Keeping the Rabble in Line Copyright ⌐ 1994 by Noam Chomsky and David
                                 Barsamian

                             Table of Contents

               Introduction

               1. The World Bank, GATT and Free Trade

               2. They Don't Even Know That They Don't Know

               3. Race

               4. Class

               5. Media, Knowledge, and Objectivity

               6. Crime and Gun Control

               7. The Emerging Global Economic Order

               8. Reflections on Democracy

               9. Health Care

                          -----------------------

                                Introduction

Keeping the Rabble in Line is a sequel as well as a departure from
Chronicles of Dissent. In this latest collection Noam Chomsky focuses on
economic and trade issues and the emerging global economic order. While an
increasingly spectacle-driven media wine and dine us on a menu of O.J.
Simpson, Tonya Harding, or whatever the current diversion is, major shifts
in the international scene are occurring. As Chomsky points out,
nation-states are becoming increasingly challenged by the power and reach
of transnational corporations. The latter may be the defining feature of
the coming era. Our response will be crucial. Again and again in these
interviews and elsewhere Chomsky suggests the need to organize and become
active. Passive consumption of information is not enough. Rabble will
hopefully get people moving in a practical direction, be it direct action
protests, getting involved with or establishing a community radio station,
producing and distributing a video, starting a bookstore, publishing a
newsletter or having discussions in your living room with a few friends.

I think Chomsky's contribution lies in the fact that he constantly stresses
not just the need to be informed and act but that we are all capable of
doing so. His own commitment, involvement and accessibility is a concrete
example. He is a cartographer. He provides a detailed road map to assist in
figuring out where things are and in charting out routes. And in another
sense he is a memory bank. So while the punditocracy engineer history
Chomsky is there as a constant corrective to remind us about the concerted
U.S. effort to destroy popular organizations in post-war Europe or the
monstrous crimes of the Indochina War or the real accomplishments of the
Nixons, Kissingers, Clintons and other luminaries who direct the global
pillage.

The interviews in this collection were recorded in Chomsky's office at MIT
or by phone. "Crime and Gun Control" was a live radio call-in on KGNU in
Boulder. Titles reflect the core theme of the interviews but each
discussion covers several topics. Many people from all over ask me to ask
him certain questions. It would be impossible to acknowledge everyone's
contribution but Carlos Otero in particular has been most helpful with his
criticisms, suggestions and encouragement. My thanks to Sandy Adler for her
transcriptions. Much appreciation to Noam Chomsky for his time and effort.

     David Barsamian
     August 1, 1994

                          -----------------------

                    The World Bank, GATT and Free Trade

                              April 20, 1992

DB: In 1944 at the Bretton Woods conference in New Hampshire the World Bank
and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) were both created. What function
do these two major financial entities play?

Their early role was in helping to carry through the reconstruction of the
state capitalist industrial societies that had been wrecked by the Second
World War. After that they shifted to what is called "development," which
is often a form of controlled underdevelopment in the Third World, which
means designing and supporting particular kinds of programs for the Third
World. At this point we move into controversy. Their effect, and you can
argue about their intention, is overwhelmingly to integrate the South, the
old colonial areas, into the global society dominated by concentrated
sectors of wealth within the North, the rich society.

DB: You know that old song, "Where Have All The Flowers Gone"? Well, where
have all the billions gone? The World Bank has lent tens of billions of
dollars. Who lent what to whom exactly? What did it do there?

You can't answer that simply. In the advanced industrial societies [that
money] helped carry out a reconstruction from postwar damage. In the Third
World [lending has] had mixed effects. It's had effects in changing the
nature of agriculture, developing infrastructure, steering projects towards
particular areas and away from other areas. It's been part of the long
process of trying to undercut import substitution and move toward export
oriented agriculture. By and large [World Bank loans have] been a
subsidiary to the policies of those who control it. The United States has
an overwhelming role in the financial institution because of its wealth and
power. And the United States and its immediate allies have designed
programs of what they called development throughout the world. The money
may have gone into anything from dams to agro-export producers to
occasionally some peasant project.

DB: The International Monetary Fund has been vilified in the Third World
for the draconian measures that it has imposed on those developing
countries.

Take a Latin American country today. There is a huge debt crisis. Remember
that the Bretton Woods system basically broke down in the early 1970s. The
Bretton Woods system involved regulation of currencies, convertibility of
the dollar for gold, all sorts of other rules which essentially made the
United States an international banker. By 1970 or so the U.S. could no
longer sustain that. It was very advantageous to the United States in the
1950s and 1960s. It allowed enormous overseas investment by American
corporations. But by 1970 the U.S. was unable to sustain [the role of
international banker]. President Nixon dismantled the system in 1971. That
led to an enormous amount of unregulated currency floating around in
international channels. The world was awash with unregulated capital,
particularly after the rise in the oil prices. Bankers wanted to lend that
capital, and they did. They lent it primarily to Third World countries,
which means to elite elements. For example, Latin American dictatorships
would go on huge borrowing binges. The results were praised in the West as
"economic miracles," like the Brazilian "miracle" under the generals which
left that country saddled with huge indebtedness. When the 1980s came
along, U.S. interest rates went up and started pulling money toward the
United States and increasing interest payments on the debt. The Latin
American economies started going into free fall. Capital flowed out of them
at a rapid rate. They were unable to control their own internal wealthy
classes. The capital export from Latin America may not have been at the
level of the debt, but it probably wasn't very far below it. There was a
flow of hundreds of billions of dollars from south to north, partly debt
service, which far outweighs new aid by the late 1980s -- payment of
interest on the debt, and so on, and other forms of capital flight. By now,
deeply impoverished African countries are even exporting capital to the
international lending institutions.

The net effect of this is what some people jokingly call a program in which
the poor in the rich countries pay the rich in the poor countries. That's
approximately the way it comes out. Then the IMF comes along, run by the
wealthy countries, which have certain rules for the weak. They are that if
you have a high level of inflation and the currency isn't stable and
various other economic indicators aren't satisfied, then you impose extreme
forms of austerity: balance the budget, cut back services, control the
currency, etc. That's neoliberal free market economics. That's typically
disastrous for the general mass of the population. That's why the rich
countries themselves will never accept those rules unless they're forced
to. For example, there was a time in the late 1970s when Britain was forced
to adopt certain IMF rules because of its weakness. But no country rich or
powerful enough would ever do it, like the U.S., for example, which has
incredible debt but doesn't accept IMF "suggestions". We're too powerful to
follow those rules. Third World countries, which are much weaker,
especially those which are under the control of Western-oriented elites
anyway, who often benefit by it, do follow the rules and there's disaster
for the population. That's why you get vilification. The same thing is
happening in Eastern Europe now. The whole neoliberal free market story is
basically designed for the benefit of the people who are going to win the
game. Nobody else follows those rules. The West doesn't follow them either
when it's not going to win. For example, the World Bank estimates that
right now protectionist measures imposed by the rich countries cost the
Third World more than twice as much as total aid going from the North to
the South -- and that "aid" is mostly a disguised form of export promotion.

DB: To whom are the World Bank and the IMF accountable?

To the people who put the money in, which means a bunch of rich countries,
primarily the United States, which is the dominant element there. It's
mainly funded by the wealthy states, and the U.S. has the largest vote, so
that's who they're beholden to.

DB: Where does the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, GATT, fit into
this economic picture? One commentator has called it the "economic teeth of
the new world order."

GATT is the international trading system, also set up in the 1940s. It's in
the news now because for the last several years the Uruguay Round of GATT
negotiations has been going on with an effort to achieve some new form of
freeing up international trade. Freeing up international trade in itself,
in a general sense, is not a bad thing. It's often a good thing. The point
is, nobody goes into that game, if they have the power, without ample
protection for their own internal needs. So for example every one of the
Western powers, including the United States, is entering the GATT
negotiations with a certain agenda, a mixture of liberalization and
protectionism geared to the particular strengths and weaknesses of that
economy. When we speak of "that economy" we mean the people in the dominant
positions in it. So the European Community wants high level protection for
the aerospace industry and agricultural production. The United States has a
mixture of policies. It's calling for liberalization and free trade in many
areas. On the other hand, it's also calling for enhanced protection in
areas where the U.S. is strong. Take so-called services like banking. The
U.S. is calling for a liberalization of services in the Third World, which
would have the instantaneous effect of swamping and overwhelming all Third
World banks and financial institutions by western ones, since they're so
much richer and more powerful. That would eliminate the possibility of any
national industrial development programs within the Third World. That's the
kind of liberalization that the U.S. is in favor of. It means that Third
World economies would be managed by western banks and those who run them
and the governments that are tied to them.

On the other hand, the U.S. is calling for more protection in other areas,
particularly intellectual property rights, which includes anything from pop
music to cinema to software to patents. Right now the U.S. is racing ahead
in patenting what may turn out to be parts of genes. The idea is to patent
the genes of corn, or for that matter humans, so that future biotechnology,
which will involve various kinds of genetic engineering, will be in the
hands of mainly U.S. private firms. They will control that field, and they
want to make sure it's protected. So they want long patent rights and so
on. That means that drugs, software, new technology, new agricultural
forms, any form of biotechnology that may involve health will be in the
hands of Merck Corporation and others like them who will make tens of
billions of dollars in profits. It means that India, which could duplicate
a lot of this much cheaper, duplicate Merck drugs at a fraction of the
cost, will not be permitted to do it. The U.S. also demands product rather
than only process patents, to insure, say, that India's pharmaceutical
industry doesn't invent a cheaper way to produce some drug -- a barrier to
efficiency and innovation, but a boon for profits. That's understandable on
the part of the rich. They want to control the future, naturally, and that
means control technology. The biotechnology aspect, the patenting of genes,
has been causing an international furor in the scientific world. It can
have a huge impact in the future. One shouldn't minimize it.

The U.S. (like others) also insists on a high level of protection for U.S.
shipping. Shipping between U.S. ports has to be in U.S. ships. If Alaskan
oil comes down to California, it has to be in U.S. ships. The U.S. insists
that anything involving U.S. goods be done to a very high percentage in
U.S. ships, which benefits the U.S. maritime industry.

Similarly, "defense" expenditures are not considered subsidies under GATT
rules. That's enormously important for the U.S., which spends more on its
military system than the rest of the world combined, as has always used
that as a cover for massive public subsidy to high-tech industry. The point
is that there is a mixture of protectionism and liberalization geared to
the interests of those who are designing the policies, which are the
powerful economic forces within the state in question. That's not a great
surprise, after all, but that's what GATT is all about, and that's what the
negotiations are about.

If the current GATT programs succeed, it's clear that they're tending
towards a world government ruled by a club of rich men who meet in their
organizations, like the G-7 meetings, the meetings of the seven richest
industrial countries, which have their own institutions, like the IMF and
the World Bank, which have a network of arrangements established in GATT
and which administer a system of what's sometimes been called "corporate
mercantilism." Remember that although this is called "liberalization" and
"free trade," there's a tremendous amount of managed trade internal to it.
So huge corporations which are often more powerful than many states carry
out controlled, managed trade internally. This means trade across borders,
too, because they're internationalized. They do planning of investments, of
production, of commercial interactions, manipulation of prices, and so on,
and they naturally manage it for their own interests. Corporate
mercantilism is fine. It's governments that are not allowed to get into the
game. The rich western powers don't have any objection at all to managed
trade. They just don't want it to be done by governments, because
governments have a dangerous feature that corporations don't have:
governments may to some extent fall under the influence of popular forces,
usually to a limited extent. But to some extent there's always that fear.
There's no such fear in corporations. They are immune from any form of
public control or even surveillance. Therefore they are much more
acceptable management agents for this mercantilist system being designed
globally in the interests of the rich. GATT plays its role in this.

DB: You mentioned the powerful economic forces. Increasingly those forces
transcend frontiers. There has been a massive internationalization of
capital and finance over the last few years. What are the implications of
that?

First of all, there's nothing novel about it. Back in the 1930s there were,
for example, notorious interconnections between, say, I.G. Farben in
Germany and Du Pont. In fact, big U.S. corporations were essentially
producing for the German war machine right up until the war and some even
claim afterwards in various devious ways. But there was a big change after
the Second World War. There was a big upsurge in the creation of
multinational firms, even beyond the traditional multinationals, for
example, the energy corporations, which always were highly
internationalized. But it extended much beyond. The Marshall Plan, for
example, gave a big shot in the arm to the internationalization of capital.
It would designate some project in Belgium where you could build a steel
complex. It would then encourage bids from American corporations, which
would naturally win the bidding most of the time. Marshall Plan funds were
then used, as intended, to underlie the expansion of U.S. investment
through the rich areas, primarily in Europe. That led to an explosion of
international corporations. U.S. foreign investment exploded in the 1950s
and 1960s. Not long after came European international capital. Britain had
always been substantially involved in the internationalization of capital.
In recent years Japan has joined the game and done plenty of foreign
investing. This has increased through the 1980s.

There are a lot of reasons for this in the recent period. One is the one I
mentioned before, the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system, which led to
an enormous amount of unregulated internationalized wealth. Another was a
revolution in telecommunications, which makes it extremely easy to control
international operations in which production is done in one place and the
financing comes from somewhere else and you shift the dollars around. That
means you can have executive offices in a skyscraper in New York and
production facilities in Papua, New Guinea and fake banks in the Cayman
Islands which may be nothing more than a fax machine set up to evade
regulation. You can transfer funds around. You can control and manage
importing and exporting within the corporate empire through management
decisions. It can be scattered all over the world, with branch offices in
Zurich. That's had a lot of effect. Everyone knows that the U.S. share in
international trade has been declining in the last ten years. But in fact
if you look at the share in international trade of U.S.-based corporations,
it has not been declining. It may have been either stable or slightly
increasing. Everyone knows the U.S. is supposed to have a big trade
deficit. On the other hand, if you take into account the operations of
overseas producers that are part of U.S.-based corporations, and imports
into the United States that are actually transfers from U.S. corporations
operating abroad to the same U.S. corporations operating internally, if
they import parts for their own production, it probably levels out the
trade deficit, maybe even gives the U.S. a trade surplus.

The functioning institutions in the world system are increasingly corporate
empires. I say "increasingly" because national states, the rich states, at
least, retain substantial importance. They are instruments of integrated
corporate systems. And also increasing because it's an old phenomenon. It
goes back to the origins of capitalism. It is true that it has grown by
leaps and bounds in recent years.

DB: To continue with GATT: The Environmental News Network has said that
GATT will "open borders for businesses seeking lower labor costs and less
rigorous environmental regulation, thus blackmailing U.S workers to accept
deteriorating working conditions and lower wages or lose their jobs." Do
you think that's a fair assessment?

It's not even controversial. Of course it will have that effect. It's
already having that effect. Take the free-trade agreement with Canada. It's
actually working both ways. Canada has just objected to U.S. environmental
regulations on use of asbestos, claiming that that's interference with free
trade. Canada is an asbestos exporter, and they want the barriers lowered.
Perhaps they've already won on that, meaning that U.S. environmental
regulations on asbestos will have to decline. Sooner or later the U.S. is
probably going to object to the Canadian Health Service as an interference
with free trade because it means that Canadian-based corporations are freed
from the burden of paying parts of health costs that U.S. corporations have
to bear because of the grotesquely incompetent and highly bureaucratized
health system. Threats from U.S. insurance companies were enough to cause
Ontario to drop plans for a provincial auto insurance program that would
have reduced costs, but cut out the highly inefficient private corporations
-- an interference with free trade, they claimed, and won. Canada has lost
several hundred thousand jobs. There are various estimates, but none are
less than a quarter of a million jobs, to the United States, manufacturing
and similar type labor, because Canadian corporations would much prefer to
produce in the southeastern United States, where the government enforces
what are called "right-to-work laws," which means state policy coerces
labor to ensure that there will be no unionization. As a result, working
conditions are far inferior. Wages are less. Naturally, corporations will
move to such places. Even the threat to move serves to discipline labor. In
general, the effect of the free-trade agreements will be to move to the
lowest common denominator with regard to wages, and environmental
protection.

DB: So do you think that under the rubric of free trade that the Canadian
health care system would be seen as an unfair advantage that Canadians
have?

It hasn't yet happened, but I would expect it. I expect that American
corporations sooner or later may decide that it would be a good idea to
undermine the Canadian Health Service by an argument of that sort. There
are a lot of calculations involved in that. One problem is that production
is so internationalized that Canadian corporations are often U.S.
corporations.

DB: What did you make of the spectacle of the President of the United
States going to Japan with about a score of CEOs of major U.S. corporations
and essentially demanding a kind of "international affirmative action," as
Jesse Jackson has called it?

First of all, remember that the propaganda phrase was, "I'm going for jobs,
jobs, jobs." How much Bush cares about jobs you can see by looking at U.S.
policy towards American workers. So while he's talking about jobs, jobs,
jobs, the U.S. government is trying to set up the basis for maquiladora
industries in Central America to take away American jobs. The phrase means
"profits, profits, profits." That's what he was there for. It was kind of
stupid for the CEOs to come along. It left the United States as an object
of ridicule. But whether they were along or not, that's what the trip was
for. Everybody should have known that. The trip was to coerce Japan into
accepting managed trade, meaning what's called here "fair-trade practices,"
which means mercantilist arrangements between powerful states to violate
free-trade arrangements and ensure that their own powerful economic forces
get benefits. There's nothing novel about that. The Reagan administration
combined free-trade bombast with a highly protectionist record. Take
control over imports. Various kinds of control over imports amount to
duties. They practically doubled, from about twelve percent to about
twenty-three percent, during the Reagan years, through what are sometimes
called "voluntary arrangements," meaning "you do what we say or we'll close
off your market." The latest effort to get Japan to buy American auto parts
is just another part of the state-managed trade system that the rich always
insist upon while of course beating their breasts about free trade when you
can use it as a weapon against someone else.

DB: Is Japan powerful enough to resist?

That's an interesting question. No one really has answers to these
questions. The domestic and international economies are only very dimly
understood by anyone. So anything we say will sound a lot more confident
than it ought to be. My own suspicion has always been that the strength of
the Japanese economy has been overestimated, that it's much flimsier than
is alleged. For objective reasons. Japan is a resource-poor country, highly
dependent upon export for survival. In particular it depends very heavily
on the U.S. market. It's expanding into Asian markets, but that doesn't
compare with the U.S. market. The U.S. remains the richest country in the
world. Also, it's dependent, unlike the United States -- which has plenty
of internal resources and enough military power to control other sources of
raw materials -- on trade for resources and raw materials as well. Also,
the Japanese, when you look at the numbers, look very rich. But if you look
at the way people live, they don't look very rich. People are crammed into
tiny apartments. They live a highly coerced and submissive existence. If
you develop any reasonable quality of life standards, Japan would not rank
very high by many measures, although it ranks quite high in others, like
health, for example. So it's a mixed story. It think there are serious
weaknesses in that economy. I'm not all that surprised by the current
recession and financial crisis in Japan. They have such resources and
capital. They'll doubtless pull out of this one.

DB: Along with the Arab oil producing states and some portions of Europe,
Japan seems to be the only other area where there is excess capital
formation for investment.

There is a lot of excess capital, but it's not clear what it's going to
look like after this crisis has passed. A lot of it was based on very
chancy investments and a huge bubble in real estate which was highly
inflated. But it's still true. They have plenty of excess capital. In my
opinion, German-based Europe is a more likely prospect for a world economic
leader in the long term.

DB: You just said "crisis," which reminds me of something I've been hearing
as long as I can remember, and I am certain you have as well, the "current
crisis in capitalism." It seems to be an ongoing story. Is this particular
crisis any different?

There has been a global stagnation for about twenty years now. The growth
rates and the rise in productivity of the 1950s and 1960s are things of the
past. It leveled off around the early 1970s. Things like the breakdown of
the Bretton Woods system were symptomatic. Since then there has been a kind
of stagnation. It's not level across the globe. For example, for Africa
it's been a catastrophe. For Latin America it's been a catastrophe. In
fact, for most of the domains of the capitalist world it has been
absolutely catastrophic, including internally. Large parts of American and
British society have suffered severely, too. On the other hand, other
sectors have done quite well. The so-called newly industrializing countries
of East Asia, the ones in the Japanese orbit, like South Korea and Taiwan,
didn't succumb in the 1980s to the international crisis of capitalism as
Latin America did. Up until then their growth rates had been pretty
comparable. But they separated sharply in the 1980s, with the East Asian
ones doing much better. Again, nobody really knows the reasons for this,
but one factor appears to have been that, unlike Latin America, the East
Asian countries don't make any pretense of following free-market rules.
Capital flight was a huge problem in Latin America. The wealthy just sent
their capital elsewhere, or else it was just payment on debt. East Asian
countries didn't do that. South Korea has no capital flight problem because
the state is powerful enough not only to control labor, which is the norm,
but also to control capital. You can get the death penalty for capital
flight. Other forms of state-corporate managed industrial and financial
development did protect them from this global crisis of capitalism. Within
the rich countries there were various reactions. The United States and
Britain are probably the ones that suffered most from it, thanks to
Reaganite and Thatcherite measures.

Whether you call this a crisis or not, it's not a well enough defined term
so you can answer the question. For a very large part, probably a
considerable majority, of the American work force, real wages have either
stagnated or maybe even declined for about a twenty-year period.

DB: The decline of major U.S. industries, such as auto, textiles,
electronics, etc., is well documented. It's not even a matter of
discussion. The fastest area of growth in jobs in the U.S. is in such areas
as janitors, waiters, truck drivers.

Actually, the fastest growing white collar profession is security guard.

DB: What does that tell you?

It means that there is a large superfluous population that has to be
controlled and a large number of rich people who have to be protected from
them.

DB: Is there any economic strategy or planning to create real jobs with
decent wages?

For U.S. workers? Why should there be?

DB: It would seem that elites would want to protect their position.

But their position does not rely primarily on U.S. labor. They do want to
have a domestic work force for services, but production is a different
matter.

DB: But if there's major economic dislocation in this country, unrest would
surely result and their position of power and strength would be threatened.

That depends on whether you can keep the public under control. For example,
the Washington Post reported on a study about black males in Washington,
D.C.

DB: Forty-six percent of all black males between 18 and 35 are incarcerated
in the District of Columbia.

I think they say at any particular moment about seventy percent of them are
somehow within the control of the justice system, on probation, etc. That's
a way of keeping people from bothering us: keep them in jail. If they're
not useful for wealth production they have to be controlled somehow. But
it's not clear that that's a threat to the elites in the Washington area.
Or take New York City, which is an absolute disaster. But you can walk
around wealthy sectors of downtown Manhattan that look very glitzy and
cheery.

DB: Prison construction in the U.S. is one of the fastest growing
industries.

Yes. The U.S. has by far the highest per capita prison population in the
world. Even things like the drug epidemic are functional in a way. I'm not
claiming that the government starts it for this purpose. Things go on
because they have certain functions for elite groups that set policy. One
effect of the so-called "drug war," which has very little to do with
controlling drugs and a lot to do with controlling people, has been to
create a huge explosion in the prison population. Anybody who works with
prisons will tell you that a very substantial part of the prison population
is people who are in there for possession, not for harming anyone. That's a
technique of control. Whether it's an economical technique of control you
could argue. Look how much it costs to control people by putting them in
prison and having them on drugs and therefore not bothering you or having
them shooting and robbing each other in inner cities. How that compares
with other techniques of social control would be a hard question to answer.

However, to go back to your original question. If you were a wealthy
professional or corporate executive living in Westchester County, there are
certain things you want. You want a comfortable environment, a golf course,
to be able to go to the theater in downtown Manhattan. You want your
executive offices to be in good shape. You want fancy restaurants around.
You want to be able to leave your limousine somewhere without having it
broken into. You want good schools for your children. You want a powerful
army to protect your interests. You want a skilled work force insofar as
you need it. But much of what happens in this country is of no interest to
you. If most of the country goes down the tube, that's no big problem.

DB: I love your comment "'Ultimately' is a notion that does not occur in
capitalist planning." Why not?

First of all, there are no capitalist systems. If there were a capitalist
system it couldn't survive for more than a couple of weeks. The only
capitalist systems are the ones that are imposed on Third World countries
for the purpose of weakening them so that they'll collapse and be taken
over by the rich. But there are systems that are more or less capitalist.
The more capitalist they are, that is, the more competitive, and less
planned and integrated, the more they will tend towards short-term gains.
That's inherent in the system. To the extent that a system is competitive
and unplanned, those participating in it will be devoting their resources,
both intellectual and capital, to short-term gain, short-term profit,
short-term increase in market share. The reasons for that are pretty
straightforward. Let's imagine that there are three car companies: Ford,
General Motors, and Chrysler. Let's say they're really competitive. Then
suppose that General Motors decided to put its resources into dealing with
problems of global pollution or even trying to produce better cars ten
years from now that would be better than those of Ford and Chrysler. At the
same time its competitors Ford and Chrysler would be putting their
resources into increasing profits and market share tomorrow, next month,
next year. During that period, General Motors would be out of luck. They
wouldn't have the capital and the profits to carry out their plans. That's
exactly why in countries like Japan in the 1950s, the ministry that
directed and organized the Japanese economy, together with the big
corporate conglomerates, explicitly and openly decided to abandon
free-market illusions and to carry out national industrial planning aimed
at Japanese development in "strategic sectors" with high long-term
potential. In newly developing industries, the industries of the future,
the startup costs can be quite considerable. Profit doesn't come for some
time. In a competitive, more capitalist society, you're out of luck. But in
a more managed society you can deal with that. There are many well-known
free-market inadequacies that typically lead capitalist entrepreneurs to
call upon the state to intervene for their benefit. In Japan this led to a
conscious decision to carry out substantial, organized, planned
interference with the market mechanism so that the economy could prosper.
Questions of pollution are perfect examples. If one company tries to devote
resources to effects on the environment, they will simply be undercut by
other companies which are not doing it. Therefore they will not be in a
position to compete in the market. These are matters which are inherent in
our capitalist systems. There were experiments with laissez faire in
Britain in the nineteenth century, when people actually took their own
rhetoric seriously. But they pretty quickly called it off. It's too
destructive.

DB: So you're saying that this class of managers is impervious to the
bridges literally collapsing on the homeless and tunnels bursting under the
city of Chicago?

Not because they're bad people, but because if they stopped being
impervious to it they wouldn't be managers any more. Suppose that the CEO
of some big corporation decides he's going to be a nice guy and devote his
resources from that corporation to the homeless people under the bridges
that are falling down or to global pollution.

DB: He's out of a job.

He's out of a job. That's inherent in the system. These are institutional
facts. If you want to watch this at its more extreme limits, you should
take a look at the World Bank plans on pollution. These recently surfaced.
One of my favorite issues of the New York Times must have been February 7,
back in the business section. There was a report called something like "Can
Capitalism Save the Ozone Layer?" Ozone being a metaphor for saving the
environment. The question was whether capitalism could save the
environment. That was a story by their financial correspondent Sylvia
Nasser. The World Bank had come out with a consensus report for the rich
countries on a position to take at the Rio conference in June on the global
environment. It was written by Lawrence Summers, the chief liberal
economist from Harvard. The idea is that the rich countries should take the
position, led by the World Bank, that the problem of pollution is that the
poor countries, the Third World, don't follow rational policies. "Rational"
means market policies. Many of them are resource and raw material
producers, energy producers, and they sometimes try to use their own
resources for their own development. That's irrational. That means that
they're using resources for themselves, often at below market rates, when
there are more efficient producers in the West who would use those
resources more efficiently. That's interference with the market. Also,
these Third World countries often introduce some measures to protect their
own population from total devastation and starvation, and that's an
interference with the market. It's an interference with rational market
policies. The effect of this Third World irrationality is to increase
production in places where it shouldn't be taking place, to increase
development in places where it shouldn't be going on, and that causes
pollution. So if we could only convince those Third World countries to
behave rationally, that is, to give all their resources to us and stop
protecting their own populations, that would reduce the pollution problem.

This document was produced with a straight face. It happened that on the
same day on the same page of the New York Times there was a little article,
unrelated, about a World Bank memo, an internal memo, that had leaked. It
had been published by the London Economist, a right-wing British Wall
Street Journal, but weekly. It was written by the same Lawrence Summers.
The Times had a brief, slightly apologetic summary of it, including an
interview with Summers in which he claimed it was intended to be sarcastic.
The World Bank memo added to what I have just said about Third World
irrationality. It said that any kind of production is going to involve
pollution. So what you have to do is to do it as rationally as possible,
meaning with minimal cost. So suppose we have a chemical factory producing
carcinogenic gases that are going into the environment. If we put that
factory in Los Angeles, we can calculate the number of people who will die
of cancer in the next forty years. We can even calculate the value of their
lives in terms of income or whatever. Suppose we put that factory in Sao
Paulo or some even poorer area. Many fewer people will die of cancer
because they'll die anyway of something else, and besides, their lives
aren't worth as much by any rational measure. So it makes sense to move all
the polluting industries to places where poor people die, not where rich
people die. That's on simple economic grounds.

