Subj: Who Runs America? Forty minutes with Noam Chomsky
Date: 99-05-20 16:17:09 EDT
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Chris Carrara)
To: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Activist Mailing List
http://get.to/activist
Who runs America? Forty minutes with Noam Chomsky
Interview by Adrian Zupp
Noam Chomsky, one of the world's leading linguistic thinkers, is also one of
its leading political dissidents. A professor of linguistics at MIT (where he
has taught since 1955), he has consistently spoken out about abuses of power,
particularly those involving U.S. corporations. He has been arrested several
times and was on Richard Nixon's infamous enemies list. Chomsky makes
countless speaking appearances around the world each year; his schedule is so
tight that it took 15 months to get this interview. Now 70, Chomsky is still
energetic and expansive; he is also quiet-spoken, somewhat shy, and
exceedingly sincere. Always quotable, Chomsky has said: "If the Nuremberg
laws were applied today, then every postwar American president would have to
be hanged." He has also said: "It is the responsibility of intellectuals to
speak the truth and expose lies."
This interview took place in his MIT office.
Q: As you tell it, the main components of power and control in America seem
to be corporations, the government, the media, and the public-relations
industry. But many people apparently find it hard to go along with your
explanation because they don't feel that control could be that monolithic.
A: What you just described is not monolithic. I mean, you mentioned four
things, and within each of these things there's a lot of conflict. First of
all, corporations disagree. And corporations and government are not the same
thing.
Q: But I get the impression that a lot of people think that you're saying
that it's a massive conspiracy.
A: That's true maybe of people in the Harvard faculty, but that's because
for them "conspiracy" is a curse word.
If something comes along that you don't like, there are a few sort of
four-letter words that you can use to push it out of the sphere of
discussion. If you were in a bar downtown, they might have different words,
but if you're an educated person what you use are complicated words like
"conspiracy theory" or "Marxist."
It's a way of pushing unpleasant questions off the agenda so that we can
continue in our own happy ideology.
Q: So would you say that the elite groups are not so much coordinated in
producing the system as they are unanimous in protecting it?
A: There are matters on which they tend to be in overwhelming agreement.
There are other matters on which there are internal differences. And in
fact, when you investigate the media product, what you typically find is that
on topics on which there is very broad consensus, there's no discussion. On
topics where there's debate, there is discussion.
A dramatic recent case was the Multilateral Agreement on Investments [a
proposed global economic treaty]. On that there was near-uniformity in the
corporate sector, the government, the media component of the corporate
sector, the international financial institutions. They were all in favor of
this treaty, overwhelmingly. They all understood very well that the public
is not going to like it, so for years they just kept it secret. On that
issue, no discussion.
The same happened on NAFTA [the North American Free Trade Agreement]. The
same sectors were overwhelmingly in favor, but they knew the population
wasn't going to like it -- which in fact remained true right until the end.
So they simply would never allow debate on it.
To their distress, the issue broke through because of popular activism and
because of Ross Perot, who just made a fuss about it. So it was impossible
to suppress it totally. And what happened then is extremely interesting.
What happened is, the major press -- the New York Times, let's say -- simply
never allowed it to be discussed. The labor movement, for example, had a
position, but it was never allowed to be presented. The labor movement was
condemned by curse words: it was "old-fashioned," "crude," "tough,"
"blundering," a long series of curse words. Here you have a consensus among
the elite.
And this is true on many other issues. Let's take an international issue --
say, the Vietnam War. There's a pretense now -- the press like to pretend
that they were opposing the war and being courageous. That's complete
nonsense. If you look back, they supported the war overwhelmingly. I mean,
not even a flicker of disagreement. And then when a debate did develop among
the real power sectors as to whether it was worth pursuing or not -- like, is
it costing us too much? -- at that point [the press] divided also. Some of
them said yes, it's costing us too much. Others said it wasn't.
On the other hand, the position of the American population was never
expressed. And we know what that position was. We have extensive polls.
>From about the time that they started being taken, the late '60s, into the
early '90s, about 70 percent of the population said that the war was
fundamentally wrong and immoral. Try to find that view anywhere in the
press. I've been through it. The view of 70 percent of the population was
inexpressible.
And it is not just in the media. Pretty much in the scholarly profession,
intellectual journals, business sectors, and so on. There are some questions
you don't ask, as was pointed out by George Orwell years ago. He wrote an
essay, an important essay, maybe the most important one he ever wrote -- and
it was not published, incidentally. It was the introduction to Animal Farm,
which everybody's read in school. But you didn't read any introduction. The
introduction was about censorship in England. He said, "Look, this is a
satire about a totalitarian state, but we shouldn't be self-righteous -- it's
not that different in free England." He said in free England there are many
ways in which ideas that are unpopular will just not be able to be expressed.
