This is the complete transcript of the talk (and questions-answers) by Noam
Chomsky given in Albuquerque's Kiva Auditorium on Saturday, 26 February,
2000. Catalina Reyes of Gata `Burque Journalism Audio Production (P.O. Box
25822, Albuquerque, NM 87125-0822; 505/243-8625; fax 505/243-8630, e-mail
gatabrq@hotmail.com) was the engineer. We are grateful for her permission to
represent the recording here in text form. Noam Chomsky, a world-class
linguist and progressive intellectual, has been professor of Linguistics and
Philosophy at MIT since 1955. His best-known work is Manufacturing Consent,
a critique of mass media and global information monopolies. A member of the
Interhemispheric Resource Center's Board of Directors, he marks the IRC's
20th anniversary by speaking about economic and political globalization. He
was introduced by Deb Preusch, Co-founder and Executive Director of the IRC.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Taking Control of Our Lives:
Freedom, Sovereignty, and Other Endangered Species
Noam Chomsky
Speaking in Santa Fe, New Mexico
February 26, 2000
When we started planning this event last summer, the first
question we had to ask ourselves was, "How many people in New
Mexico would be interested in hearing Noam Chomsky speak?" We were
sure among our circle of friends that he was very well known. But
obviously, our circle of friends is much larger than even we could
imagine. We're so pleased each and every one of you are here to
celebrate our 20th anniversary with us.
It's my great honor to welcome a member of the IRC's Board of
Directors. He is a world-class scholar recognized for
contributions to linguistics and foreign policy. He is a long-time
social activist involved in key issues of our era from the Vietnam
War to the War in Kosovo. He is one of the most important
intellectuals of our time. He is a global citizen, a friend to
those struggling for justice from the Middle East to New Mexico.
It is my great pleasure to introduce Noam Chomsky.
Thank you. It's no exaggeration to say that the effort to take
control of our lives is a dominant theme of world history with a
crescendo in the last several centuries of dramatic changes in
human relations and world order. The topic is far too large to try
to discuss here. I'll have to cut it down sharply. First, I'll
keep only to current manifestations and some of the roots with an
eye towards what might lie ahead. Also, I'll keep to the global
arena, which is by no means, the only domain in which these issues
arise.
In the past year, the global issues have been framed largely in
terms of the notion of sovereignty; that is the right of political
entities to follow their own course, which may be benign or may be
ugly, and to do so, free from external interference. In the real
world, that means interference by highly concentrated power with
its major center in the United States.
These concentrated global powers are called by various terms,
depending on which aspect of sovereignty and freedom one has in
mind. Sometimes it's called the Washington Consensus or the Wall
Street-Treasury Complex or NATO or the International Economic
Bureaucracy (World Trade Organization, World Bank, and IMF), or G7
(the rich western industrial countries), or G3, or, more
accurately, usually, G1.
From a more fundamental perspective, though it takes longer to
say, we could describe it as, An array of mega-corporations, often
linked to one another by strategic alliances, administering a
global economy which is in fact a kind of a corporate mercantilism
tending toward oligopoly in most sectors, heavily reliant on state
power to socialize risk and cost and to subdue recalcitrant
elements.
In the past year, the issues of sovereignty have risen in two
domains. One has to do with the sovereign rights to be secure from
military intervention. Here the questions arise in a world order
based on sovereign states. Second, the matter of sovereign rights
in the face of socio-economic intervention. Here the questions
arise in a world that's dominated by multinational corporations,
especially financial institutions in recent years, and the whole
framework that has been constructed to serve their interests.
Those are, for example, the issues that arose dramatically in
Seattle last November.
The first category, military intervention, was a very lively topic
last year. Two cases gained particular significance, attention,
prominence: East Timor and Kosovo in the opposite order which is
an interesting fact because that reverses both the timing and the
significance. There is a lot to say about these matters and a lot
of new information about them I would like to discuss but
reluctantly I'm going to drop that topic. If you'd like to bring
it up later in questions, fine, I'll be happy to talk about it.
It's a big, important, and instructive topic, but time's short.
So let me turn to the second topic and that's the one I'll keep to
(still cutting things down) -- the questions of sovereignty,
freedom, human rights; the kind of questions that arise in the
socio-economic arena. That's the subpart of this whole topic I
want to keep to.
First a general comment: sovereignty is no value in itself. It's
only of value insofar as it relates to freedom and rights, either
enhancing them or diminishing them. I want to take for granted
something that may seem obvious, but is actually controversial --
namely that, in speaking of freedom and rights, we have in mind
human beings; that is, persons of flesh and blood. Not abstract
political and legal constructions like corporations or states or
capital. If these entities have any rights at all, which is
questionable, they should be derivative from the rights of people.
That's the core of classical liberal doctrine. It's also the
guiding principal for popular struggles for centuries. But it's
very strongly opposed. It's opposed by official doctrine. It's
opposed by sectors of wealth and privilege. That's true both in
the political and the socio-economic realms. I'll ask you to keep
that question on the shelf for a minute, and say a couple of words
of background.
In the political realm, the familiar slogan is "popular
sovereignty in a government of, by, and for the people." But the
operative framework is quite different. The operative framework is
that the people are considered a dangerous enemy. They have to be
controlled for their own good.
These issues go back centuries, back to the earliest modern
democratic revolutions in 17th century England and in the North
American colonies a century later. In both cases, the Democrats
were defeated -- not completely and certainly not permanently by
any means.
In 17th century England, much of the population did not want to be
ruled by either king or parliament. Recall that those were the two
contestants in the standard version of the civil war. But like
most civil wars a good part of the population wanted neither of
them. As their pamphlets put it, they wanted to be governed "by
countrymen like ourselves that know our wants," not by "knights
and gentlemen [that] make us laws, that are chosen for fear and do
but oppress us, and do not know the people's sores."
These same ideas animated the rebellious farmers of the colonies a
century later. But the constitutional system was designed quite
differently. It was designed to block that heresy. The goal was,
"to protect the minority of the opulent from the majority" and to
ensure that "the country is governed by those who own it." Those
are the words of the leading framer, James Madison, and the
president of the Continental Congress and first Chief Justice of
the Supreme Court, John Jay. Their conception prevailed but the
conflicts continued. They continually take new forms. They are
alive right now. However, elite doctrine remains essentially
unchanged.
Fast forwarding to the 20th century -- I'll keep here to the sort
of liberal progressive side of the spectrum; it's harsher on the
other side. The population are regarded as "ignorant and
meddlesome outsiders" whose role is to be "spectators," not
"participants," apart from periodic opportunities to choose among
the representatives of private power. These are what are called
elections. In elections, public opinion is considered essentially
irrelevant if it conflicts with the demands of the minority of the
opulent who own the country. We're seeing that right now in fact.
One striking example (there are many) has to do with the
international economic order -- what are called trade agreements.
The general population, as polls make very clear, is strongly
opposed to most of what's going on but the issues don't arise.
It's not an issue in the elections because the centers of power,
the minority of the opulent, are unified in support of instituting
a particular kind of socio-economic order. So therefore, the issue
doesn't arise. The things that are discussed are things that they
don't much care about. Like questions of character or questions of
reform which they know that aren't going to be implemented. So
that's what discussed. Not what people care about. And that's
pretty typical and it makes sense on the assumption that the role
of the public as the ignorant and meddlesome outsiders is just to
be spectators.
If the general public, as it often does, seeks to organize and
enter the political arena to participate, to press its own
concerns, that's a problem. It's not democracy. It's what's called
a "crisis of democracy" that has to be overcome. Again I'm
quoting. These are all quotes from the liberal, progressive side
of the modern spectrum, but the principals are quite widely held.
The past 25 years have been one of those regular periods when a
major campaign has been conducted to try to overcome the perceived
"crisis of democracy" and to reduce the public to their proper
role of apathetic and passive and obedient spectators. That's the
political realm.
In the socio-economic realm, there is something similar. There has
been a parallel of closely-related conflicts for a long, long
time. In the early days of the industrial revolution in the United
States -- in New England, 150 years ago -- there was a very
lively, independent labor press run by young women from the farms,
or artisans in the towns. They condemned the "degradation and
subordination" of the newly-emerging industrial system which
compelled people to rent themselves to survive.
----------------------------------------------------------------
| |
| These issues go back centuries, back to the earliest |
| modern democratic revolutions in 17th century England and |
| in the North American colonies a century later. In both |
| cases, the Democrats were defeated -- not completely and |
| certainly not permanently by any means. |
| In 17th century England, much of the population did |
| not want to be ruled by either king or parliament.... As |
| their pamphlets put it, they wanted to be governed "by |
| countrymen like ourselves that know our wants," not by |
| "knights and gentlemen [that] make us laws, that are |
| chosen for fear and do but oppress us, and do not know the |
| people's sores." |
| These same ideas animated the rebellious farmers of |
| the colonies a century later. But the constitutional |
| system was designed quite differently. It was designed to |
| block that heresy. The goal was, "to protect the minority |
| of the opulent from the majority" and to ensure that "the |
| country is governed by those who own it." Those are the |
| words of the leading framer, James Madison, and the |
| president of the Continental Congress and first Chief |
| Justice of the Supreme Court, John Jay. Their conception |
| prevailed but the conflicts continued. They continually |
| take new forms. They are alive right now. However, elite |
| doctrine remains essentially unchanged. |
| Fast forwarding to the 20th century -- I'll keep here |
| to the sort of liberal progressive side of the spectrum; |
| it's harsher on the other side. The population are |
| regarded as "ignorant and meddlesome outsiders" whose role |
| is to be "spectators," not "participants," apart from |
| periodic opportunities to choose among the representatives |
| of private power. These are what are called elections. In |
| elections, public opinion is considered essentially |
| irrelevant if it conflicts with the demands of the |
| minority of the opulent who own the country. We're seeing |
| that right now in fact. |
| |
----------------------------------------------------------------
It's worth remembering (and hard to remember perhaps), that wage
labor was considered not very different from chattel slavery at
that time. Not only by the workers in the mills but right through
much of the mainstream. For example Abraham Lincoln, or the
Republican Party, even editorials in the New York Times (that they
might like to forget).
Working people opposed what they called "monarchical principles"
in the industrial system and they demanded that those who work in
the mills should own them -- the spirit of Republicanism. They
denounced what they called the "new spirit of the age: Gain
wealth, forgetting all but self." A demeaning and degrading vision
of human life that has to be driven into people's minds by immense
effort, which in fact has been going on over centuries.
