Secrets, Lies and Democracy
Noam Chomsky
Copyright ⌐ 1994 by David Barsamian
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Table of Contents
* Editor's note 4. Nicaragua
5. China
The US 6. Russia
7. Dead children and debt service
1. Defective Democracy
2. Keeping the rich on welfare Historical background
3. Health care
4. Crime and punishment 1. How the Nazis won the war
5. Gun control 2. Chile
6. Becoming a Third World 3. Cambodia
country 4. World War II POWs
7. Labor
8. The CIA Miscellaneous topics
9. The media
10. Sports 1. Consumption vs. well-being
11. Religious fundamentalism 2. Cooperative enterprises
12. Don't tread on me 3. The coming eco-catastrophe
4. Nuclear power
The world 5. The family
1. Toward greater inequality What you can do
2. "Free trade"
3. Mexico (and South Central LA) 1. Organize
4. Haiti
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Editor's note
This book was compiled from interviews David Barsamian conducted with Noam
Chomsky on December 6, 1993 and February 1, April 11 and May 2, 1994. I
organized the material into (what I hope are) coherent topics and removed
-- as much as possible -- the repetition that inevitably crops up in widely
spaced interviews like these. Then I sent the result to Chomsky and
Barsamian for final corrections and changes.
Barsamian's questions appear in this typeface. Phoned-in questions from
radio listeners appear in the same typeface, but in italics.
We've tried to define terms and identify people that may be unfamiliar the
first time they're mentioned. These explanatory notes are also in this
typeface and appear [inside square brackets]. If you run across a term or
name you don't recognize, check the index for the first page on which it
appears.
Since many readers of Chomsky's books come away from them feeling
overwhelmed and despairing, the last section of this book, called What you
can do, contains a list of 144 organizations worth investing energy in.
[Note: That section is not yet available in the on-line version of this
book.]
The interviews this book is based on were broadcast as part of Barsamian's
Alternative Radio series, which is heard on 100 stations in the US, Canada,
Europe and Australia. Alternative Radio has tapes and transcripts of
hundreds of other Chomsky interviews and talks, and ones by many other
fascinating speakers as well. For a free catalog, call 303 444 8788 or
write 2129 Mapleton, Boulder CO 80304.
Noam Chomsky was born in Philadelphia in 1928. Since 1955, he's taught at
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he became a full professor
at the age of 32. A major figure in twentieth-century linguistics, he's
also written many books on contemporary issues.
Chomsky's political talks have been heard, typically by standing-room-only
audiences, all over the country and the globe, and he's received countless
honors and awards. In a saner world, his tireless efforts to promote
justice would have long since won him the Nobel Peace Prize.
Arthur Naiman
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The US
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Defective democracy
Clinton's National Security Advisor, Anthony Lake, is encouraging the
enlargement of democracy overseas. Should he extend that to the US?
I can't tell you what Anthony Lake has in mind, but the concept of
democracy that's been advanced is a very special one, and the more honest
people on the right describe it rather accurately. For example, Thomas
Carothers, who was involved in what was called the "democracy assistance
project" during the Reagan administration, has written a book and several
articles about it.
He says the US seeks to create a form of top-down democracy that leaves
traditional structures of power -- basically corporations and their allies
-- in effective control. Any form of democracy that leaves the traditional
structures essentially unchallenged is admissible. Any form that undermines
their power is as intolerable as ever.
So there's a dictionary definition of democracy and then a real-world
definition.
The real-world definition is more or less the one Carothers describes. The
dictionary definition has lots of different dimensions, but, roughly
speaking, a society is democratic to the extent that people in it have
meaningful opportunities to take part in the formation of public policy.
There are a lot of different ways in which that can be true, but insofar as
it's true, the society is democratic.
A society can have the formal trappings of democracy and not be democratic
at all. The Soviet Union, for example, had elections.
The US obviously has a formal democracy with primaries, elections,
referenda, recalls, and so on. But what's the content of this democracy in
terms of popular participation?
Over long periods, the involvement of the public in planning or
implementation of public policy has been quite marginal. This is a
business-run society. The political parties have reflected business
interests for a long time.
One version of this view which I think has a lot of power behind it is what
political scientist Thomas Ferguson calls "the investment theory of
politics." He believes that the state is controlled by coalitions of
investors who join together around some common interest. To participate in
the political arena, you must have enough resources and private power to
become part of such a coalition.
Since the early nineteenth century, Ferguson argues, there's been a
struggle for power among such groups of investors. The long periods when
nothing very major seemed to be going on are simply times when the major
groups of investors have seen more or less eye to eye on what public policy
should look like. Moments of conflict come along when groups of investors
have differing points of view.
During the New Deal, for example, various groupings of private capital were
in conflict over a number of issues. Ferguson identifies a high-tech,
capital-intensive, export-oriented sector that tended to be quite pro-New
Deal and in favor of the reforms. They wanted an orderly work force and an
opening to foreign trade.
A more labor-intensive, domestically oriented sector, grouped essentially
around the National Association of Manufacturers, was strongly anti-New
Deal. They didn't want any of these reform measures. (Those groups weren't
the only ones involved, of course. There was the labor movement, a lot of
public ferment and so on.)
You view corporations as being incompatible with democracy, and you say
that if we apply the concepts that are used in political analysis,
corporations are fascist. That's a highly charged term. What do you mean?
I mean fascism pretty much in the traditional sense. So when a rather
mainstream person like Robert Skidelsky, the biographer of [British
economist John Maynard] Keynes, describes the early postwar systems as
modeled on fascism, he simply means a system in which the state integrates
labor and capital under the control of the corporate structure.
That's what a fascist system traditionally was. It can vary in the way it
works, but the ideal state that it aims at is absolutist -- top-down
control with the public essentially following orders.
Fascism is a term from the political domain, so it doesn't apply strictly
to corporations, but if you look at them, power goes strictly top-down,
from the board of directors to managers to lower managers and ultimately to
the people on the shop floor, typists, etc. There's no flow of power or
planning from the bottom up. Ultimate power resides in the hands of
investors, owners, banks, etc.
People can disrupt, make suggestions, but the same is true of a slave
society. People who aren't owners and investors have nothing much to say
about it. They can choose to rent their labor to the corporation, or to
purchase the commodities or services that it produces, or to find a place
in the chain of command, but that's it. That's the totality of their
control over the corporation.
That's something of an exaggeration, because corporations are subject to
some legal requirements and there is some limited degree of public control.
There are taxes and so on. But corporations are more totalitarian than most
institutions we call totalitarian in the political arena.
Is there anything large corporate conglomerates do that has beneficial
effects?
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? Not a better life
for workers and the firms in which they work, but profits and market share.
That's not a big secret -- it's the kind of thing people should learn in
third grade. Businesses try to maximize profit, power, market share and
control over the state. Sometimes what they do helps other people, but
that's just by chance.
There's a common belief that, since the Kennedy assassination, business and
elite power circles control our so-called democracy. Has that changed at
all with the Clinton administration?
First of all, Kennedy was very pro-business. He was essentially a business
candidate. His assassination had no significant effect on policy that
anybody has been able to detect. (There was a change in policy in the early
1970s, under Nixon, but that had to do with changes in the international
economy.)
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 the party of business as a whole, but that the Democrats tend to favor
big business over small business. Clinton, they said, is typical of this.
They quoted executives from the Ford Motor Company, the steel industry,
etc. who said that this is one of the best administrations they've ever
had.
The day after the House vote on NAFTA, the New York Times had a very
revealing front-page, pro-Clinton story by their Washington correspondent,
R.W. Apple. It went sort of like this: People had been criticizing Clinton
because he just didn't have any principles. He backed down on Bosnia, on
Somalia, on his economic stimulus program, on Haiti, on the health program.
He seemed like a guy with no bottom line at all.
Then he proved that he really was a man of principle and that he really
does have backbone -- by fighting for the corporate version of NAFTA. So he
does have principles -- he listens to the call of big money. The same was
true of Kennedy.
Radio listener: I've often wondered about people who have a lot of power
because of their financial resources. Is it possible to reach them with
logic?
They're acting very logically and rationally in their own interests. Take
the CEO of Aetna Life Insurance, who makes $23 million a year in salary
alone. He's one of the guys who is going to be running our health-care
program if Clinton's plan passes.
Suppose you could convince him that he ought to lobby against having the
insurance industry run the health-care program, because that will be very
harmful to the general population (as indeed it will be). Suppose you could
convince him that he ought to give up his salary and become a working
person.
What would happen then? He'd get thrown out and someone else would be put
in as CEO. These are institutional problems.
Why is it important to keep the general population in line?
Any form of concentrated power doesn't want to be subjected to popular
democratic control -- or, for that matter, to market discipline. That's why
powerful sectors, including corporate wealth, are naturally opposed to
functioning democracy, just as they're opposed to functioning markets...for
themselves, at least.
It's just natural. They don't want external constraints on their capacity
to make decisions and act freely.
And has that been the case?
Always. Of course, the descriptions of the facts are a little more nuanced,
because modern "democratic theory" is more articulate and sophisticated
than in the past, when the general population was called "the rabble." More
recently, Walter Lippmann called them "ignorant and meddlesome outsiders."
He felt that "responsible men" should make the decisions and keep the
"bewildered herd" in line.
Modern "democratic theory" takes the view that the role of the public --
the "bewildered herd," in Lippmann's words -- is to be spectators, not
participants. They're supposed to show up every couple of years to ratify
decisions made elsewhere, or to select among representatives of the
dominant sectors in what's called an "election." That's helpful, because it
has a legitimizing effect.
It's very interesting to see the way this idea is promoted in the slick PR
productions of the right-wing foundations. One of the most influential in
the ideological arena is the Bradley Foundation. Its director, Michael
Joyce, recently published an article on this. I don't know whether he wrote
it or one of his PR guys did, but I found it fascinating.
It starts off with rhetoric drawn, probably consciously, from the left.
When left liberals or radical activists start reading it, they get a
feeling of recognition and sympathy (I suspect it's directed at them and at
young people). It begins by talking about how remote the political system
is from us, how we're asked just to show up every once in a while and cast
our votes and then go home.
This is meaningless, the article says -- this isn't real participation in
the world. What we need is a functioning and active civil society in which
people come together and do important things, not just this business of
pushing a button now and then.
Then the article asks, How do we overcome these inadequacies? Strikingly,
you don't overcome them with more active participation in the political
arena. You do it by abandoning the political arena and joining the PTA and
going to church and getting a job and going to the store and buying
something. That's the way to become a real citizen of a democratic society.
Now, there's nothing wrong with joining the PTA. But there are a few gaps
here. What happened to the political arena? It disappeared from the
discussion after the first few comments about how meaningless it is.
If you abandon the political arena, somebody is going to be there.
Corporations aren't going to go home and join the PTA. They're going to run
things. But that we don't talk about.
As the article continues, it talks about how we're being oppressed by the
liberal bureaucrats, the social planners who are trying to convince us to
do something for the poor. They're the ones who are really running the
country. They're that impersonal, remote, unaccountable power that we've
got to get off our backs as we fulfill our obligations as citizens at the
PTA and the office.
This argument isn't quite presented step-by-step like that in the article
-- I've collapsed it. It's very clever propaganda, well designed, well
crafted, with plenty of thought behind it. Its goal is to make people as
stupid, ignorant, passive and obedient as possible, while at the same time
making them feel that they're somehow moving towards higher forms of
participation.
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In your discussions of democracy, you often refer to a couple of comments
of Thomas Jefferson's.
Jefferson died on July 4, 1826 -- fifty years to the day after the
Declaration of Independence was signed. Near the end of his life, he spoke
with a mixture of concern and hope about what had been achieved, and urged
the population to struggle to maintain the victories of democracy.
He made a distinction between two groups -- aristocrats and democrats.
Aristocrats "fear and distrust the people, and wish to draw all powers from
them into the hands of the higher classes." This view is held by
respectable intellectuals in many different societies today, and is quite
similar to the Leninist doctrine that the vanguard party of radical
intellectuals should take power and lead the stupid masses to a bright
future. Most liberals are aristocrats in Jefferson's sense. [Former
Secretary of State] Henry Kissinger is an extreme example of an aristocrat.
Democrats, Jefferson wrote, "identify with the people, have confidence in
them, cherish and consider them as the most honest and safe, although not
the most wise, depository of the public interest." In other words,
democrats believe the people should be in control, whether or not they're
going to make the right decisions. Democrats do exist today, but they're
becoming increasingly marginal.
Jefferson specifically warned against "banking institutions and monied
incorporations" (what we would now call "corporations") and said that if
they grow, the aristocrats will have won and the American Revolution will
have been lost. Jefferson's worst fears were realized (although not
entirely in the ways he predicted).
Later on, [the Russian anarchist Mikhail] Bakunin predicted that the
contemporary intellectual classes would separate into two groups (both of
which are examples of what Jefferson meant by aristocrats). One group, the
"red bureaucracy," would take power into their own hands and create one of
the most malevolent and vicious tyrannies in human history.
The other group would conclude that power lies in the private sector, and
would serve the state and private power in what we now call state
capitalist societies. They'd "beat the people with the people's stick," by
which he meant that they'd profess democracy while actually keeping the
people in line.
You also cite [the American philosopher and educator] John Dewey. What did
he have to say about this?
Dewey was one of the last spokespersons for the Jeffersonian view of
democracy. In the early part of this century, he wrote that democracy isn't
an end in itself, but a means by which people discover and extend and
manifest their fundamental human nature and human rights. Democracy is
rooted in freedom, solidarity, a choice of work and the ability to
participate in the social order. Democracy produces real people, he said.
That's the major product of a democratic society -- real people.
He recognized that democracy in that sense was a very withered plant.
