given the death penalty. are: >> sociopaths. >> he warns american values are under attack. >> it's hard to claim we have a democracy in our country. >> kennedy talks about his life and personal struggles. >> i started taking trucks when i was young. soon after my dad died. but everybody has tried them. the enemy of any productive life is civil pity. >> he reflects on the month he spent in a port rican prison thanks to his activism. >> you ask what it was like? experience. >> we have spoke to robert kennedy, jr., lawyer, activist, radio activist in new york. >> you are passionate about the environment. where does it come from? hen did it start? >> i knew i was going to be an environmental advocate. in fact, when i was 8s years old, i wrote a letter to my uncle, president kennedy who sat in the white house asking to talk to him about pollution issues i always saw pollution as theft. i thought why should somebody be able to pollute the air which belongs tos all of us the finks of government is to protect the commons on behalf of all of the people and make sure nobody can privatize it. buzz as democracy declines, as constitutional government declines and tierny emerges, one of the first characteristics of an emerging tierny is the tendency for powerful interests to become privatizing the commons and stealing them to the from the public. democracy. it's not just about, you know, birds. it's about fighting for all of the values that believe in. >> it's still a lot, though, for an 8-year-old to sort of be able to grasp. what did your uncle respond? >> my uncle wrote that because there were some i am planets on k street that were belching this thick smoke when we went to church in washington on sunday, it would blacken our shirts and a stream i played in when i was a little boy was called penant run, a tributary to the potomac got buried byroad developers. the animals in it, cray fish and mud puppies and there was an owl's nest up there, and that was all destroyed. so, i wrote him a letter and said i wanted to write a book about pollution. he invited me to the whistte hoe and i had a meeting with him in the oval. i had pictures of myself in my shorty shorts. >> you were eight years old? >> i was eight. i brought him a salamandar that i caught the night before that had been killed by chlorine, in the water that i brought him. we spent a lot of the meeting talking about the health of the salamandar. he said he didn't think it looked william. i said i thought it was sleeping. we released him in the rose garden fountain but he arranged for me to -- i said i wanted to do a book on pollution. and he arranged for me to meet with section terri of interior stewart udall, one of the greater than environ mentalists in our nation's history and, also, for racial carson. she launched the modern country. >> it sounds like this had an impact on you at a formative time in your life. >> you know, my my father had a very big influence on us because he put us out in the wilderness so much. and he taught us how to white-water kayak when we were young. he would take us fishing. he encouraged me in my interests in animals and wildlife, took us camping, and took us to some of the most -- to our national parks and to do water water on the salmon river and the snake and the colorado, little colorado, the yampa and the green. that was a time when people weren't doing that kind of thing, and but he wanted to show us this wilderness and say, this is parts of your heritage. this is, you know, american democracy is rooted in wilderness. andrew jackson said that, our democratic institutions are rooted in these vast tracks of wilderness and woodland. so my father considered this part of our heritage and, you know, our purple mountains' majesty and he saw the desstriction of those things, the short-sighted destruction by industry as really an attack on american values and sovereignty. >> is global warming today the biggest threat? >> i think global warmin thegrave gravest threat to, you know, the population is a threat. but global warming, it's the product of a war between old energy, the carbon cronnies who, by the way, could not stay in business in a true free market capitalism because these new technology like wind and solar can produce electropics and deliver them to their customers much more efficiently and much cheaper than the old energy economy. the only way that they maintained their foot hold in our economy is through enormous subsidies and through the domination of the political process you, through, again, through the subversion of democracy. if we could take the subsidies away from coal and oil, a trillion dollars of subsidies every year that they get, they couldn't survive in the marketplace. we need a marketplace that does what a market is supposed to do, which is to reward good behavior, which is efficiency and punish bad behavior, which is inefficiency and waste. right now, we have a marketplace that is governed by rules that were rigged by the carbon incumbents to reward the dirtiest, filthiest, most poisonous, most addictive fuels from hell rather than the chief, clean, green, holsom and pay heaven. >> what about the ordinary americans who believe that humans are not the cause