Combine that with the other document. What it says is that the Third World
should stop producing and protecting its own population because that's
irrational. We should send our polluting industries to them because that is
rational. Summers in this memo points out that you might have
counterarguments to this based on human rights and the right of people to a
certain quality of life. But he points out that if we allowed those
arguments to enter into our calculations, then just about everything the
World Bank does would be undermined. That's quite accurate. That's supposed
to be a reductio ad absurdum. Obviously we can't undermine everything the
World Bank does, so obviously we can't allow such considerations to enter.
We consider only economic rationality, of course geared to the interests of
the World Bank. That's what you do with pollution. Try to convince the
Third World to stop producing and to stop protecting their own population
and to accept our pollution. It's all perfectly explicable on rational
economic grounds. Any graduate student in economics can prove it to you.

DB: Apropos of this blindness of the planners: you have a fantasy ...

It's not blindness. I think it's very reasonable on their part.

DB: Within their framework.

Yes.

DB: You tell of a fantasy that involves the Wall Street Journal and the
greenhouse effect.

Someone asked me once and I simply said that if I had the talent, which I
don't, I would write a short story about the Wall Street Journal. I suppose
their offices are on the seventeenth floor of some New York skyscraper.
They're sitting there in that office putting out an issue of the Wall
Street Journal claiming once again that the greenhouse effect is just a
fraud invented by left fanatics. As the issue goes to press the water level
would have risen to that point and you could hear them gurgling as they
start the printer running. That's about what it's like.

DB: Let's talk about organized labor unions in the United States. Only
fifteen or sixteen percent of the total U.S. work force is now unionized,
far below, perhaps by half or even more, what it was decades ago. This is
the era of givebacks, benefits reductions, skipping, deferring or
eliminating raises. Does organized labor really have a positive,
progressive role to play?

It should, but it's in a very weakened state. It's been weak for a long
time, but it was smashed during the 1980s. It started with Reagan's success
in breaking the air-traffic controllers' strike, and it's continuing until
today. The UAW just lost a serious strike at Caterpillar. Their strategy
has been so overcome by class collaboration -- We nice guys work together
with management -- that when the crisis came at Caterpillar they were
probably unprepared. They were simply wiped out. At this point Caterpillar
probably won't even live up to the terms of the latest agreement. It seems
to be continuing to lock them out. These are serious blows to the labor
movement, and that means to American democracy, but they're much to the
benefit of the small sectors that are enriching themselves. Does labor have
a part to play? It depends on whether working people can get their act
together and rebuild the labor movement and turn it into a powerful force
for both people's rights and democracy as it once was. It's going to have
to be rebuilt from the bottom up. Labor's role has declined significantly
since the 1940s. They're not unaware of it. Doug Fraser, the former head of
the UAW, pointed out almost fifteen years ago that there has been a bitter,
one-sided class war led by American capitalists fighting against labor,
while labor, meaning labor bureaucrats, have been seduced by
class-collaboration slogans. They're not fighting a class war. The effect
of a bitter, one-sided class war is very evident.

DB: The New York Times, in talking about the economic woes, says "There is
little mystery about what caused the economic problems. The country is
suffering a hangover from the mergers, rampant speculation, overbuilding,
heavy borrowing and irresponsible government fiscal policy in the 1980s."
How well did the Times and its brethren in the media during this period of
economic dislocation and decline actually cover the events and give the
American people information that they could act upon?

The Times isn't in the business of giving the American people information
they can act upon. They hailed the Reagan revolution and its achievements.
There were sectors of the population that profited marvelously, including
the corporate sectors, of which the Times is a part. They couldn't fail to
see that there are social costs. You can't walk around New York City and
not see that there are severe social costs, so they probably saw it too.
But this was considered as a glorious period of success. There were people
who were upset about it. Take a look at, say, Mondale's funding in 1984: a
lot of it was from fiscal conservatives who were worried about the
long-term effects to their own interests of this kind of mad-dog
Keynesianism, wild crazed spending, and government stimulation of the
economy through borrowing that was going on through the Reagan years.
People could see that that was going to be very problematic for the
economy. Take what's just happened in Chicago. The estimates of the costs
of fixing those leaks in the underground tunnels might have been at the
level of $10,000. They didn't fix them because they wanted to save the
$10,000 as part of the cutback in civic services. The net effect will be a
loss of maybe over a billion dollars or more. That's a loss to private
capital, too.

DB: But compared to the S&L bailout that's peanuts.

Yes, the S&L bailout is much bigger than that. Chicago is just one piece of
a growing disaster. Spending on infrastructure has declined radically in
the last ten years, and that's going to have its costs. What happened in
Chicago is going to happen all over the place.

DB: It can't help but affect even the elites. The area that was flooded ...

And it's hurting them in Chicago. Chicago businesses are suffering.
Insurance companies are going to suffer.

DB: They're not going to like that.

No, but there's not a lot that they can do about it except to accept more
long-term, integrated state corporate planning. There are other
possibilities, like democracy, but nobody's going to talk about that.

DB: Yeah, right. And maybe there will just be more slogans like
"belt-tightening" and "austerity" and "biting the bullet" as opposed to
genuine economic policy.

There is genuine economic policy, but it's geared to the short term
economic interests of the rich. It's very genuine. And there's plenty of
state intervention for that purpose. Take the Pentagon budget. That's
massive state intervention in the economy for the benefit of the rich.
That's what keeps the electronics industry going, for example.
                          -----------------------

                 They Don't Even Know That They Don't Know

                             December 16, 1992

DB: Tis the season of fantasies and fairy tales, and in that holiday
spirit, today's New York Times editorial offers the following history
lesson: "America became rich by tapping its natural resources and building
large manufacturing plants that imposed rigid work rules." What an
inspiring story!

Actually, it's a good year to mention that. This year is sort of historic
in this respect. For one thing, it's the centenary of the destruction of
the largest union in the United States, the American Steelworkers Union, by
Andrew Carnegie, who had just in 1892 established the Carnegie Steel Works,
which became the first billion dollar U.S. corporation. His most advanced
plant was in Homestead, Pennsylvania, a working-class city with a
working-class mayor and a lively cultural scene and a commitment to
workers' rights and a union base. He locked the workers out. They took over
control of the plant and the town. He sent Pinkerton guards, who were
driven away. He then got the National Guard sent in, which took over. It
was exactly as the New York Times described. In fact, they described it at
the time. He was able not only to destroy the union, but to institute
twelve-hour work days, and miserable labor standards. The company history
published not too long after described this as the basis for the enormous
profits that they made. Although he was a pacifist, he succeeded in
overcoming his pacifist principles to take on a huge contract for steel for
naval vessels. The U.S. was then building up a big navy for purposes of
international intervention. He also succeeded crucially, and this is
important, in destroying utterly the democratic structure of the town and
the region. Scholars who went in to investigate Homestead afterwards found
that people were afraid to talk to them. They wouldn't even talk in their
homes because they were too terrified of blacklisting and other
retaliation. When Mother Jones, the eighty-nine-year-old labor organizer,
came to Homestead in 1919 to try to help organize the union again, she was
carted off by the cops when she tried to make a public statement. As late
as the 1930s, when Roosevelt's Secretary of Labor, Frances Perkins, came to
Homestead, she had to be under police protection. It wasn't until the
mid-1930s, in the course of union organizing and great public activism,
that the elements of democracy were restored to Homestead, and they didn't
last very long. The attack on the union started right away.
Nineteen-ninety-two is a historic year in that respect, too. This is the
first time in sixty years that a major corporation has dared to use the
ultimate weapon against a major union. Caterpillar broke a UAW strike by
hiring scabs, just as Carnegie and Frick had done a century earlier. So the
Times has a point to make. If you impose harsh enough working standards,
you can create profits. As the Times well knows, it turns out to be much
easier than before to move production to high-repression, low-wage areas
like Mexico or increasingly, Eastern Europe or Indonesia. There you can
really impose iron work rules and extract a lot of profit and meanwhile
leave the United States with the inner cities that we see. So all that's
accurate. I'm glad to see the Times saying something true. They could have
added a little background but you can't ask for everything.

DB: "America became rich by tapping its inner resources." The brave and
enterprising European settlers came to these shores and found this vast,
empty, fertile land with abundant flora and fauna and developed it, like
some natural process.

That's partly true. They first had to exterminate the native population and
drive them off the lands. "Exterminate" is the word they used, and it's
what they did. After exterminating the population and bringing in huge
numbers of slaves to work for them, they developed the resources.

DB: At the Little Rock economic conference and elsewhere there is much talk
of economic recovery and restoring competitiveness. Gar Alperovitz takes a
dim view that federal policy can reverse basic problems. He writes in
today's New York Times that what is being proposed is "not likely to make a
dent in our deeper economic problems. We may simply be in for a long,
painful era of unresolved economic decay." Would you agree?

I didn't see that piece but I did read this morning's Financial Times from
London, and they talk with some pleasure of the fiscal conservatism shown
by Clinton and his advisors. There are some real issues here. First of all,
as regards Gar Alperovitz's comment, it's accurate, but we have to be
careful in the use of terms. When he says America is in for a long period
of decline, we have to decide what we mean by "America." If by the United
States we mean the geographical area, he is, I'm sure, right. There has
been decline, and there will be further decline, and the country is picking
up many of the aspects of a Third World society. That's an automatic
consequence of sending productive labor elsewhere. GM, as the press
constantly reports, is closing some twenty-four factories in North America.
But what you only read about in the small print is that it's opening new
factories, including for example a $700 million high-tech factory in former
East Germany, an area of huge unemployment where they can pay forty percent
of the wages of Western Europe and none of the benefits. Or, as the
Financial Times, the leading world business journal, puts it, they don't
have to worry about the "pampered West European workers" any longer, they
can just get highly exploited Third World workers now that Eastern Europe
is being pushed back to its traditional Third World status. It's the same
in Mexico, Thailand, etc.

There is a consequence to that. We become a Third World country in some
respects. So if by the United States we mean the geographical area, he's
right. If by the United States we mean U.S.-based corporations, then he's
not right. In fact, the indications are to the contrary. Profits are doing
fine, and a small sector is enriching itself. Even production by U.S.-based
corporations is doing well, if we view the matter globally, as they do. I
think Gar is right in saying that the policies now being discussed will
have only a cosmetic effect on the United States as a geographical area.
But I think they will probably be beneficial to the United States as a
system of U.S.-based finance and industry, which is why the business
community tended to give Clinton a good deal of support.

These last couple of days, the conference, and the elections, too, did deal
with a significant issue. As usual, the issue had to do with a tactical
disagreement within business circles. They are facing an objective problem,
there's no doubt about it. The core of it has to do with what's called
"industrial policy." We have to put aside a lot of nonsense before we can
talk about this. The United States has always had an active state
industrial policy, just like every other industrial country. Outside of
ideologues, the academy, and the press, no one thinks that capitalism is a
viable system, and nobody has thought that for sixty or seventy years, if
ever. It has been understood certainly since the Great Depression and the
Second World War, if not long before, that the only way a system of private
enterprise can survive is if there is extensive government intervention to
regulate disorderly markets and protect private capital from the
destructive effects of the market system, to organize a public subsidy for
targeting advanced sectors of industry, etc. So every advanced country,
whether it's Germany or Japan or by now South Korea or certainly the United
States, France, etc., has always had an active industrial policy. You can
trace this back to the first industrializing country, England, and it's
always been true of U.S. history, increasingly consciously so, since the
Depression and the Second World War. Nobody called it industrial policy. It
was always masked within the Pentagon system, which was, internationally,
an intervention force, though domestically the Pentagon always was, and was
understood to be from the late 1940s, a method by which the government can
coordinate the private economy, can provide welfare to it, can subsidize
it, can arrange the flow of taxpayer money to research and development,
provide a state-guaranteed market for excess production, and target
advanced industries for development, etc. Just about every successful and
flourishing aspect of the U.S. economy has always relied on this kind of
government involvement. Much of it has been masked by the Pentagon system.

Why are people now talking about industrial policy? The reason is that the
mask is dropping. That's an objective problem. It is very difficult now to
get people to be willing to lower their consumption, their aspirations in
order to divert investment funds to high-technology industry on the pretext
that the Russians are coming. There are various efforts to continue this.
In fact, the current public relations stunt in Somalia, in my opinion, is
an effort which I don't think is going to work to try to reinvigorate this
system. But the system is in trouble. Economists and bankers have been
pointing out openly for some time that one of the main reasons why the
current recovery is so sluggish is that the government has not been able to
resort to the traditional pump priming mechanism, the traditional mechanism
of economic stimulation, namely increased military spending with all of its
multiplier effects. That's just not as readily available.

There's another fact that goes right along side it, which is independent of
this. The cutting edge of technology and industry has for some time visibly
been shifting in another direction, away from the electronics-based
advanced industry of the postwar period and towards biology-based industry
and commerce. Biotechnology, genetic engineering, design of seeds and
drugs, even animal species, etc. is expected to be a huge growth industry
with enormous profits. It's vastly more important than electronics. In
comparison, electronics is a sort of frill. This has to do with the means
of life and existence, which the government and U.S. corporations hope that
U.S. commercial enterprises will dominate and if possible even monopolize.
But it's very hard to disguise government involvement in that behind the
Pentagon cover. Even if the Russians were still there you couldn't do that.
So there are some real problems. That's why you have open discussion now of
industrial policy. It was pretty openly proposed and discussed in the
Little Rock meetings, and in fact throughout the campaign. There are
differences between the two political parties on this. The Clinton people
are more up front about these needs. The Reagan-Bush types, who are more
fanatically ideological, still to some extent have their heads in the sand
about it, although the Reagan administration was highly protectionist and
did set up a government corporation to try to get the computer-chip
industry back into operation. That succeeded. They were a bit more dogmatic
on this issue. I think that's one of the main reasons why Clinton had
substantial business support.

Those are real phenomena. They will have to be dealt with. Or take the
question of "infrastructure" or "human capital," a kind of vulgar way of
saying keep people alive and allow them to have an education. By now the
business community is well aware that they've got problems with that. Take,
for example, the Wall Street Journal, which has been the most extreme
advocate of Reaganite lunacies for the past ten years. They're now
publishing articles in which they're bemoaning the consequences -- without,
of course, conceding that those are the consequences. They had a big news
article a couple of weeks ago on the state of California and the collapse
of the educational system, which they are very upset about. It was about
San Diego. Businessmen in the San Diego area have relied on the state
system, on a public subsidy, to provide them with skilled workers, junior
managers, applied research, etc. The system is in collapse. The reason is
obvious: the large cutbacks in social spending in the federal budget and
the huge federal deficit, all of which the Wall Street Journal supported,
simply transferred the burden of keeping people alive and functioning to
the states. The states are unable to support that burden. They are in
serious trouble. They tried to hand it down to the municipalities, which
are also in serious trouble. One of the consequences is that the very fine
educational system in the state of California is in serious difficulty, and
now businessmen are complaining about it. They want the government to get
back into the business of providing them with what they need: skilled
workers and research. That's going to mean a reversal of the fanaticism
that the Wall Street Journal and others like it have been applauding for
all these years.

DB: At the Little Rock conference I heard Clinton talking about structural
problems and rebuilding the infrastructure. One attendee, Ann Markusen, a
Rutgers economist and co-author of the book Dismantling the Cold War
Economy, talked about the excesses of the Pentagon system and the
distortions and damages that it has caused to the U.S. economy. So it seems
that there is at least some discussion of these issues that I don't recall
ever coming up before.

The reason is that they simply can't fully maintain the Pentagon based
system with the propaganda pretexts gone. So you've got to start talking
about it.

DB: Talking about it is one thing, but do they really have a clue about
what do to? Can they have a clue?

I think they have a clue about what to do. They know perfectly well what
they can do. If you listen to smart economists like Bob Solow, who started
the thing off, they have some pretty reasonable ideas about what to do.
What they want to do is openly done by Japan and Germany and every
functioning economy, namely rely on government initiatives to provide the
basis for private profit, and do it openly. The U.S. has been doing it
indirectly through the Pentagon system, which is in fact kind of
inefficient. It won't work anymore anyway, for the most part. So they would
like to do it openly. The question is whether that can be done. One problem
is that the enormous debt created during the Reagan years, at all levels --
federal, state, corporate, local, even household -- makes it extremely
difficult to launch constructive programs. That's why they're faced with
this contradiction.

DB: There is no capital available.

Yes. In fact, that was probably part of the purpose of the Reaganite borrow
and spend program.

DB: To eliminate capital?

You recall about ten years ago, when David Stockman was kicked out, he had
some interviews with William Greider which he pretty much said that the
idea was to try to put a cap on social spending simply by debt. There will
always be plenty to subsidize the rich, but you won't be able to pay aid to
mothers with dependent children, only aid to dependent corporate
executives. They may have overdone it. Furthermore, there is another
problem, a cultural and ideological problem. They have for years relied on
propaganda based on denial of these truths. It's other countries that have
government involvement and social services. We're rugged individualists. So
IBM doesn't get anything from the government. In fact, they get plenty, but
it's through the Pentagon, among many other ways, for example, regressive
fiscal measures. Propaganda aside, the population is pretty individualistic
and kind of dissident and doesn't take orders very well, by comparative
standards, and it's not going to be easy to sell people on subsidizing
advanced sectors of the economy. These cultural factors are significant. In
Europe there has been a kind of social contract. It's now declining, for
exactly the reasons that I mentioned, but it has been largely imposed by
the strength of the unions, in my opinion, the organized work force, and
the relative weakness of the business community, which is not as dominant
in Europe as it has been here for historical reasons. That led to a kind of
social contract, if you like, in which the government does see primarily to
the needs of private wealth, but it also creates a not insubstantial safety
net for the rest of the population. So they have general health care,
reasonable services, etc. We haven't had that, in part because we don't
have the same organized work force and we have a much more class conscious
and dominant business community. In Japan, pretty much the same results
were achieved, but the reasons were largely the highly authoritarian
culture. People just do what they're told. So you tell them to cut back
consumption, they have a very low standard of living, considering their
wealth, work hard, etc. and people just do it. That's not going to be so
easy to do here. There are going to be many problems.

DB: You mentioned the GM plant moving to Mexico. There's also Smith Corona
in Cortland, New York, the last U.S.-based typewriter company. That, too,
is moving to Mexico. There's a whole maquiladora corridor along the border,
with incredible levels of lead in the water, high levels of pollution and
toxic waste, and workers working for five dollars a day.

Actually, the case that I mentioned was GM moving to Eastern Europe, which
is in a way more interesting. It tells you what the Cold War was all about.
But you're right about Mexico. One of the major issues before the country
right now, right through the whole electoral period, is NAFTA, the North
American Free Trade Agreement. It's quite interesting to see how that's
been handled. You learn a lot about the country and the future from looking
closely at that. There is no doubt that NAFTA is going to have a very large
scale effect on the life of Americans, and Mexicans, too. You can debate
what the effect will be, but nobody doubts that it will be significant.
Quite likely the effect will be to accelerate just what you've been
describing, the flow of productive labor to Mexico, which is a totalitarian
dictatorship, very brutal and repressive. Therefore you can guarantee low
wages. During what's been called the "Mexican economic miracle" of the last
decade, wages have dropped sixty percent. Union organizers get killed. If
the Ford Motor Company wants to toss out its work force and hire slave
labor, they just do it. Nobody stops them. Pollution goes on unregulated.
It's a great place for investors. One might think that NAFTA, which
includes sending productive labor down to Mexico, might improve their real
wages, maybe level the two countries. But that's most unlikely. One reason
is the repression, which prevents organization that could lead to raising
wages. Another consequence of NAFTA will be flooding Mexico with
capital-intensive agricultural products from the United States, all based
ultimately on big public subsidies, which will undercut Mexican
agriculture. So they will be flooded with American crops, which will drive
millions of people off the land to urban areas or into the maquiladora
areas. This means another major factor driving down wages. It's not at all
clear that NAFTA will lead to raising wages. It will almost certainly be a
big bonanza for investors in the United States and for the wealthy sectors
in Mexico which are their counterparts, the ones applauding the agreement,
and the professional classes who work for them. It will very likely be
quite harmful for American workers. The overall effect on jobs is
uncertain, but it's very likely that wages and work conditions will suffer.
Hispanic and black workers are the ones who are going to be hurt most.

DB: While those jobs are being lost, U.S. corporate profits are increasing.
Is that what you're saying?

Corporations are doing very well. This is one of the best years for
corporate profits.

DB: Will NAFTA and GATT, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade,
essentially formalize on an institutional level North-South relations?

That's the idea, in fact. It will also almost certainly degrade
environmental standards. For example, corporations will be able to argue
that EPA standards are violations of free trade agreements. This is already
happening in the Canada-U.S. part of the mislabeled free trade agreement.
Its general effect will be to drive life down to the lowest level while
keeping profits high. One can debate this, but there's no doubt that the
consequences are significant, and it's interesting to see how it's been
handled. It didn't even arise in the campaign. The public hasn't the
foggiest idea what's going on. In fact, they can't know. One reason is that
NAFTA is a secret. It's an executive agreement which is not publically
available. To give you an indication of the extent to which this is true,
in 1974 the Congressional Trade Act was passed. One of its provisions was
that on any trade-related issue there has to be an analysis and input by
the Labor Advisory Committee based in the unions. Obviously they have to
have an analysis and report on NAFTA. NAFTA was signed by the President.
It's an executive agreement. That was mid-August of this year. The Labor
Advisory Committee was notified. They were informed that their report was
due on September 9 of this year. However, they were only given the text
about twenty-four hours before the report was due, ensuring that they
couldn't even convene and obviously couldn't write a serious report. These
are conservative labor leaders, not the kind of guys who criticize the
government much. They nevertheless wrote a very acid report. They said, to
the extent that we can look at this thing in the few hours given to us, it
looks like it's going to be a total disaster for working people, for the
environment, for Mexicans, and a great boon for investors. They pointed out
that property rights are being protected all over the place but working
rights are never mentioned. They also bitterly condemned the utter contempt
for democracy that was demonstrated by not even allowing them to look at
it. They said parts of it are still being kept secret. GATT is the same.
Nobody knows what's going on there unless they're some kind of specialist.

DB: Have you seen details of these treaties?

You can see details in the secondary comment on them, like the Labor
Advisory Committee report. Theoretically, by now it's possible to get a
text. But the crucial point is that, even if you and I could get a text,
what does that mean for American democracy? How many people even know that
this is going on? The Labor Advisory Committee report was never reported by
the press. People not only don't know what's happening to them, they don't
even know that they don't know. GATT is even more far reaching. I just came
back from a couple of weeks in Europe, where this is a pretty big issue in
the European Community context. One of the big public concerns in the
European Community is described as nationalism, but what it really has to
do with, I think, is what's called in EC parlance the "democratic deficit,"
meaning the gap that is developing between executive decisions, which are
secret, and democratic, or at least partially democratic institutions, like
parliaments, which are less and less able to influence decisions made at
the Community level. All of this is a marvelous device for rendering
democratic forums meaningless. It means crucial decisions with enormous
impact are being raised to a level where the population can't influence
them even indirectly through parliaments and furthermore doesn't know about
them. And as in this case, doesn't even know that it doesn't know. That
leads us towards a goal that has long been sought, namely maintaining
democratic forms but ensuring that there's no interference with private
power. This is a reflection of the globalization of the economy.

Over history, governmental institutions have, to a considerable extent,
tended to reflect the form that's being taken by economic power and its
organization. It's not one hundred percent, but there is a strong tendency
in that direction. That's what we're now seeing. The economy is being
internationalized, meaning that the geographical industrial countries are
being deindustrialized but the corporations are doing fine. This
internationalized economy, run largely by transnational corporations and
supernational banks are creating their own governmental structures, like
GATT and NAFTA and the IMF and the World Bank and the G-7 meetings, etc.
The international business press is pretty up front about it. They call it
a "de facto world government" which is going to reflect these interests.

DB: It seems that the Clinton-Gore administration is going to be in a major
conflict over its support for NAFTA and GATT at the same time, at least on
a rhetorical level, talking about its commitment to environmental
protection and creating jobs for Americans.

I would be very surprised if there's a big conflict over that. I think your
word "rhetorical" is accurate. Their commitment is to U.S.-based
corporations, which means transnational corporations. They very much like
this special form that NAFTA is taking with special protection for property
rights but no protection for workers' rights. And with the methods being
developed to undercut environmental protection. That's in their interests.
I doubt that there will be a conflict in the administration about this
unless there is a lot of public pressure.

DB: There's been almost a domino effect, in terms of Canada, the United
States, and Mexico. Canadian businesses are moving to states in the deep
South and U.S. businesses moving to Mexico.

And remember that Canadian and U.S. businesses are pretty closely
interlinked. Again, we have to be very careful when we use words like
"Canada" and "United States" or "Mexico." These always were propaganda
terms which covered up a lot. You just have to look at some of the figures.
About ten years ago, when the latest U.N. figures were made available,
about forty percent of world trade was internal, intrafirm transfers,
transfers internal to a particular corporation. That is, it was centrally
managed trade. It's not really trade, just interchanges between branches of
a big transnational corporation. That's forty percent of world trade.
Undoubtedly the figure's higher now.

Take a look at neo-classical economics, the kind of stuff you're supposed
to bow before. It has a theory about this, i.e., ideally there's a
free-market sea and within it are little islands which are little
individual firms. Of course, everybody understood that a particular
business, say a grocery store down the street, internally doesn't work by
free trade. Internally it's centrally managed. So you have centrally
managed islands in the free-market sea. The free-market sea was always more
of less of a joke. But by now the islands are about the scale of the sea.
This is increasingly centrally managed trade by major corporate structures.
It's been called "corporate mercantilism" with its own governmental
structures developing and the public increasingly marginalized to a pretty
remarkable extent.

DB: Talk about the political economy of food, its production and
distribution, particularly within the framework of IMF and World Bank
policies. These institutions extend loans under very strict conditions to
the South. They must promote the market economy, and they need to pay back
the loans in hard currency. They have to increase exports, like coffee, so
that we can drink cappucino, or beef so that we can eat hamburgers, all at
the expense of indigenous agriculture.

Basically the picture's the way you have described. The individual cases
are quite interesting. Take the great economic miracle in Latin America,
which is now being used as the basis for applying the same medicine in
Eastern Europe. In fact, the same people are going. Jeffrey Sachs, a
leading Harvard expert, who carried through what's considered the highly
successful economic miracle in Bolivia, then went off to Poland and Russia
to teach them the same rules. It's interesting to have a close look. Take
Bolivia. It was in trouble. It had had brutal dictators, highly repressive,
huge debt, the whole business. The West went in, Sachs was the advisor,
with the IMF rules: stabilize the currency, increase agro-export, cut down
production for domestic needs, subsistence agriculture, etc. It worked. The
figures, the macroeconomic statistics looked quite good. The currency has
been stabilized. The debt has been reduced. The GNP is increasing. There
are a few little flaws in the ointment: poverty has rapidly increased.
Malnutrition has increased. The educational system has collapsed. But most
interesting is what has in fact stabilized the economy: agricultural
exports -- but not coffee. Coca. Some specialists on Latin American
economies estimate that it now accounts for probably about two-thirds of
Bolivian exports. The reason is obvious. Take a peasant farmer somewhere,
flood his area with U.S.-subsidized agriculture, maybe through a Food for
Peace program, so he can't produce or compete. Set up a situation in which
the only way he can function is as an agricultural exporter. He's not an
idiot. He's going to turn to the most profitable crop, which happens to be
coca.

The peasants of course don't get much out of this. They also get the guns
and the DEA helicopters. But they get something. At least they can survive.
And you get a flood of coca exports. The profits mostly go to the big
syndicates, or, for that matter, to New York banks. Nobody knows how many
billions of dollars of this pass through New York banks or their offshore
affiliates, but it's undoubtedly plenty. Plenty of it goes to U.S. based
chemical companies which, as is well known, are exporting chemicals to
Latin America far beyond any industrial needs, mainly the chemicals that
are used in cocaine production, which is an industrial activity. So there's
plenty of profit. It's probably giving a shot in the arm to the U.S.
economy as well. And it's contributing nicely to the international drug
epidemic, including here. That's the economic miracle in Bolivia. And
that's not the only case. But yes, these are the kinds of consequences that
will follow from what has properly been called "IMF fundamentalism." It's
having a disastrous effect everywhere it's applied, except that it's
regarded as successful. From the point of view of the perpetrators, it is
quite successful. So Latin America is supposed to be undergoing a dramatic
recovery, and in a sense it is. As you sell off public assets, there's lots
of money to be made, so much of the capital that fled Latin America is now
back. The stock markets are doing nicely.