Jefferson's "banking institutions and monied incorporations" had of course
become vastly more powerful by this time, and Dewey felt that "the shadow
cast on society by big business" made reform very difficult, if not
impossible. He believed that reform may be of some use, but as long as
there's no democratic control of the workplace, reform isn't going to bring
democracy and freedom.
Like Jefferson and other classical liberals, Dewey recognized that
institutions of private power were absolutist institutions, unaccountable
and basically totalitarian in their internal structure. Today, they're far
more powerful than anything Dewey dreamed of.
This literature is all accessible. It's hard to think of more leading
figures in American history than Thomas Jefferson and John Dewey. They're
as American as apple pie. But when you read them today, they sound like
crazed Marxist lunatics. That just shows how much our intellectual life has
deteriorated.
In many ways, these ideas received their earliest -- and often most
powerful -- formulation in people like [the German intellectual] Wilhelm
von Humboldt, who inspired [the English philosopher] John Stuart Mill and
was one of the founders of the classical liberal tradition in the late
eighteenth century. Like [the Scottish moral philosopher] Adam Smith and
others, von Humboldt felt that at the root of human nature is the need for
free creative work under one's own control. That must be at the basis of
any decent society.
Those ideas, which run straight through to Dewey, are deeply anticapitalist
in character. Adam Smith didn't call himself an anticapitalist because,
back in the eighteenth century, he was basically precapitalist, but he had
a good deal of skepticism about capitalist ideology and practice -- even
about what he called "joint stock companies" (what we call corporations
today, which existed in quite a different form in his day). He worried
about the separation of managerial control from direct participation, and
he also feared that these joint stock companies might turn into "immortal
persons."
This indeed happened in the nineteenth century, after Smith's death [under
current law, corporations have even more rights than individuals, and can
live forever]. It didn't happen through parliamentary decisions -- nobody
voted on it in Congress. In the US, as elsewhere in the world, it happened
through judicial decisions. Judges and corporate lawyers simply crafted a
new society in which corporations have immense power.
Today, the top two hundred corporations in the world control over a quarter
of the world's total assets, and their control is increasing. Fortune
magazine's annual listing of the top American corporations found increasing
profits, increasing concentration, and reduction of jobs -- tendencies that
have been going on for some years.
Von Humboldt's and Smith's ideas feed directly into the socialist-anarchist
tradition, into the left-libertarian critique of capitalism. This critique
can take the Deweyian form of a sort of workers'-control version of
democratic socialism, or the left-Marxist form of people like [the Dutch
astronomer and political theorist] Anton Pannekoek and [the Polish-German
revolutionary] Rosa Luxemburg, or [the leading anarchist] Rudolf Rocker's
anarcho-syndicalism (among others).
All this has been grossly perverted or forgotten in modern intellectual
life but, in my view, these ideas grow straight out of classical,
eighteenth-century liberalism. I even think they can be traced back to
seventeenth-century rationalism.
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Keeping the rich on welfare
A book called America: Who Pays the Taxes?, written by a couple of
Philadelphia Inquirer reporters, apparently shows that the amount of taxes
paid by corporations has dramatically declined in the US.
That's for sure. It's been very striking over the last fifteen years.
Some years ago, a leading specialist, Joseph Pechman, pointed out that
despite the apparently progressive structure that's built into the income
tax system (that is, the higher your income, the higher your tax rate), all
sorts of other regressive factors end up making everyone's tax rate very
near a fixed percentage.
An interesting thing happened in Alabama involving Daimler-Benz, the big
German auto manufacturer.
Under Reagan, the US managed to drive labor costs way below the level of
our competitors (except for Britain). That's produced consequences not only
in Mexico and the US but all across the industrial world.
For example, one of the effects of the so-called free trade agreement with
Canada was to stimulate a big flow of jobs from Canada to the southeast US,
because that's an essentially nonunion area. Wages are lower; you don't
have to worry about benefits; workers can barely organize. So that's an
attack against Canadian workers.
Daimler-Benz, which is Germany's biggest conglomerate, was seeking
essentially Third World conditions. They managed to get our southeastern
states to compete against one another to see who could force the public to
pay the largest bribe to bring them there. Alabama won. It offered hundreds
of millions of dollars in tax benefits, practically gave Daimler-Benz the
land on which to construct their plant, and agreed to build all sorts of
infrastructure for them.
Some people will benefit -- the small number who are employed at the plant,
with some spillover to hamburger stands and so on, but primarily bankers,
corporate lawyers, people involved in investment and financial services.
They'll do very well, but the cost to most of the citizens of Alabama will
be substantial.
Even the Wall Street Journal, which is rarely critical of business, pointed
out that this is very much like what happens when rich corporations go to
Third World countries, and it questioned whether there were going to be
overall benefits for the state of Alabama. Meanwhile Daimler-Benz can use
this to drive down the lifestyle of German workers.
German corporations have also set up factories in the Czech Republic, where
they can get workers for about 10% the cost of German workers. The Czech
Republic is right across the border; it's a Westernized society with high
educational levels and nice white people with blue eyes. Since they don't
believe in the free market any more than any other rich people do, they'll
leave the Czech Republic to pay the social costs, pollution, debts and so
on, while they pick up the profits.
It's exactly the same with the plants GM is building in Poland, where it's
insisting on 30% tariff protection. The free market is for the poor. We
have a dual system -- protection for the rich and market discipline for
everyone else.
I was struck by an article in the New York Times whose headline was,
"Nation considers means to dispose of its plutonium." So the nation has to
figure out how to dispose of what was essentially created by private
capital.
That's the familiar idea that profits are privatized but costs are
socialized. The costs are the nation's, the people's, but the profits
weren't for the people, nor did they make the decision to produce plutonium
in the first place, nor are they making the decisions about how to dispose
of it, nor do they get to decide what ought to be a reasonable energy
policy.
One of the things I've learned from working with you is the importance of
reading Business Week, Fortune and the Wall Street Journal. In the business
section of the New York Times, I read a fascinating discussion by a
bureaucrat from MITI [Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry]
who trained at the Harvard Business School.
One of his classes was studying a failed airline that went out of business.
They were shown a taped interview with the company's president, who noted
with pride that through the whole financial crisis and eventual bankruptcy
of the airline, he'd never asked for government help. To the Japanese man's
astonishment, the class erupted into applause.
He commented, "There's a strong resistance to government intervention in
America. I understand that. But I was shocked. There are many shareholders
in companies. What happened to his employees, for example?" Then he
reflects on what he views as America's blind devotion to a free-market
ideology. He says, "It is something quite close to a religion. You cannot
argue about it with most people. You believe it or you don't." It's
interesting.
It's interesting, in part, because of the Japanese man's failure to
understand what actually happens in the US, which apparently was shared by
the students in his business class. If it was Eastern Airlines they were
talking about, Frank Lorenzo, the director, was trying to put it out of
business. He made a personal profit out of that.
He wanted to break the unions in order to support his other enterprises
(which he ripped off profits from Eastern Airlines for). He wanted to leave
the airline industry less unionized and more under corporate control, and
to leave himself wealthier. All of that happened. So naturally he didn't
call on government intervention to save him -- things were working the way
he wanted.
On the other hand, the idea that corporations don't ask for government help
is a joke. They demand an extraordinary amount of government intervention.
That's largely what the whole Pentagon system is about.
Take the airline industry, which was created by government intervention. A
large part of the reason for the huge growth in the Pentagon in the late
1940s was to salvage the collapsing aeronautical industry, which obviously
couldn't survive in a civilian market. That's worked -- it's now the United
States' leading export industry, and Boeing is the leading exporter.
An interesting and important book on this by Frank Kofsky just came out. It
describes the war scares that were manipulated in 1947 and 1948 to try to
ram spending bills through Congress to save the aeronautical industry.
(That wasn't the only purpose of these war scares, but it was a big
factor.)
Huge industries were spawned, and are maintained, by massive government
intervention. Many corporations couldn't survive without it. (For some,
it's not a huge part of their profits at the moment, but it's a cushion.)
The public also provides the basic technology -- metallurgy, avionics or
whatever -- via the public subsidy system.
The same is true just across the board. You can hardly find a functioning
sector of the US manufacturing or service economy which hasn't gotten that
way and isn't sustained by government intervention.
The Clinton administration has been pouring new funds into the National
Bureau of Standards and Technology. It used to try to work on how long a
foot is but it will now be more actively involved in serving the needs of
private capital. Hundreds of corporations are beating on their doors asking
for grants.
The idea is to try to replace the somewhat declining Pentagon system. With
the end of the Cold War, it's gotten harder to maintain the Pentagon
system, but you've got to keep the subsidy going to big corporations. The
public has to pay the research and development costs.
The idea that a Japanese investigator could fail to see this is fairly
remarkable. It's pretty well known in Japan.
-----------------------
Health care
I don't suppose you can see the Boston skyline from your home in Lexington.
But if you could, what would be the two tallest buildings?
The John Hancock and the Prudential.
And they happen to be two types of what?
They're going to be running our health-care program if Clinton has his way.
There's a general consensus that the US health-care system needs to be
reformed. How did that consensus evolve?
It evolved very simply. We have a relatively privatized health-care system.
As a result, it's geared towards high-tech intervention rather than public
health and prevention. It's also hopelessly inefficient and extremely
bureaucratic, with huge administrative expenses.
This has gotten just too costly for American business. In fact, a bit to my
surprise, Business Week, the main business journal, has come out recently
with several articles advocating a Canadian-style, single-payer program.
Under this system, health care is individual, but the government is the
insurer. Similar plans exist in every industrial country in the world,
except the US.
The Clinton plan is called "managed competition." What is that, and why are
the big insurance companies supporting it?
"Managed competition" means that big insurance companies will put together
huge conglomerates of health-care institutions, hospitals, clinics, labs
and so on. Various bargaining units will be set up to determine which of
these conglomerates to work with. That's supposed to introduce some kind of
market forces.
But a very small number of big insurance conglomerates, in limited
competition with one another, will be pretty much in charge of organizing
your health care. (This plan will drive the little insurance companies out
of the market, which is why they're opposed to it.)
Since they're in business for profit, not for your comfort, the big
insurance companies will doubtlessly micromanage health care, in an attempt
to reduce it to the lowest possible level. They'll also tend away from
prevention and public health measures, which aren't their concern. Enormous
inefficiencies will be involved -- huge profits, advertising costs, big
corporate salaries and other corporate amenities, big bureaucracies that
control in precise detail what doctors and nurses do and don't do -- and
we'll have to pay for all that.
There's another point that ought to be mentioned. In a Canadian-style,
government-insurance system, the costs are distributed in the same way that
taxes are. If the tax system is progressive -- that is, if rich people pay
a higher percentage of their income in taxes (which all other industrial
societies assume, correctly, to be the only ethical approach) -- then the
wealthy will also pay more of the costs of health care.
But the Clinton program, and all the others like it, are radically
regressive. A janitor and a CEO pay the same amount. It's as if they were
both taxed the same amount, which is unheard of in any civilized society.
Actually, it's even worse than that -- the janitor will probably pay more.
He'll be living in a poor neighborhood and the executive will be living in
a rich suburb or a downtown high-rise, which means they'll belong to
different health groupings. Because the grouping the janitor belongs to
will include many more poor and high-risk people, the insurance companies
will demand higher rates from it than the one the executive belongs to,
which will include mostly wealthier, lower-risk people.
According to a Harris poll, Americans prefer the Canadian-style health-care
system by a huge majority. That's kind of remarkable, given the minimal
amount of media attention the single-payer system has received.
The best work I know on this is by [Professor] Vicente Navarro [of Johns
Hopkins]. He's discovered that there's been quite consistent support for
something like a Canadian-style system ever since polls began on this
issue, which is now over forty years.
Back in the 1940s, Truman tried to put through such a program. It would
have brought the US into line with the rest of the industrial world, but it
was beaten back by a huge corporate offensive, complete with tantrums about
how we were going to turn into a Bolshevik society and so on.
Every time the issue has come up, there's been a major corporate offensive.
One of Ronald Reagan's great achievements back in the late 1960s was to
give somber speeches (written for him by the AMA) about how if the
legislation establishing Medicare was passed, we'd all be telling our
children and grandchildren decades hence what freedom used to be like.
Steffie Woolhandler and David Himmelstein [both of Harvard Medical School]
also cite another poll result: When Canadians were asked if they'd want a
US-style system, only 5% said yes.
By now, even large parts of the business community don't want it. It's just
too inefficient, too bureaucratic and too costly for them. The auto
companies estimated a couple of years ago that it was costing them about
$500 extra per car just because of the inefficiencies of the US health
system -- as compared with, say, their Canadian operations.
When business starts to get hurt, then the issue moves into the public
agenda. The public has been in favor of a big change for a long time, but
what the public thinks doesn't matter much.
There was a nice phrase about this sort of thing in the Economist [a
leading London business journal]. The Economist was concerned about the
fact that Poland has degenerated into a system where they have democratic
elections, which is sort of a nuisance.
The population in all of the East European countries is being smashed by
the economic changes that are being rammed down their throats. (These
changes are called "reforms," which is supposed to make them sound good.)
In the last election, the Poles voted in an anti-"reform" government. The
Economist pointed out that this really wasn't too troublesome because
"policy is insulated from politics." In their view, that's a good thing.
In this country too, policy is insulated from politics. People can have
their opinions; they can even vote if they like. But policy goes on its
merry way, determined by other forces.
What the public wants is called "politically unrealistic." Translated into
English, that means the major centers of power and privilege are opposed to
it. A change in our health-care system has now become politically more
realistic because the corporate community wants a change, since the current
system is harming them.
Vicente Navarro says that a universal and comprehensive health-care program
is "directly related to the strength of the working class and its political
and economic instruments."
That's certainly been true in Canada and Europe. Canada had a system rather
like ours up until the mid-1960s. It was changed first in one province,
Saskatchewan, where the NDP [the New Democratic Party, a mildly reformist,
umbrella political party with labor backing] was in power.
