on the military, it still would be spending more for military purposes than all other NATO members plus Russia and China combined.

TM: I hardly imagine the slightest move in that direction for at least the next three years of a Bush administration …

LB: Of all the resources needed to build an economy that will sustain economic progress, none is more scarce than time. With climate change we may be approaching the point of no return. Nature is the timekeeper.

Like earlier civilizations that got into environmental trouble, we can decide to stay with business as usual and watch our global economy decline and eventually collapse. One way or another, the decision will be made by our generation. Of that there is little doubt. But it will affect life on earth for all generations to come.

For GOP voters, the 2004 presidential election was little short of miraculous: Behind in the Electoral College even on the afternoon of the vote, the Bush-Cheney ticket staged a stunning comeback. Usually reliable exit polls turned out to be wrong by an unprecedented 5 percent in swing states. Conservatives argued, and the media agreed, that "moral values" had made the difference.

In his latest book, Fooled Again: How The Right Stole The 2004 Election, And Why They'll Steal The Next One Too (Unless We Stop Them), Mark Crispin Miller argues that it wasn't moral values which swung the election -- it was theft.

TERRENCE McNALLY: You're a professor of media studies. According to your bio, you write about "film, television, propaganda, advertising and the culture industries …" Why did you write this book?

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Out of a sense of civic emergency. I believe that "Fooled Again" makes the case quite persuasively that there is actually no convincing evidence that Bush and Cheney won re-election.

This is a civic story of the utmost importance. It has to do with the dire need for election reform in the United States. But it's also a story about the colossal failure of the American press to do precisely the kind of job that the framers had in mind when they wrote the First Amendment. What they had in mind was that the press would function as a reliable check on executive power. It would keep the people informed about what their government was up to, and it would keep them politically engaged in national debate.

The newspapers, as limited and defective as they were in the 18th century, did perform that function, and I believe they performed that function for much of our history. We now have a corporate media system that is not answerable to the people nor concerned about the people, but [is] in the service of its pay masters. And it is far too close to the government for the health of anything like a democratic system.

One of the points of "Fooled Again" is that this is a story of tremendous importance, as far as a democracy is concerned. Yet the press has for the most part ridiculed those who have come up with very solid evidence of fraud. They've been in the business less of talking about the situation than of preventing anybody else from talking about it. And this includes some of the progressive media as well. In fact, the most hostile reviews that I've received have been in Mother Jones and Salon.

TM: I read the transcript of you on Democracy Now! with Mark Hertsgaard, a progressive journalist who has been fairly dismissive of those questioning Bush's victory. By the end he seemed to be agreeing that everything should be more fully investigated.

I would think that the 2004 election story, if tracked and broken, would be huge for whoever breaks it. Any other thoughts about why it's so ignored?

MCM: We have to understand that for some decades the press has served basically an establishmentarian function. They have the reputation, and they certainly have the self-image, of being terribly skeptical, prone to disrespectful questions, probing dark matters that authority would just as soon have them leave alone. That's a very flattering view of the press but completely undeserved. The press will not deal with any story that goes beyond a particular scandal to cast doubt on the very viability of the entire system. The press in this country will studiously ignore any story that too violently rocks the boat, whose implications are too shattering.

This is not new. Watergate was a story that the press avoided for months and months. Only the Washington Post pursued that story; everybody else made fun of it. Now we look back on Watergate with tremendous nostalgia and self-congratulation, telling ourselves the press saved the system. But since Watergate the press has preferred to deal with meaningless and trivial scandals like the Clinton scandals. They will not talk about 9/11, they will not talk about the theft of the last three elections.

TM: You also include the 2002 congressional election. That one also broke too consistently against predictions?

MCM: That's exactly right. In Colorado, in Minnesota, in Georgia, and in a couple of other states -- there was what we might call "Diebold magic" everywhere. In all these states, you had far-right-wing politicians predicted to lose by pre-election newspaper polls and by exit polls, and all of them won.

TM: Why do you believe the two successive Democratic candidates have given in so easily?

MCM: I think basically Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry this last time are far too concerned with establishment opinion, far too worried that they'll seem to be sore losers, conspiracy theorists, etc. They have therefore refused to go public with what they actually believe. Kerry told me personally on October 28th at a fundraising party that he believes the election was probably stolen.

TM: He then disavowed that in the press, didn't he?