And he gave two ways. One, he said, is that the press is owned by wealthy
men who have every reason not to want certain ideas to be expressed. And
second, he said, if you have a good education, you have internalized the fact
that there are some things it just wouldn't do to say.
One of the things it wouldn't do to say is that actions the United States
government is taking might be fundamentally wrong or immoral. It just
wouldn't do to say that. And it wouldn't do to think it. And if you're a
well-educated, respectable type, it can't occur to your mind. For the 70
percent of the population who don't have the benefits of a good education,
they can see it. Because it's obviously true. This is true on issue after
issue, including unimportant issues.
Let's take an unimportant issue, namely the one that has dominated the news
for the last year: the silly scandals in Washington. Now, they're an
absolute obsession with elites. Educated elites across the spectrum have
been completely obsessed with it. Journals, television, everything. The
public was not interested; they wanted them to stop it a year ago. In fact,
the split between public opinion and elite obsession became so extreme that
it even aroused some commentary, which is unusual. But that was extremely
clear. The elite could not get enough of the soft porn, and the public
didn't care. If they wanted soft porn they could find it somewhere else. And
they wanted Congress and the executive to get on to some serious business. I
mean, who cares if some guy had an affair?
Q: So was that a victory for distracting people from systemic corruption?
A: I wouldn't call it corruption. I mean, corruption takes place, but what's
far more significant is what's *not* corrupt. Like ramming through NAFTA the
way they did. That was not corrupt. Fighting the Vietnam War was not
corrupt. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 gave away maybe a hundred
billion dollars' worth of publicly owned property -- namely the digital
spectrum -- to a few megacorporations. That wasn't corrupt. It was highway
robbery on a massive scale, but not corrupt.
The question arises: "Why was it an elite obsession when the public didn't
want it?" Well, okay, now we have to speculate, but I think a plausible
speculation is exactly what you're saying. In a sense, that would make it on
a par with the years of censorship to prevent people from knowing about the
MAI and the refusal to allow opposing positions on NAFTA even to be
articulated.
Now, the press will tell you they had a debate about that. They think they
had a wonderful debate. They even had a town meeting with Gore or Perot or
something. But Perot is a good person for them to have a debate with,
because they can make fun of him. It was going to be a little harder to make
fun of the labor movement and the Office of Technology Assessment and the
economists who were giving the same arguments, so therefore they were out of
it. And a debate was set up, but only one that you could treat as a comic
act. And they were very proud of it.
Q: You've said that true capitalism doesn't work and no one really believes
in it; so bogus capitalism is what's going on in America, and communist and
socialist systems seem to get co-opted by self-serving elites. What sort of
economic and governmental system do you think is viable?
A: Systems like capitalism and socialism and communism have never been
tried. What we've had since the Industrial Revolution was one or another
form of state capitalism. It's been overwhelmed, certainly in the last
century, by big conglomerations of capital corporate structures that are all
interlinked with one another and form strategic alliances and administer
markets and so on. And are tied up with a very powerful state. So it's some
other kind of system -- call it whatever you want.
Corporate-administered markets in a powerful state system.
Actually, the Soviet Union was something like that. They didn't have General
Electric, they had more concentration of the state system, but apart from
that it worked rather like a state-capitalist system. And do these systems
work? Yeah, they kind of work. For example, the Soviet Union was a
monstrosity, but it had a pretty fast growth rate -- a growth rate unknown in
the Western economies. In the 1960s the economy started to stagnate and
decline, but for a long period they had a growth rate that was very alarming
to Western leaders.
Does the U.S. system work? Yeah, it works in some ways. Take, say, the last
10 years. One percent of the population is making out like bandits. The top
10 percent of the population is doing pretty well. The next 10 percent
actually lost net worth, and you go down below and [it gets] still worse. I
mean, it's such a rich country that even relatively poor people are still
more or less getting by. It's not like Haiti.
On the other hand, it's an economic catastrophe. The typical family in the
United States is working, latest estimates are, about 15 weeks a year more
than they did 20 years ago -- just to keep stagnating, or even declining,
incomes. That's a success in the richest, most privileged country in the
world? But it works. I mean, you and I are sitting here and we're not
starving, so something's working. It's a little unfair in my case because
I'm up in that top few percent who, like I said, are making out like bandits.
But most people aren't. So it's a mixed success.
Q: But do you see a way that will ...
A: Yeah, sure. I don't see why we have to have a system in which the wealth
that gets created is directed, overwhelmingly, to a tiny percentage of the
population. Nor do I see a system that has to be as radically undemocratic.