In the 20th century, the literature of the public relations
industry provides a very rich and instructive store of instruction
on how to instill the "new spirit of the age" by creating
artificial wants or by "regimenting the public mind just as an
army regiments the bodies of its soldiers," and inducing a
"philosophy of futility" and lack of purpose in life by
concentrating human attention on "the more superficial things that
comprise much of fashionable consumption." If that can be done
then people will accept the meaningless and subordinate lives that
are appropriate for them and they'll forget subversive ideas about
taking control of their own lives.
This is major social engineering project. It's been going on for
centuries. But it became intense and enormous in the last century.
There are a lot of ways of doing it. Some are the kind that I just
indicated which are too familiar to illustrate. Others are to
undermine security. Here too there are a number of ways.
One way of undermining security is the threat of job transfer. One
of the major consequences and, assuming rationality, one has to
assume one of the major purposes of the mislabeled "trade
agreements" (stress "mislabeled," because they're not about free
trade; they have strong anti-market elements of a variety of
kinds, and they are certainly not agreements, at least if people
matter, since people are mostly opposed), one consequence of these
arrangements is to facilitate the threat -- it doesn't have to be
reality, but sometimes it is, but just the threat -- of job
transfer, which is a good way of inducing discipline by
undermining security.
Another device, pardon the technical jargon, is to promote what is
called "labor market flexibility." Let me quote the World Bank,
who put the matter pretty plainly. They said,
"Increasing labor market flexibility -- despite the bad
name it has acquired as a euphemism for pushing wages
down and workers out" (which is exactly what it is) "is
essential in all the regions of the world. . . . The
most important reforms involve lifting constraints on
labor mobility and wage flexibility, as well as breaking
the ties between social services and labor contracts."
That means cutting the benefits and the rights that have been won
in generations of bitter struggle. When they talk about lifting
constraints on wage flexibility they mean flexibility down, not
flexibility up. The talk about labor mobility doesn't mean the
right of people to move anywhere they want (as has been required
by free market theory ever since Adam Smith), but rather the right
to fire employees at will. And under the current investor-based
version of globalization, capital and corporations must be free to
move but not people because their rights are secondary,
incidental.
These "essential reforms," as the World Bank calls them, are
imposed on much of the world as conditionalities for ratification
by the World Bank and the IMF. They're introduced into the rich,
industrial countries by other means and they have been effective.
Alan Greenspan testified before Congress that, what he called
"greater worker insecurity" was an important factor in what's
called the "fairy-tale economy." It keeps inflation down because
workers are afraid to ask for wages and benefits. They are
insecure. That shows up pretty clearly in the statistical record.
In the past 25 years, this period of roll-back, of the crisis of
democracy, wages have stagnated or declined for the majority of
the workforce, for non-supervisory workers, and working hours have
increased very sharply -- they have become the highest in the
industrial world. This is noticed, of course, by the business
press which describes it as, "a welcome development of
transcendent importance" with working people compelled to abandon
their "luxurious lifestyles" while corporate profits are "dazzling
and stupendous" (Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and Fortune).
In the dependencies less delicate measures are available. One of
them is the so-called "debt crisis" which is largely traceable to
World Bank/IMF policy programs of the 1970s, and to the fact that
the third world rich are, for the most part, exempt from social
obligations. That's dramatically true in Latin America, and one of
its major problems.
The "debt crisis" is something but we should be careful to notice
what it is. It's not a simple economic fact by any means. To a
large extent, it's an ideological construct. What's called the
"debt" could be largely overcome in a number of very elementary
ways.
One way to overcome it would be by resorting to the capitalist
principal that borrowers have to pay and lenders take the risk. So
for example, if you lend me money and I send it to my bank in
Zurich and buy a Mercedes and you come back and ask me for the
money, I'm not supposed to be allowed to say, "I'm sorry, I don't
have it. Take it from my neighbor." And if you don't want to take
the risk of the loan, you're not supposed to be able to say "My
neighbor will have to pay for it."
However that is the way it works in the international arena.
That's what the "debt crisis" is. The debt is not to be paid by
the people who borrowed it: military dictators, their cronies, the
rich and privileged in highly authoritarian societies that we've
supported. They don't have to pay.
So take Indonesia, where the current debt is about 140 percent of
Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The money was taken by the military
dictatorship and their friends and probably held by a couple
hundred people at the outside. But it has to be paid by the
population under harsh austerity measures. And the lenders are
mostly protected from risk. They get what amounts to free risk
insurance by various devices of socializing costs, transferring
them to Northern taxpayers. That's one of the functions of the
IMF.
Similarly in Latin America. The huge Latin American debt is not
all that much different from capital flight from Latin America.
Which suggests a simple way to deal with the debt, or a large part
of it, if anyone were to believe in the capitalist principle,
which is, of course, unacceptable. It puts the burden on the wrong
people -- on the minority of the opulent.
----------------------------------------------------------------
| |
| All of this is called "trade rights." It has nothing to do |
| with trade. It has to do with monopolistic pricing |
| practices enforced by protectionist measures that are |
| introduced into what are called free trade agreements. The |
| measures are designed to ensure corporate rights. They |
| also have the effect of reducing growth and innovation, |
| naturally. And they are only part of the array of |
| regulations, introduced into these agreements, which are |
| an attempt to prevent development and growth. They are not |
| economically motivated. What is at stake is investor |
| rights and not trade. And trade, of course, has no value |
| in itself. It is of value if it increases human welfare, |
| otherwise not. |
| |
----------------------------------------------------------------
There are also other ways of eliminating the debt, and they are
recognized. They also reveal the extent to which it is an
ideological construct. One other method, apart from the capitalist
principle, is a principle of international law that was introduced
by the United States when it, what's called in the history books,
"liberated" Cuba, meaning conquered Cuba to prevent it from
liberating itself from Spain in 1898.
Having done that the United States cancelled Cuba's debt to Spain
on the perfectly reasonable ground that the debt was imposed
without the consent of the population. It was imposed under
coercive conditions. That principle then entered international
law, largely at U.S. initiative. It's called the principle of
odious debt. An odious debt is invalid. It doesn't have to be
paid.
It's been recognized for example, by the U.S. Executive Director
of the IMF, that if that principle were available to the victims,
not just to the rich, the third world debt would mostly dissolve,
because it is invalid. It's odious debt.
But that is not to be. The odious debt is a very powerful weapon
of control and it can't be abandoned. For about half of the
world's population right now, thanks to this method, national
economic policy is effectively run by bureaucrats in Washington.
Another half of the population of the world -- not the same half,
but overlapping -- is subject to unilateral sanctions by the
United States which is a form of economic coercion that again,
undermines sovereignty severely and has been condemned repeatedly,
just recently again by the United Nations, as unacceptable. But it
makes no difference.
Within the rich countries, there are other means of achieving
similar results. I'll come back to that. But before doing so, just
a word about what we should never allow ourselves to forget. And
that is the devices that are used in the dependencies can be very
brutal.
There was a Jesuit-organized conference in San Salvador a couple
of years ago which considered the state terrorist project of the
1980s and it's continuation since, by the socio-economic policies
imposed by the victors. The conference took special note of what
it called the residual "culture of terror" which lasts after the
actual terror declines and has the effect of "domesticating the
expectations of the majority" who abandon any thought of
"alternatives to the demands of the powerful." They have learned
the lesson that There Is No Alternative -- TINA, as it's called;
Maggie Thatcher's cruel phrase. The idea is that there is no
alternative. That's now the familiar slogan of the corporate
version of globalization.
In the dependencies, the great achievement of the terrorist
operations has been to destroy the hopes that had been raised in
Latin America and Central America in the 1970s, inspired by
popular organizing throughout the region and the "preferential
option for the poor" of the church which was severely punished for
that deviation from good behavior. Again, an awful lot to say
about that and I hate to drop it, but time is short.
Sometimes the lessons about what happened are drawn rather
accurately in measured tones. Right now there is a torrent of
self-adulation about our success in inspiring a wave of democracy
in our Latin American dependencies. The matter is put a little
differently and more accurately in an important scholarly review
-- the major scholarly review -- by the leading specialist on the
topic, Thomas Carrothers, who, as he says, writes with an
"insider's perspective" since he served in the State Department
"democracy enhancement programs" of the Reagan Administration (as
they were called).
He believes that Washington had good intentions but he recognizes
that in practice, the Reagan Administration sought to maintain
"the basic order of . . . quite undemocratic societies" and to
avoid "populist-based change," and like its predecessors, adopted
"pro-democracy policies as a means of relieving pressure for more
radical change, but inevitably sought only limited, top-down forms
of democratic change that did not risk upsetting the traditional
structures of power with which the United States had long been
allied." Almost accurate. It would be more accurate to say "the
traditional structures of power with which the traditional
structures of power within the United States had long been
allied." That's accurate.
Carrothers himself is dissatisfied with the outcome but describes
what he calls the "liberal critique" as fundamentally flawed. This
critique leaves the old debates "unresolved," because of "its
perennial weak spot." The perennial weak spot is that it offers no
alternative to the policy of restoring the traditional structures
of power. In this case by murderous terror that left a couple
hundred thousand corpses in the 1980s and millions of refugees,
maimed and orphaned in the devastated societies. So again, TINA --
There Is No Alternative.
The same dilemma was recognized at the other end, the opposite end
of the political spectrum, by President Carter's main Latin
American specialist, Robert Pastor, who is quite far to the
dove-ish, progressive end of the admissible spectrum. He explains
in an interesting book why the Carter Administration had to
support the murderous and corrupt Samoza regime right to the
bitter end. Then, when even the traditional structures of power
turned against the dictator, the U.S. (Carter Administration) had
to try to maintain the National Guard that it had established and
trained and that was then attacking the population "with the
brutality a nation usually reserves for its enemy," as he puts it.
This was all done with benign intent under the TINA principal --
no alternative. Here's the reason. "The United States did not want
to control Nicaragua or the other nations of the region, but it
also did not want developments to get out of control. It wanted
Nicaraguans to act independently except" (his emphasis) "when
doing so would affect U.S. interests adversely." So in other
words, Latin Americans should be free, free to act in accord with
our wishes. We want them to be able to choose their own course
freely, unless they make choices that we don't want. In which
case, we have to restore the traditional structures of power -- by
violence, if necessary. That's the more liberal and progressive
side of spectrum. (If you can tell the difference.)