MCM: Exactly -- a few hours after the story broke. The Democratic Party is as much a part of the problem as the Republican Party.

TM: Are there exceptions among the ranks of mainstream politicians? I think of Barbara Boxer and John Conyers. Any others?

MCM: Tom Daschle has told me he thinks very highly of the book and has given me permission to quote him to that effect. Stephanie Tubbs Jones, Rush Holt. There are growing numbers of Democratic politicians who are willing to take the risks of facing the truth on this issue.

Let's put it less dogmatically. All right, maybe I haven't proven that the election was stolen, but I am completely confident that I've provided ample grounds for a serious investigation of what went on last year. It seems to me that any Democrat who refuses to even go for that kind of inquiry is really failing his or her constituency.

TM: -- and failing the voters. As a citizen, it bothers me that we leave it to a Gore or a Kerry, who's thinking about his future reputation or his future career, to stage the protest. I don't care about their careers. I care about my vote getting counted or discounted.

What's the statement that you're willing to make in "Fooled Again" about the 2004 election: stolen? worthy of investigation? evidence clearly shows in six states …?

MCM: The evidence in Ohio, as anyone who followed the story knows, is copious. Bush allegedly won that state by 118,000 votes. As I point out -- and this part of the book is largely based on John Conyers' report to the House Judiciary Committee -- the various stratagems, tricks and tactics used to prevent people from registering, to prevent them from voting, to throw away provisional ballots -- all these add up to a number far greater than 118,000.

TM:: That's news to me. Many people have said, yes, there were long lines, yes, there was disproportionate distribution of voting machines, yes, there was trouble with provisional ballots, yes, there was intimidation -- but the margin was 120,000. You're saying that they add up to over 120,000?

MCM: Oh easily, easily. It was in the urban parts of Ohio that most of this stuff went down. All the urban centers in Ohio were Democratic. If people want to get a strong sense of what was happening at the grassroots level coast to coast last year, go to a website called the Election Incident Reporting System, EIRS. Then type in the name of a state or a county, and you'll get a transcript of all the complaints that were lodged that day by people who called 1-866-MY-VOTE.

Now a lot of them couldn't get through because it was understaffed, but those who did get through left messages. You can find copious firsthand evidence of what the average person had to go through to try to vote against Bush. This didn't happen only in Ohio. Electronic touchscreen machines flipped Kerry votes into Bush votes in at least 11 states.

TM: You say similar practices (and occasionally worse ones) were applied in several other key states -- Florida, Oregon, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona and even New York?

MCM: In New Mexico, for example, we're told that Bush won by some 7,000 votes. We know of over 17,000 Democratic voters who were unable to cast a vote for president because the touchscreen machines in their districts refused to record a vote for president.

These 17,000-plus New Mexicans turned out to vote in Democratic areas, and they didn't record a vote for president. Seventeen thousand is 10,000 more than 7,000. That glitch alone can account for the ostensible victory margin of Bush over Kerry in New Mexico. Greg Palast's new book will have a whole chapter on New Mexico. It's hair-raising stuff, and we haven't heard a word about it. The same kind of thing happened in Iowa, where Bush supposedly won by under 10,000 votes.

Tom Daschle was supposedly beaten in South Dakota by 4,500 votes. There was so much chicanery going on there, that it's easy to argue that John Thunes should not have won. I know Daschle believes he was robbed.

This isn't only a matter of the White House, it's also a matter of the Congress. I don't believe that this government represents the people of this country. The people of this country, however frightened some of them may be by terrorism, are essentially not theocratically inclined. They don't want a Christian republic. They were not happy with the way the government dealt with the Terry Schiavo case. Americans basically believe in the American system of government. Checks and balances, the separation of church and state.

The press kept telling us after the election that a huge outpouring of religious voters account for Bush's miraculous victory. Well that's nothing more than a talking point that the religious right itself put out after the election. There is no statistical evidence whatsoever that there was any increase in the number of religious voters.

TM: The big thing that people seized on was one particular exit poll in which people, when given a choice of a few things, said moral values was the No. 1 reason for their vote. More people answered moral values in 1996 and in 2000 than in 2004. There was actually a drop in the number of people who attributed their vote to moral values in 2004, not a rise.

Let me check a couple of things with you. I've heard that exit polls were most inaccurate -- by a big margin -- in those areas that used electronic voting machines with no paper trail. True?