of all of this? is it their fault they don't understand? don't they have a valid point in the sense that that's how they really feel? >> a feeling is not a fact. our country is almost unique in people believing that global warming is not human caused. the rest of the world understands the connection. science is facts and the science is very clear and the science is consent annual and the reason in this country that people don't believe that there is, you know, that there are some people, a large group of people, you know, nearly 50% that don't accept the science behind global warming is because of propaganda. the companies like exxon and the koch brothers have spent hundreds of millions of dollars over the past, since 1997, in a conservative, deliberate effort to persuade americans that global warming is a hoax, and they have used advertising, and they've set up these forn think tanks on capitol hill and stocked them with these forn to be acco scientists that we call biostitutes, and slick pr flacks and voodoo committees and this men age reof kind of sociopaths agerie of kind of sociopaths. >> sorry i can't paths? >> sorry i don't paths who are putting though their own interests, their own financial interests against the lives and health of the society as a whole, people who are essentially anti-social. >> does that apply to everybody who works in the coal and oil you didn't that they are all bad people? they are all sociopaths? >> no. of course not. most people who work in the coal industry, for example, coal miners, there is about 80,000 coal miners left in america and most of those people are living in communities where they are desperate for jobs. and this is what they are trained for and this is the work that they are doing. and depending upon what kind of coal mining -- it can be high-paying work, or it can be very low-paying and dangerous work. those are not bad people. i am talking about -- i am talking about the -- about the people who run these oil companies, particularly people like lee raymond, people like david koch and charles koch and the people who run these big think tanks on capitol hill, the american enterprise institute, the competitive enterprise institute, the cato institute, marshal institute, clever people who are deliberately lying to the american public, deliberately deceiving people in order to make sure that the industry that the high level people in an industry continue to collect their income. so, it's not, you know, it's not the lower tiers of the industry that i would say are bad people. i don't think that at all. i think they are just regular people who are like the rest of us trying to make our way in the world and survive, but i think that the people who are kin i e i'ving to lie to the american people iving to lie to the american people, with this massive propaganda campaign, those are sociopaths. >> you wrote recently corporations that deliberately, purposely and system at including sponsor climate lies should be given the death penalty. explain what you mean. this? >> yeah. you know, corporations exist under charters that are -- that are issued by the state. it's essentially a license to do business in a particular state. and in every state that issues corporate licenses, the license requires that the corporation function for the public interests and that they cause no harm. so, if a corporation begins to cause harm or if they function against the public interest or conduct themselves in ways that are contrary to the public interest, the secretary of state or the attorney general of that state has the right to the withdraw their charter, and if it's a foreign corporation, in other words, a corporation that is organized under the laws of this state, of a different state, but it has the right to operate in your state, your attorney general can withdraw that operational license and this has been done before in 1998. the republican attorney general of the state of new york, dennis bachow, gave the corporate death penalty to the tobacco institute and to some of the other front groups for the tobacco industry. the tobacco institute was very, very effective. it essentially shielded the ton acco industry. this was killing one out of every four or five of its customers that used its product as directed. the carbon industry, with much greater profit did had stake in revenues at stake, is doing the same thing today. they have created a whole string, not just two or three of these front groups. they pretend to do signs. they do fake science. >> coming up on you talk to al jazeera, we will ask robert kennedy, jr., about some of the unique experiences of being a kennedy. ♪ welcome back. our guest this week, robert kennedy, jr. >> i want to ask you a littles about your life story. the early 1980s, you were busted for heroin use? >> i started taking drugs when i was young, soon after my dad died. it was a struggle for me that i dealt with sufblings and when i was 29 years old. >> a lot of people may not draw the connection between the unbelievable things you had to witness and go through as a child, the death of your uncle, the death of your father and, perhaps, the connection with drug use? >> i don't think it had much to do with