Noam Chomsky is, in my humble opinion, the most thoughtful political
mind in America today.
Carl Jarvis
On 3/25/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Noam Chomksy: Bernie Sanders Is the Most Popular Politician in the Country,
but the Mainstream Media Is Ignoring Him
By Lynn Parramore, Institute for New Economic Thinking
25 March 18
The renowned linguist, cognitive scientist, and historian on where we stand
as an economy, as a country, and as human beings
We recently interviewed Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor Emeritus at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Laureate Professor in the
Department of Linguistics at the University of Arizona. He shared his
thoughts with the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) on foreign
policy, dissent in the internet age, public education, corporate predation,
who's really messing with American elections, climate change, and more.
Lynn Parramore: You've been looking at politics and international relations
for quite a long time. Over the decades, what are the continuities in these
areas that stand out in your view?
Noam Chomsky: Well the continuities are the message of the Athenians to
Melos: "the powerful do what they wish and the weak suffer what they must"
[from Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War"]. It's often disguised
in humanitarian terms. The modalities and the context change. The
situations
change but the message stays the same.
LP: What do you see as the most significant changes?
NC: There are some steps towards imposing constraints and limits on state
violence. For the most part, they come from inside. So for example, if you
look at the United States and the kinds of actions that John F. Kennedy and
Lyndon Johnson could carry out in Vietnam, they were possible because of
almost complete lack of public attention.
I don't know if you know, but as late as 1966 in Boston we could barely
have
an anti-war action because it would be violently broken up with the support
of the press and so on. By then, South Vietnam had been practically
destroyed. The war had expanded to other areas of Indochina. The Reagan
administration, at the very beginning, tried to duplicate what Kennedy had
done in 1961 with regard to Central America. So they had a white paper more
or less modeled on Kennedy's white paper that said the Communists are
taking
over. It was the usual steps, the propaganda, but it collapsed quickly. In
the case of the Kennedy white paper, it took years before it was exposed as
mostly fraudulent, but the Wall Street Journal, of all places, exposed the
Reagan white paper in six months. There were protests by church groups and
popular organizations and they had to kind of back off. What happened was
bad enough but it was nothing like Indochina.
Iraq was the first time in the history of imperialism that there were
massive protests before the war was even officially launched. It's claimed
by people that it failed, but I don't think so. I mean, they never began to
do the kinds of things that they could have done. There were no B-52 raids
on heavily populated areas or chemical warfare of the kind they did in
Indochina. By and large the constraints come from inside, and they
understood that. By the time you got to the first Bush administration,
after
the collapse of the Soviet Union, they came out with a national defense
policy and strategic policy. What they basically said is that we're going
to
have wars against what they called much weaker enemies and these have to be
carried out quickly and decisively or else there will be embarrassment-a
way
of saying that popular reaction is going to set in. And that's the way it's
been. It's not pretty, but it's some kind of constraint.
There are increasingly conditions in international law, like the Rome
Treaty
[the 1957 treaty that established the European Economic Community] and so
on, but great powers just ignore them if they can get away with it, and
getting away with it means ignoring the constraints of other states, which,
in the case of, say, the U.S., don't amount to much. Or internal
constraints
from changes inside the society, which have put in conditions of some
significance, I think.
It's almost unimaginable now that the U.S. could carry out the kind of war
it did in Indochina, which is something recognized by elite opinion. A
typical example is Mark Bowden's op-ed in the New York Times the other day
about [Walter] Cronkite and how he changed everything. Well, what did
Cronkite say? He said, it doesn't look as if we're going to win. That's the
criticism of the war. That's the way it was perceived at the time, and
that's the way it's still perceived by intellectual elites. But if you look
at public opinion-which doesn't really get investigated much so it's not
too
clear what it means, but it's interesting-the Chicago Council on Global
Affairs was running polls on all sorts of issues in the 70s and 80s, and
when the Vietnam War ended in 1975, about 70 percent of the population
described the war as fundamentally wrong and immoral, not a mistake. That
stayed pretty steady for several years until they stop asking the question.