The NDP was able to put through a provincial insurance program, driving the
insurance companies out of the health-care business. It turned out to be
very successful. It was giving good medical care and reducing costs and was
much more progressive in payment. It was mimicked by other provinces, also
under labor pressure, often using the NDP as an instrument. pretty soon it
was adopted across Canada nationally.
The history in Europe is pretty much the same. Working-class organizations
have been one of the main (although not the only) mechanisms by which
people with very limited power and resources can get together to
participate in the public arena. That's one of the reasons unions are so
hated by business and elites generally. They're just too democratizing in
their character.
So Navarro is surely right. The strength and organization of labor and its
ability to enter into the public arena is certainly related -- maybe even
decisively related -- to the establishment of social programs of this kind.
There may be a parallel movement going on in California, where there's a
ballot initiative to have single-payer health care.
The situation in the US is a little different from what Navarro described,
because business still plays an inordinate role here in determining what
kind of system will evolve. Unless there are significant changes in the US
-- that is, unless public pressure and organizations, including labor, do a
lot more than they've done so far -- the outcome will once again be
determined by business interests.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Much more media attention has been paid to AIDS than to breast cancer, but
a half a million women in the US will die from breast cancer in the 1990s.
Many men will die from prostate cancer. These aren't considered political
questions, are they?
Well, there's no vote taken on them, but if you're asking if there are
questions of policy involved, of course there are. You might add to those
cancers the number of children who will suffer or die because of extremely
poor conditions in infancy and childhood.
Take, say, malnutrition. That decreases life span quite considerably. If
you count that up in deaths, it outweighs anything you're talking about. I
don't think many people in the public health field would question the
conclusion that the major contribution to improving health, reducing
mortality figures and improving the quality of life, would come from simple
public health measures like ensuring people adequate nutrition and safe and
healthy conditions of life, clean water, effective sewage treatment, and so
on.
You'd think that in a rich country like this, these wouldn't be big issues,
but they are for a lot of the population. Lancet, the British medical
journal -- the most prestigious medical journal in the world -- recently
pointed out that 40% of children in New York City live below the poverty
line. They suffer from malnutrition and other poor conditions that cause
very high mortality rates -- and, if they survive, they have very severe
health problems all through their lives.
The New England Journal of Medicine pointed out a couple of years ago that
black males in Harlem have about the same mortality rate as people in
Bangladesh. That's essentially because of the extreme deterioration of the
most elementary public health conditions, and social conditions.
Some people have linked the increase in breast cancer and prostate cancer
to environmental degradation, to diet, and to the increase of additives and
preservatives. What do you think about that?
It's doubtless some kind of a factor. How big or serious a factor it is I'm
not sure.
Are you at all interested in the so-called natural or organic food
movement?
Sure. I think there ought to be concerns about the quality of food. This I
would say falls into the question of general public health. It's like
having good water and good sewage and making sure that people have enough
food and so on.
All these things are in roughly the same category -- they don't have to do
with high-technology medical treatment but with essential conditions of
life. These general public-health issues, of which eating food that doesn't
contain poisons is naturally a part, are the overwhelming factors in
quality of life and mortality.
-----------------------
Crime and punishment
There's been a tendency over the last few years for local TV news programs
to concentrate on crimes, rapes, kidnappings, etc. Now this is spilling
over into the national network news programs.
That's true, but it's just a surface phenomenon. Why is there an increase
in attention to violent crime? Is it connected to the fact that there's
been a considerable decline in income for the large majority of the
population, and a decline as well in the opportunity for constructive work?
But until you ask why there's an increase in social disintegration, and why
more and more resources are being directed towards the wealthy and
privileged sectors and away from the general population, you can't have
even a concept of why there's rising crime or how you should deal with it.
Over the past twenty or thirty years, there's 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.
The result is an increasing crime rate, as well as other signs of social
disintegration. Most of the crime is poor people attacking each other, but
it spills over to more privileged sectors. People are very worried -- and
quite properly, because the society is becoming very dangerous.
A constructive approach to the problem would require dealing with its
fundamental causes, but that's off the agenda, because we must continue
with a social policy that's aimed at strengthening the welfare state for
the rich.
The only kind of responses the government can resort to under those
conditions is pandering to the fear of crime with increasing harshness,
attacking civil liberties and attempting to control the poor, essentially
by force.
Do you know what "smash and grab" is? When your car is in traffic or at a
stop light, people come along, smash in the window and grab your purse or
steal your wallet.
The same thing is going on right around Boston. There's also a new form,
called "Good Samaritan robbery." You fake a flat tire on the highway and
when somebody stops to help, you jump them, steal their car, beat them up
if they're lucky, kill them if they're not.
The causes are the increasing polarization of the society that's been going
on for the past twenty-five years, and the marginalization of large sectors
of the population. Since they're superfluous for wealth production (meaning
profit production), and since the basic ideology is that a person's human
rights depend on what they can get for themselves in the market system,
they have no human value.
Larger and larger sectors of the population have no form of organization
and no viable, constructive way of reacting, so they pursue the available
options, which are often violent. To a large extent, those are the options
that are encouraged in the popular culture.
You can tell a great deal about a society when you look at its system of
justice. I was wondering if you'd comment on the Clinton crime bill, which
authorizes hiring 100,000 more cops, boot camps for juveniles, more money
for prisons, extending the death penalty to about fifty new offenses and
making gang membership a federal crime -- which is interesting, considering
there's something about freedom of association in the Bill of Rights.
It was hailed with great enthusiasm by the far right as the greatest
anticrime bill ever. It's certainly the most extraordinary crime bill in
history. It's greatly increased, by a factor of five or six, federal
spending for repression. There's nothing much constructive in it. There are
more prisons, more police, heavier sentences, more death sentences, new
crimes, three strikes and you're out.
It's unclear how much pressure and social decline and deterioration people
will accept. One tactic is just drive them into urban slums --
concentration camps, in effect -- and let them prey on one another. But
they have a way of breaking out and affecting the interests of wealthy and
privileged people. So you have to build up the jail system, which is
incidentally also a shot in the arm for the economy.
It's natural that Clinton picked up this crime bill as a major social
initiative, not only for a kind of ugly political reason -- namely, that
it's easy to whip up hysteria about it -- but also because it reflects the
general point of view of the so-called New Democrats, the business-oriented
segment of the Democratic Party to which Clinton belongs.
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.
Radio listener: Does this country have a vested interest in supporting the
drug trade?
It's complicated; I don't want to be too brief about it. For one thing, 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
marijuana is 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 motives other than concern about drugs.
On the other hand, hard drugs, to which people have been driven to a
certain extent by the prohibitions against soft drugs, are very harmful --
although nowhere near the harm of, say, tobacco and alcohol in terms of
overall societal effects, including deaths.
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
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.
-----------------------
Gun control
Advocates of free access to arms cite the Second Amendment. Do you believe
that it permits unrestricted, uncontrolled possession of guns?
It's pretty clear that, taken 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. Laws permit what
the tenor of the times interprets them as permitting.
But underlying the controversy over guns are some serious questions.
There's a feeling in the country that people are under attack. I think
they're misidentifying the source of the attack, but they do feel under
attack.
The government is the only power structure that's even partially
accountable to the population, so naturally the business sectors want to
make that the enemy -- not the corporate system, which is totally
unaccountable. After decades of intensive business propaganda, people feel
that the government is some kind of enemy and that they have to defend
themselves from it.
It's not that that doesn't have its justifications. The government is
authoritarian and commonly hostile to much of the population. But it's
partially influenceable -- and potentially very influenceable -- by the
general population.
Many people who advocate keeping guns have fear of the government in the
back of their minds. But that's a crazy response to a real problem.
Do the media foster the feeling people have that they're under attack?
At the deepest level, the media contribute to the sense that the government
is the enemy, and they suppress the sources of real power in the society,
which lie in the totalitarian institutions -- the corporations, now
international in scale -- that control the economy and much of our social
life. In fact, the corporations set the conditions within which the
government operates, and control it to a large extent.
The picture presented in the media is constant, day after day. People
simply have no awareness of the system of power under which they're
suffering. As a result -- as intended -- they turn their attention against
the government.
People have all kinds of motivations for opposing gun control, but there's
definitely a sector of the population that considers itself threatened by
big forces, ranging from the Federal Reserve to the Council on Foreign
Relations to big government to who knows what, and they're calling for guns
to protect themselves.
Radio listener: On the issue of gun control, I believe that the US is
becoming much more like a Third World country, and nothing is necessarily
going to put a stop to it. I look around and see a lot of Third World
countries where, if the citizens had weapons, they wouldn't have the
government they've got. So 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.
Your point illustrates exactly what I think is a major fallacy. The
government is far from benign -- that's true. On the other hand, it's at
least partially accountable, and it can become as benign as we make it.
What's not benign (what's extremely harmful, in fact) is something you
didn't mention -- business power, which is highly concentrated and, by now,
largely transnational. Business power is very far from benign and it's
completely unaccountable. It's a totalitarian system that has an enormous
effect on our lives. It's also the main reason why the government isn't
benign.
As for guns being the way to respond to this, that's outlandish. First of
all, this is not a weak Third World country. If people have pistols, the
government has tanks. If people get 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.
-----------------------
Becoming a Third World country
A recent Census Bureau report stated that there's been a 50% increase in
the working poor -- that is, people who have jobs but are still below the
poverty level.
That's part of the Third-Worldization of the society. It's not just
unemployment, but also wage reduction. Real wages have been declining since
the late 1960s. Since 1987, they've even been declining for
college-educated people, which was a striking shift.
There's supposed to be a recovery going on, and it's true that a kind of
recovery is going on. It's at about half the rate of preceding postwar
recoveries from recession (there've been half a dozen of them) and the rate
of job creation is less than a third. Furthermore -- out of line with
earlier recoveries -- the jobs themselves are low-paying, and a huge number
of them are temporary.
This is what's called "increasing flexibility of the labor market."
Flexibility is a word like reform -- it's supposed to be a good thing.
Actually, flexibility means insecurity. It means you go to bed at night and
don't know if you'll have a job in the morning. Any economist can explain
that that's a good thing for the economy -- that is, for profit-making, not
for the way people live.
Low wages also increase job insecurity. They keep inflation low, which is
good for people who have money -- bondholders, say. Corporate profits are
zooming, but for most of the population, things are grim. And grim
circumstances, without much prospect for a future or for constructive
social action, express themselves in violence.
It's interesting that you should say that. Most of the examples of mass
murders are in the workplace. I'm thinking of the various killings in post
offices and fast-food restaurants, where workers are disgruntled for one
reason or another, or have been fired or laid off.
Not only have real wages stagnated or declined, but working conditions have
gotten much worse. You can see that just in counting hours of work. Julie
Schor, an economist at Harvard, brought out an important book on this a
couple of years ago, called The Overworked American. If I remember her
figures correctly, by around 1990, the time she was writing, workers had to
put in about six weeks extra work a year to maintain something like a 1970
real wage level.
Along with the increasing hours of work comes increasing harshness of work
conditions, increasing insecurity and, because of the decline of unions,
reduced ability to protect oneself. In the Reagan years, even the minimal
government programs for protecting workers against workplace accidents and
the like were reduced, in the interest of maximizing profits. The absence
of constructive options, like union organizing, leads to violence.
-----------------------
Labor
[Harvard professor] Elaine Bernard and [union official] Tony Mazzocchi have
been talking about creating a new labor-based party. What are your views on
that?
I think that's an important initiative. The US 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
that's being left out of social planning and the political process.
Labor unions have often been a significant force -- in fact, the main
social force -- for democratization and progress. On the other hand, when
they aren't linked to the political system through a labor-based party,
there's a limit on what they can do. Take health care, for example.
Powerful unions in the US were able to get fairly reasonable health-care
provisions for themselves. But since they were acting independently of the
political system, they typically didn't attempt to bring about decent
health conditions for the general population. Compare Canada, where the
unions, being linked to labor-based parties, were able to implement health
care for everybody.
That's an illustration of the kind of difference 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 Bernard and Mazzocchi are on
the right track in thinking along those lines.
Yesterday was May 1. What's its historical significance?
It's May Day, which throughout the world has been a working-class holiday
for more than a hundred years. It was initiated in solidarity with American
workers who, back in the 1880s, were suffering unusually harsh conditions
in their effort to achieve an eight-hour workday. The US is one of the few
countries where this day of solidarity with US labor is hardly even known.
This morning, way in the back of the Boston Globe, there was a little item
whose headline read, "May Day Celebration in Boston." I was surprised,
because I don't think I've ever seen that here in the US. It turned out
that there indeed was a May Day celebration, of the usual kind, but it was
being held by Latin American and Chinese workers who've recently immigrated
here.
That's a dramatic example of the efficiency with which business controls US
ideology, of how effective its propaganda and indoctrination have been in
depriving people of any awareness of their own rights and history. You have
to wait for poor Latino and Chinese workers to celebrate an international
holiday of solidarity with American workers.
In his New York Times column, Anthony Lewis wrote: "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, threatening tactics" were labor's attempt to get their
representatives to represent their interests. By the standards of the
elite, that's an attack on democracy, because the political system is
supposed to be run by the rich and powerful.
Corporate lobbying vastly exceeded labor lobbying, but you can't even talk
about it in the same breath. It wasn't considered raw muscle or
antidemocratic. Did Lewis have a column denouncing corporate lobbying for
NAFTA?
I didn't see it.
I didn't see it either.
Things reached the peak of absolute hysteria the day before the vote. The
New York Times lead editorial was exactly along the lines of that quote
from Lewis, and it included a little box that listed the dozen or so
representatives in the New York region who were voting against NAFTA. It
showed their contributions from labor and said that this raises ominous
questions about the political influence of labor, and whether these
politicians are being honest, and so on.