There are voices that are outside the spectrum -- I don't want to
deny that. For example, there is the idea that "people should have
the right to share in the decisions, which often profoundly modify
their way of life," not have their hopes "cruelly dashed" by
violence, by foreign power in a global order in which "political
and financial power is concentrated" while financial markets
"fluctuate erratically" with devastating consequences for the
poor, "elections can be manipulated," and "the negative aspects on
others are considered completely irrelevant" by the powerful.
Those are quotes from the radical extremist in the Vatican whose
annual New Year's message could scarcely be mentioned in the
national press. It is certainly an alternative that is not on the
agenda.
Why is there such broad agreement that Latin Americans (in fact
the world) cannot be allowed to exercise sovereignty? That is, to
take control of their lives? It is the global analog to the fear
of democracy within. Actually, that question has been frequently
addressed in very instructive ways, primarily in the internal
record which we have (quite a free country -- we have a rich
record of declassified documents, and they are very interesting).
The theme that runs through all of them is strikingly illustrated
in one of the most influential cases, a hemispheric conference
that the United States called in February 1945 in order to impose
what was called the Economic Charter for the Americas that was one
of the cornerstones of the postwar world still firmly in place.
The charter called for an end to "economic nationalism (meaning
sovereignty) in all its forms." Latin Americans, it said, would
have to avoid what was called "excessive" industrial development
that would compete with U.S. interests, though they could have
"complimentary development." So Brazil could produce low-cost
steel that the U.S. corporations were not interested in.
Crucially, it was necessary "to protect our resources," as George
Kennan put it, even if that required "police states," he
continued.
But Washington faced a problem in imposing the charter. That was
clearly explained internally in the State Department at the time
in this way: Latin Americans were making the wrong choices. They
were calling for "policies designed to bring about a broader
distribution of wealth and to raise the standard of living of the
masses," and they were "convinced that the first beneficiaries of
a country's resources should be the people of that country," not
U.S. investors. That is unacceptable, so sovereignty cannot be
allowed. They can have freedom, but freedom to make the right
choices.
That message has been regularly and forcefully reaffirmed in case
after case up to the present. I'll just mention a couple of
examples. Guatemala had a brief interlude of democracy. It was
ended, as you know, by a U.S. military coup. For the public, this
was presented as defense against the Russians. A little bit
exotic, but that was the story. Internally, the thrust was
different and the threat was seen more realistically. Here is the
way it was seen:
"The social and economic programs of the elected
government met the aspirations" of labor and the
peasantry, and "inspired the loyalty and conformed to
the self-interest of most politically-conscious
Guatemalans." Worse still the government of Guatemala
had "become an increasing threat to the stability of
Honduras and El Salvador. Its agrarian reform is a
powerful propaganda weapon; its broad social program of
aiding the workers and peasants in a victorious struggle
against the upper classes and large foreign enterprises
has a strong appeal to the populations of Central
American neighbors where similar conditions prevail."
So therefore, a military solution was necessary. It has been going
on for 40 years and it's left the same culture of terror as in
Central American neighbors.
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| |
| In general the primary principle and related treaties of |
| the World Trade Organization is that sovereignty and |
| democratic rights have to be subordinated to the rights of |
| investors. In practice that means the rights of the huge, |
| immortal persons; the private tyrannies to which people |
| must be subordinated. |
| |
----------------------------------------------------------------
The same was true in Cuba, another currently live case. When the
United States made the decision, secretly, to overthrow the
government of Cuba in 1960, the reasoning was very similar. It was
explained by historian Arthur Schlesinger, who summarized to
President Kennedy the study of a Latin American mission in a
secret report to the incoming president. The Cuban threat
(according to the mission) was "the spread of the Castro idea of
taking matters into one's own hands." That's a disease that might
infect the rest of Latin America, Schlesinger explained, where
"the poor and underprivileged," which means almost everyone,
"stimulated by the example of the Cuban Revolution, are now
demanding opportunities for a decent living." So something has to
be done and you know what was done. What about "the Soviet
connection"? That was actually mentioned in the report in this
way: "Meanwhile, the Soviet Union hovers in the wings, flourishing
large development loans and presenting itself as the model for
achieving modernization in a single generation."
Well, that's the threat -- the threat of taking their lives in
their own hands. And it had to be destroyed by terrorism and
economic strangulation, which is still continuing. All of that is
totally independent of the cold war, as surely is obvious by now,
even without the secret record. The same concerns in the post-cold
war period led to the quick undermining of Haiti's brief
experiment in democracy by Presidents Bush and Clinton, continuing
an earlier record.
The same concerns lie in the background of the trade agreements --
NAFTA, for example. At the time of NAFTA (you will recall), the
propaganda was that it was going to be a wonderful boom to working
people in all three countries -- Canada, United States, and
Mexico. Well that was quietly abandoned shortly after when the
facts were in. What was obvious all along was in fact, finally,
publicly conceded -- publicly. The goal was to "lock Mexico into
the reforms" of the 1980s -- reforms which has sharply reduced
wages and enriched a small sector and foreign investors.
The background concerns were articulated at a Latin American
strategy development conference in Washington, a workshop in 1990.
It warned that "a `democracy opening' in Mexico could bring into
office a government more interested in challenging the United
States on economic and nationalist grounds." Notice that's the
same threat as in 1945 and since. Overcome, in this case, by
locking Mexico into treaty obligations. These same reasons
consistently lie behind a half a century of torture and terror,
not only in the Western Hemisphere. They are also at the core of
the investor rights agreements that are being imposed under the
specific form of globalization that's designed by the
state-corporate power nexus.
Now let's go back to what I asked you to put on the shelf, the
point of departure: the contested issue of freedom and rights,
hence sovereignty insofar as it's to be valued. Do they inhere in
persons of flesh and blood? Or only in small sectors of wealth and
privilege? Or even in abstract constructions, like corporations or
capital or states? In the past century, the idea that such
entities have special rights, over and above persons, has been
very strongly advocated. The most prominent examples are
Bolshevism, fascism, and private corporatism, which is a form of
privatized tyranny. Two of these systems have collapsed. The third
is alive and flourishing under the banner, TINA -- There Is No
Alternative to the emerging system of state corporate mercantilism
disguised with various mantras like globalization and free trade.
A century ago, during the early stages of the corporatization of
America, discussion about these matters was quite frank.
Conservatives, a century ago, denounced the procedure describing
corporatization as a "return to feudalism" and "a form of
communism." Which is not an entirely inappropriate analogy. There
were similar intellectual origins and neo-Hegelian ideas about the
rights of organic entities, along with the belief in the need to
have a centralized administration of chaotic systems -- like the
markets, which were totally out of control.
It's worth bearing in mind, that in today's so-called "free-trade
economy," a very large component of cross-border transactions
(which are called trade, misleadingly), probably about 70 percent
of them, are actually within centrally managed institutions,
within corporations and corporate alliances, if we include
outsourcing and other devices of administration. This is quite
apart from all other kinds of radical market distortions.
The conservative critique -- notice that I am using the term
"conservative" in a traditional sense; such conservatives scarcely
exist any more -- the conservative critique was echoed at the
liberal/progressive end of the spectrum early in the 20th century,
most notably perhaps by John Dewey, America's leading social
philosopher, whose work focused largely on democracy. He argued
that the democratic forms have little substance when "the life of
the country" -- production, commerce, media -- is ruled by private
tyrannies in a system that he called "industrial feudalism" in
which working people are subordinated to managerial control and
politics becomes "the shadow cast by big business over society."
Notice that he was articulating ideas that were common coin among
working people many years earlier, as I mentioned. And the same
was true of his call for the elimination of the replacement of
industrial feudalism by self-managed industrial democracy.
Interestingly, progressive intellectuals, who favored the process
of corporatization, agreed more or less with this description.
Woodrow Wilson, for example, wrote that, "most men are servants of
corporations," which now account for the "greater part of the
business of the country" in a "very different America from the
old. . . . no longer a scene of individual enterprise, individual
opportunity and individual achievement," but a new America in
which "small groups of men in control of great corporations wield
a power and control over the wealth and business opportunities of
the country," becoming "rivals of the government itself," and
undermining popular sovereignty, exercised through the democratic
political system.
Notice this was written in support of the process. He described
the process as maybe unfortunate, but necessary, agreeing with the
business world. Particularly after the destructive market failures
of the proceeding years had convinced the business world and
progressive intellectuals that markets simply had to be
administered and that financial transactions had to be regulated.
Very similar questions are very much alive in the international
arena today. The talk about reforming financial architecture and
that sort of thing. A century ago, right about that time,
corporations were granted the rights of persons by radical
judicial activism, an extreme violation of classical liberal
principles.[1] They were also freed from earlier obligations to
keep to specific activities for which they were chartered.[2]
Furthermore, in an important move, the courts shifted power
upwards, from the stockholders in a partnership to the central
management, which was identified with the immortal corporate
person.
Those of you who are familiar with the history of communism will
recognize that this is very similar to the process that was taking
place at the time -- very quickly predicted in fact by left
critics, left Marxist and anarchist critics of Bolshevism; people
like Rosa Luxembourg, who warned, early on, that the centralizing
ideology would shift power from working people to the party to the
central committee and then to the maximal leader, as happened very
quickly after the conquest of state power in 1917 which at once
destroyed every residue of socialist forms and principles. The
propagandists on both sides prefer a different story for
self-serving reasons. But I think that's the accurate one.