The director of the study, John Rielly, interpreted that as meaning too
many
American were being killed. Maybe. There's another possible interpretation
of "fundamentally wrong and immoral," which is that the U.S. was carrying
out a crime against humanity. But it was never investigated because there's
too much cognitive dissonance. Elite intellectuals can't perceive that
possibility.
Everybody had a comment when the war ended, and so the hawks said, "stab in
the back" [i.e. civilian critics undermined the military] and "if we'd
fought harder we would have won." The doves went kind of like Anthony Lewis
of the New York Times, who was maybe the most extreme. In 1975 when the war
ended, he said the war began with blundering efforts to do good. "Efforts
to
do good" is virtual tautology, facts irrelevant; and "blundering" means it
failed. He said that by 1969 it was clear that it was a disaster because
the
U.S. could not bring democracy to Vietnam at a cost acceptable to us.
That's
the far left critique of the war in 1975. And Bowden, who is writing from a
critical point of view, basically reiterated that point a couple days ago:
Cronkite's great contribution was to say, "look, it looks as if we can't
win, and if we can't win." I mean, Russian generals said the same in
Afghanistan. We don't honor them for that.
LP: When you talked about protests in Understanding Power before the
digital
age, you mentioned that it was difficult for dissenters and protesters to
connect with each other. How has the internet changed that? Protesters are
obviously under surveillance when they are online, but they are able to
connect with each other more quickly. Has there been a net gain to those
who
want to object to wars and oppression? Or is this illusory?
NC: You may remember, during the Tahrir Square demonstrations in Cairo,
which were being organized through social media, at one point [Hosni]
Mubarak actually closed down the internet. That increased the mobilization.
People just started talking to each other. It's a different kind of
communication. It means a lot more. So I think, yes, social media do offer
opportunities for quick organization and transmission, but typically at a
pretty superficial level. Face-to-face organizing is something quite
different. The same, incidentally, has been found in electoral politics.
Andrew Cockburn had an interesting article in Harper's during the [2016]
campaign in which he compared studies on the effect on potential voters of
advertising, you know, TV, and the effect of knocking on doors and talking
to people. It was overwhelming that the latter was more effective. We're
still human beings.
LP: Companies like Google and Facebook increasingly control the information
we can access. They've even been enlisted to vet stories, to weed out fake
news, though there's evidence that they may be weeding out legitimate
dissent. Yet they are often applauded as if they're doing a service. How is
this sort of thing affecting our freedom?
NC: It's service for a bad reason. The younger people just don't read much,
so they want something quick, fast, easy. You go through a newspaper, it
takes time. You have to see what's at the end of the column, not just
what's
in the headline. So this kind of instant gratification culture is drawing
people to these quick summaries. Practically everybody's on Facebook
(except
me).
The other thing they're doing which is kind of interesting has to do with
microtargeting, which is being used for electoral manipulation. There are
some cases, which have not been discussed as far as I know outside the
business press. During the last German election, there was a lot of talk of
potential Russian interference, you know, it's gonna swing the election.
Well, it turns out there was foreign interference, but it wasn't Russian.
It
was a combination of the Berlin office of Facebook and a media company in
the U.S., which works for Trump, Le Pen, Netanyahu, other nice guys. They
used Facebook in Berlin to get a demographic analysis of parts of the
population to allow them to microtarget ads to individuals in favor of AfD,
the neo-Nazi party, which may have been a factor in their unexpectedly high
vote in the election. This was reported in Bloomberg Businessweek. This was
a real case of electoral manipulation but somehow it doesn't make the
headlines.
LP: Which brings us to the narrative of Russian influence in the 2016
presidential election. I understand you're not very impressed with this
line.