As a number of these representatives later pointed out, the Times didn't
have a box listing corporate contributions to them or to other politicians
-- nor, we may add, was there a box listing advertisers of the New York
Times and their attitudes towards NAFTA.
It was quite striking to watch the hysteria that built up in privileged
sectors, like the Times' commentators and editorials, as the NAFTA vote
approached. They even allowed themselves the use of the phrase "class
lines." I've never seen that in the Times before. You're usually not
allowed to admit that the US has class lines. But this was considered a
really serious issue, and all bars were let down.
The end result is very intriguing. In a recent poll, about 70% of the
respondents said they were opposed to the actions of the labor movement
against NAFTA, but it turned out that they took pretty much the same
position that labor took. So why were they opposed to it?
I think it's easy to explain that. The media scarcely reported what labor
was actually saying. But there was plenty of hysteria about labor's alleged
tactics.
-----------------------
The CIA
What about the role of the CIA in a democratic society? Is that an
oxymoron?
You could imagine a democratic society with an organization that carries
out intelligence-gathering functions. But that's a very minor part of what
the CIA does. Its main purpose is to carry out secret and usually illegal
activities for the executive branch, which wants to keep these activities
secret because it knows that the public won't accept them. So even inside
the US, it's highly undemocratic.
The activities that it carries out are quite commonly efforts to undermine
democracy, as in Chile through the 1960s into the early 1970s [described on
pp. 91-95]. That's far from the only example. By the way, although most
people focus on Nixon's and Kissinger's involvement with the CIA, Kennedy
and Johnson carried out similar policies.
Is the CIA an instrument of state policy, or does it formulate policy on
its own?
You can't be certain, but my own view is that the CIA is very much under
the control of executive power. I've studied those records fairly
extensively in many cases, and it's very rare for the CIA to undertake
initiatives on its own.
It often looks as though it does, but that's because the executive wants to
preserve deniability. The executive branch doesn't want to have documents
lying around that say, I told you to murder Lumumba, or to overthrow the
government of Brazil, or to assassinate Castro.
So the executive branch tries to follow policies of plausible deniability,
which means that messages are given to the CIA to do things but without a
paper trail, without a record. When the story comes out later, it looks as
if the CIA is doing things on their own. But if you really trace it
through, I think this almost never happens.
-----------------------
The media
Let's talk about media and democracy. In your view, what are the
communications requirements of a democratic society?
I agree with Adam Smith on this -- we'd like to see a tendency toward
equality. Not just equality of opportunity, but actual equality -- the
ability, at every stage of one's existence, to access information and make
decisions on the basis of it. So a democratic communications system would
be one that involves large-scale public participation, and that reflects
both public interests and real values like truth, integrity and discovery.
Bob McChesney, in his recent book Telecommunications, Mass Media and
Democracy, details the debate between 1928 and 1935 for control of radio in
the US. How did that battle play out?
That's a very interesting topic, and he's done an important service by
bringing it out. It's very pertinent today, because we're involved in a
very similar battle over this so-called "information superhighway."
In the 1920s, the first major means of mass communication since the
printing press came along -- radio. It's obvious that radio is a bounded
resource, because there's only a fixed bandwidth. There was no question in
anyone's mind that the government was going to have to regulate it. The
question was, What form would this government regulation take?
Government could opt for public radio, with popular participation. This
approach would be as democratic as the society is. Public radio in the
Soviet Union would have been totalitarian, but in, say, Canada or England,
it would be partially democratic (insofar as those societies are
democratic).
That debate was pursued all over the world -- at least in the wealthier
societies, which had the luxury of choice. Almost every country (maybe
every one -- I can't think of an exception) chose public radio, while the
US chose private radio. It wasn't 100%; you were allowed to have small
radio stations -- say, a college radio station -- that can reach a few
blocks. But virtually all radio in the US was handed over to private power.
As McChesney points out, there was a considerable struggle about that.
There were church groups and some labor unions and other public interest
groups that felt that the US should go the way the rest of the world was
going. But this is very much a business-run society, and they lost out.
Rather strikingly, business also won an ideological victory, claiming that
handing radio over to private power constituted democracy, because it gave
people choices in the marketplace. That's a very weird concept of
democracy, since your power depends on the number of dollars you have, and
your choices are limited to selecting among options that are highly
structured by the real concentrations of power. But this was nevertheless
widely accepted, even by liberals, as the democratic solution. By the mid-
to late 1930s, the game was essentially over.
This struggle was replayed -- in the rest of the world, at least -- about a
decade later, when television came along. In the US this wasn't a battle at
all; TV was completely commercialized without any conflict. But again, in
most other countries -- or maybe every other country -- TV was put in the
public sector.
In the 1960s, television and radio became partly commercialized in other
countries; the same concentration of private power that we find in the US
was chipping away at the public-service function of radio and television.
At the same time in the US, there was a slight opening to public radio and
television.
The reasons for this have never been explored in any depth (as far as I
know), but it appears that the private broadcasting companies recognized
that it was a nuisance for them to have to satisfy the formal requirements
of the Federal Communications Commission that they devote part of their
programming to public-interest purposes. So CBS, say, had to have a big
office with a lot of employees who every year would put together a
collection of fraudulent claims about how they'd met this legislative
condition. It was a pain in the neck.
At some point, they apparently decided that it would be easier to get the
entire burden off their backs and permit a small and underfunded public
broadcasting system. They could then claim that they didn't have to fulfill
this service any longer. That was the origin of public radio and television
-- which is now largely corporate -- funded in any event.
That's happening more and more. PBS [the Public Broadcasting Service] is
sometimes called "the Petroleum Broadcasting Service."
That's just another reflection of the interests and power of a highly
class-conscious business system that's always fighting an intense class
war. These issues are coming up again with respect to the Internet [a
worldwide computer network] and the new interactive communications
technologies. And we're going to find exactly the same conflict again. It's
going on right now.
I don't see why we should have had any long-term hopes for something
different. Commercially run radio is going to have certain purposes --
namely, the ones determined by people who own and control it.
As I mentioned earlier, they don't want decision-makers and participants;
they want a passive, obedient population of consumers and political
spectators -- a community of people who are so atomized and isolated that
they can't put together their limited resources and become an independent,
powerful force that will chip away at concentrated power.
Does ownership always determine content?
In some far-reaching sense it does, because if content ever goes beyond the
bounds owners will tolerate, they'll surely move in to limit it. But
there's a fair amount of flexibility.
Investors don't go down to the television studio and make sure that the
local talk-show host or reporter is doing what they want. There are other,
subtler, more complex mechanisms that make it fairly certain that the
people on the air will do what the owners and investors want. There's a
whole, long, filtering process that makes sure that people only rise
through the system to become managers, editors, etc., if they've
internalized the values of the owners.
At that point, they can describe themselves as quite free. So you'll
occasionally find some flaming independent-liberal type like Tom Wicker who
writes, Look, nobody tells me what to say. I say whatever I want. It's an
absolutely free system.
And, for him, that's true. After he'd demonstrated to the satisfaction of
his bosses that he'd internalized their values, he was entirely free to
write whatever he wanted.
Both PBS and NPR [National Public Radio] frequently come under attack for
being left-wing.
That's an interesting sort of critique. In fact, PBS and NPR are elite
institutions, reflecting by and large the points of view and interests of
wealthy professionals who are very close to business circles, including
corporate executives. But they happen to be liberal by certain criteria.
That is, if you took a poll among corporate executives on matters like,
say, abortion rights, I presume their responses would be what's called
liberal. I suspect the same would be true on lots of social issues, like
civil rights and freedom of speech. They tend not to be fundamentalist,
born-again Christians, for example, and they might tend to be more opposed
to the death penalty than the general population. I'm sure you'll find
plenty of private wealth and corporate power backing the American Civil
Liberties Union.
Since those are aspects of the social order from which they gain, they tend
to support them. By these criteria, the people who dominate the country
tend to be liberal, and that reflects itself in an institution like PBS.
You've been on NPR just twice in 23 years, and on The MacNeil-Lehrer News
Hour once in its almost 20 years. What if you'd been on MacNeil-Lehrer ten
times? Would it make a difference?
Not a lot. By the way, I'm not quite sure of those numbers; my own memory
isn't that precise. I've been on local PBS stations in particular towns.
I'm talking about the national network.
Then probably something roughly like those numbers is correct. But it
wouldn't make a lot of difference.
In fact, in my view, if the managers of the propaganda system were more
intelligent, they'd allow more leeway to real dissidents and critics. That
would give the impression of broader debate and discussion and hence would
have a legitimizing function, but it still wouldn't make much of a dent,
given the overwhelming weight of propaganda on the other side. By the way,
that propaganda system includes not just how issues are framed in news
stories but also how they're presented in entertainment programming -- that
huge area of the media that's simply devoted to diverting people and making
them more stupid and passive.
That's not to say I'm against opening up these media a bit, but I would
think it would have a limited effect. What you need is something that
presents every day, in a clear and comprehensive fashion, a different
picture of the world, one that reflects the concerns and interests of
ordinary people, and that takes something like the point of view with
regard to democracy and participation that you find in people like
Jefferson or Dewey.
Where that happens -- and it has happened, even in modern societies -- it
has effects. In England, for example, you did have major mass media of this
kind up until the 1960s, and it helped sustain and enliven a working class
culture. It had a big effect on British society.
What do you think about the Internet?
I think that there are good things about it, but there are also aspects of
it that concern and worry me. This is an intuitive response -- I can't
prove it -- but my feeling is that, since people aren't Martians or robots,
direct face-to-face contact is an extremely important part of human life.
It helps develop self-understanding and the growth of a healthy
personality.
You just have a different relationship to somebody when you're looking at
them than you do when you're punching away at a keyboard and some symbols
come back. I suspect that extending that form of abstract and remote
relationship, instead of direct, personal contact, is going to have
unpleasant effects on what people are like. It will diminish their
humanity, I think.
-----------------------
Sports
In 1990, in one of our many interviews, we had a brief discussion about the
role and function of sports in American society, part of which was
subsequently excerpted in Harper's. I've probably gotten more comments
about that than anything else I've ever recorded. You really pushed some
buttons.
I got some funny reactions, a lot of irate reactions, as if I were somehow
taking people's fun away from them. I have nothing against sports. I like
to watch a good basketball game and that sort of thing. On the other hand,
we have to recognize that the mass hysteria about spectator sports plays a
significant role.
First of all, spectator sports make people more passive, because you're not
doing them -- you're watching somebody doing them. Secondly, they engender
jingoist and chauvinist attitudes, sometimes to quite an extreme degree.
I saw something in the newspapers just a day or two ago about how high
school teams are now so antagonistic and passionately committed to winning
at all costs that they had to abandon the standard handshake before or
after the game. These kids can't even do civil things like greeting one
another because they're ready to kill one another.
It's spectator sports that engender those attitudes, particularly when
they're designed to organize a community to be hysterically committed to
their gladiators. That's very dangerous, and it has lots of deleterious
effects.
I was reading something about the glories of the information superhighway
not too long ago. I can't quote it exactly, but it was talking about how
wonderful and empowering these new interactive technologies are going to
be. Two basic examples were given.
For women, interactive technologies are going to offer highly improved
methods of home shopping. So you'll be able to watch the tube and some
model will appear with a product and you're supposed to think, God, I've
got to have that. So you press a button and they deliver it to your door
within a couple of hours. That's how interactive technology is supposed to
liberate women.
For men, the example involved the Super Bowl. Every red-blooded American
male is glued to it. Today, all they can do is watch it and cheer and drink
beer, but the new interactive technology will let them actually participate
in it. While the quarterback is in the huddle calling the next play, the
people watching will be able to decide what the play should be.
If they think he should pass, or run, or punt, or whatever, they'll be able
to punch that into their computer and their vote will be recorded. It won't
have any effect on what the quarterback does, of course, but after the play
the television channel will be able to put up the numbers -- 63% said he
should have passed, 24% said he should have run, etc.
That's interactive technology for men. Now you're really participating in
the world. Forget about all this business of deciding what ought to happen
with health care -- now you're doing something really important.
This scenario for interactive technology reflects an understanding of the
stupefying effect spectator sports have in making people passive, atomized,
obedient nonparticipants -- nonquestioning, easily controlled and easily
disciplined.
At the same time, athletes are lionized or -- in the case of Tonya Harding,
say -- demonized.
If you can personalize events of the world -- whether it's Hillary Clinton
or Tonya Harding -- you've succeeded in directing people away from what
really matters and is important. The John F. Kennedy cult is a good
example, with the effects it's had on the left.
-----------------------
Religious fundamentalism
In his book When Time Shall Be No More, historian Paul Boyer states that,
"surveys show that from one third to one half of [all Americans] believe
that the future can be interpreted from biblical prophecies." I find this
absolutely stunning.
I haven't seen that particular number, but I've seen plenty of things like
it. I saw a cross-cultural study a couple of years ago -- I think it was
published in England -- that compared a whole range of societies in terms
of beliefs of that kind. The US stood out -- it was unique in the
industrial world. In fact, the measures for the US were similar to
pre-industrial societies.
Why is that?
That's an interesting question. This is a very fundamentalist society. It's
like Iran in its degree of fanatic religious commitment. For example, I
think about 75% of the US population has a literal belief in the devil.
There was a poll several years ago on evolution. People were asked their
opinion on various theories of how the world of living creatures came to be
what it is. The number of people who believed in Darwinian evolution was
less than 10%. About half the population believed in a church doctrine of
divine-guided evolution. Most of the rest presumably believed that the
world was created a couple of thousand years ago.
These are very unusual results. Why the US should be off the spectrum on
these issues has been discussed and debated for some time.