I mean, remember *how* undemocratic it is. A private corporation, let's say
General Electric, is, in fact, just a pure tyranny. You and I have *nothing*
to say about how it works. The people *inside* the corporation have nothing
to say about how it works, except that they can take orders from above and
give them down below. It's what we call tyranny.
And when those institutions also control the government, the framework for
popular decision-making very much narrows. In fact, that's the purpose of
shrinking government. It's so that the sphere of popular decision-making
will narrow and more decisions will fall into the hands of the private
tyrannies.
"Government" is a kind of interesting term in American political mythology.
The government is presented as some enemy that's outside, something coming
from outer space. So when the IRS comes to collect your taxes, it's this
enemy coming to steal your money. That's driven into your head from infancy,
almost.
There's another way of looking at it, which is that the IRS is the instrument
by which you and I decide how to spend our resources for schools and roads
and so on. Whatever faults the government has, and there are plenty, it's the
one institution in which people can, at least in principle and sometimes in
fact, make a difference.
So government's shrinking, meaning the public role is shrinking. And business
-- that is, unaccountable private power -- has to take its place. That's the
dominant ideology. Why should we accept that? Suppose someone said, "Look,
you've got to have a king or a slave owner." Should we accept it? I mean,
yes, there are much better systems. Democracy would be a better system. And
there are a lot of ways for the country to become way more democratic.
Handing over the digital spectrum, or for that matter the Internet, to
private power -- that's a huge blow against democracy. In the case of the
Internet, it's a particularly dramatic blow against democracy because this
was paid for by the public. How undemocratic can you get? Here is a major
instrument, developed by the public -- first part of the Pentagon, and then
universities and the National Science Foundation
-- handed over in some manner that nobody knows to private corporations who
want to turn it into an instrument of control. They want to turn it into a
home shopping center. You know, where it will help them convert you into the
kind of person they want. Namely, someone who is passive, apathetic, sees
their life only as a matter of having more commodities that they don't want.
Why give them a powerful weapon to turn you into that kind of a person?
Especially after you paid for the weapon? Well, that's what's happening
right in front of our eyes.
Could the system be different? Of course it could be different. This [the
Internet] could remain what it ought to be: just a public instrument. There
ought to be efforts -- not just talk but *real* efforts -- to ensure Internet
access, not just for rich people but for everyone. And it should be freed
from the influence of Microsoft or anybody else. They don't have any rights
to have anything to do with that system. They had almost nothing to do with
creating it. What little they did was on federal contract.
And we can say the same across the board. There are a lot of changes that
can be made. Now let's take, say, living wages. There are now living-wage
campaigns in many places. They're very good campaigns, it's a great idea.
But if you had a free press, what they would be telling you is the following,
because they know the facts. If you look at American history, since, say, the
1930s, the minimum wage tracked productivity. So as productivity went up,
the minimum wage went up. Which, if you believe in a capitalist society,
makes sense. That stops in the mid-'60s.
Suppose you made it continue to track productivity. The minimum wage would
be about double what it is now. Now, to say that we should continue doing
what was done for 30 years and what just makes obvious sense -- there's
nothing radical about that. If you had a free press, this would be all over
the front page. But you're not going to find it on the front pages, because
the corporate media and their leaders and owners, they don't want that to be
an issue. Well, you know, this doesn't have to remain. We're free agents.
We're not living in fear of death squads. We can organize to change these
things. Every single one of them.
Q: With respect to that, you seem to be someone whom a lot of people listen
to. Could you do some things that make the media focus on you?
A: I've done all that. I've been in and out of jail any number of times for
organizing. I organized national tax resistance; I was one of the people who
organized national draft resistance. I mean, I was up for a long jail
sentence. It was so close that my wife went back to school because we figured
we were going to have to have somebody who'd take care of the three children.
It's true that I don't spend a lot of time in organizing. I used to, but
there came to be a sort of division of labor at some point. And I think we
all figured that I'm more helpful when I go out giving talks and show up at
fundraising events and so on.
Q: Do you ever get exhortative in your lectures? Do you try to stir people
up?
A: No. People say, "Look, he's not a good speaker," and I'm happy about
that. If I knew how to do it, I wouldn't. I really dislike good speakers. I
think they're dangerous people. Because you shouldn't be exhorting people by
the force of your rhetoric. You should be getting them to think about it so
they can figure out what they want to do. The best way to do that, that I
can imagine, is to say, "Why don't you think about these questions?"
Quietly, not screaming. "Think about these questions. Figure out for
yourself what's the best way to deal with them."
Adrian Zupp can be reached at:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
*** Reprinted under the fair use doctrine of international copyright law.
http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html ***