Take a look at Chile. There's another big economic miracle. The poverty
level has increased from about twenty percent during the Allende years up
to about forty-four percent now, after the great miracle. Similarly in
country after country. But the elite sectors, the professionals, the
businessmen, are very happy with it. And they're the ones who make the
plans, write the articles, etc. So there's a lot of praise for the economic
miracle here, too. It's just a far more exaggerated version of what we see
here. Here we see it in a relatively mild way as compared with the Third
World, but the structural properties are the same. The wealthy sector is
doing fine. The general public is in deep trouble.

DB: Between 1985 and 1992, for example, in the United States, Americans
suffering from hunger rose from twenty to thirty million, this while
novelist Tom Wolfe, a great admirer of yours (Not!), described the 1980s as
one of the "great golden moments that humanity has ever experienced."

Take a look at last Sunday's New York Times Magazine. There was an article
which was properly apolitical, but if you just add the background politics
you can explain it. It was about the Boston City Hospital, the hospital for
the poor, the general public in Boston, not the fancy Harvard teaching
hospital. They didn't say so in the article, but a couple of years ago they
had to institute a malnutrition clinic because they were getting Third
World levels of malnutrition and their funds are so slight that they had to
institute triage, take the cases that you can save more easily. That's
something that has never happened before. Most of the deep starvation and
malnutrition in the country had pretty well been eliminated by the Great
Society programs in the 1960s. But by the early 1980s it was beginning to
creep up again, and now the latest estimates are thirty million or so in
deep hunger. It gets much worse over the winter because parents have to
make this agonizing decision between heat and food. The effect is the kind
of things described in that article: children dying because they're not
getting water with some rice in it.

DB: The group Worldwatch says that one of the solutions to the shortage of
food is control of population. Do you support efforts to limit population?

First of all, there is no shortage of food. There are problems of
distribution, serious problems. However, that aside, I think undoubtedly
there should be efforts to control population. There are well-known ways to
control population: increase the economic level. Population is very sharply
declining in industrial societies. Many of them are barely reproducing
their own population. Take Italy, which is a late industrializing country
but has been industrializing. The birth rate now doesn't reproduce the
population. That's a standard phenomenon. The reasons are pretty well
understood. Economic development is the best method of population
reduction.

DB: Coupled with education?

Coupled with education and, of course, the means for birth control. The
United States has had a terrible role. It will not help fund international
efforts to even provide education about birth control.

DB: The globe is burning while various Neroes are fiddling. A study
reported in the current issue of the British journal Nature indicates with
greater precision and certainty than ever before that global warming is
increasing. It predicts anywhere from a four to six degree increase in
temperature. The resulting change in the earth's climate would have
disruptive and possible catastrophic consequences for both human society
and natural ecosystems.

This has been pretty well known to scientists for over twenty years. I
remember when I first heard it from the head of the Meteorology and Earth
Sciences Department at MIT, a very distinguished scientist and incidentally
a big skeptic about catastrophism. But by about 1970 he was convinced that
there was a very serious problem ahead. There has been much debate about
the timing, but the course of developments is not really in doubt. There
are some holdouts, like the editors of the Wall Street Journal, but it's
pretty clear. This new study seems to sharpen up the estimates. It narrows
the range that had already been assumed and adds more evidence to it.

Nobody can be certain about these things, of course. There's always going
to be a margin of error, and a lot is simply not understood. But to play
games with these possibilities is just insane. You have to take seriously a
worst-case analysis.

DB: Carl Sagan spoke in Boulder a few months ago and talked about the
environmental crises transcending narrow state interests and state
abilities to address them, thus opening the way to global cooperation. This
is something you've talked about as well.

The question is: Who's going to do the global cooperation? There's plenty
of cooperation going on.

DB: The global enforcer.

There's that, and there's also this de facto world government, reflecting
the needs and interests of the global corporations and banks. That's global
cooperation. What is lacking, however, is global cooperation arising out of
popular democratic structures. That's not only lacking, it's declining,
because the democratic structures are declining. So to talk about global
cooperation is not helpful. Global cooperation among the transnational
corporations is just going to make the problem worse.

DB: There is a burst, a surge of tribalism all over the world: nationalism,
religious fanaticism, racism, from L.A. to the Balkans to the Caucasus to
India. Why now?

First of all, let's remember that it's always been going on.

DB: I grant you that, but it seems more pronounced.

In parts of the world it's more pronounced. Take Eastern Europe. Up until a
couple of years ago it was under the control of a very harsh tyranny. A
tyranny like the Soviet system basically immobilizes the civil society,
which means that you eliminate what's good, but you also eliminate what's
bad. One of the things that was bad in that civil society traditionally was
very bitter ethnic hatreds. Europe altogether is a very racist place, even
worse than we are. But Eastern Europe was particularly ugly. One of the
reasons why I'm here is that a lot of my parents and grandparents fled from
that. It was held down by the general repression of civil society, which
repressed democratic forces but also ethnic hatreds and hostilities. Now
that the tyranny is gone, the civil society is coming back up, including
its warts, of which there are plenty. Elsewhere in the world, say in
Africa, yes, there are all kinds of atrocities. They were always there. One
of the worst atrocities was in the 1980s. South African atrocities, meaning
U.S.-backed atrocities, from 1980 to 1988, were responsible for about a
million-and-a-half killings, plus about $60 billion of damage, only in the
region surrounding South Africa. Nobody here batted an eyelash about that,
because the U.S. was backing it. If you go back to the 1970s in Burundi,
there was a huge massacre, hundreds of thousands of people killed. Nobody
cared.

In Western Europe, you are getting an increase in localism. This is in part
a reflection of the decline in the representative character of the
democratic institutions. So as the European Community slowly consolidates
towards executive power, reflecting big economic concentrations, people are
trying to find other ways to preserve their identity, and that leads to a
lot of localism. That's not the whole factor, but it's a lot of it. You
should be careful with what's called "racism" in the United States. Take
Los Angeles. There's plenty of racism. But remember that there's an
unpronounceable five letter word in the United States, namely "class." And
a lot of the conflict is in fact class. There are tremendous disparities
between black and white populations in health, infant mortality, etc. But a
substantial factor of that is actually a class factor. At every class
level, from homeless up to executive, blacks are worse off than whites.
Nevertheless, a lot of the disparity between blacks and whites is
class-based -- poor whites are not much better off than poor blacks. Race
and class are pretty well correlated, so you get confusions. As the
population moves towards a kind of a Third World character, people get
bitter and desperate. And as the democratic institutions become more and
more evacuated of content, people look for other things. They may look for
a savior, like a guy from Mars like Ross Perot. Or they may turn to
religious fanaticism, or other things.

DB: Or resurrect the Kennedy myth.

That's another case, in my opinion.

DB: Germany is the country everyone loves to hate. It's a very convenient
target. It's interesting to see what the German government response has
been to the incidents in that country to restrict immigration -- they had
the most liberal asylum policies in the world -- limit civil liberties, and
ban political parties.

When anything happens in Germany, people get pretty upset. And they're
right. There is a history, after all. Nevertheless, we should remember a
few things. As you said, Germany had the most liberal policy. Furthermore,
they had by far the largest number of refugees. Europe is an extremely
racist place. The localism is way beyond anything that we're used to. To an
extent that you rarely find here, people tend to live near where they were
raised and hate the person in the next village. There's a lot of talk about
German racism, and it's bad enough. For example, kicking out the Gypsies
and sending them off to Romania is such a scandal you can't even describe
it. The Gypsies were treated just like the Jews in the Holocaust, and
nobody's batting an eyelash about that because nobody gives a damn about
the Gypsies. But we should remember that there are other things going on,
too, which are getting less publicity. Take Spain. It was admitted into the
European Community with some conditions, one of which was that it is to be
what is pretty openly called a "barrier" to these hordes of North Africans
who the Europeans are afraid are going to flock up to Europe. It's a narrow
distance. There are plenty of boat people trying to get across from North
Africa to Spain, kind of like Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The boats
are sinking in the Mediterranean, or if people happen to make it, they are
expelled by the Spanish police and navy. It's very ugly. There are of
course reasons why people are going from Africa to Europe and not the other
direction. There are five hundred years of reasons for that. But it's
happening, and Europe doesn't want it. They want to preserve their wealth
and keep the poor people out.

The same problem is happening in Italy. There was a recent electoral
victory by the Lombard League, a group that seems to have a kind of
neofascist element. It reflects northern Italian interests. Part of their
concern is the same thing: North Africans drifting up through Sicily and
into Italy and coming up from the south. They don't want them. They want
rich white people. Europe has not been a heterogenous society to anything
like the extent that the United States has. Nor has it been as mobile a
society as the United States. These matters have been a bit under the
cover, but they're harder to keep under the cover.

DB: What are your two new books?

One is called Year 501. As the title indicates, it's an effort to look back
over and rethink the major themes of the past five hundred years, the
period of the European conquest of the world, and to look at the forms that
it's taken, the principles and themes that underlay it and ask what they
suggest about year 501, meaning the future. In my opinion it's basically
more of the same adapted to current contingencies with elements of the kind
we've been discussing. The second book is called Rethinking Camelot. The
main focus is on two years, 1963-64, the presidential transition and the
planning for the Vietnam War. That's a fascinating period that we probably
know more about than almost anything in American history. There's huge
documentation. It's extremely important. It led to one of the largest
atrocities of the whole five-hundred-year era, namely the Indochina War,
which had enormous consequences. Major decisions were being made at that
time. It takes on added interest because of the fact that there was a
presidential transition and an assassination which has led to a lot of, in
my view, fantasies, but at least beliefs that something crucial happened,
that some major change in American history took place at the time of the
Kennedy assassination which cast a pall on everything that followed. This
has been fostered in large part by Kennedy intellectuals. After the Tet
Offensive in 1968, when corporate America basically called off the war,
they completely changed their story as to what had happened. If you take a
look at the people who had written memoirs, Kennedy's associates, they came
out with new versions totally different from the old ones, in which it
turned out that Kennedy was a secret dove and was trying to withdraw. There
was no hint of that in the earlier versions or, for that matter, in the
secret record or anywhere else. But they have an obvious stake in trying to
recover the image of Camelot and make it look beautiful. Arthur Schlesinger
is the most remarkable example. Also, large sectors of the popular
movements have been involved in this, to a certain extent even immobilized
by these ideas, especially in the last year or two.
                          -----------------------

                                    Race

                             January 14, 1993

DB: The latest news bulletins report that Allied bombers are currently
attacking Ankara, Jakarta, Tel Aviv, and even Washington, D.C., because of
their defiance of UN resolutions. Would you care to comment?

Not Port-au-Prince?

DB: You just wrote a book called Year 501, and it's beginning the same way
that Year 499 began, with the bombing of Iraq, which is very much what you
anticipated.

Although this bombing is of a very different character. This one is a
matter of George Bush and Saddam Hussein playing to their respective
audiences and each giving the other appropriate assistance in the action.
It's difficult to conceal. I noticed Bob Simon on CBS the other night just
after the bombing, reporting from Baghdad, saying, This is the best gift
that Bush can give to Saddam Hussein. Conversely, although for a short time
only, Saddam Hussein will now again, even more, be able to appeal not only
to his own population but to a considerable part of the Arab world and a
lot of the Third World as someone who is defying imperialist violence. The
bombing was immediately denounced by the Arab League as an act of
aggression against an Arab country. The Arab countries wouldn't take part.
Certainly at home he's guaranteed a worshipful reception on the part of
those who transmit pictures of the world to the public. The same with Bush:
worshipful reception at home, easy action, overwhelming force against
people who can't shoot back. You can strut around the stage and strike
heroic poses. It emphasizes what he wants to go down in history as his one
achievement, namely killing a lot of people without getting shot at.

DB: There was Libya in the 1980s and now Iraq in the 1990s, convenient
punching bags. But Muammar Qaddafi and Saddam Hussein also play their part.
They're great villains. They're easy to hate, too.

Qaddafi is sort of a small time thug, but Saddam Hussein is a major one. On
the other hand you have to bear in mind that the villainy is totally
irrelevant. He was as much a villain before August 2, 1990. His worst
crimes by far are during the period when he was a highly admired ally who
was being strongly supported by the United States, so strongly that he even
almost approached the level of Israel. Israel, I had thought, would be the
only country in the world that could bomb an American ship (the Liberty),
kill a couple of dozen American sailors and get away with it completely.
But I was wrong. Iraq was able to do it, too. Iraq was able to bomb the
U.S.S. Stark in the Gulf, killing Americans, and get away with it because
they were such close allies. That was in 1987, the period when the U.S. was
tilting strongly toward Iraq to try to make sure that they won the
Iraq-Iran war. It continued until the one crime for which Saddam Hussein
cannot be forgiven: he disobeyed orders on August 2. Immediately after,
within a few months, the U.S. was supporting him again. There was no secret
about it. In March, right after the fighting stopped, when Saddam Hussein
turned to crushing the Shiites in the South and then the Kurds in the
North, the U.S. stood by quietly and assisted him. The Kurds finally got
some publicity. They're blue-eyed and Aryan. But the Shiites got no
publicity. They were much harder hit. That was right under the nose of
American forces. Iraqi generals were appealing to the American forces to
let them have some arms so they could fight off Saddam Hussein's troops.
Stormin' Norman was just sitting there and watching, maybe writing his
memoirs at the time. This was reported. It received sober approval in the
press: Yes, we don't like Saddam Hussein, but we have to support him in the
interests of stability, meaning retaining our power in the region. In fact,
at that time, the government was actually kind enough to explain for once
exactly what they were doing. It's worth paying attention to the words,
passed through the government spokesman at the New York Times, chief
diplomatic correspondent Thomas Friedman, who described U.S. policy as
handed to him, which is that the U.S. is seeking the "best of all worlds":
an iron-fisted Iraqi junta which could wield the iron fist in Iraq just the
way Saddam Hussein did before the invasion of Kuwait, much to the
satisfaction of the U.S. allies Turkey and Saudi Arabia and obviously the
boss in Washington. That's what they want. This makes it extremely clear.
You can't miss the message. It's explicit and clear and lucid. They want a
Saddam Hussein, and since he's now an embarrassment, they want a clone,
somebody equivalent to Saddam Hussein who will be able to wield the iron
fist again just like he did. So the crimes are irrelevant. Yes, he's a
demon, but that's irrelevant. What's relevant is the obedience. That's a
pattern that goes way back in history. We supported Mussolini and Hitler
for similar reasons.

DB: No noise from the servants' quarters.

Yes.

DB: What do you think of this new concept in statecraft, the "no-fly zone"?

Anyone's going to try to lead with their strength, and the U.S. strength is
in high-technology military capacity. The U.S. government recognizes that
classical intervention is no longer an option. This is one of the major
changes since the 1960s; in fact it's a change in world history. I think
they well understand that the population will not tolerate the classical
forms of intervention. We should remember what that means. Classical
intervention is, for example, when Woodrow Wilson sent the Marines to
attack Haiti and the Dominican Republic and conquer them, killing thousands
of people, tearing apart the constitutional system and reinstating virtual
slavery, turning the countries over to western investors, turning them both
into plantations. Neither country has recovered. In the case of Haiti we
stayed there for almost twenty years. Or marauding around Nicaragua
searching for Sandino. Or another form of classical intervention, actually
one that set some new precedents, was Kennedy thirty years ago, when he
sent the U.S. Air Force to start bombing villages, authorized napalm and
defoliation, and sent U.S. military forces in as combat advisors. All of
that's classical intervention. That's finished. Nobody assumes that that's
even possible any longer. They can only carry out what an early Bush
administration high-level planning document stated: only rapid and decisive
intervention against much weaker enemies which will lead to very quick
victory without any fighting. Anything else will undercut political
support. There is no longer any political support.

That gets back to no-fly zones. No-fly zones nobody knows about. It's
clean. The only people who get killed are other people. There's never any
interaction between the military forces. So what was called a "combat"
between U.S. and Iraqi jets wasn't a combat. It wouldn't be a combat if I
sat here pushing a button and a bomb went off halfway around the world. The
Iraqi jets are only "in combat" when U.S. planes are out of their range. So
there are cheap wars. We can attack, but we never get shot at. That the
public will still tolerate. That's what no-fly zones are about.

DB: What about the role of the UN in these various interventions now,
giving its approval?

First of all, the UN doesn't really give its approval. It just stays back.
So during the Gulf War, the UN did not give its approval. The UN was
neutralized. There was a series of resolutions. When Iraq invaded Kuwait,
the Security Council passed resolution 660, which is the usual kind of
resolution that's introduced after some act of aggression. It called for
Iraq to withdraw. It had a second part, which was immediately forgotten,
because the U.S. wouldn't tolerate it. The second part was that Iraq and
Kuwait should immediately undertake negotiations to settle issues between
them. The U.S. wasn't having that. They didn't want negotiations. The
second part dropped out of history. But the first part stayed. Iraq should
withdraw. The only difference between that and any other UN resolution was
that this time it wasn't vetoed. A similar resolution had been introduced
just a few months earlier, when the U.S. invaded Panama. Of course that
time it was vetoed. The U.S. has vetoed dozens of such resolutions. Same
thing when Israel invaded Lebanon.

Then came a series of resolutions leading ultimately to the final one, 678,
in which the UN simply washed its hands of the matter. In late November
1990 the UN simply said, Look, it's out of our hands. Any state can do
anything they feel like. That's one of the most destructive attacks on the
UN that has ever taken place. The UN simply said, We cannot carry out our
function. The UN charter is very explicit that no state can use violence
unless explicitly authorized by the Security Council. The UN didn't do
that, but simply said, We have to wash our hands of the matter. The reason
is the U.S. is going to do what it feels like.

DB: So yesterday's bombing was illegal?

It had no authorization at all. Nobody even pretends that it did.
Furthermore, whatever the Iraqis were doing with the missiles, whatever
games they were playing, right or wrong, you can discuss it at some other
level, but as far as the UN resolutions are concerned, it's conceded in the
small print that they did not violate any resolution. As to the other
things, impeding access of UN inspectors and moving into Umm Qasr port to
pick up their equipment, that's arguably in violation of resolutions in a
technical sense, but the UN simply made a comment -- didn't condemn them as
they condemn lots of things -- authorizing no actions. The bombing was
completely unilateral, a unilateral decision by the United States, which
apparently was made even before the UN meeting. The aircraft carrier Kitty
Hawk was already preparing. The only reason they didn't attack a day
earlier was because the weather was bad, meaning it would have occurred
even before the UN meeting. It was independent of it. The UN never
authorized any such action.

Independently of all of this the UN has been neutralized in another
respect. For a long time, many decades, from about the late 1960s through
the end of the 1980s, the United States was intent on essentially
destroying the United Nations, because it simply was not a pliable
instrument of U.S. policy. Under Reagan, the U.S. didn't pay its dues. It
was way in the lead in vetoing Security Council resolutions in the past
quarter-century. It was doing everything it could to undermine and
eliminate the organization, especially those parts of it that were
concerned with Third World affairs, like UNESCO. However, by about 1989 or
1990, the situation changed. The UN came back into favor. During the Gulf
War there was a long series of awed articles about the "wondrous sea
change" in the United Nations. What happened is that it fell back into
line. The UN is essentially the five permanent members of the Security
Council. They run the Security Council. The General Assembly you can
dismiss. The great power doesn't pay any attention to it. The United States
always had two automatic votes in the Security Council, usually three.
Britain is a kind of colony. France will make a couple of noises, but they
go along. So they had three votes out of the five. With the collapse of the
Soviet Union they had four. Russia became even a more loyal client than
Britain, which is hard to imagine. That gives four automatic votes. China
is very dependent on U.S. trade. It will at most abstain. That means the
U.S. essentially has the Security Council in its pocket.

The disappearance of the Soviet Union is one of a number of factors that
had the effect of essentially eliminating Third World voices. As long as
the Soviet Union was there, two big gangsters parading around, there was
some space for independent forces, there was room for non-alignment. You
could play one power against the other, or they'd squabble between
themselves. With the Soviet Union gone and only one gangster left, that's
finished. Furthermore, it's very important to remember that there was a
tremendous crisis of capitalism that swept most of the capitalist world in
the 1980s. Especially the former colonial world, which was devastated. The
only areas that escaped were those in the region around Japan which didn't
submit to the neoliberal orthodoxy and standard economic principles that
had a devastating impact on Africa, Latin America, and parts of Asia that
weren't in the Japanese orbit, like the Philippines.

That also undermines very strongly any form of Third World independence.
There are other factors, but the net effect is that the UN is pretty much
back in the pocket of the United States, which means that it's getting a
much more favorable press at this point. Of course, not when it does things
that the U.S. doesn't want. For example, there was a condemnation of Iraq,
although it didn't authorize bombing. There was a simultaneous condemnation
of Israel for deporting 415 alleged Hamas members from Gaza. They deported
mostly the intellectuals, the professional class. At one university
virtually the whole staff was kicked out. There was condemnation of that.
Of course the U.S. doesn't mind that, so therefore it doesn't matter. So
it's the usual story: insofar as the United Nations will be an instrument
of U.S. power or can at least be made to look it, it is a useful
organization. When it isn't doing what the U.S. wants, then it can
disappear.

DB: Does Operation Restore Hope in Somalia represent a new pattern of
intervention?

I think it represents another try. I don't think that really should be
classified as an intervention. It should be classified as a PR operation
for the Pentagon. The U.S. has some interests in Somalia, but I don't think
they're major. The U.S. was, of course, deeply involved in Somalia. This
has to be finessed by the press at the moment, because it's not a pretty
story. From 1978 through 1990 -- it's not ancient history -- the U.S. was
the main support for Siad Barre, who was a kind of Saddam Hussein clone,
tearing the country apart. He probably killed fifty or sixty thousand
people, according to Africa Watch. He destroyed the civil and social
structure, in fact, laid the basis for what's happening now. The U.S. was
supporting and may well be still supporting him. We don't know exactly. We
know that the forces, mostly loyal to him, are being supported through
Kenya, which is very much under U.S. influence. It's possible that that
support continues. Anyhow we certainly did through the end of 1990.

The U.S. was there for a reason: there are military bases there which are
part of the system aimed at the Gulf region. The main U.S. intervention
forces, overwhelmingly, have always been aimed at the Middle East. This was
part of the system of bases surrounding that. However, I doubt that that's
much of a concern at this point. They are much more secure bases and more
stable areas. What is needed now, desperately needed, is some way to
prevent the Pentagon budget from declining. In fact, it's kind of
intriguing that it was almost openly stated this time. So Colin Powell, the
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, made a statement about how this was a great
public relations job for the military. The Washington Post had an editorial
describing it as a bonanza for the Pentagon. The reporters could scarcely
fail to see what was happening. After all, when the Pentagon calls up all
the news bureaus and major television networks and says, Look, be at
such-and-such a beach at such-and-such an hour with your cameras aiming in
this direction because you're going to watch Navy Seals climbing out of the
water and it will be real exciting, nobody can fail to see that this is a
PR job. There's a level of stupidity that's too much for anyone. So it was
a big PR job. And it's needed. The best explanation for the intervention,
in my opinion, was given in an article on the day of the intervention in
the London Financial Times which didn't mention Somalia. It was about the
U.S. recession and why the recovery is so sluggish. It quoted various
economists from investment firms and banks and so on, the guys that don't
just design models for mathematical journals but care about the economy.
The consensus was that the problem with the recovery from the recession was
that the standard methods of government stimulation of the economy weren't
available. The pump priming through the Pentagon system, one of the major
government devices for management of the economy, simply was not available
to the extent that it had been in the past. The economy was therefore very
sluggish, for that and other reasons.

That's a big problem. The Pentagon system has been the core of state
industrial policy. It's declining. There have been various efforts through
the 1980s to revitalize it. Bush put it pretty honestly in his farewell
address when he explained why we intervened in Somalia and not Bosnia. What
it comes down to is in Bosnia somebody might shoot at you. In Somalia it's
just a bunch of teenaged kids. We figure 30,000 Marines can handle that. So
it's just photo ops, basically. One hopes it will help the Somalis more
than harm them, but they're more or less incidental. They're just props for
photo opportunities for Pentagon public relations, which is a crucial
thing. When the press and commentators say the U.S. has no interests there,
that's taking a very narrow and misleading view. Maintaining the Pentagon
system is a major interest for the masters of the U.S. economy.

DB: There was a Navy and Marine White Paper in September 1992 called "From
the Sea." It discusses that the military focus shifts from global military
threats to "regional challenges and opportunities" including "humanitarian
assistance and nation building efforts in the Third World."

But that's always been the focus, rhetoric aside. The military budget is
mainly for intervention. In fact, even strategic nuclear forces were
basically for intervention. It's not that we intended to use nuclear
weapons against Grenada. But the point is that you have to think about the
way strategy works. The U.S. is a global power. It wasn't like the Soviet
Union. The Soviet Union carried out intervention right around its borders,
where it had overwhelming conventional forces. The U.S. is a global power.
It carries out intervention everywhere: in Southeast Asia, the Middle East,
in places where it has no conventional advantage. Accordingly, it always
had to have an extremely intimidating posture to make sure that nobody got
in the way. That required what was called a "nuclear umbrella": powerful
strategic weapons forces to intimidate everybody so that conventional
forces could be an instrument of political power. In fact, virtually the
entire military system -- its military aspect, not its economic aspect --
was geared for intervention, and that was usually covered as "nation
building." In Vietnam, in Central America. We're always humanitarian. So
when the Marine Corps documents say we now have a new mission, humanitarian
nation building, that's just the old mission. We now have to emphasize it
more than before because traditional pretext is gone. There was always an
ideological framework in which you could place this, namely the conflict
with the Russians. If you had to carry out nation building, humanitarian
efforts by attacking and destroying South Vietnam, that was to block Soviet
expansion. That part's gone. You can't any longer be blocking Soviet
expansion. So we're now just focusing on what was left, the humanitarian
nation building. But it's the same as it's always been. It's just the
current form of imperialist concern.

DB: What kind of impact will the injection of U.S. armed forces into
Somalia have on the civil society? Somalia has been described by one U.S.
military official as "Dodge City" and the Marines as "Wyatt Earp." What
happens when the marshall leaves town?

First of all, that description has nothing to do with Somalia. One crucial
striking aspect of this intervention is that there's no concern for
Somalia. No one who knew anything about Somalia was involved in planning
it, and there is no interaction with Somalis as far as we know. Since the
Marines have gotten in the only people they have been dealing with are the
so-called "warlords," and they're the biggest gangsters in the country.
They're dealing with them. But Somalia is a country. There are people who
know and care about it. They've described it. They don't have much of a
voice here. One of the most knowledgeable is a Somali woman named Rakiya
Omaar, who was the Executive Director of Africa Watch. She did most of the
human rights work, writing, etc., up until the intervention, which she
strongly opposed and was then fired from Africa Watch. She knows Somalia
well. Another is her co-director, Alex de Waal, who resigned from Africa
Watch in protest after she was fired. Apart from his human rights work, he
is also an academic specialist on the region. He has published a major book
with Oxford University Press on the Sudan famine and has written many
articles on this. He knows not only Somalia but the region very well. And
there are others. Their picture is typically quite different. In fact, many
things are not controversial. Most of Somalia recovered from the
U.S.-backed Siad Barre attack. Siad Barre's main atrocities were in the
northern part of Somalia, what formerly had been a British colony. It was
recovering. It's pretty well organized. It has its own civil society
emerging, a rather traditional one, with traditional elders and lots of new
groups, womens' groups, have come up in this crisis. They could use aid,
doubtless, but it's kind of recovering.

The area of real crisis was one region in the south, in part because of the
forces of General Mohammed Hersi, known as Morgan, Siad Barre's son-in-law,
which are supported from Kenya. They were carrying out some of the worst
atrocities. The forces of General Mohammad Farah Aidid and Ali Mahdi were
also rampaging. It led to a serious breakdown in which people just grabbed
guns in order to survive. There was a lot of looting. That's when you get
these teenaged gangsters. That's a description of a certain region. It was
at its worst in the early part of 1992. By September-October it was already
being overcome and this part of Somalia was also recovering. If you look at
the serious aid groups, not U.S. Care, and not the UN, which are extremely
incompetent, as everyone agreed, but the ones who are doing most of the
work, like the International Red Cross, Save The Children, the smaller
groups that were carrying out development projects, like the American
Friends Service Committee, which had been there for many years, or
Australian Care, which was a major provider -- they were getting most of
aid through. They were giving figures of about eighty or ninety percent of
the aid getting through by early November. The reason was that they were
working with the reconstituting Somalian society. In this corner of real
violence and starvation, things were already recovering, rather on the
pattern of what had already taken place in the north. There were plenty of
problems, but it was recovering.