NC: Well it's very hard to take seriously for a number of reasons. One
reason is the work of Thomas Ferguson and his colleagues ["How Money Won
Trump the White House"]. There really is manipulation of elections, but
it's
not coming from the Russians. It's coming from the people who buy the
elections. Take his study of the 2016 election ["Industrial Structure and
Party Competition in an Age of Hunger Games: Donald Trump and the 2016
Presidential Election"]. That's how you interfere with elections. Or the
pretty spectacular study that he and his colleagues did about a year ago on
Congress "How Money Drives US Congressional Elections," where you just get
a
straight line [the correlation between money and major party votes in
Congress]. You rarely see results like that in the social sciences. That's
massive manipulation. Compared with that, what the Russians might be doing
is minuscule. Quite aside from the fact that the U.S. does it all the time
in other countries.
LP: It's clear from leaked emails that the Democratic National Committee
meddled with Bernie Sanders in his quest for the 2016 presidential
nomination by favoring Hillary Clinton when it was supposed to be unbiased
towards all candidates. What do you think it would it take for a real
reformist candidate, a true populist, to ever win the presidency?
NC: What it would actually take is popular organization and activism. With
all its flaws, the U.S. is still a pretty free country. In this case,
Democratic Party managers had to manipulate to keep Sanders from winning
the
nomination. His campaign, I think, was really spectacular. I couldn't have
predicted anything like it. It's a break with over a century of American
political history. No corporate support, no financial wealth, he was
unknown, no media support. The media simply either ignored or denigrated
him. And he came pretty close-he probably could have won the nomination,
maybe the election. But suppose he'd been elected? He couldn't have done a
thing. Nobody in Congress, no governors, no legislatures, none of the big
economic powers, which have an enormous effect on policy. All opposed to
him. In order for him to do anything, he would have to have a substantial,
functioning party apparatus, which would have to grow from the grass roots.
It would have to be locally organized, it would have to operate at local
levels, state levels, Congress, the bureaucracy-you have to build the whole
system from the bottom.
It's kind of intriguing now, I'm sure you've seen the polls where he turns
out to be the most popular political figure. Well, in a functioning
democracy, the person who is the most popular political figure should
appear
somewhere. But nothing he does gets reported. It's taking place, it's
having
effects, but from the point of view of the liberal media, it's as if it
doesn't exist.
LP: What about recent events in California with Senator Dianne Feinstein,
who got a big surprise by failing to win the state Democratic Party
endorsement for a sixth term? Is this like the Sanders phenomenon, where
people who want basic things like universal healthcare and worker
protections are making their preferences heard by refusing to support
candidates who are unresponsive?
NC: She was voted down, and like the Sanders campaign or [Jeremy] Corbyn in
England, there is a groundswell, and if it could be turned into something
sustained and with a serious base, it could mean a lot. Traditionally, this
has always been built around the labor movement, and that's why the
corporate sector is so dedicated to destroying the unions. It's coming up
in
the Janus case, which was heard the other day, which will probably be voted
in favor of Janus, which will be a lethal blow to public unions. [Mark
Janus
is the plaintiff in the U.S. Supreme Court case Janus v. AFSCME involving
the issue of whether government employees represented by a union must pay
dues to cover the cost of collective bargaining and resolving grievances].
The whole U.S. private sector is passionate about destroying the union
movement. This has been going on for a long time, but now they really think
they can strangle it because it's the core of activism for almost anything.
Take a look at, say, healthcare. In Canada, in the 50s, it was the unions
who were pressing hard for national healthcare, and kind of interestingly,
in the U.S. the same unions were pressing for healthcare for themselves,
auto workers in Detroit. These are two pretty similar countries, but with
this striking difference in outcomes on healthcare.
A more interesting case is England. There's a pretty good article that just
came out in the latest issue of Jacobin, which runs through the history of
British healthcare and it's quite interesting. It began, in England under
Bevan in the late 40s. They got what was the best healthcare system in the
world-still is, probably, and certainly was then. It started with mine
workers in Wales who developed their own cooperative health system on a
small scale. Aneurin Bevan was a Welsh mine worker. The cooperative system
was picked up by the Labour Party as a program and the Labour Party
actually
won the election in 1945 and Bevan pushed it through and they got the
National Health Service.