I remember reading something maybe ten or fifteen years ago by a political
scientist who writes about these things, Walter Dean Burnham. He suggested
that this may be a reflection of depoliticization -- that is, the inability
to participate in a meaningful fashion in the political arena may have a
rather important psychic effect.
That's not impossible. People will find some ways of identifying
themselves, becoming associated with others, taking part in something.
They're going to do it some way or other. If they don't have the option to
participate in labor unions, or in political organizations that actually
function, they'll find other ways. Religious fundamentalism is a classic
example.
We see that happening in other parts of the world right now. The rise of
what's called Islamic fundamentalism is, to a significant extent, a result
of the collapse of secular nationalist alternatives that were either
discredited internally or destroyed.
In the nineteenth century, you even had some conscious efforts on the part
of business leaders to promote fire-and-brimstone preachers who led people
to look at society in a more passive way. The same thing happened in the
early part of the industrial revolution in England. E.P. Thompson writes
about it in his classic, The Making of the English Working Class.
In a State of the Union speech, Clinton said, "We can't renew our country
unless more of us -- I mean, all of us -- are willing to join churches."
What do you make of this?
I don't know exactly what was in his mind, but the ideology is very
straightforward. If people devote themselves to activities that are out of
the public arena, then we folks in power will be able to run things the way
we want.
-----------------------
Don't tread on me
I'm not quite clear about how to formulate this question. It has to do with
the nature of US society as exemplified in comments like do your own thing,
go it alone, don't tread on me, the pioneer spirit -- all that deeply
individualistic stuff. What does that tell you about American society and
culture?
It tells you that the propaganda system is working full-time, because there
is no such ideology in the US. Business certainly doesn't believe it. All
the way back to the origins of American society, business has insisted on a
powerful, interventionist state to support its interests, and it still
does.
There's nothing individualistic about corporations. They're big
conglomerate institutions, essentially totalitarian in character. Within
them, you're a cog in a big machine. There are few institutions in human
society that have such strict hierarchy and top-down control as a business
organization. It's hardly don't tread on me -- you're being tread on all
the time.
The point of the ideology is to prevent people who are outside the sectors
of coordinated power from associating with each other and entering into
decision-making in the political arena. The point is to leave the powerful
sectors highly integrated and organized, while atomizing everyone else.
That aside, there is another factor. There's a streak of independence and
individuality in American culture that I think is a very good thing. This
don't tread on me feeling is in many respects a healthy one -- up to the
point where it keeps you from working together with other people.
So it's got a healthy side and a negative side. Naturally it's the negative
side that's emphasized in the propaganda and indoctrination.
-----------------------
The world
-----------------------
Toward greater inequality
In his column in the New York Times, Anthony Lewis wrote, "Since World War
II, the world has experienced extraordinary growth." Meanwhile, at a
meeting in Quito, Ecuador, Juan de Dias Parra, the head of the Latin
American Association for Human Rights, said, "In Latin America today, there
are 7 million more hungry people, 30 million more illiterate people, 10
million more families without homes, 40 million more unemployed persons
than there were 20 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 two statements?
It just depends on which people you're talking about. The World Bank came
out with a study on Latin America which warned that Latin America was
facing chaos because of the extraordinarily high level of inequality, which
is the highest in the world (and that's after a period of substantial
growth). Even the things the World Bank cares about are threatened.
The inequality didn't just come 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 called for increasing production for domestic needs and
reducing inequality. The basic principle of this new nationalism was that
the people of the country should be the prime beneficiary of the country's
resources.
The US was sharply opposed to that and came out with an economic charter
for the Americas that called for eliminating economic nationalism (as it's
also called) in all of its forms and insisting that Latin American
development be "complementary" to US development. That means we'll have the
advanced industry and the technology and the peons in Latin America will
produce export crops and do some simple operations that they can manage.
But they won't develop economically the way we did.
Given the distribution of power, the US of course won. In countries like
Brazil, we just took over -- Brazil has been almost completely directed by
American technocrats for about fifty years. Its enormous resources should
make it one of the richest countries in the world, and it's had one of the
highest growth rates. But thanks to our influence on Brazil's social and
economic system, it's ranked around Albania and Paraguay in quality of life
measures, infant mortality and so on.
It's true, as Lewis says, that there's been very substantial growth in the
world. At the same time, there's incredible poverty and misery, and that's
increased even more.
If you compare the percentage of world income held by the richest 20% and
the poorest 20%, the gap has dramatically increased over the past thirty
years. Comparing rich countries to poor countries, it's about doubled.
Comparing rich people to poor people within countries, it's increased far
more and is much sharper. That's the consequence of a particular kind of
growth.
Do you think this trend of growth rates and poverty rates increasing
simultaneously will continue?
Actually, growth rates have been slowing down a lot; in the past twenty
years, they've been roughly half of what they were in the preceding twenty
years. This tendency toward lower growth will probably continue.
One cause is the enormous increase in the amount of unregulated,
speculative capital. The figures are really astonishing. John Eatwell, one
of the leading specialists in finance at Cambridge University, estimates
that, in 1970, about 90% of international capital was used for trade and
long-term investment -- more or less productive things -- and 10% for
speculation. By 1990, those figures had reversed: 90% for speculation and
10% for trade and long-term investment.
Not only has there been radical change in the nature of unregulated
financial capital, but the quantity has grown enormously. According to a
recent World Bank estimate, $14 trillion is now moving around the world,
about $1 trillion or so of which moves every day.
This huge amount of mostly speculative capital creates pressures for
deflationary policies, because what speculative capital wants is low growth
and low inflation. It's driving much of the world into a low-growth,
low-wage equilibrium.
This is a tremendous attack against government efforts to stimulate the
economy. Even in the richer societies, it's very difficult; in the poorer
societies, it's hopeless. What happened with Clinton's trivial stimulus
package was a good indication. It amounted to nothing -- $19 billion, but
it was shot down instantly.
In the fall of 1993, the Financial Times [of London] trumpeted, "the public
sector is in retreat everywhere." Is that true?
It's largely true, but major parts of the public sector are alive and well
-- in particular those parts that cater to the interests of the wealthy and
the powerful. They're declining somewhat, but they're still very lively,
and they're not going to disappear.
These developments have been going on for about twenty years now. They had
to do with major changes in the international economy that became more or
less crystallized by the early 1970s.
For one thing, US economic hegemony over the world had pretty much ended by
then, and Europe and Japan had reemerged as major economic and political
powers. The costs of the Vietnam War were very significant for the US
economy, and extremely beneficial for its rivals. That tended to shift the
world balance.
In any event, by the early 1970s, the US felt that it could no longer
sustain its traditional role as -- essentially -- international banker.
(This role was codified in the Bretton Woods agreements at the end of the
Second World War, in which currencies were regulated relative to one
another, and in which the de facto international currency, the US dollar,
was fixed to gold.)
Nixon dismantled the Bretton Woods system around 1970. That led to
tremendous growth in unregulated financial capital. That growth was rapidly
accelerated by the short-term rise in the price of commodities like oil,
which led to a huge flow of petrodollars into the international system.
Furthermore, the telecommunications revolution made it extremely easy to
transfer capital -- or, rather, the electronic equivalent of capital --
from one place to another.
There's also been a very substantial growth in the internationalization of
production. It's now a lot easier than it was to shift production to
foreign countries -- generally highly repressive ones -- where you get much
cheaper labor. So a corporate executive who lives in Greenwich, Connecticut
and whose corporate and bank headquarters are in New York City can have a
factory somewhere in the Third World. The actual banking operations can
take place in various offshore regions where you don't have to worry about
supervision -- you can launder drug money or whatever you feel like doing.
This has led to a totally different economy.
With the pressure on corporate profits that began in the early 1970s, a big
attack was launched on the whole social contract that had developed through
a century of struggle and that had been more or less codified around the
end of the Second World War with the New Deal and the European social
welfare states. The attack was led by the US and England, and by now has
reached continental Europe.
It's led to a serious decline in unionization, which carries with it a
decline in wages and other forms of protection, and to a very sharp
polarization of the society, primarily in the US and Britain (but it's
spreading).
Driving in to work this morning, I was listening to the BBC [the British
Broadcasting Company, Britain's national broadcasting service]. They
reported a new study that found that children living in workhouses a
century ago had better nutritional standards than millions of poor children
in Britain today.
That's one of the grand achievements of [former British Prime Minister
Margaret] Thatcher's revolution. She succeeded in devastating British
society and destroying large parts of British manufacturing capacity.
England is now one of the poorest countries in Europe -- not much above
Spain and Portugal, and well below Italy.
The American achievement was rather similar. We're a much richer, more
powerful country, so it isn't possible to achieve quite what Britain
achieved. But the Reaganites succeeded in driving US wages down so far that
we're now the second lowest of the major industrial countries, barely above
Britain. Labor costs in Italy are about 20% higher than in the US, and in
Germany they're maybe 60% higher.
Along with that goes a deterioration of the general social contract and a
breakdown of the kind of public spending that benefits the less privileged.
Needless to say, the kind of public spending that benefits the wealthy and
the privileged -- which is enormous -- remains fairly stable.
-----------------------
"Free trade"
My local newspaper, the Boulder [Colorado] Daily Camera, which is part of
the Knight-Ridder chain, ran a series of questions and answers about GATT
[the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade]. They answered the question,
Who would benefit from a GATT agreement? by writing, "Consumers would be
the big winners." Does that track with your understanding?
If they mean rich consumers -- yes, they'll gain. But much of the
population will see a decline in wages, both in rich countries and poor
ones. Take a look at NAFTA [the North American Free Trade Agreement], where
the analyses have already been done. The day after NAFTA passed, the New
York Times had its first article on its expected impact in the New York
region. (Its conclusions apply to GATT too.)
It was a very upbeat article. They talked about how wonderful NAFTA was
going to be. They said that finance and services will be particularly big
winners. Banks, investment firms, PR firms, corporate law firms will do
just great. Some manufacturers will also benefit -- for example, publishing
and the chemical industry, which is highly capital-intensive, with not many
workers to worry about.
Then they said, Well, there'll be some losers too: women, Hispanics, other
minorities, and semi-skilled workers -- in other words, about two-thirds of
the work force. But everyone else will do fine.
Just as anyone who was paying attention knew, the purpose of NAFTA was to
create an even smaller sector of highly privileged people -- investors,
professionals, managerial classes. (Bear in mind that this is a rich
country, so this privileged sector, although smaller, still isn't tiny.) It
will work fine for them, and the general population will suffer.
The prediction for Mexico is exactly the same. The leading financial
journal in Mexico, which is very pro-NAFTA, estimated that Mexico would
lose about 25% of its manufacturing capacity in the first few years and
about 15% of its manufacturing labor force. In addition, cheap US
agricultural exports are expected to drive several million 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, union organizing is essentially impossible. Corporations
can operate internationally, but unions can't -- so there's 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 most
people in Mexico and for most people in the US.
The strongest NAFTA advocates point that out in the small print. My
colleague at MIT, Paul Krugman, is a specialist in international trade and,
interestingly, one of the economists who's done some of the theoretical
work showing why free trade doesn't work. He was nevertheless an
enthusiastic advocate of NAFTA -- which is, I should stress, not a free
trade agreement.
He agreed with the Times that unskilled workers -- about 70% of the work
force -- would lose. The Clinton administration has various fantasies about
retraining workers, but that would probably have very little impact. In any
case, they're doing nothing about it.
The same thing is true of skilled white-collar workers. You can get
software programmers in India who are very well trained at a fraction of
the cost of Americans. Somebody involved in this business recently told me
that Indian programmers are actually being brought to the US and put into
what are kind of like slave labor camps and kept at Indian salaries -- a
fraction of American salaries -- doing software development. So that kind
of work can be farmed out just as easily.
The search for profit, when it's unconstrained and free from public
control, will naturally try to repress people's lives as much as possible.
The executives wouldn't be doing their jobs otherwise.
What accounted for all the opposition to NAFTA?
The original expectation was that NAFTA would just sail through. Nobody
would even know what it was. So it was signed in secret. It was put on a
fast track in Congress, meaning essentially no discussion. There was
virtually no media coverage. Who was going to know about a complex trade
agreement?
That didn't work, and there are a number of reasons why it didn't. For one
thing, the labor movement got organized for once and made an issue of it.
Then there was this sort of maverick third-party candidate, Ross Perot, who
managed to make it a public issue. And it turned out that as soon as the
public learned anything about NAFTA, they were pretty much opposed.
I followed the media coverage on this, which was extremely interesting.
Usually the media try to keep their class loyalties more or less in the
background -- they try to pretend they don't have them. But on this issue,
the bars were down. They went berserk, and toward the end, when it looked
like NAFTA might not pass, they just turned into raving maniacs.
But despite this enormous media barrage and the government attack and huge
amounts of corporate lobbying (which totally dwarfed all the other
lobbying, of course), the level of opposition remained pretty stable.
Roughly 60% or so of those who had an opinion remained opposed.
The same sort of media barrage influenced the Gore-Perot television debate.
I didn't watch it, but friends who did thought Perot just wiped Gore off
the map. But the media proclaimed that Gore won a massive victory.
In polls the next day, people were asked what they thought about the
debate. The percentage who thought that Perot had been smashed was far
higher than the percentage who'd seen the debate, which means that most
people were being told what to think by the media, not coming to their own
conclusions.
Incidentally, what was planned for NAFTA worked for GATT -- there was
virtually no public opposition to it, or even awareness of it. It was
rammed through in secret, as intended.
What about the position people like us find ourselves in of being
"against," of being "anti-," reactive rather than pro-active?
NAFTA's a good case, because very few NAFTA critics were opposed to any
agreement. Virtually everyone -- the labor movement, the Congressional
Office of Technology Assessment (a major report that was suppressed) and
other critics (including me) -- was saying there'd be nothing wrong with a
North American Free Trade Agreement, but not this one. It should be
different, and here are the ways in which it should be different -- in some
detail. Even Perot had constructive proposals. But all that was suppressed.