A lot of this had been under the initiative of a UN negotiator, Mohammed
Sahnoun, of Algeria, who was extremely successful and highly respected on
all sides. He was working with traditional elders, with the newly emerging
civic groups, especially women's groups. They were coming back together
under his guidance, or at least initiative. He had good contacts
everywhere. He was kicked out by Boutrous Ghali in October because he
publicly criticized the incompetence and corruption of the UN effort. They
put in an Iraqi replacement who maybe would have achieved something, maybe
not. It was over because of the Marine intervention. A U.S. intervention
was apparently planned from shortly after the election. The official story
is that it was decided upon at the end of November, when George Bush saw
heartrending pictures on television. But in fact U.S. reporters in Baidoa
in early November saw Marine officers in civilian clothes walking around
and scouting out the area, planning for where they were going to set up
their base. This was rational timing. The worst crisis was over. The
society was reconstituting. You could be pretty well guaranteed a fair
success at getting food in, since it was getting in anyway. Thirty thousand
troops would only expedite it in the short term. Not too much fighting,
because that was subsiding. Good timing for Bush, too, because it means you
get the photo opportunities and then you leave and somebody else faces the
problems later on, which are bound to arise.

So it wasn't Dodge City. There was an area which was horrible and was
recovering. What this massive intervention will do to that is very hard to
predict. It could make it worse, could make it better. It's like hitting a
seriously ill patient with a sledge hammer. Maybe it will help. Maybe it
won't. But that comment about Dodge City simply reflects what is true:
nobody cared. They didn't try to find out what Somalia was, because they
didn't care. Somalis are props. What happens to them is incidental. If it
works, great, we'll applaud and cheer ourselves and bask in self-acclaim.
If it turns into a disaster, we'll treat it the same way we do with other
interventions that turn into disasters. After all, there's a long series of
them. Take Grenada. That was a humanitarian intervention. We were going to
save the people from tragedy and turn it into what Reagan called a
"showplace for democracy" or a "showplace for capitalism." In fact, they
poured aid in. It had the highest per capita aid in the world the following
year, next to Israel, which is in another category. And it turned into a
complete disaster. The society is in total collapse. About the only thing
that's functioning there is money laundering for drugs. But nobody hears
about it. The television cameras were told to look somewhere else. So if
the Marine intervention turns out to be a success, which is conceivable,
then there will be plenty of focus on it and how marvelous we are and have
to do it again. If it turns into a disaster it's off the map. Forget about
it. So either way you can't lose.

DB: There's another factor at work here I'd like you to comment on: the
notion of intervention on humanitarian grounds is a claim that's always
made by the powerful against the weak. You don't have Bangladesh sending
troops to help quell the situation in South Central L.A.

Not only that, but it is so routine that it's just like saying "hello" when
you walk into a room. Take, say, American history. When the U.S. was
expelling or exterminating the native population back right from the
Revolution on, it was always described as "humanitarian." We're their
benefactors. When Andrew Jackson proclaimed his Indian Removal Act, which
set off virtual genocide, he described it to Congress with great
self-acclaim, describing in a teary voice what a great benefactor he was to
the Indians. He said that white people wished that they were getting such
benefits from us. After all, the white settlers, when they go out to the
West, they don't get huge government grants, they don't have the U.S.
military lead the way for them. But when the Cherokees are being sent out
there on what was called the "Trail of Tears," on which about half of them
died, they were being accompanied by the U.S. Army and even given a couple
of cents to get started. It was a tremendous gift. We were so benevolent.
In fact, right after the American Revolution, in 1783, there was a
commission established to try to determine what to do with the Indians. The
question was: How do we kick them out of their land now that we've won?
They decided to expel them, remove them from one area to another, rob their
lands. It's worth reading what they wrote: They said we shouldn't go
overboard in generosity. Our natural generosity should have certain limits,
because if generosity goes too far, it becomes harmful to everybody. So we
should be generous as always, but not too generous, while we're robbing
them of their lands.

This is a refrain which is such a deep element of the national culture that
to refer to it in this case is misleading. There's no atrocity that's been
carried out that hasn't been described as humanitarian and beneficial to
the victims.

DB: Comment on the events in the former Yugoslavia. This constitutes the
greatest outburst of violence in Europe in fifty years -- tens of thousands
killed, hundreds of thousands of refugees. This isn't remote East Timor
we're talking about -- this is Europe. It's a living room war on the news
every night.

In a certain sense what's happening is that the British and American right
wings are essentially getting what they asked for. Since the 1940s they've
been quite bitter about the fact that Western support for a short time
turned to Tito and the partisans and against Mikhailovich and his Chetniks
and the Croatian anti-Communists, including the Ustasha, who were outright
Nazis. The Chetniks were also playing with the Nazis and were mainly trying
to overcome the partisans. They won. The partisan victory imposed a
communist dictatorship, but it also federated the country. It suppressed
ethnic violence, and created the basis of some sort of functioning society
in which the parts had their role. That collapsed for a variety of reasons,
and now we're essentially back to the 1940s, but without the partisans.
Serbia now has inherited the ideology of the Chetniks. Croatia has
inherited something of the ideology of the Ustasha, far less ferocious than
the Nazi original, but similar in some ways. They are now doing pretty much
what they would have done if it hadn't been for the partisan victory.

Of course, the leadership of Serbia and Croatia come from the Communist
Party, but that's because every thug in the region was part of the ruling
apparatus. (Yeltsin, for example, was a tough CP boss.) It's interesting
that the right wing, at least its more honest elements, approve. For
example, Nora Beloff, a right wing British commentator on Yugoslavia, had a
letter in the London Economist condemning the people who are denouncing the
Serbs in Bosnia. She's saying it's the fault of the Muslims. They are
refusing to accommodate the Serbs who are just defending themselves. She's
been a supporter of the Chetniks from way back, no reason why she shouldn't
continue to support Chetnik violence, which is what this amounts to. Of
course there's another factor. She's a super fanatic Zionist, and the fact
that the Muslims are involved already makes them guilty in her eyes.

DB: Some say that just as the Allies should have bombed the rail lines to
Auschwitz to prevent the deaths of many people in concentration camps, so
we should now bomb Serbian gun positions surrounding Sarajevo that have
kept that city under siege. Would you advocate the use of force?

First of all, there's a good deal of debate about the Second World War, and
how much of an effect bombing would have had. Putting that aside, it seems
to me that a judicious threat of force, not by the Western powers but by
some international, multinational group could have, at an earlier stage,
suppressed a good deal of the violence and maybe blocked it. Whether that
would mean bombing gun positions or not is a question that you can't make a
decision about lightly. For one thing, you have to ask not only about the
morality of it, but also about the consequences. The consequences could be
quite complex. For example, conservative military forces within Russia
might move in. They already are there, in fact, to support their Slavic
brothers in Serbia, and they might decide to move in en masse. (That's
traditional, incidentally. Go back to Tolstoy's novels and you can read
about how the Russians saved their Slavic brothers from attacks. That's now
being reenacted.) At that point you're getting fingers on nuclear weapons.
It's also entirely possible that an attack on the Serbs, who feel that
they're the aggrieved party, could inspire them to move more aggressively
in Kosovo, the Albanian area, which could very well set off a large-scale
war, with Greece and Turkey involved. So it's not so simple.

Or what if Bosnian Serbs, with the backing of both the Serbian and maybe
even other Slavic regions, started a guerrilla war? Western military
"experts" have suggested it would take maybe a hundred thousand troops just
to hold the area. So bombing Serbian gun emplacements sounds simple, but
one has to ask about the consequences. That's not so simple.

If it were possible to stop the bombardment of Sarajevo by threatening to
and maybe even actually bombing some emplacements, I think you could give
an argument for it. But that's a very big if.

DB: Zeljko Raznjatovic, known as Arkan, a fugitive bank robber wanted in
Sweden, was elected to the Serb Parliament in December 1992. His Tiger's
Militia is accused of killing civilians in Bosnia. He's among ten people
listed by the U.S. State Department as a possible war criminal. Arkan
dismissed the charges and said, "There are a lot of people in the United
States I could list as war criminals."

That's quite correct. By the standards of Nuremberg, there are plenty of
people who could be listed as war criminals in the West. It doesn't absolve
him in any respect, of course.

DB: Christmas came early in 1992 for at least six former Reagan
administration officials implicated in the Iran-Contra scandal. There was a
presidential pardon on Christmas Eve. Bush said of the pardonees, "The
common denominator of their motivation, whether their actions were right or
wrong, was patriotism." That doesn't sound like the position of German
defense lawyers at Nuremberg.

No. They couldn't have gotten away with it, but it was quite accurate.
Probably Himmler and Goering were acting as patriotic Germans. I frankly
didn't take the pardons all that seriously. It was a highly selective
prosecution. They didn't go after top people or the important issues. What
they were being charged with is minor issues. Lying to Congress is bad,
it's a serious violation of law which carries a five-year jail sentence.
But as compared with carrying out huge international terrorist operations,
it's pretty small potatoes. Nobody was charged with conducting an illegal
war against Nicaragua. They were only charged with lying to Congress about
it. It indicates the values that lie behind the prosecution. In other
words, kill and torture whoever you like, but be sure to tell us. We want
to take part too. If you think about it, that's exactly what happened in
Watergate. The charges against Nixon never included bombing Cambodia. It
did come up in the hearings, but the only respect in which it came up was
that Nixon had lied to Congress about it. There was no charge ever that he
had sent U.S. bombers to devastate Cambodian peasant society, killing tens
of thousands of people. That was never even considered a crime. So to
pardon people for lying to Congress makes a certain amount of sense if we
understand it as meaning, Look, the major crimes are never even being
discussed. It's kind of like catching Al Capone on his income tax.

DB: I've never heard you talk about Gandhi. Orwell wrote of him that
"...compared to other leading political figures of our times, how clean a
smell he has managed to leave behind." What are your views on the Mahatma?

I'd hesitate to say without undertaking a much closer analysis of what he
did and what he achieved. There were some positive things there. For
example, his emphasis on village development and self-help and communal
projects. That would have been very healthy for India. Implicit in what he
was suggesting was a model of development for India that could well have
been a much more successful and humane one than the Stalinist model that
was adopted, the development of heavy industry, etc. The talk about
nonviolence you really have to think through. Sure, everybody's in favor of
nonviolence rather than violence, but under what conditions and when? Is it
an absolute principle?

DB: You know what he said to Louis Fischer in 1938 about the Jews in
Germany. He said that German Jews ought to commit collective suicide which
would "have aroused the world and the people of Germany to Hitler's
violence."

That is a tactical proposal, not a principled one. He's not saying they
should have walked cheerfully into the gas chambers because that's what
nonviolence dictates. He's saying, If you do it you may be better off. So
that's a tactical proposal. It reflects no moral principle. It has to be
evaluated on its merits. If you evaluate it on its merits, from that point
of view, divorcing it from any principled concern other than how many
people's lives can you save by doing this, it's conceivable that it was
true. I don't think it's likely, but it's conceivable, not out of the
question, that that would have aroused world concern in a way in which the
Nazi slaughter surely did not. I think that the argument for it is very
slight. On the other hand, there's nothing much that the Jews could have
done anyway.

DB: Orwell adds that after the war Gandhi justified his position, saying,
"The Jews had been killed anyway and might as well have died
significantly."

Again, he's making a tactical, not a principled statement. One has to ask
the question what the consequences would have been of the actions he
recommended. That's speculation based on little evidence. For him to have
directed that recommendation at the time is kind of grotesque. What he
should have been emphasizing was: Let's do something to prevent them from
being massacred. The right position to take at the time was, Look, they
can't do anything. Powerless people who are being led to slaughter can't do
anything. Therefore it's up to others to do something for them. To give
them advice on how they should be slaughtered is not very uplifting, to put
it mildly. You can say the same about other things all the time. Take
people being tortured and murdered in Haiti. You want to tell them, The way
you ought to do it is to walk up to the killers and put your neck in front
of their knife and maybe people on the outside will notice. Could be. But a
little more significant would be to tell the people who are giving the
murderers the knives that they should do something different.

DB: India today is torn asunder by various separatist movements, Kashmir is
an incredible mess, occupied by the Indian army, and there are killings,
detentions, and massive human rights violations, in the Punjab and
elsewhere. I'd like you to comment on a tendency in the Third World to
blame the colonial masters for all the problems that are besetting the
countries today. They seem to say, "Yes, India has problems but it's the
fault of the British," as if India was once a great big happy place.

How to assess blame for historical disasters is a difficult matter. You
could ask the same thing about the health of a starving and diseased
person. There are a lot of different factors that enter into it. If there
was a torturer around who was torturing them, that certainly had a role.
But maybe after the torture is over, the person eats the wrong diet and
lives a dissolute life and dies from the effects of that. That's what we're
talking about here. It's not easy to sort out the proportion of blame.
There's no doubt that imperial rule was a complete disaster. Take India.
Bengal was one of the richest places in the world when the first British
merchant warriors arrived there. They described it as a paradise. Today
this area is Bangladesh and Calcutta, the very symbols of despair and
hopelessness. These rich agricultural areas produced unusually fine cotton,
the major commodity of that period. They had, by the standards of the day,
advanced manufacture. Dacca, which is the capital of Bangladesh, was
compared by Clive, the British conqueror, to London.

About a century later, in debates in the House of Lords, Sir Charles
Trevelyan described how Dacca had collapsed from a major manufacturing
center and thriving city to a marginal slum under the impact of British
rule. In Bengal, and throughout the parts of India that they controlled,
the British undermined and tried to destroy the existing manufacturing
system, which was comparable to their own in many respects. As the
industrial revolution was urbanizing and modernizing England, India was
becoming ruralized, a poor, agrarian country. Adam Smith, over two hundred
years ago, deplored the depredations that the British carryied out in
Bengal, which, as he puts it, first of all destroyed the agricultural
economy, and then turned "dearth into a famine." The British overseers even
took agricultural lands and turned them over to poppy production for the
opium trade to China. The only thing that the British could sell to China
was opium, and Bengal was one of the places where they produced it. There
was huge starvation.

Indian manufacturing in other areas was considerable. For example, an
Indian firm built one of the flagships for the English fleet during the
Napoleonic Wars. Britain imposed harsh tariff regulations, starting in
about 1700, to prevent Indian manufacturers from undercutting British
textiles. That's the beginning of the industrial revolution, beginning with
textile production and extending to other things. They had to undercut and
destroy Indian textiles because India had a comparative advantage. They
were using better cotton and had, by the standards of the day, a relatively
advanced industry. It wasn't until 1846 that Britain suddenly discovered
the merits of free trade. By that time their competitors had been destroyed
and they were way ahead. They were very well aware of it. The British
liberal historians, the big advocates of free trade in that period they
say: "Look, what we're doing to India is not pretty, but there's no other
way for the mills of Lancaster to survive. We have to destroy the
competition."

And it continued. Nehru, in 1944 in a British prison, wrote an interesting
book (The Discovery of India) in which he pointed out the correlation
between how long the British have influenced and controlled each region,
and the level of poverty. The longer the British have been in a region the
poorer it is. The worst, of course, was Bengal, where the British arrived
first.

In Canada and North America, they just wiped out the population. You don't
have to get to current, "politically correct" commentators to describe
this. You can go right back to the founding fathers. The first Secretary of
Defense, General Henry Knox, who was in charge of Indian removal from 1784
on, said that what we're doing to the native population is worse than what
the Conquistadors did in Peru and Mexico. He said future historians will
look at these actions, what would be called in modern terminology
"genocide," and paint them with "sable colors." They weren't going to look
good to history.

John Quincy Adams, the intellectual father of Manifest Destiny, became an
opponent of both slavery and the policy toward the Indians long after he
left power. He felt that he himself had been involved in a crime of
extermination of such enormity that he believed God would punish the
country for this monstrous deed. So in North America we just essentially
exterminated and expelled the population.

Latin America was more complex, but the initial population was virtually
destroyed within a hundred and fifty years. What was left was a mixture.
Meanwhile, Africans were brought over as slaves, which had a major effect
on devastating Africa even before the colonial period. The conquest of
Africa drove it back even further. After the West had robbed the colonies
-- as they did, no question about that, and there's also no question that
it contributed to their own development -- they changed the relationships
to so-called "neo-colonial", domination without direct administration,
which was also generally a disaster.

How do you sort the guilt at this point? If Israel is committing crimes
against the Palestinians, does that justify the Holocaust? I suppose some
unreconstructed Nazi could say, look at what those guys do as soon as you
let them go. Just means we didn't do anything. It's all their fault.

DB: To continue with India: talk about the divide-and-rule policy of the
British Raj, playing Hindus off against Muslims. You see the results of
that today.

Which is not to say that it was pretty before, because it wasn't. The
Marathi invasions were ugly and brutal. But the fact is that the level of
brutality introduced by the Europeans was novel almost everywhere in the
world. Naturally, any conqueror is going to play one group against another.
In India, for example, I think about ninety percent of the forces that the
British used to control India were Indians.

DB: There's that astonishing statistic that at the height of British power
in India, they never had more than 150,000 people there.

That was true everywhere. It was true when the American forces conquered
the Philippines, killing a couple hundred thousand people. They were helped
by Philippine tribes. They exploited conflicts among local groups. There
are always plenty who will side with the conquerors. Just take a look at
the Nazi conquest of Europe. Take Western Europe; let's forget the Third
World. Nice, civilized Western Europe. Places like Belgium and Holland and
France. Who was rounding up the Jews? The local people. In fact, in France
they turned them over faster than the Nazis could handle them. If the
United States was conquered by the Russians, George Bush, Elliott Abrams,
and the rest of them would all be working for the invaders and sending
people off to concentration camps. Ronald Reagan would be reading their ads
on TV. That's the traditional pattern. Invaders very naturally play upon
any kind of rivalries and hostilities that they find to get one group to
work for them against others.

You can see it right now with the Kurds. The West is trying to mobilize
Iraqi Kurds to destroy Turkish Kurds. Turkish Kurds are by far the largest
number, and historically, they were the ones who were the most repressed.
It's not covered much in the West because Turkey is an ally, so you don't
cover the atrocities they carry out. But right into the Gulf War they were
bombing in Kurdish areas. Tens of thousands of people were driven out. But
now the western goal is to use the Iraqi Kurds as a weapon to try to
restore what they call "stability" in Iraq, meaning their own kind of
system.

Last October there was a very ugly incident in which there was a kind of
pincer movement between the Turkish army and Iraqi Kurdish forces to expel
and destroy Kurdish guerrillas from Turkey. Independently of what we might
think of those guerrillas, there's no doubt that they had substantial
popular support in southeastern Turkey. But the Iraqi Kurdish leaders and
some sectors of Kurdish population were going to cooperate because they
thought they could gain something by it. You could understand their
position. Not necessarily approve of it -- that's another question. These
are people who are being crushed and destroyed from every direction. If
they grasp at some straw for survival, it's not surprising, even if
grasping at that straw means helping to kill their cousins across the
border. That's the way conquerors work. They've always worked that way.
They worked that way in India.

India wasn't a peaceful place before the British, no, nor was the western
hemisphere a pacifist utopia. But that aside, everywhere the Europeans went
they raised the level of violence to an extraordinary degree. On that
serious military historians have no doubts. As the most recent historian of
the East India Company puts it, "warfare in India was still a sport, in
Europe it had become a science."

Europe had been fighting vicious, murderous wars internally and it had
developed a culture of violence, as well as the means of violence, which
were unsurpassed. The culture of violence was extraordinary. European wars
were wars of extermination. Everywhere the Europeans went, whether it was
the Portuguese or the Spanish or the English or the Dutch, they fought with
a level of violence which appalled the natives. They had never seen
anything like it. That was true virtually over the entire world, with very
few exceptions. In fact, from Europe's viewpoint, these colonial wars were
what we call today small wars. It didn't take very many forces to destroy
huge numbers of natives, not so much because the technology was better, but
because the Europeans fought differently. If we were to be honest about the
history, we would describe European colonialism simply as a barbarian
invasion.

The British and Dutch merchants who moved into Asia broke into relatively
free trading areas which had been functioning for long, long periods with
pretty well established rules. More or less free, fairly pacific. Sort of
like free trade areas. The description of what they did is just monstrous.
They introduced a level of violence which had never been felt before. They
destroyed what was in their way.

The only ones who were able to fend it off for a while were Japan and
China. Japan did manage to fend it off almost entirely. That's why Japan is
the one area of the Third World that developed. That's striking. The one
part of the Third World that wasn't colonized is the one part that's part
of the industrial world. That's not by accident. To strengthen the point,
you need only look at the parts of Europe that were colonized. Parts of
western Europe were colonized, like Ireland, which is very much like the
Third World, for similar reasons. The patterns are striking. China sort of
made the rules and had the technology and was powerful, so they were able
to fend off Western intervention for a long time. But when its defense
finally broke down in the nineteenth century, the country collapsed.

So it's completely correct that the post-colonial period had seen many
brutal monsters develop. But when people in the Third World blame the
history of imperialism for their plight, they have a very strong case to
make. It's interesting to see how this is treated in the West these days.
On January 7, 1993 there was an amazing article in the Wall Street Journal
by Angelo Codevilla, a so-called scholar at the Hoover Institute at
Stanford, criticizing the intervention in Somalia. He says, Look, the
problem in the world is that Western intellectuals hate their culture and
therefore they terminated colonialism. Only civilizations of great
generosity can undertake tasks as noble as colonialism to try to rescue
these barbarians all over the world from their miserable fate. The
Europeans did it and of course gave them enormous gifts and benefits. But
then these western intellectuals who hate their own cultures forced them to
withdraw. The result is what you now see. You really have to go to the Nazi
archives to find anything comparable to that. Apart from the stupendous
ignorance that is so colossal that it can only appear among respected
intellectuals, the moral level is -- you have to go back to the Nazi
archives. But it's an op ed in the Wall Street Journal. It probably won't
get much criticism.

There are counterparts in England, the Sunday Telegraph, the Daily
Telegraph. It's interesting to read the right-wing British press after
Rigoberta Menchu won the Nobel Prize. They were infuriated, especially
their Central America correspondent. Their view is, true, there were
atrocities in Guatemala. But either they were carried out by the left wing
guerrillas or they were an understandable response on the part of the
respectable sectors of the society to the violence and atrocities of these
Marxist priests. So to give a Nobel Prize to the person who's been
torturing the Indians all these years, Rigoberta Menchu ... it's hard for
me to reproduce this. You have to read the original. Again, at it's worst,
it's straight out of the Stalinist and Nazi archives. It's very typical of
British and American culture.

DB: That brings in the whole question of race and racism and how that
factored into the relationship between what I'll call the "North" and the
"South."

There has always been racism. But it developed as a leading principle of
thought and perception very much in the context of colonialism. It's not
that it wasn't there before. It obviously was. But it gained entirely new
dimensions and new significance in the imperialist context. That's
understandable. When you have your boot on someone's neck, you have to have
a justification for it. The justification has to be their depravity. If you
can find anything to hang their depravity on, like the color of their eyes,
it's that. It's very striking to see this in the case of people who are not
very different from one another. Take a look at the British conquest of
Ireland, which was the earliest of the western colonial conquests. It was
described in the same kind of terms as the conquest of Africa. The Irish
were a different race. They weren't human. They were a depraved race of
people who had to be crushed and destroyed.

DB: Some Marxists connect racism as a product of the economic system, of
capitalism. Would you accept that?

No. It has to do with conquest. It's oppression. If you're oppressing
somebody, maybe you're robbing them, it doesn't have to be torture. If
you're robbing somebody, oppressing them, controlling them, dictating their
lives, it's a very rare person who can say, Look, I'm a monster. I'm doing
this for my own good. Even Himmler didn't say that. There's a standard
technique of belief formation that goes along with oppression, whether it's
throwing them in the gas chambers or charging them too much at a corner
store or anything between those. There's a standard mode of reaction, and
that is to say that it's their depravity. That's why I'm doing it. Maybe
I'm even doing them good. If it's their depravity, there's got to be
something about them that makes them different from me. What's different
about them will be whatever you can find.

DB: And that's the justification.

Then it becomes racism. You can always find something, like a different
color hair or eyes, they're too fat, they're gay. Whatever it might be. You
find something that's different enough. Of course you lie about it, so it's
easier to find more.

DB: Do you know the scorpion and camel story? There's a scorpion who wants
to cross the river. He needs the camel to help him across. He asks the
camel, "Hey, come on. Give me a lift." The camel says, "What are you,
crazy? I know who you are. You're going to sting me." The scorpion says,
"No, no, no. I'm a reformed scorpion. I'm a good guy. I wouldn't do
something like that." So after much persuasion the camel finally relents
and says, "OK. Hop on." So the scorpion gets on the camel's back. In the
middle of the river, the camel feels a sting in his back and realizes that
the scorpion has just stung him. He starts howling and cursing and says,
"You promised me you wouldn't do this! We're both going to die now. We're
going to drown. You're insane." The scorpion says, "Well, it's in my
nature." This leads to human nature. Is racism something that's acquired or
learned, or is it innately endowed?

I don't think either of those is the right answer. There's no doubt that
there's a rich human nature. We're not rocks. Anybody sane knows that an
awful lot about us is genetically determined, in our behavior, our
attitudes. That's not even a question among sane people. When you go beyond
that and ask what it is, you're entering into near-total ignorance. We know
there's something about human nature that forces you to grow arms, not
wings, and to undergo puberty at roughly a certain age. And by now we know
that things like acquisition of language are part of human nature even in
its very specific forms, things about the visual system and so on. When you
get to cultural patterns, belief systems, etc., the guess of the next guy
you meet at the bus stop is as good as the best scientist. People can rant
about it if they like, but they basically know virtually nothing.

In this particular area we can make some kind of reasonable speculation. I
think most reasonable is the one I've just outlined. It's not so much that
racism is in our genes. What is in our genes is the need for improving your
own self-image.

DB: For domination.

No. For justifying what you do. I can't believe that everybody doesn't know
this from their own lives. If any person thinks about their own life
honestly for a minute, they'll think of plenty of things that they did that
they shouldn't have done. Maybe they stole something from their brother
when they were ten. If you look back honestly and ask yourself, Did I say
to myself at the time, I'm a rotten bastard but I'm going to do this
because I want it? Or did you say, Look, I'm right to do this for this and
that reason? The answer almost invariably is the second. It doesn't matter
whether it was a minor or major thing. That's probably in our nature. It's
probably in our nature to find a way to recast anything that we do in some
way that makes it possible for us to live with it.

If we move into the social sphere, the sphere of human interactions, where
there are institutions and systems of oppression and domination, people who
are in those positions of authority and domination, who are in control, who
are doing things to others, who are harming them, are going to pursue this
course of constructing justifications for themselves. They may do it in
sophisticated ways or non-sophisticated ways, but they're going to do it.
That much is in human nature. One of the consequences of that can turn out
to be racism. It can turn out to be other things, too.

Take the sophisticated ones. One of the intellectual gurus of the modern
period in the United States is Reinhold Niebuhr, who was called the
"theologian of the establishment." He was revered by the Kennedy liberal
types, by people like George Kennan. He was considered a moral teacher of
the contemporary generation. It's interesting to look at why he was so
revered. I actually went through his writings once. The intellectual level
is depressingly low. But there's something in there that made him
appealing. It was what he called the "paradox of grace." What it comes down
to is, no matter how much you try to do good, you're always going to do
harm. Of course, he's an intellectual, so they have to dress it up with big
words and big volumes. But that's what it comes down to.

That's very appealing advice for people who are planning to enter into a
life of crime. To say, no matter how much I try to do good I'm always going
to harm people. That's the paradox of grace. You can't get out of it. A
wonderful idea for a Mafia don. Then he can go ahead and do whatever he
feels like, and if he harms people, Oh my God, the paradox of grace. That,
I think, explains why he was so appealing to American intellectuals in the
post-World War II period. They were preparing to enter into a life of major
crime, major criminal actions. They were going to be either the managers or
else the commissars for a period of global conquest, running the world,
which is obviously going to entail enormous crimes. Isn't it nice to have
this doctrine before us? Of course we're superbenevolent and humane, but
the paradox of grace! Again, if you're an intellectual you dress it up and
write articles about it.

The mechanisms, however, are quite simple and elementary. I think all of
that is, if you like, part of our nature, but in such a transparent way
that you don't even call it a theory. Everybody knows this from their own
experience, if they stop to think about it. Like just about everything
that's understood about human beings, everybody knows it if they stop to
think about it. It's not quantum physics. Mostly what's known is on the
surface. Think about yourself and you can see it right there. Forget the
big words and the polysyllables and the intellectual apparatus and just
think about it. It's easy to see how that transmutes itself into racism.

Take the Serbs and the Croats. All they want to do right now is murder each
other. They're indistinguishable. They use a different alphabet, but they
speak the same language. They belong to different branches of the Catholic
Church. That's about it. But they're perfectly ready to murder and destroy
each other. They can imagine no higher task in life.

DB: What about the so-called "competitive ethic" of competition? Is there
any evidence that we are naturally competitive? Proponents of the free
market theory and the advocates of market capitalism say that you've got to
give people the ability to compete -- it's a natural thing.