----------------------------------------------------------------
| |
| [I]n a lot of ways, the conflict between popular |
| sovereignty and private power was illuminated more sharply |
| a couple months after Seattle, just a few weeks ago in |
| Montreal, where an ambiguous settlement was reached on the |
| so-called "bio-safety protocol." There the issue was very |
| clearly drawn. . . . |
| Notice what's at stake here. The question that's at |
| stake is whether people have the right to refuse to be |
| experimental subjects. So, to personalize it, suppose the |
| biology department at the university were to walk in and |
| tell you, "You folks have to be experimental subjects in |
| an experiment we're carrying out where we're going to |
| stick electrodes in your brain and see what happens. And |
| you can refuse. But only if you provide scientific |
| evidence that it is going to harm you." Usually you can't |
| provide scientific evidence. |
| The question is: Do you have a right to refuse? Under |
| World Trade Organization rules, you don't. You have to be |
| experimental subjects. It's a form of what Edward Herman, |
| a co-author of mine who's an economist, has called |
| "producer sovereignty." The producer reigns; consumers |
| have to somehow defend themselves. That works |
| domestically, too, as he pointed out. It's not the |
| responsibility of, say, chemical and pesticide industries, |
| to demonstrate, to prove that what they are putting into |
| the environment is safe. It's the responsibility of the |
| public to prove scientifically that it's unsafe. They have |
| to do this through under-funded public agencies that are |
| susceptible to industry influence through lobbying and |
| other pressures. |
| |
----------------------------------------------------------------
In recent years, corporations have been granted rights that go far
beyond those of persons. So under the World Trade Organization
rules, corporations can demand what's called the right of
"national treatment." That means that, for instance, Genearl
Motors, if it's operating in Mexico, can demand to be treated like
a Mexican firm. That is only a right of the immortal persons. It
is not a right of flesh-and-blood persons. Thus a Mexican can't
come to New York and demand national treatment and do very well.
But corporations can.
Other rules require that the rights of investors, lenders, and
speculators must prevail over the rights of mere flesh-and-blood
people generally, undermining popular sovereignty and diminishing
democratic rights. Corporations, as I'm sure you know, even have
the right to bring suits, to bring actions against sovereign
states. And they are interesting cases.
For example, Guatemala a couple of years ago sought to reduce
infant mortality by regulating the marketing of infant formula by
multinationals. The measures that Guatemala proposed were in
conformity with World Health Organization guidelines and they kept
to international codes. But the Gerber Corporation claimed
expropriation and the threat of a World Trade Organization
complaint sufficed for Guatemala to withdraw, fearing retaliatory
sanctions by the United States.
Actually the first such complaint under the new World Trade
Organization rules was brought against the United States by
Venezuela and Brazil who complained that EPA regulations on
petroleum violated their rights as petroleum exporters. Washington
backed down that time also allegedly in fear of sanctions but I'm
skeptical about that interpretation. I don't think the U.S. fears
trade sanctions from Venezuela and Brazil. More likely, the
Clinton Administration simply saw no compelling reason to defend
the environment and protect health.
These issues are arising very dramatically and in fact, obscenely
right now. Tens of millions of people around the world are dying
from treatable diseases because of the protectionist elements
written into the World Trade Organization rules that grant private
mega-corporations monopoly-pricing rights. So Thailand and South
Africa, for example, which have pharmaceutical industries, can
produce life-saving drugs at a fraction of the cost of the
monopolistic pricing. But they are afraid to do so under threat of
trade sanctions. In fact, in 1998, the United States even
threatened the World Health Organization that it would withdraw
funding if the World Health Organization even monitored the
effects of trade conditions on health. These are very real
threats; I'm talking about today, like this week's international
press.
All of this is called "trade rights." It has nothing to do with
trade. It has to do with monopolistic pricing practices enforced
by protectionist measures that are introduced into what are called
free trade agreements. The measures are designed to ensure
corporate rights. They also have the effect of reducing growth and
innovation, naturally. And they are only part of the array of
regulations, introduced into these agreements, which are an
attempt to prevent development and growth. They are not
economically motivated. What is at stake is investor rights and
not trade. And trade, of course, has no value in itself. It is of
value if it increases human welfare, otherwise not.
In general the primary principle and related treaties of the World
Trade Organization is that sovereignty and democratic rights have
to be subordinated to the rights of investors. In practice that
means the rights of the huge, immortal persons; the private
tyrannies to which people must be subordinated.
These are among the issues that led to the remarkable events in
Seattle. But in a lot of ways, the conflict between popular
sovereignty and private power was illuminated more sharply a
couple months after Seattle, just a few weeks ago in Montreal,
where an ambiguous settlement was reached on the so-called
"bio-safety protocol."[3]
There the issue was very clearly drawn. I'll quote the New York
Times: "A compromise was reached after intense negotiations that
often pitted the United States against almost everyone else" over
what's called "the precautionary principle." What's that? Quoting
the chief negotiator for the European Union who described it this
way: "Countries must have the freedom, the sovereign right, to
take precautionary measures with regard to genetically altered
seed, microbes, animals, crops that they fear might be harmful."
The United States, however, insisted on World Trade Organization
rules. Those rules are that an import can be banned only on the
basis of scientific evidence.[4]
Notice what's at stake here. The question that's at stake is
whether people have the right to refuse to be experimental
subjects. So, to personalize it, suppose the biology department at
the university were to walk in and tell you, "You folks have to be
experimental subjects in an experiment we're carrying out where
we're going to (I don't know what), stick electrodes in your brain
and see what happens. And you can refuse. But only if you provide
scientific evidence that it is going to harm you." Usually you
can't provide scientific evidence.
The question is: Do you have a right to refuse? Under World Trade
Organization rules, you don't. You have to be experimental
subjects. It's a form of what Edward Herman, a co-author of mine
who's an economist, has called "producer sovereignty." The
producer reigns; consumers have to somehow defend themselves. That
works domestically, too, as he pointed out. It's not the
responsibility of, say, chemical and pesticide industries, to
demonstrate, to prove that what they are putting into the
environment is safe. It's the responsibility of the public to
prove scientifically that it's unsafe. They have to do this
through under-funded public agencies that are susceptible to
industry influence through lobbying and other pressures.
That was the issue at Montreal and a kind of an ambiguous
settlement was reached. Notice, to be clear, there was no issue of
principle. You can see that by just looking at the line-up. The
United States was on one side and it was joined in fact by some
other countries with a stake in biotechnology and hi-tech
agro-export. On the other side was everybody else -- those who
didn't expect to profit by the experiment. That was the line-up
and that tells you exactly how much principle was involved. For
similar reasons, the European Union favors high tariffs on
agricultural products, just as the United States did 40 years ago
but no longer and not because the principles have changed; just
because power has changed.
----------------------------------------------------------------
| |
| [The 1940s] was a time of overwhelming popular support for |
| social welfare programs and radical democratic measures. |
| And primarily for those reasons -- this is very explicit |
| incidentally, not inference -- the Bretton Woods system of |
| the mid-forties regulated exchange rates. The idea was to |
| cut down wasteful and harmful speculation and it permitted |
| countries to restrict capitol flow. And the reasons were |
| well understood and clearly articulated. Free capital flow |
| creates what's sometimes called a "virtual parliament" of |
| global capital, which can exercise veto power over |
| government policies that it considers irrational. That |
| means things like labor rights or educational programs or |
| health or efforts to stimulate the economy. Or in fact |
| anything that might help people and not profits (and |
| therefore is irrational in the technical sense). |
| |
----------------------------------------------------------------
There is an overriding principle. The principle is that the
powerful and the privileged have to be able to do what they want
(of course, pleading high motives). The corollary is that
sovereignty and democratic rights of people must go. In this case
-- and that's what makes it so dramatic -- their reluctance to be
experimental subjects when U.S.-based corporations can profit by
the experiment. The U.S. appeal to the World Trade Organization
rules is very natural since they codified that principle; that's
the point.
These issues, although they are very real and affecting a huge
number of people in the world, are actually secondary to other
modalities to reduce sovereignty in favor of private power. Most
important, I think, surely, was the dismantling of the Bretton
Woods system in the early 1970s by the United States and Britain
and others. That system was designed by the U.S. and Britain in
the 1940s.
It was a time of overwhelming popular support for social welfare
programs and radical democratic measures. And primarily for those
reasons -- this is very explicit incidentally, not inference --
the Bretton Woods system of the mid-forties regulated exchange
rates. The idea was to cut down wasteful and harmful speculation
and it permitted countries to restrict capitol flow. And the
reasons were well understood and clearly articulated. Free capital
flow creates what's sometimes called a "virtual parliament" of
global capital, which can exercise veto power over government
policies that it considers irrational. That means things like
labor rights or educational programs or health or efforts to
stimulate the economy. Or in fact anything that might help people
and not profits (and therefore is irrational in the technical
sense).
The Bretton Woods system more-or-less functioned for about 25
years. That's what many economists called the "golden age" of
modern capitalism; modern state capitalism, more accurately. That
was a period -- roughly up until about 1970 -- of quite
historically unprecedented rapid growth of the economy, of trade,
of productivity, capital investment, extension of welfare state
measures, a golden age. That was reversed in the early seventies.
The Bretton Woods system was dismantled with liberalization of
financial markets and floating exchange rates.
The period since has often been described as a "leaden age,"
accurately. There was a huge explosion of very short-term
speculative capital completely overwhelming the productive
economy. There was quite marked deterioration in just about every
respect: considerably slower economic growth, slower growth of
productivity of capital investment, much higher interest rates
(which slow down growth), greater market volatility and financial
crises. All of these things have very severe human effects, even
in the rich countries where the lenders tend to be bailed out:
stagnating or declining wages, much longer working hours,
particularly striking in the United States, cutback of services.
Just to give one example in today's great economy that everyone's
talking about, the median income (half above, half below) for
families has gotten back now to what it was in 1989 which is well
below what it was in the 1970s. It has also been a period of the
dismantling of social democratic measures that had considerably
improved human welfare. And in general the newly-imposed
international order provided much greater veto power for the
"virtual parliament" of private capital of investors leading to
significant decline of democracy and sovereign rights (as
intended), and a significant deterioration in social health.
While those effects are felt in the rich societies, they are a
catastrophe in the poorer societies. These issues cut across
societies. It is not a matter of this society got richer and that
one got poorer. The more significant measures are sectors of the
global population. So, for example, using recent World Bank
analyses, if you take the top five percent of the world's
population and compare their income wealth to the bottom five
percent, that ratio was 78:1 in 1988 and 114:1 in 1993 (that's the
last period for which figures were available), and undoubtedly
higher now. The same figures, the top one percent of the world's
population has the same income as the bottom 57 percent --
two-and-a-half billion people.
For the rich countries, the point was made very clearly (to quote
a well-known economist) by Barry Eichengreen, in his highly
regarded history of the international monetary system. Listen to
it carefully. He has the point correct. Like others, he pointed
out (many people have pointed this out) that the current phase of
globalization is rather similar to the pre-World War I period by
rough measures. However, there are differences.