MCM: That's basically true, and it was particularly noticeable in five swing states. There's a lot of stuff floating around out there in cyberspace about the exit polls. The question of the exit polls has been very badly muddied by a lot of disingenuous argument. Now a lot of people think that it's not a reliable gauge, it doesn't tell us anything. That's actually the result of propaganda obfuscation. The exit polls' sudden divergence, sudden wrongness in these five states is really a remarkable deviation from the norm.

The guy doing the best work on that particular issue is a statistician at the University of Pennsylvania named Steve Freeman, who will have a book coming out in a few months primarily about the exit poll question.

Bogus reasons for why the exit polls were so wrong include the reluctant responder argument, which holds that Bush voters were strangely reluctant to tell exit pollsters how they voted. Well, Freeman has read the raw data at precinct level and has discovered that, as a matter of fact, if anyone showed a greater reluctance to come forward and say honestly who they voted for when confronted with an exit pollster, it was actually the Democrats. There's no evidence of any numerical kind that can support the view that somehow Republicans wouldn't fess up.

TM: I would assume that the very ones being referred to as reluctant are the ones who would be proud to say they voted for God's candidate.

MCM: One of the weirdest things about this whole election business is that one of the two parties has, for over the last year and longer, been vociferously complaining about the dangers of election fraud, and that's the Republican party.

TM: Thus the ID card in Georgia, right?

MCM: Exactly. They're the ones who are always screaming about Democratic fraud, but the Republicans in this last race were really the only ones engaging in election fraud.

This has to do with the peculiarly paranoid quality of the crusading mindset. I believe this theft was to a great extent carried out thanks to a kind of crusader mentality. I've got plenty of evidence in the book that the religious right played an enormously large role in the theft of the election last year.

TM: I think first of Diebold, I think of the Ken Blackwells or the Kathryn Harrises. How does the religious right itself play a role beyond mobilizing its own troops?

MCM: That mobilization is significant when you consider that a lot of those troops have actually become embedded inside the election system.

TM: Local polling officials, that sort of thing?

MCM: One Democratic election judge tried to observe the vote count in Pima County, Arizona. A roomful of polling personnel who all belonged to the same evangelical church in the area started to call him a liberal demon, a liberal scum.

TM: When you talk about a crusader mentality, you basically mean that if you do not support my candidate you are an infidel -- and the ends justify the means?

MCM: Precisely. See, all these crimes that I attest to in the book were committed with impunity by people who regard their political adversaries as demons. And that's not an exaggeration. You know, this government is to a great extent dominated by people who have that metaphysical view of the current political situation.

It is a very serious mistake I believe to think that all of this is happening only because of the excessive greed of certain corporate powers. That greed is decisive It played an enormous role. There is no question about it. But it could not have succeeded without the vigorous grassroots assistance of a lot of people who are religious true believers. And I think that they include the likes of Tom DeLay and others.

TM: I've heard that almost all irregularities worked in Bush's favor. True?

MCM: Absolutely true. I have not yet heard of a single example of a touchscreen voting machine flipping a Bush vote into a Kerry vote. This does not mean it never happened. I'm just saying I haven't heard about it if it has.

TM: I've read that in New Hampshire, Ralph Nader's Green Party campaign paid for an actual recount. They picked the precincts they thought were suspicious, and the hand recount confirmed the actual vote totals and showed that the exit polls were, in fact, wrong. What do you say to that?

MCM: Well, the recount that they paid for found no evidence of fraud in that particular case.

TM: It confirmed the hand recount, showing that the exit polls were in fact wrong. So how does that fit your analysis of the whole scheme?

MCM: The only thing one can say about that with any scientific certainty is that the particular hand count that they carried out did not reveal any evidence of fraud. That does not mean that no fraud was committed. This is a very fine point, but when we're dealing with questions of electoral honesty and accuracy, I think we have the right to make fine points. The distinction must be made -- that particular hand count involved a sample, that sample revealed no fraud, but that does not mean that we can then sit back and say, well, OK, so the exit polls were wrong.

TM: To the question "What is the point of revisiting the last election?" you point out that there has never been a great reform that was not driven by a major scandal. Do you believe that true election reform is not going to happen until the people and the media finally wake up to this?

MCM: I think it's going to depend on the people. It's going to depend on the people simply and irresistibly insisting that the media finally deal with this subject. That's why I wrote the book.