What's left is the picture that, say, Anthony Lewis portrayed in the Times:
jingoist fanatics screaming about NAFTA. Incidentally, what's called the
left played the same game. James Galbraith is an economist at the
University of Texas. He had an article in a sort of left-liberal journal,
World Policy Review, in which he discussed an article in which I said the
opposite of what he attributed to me (of course -- but that's typical).
Galbraith said there's this jingoist left -- nationalist fanatics -- who
don't want Mexican workers to improve their lives. Then he went on about
how the Mexicans are in favor of NAFTA. (True, if by "Mexicans" you mean
Mexican industrialists and executives and corporate lawyers, not Mexican
workers and peasants.)
All the way from people like James Galbraith and Anthony Lewis to way over
to the right, you had this very useful fabrication -- that critics of NAFTA
were reactive and negative and jingoist and against progress and just
wanted to go back to old-time protectionism. When you have essentially
total control of the information system, it's rather easy to convey that
image. But it simply isn't true.
Anthony Lewis also wrote, "The engine for [the world's] growth has
been...vastly increased...international trade." Do you agree?
His use of the word "trade," while conventional, is misleading. The latest
figures available (from about ten years ago -- they're probably higher now)
show that about 30% or 40% of what's called "world trade" is actually
internal transfers within a corporation. I believe that about 70% of
Japanese exports to the US are intrafirm transfers of this sort.
So, for example, Ford Motor Company will have components manufactured here
in the US and then ship them for assembly to a plant in Mexico where the
workers get much lower wages and where Ford doesn't have to worry about
pollution, unions and all that nonsense. Then they ship the assembled part
back here.
About half of what are called US exports to Mexico are intrafirm transfers
of this sort. They don't enter the Mexican market, and there's no
meaningful sense in which they're exports to Mexico. Still, that's called
"trade."
The corporations that do this are huge totalitarian institutions, and they
aren't governed by market principles -- in fact, they promote severe market
distortions. For example, a US corporation that has an outlet in Puerto
Rico may decide to take its profits in Puerto Rico, because of tax rebates.
It shifts its prices around, using what's called "transfer pricing," so it
doesn't seem to be making a profit here.
There are estimates of the scale of governmental operations that interfere
with trade, but I know of no estimates of internal corporate interferences
with market processes. They're no doubt vast in scale, and are sure to be
extended by the trade agreements.
GATT and NAFTA ought to be called "investor rights agreements," not "free
trade agreements." One of their main purposes is to extend the ability of
corporations to carry out market-distorting operations internally.
So when people like [Clinton's National Security Advisor] Anthony Lake talk
about enlarging market democracy, he's enlarging something, but it's not
markets and it's not democracy.
-----------------------
Mexico (and South Central LA)
I found the mainstream media coverage of Mexico during the NAFTA debate
somewhat uneven. The New York Times has allowed in a number of articles
that official corruption was -- and is -- widespread in Mexico. In fact, in
one editorial, they virtually conceded that Salinas stole the 1988
presidential election. Why did that information come out?
I think it's impossible to repress. Furthermore, there were scattered
reports in the Times of popular protest against NAFTA. Tim Golden, their
reporter in Mexico, had a story a couple of weeks before the vote, probably
in early November [1993], in which he said that lots of Mexican workers
were concerned that their wages would decline after NAFTA. Then came the
punch line.
He said that that undercuts the position of people like Ross Perot and
others who think that NAFTA is going to harm American workers for the
benefit of Mexican workers. In other words, the fact that they're all going
to get screwed was presented as a critique of the people who were opposing
NAFTA here!
There was very little discussion here of the large-scale popular protest in
Mexico, which included, for example, the largest non-governmental trade
union. (The main trade union is about as independent as the Soviet trade
unions were, but there are some independent ones, and they were opposed to
the agreement.)
The environmental movements and most of the other popular movements were
opposed. The Mexican Bishops' Conference strongly endorsed the position the
Latin American bishops took when they met at Santa Domingo [in the
Dominican Republic] in December 1992.
That meeting in Santa Domingo was the first major conference of Latin
American bishops since the ones at Puebla [Mexico] and Medellφn [Colombia]
back in the 1960s and 1970s. The Vatican tried to control it this time to
make sure that they wouldn't come out with these perverse ideas about
liberation theology and the preferential option for the poor. But despite a
very firm Vatican hand, the bishops came out quite strongly against
neoliberalism and structural adjustment and these free-market-for-the-poor
policies. That wasn't reported here, to my knowledge.
There's been significant union-busting in Mexico.
Ford and VW are two big examples. A few years ago, Ford simply fired its
entire Mexican work force and would only rehire, at much lower wages, those
who agreed not to join a union. Ford was backed in this by the
always-ruling PRI [the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which has
controlled Mexico since the 1920s].
VW's case was pretty much the same. They fired workers who supported an
independent union and only rehired, at lower wages, those who agreed not to
support it.
A few weeks after the NAFTA vote in the US, workers at a GE and Honeywell
plant in Mexico were fired for union activities. I don't know what the
final outcome will be, but that's exactly the purpose of things like NAFTA.
In early January [1994], you were asked by an editor at the Washington Post
to submit an article on the New Year's Day uprising in Chiapas [a state at
the southern tip of Mexico, next to Guatemala]. Was this the first time the
Post had asked you to write something?
It was the first time ever. I was kind of surprised, since I'm never asked
to write for a national newspaper. So I wrote the article -- it was for the
Sunday Outlook section -- but it didn't appear.
Was there an explanation?
No. It went to press, as far as I know. The editor who commissioned it
called me, apparently after the deadline, to say that it looked OK to him
but that it had simply been cancelled at some higher level. I don't know
any more about it than that.
But I can guess. The article was about Chiapas, but it was also about
NAFTA, and I think the Washington Post has been even more extreme than the
Times in refusing to allow any discussion of that topic.
What happened in Chiapas doesn't come as very much of a surprise. At first,
the government thought they'd just destroy the rebellion with tremendous
violence, but then they backed off and decided to do it by more subtle
violence, when nobody was looking. Part of the reason they backed off is
surely their fear that there was just too much sympathy all over Mexico; if
they were too up front about suppression, they'd cause themselves a lot of
problems, all the way up to the US border.
The Mayan Indians in Chiapas are in many ways the most oppressed people in
Mexico. Nevertheless, their problems are shared by a large majority of the
Mexican population. This decade of neoliberal reforms has led to very
little economic progress in Mexico but has sharply polarized the society.
Labor's share in income has declined radically. The number of billionaires
has shot up.
In that unpublished Post article, you wrote that the protest of the Indian
peasants in Chiapas gives "only a bare glimpse of time bombs waiting to
explode, not only in Mexico." What did you have in mind?
Take South Central Los Angeles, for example. In many respects, they are
different societies, of course, but there are points of similarity to the
Chiapas rebellion. South Central LA is a place where people once had jobs
and lives, and those have been destroyed -- in large part by the
socio-economic processes we've been talking about.
For example, furniture factories went to Mexico, where they can pollute
more cheaply. Military industry has somewhat declined. People used to have
jobs in the steel industry, and they don't any more. So they rebelled.
The Chiapas rebellion was quite different. It was much more organized, and
much more constructive. That's the difference between an utterly
demoralized society like South Central Los Angeles and one that still
retains some sort of integrity and community life.
When you look at consumption levels, doubtless the peasants in Chiapas are
poorer than people in South Central LA. There are fewer television sets per
capita. But by other, more significant criteria -- like social cohesion --
Chiapas is considerably more advanced. In the US, we've succeeded not only
in polarizing communities but also in destroying their structures. That's
why you have such rampant violence.
-----------------------
Haiti
Let's stay in Latin America and the Caribbean, which [former US Secretary
of War and of State] Henry Stimson called "our little region over here
which has never bothered anyone." Jean-Bertrand Aristide was elected
president of Haiti in what's been widely described as a free and democratic
election. Would you comment on what's happened since?
When Aristide won in December 1990 (he took office in February, 1991), it
was a big surprise. He was swept into power by a network of popular
grassroots organizations, what was called Lavalas -- the flood -- which
outside observers just weren't aware of (since they don't pay attention to
what happens among poor people). There had been very extensive and very
successful organizing, and out of nowhere came this massive popular
organization that managed to sweep their candidate into power.
The US was willing to support a democratic election, figuring that its
candidate, a former World Bank official named Marc Bazin, would easily win.
He had all the resources and support, and it looked like a shoe-in. He
ended up getting 14% of the vote, and Aristide got about 67%.
The only question in the mind of anybody who knows a little history should
have been, How is the US going to get rid of Aristide? The disaster became
even worse in the first seven months of Aristide's office. There were some
really amazing developments.
Haiti is, of course, an extremely impoverished country, with awful
conditions. Aristide was nevertheless beginning to get places. He was able
to reduce corruption extensively, and to trim a highly bloated state
bureaucracy. He won a lot of international praise for this, even from the
international lending institutions, which were offering him loans and
preferential terms because they liked what he was doing.
Furthermore, he cut back on drug trafficking. The flow of refugees to the
US virtually stopped. Atrocities were reduced to way below what they had
been or would become. There was a considerable degree of popular engagement
in what was going on, although the contradictions were already beginning to
show up, and there were constraints on what he could do.
All of this made Aristide even more unacceptable from the US point of view,
and we tried to undermine him through what were called -- naturally --
"democracy-enhancing programs." The US, which had never cared at all about
centralization of power in Haiti when its own favored dictators were in
charge, all of a sudden began setting up alternative institutions that
aimed at undermining executive power, supposedly in the interests of
greater democracy. A number of these alleged human rights and labor groups
became the governing authorities after the coup, which came on September
30, 1991.
In response to the coup, the Organization of American States declared an
embargo of Haiti; the US joined it, but with obvious reluctance. The Bush
administration focused attention on Aristide's alleged atrocities and
undemocratic activities, downplaying the major atrocities which took place
right after the coup. The media went along with Bush's line, of course.
While people were getting slaughtered in the streets of Port-au-Prince
[Haiti's capital], the media concentrated on alleged human rights abuses
under the Aristide government.
Refugees started fleeing again, because the situation was deteriorating so
rapidly. The Bush administration blocked them -- instituted a blockade, in
effect -- to send them back. Within a couple of months, the Bush
administration had already undermined the embargo by allowing a minor
exception -- US-owned companies would be permitted to ignore it. The New
York Times called that "fine-tuning" the embargo to improve the restoration
of democracy!
Meanwhile, the US, which is known to be able to exert pressure when it
feels like it, found no way to influence anyone else to observe the
embargo, including the Dominican Republic next door. The whole thing was
mostly a farce. pretty soon Marc Bazin, the US candidate, was in power as
prime minister, with the ruling generals behind him. That year -- 1992 --
US trade with Haiti was not very much below the norm, despite the so-called
embargo (Commerce Department figures showed that, but I don't think the
press ever reported it).
During the 1992 campaign, Clinton bitterly attacked the Bush administration
for its inhuman policy of returning refugees to this torture chamber --
which is, incidentally, a flat violation of the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights, which we claim to uphold. Clinton claimed he was going to
change all that, but his first act after being elected, even before he took
office, was to impose even harsher measures to force fleeing refugees back
into this hellhole.
Ever since then, it's simply been a matter of seeing what kind of finessing
will be carried out to ensure that Haiti's popularly elected government
doesn't come back into office. It doesn't have much longer to run [the next
elections are scheduled for December, 1995], so the US has more or less won
that game.
Meanwhile, the terror and atrocities increase. The popular organizations
are getting decimated. Although the so-called embargo is still in place, US
trade continues and, in fact, went up about 50% under Clinton. Haiti, a
starving island, is exporting food to the US -- about 35 times as much
under Clinton as it did under Bush.
Baseballs are coming along nicely. They're produced in US-owned factories
where the women who make them get 10ó an hour -- if they meet their quota.
Since meeting the quota is virtually impossible, they actually make
something like 5ó an hour.
Softballs from Haiti are advertised in the US as being unusually good
because they're hand-dipped into some chemical that makes them hang
together properly. The ads don't mention that the chemical the women
hand-dip the balls into is toxic and that, as a result, the women don't
last very long at this work.
In his exile, Aristide has been asked to make concessions to the military
junta.
And to the right-wing business community.
That's kind of curious. For the victim -- the aggrieved party -- to make
concessions to his victimizer.
It's perfectly understandable. The Aristide government had entirely the
wrong base of support. The US has tried for a long time to get him to
"broaden his government in the interests of democracy."
This means throw out the two-thirds of the population that voted for him
and bring in what are called "moderate" elements of the business community
-- the local owners or managers of those textile and baseball-producing
plants, and those who are linked up with US agribusiness. When they're not
in power, it's not democratic.
(The extremist elements of the business community think you ought to just
slaughter everybody and cut them to pieces and hack off their faces and
leave them in ditches. The moderates think you ought to have them working
in your assembly plants for 14ó an hour under indescribable conditions.)
Bring the moderates in and give them power and then we'll have a real
democracy. Unfortunately, Aristide -- being kind of backward and disruptive
-- has not been willing to go along with that.
Clinton's policy has gotten so cynical and outrageous that he's lost almost
all major domestic support on it. Even the mainstream press is denouncing
him at this point. So there will have to be some cosmetic changes made. But
unless there's an awful lot of popular pressure, our policies will continue
and pretty soon we'll have the "moderates" in power.
Let's say Aristide is "restored." Given the destruction of popular
organizations and the devastation of civil society, what are his and the
country's prospects?