And here they are. The main one: At that time, global policy,
government policy, had not yet been "politicized" by "universal
male suffrage and the rise of trade unionism and parliamentary
labor parties." Therefore the severe human costs of financial
rectitude that are imposed by the virtual parliament could be
transferred to the general population. But that luxury was no
longer available in the more democratic Bretton Woods era in 1945,
so that "limits on capital mobility substituted for limits on
democracy as a source of insulation from market pressures."
There is a corollary to that. It is quite natural that the
dismantling of the post-war economic order should be accompanied
by a significant attack on substantiative democracy, freedom and
popular sovereignty and human rights, under the slogan, TINA,
There Is No Alternative. It's kind of a farcical, mimicry of
vulgar Marxism. The slogan, needless-to-say, is self-serving
fraud. The particular socio-economic order that's being imposed is
the result of human decisions and human institutions. The
decisions can be modified. The institutions can be changed. If
necessary they can be dismantled and replaced just as honest and
courageous people have been doing throughout the course of
history.
* * * * * *
IRC Board Member Charlie Clements read out written questions from
from the audience. First, he acknowledged and thanked Ken Forens
(sp?), who presented sign-language during the talk saying, "I have
always found listening to Dr. Chomsky like taking a drink of water
from a fire hydrant so I can't imagine how it was for people
reading the sign presentation." He went on to speak briefly about
the IRC while the questions were being gathered.
"There are two main publications that you might want to
participate in. One is called Foreign Policy In Focus which comes
out periodically and the subjects are what we tend to read about
all the time but probably don't have a lot of clarity on. One week
we had Human Rights and U.S. Foreign Policy; here's another one on
so-called `Humanitarian Intervention' is what we call what we did
in Kosovo; here's one on Population and Environment; here's one on
AIDS and Developing Countries: Democratizing Access to Essential
Medicines which Dr. Chomsky referred to; there was one on Star
Wars Revisited: Still Dangerous, Costly, and Unworkable, the World
Trade Organization and Sustainable Development. There are one page
briefs followed by a page with problems of current U.S. foreign
policy, what a new foreign policy might look like, a progressive
foreign policy, and on the back there is a number of references to
go to for more information on these subjects. These come out about
every two weeks.
"In addition to that, IRC publishes borderlines which talks about
our role as a state in the borderlands. This comes out less
frequently. Water Conflict in the Borderlands was a recent one;
Native Communities in the Borderlands on both sides of the border;
the scope and limits of Environmental Law. These are very
informative if you really want to understand our place in the
borderlands of the states of both Mexico and the United States."
Question: You note that sovereignty is under attack but I wonder
how we can both protest democracy at a local level and national
level, while at the same time promoting the need for effective
international norms and institutions.
Noam: When you're part of any system, whatever it is -- a family,
a country, a world -- if you want to be part of it, you're making
a compromise. You're giving up a certain degree of freedom of
action because of the gains that come to you, or to others (not
just to you), from solidarity and participation. And the same is
true of sovereignty. Like I said, national sovereignty, in itself,
is of no value. It's of value insofar as it contributes to human
welfare -- to human rights, to freedom, and so on. In this world
participation in an international community, which is a
constructive and a healthy one, is good for everybody. Not just
us, but everyone else.
So I don't see any contradiction between maintaining, or trying to
maintain, our control of our own polity -- that is, in fact,
trying to create control over it, because we don't have much
control over the way decisions are made within our own community,
state, nation, etc. -- and making the decision, our own decision,
to subordinate some of those choices to international institutions
which could express a broader notion of solidarity and
cooperation. These are the kinds of choices you make if you decide
to live in a family, and any bigger unit.
Q: President Clinton recently said the U.S. has the right on
humanitarian grounds to intervene, with force, in any country
which it deems is abusing the human rights of its citizens. Do you
agree with President Clinton's statement?
Noam: It has interesting consequences. So, for example, I presume
the U.S. Air Force has the capacity to bomb Washington. That would
certainly follow. And plenty of other places.
I said I wouldn't go into this, but take, say, East Timor. There
was never any intervention in East Timor, contrary to what you
read. There was no intervention because there was no issue of
sovereignty. Indonesian rights in East Timor were granted solely
by the United States. It was an invasion. Indonesia invaded in
1975 with U.S. authorization. The Security Council ordered them
out. (Actually the U.S. voted for that, but undermined the
Security Council resolution and, in fact, the Ambassador said so,
and explained why.)
Then came 25 years of huge massacres. Maybe a third of the
population was wiped out with U.S. diplomatic and military
support. In early 1999, the atrocities started escalating again.
In the early months of the year there were thousands of people
killed by the Indonesian military and their paramilitary forces.
This wasn't much reported here, but it wasn't very secret.
This went on up to the point where, in September last year,
750,000 people -- that's 85 percent of the population -- were
driven out of their homes, brutally driven out, most of the
country destroyed. A couple hundred thousand were driven into
Indonesian territory. 150,000 are still there in Indonesian
concentration camps. The U.S. did nothing. The U.S. position was,
"It's their responsibility and we don't want to take it away from
them." That was the position right through.
Finally, in mid-September, Clinton was compelled -- under domestic
pressure and pretty heavy international pressure, primarily from
Australia -- to tell the Indonesian generals that the game was
over. That's essentially what happened. He said, "Look, that's
enough." Immediately they left. That tells you exactly how much
latent power was always there.
It wasn't necessary to bomb Washington to stop this atrocity, or
to bomb Jakarta, or to impose sanctions. It was enough to withdraw
participation and tell them it's finished. They left. After they
left, the UN peacekeeping force entered, and the United States
wants it to be reduced and refuses to fund it and so on and so
forth and, of course, is doing nothing about those who right now
are rotting in concentration camps. That's not intervention and
it's not humanitarian intervention.
And there are many cases like that. If we want to do good in the
world, the best place to start is with the famous Hippocratic
principle: first, do no harm. The first thing to do is to stop
carrying out atrocities, and we're not doing that. While Clinton
is talking about the right of humanitarian intervention, which he
has never once exercised and -- I want to cut down the criticism
of Clinton, nor has anyone else -- it's unlikely that in all of
history you can find a genuine case of humanitarian intervention.
Try. It's very hard. I mean intervention that was carried out with
a humanitarian purpose. Occasionally they have humanitarian
effects, which are incidental. And of course, just about every
intervention is declared to be humanitarian -- Hitler, Mussolini,
everybody. But real ones, real humanitarian intent, that's
extremely hard to find. There may not be any examples. So
Clinton's not unusual. But there are many ways in which we can act
to improve things in the world.
For example, the easiest way is by not participating in escalating
atrocities. And we're doing it right now. I'm not talking about
the past, not last year. Next year. So, one of Clinton's main
projects for next year is a huge increase in military aid to
Colombia. Colombia has the worst human rights record in the
hemisphere and has had it for the last ten years, mostly because
human rights violations in our other client states declined so it
went up. It's also been the leading recipient of U.S. military aid
and training during that decade, going on right under Clinton. Now
it's going to go up even further.
Notice that Colombia has now replaced Turkey at the top of the
recipients of U.S. military aid. Actually there's another
category, Israel and Egypt, but that's a separate category for
totally other reasons. But among the countries that get military
aid, Turkey was top until this year, now Colombia has moved to the
top. The reason is that Turkey was carrying out a murderous,
brutal, counterinsurgency program and ethnic cleansing operation
(notice this is within NATO, it's not across the borders) which
led to about 2-3 million refuges, 3,500 towns destroyed -- that's
about seven times Kosovo -- tens of thousands of people killed.
How were they doing it? Well, with U.S. military aid that the
Clinton administration was pouring in. As the atrocities escalated
the aid escalated. A lot of it illegal because it was banned by
Congress. So it had to be done in devious ways, like jet planes
and so on. Why has that declined? Because they pretty much
suppressed the indigenous population that they were attacking, so
therefore the aid has declined.
Now it's shifting over to Colombia where they still have that
problem. About 70 percent -- 80 percent of the atrocities, several
thousand killed a year, are attributed (even by the State
Department) to the paramilitaries who are tightly linked with the
military. The aid is going to exactly those people. It's being
directed for a counterinsurgency war, it's going to attack
peasants. It's avoiding the areas of paramilitary control, even
though everybody knows that the paramilitaries are up to their
neck in narco-trafficking, just as the military is. All of this is
under the cover of a drug war, which nobody takes seriously who
knows anything about either Colombia or drugs. OK, that's going to
escalate atrocities. That's very likely going to escalate what is
already the worst level of human rights violations in the
hemisphere and it's going to get even higher.
OK, you want to stop. Again, before talking about the academic
issue of humanitarian intervention (of which there are no known
examples), you can start by not escalating atrocities as you have
been doing in the past. So instead of continuing to escalate
atrocities, say, in Turkey, and I could give a long list of
others, don't do it in Colombia, and plenty of other places. So
there's a lot that can be done. It's not that there's nothing that
can be done. But you have to be serious about it.
------------------------------------------------------------------
| |
| It is quite natural that the dismantling of the post-war |
| economic order should be accompanied by a significant attack |
| on substantiative democracy, freedom and popular sovereignty |
| and human rights, under the slogan, TINA, There Is No |
| Alternative. It's kind of a farcical, mimicry of vulgar |
| Marxism. The slogan, needless-to-say, is self-serving fraud. |
| The particular socio-economic order that's being imposed is |
| the result of human decisions and human institutions. The |
| decisions can be modified. The institutions can be changed. |
| If necessary they can be dismantled and replaced just as |
| honest and courageous people have been doing throughout the |
| course of history. |
| |
------------------------------------------------------------------
Q: Without having looked at the questions, I know that there are
many people in the audience that would like to have your
impressions of what happened in Seattle, in terms of its prognosis
for social activism.
Noam: Seattle was very significant, I think. For one thing, those
people didn't just show up spontaneously. They were there because
of very serious, extensive, long-term, educational, and organizing
activities. And they show what can be achieved by that, and that's
the only thing that can achieve anything. That's the first lesson
that ought to be drawn from it. Educational and organizing
activities can have a real effect. A very constructive effect.
The other striking fact about Seattle, very striking, was the
range of the diversity of the constituencies that were involved.
They ranged from people speaking for indigenous people of the
third world, third world peasant and labor groups, U.S. labor,
environmentalists (in the United States and abroad), in fact a
very wide range of activists -- people who, in the past, haven't
had very much to say to one another, or have even been
antagonistic. But here they found common ground, and important
common ground, in opposing a major attack on popular sovereignty
and human rights and freedom that's going on under the rubric of
these investor rights agreements.