There are certainly conditions under which people will compete. There are
conditions under which people will cooperate. For example, take a family.
Suppose that whoever is providing the money for the family loses his or her
job, so they don't have enough food to eat. The father is probably the
strongest one in the family. Does he steal all the food and eat it, so all
the kids starve? I guess there are people who do that, but then you lock
them up. They're pathological. There's a defect there somewhere. No, what
you do is share. Does that mean they're not competitive? No. It means that
in that circumstance you share. Those circumstances can extend quite
broadly. For example, they can extend to the whole working class. When you
have periods of working class solidarity, people struggling together to
create unions and decent working conditions, a republic of labor in which
people would control their work and not have to suffer wage slavery. That's
the United States, after all. Take a look at the Homestead lockout a
century ago, when Andrew Carnegie established the world's first
billion-dollar corporation by destroying the biggest union in the country.

He destroyed it right in Homestead, which was a working-class town with
working-class solidarity. That was a period of enormous ethnic hatred and
rivalry and racism, at that time directed mostly against the Eastern
European immigrants, the Huns and the Slovaks. But during that conflict
they worked together. It's one of the few periods of real ethnic harmony.
They worked with Anglo-Saxon Americans and Germans and the rest of them.
There are circumstances in which competition shows up and in which
cooperation does. Again, I doubt that any person can fail to see this in
their own life.

Let me tell you a personal story. I'm not particularly violent. But when I
was in college, I had to take boxing. The way you did it was to spar with a
friend, but we all found, and we were amazed, that pretty soon we wanted to
kill each other. After doing this pushing around for a while, you really
wanted to hurt that guy, your best friend. You could feel it coming out.
It's horrifying to look at, and again I doubt that people have failed to
see this in themselves and something about their lives. Does that mean that
the desire to hurt people is innate? In certain circumstances, this aspect
of our personality will dominate. There are other circumstances in which
other aspects will dominate. You want to create a humane world, you change
the circumstances.

DB: How crucial is social conditioning in all of this? Let's say you're a
child growing up in Somalia today.

How about a child growing up in Boston, just down the street? Or even here,
in Cambridge. Just last summer a foreign student at MIT was killed, knifed,
just a few blocks from here, by a couple of teenagers from the local high
school. They were engaged in a sport that works like this: high-school kids
are supposed to walk around and find somebody walking the street. One of
the kids is picked, and he's supposed to knock the person down with one
blow. If he fails to do it, the other kids beat up the kid who failed. So
that's the sport. So they were walking along and saw this MIT kid. One of
them was chosen and knocked him down with one blow. For unexplained reasons
they also knifed him and killed him. They didn't see anything especially
wrong with it. They walked off and went to a bar somewhere. Somebody had
seen them, and they were later picked up by the police. They hadn't even
tried to get away. They didn't see anything wrong with it. They're growing
up in Cambridge, not on Brattle Street, but probably in the slums, which
are not Somali slums by any means, not even Dorchester slums. But surely
kids in the western suburbs wouldn't act like that. Are they different
genetically? No. There's something about the social conditions in which
they grew up that makes this an acceptable form of behavior, even a natural
form of behavior. Anyone who has grown up in an urban area must be aware of
this. I can remember from childhood, there were neighborhoods where if you
went in you'd be beaten up. You were not supposed to be there. The people
who were doing it, kids, felt justified and righteous about it. They were
defending their turf. What else do they have to defend?

DB: Speaking of Brattle Street, just last night I was there. Panhandlers,
people asking for money, people sleeping in the doorways of buildings. This
morning at Harvard Square in the T station it was more of the same. The
spectre of poverty and despair has increasingly come into the vision or the
sightlines of the middle- and upper-class. You just can't avoid it as you
could years ago when it was limited to a certain section of town. This has
a lot to do with the pauperization, the internal Third Worldization, I
think you call it, of the United States.

There are several factors, which we've discussed before. In part it's an
immediate corollary to what's called the globalization of the economy.
Furthermore, there is a tremendous expansion of unregulated capital in the
world seeking stable currencies and low growth. These factors have
immediate, obvious consequences, namely extension of the Third World model
to industrial countries. The Third World model is a sector of extreme
wealth and privilege amidst huge misery and despair among useless,
superfluous people. The model is extending to the entire world.

Take a look at the NAFTA discussions. The argument for NAFTA, the North
American Free Trade Agreement, is that it's not going to hurt many American
workers, just unskilled workers, defined to mean about seventy percent of
the work force. That's one of the things you're seeing.

Look at South Central Los Angeles. That's an area where there were
factories, but not any more. They moved to Eastern Europe, Mexico, and
Indonesia, where you can get peasant women off the land. That's the part of
free trade the elites advocate. They don't advocate the other parts of it.
But the parts they can benefit from they advocate. That
internationalization of production will have the effect, over the long
term, of giving the industrial countries a sort of Third World aspect
themselves.

There are other things happening everywhere in the industrial world, but
most strikingly in four major English speaking countries -- England, the
United States, Australia and New Zealand. I think the reason for that is
pretty obvious. These are the countries that in the 1980s took at least
minimally seriously some of the rhetoric that they preached. In most of the
world, the free market rhetoric is not taken seriously. But England under
Thatcher and the United States under the Reaganites and Australia and New
Zealand under Labor governments to a limited extent adopted some of the
doctrines they preached for the Third World. Naturally, the population
suffered for it.

DB: Deregulation?

Deregulation, something a little bit like structural adjustment, which in
the Third World means eliminate welfare, eliminate subsidies, stop building
roads, give everything to the investors and something will trickle down by
some magic, some time after the Messiah comes. The western countries of
course would never really play this game completely. It would be too
harmful to the rich. But they flirted with it in these English-speaking
countries. And they suffered. When you say "they" suffered, you've got to
be careful. The population suffered. The rich did fine, just as they do in
the Third World. When I say there's a catastrophe of capitalism in the
Third World, that doesn't mean for the rich people. They're doing just
great.

DB: That's the paradox of 1992.

The New York Times did have a headline in the business pages: "Paradox of
92: Weak Economy, Strong Profits." Big paradox. That's the story of the
Third World. It's the story now of Eastern Europe. And it's also the story
in Thatcherite England, Reaganite America, and Labor party Australia and
New Zealand. Most of the population suffered as the societies moved more
towards the Third World pattern than is the case, say, in continental
Europe or Japan. In the periphery of Japan what you're getting is a move
out of the Third World pattern into an industrial pattern, as in South
Korea and Taiwan, who dismiss neoliberal economics as a joke, are able to
develop internally.

DB: Thank you.
                          -----------------------

                                   Class

                             January 21, 1993

DB: It's a given that ideology and propaganda are phenomena of other
cultures. They don't exist in the United States. Class is in the same
category. You've called it the "unmentionable five-letter word."

It's kind of interesting the way it works. For example, there was quite an
interesting study done by Vicente Navarro, a professor at Johns Hopkins,
who works on public health issues. There are lots of statistics about
things like quality of life, infant mortality, life expectancy, etc.,
usually broken down by race. It always turns out that blacks have horrible
statistics as compared with whites; there's a huge gap. He decided to
reanalyze the statistics, separating out the factors of race and class. So,
let's look at white workers and black workers versus white executives and
black executives. He discovered that a considerable part of the distinction
between blacks and whites was actually a class difference. That's natural
because there's a correlation between race and class. If you look at poor
white people, white workers, and white executives, the gap between them is
enormous. He did the study, obviously of relevance to epidemiology and
public health. He submitted it to the major American medical journals. They
all rejected it. He then sent it to the world's leading medical journal,
Lancet, in Britain. They accepted it right away.

In the United States you're not allowed to talk about class differences. In
fact, only two groups are allowed to be class conscious in the United
States. One of them is the business community, which is rabidly class
conscious. When you read their literature, it's all full of the danger of
the masses and their rising power and how we have to defeat them. It's kind
of vulgar Marxist, except inverted. The other is the high planning sector
of the government. So they're full of it, too. How we have to worry about
the rising aspirations of the common man and the impoverished masses who
are seeking to improve standards and harming the business climate. So they
can be class conscious. They have a job to do. But it's extremely important
to make other people, the rest of the population, believe that there is no
such thing as class. We're all just equal. We're all Americans. We live in
harmony. We all work together. Everything is great.

There's a book, Mandate for Change, put out by the Progressive Policy
Institute, the Clinton think tank. It's a description of the program for
the Clinton administration. It was part of the campaign literature, a book
you can buy at an airport newsstand. It has a section on "entrepreneurial
economics," which is going to avoid the pitfalls of the right and the left.
It gives up these old fashioned liberal ideas about entitlement, welfare
mothers have a right to feed their children, that's all passΘ. We're not
going to have any more of that stuff. We now have "enterprise economics,"
in which we improve investment and growth. The only people we want to help
are workers and the firms in which they work. There are workers, there are
the enterprises in which they work, and that's who we're interested in
benefitting. We're going to help them.

There's somebody missing from this story. There are no managers, no bosses,
no investors. They don't exist. It's just workers and the firms in which
they work. We're going to help them. The word "entrepreneurs" shows up.
Entrepreneurs are people who assist the workers and the firms in which they
work. The word "profits" appears once. I don't know how that sneaked in,
that's another dirty word, like "class." But the picture is, all of us are
workers. There are firms in which we work. We would like to improve the
firms in which we work, like you'd like to improve your kitchen. Get a new
refrigerator. Improve the firm in which you work. That's all they're
interested in, just helping us folks out there.

Another mechanism used to achieve the same result is a kind of interesting
innovation in the language in the last couple of years. That's the word
"jobs." It's now used to mean "profits." So when, say, George Bush took off
to Japan with Lee Iacocca and the rest of the auto executives, you remember
his slogan was "Jobs, jobs, jobs." That's what he was going for. We know
exactly how much George Bush cares about jobs. All you have to do is look
at what happened during his tenure in office, when the number of unemployed
and underemployed has now reached about seventeen million or so officially.
I don't know what is unofficially, about another eight million, a million
of them during his term. He was trying to create conditions for exporting
jobs overseas. He continued to help out with the undermining of unions and
the lowering of real wages. So what does he mean when he says and the media
shout, "Jobs, jobs, jobs"? It's obvious: "Profits, profits, profits."
Figure out a way to increase profits. So it goes down the line.

The idea is to create a picture among the population that we're all one
happy family. We're America. We have a national interest. We're working
together. There's us nice workers, the firms in which we work, the media
that labor to tell us the truth about the things that matter to us, the
government that works for us. We pick them. They're our servants. And
that's all there is in the world, no other conflicts, no other categories
of people, no further structure to the system beyond that. Certainly
nothing like class. Unless you happen to be in the ruling class, in which
case you're very well aware of it.

DB: So then issues like class oppression and class warfare, equally exotic,
occur only in obscure books and on Mars?

Or in the business press, where it's written about all the time, and the
business literature, or in internal government documents. It exists there
because they have to worry about it.

DB: You use the term "elite." Samir Amin says it confers too much dignity
upon them. He prefers "ruling class." Incidentally, a more recent invention
is "the ruling crass."

The only reason I don't use the word "class" is that the terminology of
political discourse is so debased it's hard to find any words at all.
That's part of the point, to make it impossible to talk. For one thing,
"class" has various associations. As soon as you say the word "class,"
everybody falls down dead. There's some Marxist raving again. But the other
thing is that to do a really serious class analysis, you can't just talk
about the ruling class. Are the professors at Harvard part of the ruling
class? Are the editors of the New York Times part of the ruling class? Are
the bureaucrats in the State Department? There are differentiations, a lot
of different categories of people. So you can talk vaguely about the
establishment or the elites or the people in the dominant sectors. But you
can't get away from the fact that there are sharp differences in power
which in fact are ultimately rooted in the economic system. You can talk
about the masters, if you like. It's Adam Smith's word, you might as well
go back to that. They are the masters, and they follow what he called their
"vile maxim," namely "all for ourselves and nothing for other people."
That's a good first approximation to it, since Adam Smith is now in
fashion.

DB: You say that class transcends race, essentially.

In an important sense, I think it does. For example, the United States
could become a color-free society. It's possible. I don't think it's going
to happen, but it's perfectly possible that it would happen, and it
wouldn't change the political economy, hardly at all. Just as you could
remove the "glass ceiling" for women and that wouldn't change the political
economy at all. That's one of the reasons why you quite commonly find the
business sector reasonably willing, often happy to support efforts to
overcome racism and sexism. It basically doesn't matter that much. You lose
a little white male privilege, but that's not all that important. On the
other hand, basic changes in the core institutions would be bitterly
resisted, if they ever became thinkable.

DB: And you can pay the women less.

You can pay them the same amount. Take England. They just went through ten
pleasant years with the Iron Lady running things. Even worse than
Reaganism.

DB: So in this pyramid of control and domination, where there's class and
race and gender bias, sexism, lingering in the shadows, certainly in the
liberal democracies, is coercion, force.

That comes from the fact that objective power is concentrated. Objective
power lies in various places: in patriarchy, in race. Crucially it lies in
ownership. It's very much worth overcoming the other forms of oppression.
For people's lives, they may be much worse than the class oppression. When
a kid was lynched in the South, that was worse than being paid low wages.
So when we talk about what's at the core of the system of oppression and
what isn't, that can't be spelled out in terms of suffering. Suffering is
an independent dimension, and you want to overcome suffering.

On the other hand, if you think about the way the society works in general,
it works pretty much the way the founding fathers said. The society should
be governed by those who own it, and they intend to follow Adam Smith's
vile maxim. That's at the core of things. Lots of other things can change
and that can remain and we will have pretty much the same forms of
domination.

DB: You've said the real drama since 1776 has been the "relentless attack
of the prosperous few upon the rights of the restless many." I want to ask
you about the "restless many." Do they hold any cards?

Sure. They've won a lot of victories. The country's a lot more free than it
was two hundred years ago. For one thing, we don't have slaves. That's a
big change. You recall that Thomas Jefferson's goal, at the very
left-liberal end, was to create a country without "blot or mixture,"
meaning no red Indians, no black people, good white, Anglo-Saxons. That's
what the liberals wanted. They didn't succeed. They did pretty much get rid
of the native population. But they couldn't get rid of the black population
and they've had to incorporate them in some fashion into the society over
time. Women finally received the franchise one hundred and fifty years
after the Revolution. The right of freedom of speech was vastly extended.
Workers finally won some rights in the 1930s, about fifty years after they
did in Europe, after a very bloody struggle. They've been losing them ever
since, but they won them to some extent. In many ways large parts of the
general population were integrated into the system of relative prosperity,
relative freedom, almost always as a result of popular struggle. The
general population has lots of cards. That's something that David Hume
pointed out a couple of centuries ago as a kind of paradox of government.
In his work on political theory, he asks why the population submits to the
rulers, since force is in the hands of the governed. Therefore, ultimately
the governors, the rulers, can only rule if they control opinion. He says
this is true of the most despotic societies and the most free. There is a
constant battle between those who refuse to accept it and those who are
trying to force them to accept it.

DB: How to break from the system of indoctrination and propaganda? You've
said that it's nearly impossible for individuals to do anything, that's
it's much easier and better to act collectively. What prevents people from
getting associated?

There's a big investment involved. Anybody lives within a cultural and
social framework which has certain values and certain opportunities. It
assigns cost to various kinds of action and benefits to others. You just
live in that. You can't help it. We live in one that assigns benefits to
efforts to achieve individual gain. Any individual can ask himself or
herself, let's say I'm the father or mother of a family, what do I do with
my time? I've got twenty four hours a day. If I've got children to take
care of, a future to worry about, what do I do? One thing you can do is try
to play up to the boss and see if you can get a dollar more an hour, or
maybe kick somebody in the face when you walk past them. If not do it
directly, do it indirectly, by the mechanisms that are set up for you
within a capitalist society. That's one way. The other way you can do it is
by spending your evenings going around trying to organize other people who
will then spend their evenings at meetings, go out on a picket line, carry
out a long struggle in which they'll be beaten up by the police and lose
their jobs. Maybe they'll finally get enough people together so they'll
ultimately achieve a gain, which may or may not be greater than the gain
that you tried to achieve by following the individualist course. People
have to make those choices. They make them within a framework of existing
structures. Within the framework of existing structures, although it harms
everyone in the long run, the choices for a particular individual are to
maximize personal gain. In game theory it's called "prisoner's dilemma."
You can set up things called "games," interactions, in which each
participant will gain more if they work together, but you only gain if the
other person works with you. If the other person is trying to maximize his
or her own gain, you lose.

Let me take a simple case, driving to work. It would take me longer to take
public transportation than to drive to work. As long as everybody else is
driving, that's the way it's going to be. If we all took the subway and put
the money into that instead of into roads, we'd all get there faster by the
subway. But we all have to do it. It's only if we all do something a
different way that we'll all benefit a lot more. The costs to you, to an
individual, of working to try to create the possibilities to do things
together can be severe. It's only if lots of people begin to do it, and do
it seriously, that you get real benefits.

The same was true of every popular movement that ever existed. Suppose you
were a twenty-year-old black kid in Atlanta in 1960, at Spelman College.
You had two choices. One is: I'll try to get a job in a business somewhere.
Maybe somebody will be willing to pick a black manager. I'll be properly
humble and bow and scrape. Maybe I'll live in a middle-class home. That's
one path. The other path was to join SNCC, in which case you might get
killed. You were certainly going to get beaten and defamed. It would be a
very tough life for a long time. Maybe in the long term you'll finally be
able to create enough popular support that people like you and your family
and your children will live better. It was hard to make that second choice,
given the alternatives available. Fortunately, a lot of young people did,
and it's a better world because of it. But society is very much structured
to try to drive you toward the individualist alternative.

DB: You've noted polls that indicate that alienation from institutions
keeps increasing. You've observed that the population is going in one way,
toward Orlando, and the policy is going toward Santa Monica, in a
completely different direction. Eighty-three percent regard the entire
economic system as "inherently unfair." But it doesn't translate into
anything.

It can only translate into anything if people do something about it. That's
true whether you're talking about general things, like the inherent
unfairness of the economic system, which requires revolutionary change, or
about small things. Take, say, health insurance. Even though in public very
few articulate voices call for what's called a "Canadian style" system, the
kind of system that they have more or less everywhere in the world, an
efficient, nationally organized public health system that guarantees health
services for everyone and if it were serious, as Canada isn't enough, would
also do preventive care. But polls have shown for years that most of the
population are in favor of it anyway, even though they've never heard
anybody advocate it. Does it matter? No. There will be some kind of
insurance company based, "managed" health care system which is designed to
ensure that the insurance companies and the health corporations that they
run will make plenty of money. The only way we could get what most of the
population wants with regard to health care is either by a large-scale
popular movement, which would mean moving towards democracy, and nobody in
power is going to want that, or else if the business community decides that
it's good for them. Which they might. Because this highly bureaucratized,
extremely inefficient system designed for the benefit of one sector of the
private enterprise system happens to harm other sectors. Auto companies pay
more in health benefits here than they would across the border. They notice
that. They may press for a more efficient system that breaks away from the
extreme inefficiencies and irrationalities of the capitalist based system.

DB: Edward Herman wrote a book about elections in U.S. client states called
Demonstration Elections. That might describe what happens in the United
States. What functions do elections serve here?

Today is the 21st of January. As anybody who bothered watching television
for the last two or three days knows, it's supposed to make people feel
good about themselves and that something wonderful is happening. We have a
marvelous country. There's hope. There's a young man there with a pretty
wife. They're baby boomers. Now everything's going to be great. So it's a
way of overcoming the growing alienation, at least for a short period,
without doing anything. It's like Roman circuses. I don't want to suggest
it's of zero significance. There is some significance. How much, you can
debate. But the hoopla about it, the big celebrations, is simply at the
level of Roman circuses. You have to do something for the population.

DB: Talking about bread and circuses, the Romans would be in awe. Did you
hear about the Elvis stamp? There were two choices. One showed the young
Elvis in his prime, and the other a more mature Elvis. The Post Office ran
an expensive publicity campaign and millions of people voted. They picked
the younger Elvis and lined up in the middle of the night to buy the first
stamps. Bread and circuses. Give them something really meaningful to vote
on.

Right. And get people excited about that and they won't worry too much
about the fact that the economy is inherently unfair or their real wages
are declining or their children are not going to live as well as they do.
Let them worry about Elvis.

DB: You've called the function of the President of the United States the
"CEO of corporate America."

If you want to know how they feel about Bill Clinton, look at the stock
market. It's doing rather nicely.

DB: Business right after the election was very positive.

There was an article yesterday in the London Financial Times, the major
international business journal, pointing out that the stock market was
looking at Clinton and thinking he was doing the right things. Investors
are happy.

DB: It's only in America that a billionaire can run for President and pose
as a populist, as Ross Perot did. What was your take on his candidacy and
the whole Perot phenomenon?

The most interesting period, I thought, was when he just appeared, at the
very beginning. He could have come from Mars, as far as anyone knew. Nobody
knew what his program was. He probably didn't have one. He had nothing to
say. He was just this guy who said, Look, I made a lot of money and I've
got big ears and a big smile. Within about two weeks, he was running even
with the two major candidates. I think what that indicates is pretty clear.
It means the population is so desperate that if somebody lands from Mars,
they'll try him.

DB: Calls for a third party assume that we have a two-party system. Is that
off base?

It's a question of definition. We certainly have two candidate-producing
organizations. We don't have two parties that people participate in. We
don't have two parties with different interests. They basically reflect one
or another faction of the part of society that you're not allowed to
mention in Mandate for Change, namely the owners and investors and
managers. They both represent their interests. But they have different
takes on it. And they also have different popular constituencies. That in
fact has some effect. The popular constituencies have to be offered some
crumbs, just to keep the system of bureaucratic and other power
functioning. The main structure of decision making, which has to do with
profit, with international affairs, with strategic issues, the popular
constituency is allowed no role in that, no matter who's in office. But it
can be given other things. For example, the Republicans tend to be somewhat
more openly the party of the business classes and the rich. They hide it
less than the Democrats. Therefore it's harder for them to appeal to the
general public. Their appeal quite often is in terms of jingoism, violence,
religious fundamentalism, and the so-called social issues. They've got to
give some crumbs to their constituencies, so they give them those things.
That's why you have the Supreme Court appointments that you've had in the
last ten years. The big attack on civil rights, the racism, the attacks on
welfare mothers. That's a gift to that sector of the population. It doesn't
affect profits. It doesn't affect power, so you can give it to them. The
Democrats have tried to appeal to a different constituency. They pretend to
be the party of the people. So they have to do something for the working
people, women, minorities. That means that they can be expected to get the
crumbs, like the Supreme Court appointments. And when I say "crumbs," I
don't mean to demean it. Those are things that can have an enormous effect
on individual life. They just don't affect the structure of the political
economy.

DB: "The phenomenal concentration of property and business under the
control of monopolies known as 'corporations' is changing the commercial
aspect of the world and also changing the social relations. At no time in
history has combination succeeded combination in greater and greater
aggregations like the present. The little fellow is no longer in it."
August 31, 1895. J.A. Whalen's first editorial in the Appeal to Reason.

The Appeal to Reason was an interesting left journal which about ten years
after that appeared had about three-quarters of a million subscribers. One
of the major journals in the country. It was part of a flourishing and
lively labor press, all of which has disappeared, a big change over the
last century. The comment is correct. Of course it has increased. The
difference is that increasingly, especially in the last twenty years, the
corporations have become much more international, with effects that we've
discussed.

DB: Reagan comes to power in 1981 and the debt is one trillion dollars.
Today it's four trillion dollars, and that's projected to grow by fifty
percent over the next six years. Who owns the debt? Who's going to pay it?

Debt just means people who buy government bonds and securities. They own
the debt. Mostly the rich, naturally, at home and abroad. The people who
pay it are taxpayers. The debt is just another mechanism for transferring
wealth from the poor to the rich, like most social policy. Of course,
there's another form of payment. The debt takes away from the possibility
of social spending that would benefit the general population. Incidentally,
the debt itself, just the numbers, is not a huge problem. We've had bigger
debts than that, not in numbers, but relative to GNP, in the past. What the
debt is exactly is a bit of a statistical artifact. You can make it
different things depending on how you count.

But whatever it is, it's not something that couldn't be dealt with. The
question is, what was done with the borrowing? If the borrowing in the last
ten years had been used for constructive purposes, say, for investment or
infrastructure, we'd be quite well off. The fact is that the borrowing was
used for enrichment of the rich, for consumption, which meant lots of
imports, which built up the trade deficit; and for financial manipulation
and speculation, which are very harmful to the economy.

DB: Given the economic situation, it would seem to be a propitious moment
for the left, the progressive movement, to come forward with some concrete
proposals. People are not unaware of what's going on: high rents,
skyrocketing college tuition and medical costs, etc. Yet the left, if I can
call it that, when not bogged down in internecine warfare, is seemingly in
a reactive mode only. It's not proactive.

What people call the "left," the peace and justice movements, whatever they
are, in terms of numbers, I think they've expanded a lot over the years. On
particular issues they focus on them and achieve things. They tend to be
very localized. There's very little in the way of broader integration, of
institutional structure. They can't coalesce around unions because the
unions are essentially gone. To the extent that there's any structure it's
usually something like the church. There is virtually no functioning left
intelligentsia. Nobody's talking much about what should be done or is even
available to give talks. So you have a very large number of people, an
enormous constituency, with a local focus, both regionally and in terms of
issues, and nothing much in the sense of a general vision or picture.
That's the result of the success of the class warfare of the last decades
in destroying, breaking up popular organizations and isolating people.

Also I should say that the policy issues that have to be faced are quite
deep. It's always nice to have reforms. It would be nice to have more money
for starving children. You can think of lots of reforms that should be
carried out. But there are some objective problems which you and I would
have to face if we ran the country. One objective problem, which was kindly
pointed out to the Clinton administration by the Wall Street Journal in a
front page article the other day is that if they get any funny ideas about
taking some of their own rhetoric seriously -- granted, that's not very
likely, but just in case anybody has some funny ideas -- spending money for
social spending, the United States is so deeply in hock to the
international financial community because of the debt and the sale of
Treasury bonds, that they have a lock on U.S. policy. The lock is very
simple. If something happens here, say, increasing workers' salaries, that
the bondholders don't like, that's going to cut down their short-term
profit, they'll just start withdrawing from the U.S. bond market, which
will drive interest rates up, which will drive the economy down. They point
out that Clinton's twenty-billion-dollar spending program can be turned
into a twenty-billion-dollar additional cost to the government, to the
debt, just by slight changes in the purchase and sale of bonds, with their
automatic effects on increasing interest rates, etc. So social policy, even
in a country as rich and powerful as the United States, which is the
richest and most powerful of them all, is mortgaged to the international
wealthy sectors here and abroad. Those are issues that have to be dealt
with.

To deal with those issues means to face problems of revolutionary change.
There's apparently a debate going on within the Clinton administration over
whether there should be efforts to protect American workers no matter who
owns an enterprise, or U.S.-based enterprises. All those debates are taking
place within a framework of assumptions: the investors have the right to
decide what happens. So we have to make things as attractive as possible to
the investors. As long as the investors have the right to decide what
happens, nothing much else is going to change. It's like saying in a
totalitarian state, shall we change from proportional representation to
some other kind in the state-run parliament. Maybe it will make a little
change, but it's not going to matter much. Until you get to the source of
power, which ultimately is investment decisions, other changes are cosmetic
and can only take place in a limited way. If they go too far the investors
will just make other decisions, and there's nothing you can do about it.

To challenge the right of investors to determine who lives, who dies, how
they live and die, that would be to make a significant move toward
Enlightenment ideals, actually the classical liberal ideal. That would be
revolutionary.

DB: There's another factor at work here, and I'd like you to address it.
That is the psychological one that it's a lot easier to criticize something
than to promote something constructive. There's a completely different
dynamic at work.

You can see a lot of things wrong. Small changes you can propose. But to be
realistic, substantial change, which will really change the large-scale
direction of things and overcome major problems that we all see, will
require profound democratization of the society and the economic system. If
you take an enterprise, a business or a big corporation, internally it's a
fascist structure. Power is at the top. Orders go from top to bottom. You
either follow the orders or get out. There's very little else going on.
Furthermore, the concentration of power in such structures means that
virtually everything else, whether it's in the ideological or the political
sphere, is sharply constrained, not totally controlled by any means, but
sharply constrained. Those are just facts.

By now, the international economy imposes other kinds of constraints. You
can't overlook those things. They're just true. If anybody bothered to read
Adam Smith, instead of prating about him, they would see this pointed out
very clearly. He pointed out that social policy is class-based. He took
class analysis for granted. It wasn't even an issue. So, if you studied the
canon properly at the University of Chicago, they taught you that Adam
Smith denounced the mercantilist system and colonialism because he was in
favor of free trade. That's half the truth. The other half of the truth is
that he pointed out that the mercantilist system and colonialism were
harmful to the people of England but very beneficial to the merchants and
manufacturers who were the principal architects of policy. In short, it was
a class-based policy which worked for the rich and powerful in England. The
people of England paid the costs. He was opposed to that, because he was an
enlightened intellectual, but he recognized it. Unless you recognize that
you're just not in the real world.