Some of the closest observation of this has been done by Americas Watch [a
US-based human-rights monitoring organization]. They gave an answer to that
question that I thought was plausible. In early 1993, they said that things
were reaching the point that even if Aristide were restored, the lively,
vibrant civil society based on grassroots organizations that had brought
him to power would have been so decimated that it's unlikely that he'd have
the popular support to do anything anyway.
I don't know if that's true or not. Nobody knows, any more than anyone knew
how powerful those groups were in the first place. Human beings have
reserves of courage that are often hard to imagine. But I think that's the
plan -- to decimate the organizations, to intimidate people so much that it
won't matter if you have democratic elections.
There was an interesting conference run by the Jesuits in El Salvador
several months before the Salvadoran elections; its final report came out
in January [1994]. They were talking about the buildup to the elections and
the ongoing terror, which was substantial. They said that the long-term
effect of terror -- something they've had plenty of experience with -- is
to domesticate people's aspirations, to make them think there's no
alternative, to drive out any hope. Once you've done that, you can have
elections without too much fear.
If people are sufficiently intimidated, if the popular organizations are
sufficiently destroyed, if the people have had it beaten into their heads
that either they accept the rule of those with the guns or else they live
and die in unrelieved misery, then your elections will all come out the way
you want. And everybody will cheer.
Cuban refugees are considered political and are accepted immediately into
the US, while Haitian refugees are termed economic and are refused entry.
If you look at the records, many Haitians who are refused asylum in the US
because they aren't considered to be political refugees are found a few
days later hacked to pieces in the streets of Haiti.
There were a couple of interesting leaks from the INS [the Immigration and
Naturalization Service]. One was from an INS officer who'd been working in
our embassy in Port-au-Prince. In an interview with Dennis Bernstein of
KPFA [a listener-supported radio station in Berkeley CA], he described in
detail how they weren't even making the most perfunctory efforts to check
the credentials of people who were applying for political asylum.
At about the same time, a document was leaked from the US interests section
in Havana (which reviews applications for asylum in the US) in which they
complain that they can't find genuine political asylum cases. The
applicants they get can't really claim any serious persecution. At most
they claim various kinds of harassment, which aren't enough to qualify
them. So -- there are the two cases, side by side.
I should mention that the US Justice Department has just made a slight
change in US law which makes our violation of international law and the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights even more grotesque. Now Haitian
refugees who, by some miracle, reach US territorial waters can be shipped
back. That's never been allowed before. I doubt that many other countries
allow that.
-----------------------
Nicaragua
You recall the uproar in the 1980s about how the Sandinistas were abusing
the Miskito Indians on Nicaragua's Atlantic coast. president Reagan, in his
inimitable, understated style, said it was "a campaign of virtual
genocide." UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick was a bit more restrained; she
called it the "most massive human rights violation in Central America."
What's happening now with the Miskitos?
Reagan and Kirkpatrick were talking about an incident in which, according
to Americas Watch, several dozen Miskitos were killed and a lot of people
were forcefully moved in a rather ugly way in the course of the contra war.
The US terrorist forces were moving into the area and this was the
Sandinista's reaction.
It was certainly an atrocity, but it's not even visible compared to the
ones Jeane Kirkpatrick was celebrating in the neighboring countries at the
time -- and in Nicaragua, where the overwhelming mass of the atrocities
were committed by the so-called "freedom fighters."
What's happening to the Miskitos now? When I was in Nicaragua in October
1993, church sources -- the Christian Evangelical Church, primarily, which
works in the Atlantic coast -- were reporting that 100,000 Miskitos were
starving to death as a result of the policies we were imposing on
Nicaragua. Not a word about it in the media here. (More recently, it did
get some slight reporting.)
People here are worrying about the fact that one typical consequence of US
victories in the Third World is that the countries where we win immediately
become big centers for drug flow. There are good reasons for that -- it's
part of the market system we impose on them.
Nicaragua has become a major drug transshipment center. A lot of the drugs
go through the Atlantic coast, now that Nicaragua's whole governmental
system has collapsed. Drug transhipment areas usually breed major drug
epidemics, and there's one among the Miskitos, primarily among the men who
dive for lobsters and other shellfish.
Both in Nicaragua and Honduras, these Miskito Indian divers are compelled
by economic circumstances to do very deep diving without equipment. Their
brains get smashed and they quickly die. In order to try to maintain their
work rate, the divers stuff themselves with cocaine. It helps them bear the
pain.
There's concern about drugs here, so that story got into the press. But of
course nobody cares much about the working conditions. After all, it's a
standard free-market technique. You've got plenty of superfluous people, so
you make them work under horrendous conditions; when they die, you just
bring in others.
-----------------------
China
Let's talk about human rights in one of our major trading partners --
China.
During the Asia Pacific summit in Seattle [in November, 1993], Clinton
announced that we'd be sending more high-tech equipment to China. This was
in violation of a ban that was imposed to punish China for its involvement
in nuclear and missile proliferation. The executive branch decided to
"reinterpret" the ban, so we could send China nuclear generators,
sophisticated satellites and supercomputers.
Right in the midst of that summit, a little tiny report appeared in the
papers. In booming Kwangdong province, the economic miracle of China, 81
women were burned to death because they were locked into a factory. A
couple of weeks later, 60 workers were killed in a Hong Kong-owned factory.
China's Labor Ministry reported that 11,000 workers had been killed in
industrial accidents just in the first eight months of 1993 -- twice as
many as in the preceding year.
These sort of practices never enter the human rights debate, but there's
been a big hullabaloo about the use of prison labor -- front-page stories
in the Times. What's the difference? Very simple. Because prison labor is
state enterprise, it doesn't contribute to private profit. In fact, it
undermines private profit, because it competes with private industry. But
locking women into factories where they burn to death contributes to
private profit.
So prison labor is a human rights violation, but there's no right not to be
burned to death. We have to maximize profit. From that principle,
everything follows.
-----------------------
Russia
Radio listener: I'd like to ask about US support for Yeltsin vs. democracy
in Russia.
Yeltsin was the tough, autocratic Communist Party boss of Sverdlovsk. He's
filled his administration with the old party hacks who ran things for him
under the earlier Soviet system. The West likes him a lot because he's
ruthless and because he's willing to ram through what are called "reforms"
(a nice-sounding word).
These "reforms" are designed to return the former Soviet Union to the Third
World status it had for the five hundred years before 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 -- an area of resources,
markets and cheap labor for the West.
Yeltsin is leading the pack on pushing the "reforms." Therefore he's a
"democrat." That's what we call a democrat anywhere in the world -- someone
who follows the Western business agenda.
-----------------------
Dead children and debt service
After you returned from a recent trip to Nicaragua, you told me it's
becoming more difficult to tell the difference between economists and Nazi
doctors. What did you mean by that?
There's a report from UNESCO (which I didn't see reported in the US media)
that estimated the human cost of the "reforms" that aim to return Eastern
Europe to its Third World status.
UNESCO estimates that about a half a million deaths a year in Russia since
1989 are the direct result of the reforms, caused by the collapse of health
services, the increase in disease, the increase in malnutrition and so on.
Killing half a million people a year -- that's a fairly substantial
achievement for reformers.
The figures are similar, but not quite as bad, in the rest of Eastern
Europe. In the Third World, the numbers are fantastic. For example, another
UNESCO report estimated that about half a million children in Africa die
every year simply from debt service. Not from the whole array of reforms --
just from interest on their countries' debts.
It's estimated that about eleven million children die every year from
easily curable diseases, most of which could be overcome by treatments that
cost a couple of cents. But the economists tell us that to do this would be
interference with the market system.
There's nothing new about this. It's very reminiscent of the British
economists who, during the Irish potato famine in the mid-nineteenth
century, dictated that Ireland must export food to Britain -- which it did
right through the famine -- and that it shouldn't be given food aid because
that would violate the sacred principles of political economy. These
policies always happen to have the curious property of benefiting the
wealthy and harming the poor.
-----------------------
Historical background
-----------------------
How the Nazis won the war
In his book Blowback, Chris Simpson described Operation Paper Clip, which
involved the importation of large numbers of known Nazi war criminals,
rocket scientists, camp guards, etc.
There was also an operation involving the Vatican, the US State Department
and British intelligence, which took some of the worst Nazi criminals and
used them, at first in Europe. For example, Klaus Barbie, the butcher of
Lyon [France], was taken over by US intelligence and put back to work.
Later, when this became an issue, some of his US supervisors didn't
understand what the fuss was all about. After all, we'd moved in -- we'd
replaced the Germans. We needed a guy who would attack the left-wing
resistance, and here was a specialist. That's what he'd been doing for the
Nazis, so who better could we find to do exactly the same job for us?
When the Americans could no longer protect Barbie, they moved him over to
the Vatican-run "ratline," where Croatian Nazi priests and others managed
to spirit him off to Latin America. There he continued his career. He
became a big drug lord and narcotrafficker, and was involved in a military
coup in Bolivia -- all with US support.
But Barbie was basically small potatoes. This was a big operation,
involving many top Nazis. We managed to get Walter Rauff, the guy who
created the gas chambers, off to Chile. Others went to fascist Spain.
General Reinhard Gehlen was the head of German military intelligence on the
eastern front. That's where the real war crimes were. Now we're talking
about Auschwitz and other death camps. Gehlen and his network of spies and
terrorists were taken over quickly by American intelligence and returned to
essentially the same roles.
If you look at the American army's counterinsurgency literature (a lot of
which is now declassified), it begins with an analysis of the German
experience in Europe, written with the cooperation of Nazi officers.
Everything is described from the point of view of the Nazis -- which
techniques for controlling resistance worked, which ones didn't. With
barely a change, that was transmuted into American counterinsurgency
literature. (This is discussed at some length by Michael McClintock in
Instruments of Statecraft, a very good book that I've never seen reviewed.)
The US left behind armies the Nazis had established in Eastern Europe, and
continued to support them at least into the early 1950s. By then the
Russians had penetrated American intelligence, so the air drops didn't work
very well any more.
You've said that if a real post-World War II history were ever written,
this would be the first chapter.
It would be a part of the first chapter. Recruiting Nazi war criminals and
saving them is bad enough, but imitating their activities is worse. So the
first chapter would primarily describe US -- and some British -- operations
throughout the world that aimed to destroy the anti-fascist resistance and
restore the traditional, essentially fascist, order to power. (I've also
discussed this in an earlier book in this series, What Uncle Sam Really
Wants.)
In Korea (where we ran the operation alone), restoring the traditional
order meant killing about 100,000 people just in the late 1940s, before the
Korean War began. In Greece, it meant destroying the peasant and worker
base of the anti-Nazi resistance and restoring Nazi collaborators to power.
When British and then American troops moved into southern Italy, they
simply reinstated the fascist order -- the industrialists. But the big
problem came when the troops got to the north, which the Italian resistance
had already liberated. The place was functioning -- industry was running.
We had to dismantle all of that and restore the old order.
Our big criticism of the resistance was that they were displacing the old
owners in favor of workers' and community control. Britain and the US
called this "arbitrary replacement" of the legitimate owners. The
resistance was also giving jobs to more people than were strictly needed
for the greatest economic efficiency (that is, for maximum profit-making).
We called this "hiring excess workers."
In other words, the resistance was trying to democratize the workplace and
to take care of the population. That was understandable, since many
Italians were starving. But starving people were their problem -- our
problem was to eliminate the hiring of excess workers and the arbitrary
dismissal of owners, which we did.
Next we worked on destroying the democratic process. The left was obviously
going to win the elections; it had a lot of prestige from the resistance,
and the traditional conservative order had been discredited. The US
wouldn't tolerate that. At its first meeting, in 1947, the National
Security Council decided to withhold food and use other sorts of pressure
to undermine the election.
But what if the communists still won? In its first report, NSC 1, the
council made plans for that contingency: the US would declare a national
emergency, put the Sixth Fleet on alert in the Mediterranean and support
paramilitary activities to overthrow the Italian government.
That's a pattern that's been relived over and over. If you look at France
and Germany and Japan, you get pretty much the same story. Nicaragua is
another case. You strangle them, you starve them, and then you have an
election and everybody talks about how wonderful democracy is.
The person who opened up this topic (as he did many others) was Gabriel
Kolko, in his classic book Politics of War in 1968. It was mostly ignored,
but it's a terrific piece of work. A lot of the documents weren't around
then, but his picture turns out to be quite accurate.
-----------------------
Chile
Richard Nixon's death generated much fanfare. Henry Kissinger said in his
eulogy: "The world is a better place, a safer place, because of Richard
Nixon." I'm sure he was thinking of Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. But let's
focus on one place that wasn't mentioned in all the media hoopla -- Chile
-- and see how it's a "better, safer place." In early September 1970,
Salvador Allende was elected president of Chile in a democratic election.
What were his politics?
He was basically a social democrat, very much of the European type. He was
calling for minor redistribution of wealth, to help the poor. (Chile was a
very inegalitarian society.) Allende was a doctor, and one of the things he
did was to institute a free milk program for half a million very poor,
malnourished children. He called for nationalization of major industries
like copper mining, and for a policy of international independence --
meaning that Chile wouldn't simply subordinate itself to the US, but would
take more of an independent path.
Was the election he won free and democratic?
Not entirely, because there were major efforts to disrupt it, mainly by the
US. It wasn't the first time the US had done that. For example, our
government intervened massively to prevent Allende from winning the
preceding election, in 1964. In fact, when the Church Committee
investigated years later, they discovered that the US spent more money per
capita to get the candidate it favored elected in Chile in 1964 than was
spent by both candidates (Johnson and Goldwater) in the 1964 election in
the US!
Similar measures were undertaken in 1970 to try to prevent a free and
democratic election. There was a huge amount of black propaganda about how
if Allende won, mothers would be sending their children off to Russia to
become slaves -- stuff like that. The US also threatened to destroy the
economy, which it could -- and did -- do.