Well, what's the prognosis? Like everything else, it depends what
you make of it. There's no way to predict those things. These are
things you try to do something about, not make predictions about.
The predictions are idle. The actions that can be undertaken are
very real. It's going to come up again. The Boston Globe, my local
newspaper, had a little item the other day that said, "Anarchists
Planning to Attack IMF Meeting." Well, OK, the anarchists are
those people, you know who they were, but that's the way it must
look from the centers of power. There's something right about it.
If you're trying to undermine authority and subordination and
domination, then you're in the highest principles of anarchism. So
it's not totally false. But whether the "anarchists" will succeed
in compelling the IMF and the World Bank to reverse course or
modify them substantially and to move the international order in
totally different directions, those are questions of choice, not
prediction.
Q: Kosovo: what are the interests driving intervention? What do
you foresee for the people of the region?
Before he answers that question, the book that he's autographed,
you've heard the expression, "Read the book." The book he's
autographed out front is called, The New Military Humanism:
Lessons from Kosovo, is Dr. Chomsky's latest book.
Noam: That one was written last July and, since then, a lot of
documentation has come out from impeccable sources, like the State
Department, and NATO, and so on, which affirms, to an extent that
actually surprises me, the rather tentative conclusions there.
I've written more recent stuff about it, if you're interested. We
can start by saying what the intervention was not motivated by. It
was not motivated by humanitarian concern; I think that is
overwhelmingly obvious at this point.
There is now a rich mine of documentation from sources of the kind
I've just mentioned which demonstrate that, up until the bombing,
Kosovo was a pretty ugly place. In fact, not unlike Colombia,
though probably not as bad. But nothing special was happening in
the period before the bombing. The place was teeming with
monitors, European monitors, the international human rights
organizations, the ICRC, the UNHCR, etc., and their reports are
available, to a large extent, and they're pretty clear. In the
last two-month reporting period before the bombing, they estimate
more than one violent death a day, which is bad (on both sides,
incidentally, these are distributed -- Serbs, Albanians, some of
the Albanians being killed by Albanians). Ugly, but not changing;
and, in fact, nothing special happening.
The bombing was then undertaken with the expectation that it was
going to sharply escalate atrocities. We now have a record of
where it escalated atrocities from the Organization for Security
and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), who gave a detailed
documentation of what happened afterwards. Their conclusion is
that the atrocities took place as anticipated, primarily in areas
of guerilla activity and potential invasion routes. Ugly and
horrible and war crimes and everything else, but not all that
surprising when you bomb some country and you plan and you
threaten to invade them. That was the anticipated consequence of
the bombing.
It's been kind of inverted now in the rendition, so what you read
is that they were carrying out ethnic cleansing so we had to bomb
to stop ethnic cleansing. Just take a look at the record; it's
exactly the other way around. The ethnic cleansing followed the
bombing, and it was the anticipated consequence of it, and for
ugly, but intelligible reasons. You might ask yourself what would
be happening here, let's say, if a guerilla army based in Mexico
were killing policemen, civil servants, civilians, so on and so
forth, with supplies coming in from Mexico, in an effort to try to
recover for Mexico the territory that was stolen from it not all
that long ago. How would you react around here? How would the
United States react? You don't have to bother saying.
What the commander, General Clark, said at the time turns out to
be very accurate. As the bombing started, NATO Commander Wesley
Clark informed the press that it was "entirely predictable" that
atrocities would sharply increase. We now know how sharply they
increased because we know what they were before and what they were
afterwards. A couple of weeks later he informed the press again
that the purpose of the bombing never had anything to do with
ethnic cleansing; that was not a concern of the political
leadership or of the military command that was implementing it.
Now in retrospect, that's pretty much what is the case. So I think
we can wipe out that argument, that it was humanitarian in intent
(perhaps for the first time in history) -- it wasn't. So what was
it? That's the question.
Well, here we go from fact, which you can verify, to speculation,
which you can only just guess, because we don't have internal
documents. So if you want my speculation, it's about what I had in
that book. I think there's now more evidence for it, but it's
still speculation because we don't have documents of internal
planning. If you take a look back at that time, you'll notice that
two arguments were given for the bombing. The first argument was
that we had to stop ethnic cleansing. That can't possibly be right
-- just take a look at the factual record. The second argument
that was given is more plausible, in my view, and that is that it
was necessary to maintain the credibility of NATO. Well, I think
that's plausible, but you have to translate it. Like most things
in political rhetoric, you've got to do a little work on it.
When the U.S. and Britain talk about the credibility of NATO, what
do they have in mind? I mean, are they worried about the
credibility of Norway? The credibility of Italy? Belgium? I don't
think so. They're worried about the credibility of the United
States and its attack dog, which is what England has become. It
basically is a highly militarized state that is sent out to attack
people. So the U.S. and its attack dog, it's their credibility
that's at stake. With whom? It's a wide audience. For one thing,
with Europe. Part of the reason, I suspect, for shifting the arena
of confrontation from diplomacy to violence is that that's where
the U.S. and Britain reign supreme. If you can bring NATO in, it's
a U.S., secondarily British, operation. If it's a matter of
diplomacy, the United States doesn't hold any cards any stronger
than Germany or France or anyone else.
There's been a significant conflict between Europe and the United
States over the emerging shape of the world. They don't agree on
everything. They disagree on things. Putting NATO in the forefront
is a way of putting the United States in the forefront. The United
States doesn't dominate Europe, but it does dominate NATO. If
Europe were to move towards a security system from, say the
Atlantic to the Urals, the way France and some in Germany have
proposed, that's going to marginalize the United States in
European affairs. If Europe stays under NATO control, the U.S. is
going to run it. That's NATO expansion and everything else. So
part of the credibility that was involved, I think, was
credibility of U.S. power, vis-a-vis Europe.
------------------------------------------------------------------
| |
| Norman Solomon, who's a media critic you may know, made the |
| interesting observation that before . . . 1995, it was |
| described usually as an information superhighway. Since 1995 |
| it's been described mostly as e-commerce, home marketing |
| service. That's not accidental. |
| When it was under public control, the goal was (or at |
| least thought to be) an information superhighway, something |
| people could participate in. Now it's a technique of |
| subordination. It's being converted into a device of exactly |
| the kind that I was describing from the advertising industry |
| (going back decades), a device to degrade and control |
| people. To create wants -- to impose a philosophy of |
| futility, to focus your attention on the superficial aspects |
| of life, like fashionable consumption -- and to marginalize |
| people (keep them from the dangerous activity of interacting |
| with one another), and to satisfy created wants. |
| Will it be that? That's kind of like the question about |
| Seattle. It depends on whether people let it happen. That's |
| a terrain of struggle right now. The Internet has been very |
| effective in organizing. It's had a very valuable, |
| subversive effect -- like Seattle, for instance. A lot of |
| the organizing was through Internet. Or East Timor -- I've |
| been working on East Timor for years, ever since the |
| mid-seventies; almost got no where. The effects were pretty |
| limited until the early nineties when Charlie Scheiner came |
| along and organized ETAN (the East Timor Action Network) |
| largely through the Internet. Within a very short time there |
| was a pretty active and effective lobbying efforts and |
| educational and organizing efforts, which made a big |
| difference. That's the kind of thing you can do with it.... |
| Well, that's just what the major corporations want to |
| stop. They want to stop that kind of freedom. And that's |
| just what the public ought to be calling for and trying to |
| maintain. That's a big battle that's going to go on in the |
| next couple of years. It's like everything else, you can't |
| predict the outcome -- it's the kind of thing you try to do |
| something about rather than try to predict. So the future of |
| the Internet is very much up for grabs, I think. |
| |
------------------------------------------------------------------
But then it's much broader than that. Serbia, like it or hate it,
it's the one part of Europe which has not subordinated itself to
the U.S. picture of what things should look like, and it's got to
go. And if it turns out to be disobeying orders, as it was doing,
then all the more reason why it's got to go. Here, credibility in
another sense enters. If you want to understand that form of
credibility, just go to your favorite Mafia don and ask him what
credibility means. If a local storekeeper doesn't pay protection
money, you don't just send somebody to collect the money, you make
an example of him because you have to establish credibility. You
send in goons and beat him to a pulp, or something like that. That
establishes credibility. Then others understand they'd better
listen.
That's credibility, and it you look through the record, that's the
kind of credibility that has to be established all the time. Not
just by the Mafia don, but by the global Mafia don as well.
Whoever it may be, and in the last half-century it's been mostly
the United States -- and now, dramatically.
I think that's the sense in which credibility had to be
established. You have to show who's boss. You have to "domesticate
aspirations," as the Jesuits in San Salvador learned, the
surviving ones. Because aspirations contrary to the wishes of the
powerful will not be tolerated and efforts to pursue them will
lead to very severe consequences. My guess is that that range of
considerations is probably what underlies planning in this case,
as in many others. But, let me say again, that's speculation.
Until the documentary record may come out, long after I'm gone,
we're not going to have any clear evidence about this, I expect.
Q: Dr. Chomsky, there have been several questions about the
Internet, and if you might comment on your thoughts about its
impact on wealth distribution, capital mobility, and its potential
to alter the status quo.
Noam: Remember, first, something that is important to bear in
mind: like just about every dynamic aspect of the economy, the
Internet is a product of the state sector; that is, it was created
at public expense. It was within the vast state sector of the
economy for around thirty years. First the Pentagon, then the
National Science Foundation, that's where the ideas came, the
development, the research, meaning the public paid for it. Maybe
the public didn't know. But the public paid for it. And that went
on until very recently.
The Internet was handed over to private power only in 1995. It was
a gift, a huge gift from the public (which didn't know a thing
about it) to private power. That certainly didn't have to happen.
In fact, an interesting question is how it happened, and nobody's
been able to figure that out yet. There's no record that anybody
can discern of what the decision-making process was by which you
guys, the public, handed over to Bill Gates (and others) this
tremendous development. It's by no means the only thing. Most of
the dynamic economy is sort of similar; this is a dramatic case of
it.
Norman Solomon, who's a media critic you may know, made the
interesting observation that before and after 1995 the Internet
was differently described in the media. Before 1995, it was
described usually as an information superhighway. Since 1995 it's
been described mostly as e-commerce, home marketing service.
That's not accidental.