Well, there's two points that are critical for the U.S. It's the unions.
That why you have to destroy the unions. You destroy solidarity. It's same
reason for the attack on public schools, the attack on social security.
These are all based on the idea that somehow you care about others, the
community, and so on, and that's completely unacceptable in a culture where
you want to try to concentrate wealth and power. You don't want people to
have anything to do except to try to gain whatever they can for themselves.
In that case, they'll be very weak, of course. It's only when you organize
together than you can confront private capital.
Secondly, there was a political party. The American political system
probably wouldn't be accepted by the European Court of Justice as a
legitimate system. There's no way for independent parties to enter the
system. The Labour Party in England started as a very small party. But
because the system allows-as most democratic countries do-small parties to
function, they were able to develop and work within Parliament and expand
and get political figures and the government and finally ended up being a
big party. That's almost impossible in the U.S. If you look at a ballot in
the U.S., it says Democrat, Republican, Other. Nobody can break in. It's a
political monopoly. It's two things that aren't really political parties.
You can't really be a member of the Democratic Party, you can't participate
in designing its programs. You can be a member of the Labour Party. These
are big differences, so I think two huge problems in the U.S. are the
deficiencies of the political system, which shows up in the kind of things
that Tom Ferguson and his colleagues study-you know, the enormous power of
concentrated wealth in determining the outcome of elections and then the
policies afterwards. That's one, and the other is the destruction of the
labor movement.
LP: Let's talk about the attack on public schools, which Gordon Lafer has
outlined in his book, The One Percent Solution.
NC: Yes, a very interesting book.
LP: He discusses efforts by ALEC and other corporate-backed groups to
dismantle public education, to get legislation passed to replace teachers
with online education, increase class sizes, replace public schools with
privately-funded charters, and so on. You've talked about the history of
mass education. How do you see this corporate agenda for American schools?
NC: You know, mass public education was, with all its flaws, one of the
real
contributions to American democracy. It was way ahead of other countries
all
the way through, including the college level with land grant colleges and
so
on. Europe just began to match that after World War II. Here it was
happening in the late 19th century. Now there's a real concerted effort to
destroy the whole public education system. ALEC and Koch Brothers just
recently announced a campaign taking Arizona as the test case because they
figure Arizona is probably an easy one since it has probably the lowest per
capita expenditure for education and a very right-wing legislature. What
they're trying to do-they describe it openly-is to try to essentially
destroy the public education system, turn everything to vouchers and
charter
schools. It'll be an interesting battle, and if it works in Arizona they
want to do it elsewhere.
It's a huge corporate offensive. It's very similar to attack on unions.
First the Friedrichs [Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, in
which the Supreme Court deadlocked on the issue of the right of
public-sector unions to collect fees from workers they represent, including
those who don't join the union, to cover bargaining and other activities],
now the Janus case, and they'll probably succeed. This right-to-work
legislation is just unacceptable in other countries. In fact, in the NAFTA
negotiations, at one point Canada proposed that part of a revision should
be
to ban measures that undermine labor rights like the right-to-work
legislation. It's kind of like using scabs. It's just not heard of. But
Reagan introduced it here-I think the U.S. and South Africa were the only
countries that allowed it. In fact, the U.S. has never even ratified the
first principle of the International Labour Organization, the right of
association. I think the U.S. must be alone, frankly. It's very much a
business-run society.
LP: What are students being trained for now in the corporate vision of
education that is taking over the country? What kind of future will they
have? And what does it do to the idea of a democracy?