Nevertheless, Allende won. A few days after his victory, Nixon called in
CIA Director Richard Helms, Kissinger and others for a meeting on Chile.
Can you describe what happened?
As Helms reported in his notes, there were two points of view. The "soft
line" was, in Nixon's words, to "make the economy scream." The "hard line"
was simply to aim for a military coup.
Our ambassador to Chile, Edward Korry, who was a Kennedy liberal type, was
given the job of implementing the "soft line." Here's how he described his
task: "to do all within our power to condemn Chile and the Chileans to
utmost deprivation and poverty." That was the soft line.
There was a massive destabilization and disinformation campaign. The CIA
planted stories in El Mercurio [Chile's most prominent paper] and fomented
labor unrest and strikes.
They really pulled out the stops on this one. Later, when the military coup
finally came [in September, 1973] and the government was overthrown -- and
thousands of people were being imprisoned, tortured and slaughtered -- the
economic aid which had been cancelled immediately began to flow again. As a
reward for the military junta's achievement in reversing Chilean democracy,
the US gave massive support to the new government.
Our ambassador to Chile brought up the question of torture to Kissinger.
Kissinger rebuked him sharply -- saying something like, Don't give me any
of those political science lectures. We don't care about torture -- we care
about important things. Then he explained what the important things were.
Kissinger said he was concerned that the success of social democracy in
Chile would be contagious. It would infect southern Europe -- southern
Italy, for example -- and would lead to the possible success of what was
then called Eurocommunism (meaning that Communist parties would hook up
with social democratic parties in a united front).
Actually, the Kremlin was just as much opposed to Eurocommunism as
Kissinger was, but this gives you a very clear picture of what the domino
theory is all about. Even Kissinger, mad as he is, didn't believe that
Chilean armies were going to descend on Rome. It wasn't going to be that
kind of an influence. He was worried that successful economic development,
where the economy produces benefits for the general population -- not just
profits for private corporations -- would have a contagious effect.
In those comments, Kissinger revealed the basic story of US foreign policy
for decades.
You see that pattern repeating itself in Nicaragua in the 1980s.
Everywhere. The same was true in Vietnam, in Cuba, in Guatemala, in Greece.
That's always the worry -- the threat of a good example.
Kissinger also said, again speaking about Chile, "I don't see why we should
have to stand by and let a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility
of its own people."
As the Economist put it, we should make sure that policy is insulated from
politics. If people are irresponsible, they should just be cut out of the
system.
In recent years, Chile's economic growth rate has been heralded in the
press.
Chile's economy isn't doing badly, but it's based almost entirely on
exports -- fruit, copper and so on -- and thus is very vulnerable to world
markets.
There was a really funny pair of stories yesterday. The New York Times had
one about how everyone in Chile is so happy and satisfied with the
political system that nobody's paying much attention to the upcoming
election.
But the London Financial Times (which is the world's most influential
business paper, and hardly radical) took exactly the opposite tack. They
cited polls that showed that 75% of the population was very "disgruntled"
with the political system (which allows no options).
There is indeed apathy about the election, but that's a reflection of the
breakdown of Chile's social structure. Chile was a very vibrant, lively,
democratic society for many, many years -- into the early 1970s. Then,
through a reign of fascist terror, it was essentially depoliticized. The
breakdown of social relations is pretty striking. People work alone, and
just try to fend for themselves. The retreat into individualism and
personal gain is the basis for the political apathy.
Nathaniel Nash wrote the Times' Chile story. He said that many Chileans
have painful memories of Salvador Allende's fiery speeches, which led to
the coup in which thousands of people were killed [including Allende].
Notice that they don't have painful memories of the torture, of the fascist
terror -- just of Allende's speeches as a popular candidate.
-----------------------
Cambodia
Would you talk a little about the notion of unworthy vs. worthy victims?
[NY Newsday columnist and former New York Times reporter] Sidney Schanberg
wrote an op-ed piece in the Boston Globe in which he blasted Senator Kerry
of Massachusetts for being two-faced because Kerry refused to concede that
the Vietnamese have not been entirely forthcoming about American POWs.
Nobody, according to Schanberg, is willing to tell the truth about this.
He says the government ought to finally have the honesty to say that it
left Indochina without accounting for all the Americans. Of course, it
wouldn't occur to him to suggest that the government should be honest
enough to say that we killed a couple of million people and destroyed three
countries and left them in total wreckage and have been strangling them
ever since.
It's particularly striking that this is Sidney Schanberg, a person of utter
depravity. He's regarded as the great conscience of the press because of
his courage in exposing the crimes of our official enemies -- namely, Pol
Pot [leader of Cambodia's Khmer Rouge rebel army]. He also happened to be
the main US reporter in Phnom Penh [Cambodia's capital] in 1973. This was
at the peak of the US bombardment of inner Cambodia, when hundreds of
thousands of people (according to the best estimates) were being killed and
the society was being wiped out.
Nobody knows very much about the bombing campaign and its effects because
people like Sidney Schanberg refused to cover it. It wouldn't have been
hard for him to cover it. He wouldn't have to go trekking off into the
jungle -- he could walk across the street from his fancy hotel in Phnom
Penh and talk to any of the hundreds of thousands of refugees who'd been
driven from the countryside into the city.
I went through all of his reporting -- it's reviewed in detail in
Manufacturing Consent, my book with Edward Herman [currently editor of Lies
of Our Times]. You'll find a few scattered sentences here and there about
the bombing, but not a single interview with the refugees.
There is one American atrocity he did report (for about three days); The
Killing Fields, the movie that's based on his story, opens by describing
it. What's the one report? American planes hit the wrong village -- a
government village. That's an atrocity; that he covered. How about when
they hit the right village? We don't care about that.
Incidentally, the United States' own record with POWs has been atrocious --
not only in Vietnam, where it was monstrous, but in Korea, where it was
even worse. And after WW II, we kept POWs illegally under confinement, as
did the British.
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World War II POWs
Other Losses, a Canadian book, alleges it was official US policy to
withhold food from German prisoners in World War II. Many of them
supposedly starved to death.
That's James Bacque's book. There's been a lot of controversy about the
details, and I'm not sure what the facts of the matter are. On the other
hand, there are things about which there's no controversy. Ed Herman and I
wrote about them back in the late 1970s.
Basically, the Americans ran what were called "re-education camps" for
German POWs (the name was ultimately changed to something equally
Orwellian). These camps were hailed as a tremendous example of our
humanitarianism, because we were teaching the prisoners democratic ways (in
other words, we were indoctrinating them into accepting our beliefs).
The prisoners were treated very brutally, starved, etc. Since these camps
were in gross violation of international conventions, they were kept
secret. We were afraid that the Germans might retaliate and treat American
prisoners the same way.
Furthermore, the camps continued after the war; I forget for how long, but
I think the US kept German POWs until mid-1946. They were used for forced
labor, beaten and killed. It was even worse in England. They kept their
German POWs until mid-1948. It was all totally illegal.
Finally, there was public reaction in Britain. The person who started it
off was Peggy Duff, a marvelous woman who died a couple of years ago. She
was later one of the leading figures in the CND [the Campaign for Nuclear
Disarmament] and the international peace movement during the 1960s and
1970s, but she started off her career with a protest against the treatment
of German POWs.
Incidentally, why only German POWs? What about the Italians? Germany's a
very efficient country, so they've published volumes of documents on what
happened to their POWs. But Italy's sort of laid back, so there was no
research on their POWs. We don't know anything about them, although they
were surely treated much worse.
When I was a kid, there was a POW camp right next to my high school. There
were conflicts among the students over the issue of taunting the prisoners.
The students couldn't physically attack the prisoners, because they were
behind a barrier, but they threw things at them and taunted them. There
were a group of us who thought this was horrifying and objected to it, but
there weren't many.
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Miscellaneous topics
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Consumption vs. well-being
The United States, with 5% of the world's population, consumes 40% of the
world's resources. You don't have to be a genius to figure out what that's
leading to.
For one thing, a lot of that consumption is artificially induced -- it
doesn't have to do with people's real wants and needs. People would
probably be better off and happier if they didn't have a lot of those
things.
If you measure economic health by profits, then such consumption is
healthy. If you measure the consumption by what it means to people, it's
very unhealthy, particularly in the long term.
A huge amount of business propaganda -- that is, the output of the public
relations and advertising industry -- is simply an effort to create wants.
This has been well understood for a long time; in fact, it goes back to the
early days of the Industrial Revolution.
For another thing, those who have more money tend to consume more, for
obvious reasons. So consumption is skewed towards luxuries for the wealthy
rather than towards necessities for the poor. That's true within the US and
on a global scale as well. The richer countries are the higher consumers by
a large measure, and within the richer countries, the wealthy are higher
consumers by a large measure.
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Cooperative enterprises
There's a social experiment in Mondrag≤n in the Basque region of Spain. Can
you describe it?
Mondrag≤n is basically a very large worker-owned cooperative with many
different industries in it, including some fairly sophisticated
manufacturing. It's economically quite successful, but since it's inserted
into a capitalist economy, it's no more committed to sustainable growth
than any other part of the capitalist economy is.
Internally, it's not worker-controlled -- it's manager-controlled. So it's
a mixture of what's sometimes called industrial democracy -- which means
ownership, at least in principle, by the work force -- along with elements
of hierarchic domination and control (as opposed to worker management).
I mentioned earlier that businesses are about as close to strict
totalitarian structures as any human institutions are. Something like
Mondrag≤n is considerably less so.
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The coming eco-catastrophe
Radio listener: What's happening in the growing economies in Southeast
Asia, China, etc.? Is it going to be another example of capitalist
exploitation, or can we expect to see some kind of change in their
awareness?
Right now, it's catastrophic. In countries like Thailand or China,
ecological catastrophes are looming. These are countries where growth is
being fueled by multinational investors for whom the environment is what's
called an "externality" (which means 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, the disasters which lie not too far ahead could be extraordinary
-- simply because of the country's size. The same is true throughout
Southeast Asia.
But when the environmental pressures become such that the very survival of
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.
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Nuclear power
At a conference in Washington DC, a woman in the audience got up and
decried the fact that you're in favor of nuclear power. Are you?
No. I don't think anybody's in favor of nuclear power, even business,
because it's too expensive. But what I am in favor of is being rational on
the topic. That means recognizing that the question of nuclear power isn't
a moral one -- it's a technical one. You have to ask what the consequences
of nuclear power are, versus the alternatives.
There's a range of other alternatives, including conservation, solar and so
on. Each has its own advantages and disadvantages. But imagine that the
only alternatives were hydrocarbons and nuclear power. If you had to have
one or the other, you'd have to ask yourself which is more dangerous to the
environment, to human life, to human society. It's not an entirely simple
question.
For example, suppose that fusion were a feasible alternative. It could turn
out to be nonpolluting. But there are also negative factors. Any form of
nuclear power involves quite serious problems of radioactive waste
disposal, and can also contribute to nuclear weapons proliferation. Fusion
would require a high degree of centralization of state power too.
On the other hand, the hydrocarbon industry, which is highly polluting,
also promotes centralization. The energy corporations are some of the
biggest in the world, and the Pentagon system is constructed to a
significant degree to maintain their power.
In other words, there are questions that have to be thought through.
They're not simple.
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The family
You've suggested that, to further democracy, people should be "seeking out
authoritarian structures and challenging them, eliminating any form of
absolute power and hierarchic power." How would that work in a family
structure?
In any structure, including a family structure, there are various forms of
authority. A patriarchal family may have very rigid authority, with the
father setting rules that others adhere to, and in some cases even
administering severe punishment if there's a violation of them.
There are other hierarchical relations among siblings, between the mother
and father, gender relations, and so on. These all have to be questioned.
Sometimes I think you'll find that there's a legitimate claim to authority
-- that is, the challenge to authority can sometimes be met. But the burden
of proof is always on the authority.
So, for example, some form of control over children is justified. It's fair
to prevent a child from putting his or her hand in the oven, say, or from
running across the street in traffic. It's proper to place clear bounds on
children. They want them -- they want to understand where they are in the
world.
However, all of these things have to be done with sensitivity and with
self-awareness and with the recognition that any authoritarian role
requires justification. It's never self-justifying.
When does a child get to the point where the parent doesn't need to provide
authority?
I don't think there are formulas for this. For one thing, we don't have
solid scientific knowledge and understanding of these things. A mixture of
experience and intuition, plus a certain amount of study, yields a limited
framework of understanding (about which people may certainly differ). And
there are also plenty of individual differences.
So I don't think there's a simple answer to that question. The growth of
autonomy and self-control, and expansion of the range of legitimate
choices, and the ability to exercise them -- that's growing up.
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What you can do
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Radio listener: Taking 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. Most people 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. I've
often wondered why there isn't a limitation on the amount of profit any
business can make (I know this probably isn't democratic).
I think it's highly democratic. There's nothing in the principle of
democracy that says that power and wealth should be so highly concentrated
that democracy becomes a sham.
But your first 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, and
political parties that are based on working people.
If such a party were around, they'd be the ones speaking up for you and
telling the truth about what's going on with the rate hike. Then they'd be
denounced by the Anthony Lewises of the world for being anti-democratic --
in other words, for representing popular interests rather than power
interests.
Radio listener: I'm afraid there may be a saturation point of despair just
from knowing the heaviness of the truth that you impart. I'd like to
strongly lobby you to begin devoting maybe 10% or 15% of your appearances
or books or articles towards tangible, detailed things that people can do
to try to change the world. I've heard a few occasions where someone asks
you that question and your response is, Organize. Just do it.
I try to keep it in the back of my mind and think about it, but I'm afraid
that the answer is always the same. There is only one way to deal with
these things. Being alone, you can't do anything. All you can do is deplore
the situation.
But if you join with other people, you can make changes. Millions of things
are possible, depending on where you want to put your efforts.
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