it. there are many, many people who have been through a lot worse things than i went through. i lost my dad when i was 14. and to violence, but there are millions of people living in the worst parts of our country, in harlem and watts and apalachia and the migrant worker fields in the southern states or in southern california who lose their parents to disease or to violence. >> that's a direct result of their poverty and desperation and those kids don't have many of the advantages that i had. you know, i had a tragedy but everybody has tragedy in their lives. and i -- >> you also had to deal with -- >> i also had a tremendous amount of support. a very, very strong family. i had the resources for a good education, and so i had advantages. >> there is something different about going through it in the very public manner in which your family has had to go through it. >> there may be mooredship in going through it privately. so is a like my mother says, everybody takes their licks, you know. and the enemy of any productive life is self-pity. the adversary and it's toxic. and that, you know, we all -- everybody struggles with something. it makes us the kind of people that challenge and, you know, the experience in some case of overcoming it are what builds our character and, you know, enriches our lives and makes us effective people. >> you also spent time in a prison in puerto rico for some of your activism. what was that experience like? >> i was representing 10,000 people on the island of viacos who were being bombed by the navy and i -- and there were persons -- they were experiencing devastating impacts on the highest unemployment in the caribbean and the highest cancer rates in the caribbean. their food was poisoned with lead, with arsenic, the by-products of the dead nation of naval ordinance . their fisheries were being destroyed and schools were being destroyed by the impact of the navy's bombing. this would not have happened. these were american -- if these were american citizens. i represented the people on the island to try to get the navy to change some of its perhaps. we won our litigation, but the navy continued. so the people on the island led by the mayor asked me to engage in a civil disobedience which i did. at the time, i said, how long do you think they will put me in prison? they said probably two or or three days which was okay. i ended up having to go to jail for 34 days, a maximum security prison in puerto rico. you asked what it was like. for me, it was a wonderful experience. >> really? >> it was very quiet. i had no cell phone. decisions. i got to read books that i had not, that had been sitting on my shelf for 20 years. and it was like almost going on like a catholic religious retreat, you know, which i used to go on when i was a kid. the people in the prison were -- we all had meals together every day when they let us out of our cells. there was 140 people in the cell block and about half of them, about 60 of them when i got there were political prisoners and the rest of them were gang members and, you know, people who had committed n some cases, heinous crimes. but this kind of gestalt developed in the prison where we auld watched the t.v. every night and watched the coverage on the frosts against yakos and it politsized everybody in the prison and brought them together and it was really kind of an extraordinary process watching that, watching people who never saw themselves as part of a political process, all of the sudden identifying with, you know, with the -- with the problems of the people of the island, you know, people were sort of hardened criminals who were all of the sudden, speak with empathy about these innocent children and communities whose lives were being destroyed by the greatest power on earth. >> coming up, robert kennedy, jr., talks about what he perceives to be the decline in american moral authority. i am david shuster. this is "talk to al jazeera." we are speaking with robert kennedy, jr. >> there is a campaign against the islamic state and what do you make about how the obama administration is handling it? >> i think the obama inherited, you know, a dismissal situation. you know, the original problem was us going in to a iraq in the first place, which was probably the worst foreign policy mistake in american history to attack a country a that had not attacked us andposed no threat to us. i think it's a bad use of american military power. i think that you the kind of problems that need to be solved in the middeast are problems that don't need more guns and weapons and bombs. i think probably the more appropriate response to .9-11 would have been a commitment by george bush to get -- go before the american people and say we are embroiled to wars in the mid east because we are addicted to oil. we are borrowing a billion dollars a day from nations that don't share our values in order to import a billion dollars of oil a day and in many cases from nations that are outright hostile to us where we are in essence funding both sides of war against terror through our addiction to oil the solution is not to drop bombs on people. the solution is to get off of oil in this country. we need to turn every american into an energy