DB: Huey Long once said that when fascism comes to this country it's going
to be wrapped in an American flag. You have detected and commented on
tendencies toward fascism in this country. You've even been quoting Hitler
on the family and the role of women.

It was kind of striking. After the Republican convention (fortunately I
saved my self the pain of watching television, but I read about it) it
struck such chords that I began to look up some literature from the 1930s,
contemporary literature on fascism. I looked up Hitler's speeches in the
late 1930s to women's groups and big rallies. The rhetoric was very similar
to that of the "God and country" rally the first night of the Republican
convention. I don't really take that too seriously. The reason is that the
levers of power are firmly in the hands of the corporate sector. They will
permit rabid fundamentalists to scream about God and country and family,
but they're very far from having any influence over major power decisions,
as you could see from the way the campaign developed. They were given the
first night to scream and yell. They were even given the party platform.
It's pre-Enlightenment. But then when the campaign started we were back to
business as usual.

However, that can change. One of the consequences of the growing alienation
and isolation of people is that they begin to develop highly irrational and
self-destructive attitudes. You want to try to identify yourself somehow.
You don't want to be just glued to the television set. You want something
in your life. If most of the constructive ways are cut off, you turn to
other ways. You can see that in the polls, too. I was just looking at a
study published in England, done by an American sociologist, of comparative
religious attitudes in various countries. The figures are shocking.
Three-quarters of the American population literally believes in religious
miracles. The numbers who believe in the devil, in resurrection, God does
this and that -- astonishing. These are numbers that you have nowhere in
the industrial world. You've got to go to maybe mosques in Iran, or maybe
do a poll among old ladies in Sicily. You might get numbers like this. This
is the American population. Just a couple of years ago there was a study of
what people thought of evolution. The percentage of the population that
believed in Darwinian evolution at that point was nine percent. Like
statistical error, basically. About half the population believed in divine
guided evolution, Catholic church doctrine. About forty percent thought the
world was created about six thousand years ago. Again, you've got to go
back to pre-technological societies, or else devastated peasant societies,
before you get numbers like that. Those are the kinds of belief systems
that show up in things like the God and country rally. Religious
fundamentalism can be a very scary phenomenon. That could be the mass base
for popular movement of extreme danger. Also, these people are not stupid.
They have huge amounts of money. They're organizing. They are moving the
way they should, beginning to take over local offices where nobody notices
them. There was a striking phenomenon in the last election, it even made
the front pages of the national newspapers. It turned out that in many
parts of the country ultraright fundamentalist fanatics had been running
candidates without identifying them. It doesn't take a lot of work to get
somebody elected to the school committee. Not too many people pay
attention. You don't have to say who you are. You just appear with a
friendly face and a smile and say, I'm going to help your kids, and people
will vote for you. A lot of people got in as a result of organized
campaigns to take over these local structures. That can build up and end up
with a society that moves back to real pre-Enlightenment times. If that
ties in with some charismatic power figure saying, "I'm your leader, follow
me," that could be very ugly.

DB: There's also a huge increase in fundamentalist media, print, obviously
in newspapers and magazines, but particularly in the electronic media. You
can't drive across the country.

That was true years ago. I remember driving across the country in the
1950s, being bored out of my head and turning on the radio. Every station I
could find was some ranting preacher. Now it's much worse, and of course
now there's television.

DB: You talk about the standard techniques and devices that are used to
control the population: construction of enemies, both internal and
external, the creation of hatreds, religious enthusiasm, and then you say,
"the techniques are constant for the same structural reasons." What are
those structural reasons?

The structural reason is that power is concentrated. The general policy is
exactly the way that Adam Smith described it: it's designed for the benefit
of its principal architects, the powerful. It serves the vile maxim of the
masters: all for ourselves and nothing for anyone else. Those are the basic
rules of the world. The way it works out depends on what the structures
are. In our case it happens to be basically corporate structure. Much of
the population is going to be harmed by that. Those policies are designed
to turn state power into an instrument that works for the wealthy. Maybe
there are some crumbs for the rest of the population, maybe not. But that's
given.

Somehow you have to get the general public to accept this. Hume's paradox
does hold: power is in the hands of the governed. If they refuse to accept
it, you're in trouble, no matter how many guns you have. How do you do
that? There are not a lot of ways. One way is to frighten people and make
them cower in terror that only the great leader can save them. Saddam
Hussein is coming. You'd better hide in the sand, and by a miracle I'll
save you. Then you save them by a miracle. So the combination of fear and
awe is a standard technique, used all the time. Diverting people to other
things. Elvis stamps. That's a technique. Professional sports are another.
Get people to go insane about somebody or other. It also has the effect of
creating attitudes of subservience. Somebody else is doing it, and you're
supposed to applaud them. They're doing something you could never dream of
doing in your life. So there are many devices, but not a lot. You generally
find one or another of them being employed.

DB: You're predicting that the next big target is going to be the schools.

The schools are already a target. I think more generally what's going to
happen is one or another move still further towards a two-tiered system
designed for the two-tiered society. It's always been that, but more so
than before. Better schools and more investment for relatively privileged
sectors, what's called "choice." If you're in the slums, by some miracle
you might be able to get in. Degradation or even elimination of the public
education sector for large numbers of other people.

Increasingly, the assumption that it is not our responsibility as citizens
to care for all of the citizens. What you have to do is work for yourself.
That means try to create a system in which those with privilege, education
and clout can get the education they want for their kids and the rest are
out of luck.

DB: The conditions that form the U.S.-Israeli alliance have changed, but
have there been any structural changes?

No significant structural changes. It's just that the need for the
strategic alliance has intensified. Its viability has increased. The
capacity of Israel to serve U.S. interests, at least in the short term, has
probably increased. The Clinton administration has made it very clear that
it's intending to go even beyond the extreme pro-Israeli bias of the
Bush-Baker administration. Their appointment for the Middle East desk of
the National Security Council is Martin Indyk, whose background is AIPAC,
who has headed a fraudulent research institute, the Washington Institute
for Near East Studies, which is basically there so that journalists who
want to publish Israeli propaganda, but want to do it objectively, can
quote somebody. The one hope that the United States has always had from the
so-called peace negotiations is that the traditional tacit alliance between
Israel and the family dictatorships that rule the Gulf states will somehow
become a little more overt or solidified. And it's conceivable. There is a
big problem, however.

The problem is that Israel's plans, which have never changed, to take over
and integrate the occupied territories, are running into some objective
problems. They have always hoped that in the long run they would be able to
reduce the Palestinian population. Many moves were made to try to
accelerate that. One of the reasons they instituted an educational system
on the West Bank was in the conscious hope that more educated people would
want to get out because there wouldn't be any job opportunities. For a long
time it worked. They were able to get a lot of people to leave. They now
may well be stuck with the population. This is going to cause some real
problems, because they're intending to take the water and the land. That
may not be so pretty and not so easy.

DB: What's Israel's record of compliance with the more than twenty Security
Council resolutions condemning its policies?

It's in a class by itself.

DB: No sanctions, no enforcement?

None. Just to pick one at random: Security Council resolution 425, March
1978, called on Israel to withdraw immediately and unconditionally from
Lebanon. They're still there. The request was renewed by the government of
Lebanon in February of 1991, when everyone was going at Iraq. You can't do
anything. The United States will block it. Many of the Security Council
resolutions that the U.S. has vetoed have to do with Israeli aggression or
atrocities. For example, take the invasion of Lebanon in 1982.

At first the United States went along with the Security Council
condemnations, but within a few days the U.S. had vetoed the major Security
Council resolution, which called on everyone to withdraw and stop fighting.

DB: The U.S. has gone along with the last few UN resolutions or
deportations.

The U.S. gone along, but refused to allow them to have any teeth. The
crucial question is, do you do anything about it? For example, the United
States went along with the Security Council resolution condemning the
annexation of the Golan Heights. But when the time came to do something
about it, that stopped.

DB: Lebanon is a dumping ground for deportees. Israel has taken and dropped
by helicopter and bussed scores of deportees in the 1970s and 1980s. Why
has that changed now? Why has Lebanon refused?

It's not so much that it has refused. If Israel dropped some of them by
helicopter into the outskirts of Sidon, Lebanon couldn't refuse. This time
Israel, I think, made a tactical error. The deportation of 415 people is
going to be very hard for them to deal with. It's an interesting
background. I just read in Ha'aretz, the main Israeli journal, that the
Shabak, the secret police, stated, which they rarely do, that they had only
asked for seven people to be deported. The other four hundred or so were
taken by the Labor government and added. Shabak announced that it wasn't on
their initiative. They never said anything about deporting them.

But taking this big class of people, mostly intellectuals, clerics, etc.,
and putting them in the mountains of southern Lebanon, where it's freezing
and they may start dying, that's not going to look pretty in front of the
TV cameras, which is the only thing that matters. So they may have some
problems, because they're not going to let them back in.

DB: International law transcends state law, but Israel says these
resolutions are not applicable. How are they not applicable?

Just like they're not applicable to the United States. The United States
was condemned by the World Court. States do what they feel like. Of course,
small states have to obey. Israel's not a small state. It's an appendage to
the world superpower, so it does what the United States says it has to do.
The United States tells it: You don't have to obey any of these
resolutions, therefore they're null and void. As they are when the U.S.
gets condemned. The U.S. never gets condemned by a Security Council
resolution, because it vetoes them. But there are repeated Security Council
resolutions condemning the United States which would have passed if it was
any other country, and the General Assembly all the time. Take, say, the
invasion of Panama. There were two resolutions in the Security Council
condemning the United States for the invasion of Panama. We vetoed them
both.

DB: I remember talking to Mona Rishmawi of Al Haq in Ramalla. She told me
that when she would go to court, she wouldn't know whether the Israeli
prosecutor would prosecute her clients under British mandate emergency law,
Jordanian law, Israeli law, or Ottoman law.

Or their own laws. There are administrative regulations, some of which are
never published. The whole idea is a joke, as any Palestinian lawyer will
tell you. There is no law in the occupied territories. There's just pure
authority. Even within Israel itself, the legal system is a joke when it
comes to Arabs. It has to be covered up here. Arab defendants who come to
the Supreme Court come after having been convicted. The convictions are in
the high ninetieth percentile based on confessions. When people confess,
everybody knows what that means. Finally, after about sixteen years, when
one of the people who confessed and was tried turned out to be a Druse army
veteran who was proven to have been innocent, it became a scandal. There
was an investigation, and the Supreme Court stated that for sixteen years
the secret services had been lying to them, had been torturing people and
telling them that they hadn't. There was a big fuss in Israel about the
fact that they had been lying to the Supreme Court. How could you have a
democracy when they lie to the Supreme Court? Not the torture. Everyone
knew it all along.

I recall once after an Amnesty International investigation of torture in
Israel, one of the Supreme Court justices was in London and was interviewed
by Amnesty International. They asked him, could he explain the extremely
high percentage of confessions of Arabs. He said, "It's part of their
nature" to confess. That's the Israeli legal system.

DB: About the deportations again: I heard Steven Solarz on the BBC a couple
of weeks ago. He said the world has a double standard. Seven hundred
thousand Yemenis were expelled from Saudi Arabia and no one said a word.
Which is true. Four hundred and fifteen Palestinians get expelled from Gaza
and the West Bank and everybody's screaming.

Every Stalinist said the same thing. We sent Sakharov into exile and
everyone is screaming. What about this other atrocity? There is always
somebody who has committed a worse atrocity. For a Stalinist like Solarz --
which is exactly what is he, the typical Stalinist hack -- why not use the
same line? In fact, as Solarz knows, Israel is treated with a very gentle
hand, and the expulsion of Yemenis was part of the propaganda build-up for
the war in the Gulf, hence acceptable.

DB: Israel's record and its attitude toward Hamas have evolved over the
years. It once held it in favor, did it not?

They not only held it in favor, they tried to organize and stimulate it. In
the early days of the intifada, Israel was sponsoring Islamic
fundamentalists. If there was a strike of students at some West Bank
university, the Israel army would sometimes bus in Islamic fundamentalists
to break up the strike. Sheikh Yaseen, an anti-Semitic maniac down in Gaza,
who is the leader of the Islamic fundamentalists, was protected for a long
time. They liked him. He was saying, Let's kill all the Jews. It's a
standard thing, way back in history. Chaim Weizman, seventy years ago, was
saying, Our danger is Arab moderates, not the Arab extremists. The invasion
of Lebanon was the same thing. They invaded Lebanon openly in order to
destroy the PLO, which was a threat because it was secular and nationalist
and calling for negotiations and a diplomatic settlement. That was the
threat. Not the terrorists. The facts are familiar in Israel, unmentionable
here, as part of the general cover-up of crimes of an unusually favored
ally. They've done the same thing again, and always make the same mistake.

In Lebanon they went in to destroy the threat of moderation and ended up
with Hezbollah on their hands. In the West Bank, they wanted to destroy the
threat of moderation, people who wanted to make a political settlement, and
they're ending up with Hamas on their hands. The mistake was predictable.
The result was predictable. But it's important to recognize how utterly
incompetent secret services are. Intelligence agencies make the most
astonishing mistakes. For the same reason that academics do. They've got
the same kind of background, the same assumptions. Especially when they're
in a situation of occupation or domination, the occupier, the dominant
power, has to justify what they're doing. There is only one way to do it,
that's to become a racist: you have to blame the victim. Once you become a
racist in self-defense, you've lost your capacity to understand what's
happening. This is a very standard procedure. The U.S. in Indochina was the
same. They never could understand. The FBI right here is the same. They
make the most astonishing mistakes, for similar reasons.

DB: Get us through these Orwellisms of "security zone" and "buffer zone."

In southern Lebanon? That's what Israel calls it, and that's how it's
referred to in the media. Israel invaded southern Lebanon in 1978. It was
obvious at the time that the Camp David negotiations would have the
consequence that they did, namely freeing Israel up to attack Lebanon and
integrate the occupied territories by eliminating Egypt as a deterrent. Any
kindergarten child could have seen that, and by now it's even conceded. So
Israel invaded Lebanon in 1978 and held on to it. That's when the
resolution was passed. They usually held on to it through clients, at the
time it was the Haddad militia.

When Israel invaded in 1982, the border had not been quiet. There had been
a lot of violence across the border, all from Israel north. There was an
American-brokered ceasefire which the PLO had held to scrupulously. But
Israel carried out literally thousands of provocative actions, including
heavy bombing of civilian targets in an effort to try to get the PLO to do
something so that they'd have an excuse for the invasion that finally took
place. It's interesting the way that period is portrayed in American
journalism. Universally it is portrayed as the period when the PLO was
bombarding Israeli settlements. What was happening in fact was that Israel
was bombing and invading north of the border and the PLO wasn't responding.
They were trying at that time to move towards a negotiated settlement.
Israel invaded Lebanon. We know what happened then. They were driven out by
what they call "terrorism," meaning resistance by people who weren't going
to be cowed. Israel succeeded in awakening a fundamentalist resistance
which they couldn't control. They were forced out. They held on to the
southern zone, which they call a "security zone," but there's no reason to
believe that it has the slightest thing to do with security. It's their
foothold in Lebanon. It's run by a mercenary army, the South Lebanon Army,
backed up by Israeli troops. They're very brutal. It's got horrible torture
chambers. We don't know the full details, because they refuse to allow any
inspections, by the Red Cross or anyone else. But there have been
investigations by human rights groups, journalists and others who attest to
overwhelming evidence from independent sources, people who got out, what
goes on there, even Israeli sources. There was actually an Israeli soldier
who committed suicide there because he couldn't stand what was going on.
Some others have written about it in the Hebrew press. Ansar is the main
one, which they very nicely put in the town of Khiyam which is a place
where they carried out a massacre back in 1948. There was another massacre
by the Haddad militia under Israeli eyes in 1982. That's mainly for
Lebanese who refuse to cooperate with the South Lebanon Army. That's the
security zone.

DB: Anti-Defamation League Director Abraham Foxman, in a January 11, 1993
letter to the New York Times, says that since assuming leadership the Rabin
government has "unambiguously demonstrated its commitment to the peace
process." "Israel is the last party that has to prove its desire to make
peace." What's been the Rabin record?

It's perfectly true that Israel wants peace. So did Hitler. Everybody wants
peace. When you say somebody wants peace, that's a tautology. Everybody
wants peace. The question is on what terms. The Rabin government, exactly
as was predicted, harshened the repression in the territories. Just this
afternoon I was speaking to a woman who has spent the last couple of years
in Gaza doing human rights work. She reported what everyone reports, and
what everybody with a brain knew: As soon as Rabin came it got tougher.
He's the iron fist man. That's his record. Actually, Likud had a better
record in the territories than Labor did. Torture and collective punishment
stopped under Likud. There was one period when Sharon was there that it was
bad, but under Begin it was generally better. When the Labor party came
back into the government in 1984, torture started again, collective
repression started again, the intifada came. Rabin stated publicly, it was
published in February 1989 to a bunch of Peace Now leaders, that the
negotiations with the PLO didn't mean anything. It was going to give him
time to crush them by force, and they will be crushed, he said, they will
be broken.

DB: It hasn't happened.

It happened. The intifada was pretty dead. He has awakened it again. His
own violence has succeeded in reawakening the intifada. Several things,
including the recent expulsion. But the increased repression after Rabin
came in did reawaken the rather dormant protests and resistance -- possibly
people just wanted to be left alone, they couldn't take any more. Rabin
succeeded in reawakening it. He has increased settlement in the occupied
territories, exactly as everyone predicted. There was a very highly
publicized cutoff of settlement. It was obvious right away that it was a
fraud. Foxman knows that. He reads the Israeli press, I'm sure. What Rabin
stopped was some of the more extreme and crazy Sharon plans. Sharon was
building houses all over the place, in places where nobody was ever going
to go, and the economy couldn't handle it. So he eased back to a more
rational settlement program. I think the current number is eleven thousand
new housing units going up. Labor tends to have a more rational policy than
Likud, one of the reasons the U.S. has always preferred Labor. They do it
more quietly, less brazenly. Also, it's more realistic. Instead of trying
to make seven big areas of settlement, they're down to four. But the theory
is the same: try to break up the West Bank in a way which will make full
Jewish settlement everywhere that's worthwhile, but surrounding pockets of
Arab population concentration. So big highways, a network of highways
connecting Jewish settlements, avoiding some little Arab village way up in
the hills. All of this is continuing. The goal is to arrange the
settlements so that they separate the Palestinian areas, so that there's no
connection between them. That's to make certain that any form of local
autonomy will never turn into any meaningful form of self government.
That's continuing, and the U.S. is of course funding it, because it's in
favor of it, as it always was. But true, Rabin is delighted to have a peace
process if it can be on his terms.

DB: Critics of the Palestinian movement point to what they call the
"intrafada," the fact that Palestinians are killing other Palestinians, as
if this justifies Israeli rule and delegitimizes any Palestinian national
anspirations.

You might look back at the Zionist movement. There was plenty of killing of
Jews by other Jews. They killed collaborators, traitors, people they
thought were traitors. And they were under nothing like the harsh
conditions of the Israeli occupation. As plenty of Israelis have pointed
out, the British weren't nice, but they were gentlemen compared with us.
The first Haganah assassination, the Labor-based defense force, the first
that's recorded, at least, was in 1921. I looked it up in the official
Haganah history. It's described there straight. A Dutch Jew named Jacob de
Haan, because he was trying to approach local Palestinians to see if things
could be worked out between the new settlers and the Palestinians, had to
be killed. One of the murderers is assumed to be the woman who later became
the wife of the first President of Israel. They said in the history that
another reason for assassinating him was that he was a homosexual. Don't
want those guys around. There were Haganah torture chambers, assassins.
Yitzhak Shamir became head of the Stern gang by killing the guy who was
designated to be the head. Shamir was supposed to take a walk with him on a
beach. He never came back. Everyone knows Shamir killed him. The American
revolution was no different.

As the intifada began to self-destruct under tremendous repression, this
killing got completely out of hand. It began to be a matter of settling old
scores, gangsters killing anybody they disliked. Originally it was pretty
disciplined. But when the repression got harsh enough and the leadership
was taken away, thrown into concentration camps, the thing deteriorated. It
ended up with a lot of random killing, which Israel loves. Then they can
point out how rotten the Arabs are.

DB: It's a dangerous neighborhood.

Yes, it is. They help make it dangerous.

DB: David Frum, a Canadian journalist, in the January 2, 1993 Financial
Post, calls you, among other things, the "great American crackpot." I think
that ranks up there with the New Republic's Martin Peretz's comment placing
you "outside the pale of intellectual responsibility." But Frum actually
has some substantive things to say: "There was a time when the New York
Times op ed page was your stomping ground." Have I missed something here?

I guess I did too. I did once have an op ed, one. It was in 1971, I guess.
I had testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. This was the
period when everybody in the New York Times was deciding we'd better get
out of Vietnam because it was costing us too much. Senator Fulbright had in
effect turned the Senate Foreign Relations Committee into a seminar. He was
very turned off by the war at that time, by American foreign policy. He
invited me to testify. That was respectable enough. So they ran a segment
of ...

DB: Excerpts of your comments. There wasn't an original piece you had
written for the Times.

Maybe it was slightly edited, but it was essentially a piece of my
testimony at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. So it's true, the
Times did publish a piece of testimony at the Foreign Relations Committee.

DB: And that was your "stomping grounds." What about letters? How many
letters of yours have they printed?

Occasionally, when something appeared there which was an outlandish slander
and lie about me, I've written back to them. Usually they don't publish the
letters. Sometimes I was angry enough that I contacted friends who were
able to put enough pressure on so they would run a letter of response.

DB: I haven't seen one in years.

Sometimes they just refuse. In the Times Book Review there were a bunch of
vicious lies about me and the Khmer Rouge. I wrote back a short letter
responding, and they just refused to publish it. I got annoyed and wrote
back and I actually got a response, saying, we published a different letter
that we thought was better.

DB: David Frum just can't stop lavishing praise upon you. He says, "Your
views are exactly like the stuff peddled by Lyndon LaRouche and the
Christic Institute." You had an incident involving the Larouchies that
you've mentioned in several talks.

It went as far as death threats. I had been following them pretty closely,
partly because I knew some of the kids involved. They were children of
personal friends. It grew out of the Columbia strike in 1968. Originally it
was the National Caucus of Labor Committees. It was a Marxist group of
serious young people who were going to live in working-class areas and
organize people. You could like it or dislike it. It was perfectly
rational. This guy Lyndon LaRouche, who had some other name then, was the
guru. At first he looked like some sort of standard ex-Trotskyite. After a
while you could see what was happening. These are hard things to do. You're
giving up your life, your career, the only world you live in is your
surroundings. He gradually began to introduce slightly crazy themes into
the ideology. You could see him do it little by little. At each point
everyone in the group, nineteen-year-old kids, had to make a decision: Am I
going to go along with this or am I going to give up my life? A lot of
people went along. After a while they were off in outer space. The
positions were so insane you couldn't even talk about it.

They then got quite violent. They started something called Operation
Mop-Up. They were going to take the hegemony of the left by going into some
movement meeting with baseball bats and beating everyone over the head. At
first nobody knew what to do about it. After a while they figured, OK,
we'll come back with bigger baseball bats. The next thing they started was
what amounted to an extortion racket against parents. A lot of the kids had
middle-class parents. The idea was to go back to your parents and tell them
that unless they sold the store and gave it to LaRouche, they were enemies
of the human race, objective fascists, and you were never going to have
anything to do with them again.

This went on for a while. I started getting approached at talks I was
giving. Some old couple would come up. I remember once a couple came up, a
guy who had a little grocery store somewhere. He told me this was what his
kids were saying, what did I think he ought to do? Usually I didn't answer.
This once I said, if you want me to tell you the truth, I'll tell you the
truth. I told him what I thought. About a week later I got a message signed
Labor Committee Intelligence Service: our Intelligence Service has learned
that you're spreading rumors about the party. You have one week to clear
yourself of these charges. I threw it into the waste basket. Shortly after
their newspaper started coming out with crazed attacks. The funniest one
was a pamphlet they put out for the Bicentennial, July 4, 1976. It was
called "Terrorist Commanders." It had on the front a picture of me and Marc
Raskin. It was quite amusing. It was about how the two of us run the KGB
and the CIA and the PLO and the Queen of England and whoever else was in
their conspiracy at the time. They said we were planning to put atom bombs
in major U.S. cities at the time of the Bicentennial. I got it in August, a
month after. Usually these end-of-the-world people, when it doesn't happen
they have some reason. But they were still predicting it a month after it
didn't happen. That was put on the windshield of my car with a death threat
scribbled on it. I won't go into the details of what happened next. I
didn't hear from them for a while. Since then it's similar things.

DB: Anyone who comes to visit your office at MIT will see a very large
black and white photograph of Bertrand Russell in the hallway next to your
door. What's the story behind that photograph?

He's one of the very few people that I actually admire. I did have a big
photograph of him. The office was vandalized during the Vietnam War years.
A sauerkraut bomber. One of the things that was destroyed was that picture.
Somebody succeeded in putting up another one.

DB: So does Russell exemplify the responsibility of intellectuals?

Nobody is a hero, but he had a lot of very good characteristics and did a
lot of things that I admire.

DB: You do endless rounds of interviews, and I certainly inflict a fair
share of them on you, how do you keep awake, much less sustain interest?
What constitutes a good interview? What engages you? The questions are
interminable, and usually the same.

They're not always quite the same. And I have to rethink things anyway.
These are very important and interesting topics, and as long as people are
interested in them, I'm going to keep talking about them.

DB: You can stay awake?

Most of the time.

DB: Thank you.
                          -----------------------

                     Media, Knowledge, and Objectivity

                               June 16, 1993

DB: It's about 7:00 a.m. here in Boulder, 9:00 where you are in Lexington.
What is your morning routine like? Do you start off with reading the Boston
Globe and the New York Times?

Yes, and The Wall Street Journal. The Financial Times. Whatever.

DB: Is the morning a good time for you to work or are you interrupted with
a lot of phone calls like this one?

Usually, quite a lot.

DB: The Boston Globe, your daily newspaper, has just been acquired by the
New York Times. The Globe is one of the last major papers in the country
not owned by a chain. What are your thoughts on that?

It's a natural continuation of a tendency that's been going on for a long
time. Ben Bagdikian, for example, has been documenting it year after year.
It's a natural phenomenon. Capital tends to concentrate. I frankly doubt
that it would make much difference in the nature of the newspaper, at least
for a few years. However, over time it probably will.

DB: There is a well-documented trend in the concentration of media
ownership. Do you see any countertrends?

What you are doing right now is a countertrend. It's just like everything
that's going on in the world. There's a trend toward centralization of
power in higher and higher levels, but there's also a countertrend towards
regionalization, including what's called "devolution" in Europe, creation
of grassroots movements, construction of alternatives. The new electronic
technology, in fact, has given opportunities for lots of spreading of
alternatives. Cable television offers alternatives. So things are going in
both directions. Institutionally, the major tendency is centralization. The
other tendency in the opposite direction, which is the only hopeful one, in
my opinion, is much more diffuse and has nothing much in the way of
organized institutional forms. But it's certainly going on at every level.

DB: There are also computer networks.

They offer lots of possibilities. There are tens of thousands of people
hooked up, maybe hundreds of thousands hooked into various networks on all
kinds of topics and lots of discussion goes on and lots of information
comes through. It's of varying quality, but a lot of it is alternative to
the mainstream. That's still pretty much of an elite privilege at this
point.

DB: I recently got a letter from a listener in Lafayette, Colorado, a few
miles from Boulder. He heard your talk "Manufacturing Consent," which you
gave at the Harvard Trade Union Program in January. I thought the
listener's comments were telling. He said after hearing the program that it
left him feeling "as politically isolated as the PR industry would have
us." He asked, "How do we get organized? Is everybody too tied down by
monthly bills to care?" So there are multiple questions and concerns there.

How do we get organized? There's a simple answer: you go ahead and do it.
People have gotten organized under much more onerous conditions than these.
Suppose, for example, you're a peasant in El Salvador in a Christian base
community which tries to become a peasant cooperative. The conditions under
which those things took place are so far beyond anything we can imagine
that to talk about the problems we face seems superfluous. Sure, there are
problems. People are weighed down with bills, they have personal problems.
But most of us live under conditions of extraordinary privilege by
comparative standards. The problem of getting organized is a problem of
will.

DB: Isn't one of the functions of the media to marginalize people like this
listener who wrote and to convince them that affairs must be left to the
experts and you stay out of it.

Of course. But notice that it's done differently in El Salvador. There they
send in the death squads. Here what they do is try to hook you on sitcoms.
It's true that both are techniques of control, but they are rather
different techniques.