NC: Students will be controlled and disciplined. The education doesn't
leave
any room for interaction, for creative activity, for teachers to do things
on their own, for students to find a way to do things, I've talked to
teacher's groups. I remember once I was giving a talk and a 6th grade
teacher came up to me describing experiences. She said that after one class
a little girl came up and said that she was really interested in something
that came up and wanted to know how she could do some more on it. And they
teacher had to tell her, you can't do it. You have to study for the MCAS,
the Massachusetts version of the regular exam [Massachusetts Comprehensive
Assessment System]. Everything depends on that. Even the teacher's salary
depends on that. So you can't do anything creative as an individual. You
follow the rules. It's the Marine Corps. You do what you're told. No
associations. It's a perfect system for creating a deeply authoritarian
society.
It's also kind of a two-tiered system. It's a little bit like what Sam
Bowles and Herb Gitnis [co-authors of Schooling in Capitalist America]
discussed when they wrote about early mass education. For the general
worker, turn them into industrial workers, but for the elite, you have to
have creativity: MIT, Harvard. You have to have people to create the next
stage of the economy.
LP: In the last several years, we've had a number of protest movements,
Occupy, Black Lives Matter, and the #MeToo movement, which have often met
with hostility or dismissal in the liberal press. Take #MeToo: the protest
against workplace sexual harassment and violence has shown solidarity along
class lines and across countries. For example, Latina farmworkers and
Indian
feminists back it. Yet some in the liberal press compare #MeToo protesters
to McCarthyites and warn of witch hunts, despite the fact that the movement
is helping to shift power away from oppressive management towards workers
in
challenging things like forced arbitration clauses that deny workers the
right to take charges to court.
NC: It's a very valid protest and it's an important movement. Charges do
have to be subject to some kind of verification. Just allegation is not
enough. As far as I know, the left-oriented groups like EPI [Economic
Policy
Institute] are in favor of ending forced arbitration, which also affects
many other kinds of charges. I think they're focusing on labor rights.
LP: That's true, but it seems that some may not be recognizing #MeToo as
really part of the labor rights struggle.
NC: That's interesting. Yes.
LP: Let's talk about the broader issue of economic inequality. This year,
wealthy elites polled at the World Economic Forum in Davos listed
inequality
as number 7 on their list of global worries. They're more worried about
other things, like data breaches and involuntary migration. Do you think
that they may be comforted by the fact that they've avoided some scary
scenarios, like, for example, a real populist president in the US, and can
therefore relax a bit? Should they be more worried?
NC: The danger that they perceive is that it might lead to a popular
uprising, so you have to control that. There are the standard excuses about
merit, which is a joke when you look at the details. I mean, take Bill
Gates-a perfectly admirable person, but, as I'm sure he'd be the first to
say, he based his fortune on two things, one, decades of work in the state
sector which created the technology - the creative, risky work which was
done since the 50s. He picked it up and marketed it. The second is the
World
Trade Organization, which gives him monopoly-pricing rights. I mean, that's
great but.
LP: Kind of goes against the Horatio Alger myth [the belief that anybody
can
get rich just by working hard].
NC: Yes.
LP: Finally, as you look ahead, what do you consider to be the biggest
threats to human beings in the future? What should we be most concerned
about?
NC: Climate change and nuclear war. These are really existential threats.
And what's happening now is just astonishing. If media were functioning
seriously, every day the lead headline would be this amazing fact-that in
the entire world, every country is trying or committed to doing at least
something. One country-one!-the most powerful country in history-is
committed to trying to destroy the climate. Not just pulling out of the
efforts of others, but maximizing the use of the most destructive means.
There's been nothing like this in history. It's kind of an outrageous
statement, but it happens to be true, that the Republican Party is the most
dangerous organization in human history. Nobody, not even the Nazis, was
dedicated to destroying the possibility of organized human life. It's just
missing from the media. In fact, if you read, say, the sensible business
press, the Financial Times, Businessweek, any of them, when they talk about
fossil fuel production, the articles are all just about the prospect for
profit. Is the U.S. moving to number one and what are the gains? Not that
it's going to wipe out organized human life. Maybe that's a footnote
somewhere. It's pretty astonishing.
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