When it was under public control, the goal was (or at least
thought to be) an information superhighway, something people could
participate in. Now it's a technique of subordination. It's being
converted into a device of exactly the kind that I was describing
from the advertising industry (going back decades), a device to
degrade and control people. To create wants -- to impose a
philosophy of futility, to focus your attention on the superficial
aspects of life, like fashionable consumption -- and to
marginalize people (keep them from the dangerous activity of
interacting with one another), and to satisfy created wants.
----------------------------------------------------------------
| |
| The Internet was handed over to private power only in |
| 1995. It was a gift , a huge gift from the public (which |
| didn't know a thing about it) to private power. That |
| certainly didn't have to happen. In fact, an interesting |
| question is how it happened, and nobody's been able to |
| figure that out yet. There's no record that anybody can |
| discern of what the decision-making process was by which |
| you guys, the public, handed over to Bill Gates (and |
| others) this tremendous development. It's by no means the |
| only thing. Most of the dynamic economy is sort of |
| similar; this is a dramatic case of it. |
| |
----------------------------------------------------------------
Will it be that? That's kind of like the question about Seattle.
It depends on whether people let it happen. That's a terrain of
struggle right now. The Internet has been very effective in
organizing. It's had a very valuable, subversive effect -- like
Seattle, for instance. A lot of the organizing was through
Internet. Or East Timor -- I've been working on East Timor for
years, ever since the mid-seventies; almost got no where. The
effects were pretty limited until the early nineties when Charlie
Scheiner came along and organized ETAN (the East Timor Action
Network) largely through the Internet. Within a very short time
there was a pretty active and effective lobbying efforts and
educational and organizing efforts, which made a big difference.
That's the kind of thing you can do with it. The Multilateral
Agreement on Investments -- that would've sailed right through if
it hadn't been for Internet organizing, which got around the media
suppression on the issue (very quickly in fact). The same is true
in other countries. Like in Indonesia, the overthrow of the
Suharto dictatorship was substantially done through the Internet.
That's a technique of communication that went around the main
control systems.
Well, that's just what the major corporations want to stop. They
want to stop that kind of freedom. And that's just what the public
ought to be calling for and trying to maintain. That's a big
battle that's going to go on in the next couple of years. It's
like everything else, you can't predict the outcome -- it's the
kind of thing you try to do something about rather than try to
predict. So the future of the Internet is very much up for grabs,
I think.
Q: Dr Chomsky, could you comment on the implications, the extent
of, and the consequences of corporate participation in the U.S.
system of higher education?
Noam: That's a very real issue. There has been a general assault
in the last 25 years on solidarity, democracy, social welfare,
anything that interferes with private power. And there are many
targets. One of the targets is undoubtedly the educational system.
In fact, a couple of years ago already, the big investment firms,
like Lehman Brothers, and so on, were sending around brochures to
their clients saying, "Look, we've taken over the health system;
we're taking over the prison system; the next big target is the
educational system. So we can privatize the educational system,
make a lot of money out of it."
Also, notice that privatizing it undermines the danger -- there's
a kind of ethic that has to be undermined, namely the idea that
you care about somebody else. A public education system is based
on the principle that you care whether the kid down the street
gets an education. And that's got to be stopped.
This is very much like what the workers in the mills in Lowell,
Massachusetts were worrying about 150 years ago. They were trying
to stop the idea of what they called the new spirit of the age:
"Gain wealth, forgetting all but self." We want to stop that.
That's not what we're like. We're human beings. We care about
other people. We want to do things together. We care about whether
the kid down the street gets an education. We care about whether
somebody else has a road, even if I don't use it. We care about
whether there is child slave labor in Thailand. We care about
whether some elderly person gets food. That's social security. We
care whether somebody else gets food. There's a huge effort to try
to undermine all of that. To try to privatize aspirations so then
you're totally controlled. Privatize aspirations, you're
completely controlled. Private power goes its own way, everyone
else has to subordinate themselves to it.
Well that's part of the basis for the attack on the public
education system, and it goes right up to the universities. In the
universities there's a move towards corporatization and that has
very clear effects. You see it at MIT, you see it everywhere. It
means that you want to create, just like industry, you want to
create a more flexible work force. That means undermine security.
It means have cheap temporary labor, like graduate students, who
don't have to be paid much and who can be thrown out -- they're
temps. OK, they're going to be around for a couple of years, then
you toss them out and have some more temps.
It affects research, strikingly. I'm sure you see it here, but at
a research institution like where I am, MIT, you see it pretty
clearly. As funding shifts from public entities, including,
incidentally, the Pentagon, in fact, primarily the Pentagon, which
has long understood that its domestic role is to be a cover for
transferring public funds into private profit. When funding goes
from the Pentagon and the National Science Foundation and others
into corporate funding, there's a definite shift.
A corporation, say, some pharmaceutical corporation, is not
particularly likely to want to fund research which is going to
help everybody. There's exceptions, but, by and large, it's not
going to want to fund, say basic biology, which may be a public
good that anybody can use 10 or 20 years from now. It's going to
want to fund things that it can make profit from and, furthermore,
do it in the short term. There's a striking tendency, and a
perfectly natural one, for corporate funding to institute more
secrecy and short-term applied projects to which the corporation
has proprietary control on publication and use. Well you know,
technically corporate funding can't demand secrecy, but that's
only technically. In fact they can, like the threat of not
re-funding imposes secrecy.
There are actually cases like this, some of them so dramatic
they've made the Wall Street Journal. There was an article in the
Wall Street Journal last summer, you may have seen, about MIT, my
place. What had happened was that a student in a computer science
class had refused to answer a question on an exam. When he was
asked why, by the professor, he said that he knew the answer but
he was under a secrecy condition from a different professor not to
answer it, and the reason was, in the research he was doing for
this other professor, they had sort of worked out the answer to
this; but they wanted to keep it secret. Because they wanted to
make money, or something. Well, you know, this is so scandalous
that even the Wall Street Journal was scandalized.
But that's the kind of thing you can expect as there's a move
towards corporatization. After all, corporations are not
benevolent societies. As Milton Friedman correctly says, not in
these words, "The board of directors of a corporation actually has
a legal obligation to be a monster," an ethical monster. Their
legal obligation is to maximize profits for the shareholders, the
stockholders. They're not supposed to do nice things. If they are,
it's probably illegal, unless it's intended to mollify people, or
improve market share, or something. That's the way it works.
You don't expect corporations to be benevolent any more than you
expect dictatorships to be benevolent. Maybe you can force them to
be benevolent, but it's the tyrannical structure that's the
problem, and as the universities move towards corporatization you
expect all of these effects.
And one of the effects, in a way, I think the most important, is
the undermining of the conception of solidarity and cooperation. I
think that lies at the heart of the attack on the public school
system, the attack on social security, the effort to block any
form of national health care, which has been going on for years.
And, in fact, across the board, and it's understandable. If you
want to "regiment the minds of men just as an army regiments their
bodies," you've got to undermine these subversive notions of
mutual support, solidarity, sympathy, caring for other people, and
so on and so forth.
----------------------------------------------------------------
| |
| Also, notice that privatizing it undermines the danger, |
| there's a kind of ethic that has to be undermined, namely |
| the idea that you care about somebody else. A public |
| education system is based on the principle that you care |
| whether the kid down the street gets an education. And |
| that's got to be stopped. |
| This is very much like what the workers in the mills |
| in Lowell, Massachusetts were worrying about 150 years |
| ago. They were trying to stop the idea of what they called |
| the new spirit of the age: "Gain wealth, forgetting all |
| but self." We want to stop that. That's not what we're |
| like. We're human beings. We care about other people. We |
| want to do things together. We care about whether the kid |
| down the street gets an education. We care about whether |
| somebody else has a road, even if I don't use it. We care |
| about whether there is child slave labor in Thailand. We |
| care about whether some elderly person gets food. That's |
| social security. We care whether somebody else gets food. |
| There's a huge effort to try to undermine all of that. To |
| try to privatize aspirations so then you're totally |
| controlled. Privatize aspirations, you're completely |
| controlled. Private power goes its own way, everyone else |
| has to subordinate themselves to it. |
| |
----------------------------------------------------------------
The attack on public education is one example. Incidentally I
don't know how it's working here, but in Massachusetts, where I
see it directly, there's a comparable attack on the state
colleges, which are there for working class people, people who
come back to college after they're half-way in their career,
mothers who come back, people from the urban ghettos, and so on
and so forth. That's what the state college system has been and
they're under serious attack by an interesting method. The method
has been to raise the entrance standards for the state colleges
without improving the schools. So when you don't improve the
schools but you raise the entrance standards for the people who
are trying to go on, it's obvious what happens. You get lower
enrollments. And when you get lower enrollments, you've got to cut
staff. Because remember, we have to be efficient, like
corporations. So you cut staff, and you cut services, and then you
can admit even fewer people, and there's kind of a natural cycle,
and you can see where it ends up. It ends up with people either
not going to college or figuring out some way to spend $30,000 a
year at a private college. And you know what that means. All of
these are part of the general effort, I think, to create a
socio-economic order which is under the control of private
concentrated power. It shows up all over the place.
Q: Dr. Chomsky, could you comment on socially responsible
investing? Is it a viable option for positive change, or is it a
way to depoliticize people?
Noam: I don't think it's a bad thing to do. It's like asking
dictators to be more benevolent. Which is often a good thing to
do. If you have a dictator, it's better if they're benevolent than
if they torture people. Like a slaveowner -- it's better to have a
nice slaveowner than a murderous slaveowner. I think those are
good things to do. I think it makes a lot of sense to take
illegitimate institutions and try to make them function less
harmfully to people. Whether it depoliticizes you or not depends
on whether you decide to mislead yourself. That's a choice. It can
depoliticize you if you think you're doing something different.
But if you see that this is in fact what you're doing, then this
is a good thing to do.
Q: What are the motivations of the U.S. push for sustainable
development in the developing world?
Noam: It's the first time I ever heard of it. Does the U.S. have a
push for sustainable development? As far as I know, the U.S. push
is for unsustainable nondevelopment, almost the opposite. Take a
look at the programs that are part of the World Trade Organization
rules. Like TRIPs and TRIMs (for those of you who know this stuff)
Trade-Related Intellectual Property and Trade-Related Investment
Measures. Both of those are designed to impede development and
impede growth. So the intellectual property rights are just
protection of monopolistic pricing and control, guaranteeing that
corporations, in fact, by now, mega-corporations, have the right
to charge monopolistic prices. Guaranteeing, say, that
pharmaceutical production drugs will be priced at a level at which
most of the world can't afford them, even people here. For example
drugs in the U.S. are much more expensive than the same drugs as
close as Canada, even more expensive than say, Europe. And for the
third world this just dooms tens of millions of people to death.
