David Barsamian on Stephen Harper: 'He’s a great hero. You must be proud.'

David Barsamian founded Alternative Radio in 1986 as an outlet for news and political opinions that don’t get a lot of airtime in the U.S. It’s the anti-FOX. Since then, he hasn’t let up, railing against the capitalist system, U.S. policy and media culpability at spreading misinformation. Now he’s bringing his views to the University of Calgary.

Barsamian answers his phone by saying “Hi, Mr. Harper’s office,” with a dry sense of humour before easing into an interview.

“He’s a great hero,” he says, still on the topic of Canada’s Prime Minister. “You must be proud.”

“And then you have Ignatieff the ignominious; Ignatieff waiting in the wings as your alternative. I think Canada is becoming more and more like the United States. Pick your poison. Change you can believe in, I guess.”

This is not a man to be lulled into a hypnotic daze at Obama’s promises of hope and change; as far as he’s concerned it’s just the same old imperialist bullshit. “The problem is the current U.S. foreign policy looks a lot like the old U.S. foreign policy,” he says. “It’s old wine in new bottles. The packaging is new, let’s be clear, the speaker, the representative, of the policy is articulate and eloquent and handsome and dynamic and has a beautiful family and can speak English in complete sentences. These are all plusses, but we have to look beyond these superficialities and see what is he actually doing?”

With a troop surge in Afghanistan, Barsamian sees a betrayal in what American voters cast their ballots for. “He had a mandate from the American people. He won the election over McCain by 10 million votes to end war, to start diminishing U.S. imperialism rather than ratcheting it up.”

Obama put Gen. Stanley McChrystal in charge of operations in Afghanistan, a man who ran what Barsamian calls a death squad — the Joint Special Operations Command — a secretive branch of the military responsible for such tasks as killing suspected terrorists. “We’ll never know because they were simply murdered,” says Barsamian about the suspects.

Aside from domestic and international U.S. policy, Barsamian despairs the state of American left-wing politics. He says there has been a systematic attack on the left since the Second World War. “First and foremost it has to do with the destruction of the trade union movement in this country. Trade unions were the locus of resistance and opposition to a great extent. They were, in some cases, just brutally battered and put out of existence.”

“In other instances, they became a part of the ruling-class culture. They became what radicals warned about early on — business unions.”

But he warns that he doesn’t see us doing a whole lot better in Alberta. “You’re doing such great work for the tarsands up there. I want to congratulate you on that.”