DB: You're a scientist. Talk about the notions of objectivity and balance
in the media and in scholarship. Who determines those kinds of things?

There's a big difference between the sciences and humanistic or social
science scholarship or the media. In the natural sciences you're faced with
the fact of nature as a very hard taskmaster. It doesn't let you get away
with a lot of nonsense. At least in the more well developed areas of the
sciences, it's difficult for error to perpetuate. Theoretical error, of
course, can perpetuate because it's hard to detect. But if a person does an
experiment and misstates the results, that's likely to be exposed very
quickly, since it will be replicated. There's a fairly stern internal
discipline, which by no means guarantees that you're going to find the
truth. But it imposes standards that are very hard to break away from.
There are external conditions that determine how science proceeds: funding,
etc. But it's qualitatively different from other areas, where the
constraints imposed by the outside world are much weaker. Much less is
understood. The empirical refutation is much harder to come by. It's much
easier to simply ignore things that you don't want to hear.

So let's go back to your opening comment about the Times taking over the
Globe. The east-coast press has been flowing with praise for this and
saying that because of the Times' high journalistic standards there's no
concern that this will have any danger. There are thousands of pages of
documentation in print which demonstrate that the Times' journalistic
standards are anything but high. In fact, they're grotesque. But it doesn't
matter, because the critical analysis can simply be ignored. It has the
wrong message. Therefore you ignore it. That's the kind of thing that's
very easy in journalism or any of the other ideological disciplines. You
just ignore what you don't like, and if you are on the side of the
powerful, it's easy to get away with it.

The other day I read a summary article in the Washington Post by a good
reporter who knows a lot about Central America, the lost decade in Central
America. His article expresses all sorts of puzzlement about why Central
America is worse off than it was in 1980 despite the enormous amount of
American aid that went into the region. It asks whether this American aid
was well-spent, whether it was well-designed, whether it went in the right
areas. He asks what went wrong with our enormous effort to bring democracy
and social development to Central America.

The author (Douglas Farah) of that article, at least when he's not writing
for the Post, knows the answer perfectly well. The U.S. led a devastating
terrorist war throughout the region to try to prevent democracy and social
development. These billions of dollars of aid that he talks about were
billions of dollars spent to destroy these countries. That's why they are
worse off than before. But the Post can't say that. No matter how
overwhelming the evidence is, it's perfectly possible simply to disregard
it and to go on with fantasies that are much more pleasing to powerful
interests and to oneself. In journalism, or in a good deal of what's called
"soft scholarship," meaning outside the hard sciences, that's quite easy to
do. The controls are very weak, and it's very easy simply to ignore or to
deflect critical analysis. In the hard sciences it just won't work. You do
that and you're left behind. Somebody else discovers things and you're out
of business. Years ago C. P. Snow talked about what he called the two
cultures of the humanities and the hard sciences. He was much criticized
for that. But there's something to it. They are rather different in
character. There are further blurring comments that have to be made, but
roughly speaking the difference is real.

So to answer the question, within the more developed natural sciences,
although nobody has any illusions about objectivity, there is a kind of
peer-pressure control that reflects the constraints imposed by nature. In
the other areas, work is commonly considered objective if it reflects the
views of those in power.

DB: The concept of objectivity in journalism definitely seems to be
something that's situational and mutable.

If you look at serious monographic work in diplomatic history, the
situation is somewhat different. Although there, choices and focus and
concentration and framing are themselves often quite ideological and can
hardly fail to be. More honest people will recognize that and make it
clear. The less honest will make it appear that they're simply being
objective.

DB: But of course one of the central myths of the media is that they are
objective and balanced.

Sure. That's part of their propaganda function.

It's obvious on the face of it that those words don't mean anything. What
do you mean by balanced? What's the proper measure of balance? There's no
answer to that question. If the media were honest, they would say, Look,
here are the interests we represent and this is the framework within which
we look at things. This is our set of beliefs and commitments. That's what
they would say, very much as their critics say. For example, I don't try to
hide my commitments, and the Washington Post and New York Times shouldn't
do it either. However, they must do it, because this mask of balance and
objectivity is a crucial part of the propaganda function.

In fact, they actually go beyond that. They try to present themselves as
adversarial to power, as subversive, digging away at powerful institutions
and undermining them. The academic profession plays along with this game.
Have a look at academic conferences on the media. One I went through in
detail was held at Georgetown University. It was run by a dovish, rather
liberal-leaning Quaker. It was about media coverage of Central America and
the Middle East. The way the conference is framed is this: First came a
series of statements opening the discussion by people who said the media
and journalists are overwhelmingly biased against the government. They lie.
They try to undermine the U.S. government. They're practically communist
agents. After these bitter attacks on the media for their adversarial
stance, another set of papers were presented which said, Look, it's pretty
bad, we agree. But it's not quite as bad as you say. That's our job, to be
subversive, and that's what you have to face up to in a democratic society.
Then these two positions were debated.

There is obviously a third position: the media are supportive of power
interests. They distort and often lie in order to maintain those interests.
But that position can't be expressed. In fact, in the conference I'm
talking about, one hundred percent of the coverage on Central America was
within the bounds I've described. On the Middle East, where the media are
just grotesque, it was only ninety-six percent within those ludicrous
bounds. The reason was that they allowed one statement by Eric Hoagland, a
Middle East scholar who made an accurate statement, and that's the four
percent, which nobody ever referred to again. That's the way the media like
to present themselves, naturally, and that's the way the academic
profession likes to see them presented. If you can present the media as
being critical, antagonistic to power, maybe even subversive, that makes an
enormous contribution to the propaganda function. Then they say, Look how
critical of power we are. How could anyone go beyond us?

DB: In an article about the acquisition of the Boston Globe in the Times a
few days ago, it was pointed out that the Globe was one of the first papers
in the United States to lead the crusade against U.S. intervention in
Vietnam. You were reading this paper throughout that period. Is that
accurate?

Yes, it's very accurate. They published the first editorial calling for
withdrawal from Vietnam. The editor at that time was a personal friend and
I followed this quite closely. They did a big study to determine if it
would be possible to publish this editorial and still get away with it.
They finally agreed to do it. My recollection is that that was in late
1969, that is, about a year-and-a-half after Wall Street had turned against
the war. I think it's probably true that that was the first mainstream call
for withdrawal of U.S. forces. Of course, it was not framed in terms of a
call to withdraw the U.S. forces that had attacked Vietnam, but rather, We
should get out, it doesn't make sense, etc. That tells you something about
the U.S. media. What it tells you is a year-and-a-half after the business
community determined that the government should liquidate the effort
because it was harmful to U.S. economic interests, about that time the
courageous press timidly began to say, well, maybe we ought to do what the
business community announced a year-and-a-half ago, without even conceding
the simple truth: that it was a war of U.S. aggression, first against South
Vietnam, then all of Indochina. Some elementary truths are too outrageous
to be allowed on the printed page.

DB: Do you see knowledge as a commodity? Is it something that's traded and
purchased and sold? Obviously it's sold: one sells oneself in the
marketplace.

I'd be a little cautious about the knowledge part. What passes for
knowledge is sold. Take, say, Henry Kissinger as an example. He certainly
sells himself in the marketplace. But one should be very skeptical about
whether that's knowledge or not. The reason is that what's sold in the
marketplace tends to be pretty shoddy. It works. It's knowledge or
understanding shaped or distorted to serve the interests of power. Or, to
go back to the hard sciences, their knowledge is certainly sold. Take
American high-tech industry, or the pharmaceutical industry. One of the
ways in which the public subsidizes the corporate sector is through
university research labs, which do straight research. But the benefits of
it, if something commercially viable comes out of it, are handed over to
private corporations. I don't know of any university departments which
contract out directly to industry, but there are things not too far from
that.

DB: Would you say information is a commodity?

People make such statements. I'm a little leery about them. When you say
that information is a commodity, it can certainly be sold, traded, in
elementary ways, like a newspaper joins Associated Press and purchases
[articles] or you go to a bookstore and buy a book. Information is sold.
That's not a deep point, I don't think.

DB: What about ways of acquiring knowledge outside of the conventional
structures, the colleges and universities?

First of all, even within the conventional structures, colleges,
universities, the New York Times, etc., if you read carefully, you can
learn a lot. All of these institutions have an important internal
contradiction: On the one hand, they wouldn't survive if they didn't
support the fundamental interests of people who have wealth and power. If
you don't serve those interests, you don't survive very long. So there is a
distorting and propaganda effect and tendency. On the other hand, they also
have within them something that drives them towards integrity and honesty
and accurate depiction of the world, as far as one can do it. Partly that
just comes out of personal integrity of people inside them, whether they're
journalists or historians. But partly it's because they won't even do their
job for the powerful unless they give a tolerably accurate picture of
reality. So the business press, for example, often does quite good and
accurate reporting, and the rest of the press too, in many cases. The
reason is that people in power need to know the facts if they're going to
make decisions in their own interests. These two conflicting tendencies
mean that if you weave your way between them you can learn quite a lot.

To get back to your question: Outside these institutions there are all
sorts of things people can do. Let's go back to the article I mentioned in
the Washington Post about Central America. Central American activists in
Boulder or plenty of other places, when they look at that article just
collapse in laughter. They know the facts. They didn't find out the facts
from reading the Washington Post, for the most part. They found them out
through other sources. The Central American solidarity movements had access
to extensive information and still do, through direct contacts, through
alternative media, through people travelling back and forth, that is
completely outside the framework of the mainstream media. For example, one
thing that this article states is that the United States compelled the
Marxist Sandinistas to run their first free election in 1990. Everyone in
the Central American solidarity movements, and plenty of other people,
knows that that's complete baloney and that there was a free election held
in 1984, except it came out the wrong way, so therefore it was wiped out of
history by the U.S. In fact, the author of this article certainly knows it
as well. But for him to say it in the Washington Post would be like
standing up in the Vatican and saying Jesus Christ didn't exist. You just
can't say certain things within a deeply totalitarian intellectual culture
like ours. Therefore, he has to say what he says, and maybe even believes
it, although it's hard for me to imagine. Everybody has to say that. But
people in the popular movements know perfectly well that it's not true and
know why it's not true, because they've found other ways to gain
understanding of the world.

In case you heard a big bang in the background, that was one of the piles
of books in my study collapsing on the floor, as happens regularly.

DB: I can see you surrounded by mountains and stacks of papers and books.

Occasionally they decide that the laws of physics won't handle it and they
fall on the floor, which is what just happened.

DB: You commented to a friend that the amount of material that you lose is
"awesome," but it seems to me that the amount of material that you retain
is awesome as well.

It doesn't feel that way to me. I feel mostly the loss. As I see it
disappearing it's agonizing. I know if I don't write about something within
a couple of years it will be gone, lost in these piles. The trouble is, all
of us feel like this. You're so far out of the mainstream that the few
people who follow these issues closely and who write about them know that
if they don't deal with something it's out of history. For example, the
Nicaraguan election is in history, at least for people who care, primarily
because Edward Herman did some very good research on it. It doesn't matter
to the Washington Post. For them it's out of history, period, because those
are the orders from those who are on high. But for people who want to know,
you can look at Herman's work.

DB: Something you've been saying over the years strikes me as somewhat
contradictory. When you talk about the connection between U.S. aid and
human rights abuses, you say that connection is "obvious," and at the same
time you say that there's no way to know about these things and you have to
be a fanatic, as you describe yourself, to find these things out. Doesn't
that leave people intimidated and disempowered?

If I put it that way I'm being a little misleading. As an individual, you
have to be a fanatic to find it out. On the other hand, if you're part of a
semi-organized movement, like the Central America solidarity movements, you
don't have to be a fanatic, because you have access to alternative sources
of information.

Again, take Edward Herman, my friend and colleague, who did an extensive
study of the relation between U.S. aid and torture. He found them very
highly correlated. We published information about it in jointly written
books of ours and elsewhere. He's also published his own books that
describe this in detail.

The leading Latin American academic specialist on human rights, Lars
Schoultz at North Carolina, published an article in about 1980 on U.S. aid
and human-rights violations, primarily torture, in Latin America. He found
exactly the same thing. As he put it in his article, U.S. aid tends to flow
to the most egregious human rights violators in the hemisphere. They are
consistently the highest aid recipients. He also showed that this
correlation has nothing to do with need, that it includes military aid, and
that it runs through the Carter period. In the Reagan period it shot
through the roof. You can find those things out. I've reported them.
Herman's reported them.

If an isolated individual like that person you mentioned earlier wanted to
figure this stuff out, he'd have to be kind of a fanatic. It would take
immense research to even find that anybody ever talked about these topics.
You're not going to find them in the New York Times index. What you'll find
is article after article about our profound commitment to human rights. On
the other hand, if you are part of the popular movements you have easy
access to such material and you don't have to be a fanatic at all. You just
have to have your eyes open.

DB: In the tremendous amount of mail that you receive, are these views of
isolation reflected? What is the temper of the mail?

Overwhelmingly. There is a film (Manufacturing Consent) by Mark Achbar and
Peter Wintonick that's been playing around the world, often on national
television and around this country, too, though a little less prominently.
I get a lot of letters, hundreds, maybe thousands. Very commonly the tone
is very much like what the person you mentioned said. This also happens if
I occasionally appear on TV in the United States, on Bill Moyers or
Pozner/Donahue. I get a lot of letters saying, I was very interested to
hear what you had to say. I thought I was the only person in the world who
had thoughts like this. Where can I learn more about it? Sometimes I cringe
when the letters say, How can I join your movement? Meaning I haven't at
all gotten across what I was trying to.

DB: You steadfastly refuse to see the film Manufacturing Consent. Why?

Partly because there's that feeling that however much they might have
tried, there's something inherent in the medium which personalizes and
gives the false and indeed ridiculous impression that leads to questions
like, "How can I join your movement?"

DB: How much time do you spend responding to mail per week?

I hate to think about it. Probably twenty-five hours or so.

DB: It's actually increased since the last time I spoke to you.

It goes up and up. I was away for a couple of weeks in Europe and the
Middle East giving lectures. When I came back, I think it took me over two
weeks of doing nothing else, just to clear away the mail.

DB: These are individual responses. I know people are absolutely amazed
when they do hear from you. They are stunned at the graciousness of your
replies.

These letters are often extremely serious and very thoughtful. I should say
that on one topic, finally, I had to write a form letter, saying, Sorry, I
can't respond.

DB: What was that?

Take a guess.

DB: JFK. Conspiracy theories.

That's it. It just got to the point where I couldn't respond any more.
Within the bounds of a twenty-four-hour day I couldn't answer the letters.
So much to my regret I had to say, sorry, I can't do it.

DB: Does that interest in conspiracy theories tell you something about the
political culture?

It tells you something about what's undermining the left. For people who
feel a need to believe in conspiracies, here's one sitting there waiting
for them. Just imagine the CIA deciding, How can we undermine and destroy
all of these popular movements? Let's send them off on some crazy wild
goose chase which is going to involve them in extremely detailed
microanalysis and discussion of things that don't matter. That'll shut them
up. That's happening. In case anybody misunderstands, I don't believe this
for one moment, but it's the kind of thing that goes around.

DB: It's curious that there are elements of what is called the "left" in
this country that have embraced this so fervidly.

In my opinion, that's a phenomenon similar to this feeling of impotence and
isolation that you mentioned. If you really feel, Look, it's too hard to
deal with real problems, there are a lot of ways to avoid doing so. One of
them is to go off on wild goose chases that don't matter. Another is to get
involved in academic cults that are very divorced from any reality and that
provide a defense against dealing with the world as it actually is. There's
plenty of that going on, including in the left. I just saw some very
depressing examples of it in my trip to Egypt a couple of weeks ago. I was
there to talk on international affairs. There's a very lively, civilized
intellectual community, very courageous people who spent years in Nasser's
jails being practically tortured to death and came out struggling. Now
throughout the Third World there's a sense of great despair and
hopelessness. The way it showed up there, in very educated circles with
European connections, was to become immersed in the latest lunacies of
Paris culture and to focus totally on those. For example, when I would give
talks about current realities, even in research institutes dealing with
strategic issues, participants wanted it to be translated into post-modern
gibberish. For example, rather than have me talk about the details of
what's going on in U.S policy or the Middle East, where they live, which is
too grubby and uninteresting, they would like to know how does modern
linguistics provide a new paradigm for discourse about international
affairs that will supplant the post-structuralist text. That would really
fascinate them. But not what do Israeli cabinet records show about internal
planning. That's really depressing.

DB: This was your first visit to Egypt?

Yes. Incidentally, when that happens in Egypt it's very sad. When it
happens all over the West as it does, it's maybe comical or unpleasant but
not devastating.

DB: I just got back from Amsterdam, where I did some interviews and gave
some talks. Precisely those kinds of convoluted, very pretentious questions
were asked.

I've seen the same in Holland. These are ways in which intellectuals can
separate themselves from actual, ongoing struggle and still appear to be
lefter than thou. Nobody's radical enough for them. That way you advance
your career, you separate yourself from things that are going on. You don't
have to get involved in popular activities. You don't have to learn about
the world, let alone do anything about it. I'm overstating. I don't want to
say this is true of everybody, by any means, but there are elements of it.
These are other ways of reacting to the fact that dealing with the problems
of the world is hard and unpleasant. Especially if you begin to do it
effectively, there are personal costs.

DB: It also creates a tremendous gap between them and so-called "people."

Sure. Nobody can understand this stuff. That has the effect of intimidating
people, especially young people coming into the colleges who look at this
and say, My God, to be a radical I'm going to have to understand all these
ten syllable words. It's hopeless. I'd better do something else.

DB: What did you learn about the Islamic movement in Egypt?

I don't want to overstate. I wasn't there long enough to learn a lot. But I
should say that I did meet a pretty wide range of people, people I knew and
those who were recommended to me, and most of those I came across who were
seriously thinking through problems of Egypt and the region were the
intellectuals who were associated with the Islamic movement. The ones I met
were kind of on the secular wing of those movements. I didn't meet clerics.
But these are people who regard themselves, and are regarded as,
oppositionists and part of the Islamic movement. They plainly do have
grassroots connections. They themselves describe the movement as split
between the more progressive sectors and the "rigid" sector, meaning the
real deep fundamentalists, who say, We go back to Koranic law, sharia, and
that's the end of it. But they themselves are thinking about domestic and
regional development and local problems in ways which are not at all
unrealistic. Furthermore, these movements actually do things. They provide
health care, run welfare programs, and try to deal with people's problems.
They're almost unique in that respect. Everyone agrees to that, even the
people who hate them.

DB: What's the motor that's pushing this movement in Egypt?

You just walk around Cairo and you can see the motor. There was a period of
secular nationalism, of which Nasser was the leading figure. It failed, or
was destroyed, partly by itself and partly from outside. Sadat, around
1980, undertook a policy which translates as "opening up," in effect,
structural adjustment, neo-liberal policies. There were the usual effects,
seen all over the world, completely predictable by now. They increased very
sharply the split in the society between great wealth and privilege and
enormous misery and suffering, with the proportions being by no means
balanced. People are suffering. And they see right next to them enormous
wealth and privilege. The government is totally corrupt and doesn't do
anything. It's a police state, not a harsh police state, but you can't
forget it for long. What happens under those conditions? People turn to
something else. It's happening all throughout the region.

DB: Is it not really happening throughout the world as there's global
impoverishment?

These tendencies are going on throughout the world. The rich western
countries are imposing these neo-liberal policies, as they're called, on
the Third World. They have plenty of power. The debt crisis, for example,
is being used as a very effective weapon to try to force most of the Third
World into these programs, which are lethal. The rich countries themselves
don't accept those policies. They don't accept free market policies for
themselves. They're too destructive. However, as the economy becomes more
global, more internationalized, there is an automatic effect of bringing
back Third World tendencies into the rich countries themselves. It's not
very mysterious. American capitalists can be very rich, but American
workers are going to have to compete with people in what are, in effect,
Third World countries.

DB: There was a photo in the paper here a couple of weeks ago of the
University of Colorado graduating class. One senior held up a sign: "Will
work for food."

You see that right outside of rich shopping centers near where I live. The
wealthy countries will never, and never have, accepted the neo-liberal
principles, the free market principles they impose on the poor. The
consequences of imposing them on the poor are slowly to have this Third
World model seep back into the rich countries themselves. It's very
striking in the U.S. You can see it in Europe, particularly in England, and
on the continent you're beginning to see it as well. There's nothing secret
about it. The business press -- Business Week, The Financial Times, etc. --
are very open in saying, American and especially European workers are going
to have to give up their "luxurious" social programs. They're going to have
to stop being "pampered" and accept labor mobility, meaning lose their
security, because corporations can go over to Eastern Europe. In Poland
they can get trained workers at ten percent of the wage of the "pampered"
west European workers. No benefits, and a highly repressive government that
breaks up strikes. Therefore you guys better recognize what's in store for
you. There was an article in the Financial Times recently with a wonderful
headline: "Green Shoots in Communism's Ruins," meaning Communism is a
wreck, but there are some green shoots, a few good things. The good thing
was that as capitalist reforms are imposed in Eastern Europe, pauperization
and unemployment follow, which lowers wages and makes it possible for
western corporations to move in and make huge profits. Those are the "green
shoots."

DB: There is of course a huge increase in unemployment in western European
countries. That has an attendant social component in the many attacks
against immigrant communities.

Unemployment and loss of hope lead to social breakdown. We're much more
advanced in that respect. There's a kind of breakdown of social structure
in American urban communities which is amazing to most of the world. Take,
say, Cairo. Cairo is a very poor city, extremely impoverished. There's
nothing like it here. Nevertheless there is a sense of community that
exists that doesn't exist here. You feel safer walking through the streets
there than here. You don't stumble over homeless people. People are taken
care of somehow. It's the same in Nicaragua or many other Third World
countries that haven't totally broken down. We are beginning to get Third
World characteristics, but under conditions of social breakdown. That's
very dangerous. That's why you can have people cheering when someone wins a
court trial (in Baton Rouge, Louisiana) after having blasted away somebody
(Yoshihiro Hattori) that dared to step on his lawn. That appalled most of
the world. They just couldn't understand it.

DB: Your latest book as of this morning -- Howard Zinn likes to add that
caveat -- is Letters from Lexington. Do you have any more books planned?

I promised to write up lectures on international affairs and the Middle
East that I gave in Cairo. That will be published by American University
Press (Cairo).

DB: Is the summer a good time for you to work, when you're away from the
interviews, the phone calls, the classes?

As you know, I turn off the phone. That's about the only time I can try to
get anything done.

DB: Later this year you're going to turn sixty-five.

You don't believe that propaganda, do you?

DB: Have you thought about slowing down, cutting back on your schedule at
all?

There are an awful lot of things I'd like to do that I'm just not getting
to. There isn't all that much time.

DB: You know that anecdote that Mike Albert tells when he went to Poland
some years ago, he found people who thought that there were two Noam
Chomskys, one who did the linguistics work and the other who did the
political work?

Partly because the name doesn't sound as strange to them there.

DB: There was a serious reactor explosion in a town named Tomsk in central
Russia. Is the name of that town at all connected to Chomsky?

It could be. Nobody really knows the etymology. Roman Jakobson, a great
Slavic linguist and scholar, always told me that he was convinced that that
was the origin, a corruption of Tomsk, Thomas basically.

DB: Is Avram your actual given name?

It is, but my parents never used it, so I use my middle name. It's almost
become my legal first name by now. Just to show you the good old days of
real sexism, I once had to get a copy of my birth certificate and I
discovered that a clerk who hadn't believed my name had crossed it out and
written in pencil above it "Avrane Naomi." Well, why Avrane? Because girls
are allowed to have crazy names, not boys.

DB: Just to back up a little bit. You also went recently to Northern
Ireland. What did you find there in terms of economic conditions and the
political situation?

I spent my time either in West Belfast, which is mainly Catholic and a very
repressed area, or southern parts of Northern Ireland, within what is
called "bandit country," places where the British troops can only go in in
fairly substantial force and where there have been plenty of atrocities. I
talked to human rights activists. I was at the Center for Human Rights
talking to Gerry Adams, the head of Sinn Fein, and others, and to a lot of
people. The country is under military occupation. There's no secret about
that. There are armored personnel carriers going through the streets, armed
blockades right in the middle of Belfast center, etc. There is plenty of
killing by paramilitaries on both sides. There is open debate about the
extent to which or if the British forces are connected to the loyalists,
the mainly Protestant paramilitary, and there is probably some connection,
but nobody knows how much. In the Catholic community, listening to the
stories was very much like walking around the West Bank a couple of years
ago, the same kinds of humiliation and beating and torture. There aren't a
lot of ways to have your boot on someone's neck. It always turns out about
the same.

DB: It echoes the religious conflicts of the Middle Ages in Europe.

The British, back in the mid-seventeenth century, carried out real ethnic
cleansing. The indigenous population in what's now Ulster was mostly driven
out, often into central Ireland.

DB: Was there settler colonialism?

Yes. They brought in Scottish and other British settlers to replace them.
They took most of the fertile land. Traveling through South Armagh, near
the border, I spent some time with a local civil rights group that was set
up after several young men were murdered by British troops, who are now
coming up for trial, years later. A farmer whose son had been killed took
me around and showed me what things were like. They raise cattle, but they
can only raise young cattle, because the earth is too infertile to grow
grass good enough to raise adult cattle. So they raise calves and send them
off somewhere. Every acre is completely reclaimed. You've first got to pull
out all the rocks and move them somewhere else and try to level the ground.
These are the areas to which the Irish were driven, off into the rocky
hills, by the British who cleansed the fertile areas and brought in their
own settlers. It was a couple of centuries ago, but the residue is still
there.

DB: Do you see any solution to the problem of Northern Ireland?

There are contrary tendencies going on in Europe. There's a tendency toward
centralization in the European Community executive, which is almost totally
insulated from public pressure, and there's a countertendency toward
regionalization. So local regions, whether Catalonia, the Basque country,
Wales, or whatever, are beginning to become more involved in developing
their own cultural authenticity and forms of independence and ways of
self-government. In the context of this regionalization and devolution,
it's not impossible that the former British Isles could break down into a
kind of federal arrangement, maybe as part of a broader European
federalism. It would involve a degree of independence in a number of areas:
Scotland, Wales, England, Northern Ireland, the Republic, and in that
context I think you might imagine a solution. I don't see much else. Within
a couple of years the population of Northern Ireland is going to be about
fifty-fifty Catholic and Protestant, according to demographic projections.

DB: I have to tell you, going back to the level of mail that you get, some
years ago I wrote you a letter, and that was my first contact with you. You
responded. That led to a correspondence. Then we starting doing interviews.
It really helped to get Alternative Radio going. I can bear witness and
give testimony to the enormous efficacy of your efforts. I think I speak
for a lot of people who appreciate what you're doing. It does make a
difference.

It's reciprocal. I very much appreciate what thousands of people are doing
everywhere, which is making a difference -- a big difference. These
activities of many, many people around the country and the world have made
a tremendous difference over the last thirty years.

DB: It's incremental. People want to see dramatic changes, but the culture
and politics change rather slowly.

They do, but it's very different from what it was. Under conditions like
those in the 1960s, you would have had to wait until the fall of 1969 for
the first newspaper to timidly suggest that maybe we ought to stop the
aggression in Vietnam.

DB: Thank you, and have a restful summer. How's your foot?

It's OK. It's just a fractured bone.
                          -----------------------

                           Crime and Gun Control

                             December 6, 1993

DB: I know I didn't get you up because it's well known that you stay up and
work through the night, drinking tons and tons of coffee.

That's why I sound so groggy.

DB: I want to talk to you about a couple of domestic and foreign policy
issues and then take calls from our listeners. You can tell a great deal
about a society when you look at its system of justice. I was wondering if
you would comment on the Clinton crime bill, in which some of the
provisions are to hire 100,000 more cops, build boot camps for juveniles,
spend more money for prisons, extend the death penalty to about fifty new
offenses, and make gang membership a federal crime, which is interesting,
considering that there is something about freedom of association in the
Bill of Rights.

One of the consequences of the developments over the past twenty or thirty
years has been a considerable increase in inequality. This trend
accelerated during the Reagan years. The society has been moving visibly
towards a kind of Third World model, which has to do with all sorts of
things going on in the international economy as well as very explicit
social policy. Huge sectors of the society are simply becoming more or less
superfluous for wealth creation, which is considered the only human value.
The consequence of this is an increasing crime rate, as well as other signs
of social disintegration. People are very worried, and quite properly,
because the society is becoming very dangerous. Most of the crime is poor
people attacking each other. But it spills over to more privileged sectors.
As a result there's a great deal of fear about crime.

A constructive approach to the problem would require dealing with its
fundamental causes, and that's off the agenda, because we must continue
with social policy aimed at strengthening the welfare state for the rich.
So there's no constructive response. The only kind of response that the
government can resort to under those conditions is pandering to these fears
with increasing harshness and attacks on civil liberties and moves to
control the useless population, essentially by force, which is what this is
all about.