As I said, other countries can produce the drugs. Under the
earlier patent regimes, what you had was process patents. I don't
even know if those are legitimate, but process patents meant that
if some pharmaceutical company figured out a way to produce a
drug, somebody smarter could figure out a better way to produce it
because all that was patented was the process. So if the Brazilian
pharmaceutical industry figured out a way to make it cheaper and
better, fine, they could do it. It wouldn't violate patents. The
World Trade Organization regime insists on product patents, so you
can't figure out a smarter process. Notice that impedes growth and
development and it is intended to. It's intended to cut back
innovation, growth and development and to maintain extremely high
profits.
Well, the pharmaceutical corporations and others claim they need
this for research and development. But have a close look; it's
been looked at. A very substantial part of the research and
development is paid for by the public anyway. In a narrow sense,
it's on the order of 40 to 50 percent. But that's an
underestimate, because it doesn't count the basic biology and the
basic science, which is all publicly funded. So if you get a
realistic amount, it's a very high percentage that's publicly paid
anyway. Well, suppose that went to 100 percent. Then all the
motivation for monopolistic pricing would be gone, and there'd be
a huge welfare benefit to it. There's no justifiable economic
motive for this. There's some economic motive, profit. But it is
an effort to impede growth and development.
What about Trade-Related Investment Measures? What do they do?
It's a little more subtle than TRIPs. In the case of TRIPs it's
straightforward. It's straight protectionism for the benefit of
the rich and powerful, publicly-subsidized corporations. TRIMs,
the Trade-Related Investment Measures are a little more subtle.
What they require is that a country cannot impose conditions on
what an investor decides to do. Like if an investor, let's say
General Motors, decides to carry out outsourcing, to have parts
made in some other country with non-union labor, cheap labor, and
then send them back to General Motors.
In the successful developing countries in Asia, one of the ways
they developed is by blocking that sort of thing, by insisting
that if there was foreign investment, it had to be done in a way
which was productive for the receiving country. So there had to be
technology transfer, or you had to invest in places they wanted
you to invest in, or some proportion of the investment had to be
for export of finished goods that made money. Lots of devices like
that. That's part of the way in which the East Asian economic
miracle took place. Incidentally, it's the way that all the other
developing countries developed too, including the United States,
with technology transfer from England and so on and so forth.
Those things are blocked by the Trade-Related Investment Measures.
Superficially they sound like they are increasing free trade, but
what they are in fact increasing is the capacity of huge
corporations to carry out central management of cross-border
transactions, because that's what outsourcing and intrafirm
transfers are -- centrally managed. It's not trade in any
meaningful sense. And they again undermine growth and development.
In fact, looking across the board, what's being instituted is a
regime which will prevent the kind of development that has taken
place in the industrial countries that today are rich. If you go
back from England to the United States, to Germany, to France,
Japan, Korea -- every one of these countries developed by
violating the principles that are now being built into the World
Trade Organization, and radically violating them.
These are methods of undermining growth and development and
ensuring concentration of power. The issue of sustainable
development doesn't even arise. That's another question
altogether. Sustainable development means, for example, paying
attention to what are called externalities, the things businesses
don't look at.
So take, say, trade. Trade is supposed to increase wealth or
something. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't, but you don't know
what it does until you count in the costs of trade. Including
costs which are not counted. Like, for example the cost of
pollution. When something moves from here to there it's creating
pollution. It's called an externality; you don't count it. There's
resource depletion. Like you deplete the resources of agricultural
production. There are military costs. For example, the price of
oil is kept within a certain band, not too high, not too low, by a
substantial part of the Pentagon. A very substantial part of the
Pentagon is directed toward the Middle East oil producers, not
because the United States likes desert training or something, but
because that's where the oil is. You want to make sure it doesn't
get too high, doesn't get too low, but stays where you want it.
There hasn't been much investigation of this, but one
investigation by a consultant for the U.S. energy department
estimated that Pentagon expenses alone amount to maybe a 30
percent subsidy to the price of oil, something maybe in that
range.
----------------------------------------------------------------
| |
| You don't expect corporations to be benevolent any more |
| than you expect dictatorships to be benevolent. Maybe you |
| can force them to be benevolent, but it's the tyrannical |
| structure that's the problem, and as the universities move |
| towards corporatization you expect all of these effects. |
| And one of the effects, in a way, I think the most |
| important, is the undermining of the conception of |
| solidarity and cooperation. I think that lies at the heart |
| of the attack on the public school system, the attack on |
| social security, the effort to block any form of national |
| health care, which has been going on for years. And, in |
| fact, across the board, and it's understandable. If you |
| want to "regiment the minds of men just as an army |
| regiments their bodies," you've got to undermine these |
| subversive notions of mutual support, solidarity, |
| sympathy, caring for other people, and so on and so forth. |
| |
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Well, you look across the board, there's lots of things like this.
One of the costs of trade is that it drives people out of their
livelihoods. When you export subsidized U.S. agricultural products
to Mexico, it drives millions of peasants out of farming. That's a
cost. In fact, it's a multiple cost, because those millions of
people not only suffer but they are driven into the cities where
they lower wages, so other people suffer -- including,
incidentally, American workers, who now are competing with even
lower paid wages. These are costs. If you take them into account,
you get a totally different picture of economic interactions
entirely.
Incidentally, that's also true just of something like Gross
Domestic Product. Take a look at the measures of Gross Domestic
Product -- they're highly ideological. For example, one of the
ways to increase the Gross Domestic Product in the United States
is (to do what, in fact, it's doing) to not repair roads. If you
don't repair roads and you have a lot of potholes all over the
place, that means when cars drive, they get smashed up. That means
you've got to buy a new car. Or you have to go to mechanic and get
him to fix it, and so on. All of that increases the Gross Domestic
Product. You make people sicker by polluting the atmosphere. That
increases the Gross Domestic Product because they have to go to
the hospital and they have to pay doctors and they have to have
drugs, and so on. In fact, what increases the Gross Domestic
Product is not a measure of welfare in any meaningful sense.
There have been efforts to construct other measures, which do take
account of these things, and they give you very different stories.
I'll just give you one source to look at, if you're interested.
The United States is one of the few industrial countries that does
not publish regular "social indicators" -- measures of social
welfare, like child abuse, mortality, all kinds of things. Most
countries do it. Every year they have a social indicator measure.
The United States doesn't, so it's hard to get a measure of the
social health of the country. But there have been efforts to do
it.
There's one major project at Fordham University, a Jesuit
university in New York. For years they've been trying to construct
a social health measure for the United States. They just came out
with the last volume a couple months ago. It's interesting stuff.
According to their analyses of the kinds of measures of the sort I
mentioned, up until about 1975, that is, through the "golden age,"
as it's called, social health went up, more or less, with the
economy. It kind of tracked the economy. As that got better,
social health got better. From 1975 they've diverged. The economy
has continued to grow, even though more slowly than before, but
social health has declined. And it's continuing to decline. In
fact, they conclude that the United States is in a recession. A
serious recession from the point of view of measures that matter.
That's when you're beginning to look at questions like sustainable
development, meaningful development. But that requires a
completely different perspective on all of these issues of economy
and consequences, and so on. One that definitely should be
undertaken. And those are the issues that arise when people are
talking about sustainable development. But the U.S. certainly has
no such program. It should. But it doesn't.
Q: We had wanted tonight to be a celebration of activism, and I
think that this turnout is a good indication that it is just that.
Many people have traveled a long ways to come here. I wanted to
acknowledge that there are about 60 students and faculty from the
United World College. They're students from around the world.
They'll have traveled about 250 miles tonight by the time they go
and come back to their school. There were a lot of questions about
what the individual can do and what society can do to respond
positively and productively to the kind of monopolization of power
that we're seeing.
But rather than ask that question, Dr. Chomsky continues on a
schedule like this week after week, year after year. He was booked
18 months in advance when we tried to first ask him to join us for
this celebration. This is actually the 21st year of IRC; we're
celebrating the 20th anniversary late because we wanted to
celebrate it with Dr. Chomsky. But I would like to close by asking
him what is it that sustains him, and what is it that gives him
hope, and what is it that inspires him to keep on going like he
has been doing for so many years.
Noam: That's easy. It's groups like IRC who do the real work. The
really important work is done by people who are at it
day-after-day, whatever the activity is (and there are plenty of
them), most of them unknown. You look over past history; the
people who have really changed the world in a decent direction,
nobody knows their names. Take, say, the civil rights movement in
the United States. How many of you know the names of the people
who actually were at the forefront, like SNCC workers? Nobody
knows their names. A few, maybe. That kind of dedication, energy,
activism, everywhere -- if anybody has an opportunity to
participate in it now and then, it's a gift. Thank you.
Footnotes
1. This was the 1886 Supreme Court decision, Santa Clara County
v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company [118 U.S. 394] in which
the 5-4 opinion ruled that a private corporation was a
"natural person" under the US Constitution, sheltered by the
14th Amendment, which requires due process in the criminal
prosecution of "persons." A copy of this decision is
available at
http://www.ratical.org/corporations/SCvSPR1886.html
2. For more on the history of corporate charters granted by U.S.
state power, as opposed to those granted by the divine right
of European kings, see "TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS: Citizenship
and the Charter of Incorporation," by Richard Grossman and
Frank Adams, 1993 and "Asserting Democratic Control Over
Corporations: A Call To Lawyers ," by Richard Grossman and
Ward Morehouse, Fall 1995.
3. See the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, Biosafety Home Page,
a sector of the Convention on Biological Diversity website
(http://www.biodiv.org/), for more information.
4. See "The Precautionary Principle,"Rachel's Environment &
Health Weekly, 2/19/98, and "Use and Abuse of The
Precautionary Principle," ISIS submission to US Advisory
Committee on International Economic Policy (ACIEP) Biotech.
Working Group, July 13, 2000
http://www.ratical.org/co-globalize/NC022600.html (hypertext)
http://www.ratical.org/co-globalize/NC022600.txt (text only)
http://www.ratical.org/co-globalize/NC022600.pdf (print ready)