entrepreneur, every home into a power plant. we don't have to be addicted to grounds. >> we don't have to kill americans. we don't have to bomb wedding parties and spy on people with drones and don't have to erode our own constitution. we don't have to spent $700,000,000,000 a year on the military, more than all of the nations in the world combined. americans? >> do you see anybody in the political landscape today who is asking those questions? i mean we think about hillary delinton or elizabeth warren or jim webb. >> maybe elizabeth warren is. i think bernie sand issues is. i think even rand paul is asking po those particular questions. >> fair to assume you wouldn't necessarily be a rand paul supporter, though? >> no. i wouldn't be a rand paul supporter. but, you know, i believe that he has some of his philosophy has a lot of appeal to me. >> would you support hillary 2016? >> i -- i love hillary clinton, and that doesn't mean that i agree with everything that she says. i think that we have gone down a wrong bad road in this country, you know, towards a kind of a fwar state. scan sc scan. the real damage done to us by the 9-11 attacks was the damage ourselves, you know, suspending -- basically treating the bill of rights -- i am a strict constit-tuesdayal constructionist and i believe that the bill of rights are sacred and that, you know, the republicans want to treat them and the mil tarrists want to treme them as if they are a luxury we can no longer stafford in our country and we can suspend habeas corpus and torture team and that we can spy on our own citizens and do warrantless wear tyapping and investigations and that we can suspend the ancient right to jury trial and that we can confine people, you know, from all over the world, and, you know, i don't think it's good for america. i don't think it's good for our security. when i was a little boy in 1965, my father took me to europe, to france and germany, and to poland and it will italy and many other countries, and everywhere we went, we were met even in the communist countries where the governments tried to hide that we were there, we would still be met by spontaneous crowds, some hundreds of thousands of people would come out on the street waving tiny american flags and cheering for my father as a surrogate for the united states of america. they loved our country. they saw they were starved for our leadership, for our moral authority. they didn't want our bullying and they knew the difference and in latin america and in africa and asia and, my father encountered the same kind of crowds because the idealism about america's mission in the world as an exem marry nation, as a model, a template for the greatest values of humanity, and that's what we represented and today, you know, those people no longer respect our country, and our country is widely hated. many people want to come here for the we think, but it didn't mean that they admire our values anymore. and that, to me, is one of the greatest tragedies of my lifetime, that we've lost, you know, so much of our global prestige and our moral authority and that we did it to ourselves. >> are you optimistic in the least that the united states can get back there? >> well, i think that that's where we need to be heading, you know. the -- you know, the job of every generation and every politician really should be to perfect the union, you know. and, you know, our union has never lived up to its ideals. we passed a law of probably the most important in 1907 that made it illegal for corporations to donate money to federal political campaigns. and that law stayed in tact until, you know, 100 years later when this particular supreme court, the most business-oriented supreme court in our history, threw it out with the citizens united case. so that really has unleashed thetothe tsunami of money from big oil and from, you know, big carbon and the financial industry and the pharmaceutical industry back into our political process so it's hard to even claim that we have a democracy any more in our country. it's really, you know, it's a corporate cleptocracy. a plutocracy, governed by the wealthy aristocracy that our european ancestors fled europe to come to america to escape. >> robert kennedy, thank you so much for being on "talk to "al jazeera america." ays" we appreciate it. >> thank you for having me? >> it was terrific. thank you. former fbi special agent ali soufan. >> if that specific information was shared with to the fbi agent 911 could have been stopped at its early stages. >> the ethics of torture, preventing terrorism and combatting isil. >> islamic state, their strategy differs from al qaeda because for the first time now they are controlling land. >> every saturday join us for exclusive, revealing and surprising talks with the most interesting people of our time. >> only on al jazeera america. >> this is al jazeera america. live from new york city. i'm a tony harris with a look at today's top stories. israel's prime minister discuss plans to dissolve parliament, and hold elections. crossing the border. massive crowds demanding that the president step down amid the disappearance of 43 students.

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