DB: What are your views on capital punishment?

It's a crime. I agree with Amnesty International on that one, and indeed
with most of the world. The state should have no right to take people's
lives.

DB: There's quite a bit of controversy on gun control. Advocates of free
access to arms cite the Second Amendment. Do you believe the Second
Amendment permits unrestricted, uncontrolled possession of guns?

What laws permit and don't permit is a question that doesn't have a
straightforward answer. Laws permit what the tenor of the times interprets
them as permitting. But underlying the controversy over guns are some
serious questions. Literally, the Second Amendment doesn't permit people to
have guns. But laws are never taken literally, including amendments to the
Constitution or constitutional rights.

Underlying the controversy is something which shouldn't be discounted.
There's a feeling in the country that people are under attack. I think
they're misidentifying the source of the attack, but they feel under
attack. Decades of intensive business propaganda have been designed to make
them see the government as the enemy, the government being the only power
structure in the system that is even partially accountable to the
population, so naturally you want to make that be the enemy, not the
corporate system, which is totally unaccountable. After decades of
propaganda people feel that the government is some kind of enemy and they
have to defend themselves from it. Many of those who advocate keeping guns
have that in the back of their minds. I wouldn't believe it if I hadn't
heard it so many times. That's a crazy response to a real problem.

DB: What role do the media play in fostering those attitudes?

At the deepest level, by contributing to this notion of getting the
government off our backs. It's not that that doesn't have its
justifications, too. The government is authoritarian and commonly a hostile
structure for much of the population, but it is partially accountable and
potentially very extensively accountable to the general population.

The media grossly mislead by contributing to the sense that the government
is the enemy and displacing real power from view, suppressing the sources
of real power in the society, which lie in the totalitarian institutions,
by now international in scale, that control the economy and much of social
life and in fact certainly set conditions within which government operates
and control it to a large extent. This happens sometimes in comical ways
and sometimes in deeper ways.

People simply have no awareness of the system of power under which they are
indeed suffering. As a result, as intended, they turn against the
government. People fear that they're overtaxed. By comparative standards
they're undertaxed. When people talk about a tax-based health plan, meaning
one that doesn't just soak the poor, like the Clinton plan is intended to
do, you get a reflex response: more pointy-headed bureaucrats stealing our
money and running our lives. On the other hand, payment of far higher
"taxes" -- regressive to boot -- to a far more bureaucratized and
oppressive insurance company that is completely unaccountable, that's OK
because you aren't supposed to see it.

To get back to gun control, people have all kinds of motivations, but there
is definitely a sector of the population that considers themselves
threatened by big forces, ranging from the Federal Reserve to the Council
on Foreign Relations to big government to who knows what and are calling
for guns to protect themselves.

DB: I don't know how much you watch local or national network news, but
there has been a discernible trend over the last few years. The influence
of local news primarily dealing with crimes, rapes, and kidnappings, is now
spilling over into the national network news.

That's true. But it's always the surface phenomenon. Why is there an
increase in violent crime? Is that connected to the fact that there has
been a considerable decline in income for the large majority of the
population and opportunity for constructive work? Is it connected to NAFTA,
for example, and the basic phenomena of which NAFTA itself is a symptom?
Sure it is. But until you ask why there is an increase in social
disintegration and what this has to do with policies that are directing
resources towards the wealthy and privileged sectors and away from the
general population, until you ask those questions you can't have even a
concept of why there's rising crime or how you should deal with it.

DB: There's a juxtaposition I want to pose to you now. Anthony Lewis, in a
very strong pro-NAFTA column in the New York Times, before the vote, writes
that an anti-NAFTA vote would mean "the end of nearly fifty years of rising
world prosperity. That's all. Since World War II the world has experienced
extraordinary growth. The engine for that growth has been international
trade. Vastly increased trade in an age of more and more rapid
transportation and communication." Juan de Dias Parra, the head of the
Latin American Association for Human Rights, in a meeting in Quito,
Ecuador, says, "In Latin America today there are 7 million more hungry, 30
million more illiterate, 10 million more families without homes, 40 million
more unemployed persons than there were twenty years ago. There are 240
million human beings in Latin America without the necessities of life, and
this when the region is richer and more stable than ever, according to the
way the world sees it." How do you reconcile those points of view?

It just depends on which people we're worried about. The World Bank came
out with a study on Latin America about two months ago in which they warned
that Latin America was facing chaos and even the things they're concerned
about would be threatened, because of the extraordinarily high inequality,
which is the highest inequality in the world, and that's after a period of
substantial growth rates. For example, take Brazil, which is a very rich
country with enormous resources. It would be one of the richest countries
in the world if it weren't for its social and economic system. It is ranked
around Albania and Paraguay in quality of life measures, infant mortality,
etc.

On the other hand, it's had one of the highest growth rates in the world.
It's also been almost completely directed by American technocrats for about
fifty years. The inequality that the World Bank describes is not just
something that came from the heavens. There was a struggle over the course
of Latin American development back in the mid-1940s, when the new world
order of that day was being crafted. The State Department documents on this
are quite interesting. They said that Latin America was swept by what they
called the "philosophy of the new nationalism," which calls for increasing
production for domestic needs and reducing inequality. Its basic principle
was that the people of the country should be the "first beneficiaries of
the development of a country's resources." That's the philosophy of the new
nationalism, as the State Department described it.

The U.S. was sharply opposed to that and came out with an economic charter
for the Americas that called for eliminating economic nationalism, as it's
called, "in all of its forms" and insisting that Latin American development
be "complementary" to U.S. development, meaning we'll have the advanced
industry and the technology and the peons will produce export crops and do
some simple operations that they can manage. But they won't develop the way
we did.

The U.S., of course, won, given the distribution of power. In countries
like Brazil the U.S. just took over. It was one of the "testing grounds for
scientific methods of development on the American capitalist model," as
propaganda had it. And so it was, and so you get the consequences you
describe. It's true, as Lewis says, that there has been very substantial
growth. At the same time there's incredible poverty and misery, which has
also increased. Over the past thirty years, there has been a sharp increase
in inequality. The growth has slowed down considerably in the last ten
years, but there has been growth. Much more dramatic has been the
separation of the top sector of the population from the rest. So if you
compare the percentage of world income held by the richest twenty percent
and the lowest twenty percent, the gap has dramatically increased. That's
true whether you consider countries, which is a little mystical, but taking
the top twenty percent of countries and the bottom twenty percent of
countries, that gap has about doubled. Take the top twenty and the bottom
twenty percent of people, the gap has increased far more and is much
sharper. That's the consequences of a particular kind of growth.

Incidentally, what Lewis calls "trade" -- he's using the conventional term,
but it's a bit misleading. In fact, substantially misleading, for reasons
we've already discussed. If the Ford Motor Company moves something from an
assembly plant in Mexico to an assembly plant in the U.S., that's called
trade. But it's not trade in any serious sense, and in fact the centrally
managed policies within these totalitarian structures account for about 40%
of the interchanges that are called "trade". These policies often involve
radical violations of market principles which are not considered by GATT
and NAFTA because they are not designed to extend the market system but to
extend the power of corporations who want to benefit from this kind of
market distortion.

DB: So you see this trend of growth rates and increasing poverty
simultaneously continuing?

Actually, growth rates have been slowing down a lot. In the past twenty
years, growth is roughly half of what it was in the preceding twenty years.
That tendency of lower growth will probably continue. One factor that has
to do with that is the enormous growth of unregulated, speculative capital.
That growth has accelerated rapidly basically since Nixon broke down the
Bretton Woods system around 1970. By now the unregulated financial capital
is estimated by the World Bank at about $14 trillion, and about $1 trillion
or so of that moves around every day. That creates pressures for
deflationary policies.

That's what that financial capital wants. It wants low growth, low
inflation. The huge amounts of capital, which overwhelm national states,
make it very difficult to carry out stimulative programs. In the poorer
societies it's hopeless. Even in the richer societies it would be very
hard. What happened with Clinton's trivial stimulus package was a good
indication. It amounted to nothing, $19 billion. It was shot down
instantly. Financial capital, which is now an extraordinarily large part of
the capital available internationally, has an anti-growth effect. It is
driving much of the world into a low-growth, low-wage equilibrium. The
figures are really astonishing. John Eatwell, one of the leading
specialists in finance at Cambridge University, estimates that in 1970
about ninety percent of international capital was used for trade and
long-term investment and ten percent for speculation. In 1990 those figures
were reversed: ninety percent for speculation. Also the quantity has grown
enormously. The effects of that, as he points out, are what I just said.

DB: The Boulder Daily Camera is part of the chain of Knight-Ridder
newspapers. In yesterday's edition they ran a box with questions and
answers: "What Is GATT?" "What Is the Uruguay Round of GATT?" Here's the
part I wanted to ask you about. In the question, "Who would benefit from a
GATT agreement?" the answer given is, "Consumers would be the big winners."
Does that track with your understanding of GATT?

If you mean by "consumers" rich ones, yes. Rich consumers will gain. People
who have lost their jobs, for example -- and that will be true both in the
rich countries and the poor -- obviously are not going to be better
consumers. Take a look at NAFTA, where the analyses have already been done,
and even appeared in the press after the vote. Before that, there was a
huge hype about how important the vote is, of which the Lewis column that
you mentioned is a case in point. Do you remember the date of that article?

DB: It was November 5.

Before the vote. That's the kind of stuff that was appearing before the
vote. I noticed a quite striking difference the day after the vote.
Immediately after the vote, the New York Times and other journals began for
the first time discussing the consequences of NAFTA. That was interesting.
Not that it was a surprise, but it shows what they knew all along. The day
after the vote the New York Times had its first article on the expected
impact of NAFTA in the New York region. This generalizes for GATT also.

It was a very upbeat article. They talked about how wonderful it was going
to be. They said there would be a big improvement in finance and services,
particularly. They'll be the big winners. Banks, investment firms, PR
firms, corporate law firms will do just great. They said that some
manufacturers will benefit, namely the publishing industry and chemical
industry, which is highly capital-intensive, not many workers to worry
about Also the pharmaceutical industry, the big beneficiaries of the
increased protectionist elements concerning "intellectual property".
They'll all do fine and it will just be wonderful.

Then they said that, well, there will be some losers, too. The losers will
be women, Hispanics, other minorities, and semi-skilled workers, who
comprise maybe seventy percent or more of the work force. They will be
losers. But everyone else will do fine. In other words, exactly as anyone
who was paying attention knew, the purpose of NAFTA was to split the
society even further. There will be benefits for a smaller -- it's a rich
country, so the small sector's not tiny -- but a smaller sector of highly
privileged people, investors, professionals, managerial classes, and so on,
the business-related classes. It will work fine for them, and the general
population will suffer.

The prediction for Mexico is pretty much the same. The leading financial
journal in Mexico, which is very pro-NAFTA, estimated that Mexico would
lose about twenty-five percent of its manufacturing capacity in the first
few years and about fifteen percent of its manufacturing labor force. In
addition, cheap U.S. agricultural exports are expected to drive even more
people off the land. That's going to mean a substantial increase in the
unemployed workforce in Mexico, which of course will drive down wages. On
top of that, organizing is essentially impossible. Notice that although
corporations can operate internationally, unions cannot. So though unions
can operate in different states of the U.S., they cannot cross borders,
which means there is no way for the work force to fight back against the
internationalization of production.

The net effect is expected to be a decline in wealth and income for the
majority of the population of Mexico and for the majority of the population
of the U.S., while there will be exactly that growth and increase in
consumption that the Boulder paper talks about, the increase in income that
Lewis talks about. Those are completely consistent. A country like Brazil
is the extreme example, and a very dramatic example because of its enormous
wealth and because of the fact that we've been running it for fifty years.
It's a very good model to look at.

Very high growth rates, tremendous prosperity, a lot of consumption in a
very narrow sector of the population. And overall, the quality of life at
the levels of Albania and Paraguay.

DB: Chile is another country that's recently been heralded in a number of
articles as reflecting that model growth rate.

There was a really funny pair of stories yesterday. The New York Times had
a story about the election in Chile and about how nobody was paying much
attention to it. The headline was something about Chilean satisfaction with
the political system. It talked about how everyone is so satisfied and so
happy that nobody's paying much attention to the election.

The London Financial Times, hardly radical, they had a story on the
election which was exactly the opposite. They quoted some data, some polls
that showed that seventy-five percent of the population are very
unsatisfied, "disgruntled" was their word, with regard to the political
system, which allows no options. They said that indeed there is apathy
about the election, but that's a reflection of the breakdown of the social
structure of Chile, which was a lively, vibrant, democratic society into
the early 1970s and then was essentially depoliticized through a reign of
fascist terror.

People work alone, the associations were broken down. People are trying to
fend for themselves. The economy is not doing badly, but it's based almost
entirely on primary exports, fruit, copper, and so on. It's very vulnerable
to world markets.

But the crucial thing is the dramatic breakdown of social relations and
social structure, which is pretty striking in Chile, because it was a very
vibrant and lively society for many, many years. The retreat into
individualism and personal gain is the basis for the apathy. Nathaniel Nash
wrote the Chile story for the Times. There's a section in there, a
subheading called "Painful Memories." It said many Chileans have painful
memories of Salvador Allende's fiery speeches, which led to the coup in
which thousands of people were killed. Notice they don't have painful
memories of the torture, the fascist terror, just of Allende's speeches as
a popular candidate. These are the ways in which the world is recreated for
our edification.

DB: This is a 7 a.m. early edition of Alternative Radio and we're talking
to Professor Noam Chomsky. If you'd like to join this conversation, give us
a call. One thing you've been talking about is the mystification of the
notion of nation and country. You discussed it in a recent Z Magazine
article. I was struck by a November 15 front-page New York Times article.
The headline is "Nation Considers Means To Dispose of Its Plutonium.
Options are unattractive," we are told, and there are "no easy or quick
answers to a problem that will not go away." So the nation is considering
how to dispose of essentially what was a creation of private capital,
plutonium.

That's the familiar idea that profit is to be privatized but the cost is to
be socialized. So in a sense it's correct to say that the costs are the
costs for the nation, the people. But the profits weren't for the people,
nor are they making the decisions to produce plutonium in the first place,
and they're not making the decisions about how to dispose of it. Nor or
they deciding on what ought to be a reasonable energy policy, which is no
small issue. There are major questions about energy policy that ought to be
right on the top of the social and political agenda today, things
connected, say, with global warming.

Let me give you an example. There was a study that came out in Science
magazine about a month ago reviewing recent studies on global warming. The
possibilities they were considering as plausible were that if the year 2000
goals on carbon dioxide emission are met, which is not likely, then within
a couple of centuries, by 2300, the world's temperature would have
increased by about ten degrees Centigrade, which would mean a rise in sea
level that would probably wipe out a good bit of human civilization as it's
currently constituted. Of course this doesn't mean that the effects set in
in three hundred years. They start setting in much sooner.

Maybe it will be worse. Maybe it will be better. But possibilities like
that will not be faced by any sane person with any equanimity. There's
nothing being done about them at all. The same study says that in order to
avoid this it will be necessary to undertake quite radical changes of a
kind not even contemplated. These are what ought to be front-page stories
and ought to be the focus of public attention and concern. The matter of
disposing of plutonium has largely to do with weapons production. But there
are quite serious questions about nuclear power that can't just be
dismissed.

Call-ins

Listener: You have established a fairly loyal following. I am fearful that
there may be this saturation point of despair just from knowing the
heaviness of the truth that you impart. I would like to strongly lobby you
to begin a process of maybe devoting ten or fifteen percent of your
appearances or books or articles towards tangible detailed things that
people can do to try to change the world that they're in, even if it does
seem like it's potentially useless from time to time. I've heard a few
occasions where someone says, What can I do? I live all by myself in
Lafayette, Colorado or some other little town, and your response is,
Organize. Just do it.

Your point is quite right. People have been telling me that for a long
time. I'll give you an example which goes back about ten years ago. South
End Press asked me to write a book called Turning the Tide. It came out in
1985. Most of it was just what you were criticizing, and properly, but
there was a section at the end called "Turning the Tide: What Can You Do
About It?" I try to keep it in the back of my mind and think about it, but
I'm afraid that the answer always is the same. It's that person in
Lafayette. There is only one way to deal with these things. Being alone,
you cannot do anything. All you can do is deplore the situation. If you
join with other people, they can be anything from a whole range of
possibilities, from Ralph Nader's Public Citizen, to a local activist group
to some solidarity group, and there are millions of things that are
possible depending on where you want to put your efforts, if you join with
other people, you can make changes. I don't know of any other answers.

Listener: What's happening in Asia, particularly the growing economies in
Southeast Asia, China, and so forth. What do you see for the future in
terms of the demands of the environment on the political actions in those
countries economically? Is it going to be another example of capitalist
exploitation, or is the environment going to make such a demand that we
could expect to see some kind of change in their awareness?

Countries like Thailand or China are looming ecological catastrophes. These
are countries where growth is being fueled by multinational investment and
investor interests and for them the environment is what are called
"externalities." You don't pay any attention to it. So if you destroy the
forests in Thailand, say, that's OK as long as you make a short-term profit
out of it. In China, just because of its scale, the disasters that lie not
too far ahead could be extraordinary. The same is true throughout Southeast
Asia.

But the question remains that when the environmental pressures become such
that the very survival of the people is jeopardized, do you see any change
in the actions?

Not unless people react. If power is left in the hands of transnational
investors, the people will just die.

DB: Elaine Bernard and Tony Mazzocchi were in Denver on December 3. They
were talking about the possibility of creating a new labor-based party.
What are your views on that?

I think that's an important initiative. It's interesting that right now,
we're a little bit like the way Chile is described in the Financial Times,
not the New York Times. The country is becoming very depoliticized and
negative. About half the population thinks both political parties should be
disbanded. There's a real need for something that would articulate the
concerns of that substantial majority of the population which is being left
out of social planning and the political process, those, for example, who
will be harmed by NAFTA, a substantial majority, as even the Times can see.
Labor unions have been a significant force for democratization and
progress, not always, but often, in fact the main social force. On the
other hand, when they are not linked to the political system through a
labor-based party, there's a limit on what they can do. Take, say, health
care.

Powerful unions in the U.S. were able to get fairly reasonable health care
provisions for themselves. For example, auto workers were able to get good
provisions for themselves. But since they are acting independently of the
political system, they did not attempt to or succeed in bringing about
decent health conditions for the population.

Compare Canada, where the unions also pressed for health care, but not just
for their own industry, but rather for the population. Being linked to
labor-based parties they were able to implement health care for the
population. That's an illustration of the kind of difference that a
politically oriented popular movement like labor can achieve. We're not in
the day any longer where the industrial workers are the majority or even
the core of the labor force. But the same questions arise. I think Elaine
Bernard and Tony Mazzocchi are on the right track in thinking along those
lines.

In that same Anthony Lewis column that I referred to earlier, he had this
to write: "Unions in this country, sad to say, are looking more and more
like the British unions...backward, unenlightened.... The crude,
threatening tactics used by unions to make Democratic members of the House
vote against NAFTA underline the point."

That brings out Lewis's real commitments very clearly. What he called
crude, undemocratic tactics which were assailed by the President and the
press, were labor's attempt to get their representatives to represent their
interests. By the standard of the elite, that's an attack on democracy,
because the political system is supposed to be run by the rich and
powerful. So for example corporate lobbying -- which vastly exceeded labor
lobbying -- was not considered raw muscle or anti-democratic. Did Lewis
have a column denouncing corporate lobbying for NAFTA?

I didn't see it.

I didn't see it either. This reached a peak of absolute hysteria before the
vote. The day before the vote the New York Times lead editorial was exactly
along the lines of your quote from Lewis, and it included a little box of
the dozen or so representatives of the New York region who were voting
against NAFTA. It listed their contributions from labor and said, This
raises ominous questions about political influence of labor and whether
they're being honest, etc.

As a number of these representatives later pointed out, the Times didn't
have a box listing corporate contributions to them or to others nor, we may
add, did it have a box listing advertisers of the New York Times and their
attitudes towards NAFTA. In a way you can't object to Lewis and the Times.
They are simply taking for granted a principle, which is that the rich and
powerful have a right to twist the arms of their legislators and to dictate
to them what they should do because that's what democracy is. Democracy is
a system where the rich and privileged and powerful make decisions in their
own interests, and if the general population tries to press for their
interests, that's raw muscle and anti-democratic and are ominous signs.

It was quite striking to watch the hysteria that built up in privileged
sectors, like the New York Times commentators and editorials as the NAFTA
vote approached. They even allowed themselves the use of the phrase "class
lines," which is very rare in elite circles. You're not allowed to admit
that the U.S. has class lines. But this was considered a really serious
issue, and all bars were let down. So you get columns of the kind by
Anthony Lewis that you described, with the real indication of hatred of
democracy at the core of it. The tacit assumption is if working people try
to press for their interests in the political arena, that's
anti-democratic. But if corporate power does so at a vastly greater rate,
that's fine.

Listener: I've often wondered about the people who have power through their
extensive financial and economic resources. Are they really as manipulative
as you say? Is it possible to reach them with logic and rationale?

They're acting very logically and very rationally in their own interests.
Let's be specific about it. Take the chief executive officer of Aetna Life
Insurance. He is one of the guys who is going to be running our health care
program and who makes $23 million a year in just plain salary. Could you
reach him and convince him that he ought to lobby against having the
insurance industry run the health-care program because that's going to be
very harmful to the general population, as indeed it will be? Suppose you
could. Suppose you could sit down with him and convince him, look, you
ought to give up your salary and be a working person. The insurance
industry shouldn't run this show and it will be terrible and so on. Suppose
he agreed. Then what happens? Then he gets thrown out as CEO and someone
else comes in who accepts that position. These are institutional factors.

Listener: Take it down to the individual, personal level, I got a notice in
my Public Service bill that said they're asking for a rate hike. I work,
and I really don't have the time to sit down and write a letter of protest.
This happens all the time, and not just with me. It happens with most
people who have to work. They don't have time to be active politically to
change something. So those rate hikes go through without anybody ever
really pointing out what's going on. One of the things that I've always
thought, and I know this is probably not democratic, is why is there not a
limitation on the amount of profit anybody can make, any corporation, any
business?

I think that's highly democratic, in fact. There's nothing in the principle
of democracy that says that power and wealth should be highly concentrated
so that democracy becomes a sham. But your point is quite correct. If
you're a working person you just don't have time, alone, to take on the
power company. That's exactly what organization is about. That's exactly
what unions are for. That's exactly what political parties of the kind that
David was mentioning earlier, based in working people, are for. So if such
a party was around, the kind Bernard and Mazzocchi are proposing, they
would be the ones speaking for you who would tell the truth about what's
going on with the rate hike. Then they would be denounced by the New York
Times for being anti-democratic, for representing popular interests rather
than power interests.

Since the Kennedy assassination there is a bureaucratic philosophy that
business and elite power circles control our so-called democracy. Has that
element changed at all with the Clinton administration coming in?

First of all, it didn't change with the Kennedy administration. It was very
much the case for Kennedy. Kennedy himself was very pro-business. He was
essentially a business candidate. Nothing changed with the assassination in
this respect. The Kennedy assassination had no significant effect on policy
that anybody has been able to detect.

There was a change in the early 1970s, but that was under Nixon. It had to
do with changes in the international economy, the kind that I talked about
earlier. Clinton is exactly what he says he is, a pro-business candidate.
The Wall Street Journal had a very enthusiastic big front-page article
about him right after the NAFTA vote. They pointed out that the Republicans
tend to be just the party of business, period, but the Democrats were a
little more nuanced. They tend to be the party of big business with less
concern for small business. They said that Clinton is typical of this. They
quoted executives of the Ford Motor Company and the steel industry and so
on as saying this is the best administration they ever had. They ran
through his achievements, and you can see it.

The day after the House vote the New York Times had a very revealing
front-page pro-Clinton story by their Washington correspondent, R. W.
Apple. People had been criticizing Clinton because he just didn't have any
principles. He backed down on Bosnia, on Somalia, on his economic stimulus,
on Haiti, on the health program. He was willing to give things up. It
seemed like this guy had no bottom line at all. Then he proved that he
really was a man of principle and he really has backbone and he silenced
his detractors, namely by fighting for the corporate version of NAFTA. So
he does have principles, namely, he listens to the call of big money. They
thought that was great. The same was true of Kennedy.

Is there any element of the large corporate conglomerates that would have
beneficial effect?

That's not the right question to ask. A lot of what's done by corporations
will happen to have, by accident, beneficial effects for the population.
The same is true of the government or anything else. But what are they
trying to achieve? They're not trying to achieve a better life for workers
and the firms in which they work, as the Clinton people have it. What
they're trying to achieve is profits and market share. That's not a big
secret. That's the kind of thing people should learn in third grade. In the
business system, people are trying to maximize profit, power, market share,
control over the state. By accident, sometimes that will help other people.
It's just accidental.

Listener: I'd like to ask Mr. Chomsky about the U.S. support for Yeltsin
versus democracy in Russia, and if this country has a vested interest in
continuing support for the drug trade in the world?

On Yeltsin, it's pretty straightforward. Yeltsin was the tough, autocratic
Communist party boss of Sverdlosk. He has filled his administration with
the old party hacks who ran the place under the earlier Soviet system. The
West likes him a lot. For one thing, he's tough and ruthless and
autocratic. For another, he's going to ram through what are called
"reforms," a nice word, the policies which are designed to return the
former Soviet Union to the Third World status that it had for five hundred
years prior to the Bolshevik Revolution. The Cold War was largely about the
demand that this huge region of the world once again become what it had
been, offering resources, markets and cheap labor, serving the West.
Yeltsin is leading the pack on that one. Therefore he's democratic. That's
standard. That's what we call a democrat anywhere in the world, someone who
follows the Western business agenda.

On the drug trade, it's complicated. I don't want to be too brief about it.
When you say does the government support the drug trade, of course not.
Although even here, there are complexities. You can't talk about marijuana
and cocaine in the same breath. Marijuana simply doesn't have the lethal
effects of cocaine. You can debate about whether it's good or bad, but out
of about sixty million users, I don't think there's a known case of
overdose. The criminalization of marijuana has purposes and motives beyond
concern over drugs. On the other hand, hard drugs, to which people have
been driven to a certain extent by the prohibitions against soft drugs,
those are very harmful, although deaths are nowhere near the level of
tobacco and alcohol. And here it's kind of complex. There are sectors of
American society that profit from the hard drug trade, like the big
international banks that do the money laundering or the chemical
corporations that provide the chemicals for the industrial production of
hard drugs. On the other hand, people who live in the inner cities are
being devastated by them. So there are different interests.

Listener: Two things: One is just a comment. That is that on this issue of
gun control, I believe that in fact the U.S. is becoming much more like a
Third World country. There's nothing that's going to put a stop to it,
necessarily. I look around and I see a lot of Third World countries where
if the citizens had weapons they wouldn't have the government they've got.
I think that maybe people are being a little short-sighted in arguing for
gun control and at the same time realizing that the government they've got
is not exactly a benign one. The other thing is that I think that a lot of
this stuff correlates with work that the social revolutionary party did as
early as 1914 in trying to understand business cycles. Kondratieff pointed
out that there's a sixty-year cycle of prosperity in the U.S. and in the
world. It's inversely tied in with real interest rates. Real interest rates
started to rise in the U.S. in October of 1979. They've been rising ever
since. And that in one sense tells the whole story.

Interest rates are important. There's some evidence for the Kondratieff
cycle. But I don't really think those are the big issues. However, on your
first point, it illustrates exactly what I think is a major fallacy. You
pointed out that the government is far from benign. That's true. On the
other hand, the government is at least partially accountable and could
become as benign as we make it.

What is not benign and is extremely harmful is what you didn't mention,
namely business power, highly concentrated, by now largely transnational
power both in the producing and financial sectors. That's very far from
benign. Furthermore, it's completely unaccountable. It's a totalitarian
system. It has an enormous effect on our lives and also on why the
government is not benign.

As for guns being the way to respond to this, that's frankly outlandish.
It's true that people think that. They think if we have guns we can make it
more benign. If people have guns, the government has tanks. If people have
tanks the government has atomic weapons. There's no way to deal with these
issues by violent force, even if you think that that's morally legitimate.
Guns in the hands of American citizens are not going to make the country
more benign. They're going to make it more brutal, ruthless and
destructive. So while one can recognize the motivation that lies behind
some of the opposition to gun control, I think it's sadly misguided.

DB: In a review of a book we did, Chronicles of Dissent, it was suggested
by the reviewer that I ask you tougher questions. So I thought I would save
my toughest question for you right at the end. Are you ready?

I'm ready to hang up. (chuckles)

DB: I want to know what MIT professor was born on December 7, 1928 in
Philadelphia. You've got five seconds.

How would I know anything about MIT professors?

DB: Happy Birthday tomorrow, Noam!
                          -----------------------